Brightness Reef (27 page)

Gingerly, Dwer pushed back to sit up a bit and saw that he lay amid a pile of furs, spread across a sandy floor strewn with bits of bone and shell. That untidy clutter contrasted with the rest of the small chamber- beams, posts, and paneling, all gleaming in the wan light from a candle that flickered on a richly carved table. Each wooden surface bore the fine marks of qheuen tooth-work, all the way down to angle brackets sculpted in lacy, deceptively strong filigrees.

Dwer held up his hands. White bandages covered the fingers, too well wrapped to be qheuen work. He felt hesitant relief on counting to ten and gauging their length to be roughly unchanged-though he knew sometimes frostbite stole the tips even when doctors saved the rest. He quashed an urge to tear the dressings with his teeth and find out right away.

Patience. Nothing you do now will change what’s happened. Stabbing pins-and-needles told him that he was alive and his body was struggling to heal. It made the pain easier to handle.

Dwer kicked aside more furs to see his feet-which were still there, thank the Egg, though his toes also lay under white wrappings, if there were still any toes down there. Old Fallon had gone on hunting for many years, wearing special shoes, after one close call on the ice turned his feet into featureless stumps. Still, Dwer bit his lip and concentrated, sending signals, meeting resistance, nevertheless commanding movement. Tingling pangs answered his efforts, making him wince and hiss, but he kept at it till both legs threatened cramps. At last, he sagged back, satisfied. He could wriggle the critical toes, the smallest and largest on each foot. They might be damaged, but he would walk or run normally.

Relief was like a jolt of strong liquor that went to his head. He even laughed aloud-four short, sharp barks that made Mudfoot stare. “So, do I owe you my life? Did you dash back to the Glade, yapping for help?” he crooned.

For once, Mudfoot seemed set aback, as if the noor knew it was being mocked.

Aw, cut it out, Dwer told himself. For all you know, it might even be true.

Most of his other hurts were the sort he had survived many times before. Several were sewn shut with needle and thread, cross-stitched by a fine, meticulous hand. Dwer stared at the seam-work, abruptly recognizing it from past experience. He laughed again, knowing his rescuer from tracks laid across his own body.

Lark. How in the world did he know?

Clearly, his brother had managed to find the shivering group amid the snowdrifts, dragging him all the way to one of the qheuen freeholds of the upper hills. And if I made it, Rety surely did. She’s young and would chew off Death’s arm, if He ever came for her.

Dwer puzzled for a while over blotchy, pale stains on his arms and hands. Then he recalled. The mule-spider’s golden fluid-someone must have peeled it off, where it stuck.

Those places still felt strange. Not exactly numb so much as preserved-somehow offset in time. Dwer had a bizarre inkling that bits of his flesh were younger now than they had been before. Perhaps those patches would even outlive his body for a while, after the rest of him died.

But not yet, One-of-a-Kind, he mused.

It’s the mule-spider who’s gone. Never got to finish her collection.

He recalled flames, explosions. / better make sure Rety and the glaver are all right.

“I don’t guess you’d run and fetch my brother for me, would you?” he asked the noor, who just stared back at him.

With a sigh, Dwer draped a fur over his shoulders, then gingerly pushed up to his knees, overruling waves of agony. Lark would resent him popping any of those fine stitches, so he took it easy, standing with one hand pressed against the nearest wall. When the dizziness passed, he shuffled on his heels to the ornate table, retrieving the candle in its clay holder. The doorway came next, a low, broad opening covered by a curtain of hanging wooden slats. He had to stoop, pushing through the qheuen-shaped portal.

A pitch-black tunnel slanted left and right. He chose the leftward shaft, since it angled upward a bit. Of course, blue qheuens built their submerged homes to a logic all their own. Dwer used to get lost even in familiar Dolo Dam, playing hide-and-seek with Blade’s creche-mates.

It was painful and awkward keeping most of his weight gingerly on the heels. Soon he regretted the stubborn impulse that sent him wandering like this, away from his convalescent bed. But a few duras later, his stubbornness was rewarded by sounds of anxious conversation, echoing from somewhere ahead. Two speakers were clearly human-male and female-while a third was qheuen. None were Lark or Rety, though mumbled snatches rang familiar. And tense. Dwer’s hunter-sensitivity to strong feelings tingled like his frostbitten fingers and toes.

