Chapter Nine

Heyoka found riding double with Nisk difficult to endure. The beast, sturdy as a buffalo crossed with an elephant, took no notice of the extra weight, but the ascending trail forced him to hold onto Nisk or fall off. The other male’s scent triggered something in the deepest recesses of his brain, making him twitchy and irritable. He began fantasizing about killing Nisk. It would be so easy to break his neck from behind, just one quick twist, and then he was even angrier, both at himself and the older male, for creating this pointless and idiotic situation.

When, for the tenth time in the last hour, Heyoka had to forcibly resheathe his claws, he glanced over Nisk’s bobbing head up into gradually rising green-topped hills to distract himself. After Ben’s death, he had left the Oglala hills and Earth behind forever to train as a soldier. The alien flek were making deadly incursions into Confederated Space and soldiers, of any description, were desperately needed. Fortunately, the long-repressed vicious other within him made such a splendid soldier that his military unit did not quibble about his appearance, or what appallingly primitive race had birthed him.

It was only after his injury on Enjas Two, when soldiering was no longer an option, that he contemplated a life outside the military. Surely, he had told himself, during those long, difficult days of rehabilitation, there was more to him than just a frighteningly efficient killing machine. If he could find his own kind, they would know thousands of ways to make life meaningful, and one of those ways would be right for him.

But now that he had at last met the hrinn, he was more lost than ever. The vicious other, whom he had struggled against all his life, seemed the foundation of their culture, a veritable ideal, and unpracticed as he was at giving in to that aspect of himself, he was not nearly ferocious enough to suit them. He had no desire to live like that.

The yirn’s broad hooves beat a steady rhythm as it plodded up the winding trail, and every step wasted valuable time by taking him farther from Mitsu. His skin itched from the inside with the need to act until he couldn’t sit still. He had to get back, and soon—if he weren’t already too late.

"Where are we headed?" he asked finally. Not that it really mattered, he told himself. He and Nisk would part company at the first opportunity.

Nisk flicked an ear back at Heyoka. "Levv Hold."

The path forked and he flinched at the sight of Nisk’s claws urging the yirn onto the steeper of the two tracks. Blood dribbled down the beast’s matted coat, and Heyoka held on as its muscles bunched beneath them to navigate a steep rock jumble. His fingers tightened over Nisk’s arms and the iron bands of muscle beneath; blood pounded in his ears. He felt dizzy and hot, sick with a sudden, overwhelming desire to slash the other’s throat. "Levv—you mean my Line?" he forced out.

"Levv birthed you." Nisk leaned over the yirn’s hump as though to examine the trail, casually breaking the physical contact between them. He snagged a handful of tiny blue leaves as they passed a tree and stuffed them into an inner pocket of his robes. "No one with half a nose could mistake that."

Heyoka wiped his hands on his robes. It must be male pheromones, he thought. He wasn’t used to them, and they were making him crazy. How did hrinn share the males’ houses without killing each other? He swallowed hard. "What is Levv like?"

"I cannot say, Black/on/black."

"Heyoka!" he blurted. "I told you before—I have a name."

Nisk stared ahead. "Not a Hrinnti name."

"An Oglala name, given by my—" He broke off, unable to find a name for the relationship of "father," much less "adoptive father," in his Hrinnti vocab-ulary— "by the Outsider who rescued me from the flek."

"You were not of his kind and yet he cared for you?"

Heyoka thought of the wizened Oglala trader, the only family he had ever known. "It did not matter to him. He considered himself to be related to everything that lived, as well as rocks and earth and water. It was an ancient belief of his people."

"H-a-oo-kka." Nisk tried the name out on his narrow hrinnti tongue. "This name has a meaning?"

"It means ‘sacred fool,’ someone who has had a—special seeing—something important for the people to know, and who does everything differently from that time on."

Nisk’s ears flattened. "These Outsiders thought you a fool?"

