Jo Clayton - Moongather

The Sleykyn’s boots were loud behind her as she dived once more behind the rack. He drove her from this shelter, chased her a second time around the room, getting closer and closer to trapping her as the drink wore off. While she fled, twisting, weaving, running full out from point to point, she tested the balance of the knife At the point of exhaustion, bleeding from dozens of cuts, there was no way she could get close enough to use the knife on him. She had to throw it. If she missed, she’d have to try fighting him with bare hands, something she didn’t like thinking about.

She circled the rack a third time and dived for the twin posts; the Sleykyn was so close she could almost feel his breath hot on her neck. Praying that she read the knife right, she circled the posts, seeking the intangible feel of the whole, forcing herself steady, slowing her breathing. She saw his whip hand go back, saw the triumphant glare in his bloodshot eyes, saw the thick column of his neck rising from his unbuttoned shirt. With a breathed prayer to the Maiden, she threw the knife, saw it turning in a silvery wheel through the air, saw it thud home in his throat.

Filling the cellar with an absurd soft bubbling sound, he crumpled onto his face, blood running from his mouth, his eyes glazing over. Serroi clutched the post, knees shaking, sick to her stomach, gasping for breath. Slowly the room steadied for her. She pulled herself up, feeling pleased with herself for being alive. She kicked out one leg, then the other, testing her knees. They seemed capable of holding her, so she pushed away from the post and tried standing. She took one step then another, then laughed aloud with the sheer joy of surviving.

She crossed to the Sleykyn. He was dead. The blood was no longer flowing from his neck. She rubbed her hand across her face, wiping away beads of new sweat, then knelt beside him. Grunting with the effort, she turned him over onto his back and started working on the buckles to his knife belt. She had to have a weapon. With grim distaste she pulled the belt from around him and rebuckled it; it was too big for her but she could wear it like a baldric. Succumbing to a sudden intense curiosity, she drew the blade from its sheath and turned it over slowly, very carefully. A Sleykyn poison knife. The blade was bone rather than metal, the tip, discolored for about an inch above the point. She was very careful not to touch the stain. “Enough,” she murmured. The knife back in its sheath and the belt draped across her narrow torso, she leaned over and gently closed the Sleykyn’s eyes. “Maiden give you good rest.” She stood, stretched. “I think I’m very tired of this killing.” Again she rubbed wearily at aching eyes. “I’m a fool; let me get back to the Biserica and I’ll do what they’ve always told me I should, start studying to be a healer.”

As she neared the exit she heard a rumbling drunken singing echoing down the corridor. Sliding the knife from its sheath, she ran on her toes to the pall, then flattened herself beside the opening. When the second of her guards came unsuspecting through it, cradling a wineskin in his arms like an overplump baby, she slashed a deep cut in the back of his hand, then darted away.

She watched him die with foam on his lips and twisted horror on his face. The hand that still held the bone knife shook; she looked down at the death-white blade with revulsion, wanted to hurl it away from her; instead, she replaced it carefully in its sheath and crossed to the dead man. After closing his staring eyes and sending him to rest with the blessing for the dead, she picked up the wineskin and walked into the corridor. As the fever from her own poisoned wounds began to work in her, she searched out the panel that would let her back into the maze of passages within the walls.

In stifling darkness, somewhere deep within the maze of hidden passages, she worked the stopper loose from the wineskin and drank, then drank again. She could feel the heat from her wounds whenever she held her arm close to her face. The lash tip was infected some way, she thought. I hurt, but the wounds aren’t that bad. I shouldn’t be so sick, not so soon. She drank more wine, then settled herself onto the floor and leaned against the cool stone, wondering what she should do. I can’t stay here. Domnor Hern… at least I’m inside the Plaz. She giggled. I told Coperic the Daughter would get me inside the Plaz. Not quite like this though. Dinafar. I wonder what she’s thinking. Maiden keep her safe-and don’t let Coperic get tricky with her. She pressed the back of her hand against her forehead. Fever. I wonder what the hell they put on those tips. Domnor, better find him. She got heavily to her feet, drank again from the wineskin, then wandered off along the passage, turning and twisting, stumbling up and down crazy flights of stairs until she had no idea where she was or what level of the Plaz she happened to be on.

When she was too exhausted to keep moving, she sank down, sat with her back against the wall, her legs stretched out across the width of the passage, the wineskin like a child cuddled in her lap. In a few moments she was deep asleep.

She woke with small feet pricking over her legs, small wet noses pushing into her. It was too dark to see; she was dizzy, her brain on fire, forgetting where she was, forgetting what she had to do. She reached down and felt about with shaking hands. She touched a quivering snout, slid her fingers past large delicate ears, then down a knobby spine to a hairless tail. “Rat,” she muttered, then giggled, then caught her breath. Rats came pattering along the passage, crawling over her until her legs were covered by writhing furry bodies. They kept coming. She could feel their small wet noses nudging into her, the pinpoint claws scrabbling at her. Given what she knew about rats she should have been terrified; she wasn’t. It seemed to her that in her sleep she’d called them to her-or something had called them.

Behind her aching head the stone vibrated with tension, the air around her was thick. The rats huddled close to her, half-maddened by it, licking at the blood dried on her cuts, pressing against her, more and more of them as the minutes passed until the passage was full of them. She pulled the wineskin free, heard the rats she knocked loose chittering with fear and irritation. She drank, drank again. Her head throbbed. She reached up, screamed when she touched her eye-spot, it bulged out from her brow, hotter than the fever that coursed in her blood. Something held her; something held it, called the rats to her, was burning her, burning the fever out of her. She blinked, she could see again, her night sight, could see in tones of green and grey and black. Could see the lumpy shifting carpet of small bodies crawling over each other, crouching, trembling, her body was covered by them, covered to the waist, they were behind her, on her shoulders. Warm pulsing vermin. Around and over her. She should have been terrified, she knew that distantly as from a part of her standing far off looking down on herself. She was hot with fever, hot with the thing in her fighting the fever. She couldn’t remember, there was something she needed to remember, she couldn’t remember, it was important… she slept again.

When she woke, she was cramped and stiff but her body was cooler; whatever had been on the lash tip had done its worst and was passing off. She blinked. Her eye-spot throbbed and her night-sight came back. The carpet of rats quivered and shifted about, chittering nervously. A roach whirred out of haze and settled beside her head, clinging to the stone of the wall behind her. More came, crawled over the stone, over her, roaches came and came and came, flights of them whirring about her, crawling on her head and arms. She chuckled, roaches coming to avenge their ancestor, stopped chuckling when the sound grew too shrill. “Army,” she muttered. It was hard to move her mouth properly to speak. The whip had touched her face, opening a cut at the corner of her mouth. Her cheek was swollen and her whole face felt stiff.