Butler, Octavia - Patternmaster

Inexpertly, Teray channeled Amber’s strength into his own. Then, almost doubly powerful, he reached out to the Clayarks.

The new strength was exhilarating, intoxicating. He almost had to hold himself back as he reached the Clayarks. Within one of them he located a large artery that led directly from the heart. He memorized its position so that he could find it quickly in the other Clayarks, then he ruptured the artery. The Clayark stumbled to the

ground, clawing its chest.

Instantly the other Clayarks fled, scattering in all directions, but Amber, otherwise inactive, kept track of them, focusing and refocusing Teray on them until all were dead or dying.

Several minutes later they began riding past bodies. Amber was closed again—as closed as she could be while they were linked—and Teray had returned to her control over her mental strength. That strength was temporarily lessened, of course, as was Teray’s, but the lessening was slight. One of the dangers of lending mental strength to another person was that the other person might use too much of it, might drain the lender to exhaustion and death. But neither Teray nor Amber was anywhere near death.

Teray stared at the bodies sprawled over the hillside, saw the expressions of agony on many of the Clayark faces, and did not know whether to feel sick or triumphant. Not one Clayark had had time to fire a shot or even get a look at the enemy who killed him. Still, Clayarks too were known to do their killing from hiding. It was strange fighting, repelling somehow.

“You’ve never done that before, have you?” asked Amber.

“No.” Teray rode past a Clayark female, dead, with arms outstretched toward a smaller, completely naked version of herself. A relative perhaps. A daughter? Clayarks kept their children with them to be raised by the natural parents. Teray looked away from the pair,

frowning. They were Clayarks. They would have killed him if they could have. They were carriers of the Clayark disease.

“I wanted you to handle it because I thought you hadn’t done it before.”

He turned to look at Amber almost angrily.

“I wanted to see you fight in a situation where there was no immediate danger,” she said.

“Did you think I hadn’t learned what to do back in school?”

“No, I was afraid you had. And unfortunately, you have.”

“The Clayarks are dead, aren’t they?” He was letting his disgust over what he had had to do spill over onto her and he didn’t care. What was she complaining about, anyway?

“The last couple of them almost got away.”

“Almost, hell! They’re dead.”

“If there had been just one or two more of them, we would have missed them. They would have been out of range before you could kill them. And sometime tonight or tomorrow, they would be back with all their friends.”

“You’re saying …”

“I’m saying you’re too slow. Way too slow. A big party of Clayarks would swallow us before you could do anything about it.”

“You could have done better?” Cold anger

washed over him but his tone was mild, quiet.

“Teray, I’d be a little more diplomatic if it weren’t for the chance of our meeting an army of Clayarks over the next hill. But to put it bluntly, school methods just aren’t good enough out here. Will you let me teach you some others?”

“You want to teach me others?” he said in mock surprise. “Not handle the fighting yourself from now on?”

“Yes. You ought to have a chance to survive this trip even if something happens to me, or if we separate.”

“And I won’t without your teaching?”

“That’s right.”

“The hell with your teaching.”

She sighed. “All right then, you owe me this much. The next Clayarks we meet, let me handle them.”

“So you can show me how good you are at it. And I can change my mind.”

“No, Teray, so I can be sure of us living at least that much longer.” She spoke wearily, her words reaching him both through his ears and his mind. She was open again. And with his mind, he could not help but be aware of her absolute belief in what she was saying. In spite of her manner, she was not boasting. She was afraid. Afraid for him.

He felt the anger drain out of him to be replaced by something else. Something he could

not quite name but that was far less comfortable than even the anger had been.

“Could you make it, Amber? Alone, I mean, from here to Forsyth.”

“I think so.” She was closed to him again.

“You know so.”

She said nothing.

“You’ve done it before.”

She shrugged. “I told you I was an independent. We travel.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Why should I have? The fact that I’ve done it before doesn’t insure that we’re going to make it now.”

“Especially not with me acting as a brake.”

Again she said nothing.

“We’re about the same age,” he said. “I’m the son of the two strongest Patternists of their generation, and I’m strong enough myself to succeed the Patternmaster. Yet here you are with your fifteen years of someone else’s memories and your four or five years of wandering….”

“Would you rather travel with somebody who was deadweight?”

“I just don’t like feeling that I’m deadweight myself.”

“Don’t worry. With your strength, you aren’t. I

would never have invited myself along with you if I had thought you would be.”

He looked at her sharply.

“No, that’s not the only reason,” she said, smiling. “You’ve got a few other good points.”

He sighed, and gave up without quite realizing that he was giving up.

“Like your tractable nature,” she said. “Open and let me show you how to kill Clayarks quickly.”

He obeyed, watching her with the same mistrust that she had shown for him earlier.

Chapter 6

“You see,” Amber was explaining, “we can’t afford to waste our time and strength punching holes in the Clayarks. That’s what they’re trying to do to us with their guns. Fight them on their own terms and sooner or later they’ll get you. There are just too many of them. In a large attack you’d have some of them blasting you apart while you were trying to punch holes in others.”

Teray only half listened. His ears were full of the unfamiliar sound of the surf. He had spent all his life no more than a day’s ride from the beach, yet he had never seen the ocean through his own eyes. He had seen it through the eyes of others in the learning stones he had studied, but that was not the same. Now, as he and Amber rode down toward the oceanside trail, he gazed

out, fascinated, at the seemingly endless water.

He could see tiny rocky islands off shore. Nearer, the waves broke against sand and rocks with a noisy vigor that sometimes drowned out what Amber was saying. But that did not matter. She was only emphasizing the information she had already given him mentally. Mental communication detracted from their awareness of the had—and possibly the Clayarks—around them. Thus she was repeating, summarizing aloud.

“I can do it,” he told her.

“Try it as soon as possible.”

“The next time we meet Clayarks.” But he was not eager to try her method of killing, or any method of killing, again soon. In his mind’s eye, he could still see the Clayarks he had already killed. Maybe it would be easier if they were not human-headed or if he had not had a conversation with one. But she was right. He would not only have to get used to killing them, but he would have to kill more efficiently, in the way that she had shown him, if the two of them were to survive. He recalled the memory that she had given him of herself on foot, alone, running for the safety of Redhill two years before. She had been wounded but she had kept going. Her healer’s skill had kept her alive and conscious. And she was still killing, limiting the area of her perception to a long narrow wedge, sweeping that wedge around her like a hand of a clock. The Clayarks she touched in the deadly sweep