"Most were afraid of me." Heyoka remembered the startled faces of the Oglala when Ben had emerged that first day from the shuttle towing a snarling, half-wild, sharp-toothed cub.

Nisk’s ears lifted again. "It was proper for them to be afraid. But why then should they name you ‘fool’?"

Heyoka understood Nisk’s confusion. It had taken years for him to understand, not that he was certain he had ever completely understood Ben’s Oglala people, or they, him. "The man who cared for me gave me that name. It means someone different, touched by the—the Voice, as you would say; someone who does not do things the same as everyone else—but for a special reason."

"Outsiders honor these ‘sacred fools’?"

That was a harder question for Heyoka to answer. The Oglala did honor their own heyokas, but their feelings about raising an alien cub among their own sons and daughters had never been better than mixed. "A few of them honored me, but most were afraid. They felt I represented something outside their world, a sacred presence made flesh. They were uncomfortable when I walked among them."

"So now you walk among us again."

"It has taken me many seasons to find Anktan." Heyoka thought of the database sweeps, the DNA studies, the comparison of dentition patterns he had authorized with his back pay. "Few Outsiders have heard of this world, or the hrinn."

Nisk glanced back at the black power brace encasing Heyoka’s right leg from the knee down. "Were you born imperfect?"

The emerald beaches of Enjas Two flashed back into Heyoka’s mind, prickling every hair along his spine. "No, it was an injury."

"Then perhaps a Restorer can do something for you."

A solid sheet of flek fire pinning them down on every side, green laser bursts blindingly brilliant against the pale blue of the sky. Heyoka shook his head. "The damage is—permanent."

Nisk glanced at him sharply. "Do not be so certain. Even though Outsiders were unable to heal your flesh, you know little of your own kind or our abilities."

Waves crashing against the shore as his vision shifted to blue, time slowed to a crawl—

Heyoka shivered, the remembered tang of alien seas thick in his nostrils. After the severity of that injury, he was lucky to walk at all. He glanced up at the red sun, now high overhead in the pale amber sky.

Nisk’s unfathomable black eyes turned away and Heyoka felt he had failed in some important way.

A couple of servants accompanied the gray-and-white cubling to help carry the litter. Vexk watched them struggle down the steep path from the plateau, while she herself prowled the red-orange rocks at the bottom with a restlessness born more of excitement than worry. This Outsider was important to old Seska. If the Guild could restore its life, they could rightfully name a great price, and she had just the sum in mind.

The two undersized servants, their legs stumpy and their coats an unfortunate grayish-brown, had likely been culled at birth, but the young gray-and-white, there was a prize. Vexk had sensed great depths in that one on her previous visits to Vvok. Khea had the tensile strength of one often bent, but never broken, yet she retained a sensitivity to others in the face of all the hardening an upbringing in the Lines imposed. Such empathy was regarded as "weakness" among the older breeders who supervised the Line’s genotype, and was discouraged at every turn. Cublings like Khea usually died young, far below the ground in the nursery at the claws of their age-mates, never to look upon the eye of Ankt, or sniff the rising wind. The Line Mother doubtless only saw another potential breeder to be beaten into a preordained form as she had once attempted to beat Vexk.

Even young Khea, with her greater height and strength, was panting hard by the time she reached the bottom of the ravine. The two servants were staggering under the weight of the litter, their black tongues lolling. Vexk peered down at the still form bundled onto the litter. The pale hairless skin was curiously red and patchy on the creature’s face, and it breathed so shallowly she could hardly tell if the fragile chest were moving at all. She took Khea’s pole. "We must take it into the hold."

Khea’s ears flicked nervously forward, then back. She looked away.

Vexk wanted to sigh. What have they told you—that we slaughter cublings for our food, and grind medicines from their bones? Khea must be the progeny of one of Vexk’s age-mates, perhaps Cyka or Akke; her graceful build was very like both of them. Vexk thought back to her youth before she had fled Vvok, remembering the many times she had nearly died in some pointless squabble. It was tradition that only the strongest ever left the nursery, and yet it seemed such a waste. Who knew what talents died in the teeth of some spitting cubling each season?

