Glen Cook - Doomstalker

She spied a familiar figure climbing the treacherously icy steps leading to the ramparts. She ignored it, knowing it was Grauel. Grauel, whom she had not seen in weeks, and whom she missed, and yet ...

Grauel leaned into the teeth of the wind as she approached, determined to invade Marika's private space. Her teeth were chattering when she reached Marika. "What're you doing up here in weather like this, pup? You'll catch your death."

"I like it here, Grauel. Especially at this time of year. I can come out here and think without being interrupted."

Grauel ignored the hint. "They're talking about you down there, pup." Marika noted the familiar form of speech-which even now Grauel turned to only when she was stressed-but maintained her aloofness. Grauel continued, "I just heard them. I had the duty. Gorry again. Talking to the senior. As viciously as ever, but this time I think she may have found a sympathetic ear. What have you done?"

"Nothing."

"Something, certainly. You've frightened Gorry so badly she is insisting you be sent to the Maksche cloister come spring."

That startled Marika. It was an about-face for Gorry, who till now had wanted her very existence concealed from the cloister at Maksche, of which Akard was a subservient satellite. Though she had done nothing specific to alarm Gorry, the old instructress had read her better than she had suspected. Yet another argument for exercising caution. The old silth counted experience and superior knowledge among her advantages in their subtle, bittersweet, unacknowledged duel.

"I still don't understand them, Grauel. Why are they afraid of me?" Gorry she understood on a personal level. Gorry feared because she had whelped a powerful hatred in her pupil. But Gorry's fear was far more than just a dread of Marika's vengeance. Without comprehending, Marika knew it was far more complex than that, and knew that part of Gorry's fear was, to some extent, shared by all the older silth of the packfast.

Grauel said what had been said before, by herself, Barlog, and especially by Braydic. But Marika did not relate to it any better now.

"It's not that they fear what you are now, Marika. They dread what you might become. Gorry insists you're the strongest pupil she's ever encountered, or even heard of. Including those with whom she trained, and she claims those were some of the strongest talents of the modern age. What truth there? Who knows? They're all self-serving liars. But one fact remains undeniable. You have an air of doom that makes them uneasy."

Marika almost turned. This was something a little different from what she usually heard. "An air of doom? What does that mean?"

"I don't know for sure. I'm just telling you what I've heard. And what I've heard is, Gorry believes you are something more than you. Something mythic. A fang in the jaws of fate, if you will. Gorry came up with the idea a long time ago. The others used to scoff. They don't anymore. Even those who try to find ways to thwart Gorry. You have done something that makes even your champions uneasy."

Marika reviewed the past few months. There had been nothing at all that was different from what had gone before. Except that she had reached the brink of physical maturation and been ordered to take a daily draft of a potion which would prevent the onset of her first estrus.

"I don't see it, Grauel. I don't feel like I'm carrying any doom around."

"Would you know if you did, pup? Did Jiana?"

Gorry's word. Jiana. In a moment of anger the old silth had called her Jiana one day recently. "That's a myth, Grauel. Anyway, Jiana wasn't even meth."

The demigoddess Jiana had been the offspring of a rheum-greater and the all-father avatar of the All, Gyerlin, who had descended from the great dark and had impregnated Jiana's dam in her sleep. It was not accepted doctrine. It was a story, like many other tales from the dawn of time. A prescientific attempt to explain away mysteries.

When Jiana had become an adult, she had carried curses around the world, and in her wake all the animals had lost their powers of speech and reason. All but the meth, who had been forewarned by Gyerlin and had hidden themselves away where Jiana could not find them.

It was an ancient tale, distorted by a thousand generations of retellings. Any truth it might have held once had to have been leached away by the efforts of storytellers to improve upon the original. Marika accepted it only as what it was upon its face, an explanation of why the meth were the only intelligent, talking animals. She did not see that the myth had any connection with her present situation.

She said as much to Grauel.

"Myth or not, Gorry is calling you her little Jiana. And some of the others are taking her seriously. They are certain you have been touched by the All." Which expression could have two meanings. In this case Marika knew she could interpret it as a polite way of saying she was insane.

"Someone has been touched by the All, Grauel. And I don't think it is me. These silth are not very down to earth when you look at them closely."

Marika had been very much surprised to discover that the silth, for all their education and knowledge resources, were far more mystically and ritualistically inclined than the most primitive of nomads. They honored a score of days of obligation of which she had never before heard. They offered daily propitiation to both the All and the lesser forces with which they dealt. They made sacrifices on a scale astonishing to one for whom sacrifice had meant a weekly bowl of gruel set outside the packstead gate, with a pot of ormon beer, and a small animal delivered to Machen Cave before the quarterly conjunction of the two biggest moons. The silth were devil-ridden. They still feared specters supposedly cast down when the All had supplanted earlier powers. They feared shadows that had come with the All but which were supposed to be enchained irrevocably in other worlds. They especially feared those-always wehrlen-who might be able to summon those shadows against them.

Marika had observed several of the higher ceremonies by sneaking through her loophole. Those rituals had almost no impact upon those-who-dwell, as the silth called the things Marika thought of as ghosts. And those things were the only supernatural forces Marika recognized. At the moment she seriously questioned the existence of the All itself, let alone those never-seen shadows that haunted her teachers.

The ghosts needed no propitiation that Marika could see. Insofar as she could tell, they remained indifferent to the mortal plane most all the time. They responded to it, apparently only in curiosity, at times of high stress. And acted upon it only when controlled by one with the talent.

Doomstalker. That was Jiana's mystic title. The huntress in search of something she could never find, something that was always behind her. Insofar as Marika could see, the doomstalker was little more than a metaphor for change.

The doomstalker was a powerful silth myth, though, and Marika suspected that Gorry, fearful of what her own future held, was playing upon it cynically in an effort to gain backing from the other older sisters. None of the Akard silth liked Gorry, but they grudgingly respected her for what she had been before being sent into exile.

Even so, she would have to do some tall convincing before being permitted more blatant excesses toward her pupil. Of that Marika was confident.

Caution. Caution. That was all it would take.

"I am no doomstalker, Grauel. And I have no ambitions. I'm just doing what I have to do so we can survive. They need not fear me."

She had slipped into a role she played for Grauel and Barlog both, in their rare meetings, for she feared that Grauel, at least, in her own effort to survive reported her every remark. "I sincerely believe that I will become the sort of sister who never leaves the cloister and seldom uses her talent for anything but teaching silth pups."