Jo Clayton - Fire in the Sky

“Him?” The old man’s voice was stronger than it’d been in days. “He wouldn’t tell you the sun’s shining though you could see it for yourself.”

Shadith smiled grimly. “He won’t have a choice. I’ve got some babble juice that will no doubt kill him eventually so you can rest easy about that, but before then he’ll cough everything he knows.”

He looked at her a long moment, then nodded. “Get on with it, then.”

Maorgan crouched beside the chorek, searching through his pockets, laying out their contents on the ground beside the man. He looked up as Shadith came back, her medkit in her hand. “Nothing here to say who he is.” He flicked a finger through the meager pile, sent a luck charm rolling away, uncovered a bit of paper, passed it to her. “Someone in Dumel Minach, laying out our route and what speed we’re likely to make.”

“Confirms he’s a political, if we needed such confirmation. Here.” She handed him a tape braided from fine colorless filaments. “Wrap that round his ankles and make sure the metal bits on the end touch. You don’t need to tie it.”

He raised his brows. “Looks like it’d melt in my hand, let alone hold a grown man.”

“Try to cut it if you don’t mind dulling your blade. Don’t worry, you won’t even scratch it. Give me room to work, hm?” She took his place, strapped the chorek’s wrists with a second come-along tape. When she glanced at Maorgan, he was looking at a nick in the knifeblade.

He shrugged, wrapped the tape around the chorek’s ankles, touched the locktights. Nothing obvious happened, so he tried to take them apart and redo the seal.

Shadith chuckled. “Useful gadget, right?”

“How do you get the things off?”

“I’ve got, mm, call it a key. Otherwise, to get him out of those loops we’d have to amputate his hands and feet. Well, well, so you’re coming awake on us now.” She got to her feet and stepped back to wait for him to exhaust himself and recognize futility.

The chorek’s eyes cleared. He saw them, and his face suffused with rage; he tried to break loose, throwing his body about, but all he succeeded in doing was cut himself on the filament tapes. After a useless struggle he lay panting and glaring hate at them, especially Maorgan. “Jelly sucker, you a dead man. And all your kind a perverts.”

Shadith opened the medkit, took out the spraycopeia, clicked on the mostly illegal canister of babblers Digby had sent her on the day she’d adopted as her birthday, the day Aleytys had decanted her into this body. She set the blood sampler in the sterilizer and deposited the medkit on the road. “We’re going to ask you some questions, chorek. Now I know you think you wouldn’t tell us the time of day, but you will.” The sterilizer chimed. She took the sampler out, caught one of his hands, set the nozzle against a finger tip and triggered it. In almost the same move, she was back on her feet and he was staring at the red drop welling on his finger.

“You needn’t look like the world fell on you, chorek. All I did was take a little blood from you.” She clicked the sampler into its slot on the spraycopeia. “I don’t want to kill you too soon.” She glanced at the readout, sighed. “In a laboratory with a much wider range of… mm… ingredients, I could probably guarantee not to kill you at all. As things are…” she touched the sensor, made a few fine adjustments, “the least this brew will give you is a course of boils from hell. Now. Such ethics as I have tell me I must ask if you will answer our questions freely and without stint. Well?”

He spat, the glob of spittle landing on the toe of her boot.

“Sit on him a moment, will you, Maorgan?” She detached the canister from the spraycopeia. “Hold his head so I can get at his neck.”

In spite of his struggles, she got the injector against his carotid and triggered the jolt of babble. She straightened. “That’s good. You can get off him now, Maorgan. Don’t talk to him yet, wait till I tell you.”

Glancing now and then at the chorek, she repacked the medkit, set the sampler in the sterilizer, and closed the lid. By the time she was finished, the chorek had gone limp, his face greenish white under the tan, his eyes closed, his breathing deep and slow.

“Good. Maorgan, let me talk first, then you can ask your questions. It might be a good idea to make a note of his answers.” She moved along the road, knelt when she was just beyond his head. “What is your name?” She almost sang the words, her voice soft and unthreatening. “Tell me your name.”

“Ferg. Fergal Diocas.” His voice was dragged and dreamy, the syllables mushy.

“Ferg. You have a friend in Dumel Minach. Tell me your friend’s name. What is your friend’s name?”

“Paga. Her name is Paga Focai.”

“That’s a pretty name. Is she pretty, Ferg?”

He laughed. It was an ugly sound, mocking and angry. “That silly bitch? Big as a dammalt with a laugh like a band saw. Always at you. Chel Dй\, I have to be drunk as a dog to get it up when I do her.”

“I see. It was her gave you news about the Ard and the rest of them?”

“Oh, yeah, and wetting herself because she knows I’ll come do her when I finish the scum. She gets off on blood, nothing gets her hotter.”

“And how does she get word to you? How does she do that, Ferg?” She kept her voice soft and insinuating, slipping the words in between the rustle of the leaves and the dirt grains rattling along the road as the wind picked up strength with the waning of the day.

He snickered. “Leaves me notes, doesn’t she. Silly kueh. Games! Love post she calls it like she was some just blooded girl. Hollow in a tree down by river. Ties a bit a yellow rag on branch when she put something in hole.”

His eyelids flickered, his eyes darted side to side, a buried awareness worked the muscles of his face. Shadith stopped the questions and sang to him, a low, wordless croon like a mother singing a child to sleep. After a moment he relaxed and the smug grin twisted his mouth again. “Kueh,” he said.

“No doubt. You had a weapon. A strange looking thing.”

“Cutter,” he said after a while. “Ol’ frogface he say, point it at a stinking jelly and you got yourself one krutchin’ Summerfire tree high and mountain wide. Hoooeeeshhh!”

Shadith heard a scuffling behind her, curses. She ignored them, crooned a bit more to settle the chorek again. “Old Frogface, hmm, I think I know him, tell me what he’s like.”

“Ugly anglik. Shorter’n me but twice as wide. Skin’s like lehaum bark. Made me want to see ‘f I could peel him like them there.” He waved his bound hands at the nearest tree. He blinked at the hands, waggled them, started snickering. “Peel ‘um. ‘Ould d’t too, he come back at me. Peel ‘um. Peel…” He let his hands drop, scowled at the branches arching high above the road. “Mesuch, filthy…”

Shadith leaned closer to him, began one of the Shalla croons, drawing him back into dream with the help of the drug. “Tell me about his hands. What were they like?”

“Cursed claws, black as his stinking soul.”

“Tell me about his eyes. Was there anything odd about his eyes.”

“Stuff crawled over ‘um sometimes, made ‘um shine.”

“What did he say to you? Tell me exactly what he said to you.”

His eyelids flickered again, then closed completely, the energy drained from his voice as he droned what he’d been told about how to recharge the cutter, about the price on the heads of the University team. Toward the end of the speech he started getting agitated again and this time the crooning only seemed to exacerbate the disturbance. Words drooled from his mouth as he jerked his head back and forth and tried to pull his wrists apart, jerking so hard the tape cut into his wrists. He ignored the blood and kept jerking, as if he meant to saw off his hands and set himself free.