They had crossed the road, headed eastward. We had been thrice sickened by dead ones we had passed, and we followed. But no attempts to get near the children availed us. When we showed ourselves they screamed and the little group of thirteen flew apart and disappeared. Sereth had been determined to catch one, if only to offer aid. This he did above Chayin’s mysterious and seemingly arbitrary protestations.
The child we cut from the herd and pursued was fleet. We chased it, circling, closing in on the little girl from three sides. When at last the tiny thing cringed with its back to a large boulder, weeping, its capture sure, we heard a snapping among the trees and something dark and winged swooped straight down. There came a moment of shadowed wings and whooshing air, and the child was gone, snatched into the air, only to reappear, hurtling groundward. Even as I lunged forward, it struck earth with a sickening crash.
We stood over that crushed and broken body, peering up into branches that seemed to seek eternity somewhere above our heads.
“I told you,” Chayin growled, prodding the child’s corpse with his foot. Indeed, he had told us that only death could come from our mixing in these affairs.
“If you had not obstructed me,” spat Sereth, “the child would be alive.”
The cahndor had thrown himself upon Sereth, dragging him to the ground, when the wehr’s shadow first darkened the earth.
Chayin, breathing hard, grass in his black mane, rubbed a fresh bruise on the side of his temple.
“Sereth, I will not tell you again. We have entered the wehrs’ domain. Our rules do not obtain here. A strong territoriality does. We have twice withstood wehr-rages; it is because of this that they no longer attack us. By their own ritual, we have won the right to walk these woods. But we stay not still, and this makes the wehr-folk uneasy. By the rules of their society, if we rage—if we start another bloodletting—they will fight us until either all of us or all of them lie dying. And there are very many of them. We have acted outside their conventions. The wehr-mind stretches to accommodate men who are more than men, wehrs who are less than wehrs, creatures who carry their territoriality with them.”
“How do you know all this?” Sereth demanded, his fingers toying with knife sheathed at his hip.
“I have spoken with them. As might you, if you chose.”
And he would say no more.
So we followed the children in their ragged band, and saw a thing even more strange: they came to a widening trail, at the end of which a mud-brick wall encircled a score of bent-branch huts on the Isanisa’s bank.
It was getting on to day’s end, and the light grew uncertain. We circled around the youngsters and concealed ourselves near the wall, within its very shadow in a clump of the silver-berried bushes.
Just when we had done this, two men slipped through a low door in the wall and scuttled to obscure themselves in the trees that lined the path.
Sereth laid hand on my shoulder, but I needed no warning. I held my breath and stayed very still.
I cannot recall what I expected to see, but—it surely was not what passed before my eyes:
The group of children had broken ranks. Two came, almost together, pell-mell along the trail, out of sight of the others. One had hair as red as the sun.
The men in the bushes waited until the children were almost parallel to them. Then, as one man, they leaped upon the fleet little forms.The redhead, by some few feet the straggler, let out a strangled cry and wheeled to run back the way she had come. She could not elude her pursuer.
The men secreted the children’s bodies in a pit I must assume they had dug there for that purpose, and took up once more their vigilance in the trees.
Sereth hissed articulately, and Chayin warned him, very low, that any overt attempt to interfere would bring weighty consequences, that Beneguan ways were not Silistran ways, nor his to adjudge.
For a moment I thought they would tear each other to pieces among the silver berries. Obviously they did not, but they did sit unspeaking while the rest of the children, still bunched together, passed unmolested by the two concealed men; sat there until the moon rose and the men, with grumbled laughter, forsook their concealment and pounded upon the gate that had opened to admit the balance of the children’s band, and were themselves admitted.
It seemed that within the mud-bricked wall a celebration was under way, for the silence was eaten up by laughter and the thrumming of drums and the piping of eerie pipes.
On our way back to the great road we had quit to witness this odd and terrible scene, we stumbled over two more slain children.
“It is as it was with children,” had said Chayin. “The very time divides us.” I could feel in myself the detached patience I had felt then, that cool heedlessness that had saved me from some pointless attempt to intervene in what was none of my affair. But this time, my mind told me dryly, everything was very much my affair.
