Jo Clayton - Shadowkill

She pinched the candle out, took the robe off and got into bed, shivering a little as her warm body hit the cold sheets.

She had on a blousy nightshirt, very soft and flowing, but it didn’t help at all with the cold. She wriggled around until she was comfortable, then shut her eyes and arranged her mind for sleep…

Moonlight streamed through the narrow window beside the narrow bed, white and chill and far too bright. Moonlight. It was eerie. Things looked different. She pulled her hand from under the covers, stretched it out to intersect that slant of moonshine. The color was leached from her skin; the fingers seemed bonier, they trailed light like smoke.

She wiggled her fingers and watched the shadows play inside the beam, then pulled her hand back into the dusk where it took on an ordinary dark solidity.

Sleep, sleep. She flopped over, the nightshirt twisting about her body, pulling tight against her neck. She humped herself about, tugging at the cloth, smoothing wrinkles that felt like ridges under her.

The inside of her knee itched. She twisted around and down, scratched and sighed. The itch moved to the middle of her back. She chased it as high as she could reach, shuddered all over, kicked the covers off, and rolled out of bed.

Scratching at her arm, she padded to the window and stood frowning out it at a strange colorless landscape, at roofs with pantiles like humpy scales, at a wall two stories high and wide enough to drive the landrover on, with merlons along the outer edge and towers black against a sky hot with stars, so many stars even the huge yellow-gray moon couldn’t blot them out-a full moon rising into a cloudless sky, limned against it a pair of strange mountains, black silhouettes like pointy breasts with hardened nipples.

And a river like a streamer of silver silk, splitting around the Kuysstead. Moat, she thought. Gods. Tumaks? Brushies? Those what they’re this spooky about? I wonder what they look like. All we saw was empty land. Empty land the guards were watching like it could hatch trouble any instant. Did, too. She shivered as she remembered the shooting.

North and west for fifteen days, looong days, had to be at least two thousand kays from where they’d started. Thirty days of misery for Matja Allina, coming and going. And for what? For us. Twenty-six women. If that was the measure of her desperation… ay-yai!

. Matja Allina, is she crazy? Thinking up enemies for her baby? Or is it real? Will she do what she promised? Can she? He backed her, but maybe he’s just humoring her. He doesn’t like us much; that was so thick in the air I could sink my teeth in it. He said he’d back her promise with his. He meant it, I think. Now. That doesn’t say anything about later. When the time comes. He might and he might not. If she’s crazy… paranoid… then what she said, it’s just words and we’re stuck for the duration. Ten years. Gods, I hope not. I don’t like it here. I don’t like having to kiss up to a bunch of… Hmm. Does that say something about what kind of person I was before?

She leaned on the windowsill and contemplated her reactions since she woke in that miserable hut. Up and down, elated, depressed, angry, excited. And tired. Sometimes she felt a hundred years old, sometimes about six. Sometimes she felt in charge of herself, sometimes she felt utterly helpless, though mostly she was somewhere in between. Like now. And right now she was so tired she ached, but her eyes simply wouldn’t stay closed and her body was giving her the fidgets of hell.

She blinked, startled. A small red dot bloomed high on one of the black mountains. A fire. It flickered at her, vanished as if a wall had been put in front of it, reappeared, vanished, reappeared. Then was gone altogether.

It’s a piece with everything else. Conspiracies to suppress a fetus. Things in the brush that need to be shot at, not just shot at but machine-gunned. Signals from a mountainside, aimed at… who? Someone in here? What did that mean?

She yawned, suddenly so heavy-eyed that she wasn’t sure she could make the bed before she melted in a puddle of sleep. Another turn in… in the fog. Wasn’t it fog for everyone, who could read the future? Not me. Not anyone… She stumbled the few steps to the bed, fell onto it and wriggled awkwardly about until she’d got the covers where they should be, over her, not under. She wriggled a last time, like a cat kneading a pillow, getting it right. Then she dropped into the abyss.

If she dreamed, she didn’t know it.

Dyslaera 5: Training Trials

Savant 1 (speaking into note pad):

Removed cap and restrainers from subject 3F (native name: Kinefray)… using CPF24sub2 as a reinforcer… subject continues docile, emotional reaction damped down… under orders, cut the hand off subject 7T (native name: Tolmant), showed no reaction to subject’s protests or struggles… satisfactory contrast to earlier reactions to this subject.

RECOMMENDATION: Continue this regimen for another month without reinforcement other than the CPF. Important to know how permanent this change is. If temporary, important to know how long the treatment lasts.

IMAGE: Kinefray sits in the cell like a lump; Azrarrz is talking and talking at him, agitated, crying as he tries to reach his cousin. He shakes Kinefray, slaps him, then retreats to the far side of the cell and sits there, suffering.

Savant 1 (speaking into note pad):

Subject 3Tj (native name: Tejnor)… youngest of the subjects… perhaps the most intractable, despite his youth… which might be considered to contradict trends suggested by previous data… probably an anomaly due to individual differences within the species… the subject sample is, unfortunately, too small for anything more reliable than a hint…

NOTE: recommend immediate attempts to enlarge the sample.

Have broken through the trance state repeatedly… made it impossible for 3Tj to retreat from attack, while maintaining intelligence levels and some degree of free will… have managed also to breach the strong ties between this apprentice and his master, subject 7T (native name: Tolmant)… to the point that he was willing to participate in a pain-inducing session with 7T as subject… during this session he proved so enthusiastic that 7T was accidentally killed… no great loss, the subject was badly mutilated at the time…

NOTE: Tech 1 Rivas has suggested the killing stroke was deliberate, not accident; 3Tj was questioned under probe, results inconclusive-the drugs present in his system hinder analysis of his reactions.

TENTATIVE CONCLUSION: Rivas is mistaken. If 3Tj were still feeling the pull of the kin-bond, he could not harm 7T; if he were not, he’d have no reason to harm 7T.

RECOMMENDATION: Continue testing, gradually decreasing dosage. Necessary to determine the holdover strength of the regimen, how much of the change is permanent, how much transitory, what is the overall effect on intelligence and agility.

IMAGE: Tejnor lying on his cell bed, curled into a fetal knot, his body twitching at long intervals, his head cradled in the curve of his arms.

Shadith (Kizra) On The Farm 2

Morning.

When the housemaid knocked at her door, Kizra groaned and crawled out of bed.

Aghilo had given her leather sandals to wear with the long gray skirt, the smocked shirt with the narrow scarf for a belt. She thought about wearing them, but something made her pick up the old boots and hold them and sit gazing at them. Her link with the past. She slid her feet into them, laughed a little as nothing happened. No epiphany. No magic rebirth. Not today anyway. She went downstairs, feeling vulnerable and tentative till she came up with Tinoopa and smelled the meat frying and the new baked bread waiting for them.