One of the servants stumbled over a gnarled root protruding from the hard-baked ground. "Just a little farther." She laid a hand on the weary creature’s shoulder and met its eyes. "Look, you can see the roof."

Khea’s mismatched ears, one gray and the other white, flattened. Behind the cubling’s back, Vexk took a deep breath. You will see much more shocking things than touching an unnamed servant here, young one. May you have the strength to understand that there are many patterns and those you choose must fit your own nature.

The servants paused outside the door, clearly expecting the worst from the expressions on their bedraggled faces. Of course, at Vvok, they were only property, of no more account than a bowl or a rug. Just inside the doorway, Siga and Jind, two of her older hold-sisters, waited in the cool shade. Vexk motioned to them. "Please take this poor creature inside."

The two yellow-robed females accepted the poles and bore the litter into the cool, shadowy interior of the large whitestone hold. Vexk watched them go, worried. The creature had not moved or made one sound all the way back from the cliffs. At best, this would be a difficult restoration/to/balance, if indeed hrinnti craft had any chance at all to cure something born of another world. She turned to the two exhausted servants. "Please rest here before you begin your return journey. Food and water will be brought to you shortly."

The servants’ black eyes glanced up at her furtively, then at each other. For her to take notice of their needs was unheard of, even disturbing. They looked away, unable to respond. Khea thrust her body between Vexk and the servants. "The Line Mother said they are to stay until I return with the Outsider."

"That will not be possible."

Khea bowed her head, fear apparent in every line of her young body. "The Line Mother said they are to wait!" Her ear fringes trembled.

"They cannot." Vexk put a hand on Khea’s soft thick fur, but she flinched from her touch. "Restoration is a difficult process, requiring great concentration, and their presence would disturb the harmony we seek to reestablish. Seska knew this when she sent you." Still, she understood the cubling’s distress. If old Seska had ordered the servants to stay with the cubling, knowing all the while the Restorers would not permit it, Khea would nonetheless bear the blame for not forcing through her bluff. That was the way of the Lines. Vexk still bore the scars to prove it.

The incoming supply ship was a green blip on the screen as it descended through the western skies. Eldrich checked the chronocrystal on his wrist. It was right on time, and the glare from the afternoon sun should keep it from attracting unwelcome attention. Two more Standard weeks, he thought, and it would be finished. This worthless planet could finally start earning its keep, as humans liked to phrase it. He found the wording amusing, but then he found a lot of things about this species entertaining, which was just as well, since he had spent the last twenty-seven Standard years on this abominably frigid rock. It was only right he should be able to squeeze an occasional dab of amusement out of the situation.

Clearing the ship’s trajectory from his screen, he turned his mind back to the problem of the two military personnel who had descended upon him without warning—spies, no doubt, sent by some suspicious official who detected something out of the ordinary on Anktan. He had no current word on the sergeant’s exact location, but hrinnti informants reported the Jensen woman being held by Vvok. It would be quite interesting to talk to Corporal Jensen and determine exactly what she knew. He would have a word with that old she-devil, Seska, and have her captive returned to the station. Then he would learn exactly why she and the sergeant had intruded at such an inopportune moment.

The sun hung like a swollen red eye above the mountaintops to the west by the time they stopped beside a rushing stream and drank their fill. Then, while Nisk fashioned a hobble for the yirn, Heyoka eased his claw-marked back against a stubby trunk and stared down across green hillsides that had taken the whole day to climb. The air was noticeably cooler up this high and had an alien tang, a subtle acridness nothing like the rolling plains of the Restored Oglala Nation back on Earth where Ben had raised him. Even now, when he closed his eyes, he could smell the richness of damp earth just after a summer shower.

Nisk left the hobbled yirn to graze and stretched out on the grass, grimacing at the pain from his unhealed slashes. "We have come far enough now to rest here until dusk and then hunt in the early evening." His eyes closed.

