“Good thing nobody else we know is here,” Ronan muttered, “because adding ‘octopoid wrangler’ to my CV at this stage isn’t something I’d anticipated. Might never live this down. Where’s okay to pet it?”
“Probably smart to avoid the eyes,” Kit said, reading down the spell to get the structure and the rhythm of it. “Otherwise most places should be all right.”
Kit was surprised to feel the sibik start going rather limp. “Oho, that’s where it is,” Ronan said, sounding smug.
“Where what is?”
“The good spot. Doubt there’s an animal alive that doesn’t have one. The spot that would be the one back a bit and between the ears, if it was a dog.”
Kit smiled: he knew that spot. “Great, hold that thought…”
“You need me to move anywhere?”
“Nope, you’re fine. Just a sensor spell, doesn’t need a circle.” Or rather, the circle had spread itself across the manual page. All Kit needed to do was verbally tag the scent cues that the manual was picking up from the sibik and tell the wizardry to locate and visually identify them.
Kit began to read the spell—fairly slowly and carefully, as the Speech-names for some of the aromatic esters and other chemicals involved in the sibik’s scent were fairly complicated, and misplacing a syllable could render the tracker function ineffective. All around him and the sibik and Ronan, for a few moments the world went dim and quiet as the Universe leaned in around them and listened to see what Kit wanted done. Kit finished the recitation of the spell’s power-feed component—which flared up and extinguished itself on the page quick and bright as a struck match bursting into flame, and seemed to cost Kit no more energy than it took to breathe out at the end of the phrase. I can not get used to that, he thought as he finished the spell proper and recited the shorthand verbal version of the Wizard’s Knot to close the spell and set it working: seven syllables in four groups.
Kit experienced no final burst of energy leaving him to fuel the triggering of the spell; his intervention allowance had so increased his normal power levels that for so relatively minor a spell there was almost nothing to feel. So weird, Kit thought as he closed the manual and watched the spell work. A tangled strand of pale blue light started laying itself down across the ground from near where he and Ronan stood, weaving off southward through the long turquoise grass, more or less in the direction of the transients’ encampment. But Kit could already see where it started to angle away to the westward, a few hundred yards ahead of them. Other trails, fainter than their sibik’s, crossed it and smudged it and made it wander.
“Can you see that okay?” Kit said to Ronan.
Ronan glanced around them, immediately picked up the track, and nodded. “No wonder he couldn’t figure out how to get back,” he said. “Must have been a dozen of them cluttering up the picture. Repeatedly.”
“Yeah,” Kit said, tugging the sibik’s tentacle loose from the manual and tucking it back up onto his shoulder. “With any luck we won’t find his people too far from where they lost touch with him. From the time-stamping on this, doesn’t look like he’s been gone too long.” The complex chemical signatures that the sibik emitted and the spell was tracking all had clearly defined “expiration dates”. Another sibik could judge by their strength exactly when and how quickly another of its kind had passed this way, not to mention a lot about what it had been eating and even a certain amount about its emotional state. There’s so much information encoded in these, Kit thought. Maybe I can figure out which compound is signaling the presence of saltines, so I can work out a way to spoof it and make them stop coming here and looking for more…
But right now that wasn’t the main problem. Kit and Ronan struck out across the grassy plain, following the trail, while the sibik peered past Kit’s ear with most of its tentacles wrapped around his shoulders and throat and a few spare ones playing with his hair. Kit tilted his head back to smell the wind, just letting himself enjoy it for a moment: the strange scents, the clearing weather (it had been gray for a lot of the day but hadn’t ever gotten around to actually raining), the sound of the wind itself and the quiet that underlay it. “You know what’s weird?” Kit said after a moment. “The Tevaralti are avian-descended, but I haven’t seen a single bird here. Are there even any? Because I haven’t seen anything that flies at all.”
“I think there are some,” Ronan said, “but I don’t know about what would normally live on this continent. And anyway a lot of the local wildlife’s been removed already, and a lot more is just weirded out by what’s been going on with the magnetic fields and so forth.” He looked around him, shook his head with a frown. “This would be a really nice place if it wasn’t about to wind up somewhere between mostly and completely destroyed.”
Kit nodded.
“Speaking of which,” Ronan said, “I guess I should be grateful that certain other wizards working on this planet with access to that streaming video system didn’t see any of what I was looking at last night—”
“Because ‘somewhere between mostly and completely destroyed’ might in that case be an accurate description of your general status today?” Kit said.
“Or yours, if you’d started looking at the wrong channel and her manual noticed that…”
The issue of what Nita’s manual (or the power that ran it) was capable of noticing, and how much of that it chose to share with her, was somewhat on Kit’s mind right now. “Between you and me,” Kit said, “I think it might be smart to stay out of the Jacuzzi Channel for the time being.”
“Heard and understood,” Ronan muttered. “Oh wow, look at this…”
They stopped and looked at the grass around them. The whole area was an incredible tangle of scent trails. Kit’s sibik’s trail here turned into something like an extremely tight and complex knot about a meter wide, probably the result of it shuffling around in excitement as it ran across a crowd of wild sibik who’d probably been tracking it.
“Okay, this is where you started getting lost, isn’t it,” Ronan said to the sibik. It gave him a reproachful look and then hid all its eyes against Kit’s head.
“Yeah, you can see why…” Kit said. “Must’ve been five, six, maybe eight of them here.”
“I can also see what is probably somebody’s butthole,” Ronan said, covering his eyes for a moment. “Holy Powers, there’s two of them. No, three! Sure you’re oversubscribed in the bottomly wonderfulness department, fella. But nobody else needs to see that, you’ll just embarrass the lot of us who can’t compete, ah jeez would you ever stop waving it about and just sit yourself down!”
The sibik put its body back down on Kit’s shoulder again, giving Ronan a sidelong look out of several eyes. Kit’s laughter almost got away from him before he managed to strangle it. “Okay,” he said. “Looks like a few meters further along this pretty much straightens out. Seems like they all actually did physically meet up, and then the others ran off for some reason…”
“Maybe not enough buttholes?” Ronan said, rolling his eyes.
Kit snickered as they once more started along the sibik’s trail. There were several more of these ball-of-yarn knots ahead of them, apparently more artifacts of yet more excited small wild sibik groups running across the domesticated one. Kit had a sudden mental image of a slightly nervous Labrador or Great Dane wandering through a strange dog park and being repeatedly mobbed by gangs of excited Chihuahuas.
“These lads just seem to come from all directions,” Ronan said, turning to look along some of the wild sibiks’ tracks out into the plain. “I guess they’re out foraging for whatever it is they usually eat. Have to be all kinds of wee things in the grass…”
Kit nodded. “And when they run across other sibik and check their scent trails, they know if they found anything, and they know what direction they found it in. Kind of like ants, one way.”