Time distended: in slow motion, the female drew a blade and joined the dark one in armed approach. The weapons gleamed cold and alien in the fire’s light, as bronze or iron had never gleamed. The one who stalked him, too, had such a knife.
Deilcrit made no noise with which he might betray his position. He ceased breathing. His pulse thumped, strangling, in his throat. Along the spear, his fingers spread, tensed, burned. The readiness ran tingling up his arm. Painstakingly, silent and slow, he rose up amid the jicekak, uncaring of the thorns raking his cheek. If he lived, he would find time to dress the itching scratches. Soundless, he maneuvered the spear, his forearm aching with restraint. Teeth locked, Deilcrit waited, setting and resetting his grip on the spear’s shaft.
The foremost intruder was close. His leathers, much-used, were strangely cut, matched, once opulent. About his waist was a belt from which unfamiliar shapes and a scabbard, too long for a knife and too short for a sword, depended. On his legs were boots that reached to his thighs.
Now, surely!
The ptaiss murderer closed, inexorable, as if Deilcrit stood in the open, in clearest day. He thrust his arm, decided, forward. But his fingers could not release the shaft. The cast, aborted, marked his position beyond hope of escape. He stood gasping, rock-still, feeling the slide of the shaft in his slippery palms.
The man, close enough now to be completely enshadowed, stopped. He tossed his head, and spoke in some unintelligible tongue, staring directly, it seemed, at Deilcrit’s benumbed form. Again that man-likeness spoke to him where he hid in the thicket. Deilcrit’s guts turned so violently that it was all he could do to keep his hold on the spear. With a great effort of will, he kept his body from doubling over and tumbling to the ground.
Then, without thought other than the shame upon him, and the ending death would put to his pretenses and his cowardice, he stepped from the brush.
The creature before him showed no surprise.
Deilcrit, having fought evil and the spirit temptations all of his life, laid down his spear. It was a simple thing. He pried his fingers from the shaft and it fell on the ground between them. That the message be more clear, he followed it, his head pressed to the rank, salty earth. For a moment, he had met those eyes. There had been no fear, no mortality therein. Freed now of hope, of regret, Deilcrit awaited death.
He heard the others join the one before whom he knelt. Under his left knee was a stone. It pressed against the nerves there. The red light of his inner lids turned grainy.
The three spoke together. Then it seemed to him that his spirit was lifted gently from his body; that it was examined, considered. It felt odd, being relieved of spirit. A cool touch washed over his empty place, where spirit had been, as cool as the grass and earth beneath him. A final shiver of horror shook his frame, for it came to him that even death might be denied him, that he might be forced to live on, denuded of selfhood, servant to whatever force held him entrapped. He sent a plea to Mnemaat the Unseen that he might be allowed to give up his life rather than become some mindless tool of sinister purpose.
Then a voice spoke to him in Beneguan.
“We will not harm you,” said the voice, male and low. He heard it again, and the second time the words made sense, poking their meaning out through the unfamiliar accent like quenel, their black noses through the foliage at feeding time. Then the sense was gone, as the voice spoke to its companions. The female said a thing, of which he caught only the tone: concern and relief.
Deilcrit ached to move. He could not. Grass rustled as the spear was removed from beside him.
“Can you understand me?” came the male voice once more, slow and distinct. “Get up!”
He raised his head slightly, enough to see their booted feet—and between them, the fire that defiled the bank and warmed the ptaiss’ corpse.
A hand touched his shoulder. Without volition, his flesh quivered beneath it. “Can you understand me?”
“Yes,” came the admission through his gritted teeth. The touch withdrew.
“Stand up. Now!”
Without warning, he was standing, not recollecting how he had come erect.
His hand clutched his empty scabbard, forgetful. The knife was lost somewhere along the Isanisa, lost when he had fallen, rolling heedless down the bank with the screams of the opening Spirit Gate in his ears.
The speaker raised his weapon away from his body. The woman stared at him levelly, through eyes the color of smelting copper. In the shadows, they shone bright, like the night-stalking eyes of the ptaiss. The male spoke sharply to her. She retreated slowly toward the fire. No mortal womb had spawned, those eyes, nor skin that glowed like marsh gas.