How long since he had last eaten? Heyoka couldn’t remember. Hollow with hunger, he stared up into the amber sky, waiting for Nisk to fall asleep. Despite his own weariness, he was too edgy to sleep, even if that had been his intention, which it was not. How did hrinnti males live in such close company? He couldn’t take much more of this. Constant exposure to Nisk’s scent was jumbling his thoughts and making him increasingly reckless and irritable. It was hard to believe now that he had been foolish enough to seek this experience out.

Once Nisk’s breathing deepened into the evenness of sleep, Heyoka eased to his feet and limped back down the path. He had considered attempting to hide his tracks, but knew all too well that Nisk could trail his scent and there was no way up here to disguise that. His only chance was to get enough of a head start before Nisk woke that he couldn’t catch him before Heyoka passed back into the males’ house’s territory.

His leg was stiff and he found his progress much slower than he had anticipated. Just as he rounded yet another switchback, foliage rustled on the hillside above him. He hesitated, then Nisk burst from cover with a suddenness that belied his injuries. Before he could think, the other within him swept to the surface, seizing control in the blink of an eye so that the lust for Nisk’s blood seared through his veins, burning away all hope of rational thought. He lunged for Nisk’s throat, but his opponent dodged and kicked his bad leg out from under him.

He fell heavily onto his side, twisting the damaged leg. Nisk straddled his body, a fist knotted in his robes, claws a scant breath away from slashing Heyoka’s exposed throat. His scent was hot and heavy and his eyes smoldered down at him, fierce black moons that absorbed all light. "Yield!"

His whole life, Heyoka had been bigger, stronger, more ferocious than any of his companions. He had never been afraid among humans, except that he might give into his savage other and hurt someone, never forced to admit defeat in a purely physical fight. Blood thrummed in his ears and he found he could not breathe while Nisk looked at him so, could not make his heart beat, his mind think. The unbearable black gaze swallowed him, compelling him to—what? Some shadowed corner of his brain whispered the answer, and then without volition or understanding, he looked away.

Nisk released him and lurched back onto his feet, panting hard. "Fool!" he spat, hackles still standing on end. Several of his gashes had broken open again and orange blood seeped into his matted fur. "You cannot even begin to fight me, or anyone else, with that useless leg. If I had not taken your place last night, Rakshal would have ripped your throat out before you were two breaths into that fight."

Heyoka rolled over and lay on his back, struggling for breath. The pain in his wrenched leg rolled over him in waves.

"I am not ready to speak of Levv," Nisk said. "But I see now you do not possess the strength or wit to wait for the proper moment. I either have to kill you to keep you from running back to certain death or tell you now." His eyes were narrowed as he hunkered down to draw a map in the dirt with a twig. "Levv was once a respected Line, breeding more than its share of the Black/on/black down through the generations, holding the difficult westernmost territory—here"—he indicated a place on his crude map—"which bounds the savage nomads of the plains who do not share our language. My birth-mother’s mate was bred out of Levv." He held out his arm and brushed back his black overcoat to reveal the dense undercoat, also black. "Save for the white patch on my throat, I have the Black/on/black coloring myself."

He cast the twig aside. "Near what must have been the time of your birth, scouts found dead hrinn with terrible burns, both up here in the hills and down along the river, and even out in the drylands where no Lines hold land. At first, Outsiders were thought responsible and watchers were set to kill any of the disgusting furless things who ventured out.

"But, even after they were contained, the bizarre killings continued until a wounded Qartt female survived to name her attacker—Levv." He stared off into the greenery. "In the forgotten days before the great tales of the Tellers, hrinn killed one another in great wantonness, without any reason other than the burning fierceness which lives within us all, until finally there were almost no hrinn left. The yirn and kikinti herds ranged fat and reckless, with no one to hunt them. Patterns emerged unnoticed and passed hrinn by. Chaos ruled our lives and we were almost at an end, but then the Priests arose and brought us the wisdom of the Voice, beginning with this precept: Killing without purpose is the worst crime a hrinn can commit. The young must cull the weak, of course. Adults have to satisfy insult and blood-debt, and resolve challenges to leadership, but always death is part of the sacred patterns of life and full of meaning. We could not survive another such time of darkness.

