Charles Ingrid - marked man 02 The Last Recall (35 page)

"Not yet, they won't—but they will soon." The dean took a deep draw. "I've arranged a little demonstration for them. My valued ally in the counties has met with an untimely end, but another has sprung up in his place. My longship returnees have not seen how far the human race has sunk." He gave a tight smile, showing his teeth. "I've no doubt Denethan can be goaded into showing them."

Ketchum allowed himself the luxury of a returning smile. The lizard men of the Mojave would shock the new people as nothing else had. The morning would bring interesting times.

Drakkar sat uneasily, watching the still forms of three people who'd formed the core of his existence among the Seven Counties. His fight wounds still ached and he could feel the burn of a fever flickering out even as he sat vigil. None of them breathed or stirred and yet—the blood did not pool blackly in their bodies, their eyes moved under their lids as if they dreamed violently and only Alma looked pale, as if she might have gone to meet death. He did not dare sleep himself, for fear Franklin or Stanhope might enter and misunderstand the scene. An afternoon and a night and the best part of another day had gone. His stomach made a twitch of hunger.

He paced the room stiffly, beads of sweat forming upon his brow. He paused to drink from a pitcher of water on Alma's bedstand. It was tepid like the temperature of the room. He stalked about restlessly, listening to other footsteps in the hallway past the bedroom door. No one noticed that he was missing from his room. He might well have been as cold and silent as the friends he watched.

It was beyond hope that Alma would have come to him when she found herself in trouble. But if she had, none of this would have come to pass. Dishonored, the Seven Counties would never have frowned if he'd courted her. Perhaps they would even have gladly discharged her burden into his hands. Or, if she had begged him to help her keep her secret, he would have married her and taken her home to the Mojave. Fortune had not given him that opportunity. He looked beyond the window pane and saw that the day had grown long shadows, and a pale moon hung on the horizon, before its time.

He sat and tried to rest again.

A boot heel smudged the planking outside the door. Drakkar stopped his musings, his crest coming up alertly as he realized the significance of the noise. He had no knife but had pulled Sir Thomas' from the belt sheath when the door swung open cautiously.

Tando came in sideways. His face showed little emotion beyond that of its scaled patterning as he saw the still forms of Sir Thomas, Lady Nolan, and Alma. A pigeon scroll was poised between the tips of his fingers. The Mojavan wore his nails a little long and sharpened to a point like claws.

"You are well?"

"I'll live," Drakkar said and heard with surprise how weak and tired his own voice was. "More than I can say for Shankar." He did not replace Thomas' knife, but sat back with it across his thighs.

"What happened here?"

"A seeing trance." Such things were not unheard of among the sensitives under Denethan's rule. It was the best explanation he could muster. Tando seemed to accept it. He dropped the scroll in Drakkar's palm. The fine gold seal had not been removed. Drakkar opened it and read carefully. Nesters were attacking viciously upon Denethan's borders. He was having to expend time and energy to repel them. It was a necessity that might divide his power enough to leave him open to the rebels. The scroll was, in effect, a warning to Drakkar that his father's leadership had reached a crisis it might not weather. He was inquiring if the Seven Counties had yet made a decision to move against the nesters in force.

Drakkar sighed. "Send out a pigeon. Tell him 'No.' Wish him luck from me."

"That is all?"

"That," said Drakkar wearily, looking at his friends in their stillness, "is almost more than I can spare." He would not have killed Shankar and brought the rebels to their knees, but once having felt the slow acting poison on the ambassador's blade, knew he could not have left him alive to work his ill. Now wheels were in motion he could not turn or brake. He was as helpless to aid his father as he was to help Alma. He watched Tando leave as quietly as he had crept in.

Like the arc of a falling leaf, Alma's chest moved in a breath. Then she ceased movement again. It might be morning before another one of them breathed again. He closed his burning eyes.

Thomas stumbled to a halt. He went to his knees, collapsing like a paper tent in a rainstorm, folding up like a newborn colt, and lay there, fighting only to breathe. He lifted his hand and placed it on the strand carrying Lady's colors. An electricity shocked up. He felt her presence as vividly as if she stood there with him. He levered himself to his knees holding onto the cable. He had been running the road without anchor, beginning or end. Now he knew he had to find her quickly. He was spent, and if he was, they must be also.

He fixed her in his thoughts as if he were dowsing for her soul, for the clean water purity of it behind the crustiness of her exterior. He closed his eyes as if he held a dowsing rod and searched for the wellspring that was the woman.

The span trembled behind him. Thomas' eyes flew open. He lost his grip on the strand. The upheaval that had passed before was buckling the void again, a nothingness beyond the dimness, only this—this nothingness was full, filled with . . . with something he could not touch with any of his senses. It sought out his fix on Lady Nolan and took it away from him, robbing him of his anchor and hope. It left behind a shadow, a reflection so dark he could see its silhouette clearly. It was a man, a nester perhaps, walking with a feral grace, back the way he'd come.

Thomas took a gulping breath. "Shit," he said strongly and keenly. His hands felt like ice. He tried crossing his arms and wanning them in the pits of his sweat-soaked shirt, but there was no warmth left in him. Something tremendous had crossed his pathway. Had it moved along another road, a road where only Lady was real?

He shook off his fear. The specter had passed on. He grabbed for the strand of sable and silver again and got to his feet. He could run no more. He stepped out on the road. He reached for the second strand, the faint tracing that was Alma, always fading and yet not diminished completely.

He found his anger and fresh energy and went after them.

Lady sat in the void, cradling Alma, the girl sprawled across her lap. Her ability to come and go had been stripped from her long before she'd felt Thomas take the bones. She could do nothing more than stay on the road she'd created, fueled from the fierce joy of birth and life with all its miseries, and hang on to Alma. She did not know if it had been hours or days.