“. . . our peoples are natural allies. Always have been. Recall how our ancestors helped yours throw off the tyranny of the grays?”

“As my folk succored yours when urrish packs stalked humans everywhere outside Biblos Fortress? Back when our burrows sheltered your harried farmers and their families, till your numbers grew large enough to let you fight back?”

The second voice, aspirated from two or more leg-vents, came from a qheuen matron, Dwer could tell. Probably lord of this snug mountain dam. He didn’t like the snatches of conversation he had heard so far. He blew out the candle, shuffling toward the soft glow of a doorway up ahead.

“Is that what you are asking of me now?” the matriarch went on, speaking with a different set of vents. The timbre of her Anglic accent changed. “If refuge is your need against this frightful storm, then I and my sisters offer it. Five fives of human settlers, our neighbors and friends, may bring their babes and chimps and smaller beasts. I am sure other lake-mothers in these hills will do the same. We’ll protect them here until your criminal cousins depart, or till they blast this house to splinters with their almighty power, setting the lake waters boiling to steam.”

The words were so unexpected, so free of any context in Dwer’s foggy brain, that he could not compass them.

The male human grunted. “And if we ask for more?”

“For our sons, you mean? For their rash courage and spiky claws? For their armored shells, so tough and yet so like soft cheese when sliced by Buyur steel?” The qheuen mother’s hiss was like that of a bubbling kettle. Dwer counted five overlapping notes, all vents working at once.

“That is more,” she commented after a pause. “That is very much more indeed. And knives of Buyur steel are like whips of soft boo, compared to the new things we all fear.”

Dwer stepped around the corner, where several lanterns bathed the faces of those he had been listening to. He shielded his eyes as two humans stood-a dark stern-looking man in his mid-forties and a stocky woman ten years younger, with light-colored hair severely tied back from a broad forehead. The qheuen matron rocked briefly, lifting two legs to expose flashes of claw.

“What new things do you fear, revered mother?” Dwer asked hoarsely. Turning to the humans, he went on. “Where are Lark and Rety?” He blinked. “And there . . . was a glaver, too.”

“All are well. All have departed for the Glade, bearing vital information,” the qheuen whistle-spoke. “Meanwhile, until you recover, you honor this lake as our guest. I am known as Tooth Slice Shavings.” She lowered her carapace to scrape the floor.

“Dwer Koolhan,” he answered, trying awkwardly to bow with arms crossed over his chest.

“Are you all right, Dwer?” the man asked, reaching toward him. “You shouldn’t be up and about.”

“I’d say that’s up to Captain Koolhan himself,” the woman commented. “There’s much to discuss, if he’s ready.”

Dwer peered at them.

Danel Ozawa and . . . Lena Strong.

He knew her. They had been scheduled to meet at Gathering, in fact. Something having to do with that stupid tourism idea.

Dwer shook his head. She had used a word, strange and dire-sounding.

Captain.

“The militia’s been called up,” he reasoned, angry with his mind for moving so slowly.

Danel Ozawa nodded. As chief forester for the Central Range, he was nominally Dwer’s boss, though Dwer hardly saw him except at Gatherings. Ozawa was a man of imposing intellect, a deputy sage, sanctioned to make rulings on matters of law and tradition. As for Lena Strong, the blond woman was aptly named. She had been a crofter’s wife until a tree fell-accidentally, she claimed-on her shiftless husband, whereupon she left her home village to become one of the top lumberjack-sawyers on the river.

“Highest-level alert,” Ozawa confirmed. “All companies activated.”

“What . . . all? Just to collect a little band of soon-ers?”

Lena shook her head. “The girl’s family beyond the Rimmers? This goes far beyond that.”

“Then-“

Memory assailed Dwer. The blurry image of a hovering monster, firing bolts of flame. He croaked, “The flying machine.”

“That’s right.” Danel nodded. “The one you encountered-“ •

“Lemme guess. Some hotheads dug up a cache.”

Dreamers and ne’er-do-wells were always chasing rumors of a fabled hoard. Not rubble but a sealed trove buried on purpose by departing Buyur. Dwer often had to round up searchers who strayed too far. What if some angry young urs actually found an ancient god-weapon? Might they test it first on two isolated humans, trapped in a mule-spider maze, before going on to settle larger grudges?

Lena Strong laughed out loud.

“Oh, he’s a wonder, Danel. What a theory. If only it were true!”