"Both Lines and males’ houses banded together to search Levv Hold, where they discovered a cache of Outsider weapons. On that day, Levv was exterminated down to the last nurseling, lest their madness be allowed to breed and sow chaos. The strange weapons were destroyed." Nisk paused. "Even males of Levv descent who had been accepted into males’ houses were examined by the Council, which was, of course, a fearful insult. Males leave Line behind forever once they enter a males’ house." His lips wrinkled back in a fierce grimace. "No further trace of insanity, however, was ever found, so the Council concluded the madness had run only through the females and the matter was considered at an end."

An iciness crept into Heyoka’s bones. He managed, despite the pain, to sit up. "Then they are all dead."

Nisk did not look at him. "Yes."

"What is the point of going there?"

"That whole business never smelled right to me." Nisk smoothed the fur on his arm back down so the black undercoat was again hidden. "The Council labeled the pattern of that terrible day death/in/longing, but I think it was never truly named and goes unrecognized still."

Leaning forward, he tapped Heyoka on the chest with an extended claw. "Now you walk among us, proving that in some way, Outsiders did have a claw in this. No Levv, or any other hrinn for that matter, could have taken you off this world. Somehow, your life is the thread that weaves this pattern together. It is for you to name it."

Nisk’s black-furred hrinnti face, so like his own, studied Heyoka, waiting. He glanced aside, unable to meet those black eyes directly. Nisk was apparently kin to him to some degree. It was a strange feeling. And stranger still was the knowledge that, even though he must have seen that carnage, he could not remember.

The wind whipped Seska’s face, hot with the scent of frightened kikinti. She glanced sideways at her age-mates, then raked her yirn’s neck to send it loping ahead. If she were quick, she might draw the first blood. She pulled even with the first straggler and leaned out with open claws—

A thin wail broke into her dream. Heart pounding, Seska bolted upright on her thick pile of pillows, then dug to stop the noise before the Outsider box brought the rest of the hold down upon her.

"Line Mother!" Khea’s replacement, a smallish black-and-white cubling, raced through the open door.

"Get out!" Groping beneath the cushions, Seska finally found the box’s hard outline and pressed the button to still its insistent voice. Then, glancing over her shoulder, she realized the cubling was still there, eyes turned to the floor, trembling.

Sitting up, she swatted at the black-and-white nose. "Leave me!"

The young female, Rhys, went rigid with pain, then obeyed. Seska growled low in her throat. Now she would have to keep an eye on that one; Rhys had heard more than was good for her. She pulled the traitorous black box out and punched the button.

"Seska?" the box said.

"What do you want, box?" She turned the small shiny thing over. Although in the beginning some had said the Voice itself spoke through the box, she had never believed it, but she had always been puzzled as to how the Outsiders had managed to imprison a living being in something so small.

"Vvok has taken an Outsider."

"So?" Seska bared her teeth in irritation. The box had never cared what she or any of the others did with Outsiders before.

"Bring it to the white hold."

"No!" Fur bristled on the back of Seska’s neck. "I have not finished with it."

"Bring it, or I will turn the Lines against Vvok, just as I once did against Levv."

She thought of Levv as she had seen it last, a scorched and empty mountain warren, its ancient whitestone walls smeared red-orange with the blood of its daughters. "The Outsider is dead."

"Then bring me its body or suffer Levv’s fate." The box clicked off.

She flattened her ears. There was little time. She would have to retrieve the Outsider from the Restorers, tear what it knew of the Black/on/black out of that disgusting pink hide, then deliver the remains to the Outsider hold.

Unless she were willing to put Vvok at the same risk as late unlamented Levv.