Jo Clayton - Shadowkill

Rohant leaned against the trunk of a tree, winced as his weight shook a spatter of drops from the leaves overhead. The rain was almost finished, but there was still a steady drip here under the trees as their leaves released what they’d captured.

The creature in his hair shifted position hastily to avoid being drowned, burrowing deeper into his tangled mane.

“What…” He reached up, touched it. “What happened? Who…”

“I was about to tell you… be careful…”

Rohant sneezed again, held his hand still so the creature could crawl onto it. He grinned as he set it on his knee. “Miji,” he said. “He’s a sakali. Friend of mine. You were about to tell me?”

“Right. About to introduce my rescuer and sometime partner. Ginny Seyirshi.”

“What!”

Miji eeped with fright, went running down Rohant’s leg. He sat on the Dyslaeror’s ankle, tiny hands pressed to his ribs, black eyes shifting from Rohant to Shadith and back again.

“Long story how that came about, tell you later. Looks like he decided to dissolve the relationship.”

Rohant ch’ch’ed at the sakali; without looking at her, he stopped his coaxing a moment, said, “So why are we alive?

“He gave his word, said he wouldn’t kill me for at least a year. It was Omphalos he was after.”

“You trusted him?”

“Didn’t have much choice right then.” She ran her hands through her hair, shivered as a vagrant draft hit her soaked undersuit. “Besides, he keeps his word. You just have to be careful you know what he means by it. Like, he’d be clam-happy if Miralys ashed us both, but he wouldn’t do it himself. Um, not too long from now, this place isn’t going to be very healthy.”

Deflected by the defense shield, a missile hit the ground, blew a hole in it, and sent fragments of stone scything through the trees a short distance downstream.

Rohant coaxed Miji onto his arm, drew his thumbclaw down his mustache, raised a brow at her. “Don’t know why you say that. Consider our gently salubrious surroundings.”

“Hah!” Shadith pulled herself onto her feet. “Discounting little things like…” she waved a hand at the shattered trees and steaming water, “this is going to be ground zero of a humongous meltdown.”

Rohant stood, scowled at her. “Meltdown?”

“Yeah.” Shadith shivered as another explosion shook earth and air. “Ginny’s sent his special EYEs at the kephalos. They’re going to trigger Mimishay’s self-destruct. Good-bye island, good-bye all of us, them included.” She jerked her thumb upward, waved her hand in a circle to include the attacking landers.

“How much time?”

“God knows, not me.”

Rohant scratched absently behind the neckfrill of the sakali. “Shadow, could you reach Miralys?”

“Not Miralys. Kikun maybe and that’s only if his gods have him looking.”

“Well, try it.”

“Not here. Hunh.” She began walking upstream.

Cuddling the sakali, Rohant shook himself all over, spat, and started after her. “This doesn’t work, we can always climb on a rock and dance. Hope they see us and don’t shoot us.”

Autumn Rose/Kikun

Autumn Rose booted the skimmer away from the Cillasheg, started descending in a wide spiral, keeping her distance from the attack zone. Without taking her eyes from the board, she said, “Just where is it you want me to put down?”

Kikun scratched at the skin folds under his chin. “North side, close as you can get.”

“Big place. Mountainside north or seaside?”

He frowned. “Tlee! I don’t know.”

“Then we better go too… Z’ Toyff!”

An immense elongated form went rushing past the skimmer, sending it into a wild tumble, falling end over end toward the ground.

Autumn Rose’s crashweb snapped tight and the emergency pad popped up under her hand. With the argrav spurting out streamers of blue smoke while the skimmer flipped over and over and Kikun lying unconscious in the co-chair, twisted under his crash web, half strangled by it, Rose rode the wild oscillations, praying for time, widening and flattening the curves, holding the skimmer longer and longer in the flat mode until she had control over the drives again and took a look round to see where she was…

And found herself in a descending slide across the top of the Compound with cutter beams dancing around her and the swarm of Dyslaera Landers swinging in and out of view and she was heading straight for a broad beam that was also sweeping toward her seconds away…

A black Bear fifty meters high reached out a smoky paw and the beam was deflected, turned downward, the blade-end slicing through the already tortured earth.

A black Raven flew before her, feathers glinting like shards of jet.

She followed it out of the turmoil. Nothing touched her, cutter nor missile, rot grains nor melt fields. Nothing touched her.

She got the skimmer to ground on a grassy meadow some distance up one of the smaller mountains west of the Compound.

For several moments after the web loosened, then slid into its receptacle, Rose lay in the chair shaking all over, teeth chattering as she cursed Kikun, Digby, Seyirshi, the Dyslaera, and everything and everyone in her life that had brought her to this point. She’d never been this close to death, even when she was sitting in that condemned cell waiting for the Strangler’s cord. Never this close, never this helpless, never…

When she calmed enough to reason, she remembered the Bear and the Raven. Kikun’s gods? She laughed, stopped laughing when the sound went crazy on her. “Never imagined I’d be the subject for miracles,” she said aloud “Kikun, you all right?”

No answer.

Shakily she pushed herself upright, groaning as every muscle protested; she was bruised all over, battered, scraped, bonesore. She twisted around and frowned toward the co-seat.

Kikun lay limp in the seat, one arm tangled in the semi-retracted web, a trickle of blood drying at the corner of his mouth. Blood bubbles formed and burst in his nostrils as he labored to breathe.

“Goerta b’rite!”

A tiny ancient crone of a dinhast came dashing at her like a puppet on strings, a glass puppet brightly colored but so translucent it was hard to see, yammering soundless words from a mouth snapping open and closed like a puppet’s jaws. Soundless words-yet Rose knew the ancient was crying at her to get on her feet and do something for Kikun. Something, anything. Get on her feet. Get moving. Help him. Comic and terrible, the crone swept at her, through her. Her skin prickled all over as if from a thousand tiny pinches.

Rose struggled from her chair, stood with her hand on the arm, gathering herself so she wouldn’t fall on her face. The knee she’d injured at Koulsnakko’s was sore again, she’d bumped it or something. She was still shaking, nauseated by her brush with dissolution and her brush with the inexplicable…

A dark, musky smell spread through the cabin from a great, deerlike creature looming over Kikun, shaking his antlers, roaring soundlessly, his dark eyes ringed with white. His head was clearly visible though translucent like the crone, colored glass lit from within, but the rest of him was vague, shapeless.

Rose stood clutching at the chair arm, swallowing, hair standing stiff along her spine. What she saw was ancient beyond counting, immensely powerful and essentially uncontrollable, a demiurge in beast form. Terrifying…

She forced herself to cross the short distance between the chairs; it was hard, walking into the ambience of that beast.

The Bear was there, too; she couldn’t see him, but he was present in the darkness that boiled in the corners of her eyes…