Jo Clayton - Drinker of Souls

Four Temuengs rode guard far enough behind the diligence to escape the mud and gravel the broad iron-tired wheels kicked up. They rode swathed in heavy cloaks, lances couched, bows covered, but she had little doubt they’d be a nasty surprise to anyone thinking of attacking the diligence. The leader turned his head and stared at her as he rode past. She saw a flash of gilt, of paler silver. An empush, commanding four.

Then he was past. Then they were all past. She let out a breath. Her middle hurt as if she’d been stooping and straightening for hours. She wiped at her face, kneed Coier into a walk, guiding him back onto the road, the two hounds pacing silently one on each side of her.

A few breaths later she heard the sound of a horse coming rapidly up behind her, then the Temueng empush rode around her, turning his mount to block the road. She pulled up, a flutter in her stomach, a knot of fear and rage closing her throat. She couldn’t speak, sat staring at him grimly, silently. Her eyes blurred and after a moment she knew she was crying; she didn’t try to hide her tears, only hoped the rain beating on her face would camouflage them.

“Who are you?” he shouted at her, his voice harsh, impatient. “What are you doing on this road? Where are you going?”

She stared at him, managed, “A traveler, headed for the nearest port so I can get out of this soggy backwater.” She was surprised by the crisp bite of the words, no sign of what she was feeling in them, as if someone else were speaking for her. Her fear and anger lessened, the tears stopped, she sat silent waiting for his response.

“Your credeen.” He rode closer, held out his hand. “What?”

“Your permit to travel, athin.” The honorific was an insult. He drew his sword, holding it lightly in his right hand. “The sigiled tag.”

– “Ah.” She thought furiously. Seemed the Temuengs were trying to control travel and tighten their grip on Croaldhu; nothing of this had been in place three years ago at the last Fair; the Kumaliyn didn’t bother with such nonsense. She dredged up the worst words she could think of, cursing the Temueng’s officiousness, the need to poke his nose in other people’s business. All he had to do was ride on and let her be. But he was waiting for some sort of answer and from the look of him, wasn’t inclined to accept excuses or pleas of ignorance. She glanced quickly at Jaril and Yaril. The werehounds had moved quietly out from her until almost obliterated by the rain. She risked a look over her shoulder; the other soldiers and the diligence were out of sight and hearing. Lifting a hand slowly so he could see it was empty, she moved it in a broad arc from Yaril to Jaril. “They are all the permits I need, Temueng.”

And Yaril was a fireball rushing at his head, and Jaril was fire about his sword. With a scream of pain, he dropped the blade. Hastily Brann said, “Just chase this one off, I’ve had enough lives.”

The fires seemed to shrug, then nipped and sizzled about the flanks of the already nervous horse, driving it into a frantic, bucking run after the diligence, the shaken empush struggling to keep from being thrown into the mud. One of the fires flowed into a large hawk and came flying back. It swooped to the sword’s hilt, caught it up and vanished into the rain with it. A second later it was back, settling to the ground beside Coier, Yaril again as soon as the talons touched mud. Brann lifted her Onto the saddle in front of her. “I gave that fool his sword,” Yaril said. “Better if he doesn’t have to explain how he lost it.” She leaned back against Brann, smiled as the other fire returned and was a hound again standing beside the horse. “We got trouble enough once he connects up with those enforcers.”

Brann nudged Coier into an easy canter. “I’m still glad he’s alive. We got trouble anyway, what’s one more stinking Temueng?” She stroked Yaril’s moonpale hair. “Another hour,…” She sighed. “Stinking rain. Wasn’t for that, one of you could fly watch. I don’t know what to do… I don’t know…”

BRANN RODE ON into the rain, that dreary steady downpour that falls straight from clouds to earth and stays and stays until you forget what the sun feels like. Jaril laughed at the idea that anything so simple and natural as rain could keep him from flying and was following about an hour’s ride behind, a dark gray mistcrane dipping in and out of clouds. Yaril was a hound again, running easily beside the horse. Rested and well-fed, Coier had to be held to a steady lope; he wanted to run and Brann shared the urge, but she didn’t dare let him loose.

An hour passed, then another. The children could communicate over any distance bounded by the horizon, why this limitation they either couldn’t or wouldn’t explain, and Jaril would give them an hour’s warning of pursuit, a chance to discover a hide that would fool the followers.

Another hour. Brann rode on between half-seen hedgerows beaten into a semblance of neatness by the downpour, washed to a dark shiny green that glowed through the grays of rain and mud.

Some fifteen minutes into the fourth hour the hound was suddenly Yaril trotting by her knee, screaming up at her over the hiss and splat of the rain, “Riders coming up. Fast. Temuengs. Three from the diligence, one of the enforcers. Half dozen besides. New faces. Most likely occupation troops.” She dashed ahead of the horse, was a hawk running, then powering into the rain, gone to look for a break in the hedges.

Brann was frantic. Ten men, men warned about her. Half a score of men who could stand at a distance putting arrows in her, pincushion Brann, not something pleasant to contemplate. Adept as her body was at healing itself, she had a strong suspicion there had to be a limit-at which point she would be very dead. The hedges on both sides of the road were high, wild and flourishing, taller than she was atop Coier and likely as thick as they were tall. Even if she could somehow push through, those murderous hounds on her trail would spot the signs she’d have to leave and be through after her and she’d have gained nothing, would have lost if some of them had been living long enough hereabouts to know something of the land. Even a year’s patrolling would have taught them how they could drive her into a corner.

Yaril came winging back, touched down, changed to childshape. Brann pulled her up before her once again, so they could talk without having to shout. “Nothing,” the changechild said, “No turn-offs far as I dared fly. But there’s a weak spot in the hedge about twenty minutes on, a place where one of the bushes died.”

Brann started to protest, but Yaril shook her head. “It’s all there is, Bramble. Well contrive something. Now move.” She slid of changing in midair and went soaring away on hawk wings. Brann urged Coier into a gallop and followed her, feeling a surging exhilaration at the power under her. The hedge on the left grew wilder and even the meager signs of tending evident before vanished completely, straggly canes encroaching on the paving.

Yaril stood in the road, waving at a thin spot where the canes had withered away and the few leaves clinging to branchstubs were wrinkled and yellow. Without hesitation, Brann turned Coier off the road and drove him toward the brittle barrier with voice, heels and slapping hands. Head twisted back, snorting protest, he barreled through into a long-neglected field that was grown to a fine thick crop of weeds in the center of which stood a shapeless structure with much of its thatching gone, its stone walls tumbled down, the stones charred black in spite of the rain and the many that had gone before. She rode Coier into the meager shelter through a door where half the frame still stood, the other half lay in splinters among the charred stones and twisted weeds. The roof that remained was sodden and leaking but it kept out the worst of the wet. She dismounted with a sigh of relief and trembling legs, glad to be out of that depressing incessant beat-beat on her body and head. She closed her eyes and leaned against the endwall, dripping onto the bird dung, weeds, old feathers, bits of thatching that lay in a thick layer over the beaten-earth floor. But she couldn’t stay there. She looped the reins about the remnant of the door frame, then ran back to Yaril.