She took her sleeve and wiped the dew from Alma's face. The girl stirred. Her eyelids fluttered.

"Let me go," she begged.

"No. Not you or the baby."

Alma opened her eyes. Huge eyes, Lady thought. Windows to her soul, if one knew to look into them.
"He raped me,''
Alma whispered hoarsely.

"I know. But the baby is innocent flesh. He may be the only good thing the dean has ever left in this world."

Alma looked away. "No good can ever come of this."

"He was never genetically altered. He was never contaminated by the eleven year plague. His sperm is the only thing about him that's not corrupt. You're no longer barren, Alma. Your promise is about to be fulfilled."

"Not with his child!"

"You have no choice now." Lady hugged her close. "If you had told me earlier ... but now . . . Alma, I can feel his soul burning to live as fiercely as yours does. Let me bring you back. I can purge the poisons out. You'll live. He'll live."

"No." A vicious shudder wracked the slender girl. "If the baby lives, he'll come after us. He'll pound the Seven Counties until he has what he wants, and what he wants is this child!"

A low, deep voice from the shadows about them said, "I agree." Thomas stepped into their sight. Even in the dim sensory confines of the ghost road, he radiated light. His hands seemed full of it.

Lady swallowed down the sudden, hard knot in her throat. "Thank God."

He held out the finger bones. "Lose something?"

She smiled wearily. "Nearly everything but the hope you'd come after us." She gathered up Alma, prepared to get to her feet.

But Thomas' face was not creased with welcome. His expression was drawn. He shook his head. "I won't take her back if she doesn't want to go."

"Thomas!"

He looked at Lady. "No," he said. "I won't do it. I should have killed the dean the first time we met. My mistake has cost hundreds of lives. There is nothing good that can come of him."

Alma shuddered again. Her pale fists were clenched and pushed into her stomach. "He's right."

Lady hugged her fiercely. She looked up, saw Blade's implacable face. She knew she could not move him. "Then," she said, "you'll have to return without all of us."

"You have no right to interfere with her choice!" Thomas' voice cut across the ghost road.

"I have every right! I'm older. I understand life, she doesn't! She's been beaten and broken and humiliated and terrorized. What in God's name makes you think she can make a decision like this?''

Thomas tilted his head slightly. "What makes you think she can't? It looks to me as if she already has."

"Not before I caught her on the ghost road. It's all of us—or none of us. Now you make the decision."

Alma grabbed her wrist. "Lady, don't. He loves you. He came for you."

"I came for both of you," Thomas said. "But not the . . . other."

Lady cried out, "You can't deny him."

"My Talent is death. Yours is life." He took a step. She saw with alarm how weak he was, that it had taken all his effort to remain standing. The road had taken nearly all he had to offer.

"I can't do it without you." Her voice caught. She turned her face away, hiding it as she bowed over Alma.

He caught her wrist and brought her to her feet. Alma tumbled out of her arms. They looked at each other searchingly. Lady knew then that it would never be the same between them. He caught Alma and hauled her to her feet as well. Lady saw then what he had woven into each hand, like a kind of rope. "We're going home." He dragged her a step in the direction he'd appeared from.

She could not fight his desperate strength. "Alma!"

The girl hung back.

"It's your choice," Thomas said, finally. "I won't kill it now. I may have to later.''

The girl looked at him. "If he's . . . some kind of monster?''

Thomas nodded.

"He's ... my son."

"I know that."

Her face crumpled and she let out a tiny wail. "What should I do?"

Lady reached out and took her hand, opening it to show the strand that Thomas had lain across her palm, her lifestrand, her colors, faint and commingled. "He's already part of you," she said softly, the tip of her finger disturbing the weave gently, separating purple from dark blue. "I'll be there with you. We'll understand, Alma. You're not alone."

The girl stood transfixed, looking at the colors interwoven with her own. She had felt the shock of her existence the moment Sir Thomas had put the cord in her hand. Now she felt the flickering tug of another presence.

Something young, and unformed, something fresh and untouched.

She looked up into Thomas' level gaze.

"I'll do what I have to," he repeated.

She looked to Lady. The healer nodded. "As I will."

Alma took a deep, quavering breath. "That's as much assurance as any life gets, isn't it?" She took a step forward to join them.

Trout died on the outskirts of Orange County. They buried him in the shade of a stand of eucalyptus, the peeled bark scenting the cairn with its pungent fragrance. Ma-chander, his face tanned so dark his port wine birthmark barely showed now, planted geranium at the cairn's base. Winter rains were coming and the geranium would get a foothold. Once established, the flowering plant would grow and blossom through heat and drought. The boys stood around until Stefan finally mumbled a prayer of sorts and each of them said what they felt like saying.

Watty felt more like crying. He didn't, though. He watched Jeong make a sketch of the cairn and grove and the haggard boys standing around it. He saw it before the boy flipped the cover over his sketchbook quickly. The drawing shocked him.

He looked away quickly from the sight of their failure as it was etched into their faces, their posture, all of them. Their failure to map anything truly unknown, or even to have survived the trek. Their failure to have saved Trout.

Stefan broke the silence a second time. He put his hat back on. "We'll move a lot more quickly now that we don't have to use the travois. Break it down and let's get going. Two more days and we'll be having lunch in Judge Teal's backyard."

Home. Home in the Seven Counties. Soon they would be hitting the fringe of the cattle and sheep herds, and then the farms. Now they were crossing the broken terrain at the southeast lip of the foothills. They had swung east of the College Vaults, avoiding nester territory wherever they could. Stefan had been becoming increasingly

tenser. The nesters appeared to be reclaiming old clan territory with a vengeance.