“Do not withhold your aid from him. For my sake,” I dared to beg. And then he did not answer but only pushed me gently away. “Then, if not for me, for whatever you hold sacred.”
“How cometh your obviation of space?” he queried bitterly, letting me know that he was aware of what Sereth had given me, and the price I had paid. I lowered my head. “What I will do is for his sake, not yours. I will get him through the maze and pick him up if he falls. But I will not let him die for his ignorance.”
And with that, he made motion that I should descend the tree before him.
Which took most of my concentration. I am no tree-dweller, not like Sereth, who spent his youth in forests. My youth was spent upon silken covers, learning my womanhood and those joys it can give to a man. I begrudged the loss of those days, and the joyous ignorance I then possessed.
It seemed to me that as far as Sereth remained “ignorant,” to that extent was he blessed; that we were both in that respect unlike Chayin, who sought knowledge for its own sake. And I caught my first glimpse of what Sereth had dubbed the “lack of compassion” in us Shapers’ spawn, as I climbed slowly and painstakingly down the towering memnis and Chayin followed behind.
Another thing that occurred to me as I scratched and scraped and slid my way groundward was one which caused me to reach out under my shield, testing as a warrior might reach out beyond his shield arm’s defense. I sought Wehrdom. I sought the touch that had brushed my sensing and withdrawn when we entered by the Spirit Gate; that had nearly drawn me down into its whirling tunnel when I destroyed the wehr-master. I had devalued that at the time. I had not wanted to think that Wehrdom might be a worthy foe, or even an intelligence whose wishes need be considered. A certain smugness comes with successes, such as ours, and in that smugness is the most insidious of perils.
So, at the last possible moment, as I joined Sereth where he sat on a flat, moss-grown boulder, I considered Wehrdom, and took some care as to my armament before it.
It was a soft crowd in my mind, back behind my sensing, cautiously curious like untold pairs of round eyes, blinking. I saw it as a curtain through which Sereth and the day and Chayin’s approach were not obscured, but intensified with a wonder that danced like a multitude of phosphorescent insects in all the air about, giving it volume that undulated in a pulsing dance.
I made some affirmative sound to Sereth’s query as to my well-being, though it hung long moments in my ears bereft of meaning, as Wehrdom heard it, before my habituated understanding precipitated a response.
I know Sereth looked at me strangely, for the wehr presence about me made a space of two breaths stretch interminably and performed a minute investigation of his face therein.
I walked easily; I was aware of all that passed around me with a multiple perspective that showed me the wood as a magnificent palatial estate in which all things were about a perpetual reordering. There is a joy in wehr-thought that is equally from fury and ecstasy, ascendancy and suffering, birth and death. They are one and yet all, and from them I could separate the berceides who guard the maze whose every hungry mouth and yawning pit and sinksand dead end was as familiar to me as to the campt which awaited at the most hideous misturn of all; or to the wehr-master even now striding through the jicekak to intercept us.
I said this, to Sereth and Chayin, and cautioned them to tread unerringly the very middle of the first corridor, on whose every side pink mouths waited gaping.
We did this, and I saw Sereth’s heels before my downcast eyes. Both Chayin and I called the turn, together, and my mind slipped out from the wehrknowing, startled, fearful, and I spent long awkward moments battening down the cracks in my shielding through which Wehrdom’s song yet could be heard.
When I heard it not, I heard another thing: the hissing of the berceides as they reared upon their coils for a better view. And saw Sereth’s doubtless instinctual reaction: like two popping gourds, the berceides’ heads burst apart. The steaming ichor splattered, but we three kept very still. The pink mouths of the hedge writhed and slurped and strained forward. We stood unmoving, though the death throes of the coils whipped around us, safe within the neutral barrier we had earlier determined to employ. Neutral, but immobile, sunk into the very bedrock of the universe. If Sereth wished, he could have held that envelope of space inviolate before a force that would powder the planet. As it was, the lashing tails of the dead snakes merely rebounded from any point closer than an arm’s length to our bodies.
