Danny Blue followed Brann from the clotted yellow mist to the stunted trees where she and his progenitors had cached the greater part of their gear. The mules were there, waiting, heads down, looking subdued and lightly singed. Slya’s work, no doubt, adding her mite out of friendship or something. He moved up beside Brann and began shifting the concealing rocks aside. His mind felt as chaotic as the fog blowing about in the ravine, but his body was in good shape, he didn’t have to think about what he was doing, his hands would go on working as his mind wandered. His flesh was charged and vital, his physical being hummed along at a level that Ahzurdan and Daniel Akamarino reached only when they were operating at peak in their various proficiencies. He swung a saddle onto a mule, reached warily under its belly for the cinch, drew it through the rings and used his knee to punch the swelling out of the mule so he could pull the strap tight. It was not as if two voices spoke within his head, no, more that the Composite-He would be musing about something and suddenly find himself thinking in an entirely different way about whatever it was, perhaps heading for a different outcome. And then his mind would shift again and he’d be where he was before. There was never any sense of coercion in this shifting. It was… well… like the interaction of two roughly parallel currents in a single river. As long as he rode the flow of those currents and didn’t try to fight them, he could think competently enough about whatever engaged his attention. And as time passed the Composite-He took more and more control of the Composite Mind. He retained the full memories of both his progenitors, along with their talents and their training (his work for the god-inthe-starship had been ample evidence of that) but slowly and surely the being who did the remembering was becoming someone else. Blue Dan. Danny Blue. Azure Dan, the Magic Man. He tied the depleted grain sack behind the saddle and the blanket roll on top of that and went for the saddlebags.
The changers chased each other in endless spirals, singing their exuberance in their eagle voices; their connection to Brann and the ground seemed more and more tenuous as the sun appeared and finally cleared the horizon.
Danny Blue rode behind Brann, the leadrope of the third mule tied to a saddlering. He looked up at the changers and wondered how long they’d stay in sight and whether they’d keep their ties to Brann now that they no longer needed her to stay alive. He thought about asking her what she was thinking, but he didn’t. Something in him was enjoying her tension and her quick sliding glances at the changers, something in him stood back and watched, uninvolved, unmoved; he thought that he disliked both of his progenitors, he thought they felt flat, one-dimensional. He was slaved to the god and he hated that, but he was beginning to be glad that Danny Blue was alive and aware and riding this mule along this mountainside, listening to the crackclack of the mule hooves, the morning wind hushing through the pines, the eagles screaming overhead, feeling himself sweat and chafe and jolt a bit because he still wasn’t much good at riding mules. He began to whistle a rambling undemanding tune, thought of getting out Daniel’s recorder but let the impulse slide away with the glide of the song.
One of the eagles came spiraling down, changed to a slight fair young man the moment he touched ground. Brann’s back lost its rigidity as her mule halted and stood with ears twitching nervously. “We thought we’d better ask,” Jaril said. “The god printed a map for you, but maybe you’d like us to scout out the best ground ahead till we get to Forkker Vale?”
“We could move faster that way.” Brann threaded her fingers through her hair. “Can Yaro get high enough to see Haven? That thing said there wasn’t a ship due for a week at least, I don’t know why it’d lie, the faster we can get to Maksim, the less chance he’ll have to make trouble for us, the sooner it could have its talisman, but I’d feel easier with some corroboration.”
No longer golden glass but a large brown and white raptor, the eagle overhead climbed higher, vanishing and reappearing as she passed through drifts of cloud fleece.
Jail tilted his head back and followed her with his eyes. “The sea is empty all round far as Yaro can see. Not even a smuggler out. Haven is pretty much still asleep. There are some fishboats out working nets, she sees a few women near the oven stoking it up so they can bake the day’s bread, the hands are busy with cows and whatever on the near-in farms. Nobody’s hustling more than usual. That’s about it.”
“Ah well, it was a chance.” Brann rubbed at her chin. “You want to run or ride?”
“Ride.” He walked to the third mule, waited until Dan untied the lead rope, swung into the saddle and moved to, ride beside Brann. “Yaro says Slya’s sitting on top of Isspyrivo turning the glacier into steam; she’s watching us.
Brann chuckled. “She’ll freeze her red behind if she does that for long.”
“Or flood out Haven. The creek from the crack runs down to the sea right there.”
She yawned. “Somehow I find it hard to care right now.” She thrust her hand into the bag by her knee, pulled out a paper cylinder, unrolled it and held it open along her thigh. “Hmm.” She rode closer to Jaril, tapped the nail of her forefinger against a section. “Looks like we’ll have to take a long jog about this, unless it’s not so deep as it looks. What’s this?”
“It’s a young canyon all right. I don’t know what that blurry bit is.” He was silent a minute, then he nodded. “Yaro’s gone to check it out. Be about twenty minutes’ flying time.”
Brann examined the map a few moments longer, then let it snap back into its cylinder and slid it in the bag.
Danny Blue watched Brann and the changer youth and felt a twinge of jealousy. The affection he saw between them had survived and more than survived the cutting of the chains that held them in servitude to each other; he had half-expected the changers to vanish like a fire blown out once they were free of her; when he saw their aerobatic extravagances he thought they were gone. He was wrong. A loving woman, a passionate one. The strength of the ties she forged with those alien children was evidence of that, he had more evidence of what she was in his memories. He remembered the feel of her back, the way she reacted to Daniel’s hands, his mouth twitched into a crooked smile as he remembered with equal clarity how quickly and completely Daniel shut off the flow of that passion.
He watched Brann’s back (the feel of it strong in his hands) and observed his own reactions. Ahzurdan had more hangups than a suitlocker, Daniel had only a moderate interest, enjoying sex, when it was available, not missing it all that much when it wasn’t. From the way Danny Blue’s body was sitting up and taking notice, he was going to have to change his habits. He sucked in a long breath, exploded it out and tried to think of something else before the saddle got more uncomfortable than it was already.
Jaril reached over, touched Brann’s arm. “Yaro’s got there. She says the blur you saw is a bridge over that ravine, a smuggler’s special, she says from on top and even up close it looks like a couple down trees with some vines and brush growing out of them, but she went down and walked on it and it’s solid. The mules won’t have any problem crossing it even if it’s dark by the time we get there and it probably will be.”
“Anything between here and there that might give us problems?”
“She says she doesn’t think so. Trying to read ground from the air can be tricky, you’ve got to remember that, especially as high as Yaro was flying, but she says the smuggler’s trace is fairly obvious and if we keep to that we shouldn’t have more problems than we can handle. She’s spotted a spring she thinks we can reach before it gets too dark if we start moving some faster, if we keep ambling along like this, we’ll have a dry camp because there’s no water between here and there.”
“I hear. Go ahead and show us the trail, will you?”
Jaril nodded, pulled ahead of them. He increased his mule’s pace to an easy trot as he followed the inconspicuous blazes cut at intervals into tree trunks as big around as the bodies of the mules. They’d long since passed the areas where the battles with Settsimaksimin and his surrogate elementals had torn up the ground, the mountainside was springy with old dried needles, little brush grew between giant conifers that rose a good twenty feet above their heads before spreading out great fans of branch and pungent needle bunches, there was room for the mules to stretch their legs without worrying about what they’d step into.