Only then did he notice the dark one, hovering behind his male companion. By the sheathing of his blade, the movement of his form through the night as he turned away to purposefully approach the fire and the slaughtered ptaiss, was Deilcrit suddenly conscious of his retreating presence.
“No!” It came out of him an inarticulate sob, tremulous and hoarse. Leaping wide of the lighter man, he sprinted toward the ptaiss.
He heard them shouting in his own language as he bounded the hillock. Cutting through the edges of his fire itself, he cursed his slowness, his cowardice. His feet, among the live coals, blistered through his rude boots.
But he reached her before her defiler. Aama, of the silvery, softest fur, whose breath smelled of new morning and whose black-tufted ears had always been the first to hear him. She would hear no more. How vulnerable is the desolated body in death. How empty he felt, kneeling beside her. Her eyes reproached him. Did they follow? He touched her muzzle, lifted her head in his arms. Then he saw, holding the inert weight against his chest, the extent of her wounds. Above him, far off, he heard their footsteps. Their shadows crowded out the firelight. He buried his face in the ptaiss’ fur, to smell one last time of her. The hair, loosed in death, came away under his hands. She was still warm. Once more he conjured up life in her. Then he laid her head back gently upon the ground. His hands, surely his face, were covered with blood and fur. He tried to close her eyes. She would not allow it, but stared mournfully.
The intruders were talking. He heard it as the buzzing of insects, far off. By the ptaiss’ belly lay the knife the dark one had used to loosen her hide from her flesh. He snatched it up, fingers clumsy on its hilt. Then, taking a deep breath, he straddled her swollen belly, leaning down.
If it could be, he would ask nothing else, as long as he lived.
As he cut her, deep, he prayed that they would not obstruct him. Then he totally forgot them. He was with Parpis. It was not he, but Parpis who made the incision, sure and true, who endured the gush of blood and fluid from her ravaged belly, and the smell of preborn life. His eyes watched his hands, sunk up to the elbows inside her; but it was his fingers which saw. What he touched in that hot, yielding darkness, moved. He recited the laws beneath his breath, but he did not know it. He knew bone sliding in its membranous sac; then the beslimed head, then the forequarters—and the cord. The cord, once grasped, must be held firmly between the fingers, whispered the shade of Parpis in his ear. But alone, he had not enough hands, not for keeping the head down and the cord pressed and ... A third hand reached, beside his, attending the umbilical. Both his own hands freed, he pulled forth the slippery form. He knew that the other cut the bond between dead and living, even as the hindquarters and tail appeared.
With his fingers and his lips and tongue, he cleared the mucus from the ptaissling’s eyes and nostrils. As he did so, it mewled. Other hands were upon it. He paid them no mind. He stroked its matted fur with handfuls of grass. It kicked a leg weakly. Its black muzzle sniffed, coughed, began a blind searching. He lifted its quaking warmth in his arms, pulled it across his kneeling body. He pressed its head against Aama’s cooling teat, aware of the futility in what he did. He turned, then, to see if the miracle could be repeated.
The lighter of the two men, arms bloody to the elbows, knelt so close to him that their knees touched. He could hear the smacks of the ptaissling’s lips, suckling Aama’s fast-cooling milk.
The man, as if Deilcrit’s question had been spoken aloud, shook his head, spreading his arms wide. They were awful in the firelight. He again shook his head, and Deilcrit understood that Aama’s womb held no more miracles.
Halfheartedly he sluiced the blood and mucus from his own forearms and turned away. The ptaissling pumped Aama, making little frustrated sounds. How much milk can come from a lifeless breast? He did not know, but sense told him; little. He leaned over it, guiding the searching mouth to Aama’s second udder. He blinked back tears. In the firelight, the little one gleamed black. And huge. A young male, overyoung, perhaps too young to survive this untimely introduction into life. He stroked it, not wanting more than its warmth and to feel the life coursing in it.
He shifted, ripping up more grass with which to dry its matted fur. It shivered. He murmured to it. Was it for this his life had been spared? He crouched down over the shaking form, trying to warm it with his body.
He did not notice the woman until she was on her hands and knees at his side, holding out the garment she had worn. He was too stunned to even avert his eyes. He took from her the damp, supple leather, and with it rubbed the remaining placenta from the ptaissling. Once more he moved its suckling head, to the third of Aama’s teats.