“That settles that,” growled Chayin, and spat disgustedly. “We are going in bloody: what else can follow but more of the same? It is rage for rage, here.
Why must you do this?”
“Ask your forereading. It tells you all things. If it told you true, you would know that two snakes are a cheap price for such an introduction, and will save higher blood later on.”
“You persist in this hierarchal prejudice! This is Wehrdom. No such—”
“Silence!”
And he got it. Total, complete, unbreathing absence of sound.
The hairs on my body rose up, waved in the air, returned to their normal rest. The barrier dismantled, we proceeded into the second maze.
I wondered if I would dare open my mind again to Wehrdom, after what Sereth had done, and then reflected that I, as he, might as well dare what I chose. There was precious little from which to choose; it would remain thus for a space. Such is owkahen’s price to those who wish to lie with her: she denies us nothing, but rather designates that toward which we strive.
The wehr-master met us at the beginning of the innermost maze, though I had expected him long since. But when we turned that corner, I understood.
He blocked the aisle of silver-berried bushes, wings folded around him like some fabulous cape. His loins were bound in black silk as shiny as his coal-dark pelt. Behind him were ten of his kind, all colors, and these had their wings stiffened, akimbo.
Besides the tall black-maned wehr stood a woman whose face I had seen in Deilcrit’s dreams, a woman whom Sereth yet thought to be a man: Mahrlys-iis-Vahais. Something prompted me to glance at Chayin, and the expression on his face was an odd mix of assessment and shock. I did not sufficiently mark it, for then the black-winged creature stepped forward.
“What in the name of Mnemaat,” it growled throatily in a voice quite unexpectedly clear, “do you want here? What further sacrifice could you possibly demand? What brings you to war upon us, and from whence? Who are you? What is expected of us?” As he spoke, he came ever closer: by the time he had finished speaking, he was kneeling at my feet, peering up at me through totally red eyes described by two concentric black rings that seemed to be iris and pupil. I looked into those blazing fires.
I did not know what to say. I stared down at him, noting that as he waited, his wings began to rustle. Sereth, besides reaching behind my back to touch Chayin’s arm when the thing approached me, made no move.
Before words came to me, while yet I stared into the red-on-red eyes of Wehrdom, the woman whirled on her heels. I heard the scramble of those behind her to move out of her way.
“Wait. You have not been dismissed,” Sereth advised, so quietly that I thought perhaps the woman did not hear. She took two more steps between her winged guardians, then turned stiffly and proceeded to kneel beside the black-winged one at my feet. I had seen her eyes, and there was no doubt in me that it was Sereth’s will, and not her own, holding her on her knees. And the tremors that coursed visibly over her flesh an instant later proved me right: such is the aftermath of flesh-lock.
I surreptitiously tugged on his tunic. Accidentally, he jostled me. The winged creatures, each man-sized or larger, stood very still, watching through their red eyes. Some had head ruffs or manes; some had lips, and some did not. A few were thick, with wrestlers’ muscles taut amid their wings, so massive that I wondered if they could truly fly. Most were lithe as shadows, pale as a young moon. But all were formidable, armed only with what nature had provided. I knew why they did not speak, but I was not about to open myself to Wehrdom’s thousand throats.
“Most High,” hissed the woman at my feet, “restrain your servants. I am iis of this place. Only reveal your desires to me, and they will be sated. But please”—and this an agonized whisper—“do not shame me before my wehr-masters.”
I answered her in a deep and formal tone, that all of hers might hear:
“I want a man called Deilcrit, and those belongings of ours that he has upon him. And I want your sage counsel as to how you can make amends for the loss of our ship and men.” This last was at Sereth’s rather obvious urging.
The woman put her head in her hands, raised it, and said: “Might I rise?”
I nodded, and they both stood, and I saw from the flames in her green eyes that she played a part only, one forced upon her, and that she was concerned that I realize the fact.
“What in the name of Uritheria is going on here?” exploded Chayin in Parset. Sereth silenced him in the same language, while the woman, composed, suggested that we accompany her into Dey-Ceilneeth.