Daniel Akamarino shifted in the saddle, seeking some unbattered part of his legs to rub against the saddle skirts as his mule settled from a jolting jog to a steady walk once he was nose to the tail of Ahzurdan’s mount. Daniel watched Slya what was it Fireheart? swing along as if she were out for an afternoon’s stroll through a park, four arms moving easily, hair like flame crackling in the wind (though there was no wind he could feel, maybe she generated her own). What a world. The fishtail femme was a watergod, this one looks like she’d be right at home at a volcano’s heart. Not too bright (he swallowed a chuckle, keep your mouth shut, Danny Blue, her idea of humor isn’t likely to match yours, she’d probably laugh like hell while she was pulling your arms and legs off). Handy having her about, though, (he chewed on his tongue as he belatedly noted the idiot pun; watch it,, Dan), she’ll keep old Settsiwhat off our necks. Knows Brann, seems to like her. Hmm. A story there, I wonder if I’ll ever hear it. Kuh! How much longer will we have to ride? I’m going to end up with no skin at all left on my legs.
Ahzurdan clenched his teeth and tried to swallow; his stomach was knotting and lurching, the wine that had soothed and strengthened him seemed as if it were about to rise up and strangle him. He was numb and empty and angry. Red Slya had saved them, had saved him pain and drain, perhaps ultimate failure, yet he was furious with her because she had taken from him something he hadn’t recognized until it was gone. In spite of what it had cost him, he’d found a deep and, yes, necessary satisfaction in the contest with Settsimaksimin. He’d taken his body from Maksim’s domination, but he’d never managed to erase his teacher’s mark from either of his souls. Before Slya stepped in, he was afraid and exhausted, cringing from another agonizing struggle, but there was something gathering deep and deep in him, something rising to meet the new attack, something aborted when Slya struck. He felt… incomplete. A thought came to him. He almost laughed. Like all those times, too many times to make it a comfortable memory, laboring at sex with someone, didn’t matter who, the whole thing fading away on him, leaving, his mind wanting, his body wanting, the want unfocused, impossible to satisfy, impossible to ignore. He rubbed at his stomach and tried to deal with the rising wine and the rising anger, both of which threatened to make him sick enough to wish he were dead.
They followed Slya’s flickering heels along a noisy whitewater stream into a deep crack in the mountainside where the watemoise increased to a deafening roar, sound so intense it stopped being sound and became assault. At the far end of the crack the stream fell a hundred meters down a black basalt cliff, the last ten meters lost in a swirling mist.
Slya stopped at the edge of that mist and waved a pair of right hands at it. “GO ON,” she boomed.
Brann hesitated, pulled her mount to a halt. “What about the mules, O Slya Fireheart?”
The god blinked, her mouth went slack as she considered the question; she shifted one large foot, nudged the side of the roan mule with her big toe. The beast froze. Slya gave a complicated shrug and dismissed the difficulty. “DO WHAT YOU WANT, LITTLE NOTHING, YOU ALWAYS MAKING SNAGS. FIDDLE YOUR OWN ANSWERS.” She vanished.
Brann slid from the saddle. “We’ll leave the mules and most of the gear here. I don’t want to have to be worrying about them once we’re in that place.” She waved a hand at the wavery semi-opaque curtain that was mist in part, but certainly something else along with the mist. She started stripping the gear off the roan. “One of you look about for a place where we can cache what we can’t carry.”
Yaril and Jaril in their teener forms flanking her, Brann straightened her shoulders and pushed into the mist. For a panicky moment she couldn’t breathe, then she could. She kept plowing on through whatever it was that surrounded her, she couldn’t think of it as water mist any longer, the smell, feel, temperature were all wrong. It was like wading through a three-day-old milk pudding. She heard muffled exclamations behind her and knew the two men had passed that breathless phase, following as closely on her heels as they could manage. With a sigh of relief she pushed along faster, no longer worrying about losing touch with them. The sound of the waterfall was gone, all sounds but those immediately around her were gone. She began to feel disoriented, dizzy, she began to wonder what was waiting ahead; walking blind into maybe danger was becoming less attractive every step she took.
A long oval of light like moonglow snapped open before her, three body lengths ahead and slightly to her left. She turned toward it, but hands pushed her back, smallish hands; Yaril and Jaril swam ahead of her, sweeping through the Gate before she could reach it. She leaned against the clotted pudding around her, floundering with arms and legs and will to work her body through something that wasn’t exactly fighting her but wasn’t all that yielding. An eternity later she dropped through the Gate and landed sprawling on a resilient surface like greasy wool. She bounced lightly, fell forward onto her face, rebounded. An odd feeling, as if she were swimming in air rather than water. She maneuvered herself onto her knees and gaped at the Chained God. Yaril and Jaril were holding onto each other, giggling.
Ahzurdan had trouble with the Gate; his temper flared, but he bit back angry comment when Daniel Akamarino got impatient and gave him a hard shove that popped him through it. Once he was in, he found the sudden lessening of his weigh disconcerting and difficult to deal with. He stumbled and fell over, tried to get up, all his reactions were wrong; he gripped the wooly surface and held himself down until even the twitches were gone out of him, it took a few seconds, that was all. Disciplining every movement he got slowly, carefully to his feet and stood staring at the enigmatic thing that filled most of this pocket reality, something like an immense metallic nutshell.
Daniel Akamarino wriggled after him, half swimming, half lunging. He dived through the Gate, hit the wool in a controlled flip and came warily onto his feet, arms out for balance in the half g gravity. He lowered his arms to his sides. After a breath or two of wonder, he chuckled. “It’s a freaking starship.”
13. The Chained God And His Problem.
SCENE: On the bridge of the Colony Transport. The Ship’s Computer talking to them. Yaril, Jaril, Daniel Akamarino know something about what’s going on and are reasonably comfortable with it, though there are sudden glitches that disconcert them almost as much as the whole thing does Ahzurdan. Brann has settled herself in the Captain’s place, a massive swiveling armchair, and is watching the play of lights across the face of the control surfaces and the play of emotion across the faces of the two men, detached and amused by this turn of events; another thing that pleases her is the sense that she finally knows at least one good reason why the gods running this crazy expedition have brought Daniel Akamarino across. He knows instruments like the part of this god that is machine not life or magic. This visible portion of the Chained God is a strange, incomprehensible amalgam of metal, glass, vegetable and animal matter, shimmering shifting energy webs, the plasma as it were of the magic that had gathered inside the shipshell and sparked into being the Being who called him/it self the Chained God.
“Why Chained God?” Daniel stood along in front of the specialist stations (swivelchairs with their aging pads, nests of broken wire, dangling, swaying helmets), his eyes flickering across the readouts, lifting to the dusty stretch of blind white glass curving across the forward wall of the bridge. “How’d you end up here?”