It was then that the man’s hand came down upon his shoulder, digging, insistent. Man? Not man. He pushed them from his mind. They had murdered Aama, yet one had helped him save her only child. What, what, what?
“Who are you?” said the creature, murderer and midwife both. His head, of its own accord, raised up to meet that fearsome, scarred countenance. He wondered what kind of spirit could be so marked, and what adversary might have inflicted those wounds. Then all rational thought stopped for him. His eyes, once in the grasp of the other’s, were entrapped. He could not look away. The power of the being was too great. His hand sought the newborn’s head, rested there.
“Come into the light,” the man-fleshed spirit ordered, lifting him up with a grip that dug like iron into his arm. The eyes holding him narrowed.
“The ptaissling,” he pleaded. “Do not kill it. You will not kill it?” He knew that he weaved in the man-spirit’s grip, and that his voice trembled. The bloody hand holding him did not relax. “Please, the ptaissling ...”
“I will watch it,” said the woman, low, hovering close. Or at least she seemed to say that. Unhanding him, the man-form, with flicks of his gleaming knife, repeated his order. Even as the blade disappeared in its scabbard, Deilcrit, like one in a dream, complied. His feet were uncertain on the hillock’s slope. Weight upon them caused pain, pain caused dizziness, dislocation, disregard of all else. He stumbled through a tuft and found himself leaning upon the other for support.
Dazzled, this close to the firelight, detached from the blaze of his blistered feet by the cocoon of returning fright, he stopped, blinking, at the other’s command. His eyes strayed to the disembowled ptaiss, to the woman-form, and to the black shadow of the ptaissling.
“Look at me.”
With a strangled sob, he did so, turning to his tormentor, submitting once again to that gaze which turned bones to powder, muscle to jelly, mind to prayer. Slowly the man wiped his arms of Aama’s blood. Then he nodded at Deilcrit, and smiled, and indicated that he should sit.
He collapsed on the ground, as if the other’s will had been all that held him upright. He heard a voice, and knew it his: reciting the laws from rote in the old tongue.
“Stop,” said the man-form. “I cannot understand that.”
Deilcrit stared. Cannot? If not from the lawgivers, then whence?
“Who are you?” demanded his inquisitor.
He wanted to answer. He meant to answer. He said: “If you have taken life from the sacred ptaiss, will you not take mine also?”
The spirit did not take his life, but grinned, revealing white teeth that flashed in the firelight. Then he shaded his eyes with, his hand.
“What do you call this, place?”
“Benegua,” mumbled Deilcrit, startled. Across the fire, the woman-form ministered to the ptaissling. If she intended it harm, he could not help it.
“And this language?”
“Beneguan,” he answered, fear rising to lock his jaw in ice and turn the sweat cold as it rolled down his brow. How can language be spoken by one who has no name for it? he wondered dully.
“We have come here from Fai Teraer-Moyhe,” explained the man-form. Upon hearing that, he understood. Deilcrit, wailing, struck his forehead repeatedly upon the grass. From the Dark Land .... Tears of repentance flooded him. Not once had he failed, but endlessly. Aama died. He would die. The ptaissling would die. All of Benegua might be carried off to eternal penance, because he had not fled with word. Over his own moans, he heard nothing. Not until the avenging spirit dressed as a man touched him did he realize that it desired to further enlighten him.
“Be at ease,” the man-form said. “We have no quarrel with you.”
Could a man be so simply absolved of misdeeds in their sight? He did not think so. A torrent of guilt burst within him, until dammed back by the thought of the ptaissling. Then he raised his head. Stilling his body’s tremors, he faced the spirit of Fai Teraer-Moyhe.
“Sereth,” called the woman, from the ptaissling’s side. “You will kill him with fright.” At her first word, Deilcrit leaped to his feet, filled with concern for the newborn. Even before the hand reached out to stop him, he sank back down. The spirit nodded approvingly, manlike. Once more he tried to fit the man-mold over this being, that his terror be eased. No amount of trying allowed him this grace; what sat before him could not be a man. Even if from its own mouth had not come the name of the Abode of the Dead, the other-worldliness of his interrogator’s very frame would have made the distinction clear. Men did not carry themselves with such lordly bearing, nor did they wear such garments. Nor carry such weapons. Nor speak so to women. But none had ever lived to tell what Fai Teraer-Moyhe spawned.