Mannin’s teeth were chattering. He sat hunched over, shook his head.
“Get the skin,” Genley said.
“I’m not your bloody servant,” Kim hissed. “You don’t give me orders.”
“ Get the skin. You take care of him, you bloody take care of him, hear me?” Jin had come; Genley saw it, gathered himself up in haste, drew a deep breath.
Jin stared at the hunter‑leader; at him, at one and the other, hands on his hips. It was not a moment for arguing. Not an audience that would appreciate it. After a moment Jin gave a nod of his, head toward the second, the smaller circle of hunters. “Genley,” he said.
Genley came aside, hands in his belt, walked easily beside Jin, silent as Jin walked, on soft hide soles, crouched down by the fireside as Jin sat, one of them, a leader with his own band, however poor it was. He had his beads, had his braids, had his knife at his side. Like the rest. Moved like them, silent as they. He had learned these things.
“This Mannin,” Jin said with displeasure.
“Sick,” Genley said. “Bad gut.”
Jin thrust out his jaw, reached out and clapped a hand on his knee. “Too much patience. All starmen have this patience?”
“Mannin’s got his uses.”
“What? What, my father?” Jin reached to the fire’s edge and broke off a bit of a cake baking on a stone. “For this bad gut, no cure. It’s his mind, Gen‑ley. It’s his mind wants to be sick. It’s fear.”
“So he’s not a hunter. He’s other things. Like Weirds.”
Jin looked up from under his brow. “So. A Weird.”
“We’re a lot of things.”
“Yes,” Jin said in that curious flat way of his, while the eyes were alive with thoughts. “So I give him to you. This Kim; this Mannin. You take care of them… Lord Gen‑ley.”
He drew in a breath, a long, slow one. Perhaps it was Jin’s humor at work. Perhaps it meant something else.
“You know weapons, Gen‑ley?”
Genley shrugged. “Starman weapons. Don’t have any. They don’t let them outside the Wire.”
Jin’s eyes lightened with interest.
Mistake. Genley looked into that gaze and knew it. “All right,” he said, “yes, they’ve got them. But the secret to it is up there. Up.”He made a motion of his eyes skyward and down again; it was not only Jin listening, it was Blue and others. It was the Tower‑lords. “First steps first, lord Jin. None before its time.”
“MaGee.”
“She’s got none.”
Jin’s lips compacted into a narrow grimace something like a smile.
“You put McGee in my keeping,” Genley said. He had worked for this, worked hard. It was close to getting, close to it, to get this concession. Save what he could. Do what he could, all rivalries aside. “You want Cloudside in your hand, hear, that woman knows what there is to know. You give her to me.”
“No.” There was no light of reason there, none at all in the look Jin turned on him. “Not that one.”
He felt a tightening of the gut. So, McGee, I tried. There was nothing more to do. No interference. Just ride out the storm. Gather pieces if there were pieces left. No place for a woman. She might get common sense at the last, run for it, get back to the Wire. It was the best to hope for now.
If Elai let her run.
205 CR, day 98
Cloud Towers
They gathered in the dawn, in the first pale light along the Cloud, and McGee clutched her spear and hurried along the shore. The leathers felt strange, like a second, unfamiliar skin at once binding and easy; she felt embarrassed by the spear, kept the head canted up out of likelihood of sticking anyone with it as calibans brushed by her carrying riders on their backs, tall, disdainful men and women who knew their business and were going to it in this dusty murk. God help me, she kept thinking over and over, God help me. What am I doing here?–as a scaly body shouldered her and its tail rasped against her leg in its passing, weight of muscle and bone enough to break a back in a halfhearted swing.
A Weird found her, among the thousands on the move, waved her arm at her. She followed through the press of moving bodies, of calibans hissing like venting steam, of claw‑footed giants and insistent grays that could as easily knock a human down, of ariels skittering in haste. She lost her guide, but the Weird waited on the shore where she had known to go, where her caliban waited, indistinct in the dusty dawn. Hers, the only one unridden, the only one which would be waiting on the shore.
It hissed at her, swung its head. Weirds calmed it with their hands. The tail swept the sand, impatient with her, with them. She tapped the leg with her spear; it dipped its shoulder, and her knees went to water. Enough of that, McGee. She planted her foot, heaved herself up and astride, caught the collar as it surged up under her and began to move, powerful steps, a creature at once out of control, never under it–the while she got the spear across to its right side, out of the way, got the kit that was slung at her shoulder settled so it stopped swinging. Scaly hide slid loosely under her thighs, over thick muscle and bony shoulders: buttocks on the shoulder‑hollow, legs about the neck, the soft place behind the collar. They’ve learned to carry humans, she thought, to protect their necks– O God, the tails, the jaws in a fight: that’s what the spear is for. Get the rider off, Dain had said, showing her how to couch it. Go for the gut of a human, the underthroat of a caliban. O God.
The movement became a streaming outward, leisurely in the dawn. The Weird was left behind. She joined other riders of other towers, of every tower mingled. There was no order. Elai was up there somewhere, far ahead. So were Taem and Paeia, Dain and his sisters–all, all the ones she knew. As for herself, she clung, desperately, as they shouldered others on their way; she moved her legs out of the way when offended calibans swung their heads and snapped.
There were days of this to face. And war. Some horrid dawn to find themselves facing other calibans, men with spears and venomed darts. How did I get into this?
But she knew. She shivered, for none of them had had breakfast and the wind blew cold. She comforted herself with the thought of days to go, of distance between themselves and the enemy.
Time to get used to it, she thought, and the itin her mind encompassed all manner of horrors. She hated being rushed; she had a compulsion to plan things: she wanted time to think, and this sudden madness of Elai’s that had brought them out of bed as if the enemy were at their door instead of far upriver–this was no way to wake, stumbling across the town in the dark, shoulder‑deep in proddish calibans… The shore, MaGee, a Weird had signed to her, in the last of torchlight. That was all.
But of course, she thought suddenly, weaving along within the press. Of course. The Patterns. It confounds the Patterns–
The Patterns could not foretell this madness of Elai’s, this sudden wild move. The news that they were coming could travel no faster than the calibans they rode, the great, long‑striding calibans; was nothing for ariel gossip, up and down the Cloud.
Elai, she thought, not without pride. Elai, you bastard. And on another level it was raw fear: This is your world, not mine. I’m going to get killed in it. She suffered a vision of battle, herself run through by some Styxside spear; or falling off, more likely, to be trampled under clawed feet, unnoticed in the moment; or meeting some even less romantic accident along the way–War. She remembered how fast old Scar could snap those jaws of his on an offending gray and shuddered in the wind. I’m going to die like that.