Dwer lifted a hand to his head. The vibration of the water wheel seemed labored, uneven. “Well? What is true?” he demanded testily, then stared at the expression on Ozawa’s face. The older man answered with a brief eye-flick heavenward.

“No,” Dwer whispered.

He felt strangely remote, detached.

“Well then iz all over, an’ I’m out of a job-no?”

The two humans grabbed his arms as he let go of the thing that had kept him going until now, the force that had dragged him upward out of unconsciousness in the first place: duty.

Galactics. Here on the Slope, he thought as they bore his weight back down the hall. So it’s come at last. Judgment Day.

There was nothing more to do. No way he could make any difference at all.

Apparently, the sages didn’t agree. They thought fate might yet be diverted, or at least modified somehow.

Lester Cambel and his aides are making plans, Dwer realized the next morning as he met the two humans again, this time by the shore of the forest-shrouded mountain lake. Even the dam wore trees, softening its graceful outline, helping root the structure firmly to the landscape. Stretched out on an elegant wooden bench, Dwer sipped a cool drink from a goblet of urrish glass as he faced the two envoys who had been sent all the way to see him.

Clearly the leaders of Earthling-Sept were playing a complex, multilayer game-balancing species self-interest against the good of the Commons as a whole. Bluff, open-faced Lena Strong seemed untroubled by this ambivalence, but not Danel Ozawa, who explained to Dwer the varied reactions of other races to the invaders being human.

I wish Lark had stayed. He could have made sense of all this. Dwer’s mind still felt woozy, even after a night’s restoring sleep.

“I still don’t get it. What are human adventurers doing out here in Galaxy Two? I thought Earthlings were crude, ignorant trash, even in their own little part of Galaxy Four!”

“Why are we here, Dwer?” Ozawa replied. “Our ancestors came to Jijo just decades after acquiring star drive.”

Dwer shrugged. “They were selfish bastards. Willing to endanger the whole race just to find a place to breed.”

Lena sniffed, but Dwer kept his chin raised. “Nothing else makes sense.”

Our ancestors were self-centered scoundrels-Lark had put it one day.

“You don’t believe the stories of persecution and flight?” Lena asked. “The need to hide or die?”

Dwer shrugged.

“What of the g’Keks?” Ozawa asked. “Their ancestors claimed persecution. Now we learn their race was murdered by the Inheritors’ Alliance. Does it take genocide to make the excuse valid?”

Dwer looked away. None of the g’Keks he knew had died. Should he mourn millions who were slaughtered long ago and far away?

“Why ask me?” he murmured irritably. “Can anything I do make a difference?”

“That depends.” Danel leaned”forward. “Your brother is brilliant but a heretic. Do you share his beliefs? Do you think this world would be better off without us? Should we die out, Dwer?”

He saw they were testing him. As a top hunter, he’d be valuable to the militia-if he could be trusted. Dwer sensed their eyes, watching, weighing.

Without doubt, Lark was a deeper, wiser man than anyone Dwer knew. His arguments made sense when he spoke passionately of higher values than mere animal reproduction-certainly more sense than Sara’s weird brand of math-based, what-if optimism. Dwer knew firsthand about species going extinct-the loss of something beautiful that would never be recovered.

Maybe Jijo would be better off resting undisturbed, according to plan.

Still, Dwer knew his own heart. He would marry someday, if he found the right partner, and he would sire as many kids as his wife and the sages allowed, drinking like a heady wine the love they gave, in return for his devotion.

“I’ll fight, if that’s what you’re askin’,” he said in a low voice, perhaps ashamed to admit it. “If that’s what it takes to survive.”

Lena grunted with a curt, satisfied nod. Danel let out a soft sigh.

“Fighting may not be necessary. Your militia duties will be taken up by others.”

Dwer sat up. “Because of this?” He motioned toward the bandages on his feet and left hand. Those on the right were already off, revealing that the middle finger was no longer the longest, a disconcerting but noncrippling amputation, healing under a crust of traeki paste. “I’ll be up and around soon, good as ever.”

“Indeed, I am counting on it.” Ozawa nodded. “We need you for something rather arduous. And before I explain, you must swear never to inform another soul, especially your brother.”

Dwer stared at the man. If it were anyone else, he might have laughed scornfully. But he trusted Ozawa. And much as Dwer loved and admired his brother, Lark was without any doubt a heretic. “It’s for the good?” he asked.