Path of the Crushed Heart: Book Four of the Serpent Catch Series Page 4

She kissed him more firmly, twisted in his grasp so that her right breast pressed into his chest, and the next kiss lasted minutes.

  In all the hundreds of love poems she had written, Darrissea had never envisioned such passion as she felt in unleashed in that one kiss. All her life she had imagined that when she first made love, she would take hours, that she would use the time to compose a poem even in the act.

  Yet as she kissed Stavan, feeling his taut body beside her, Darrissea’s plans all seemed like romantic nonsense. She knew that she would give herself to him in the morning.

  Near dawn the Hukm stopped, and all along the caravan, the Hukm began to talk in finger language, their waggling fingers falling like rain.

  Fava report to Darrissea that the scouts had come upon another caravan of Blade Kin, and Darrissea set camp while the Hukm prepared to make an attack.

  The Hukm rode off, leaving the humans in the dark.

  They ate breakfast, and for a while after dawn, Darrissea stood beside a small campfire hidden in a heavily wooded grotto, letting the smoke rise to warm her, feeling it caress her face.

  Stavan crept up behind, wrapped a wool blanket around her, large enough for the both of them.

  “Thank you for keeping me warm last night,” Darrissea said, and Stavan whispered in her ear, “I’m hungry for you, now.”

  Darrissea peered around. Nearly all of the Hukm had gone to fight. Fava was washing pans with snow. Phylomon had left with the hunting party.

  Two hundred yards away the odd humans occupied the only other camp in sight.

  “Where shall we go?” Darrissea said, her heart hammering, and Stavan pointed up a ravine. “Let’s go over the hill. We can be alone there.”

  She let him lead the way, eagerly, yet feeling nervous enough that she slowed their pace.

  They ambled up a narrow trail, hand in hand, until they found a small cubbyhole wedged between snow-covered rocks. “I—I’ve never done this before,” Darrissea said as he made the bed.

  “That’s all right,” Stavan answered; he kissed her, a long slow kiss from lips that tasted sweet. She could feel her skin burning right back to her eyeballs, and she stood frozen, not wanting to stop. In this one moment she felt that she had touched glory.

  Stavan made a bed of his cape, pulled his knife and plunged it into the snow, its blade naked.

  Then he began to undress her, and she found the clasp to his belt, opened it. They kissed, undressing slowly, and Darrissea closed her eyes and relished the moment. When they had undressed, Stavan helped lay her down gently.

  There was no wind here in the grotto, and though the touch of the air felt cold, it was not painful. Instead, it somehow seemed to fuel her passion.

  Footsteps crunched through the snow, coming toward them, and Darrissea imagined that Fava was searching for her.

  Stavan stopped kissing her, raised his head cautiously. Darrissea kept silent, hoping Fava would go away. The footsteps stopped just outside the circle of rocks, and Darrissea listened for a long moment, hearing nothing, thinking that perhaps the person had departed.

  Then someone moved into view—a girl—one of the newcomers to camp, found only three nights earlier, a human named Allon Tech with pale skin and blond hair. She glanced behind guiltily, as if checking the trail, her lips full and puckered, then she faced them.

  “Oh, you’re awake,” Allon said.

  “Yes,” Stavan answered.

  Allon averted her eyes, as if caught off guard. Darrissea realized that she must be a thief, for she’d obviously been checking to see if anyone had seen her approach the rock.

  “What do you want?” Stavan asked.

  Darrissea stirred, moving from beneath him.

  “What are you doing?” Allon asked Stavan casually, as if she had no idea.

  Stavan said, “What concern is it of yours?”

  The girl stared at him blankly, as if trying to comprehend his words. “I … I need,” she said to Stavan. “I thought, we might share.…”

  Darrissea’s heart hammered, afraid of what the girl was suggesting.

  Stavan rolled off Darrissea just a bit, enough to look up at the girl. Allon had a strange slack expression in her face, and her eyes did not focus on either of them, as if she looked past them.

  Darrissea suddenly realized that the girl seemed insane, possibly dangerous.

  “Go away,” Stavan said. “I have nothing to offer you.”

  “The others, they want it, too,” Allon answered. She made a strange moaning noise, like the whine of a small pup, and stepped closer, breathing heavily so that her chest heaved.

  Stavan grabbed his knife, and his muscles tensed. Darrissea could feel his arms, incredibly strong.

  “Leave,” he ordered. “Now!”

  “Oh, oh,” Allon said. She turned, shot a feral glance over her shoulder.

  Darrissea crawled free, watched her go.

  “What was that all about?” Darrissea asked, heart pounding.

  “I swear, I have no idea,” Stavan said.

  Allon had just crested the hill when Phylomon and Fava appeared over the top, riding a mammoth.

  Darrissea quickly pulled her clothes on, and then stood as the two approached. Stavan remained naked, wrapped in his blanket, scowling at the intrusion.

  Phylomon came close and gazed down at them, neither approving nor condemning.

  “The attack failed,” he said. “The Blade Kin sounded an alarm, so we lost the element of surprise. However, before their caravan had a chance to retreat, we caught some prisoners—a Dragon Captain and two Smilodon Lancers. I plan to question them tonight.”

  “Good,” Darrissea said. At least something positive had come of the morning.

  “For now,” The Starfarer asked Darrissea, “I’d like you to come with Fava and me. I have something to show you.”

  ***

  Chapter 6: Secrets Revealed

  Darrissea peered in Phylomon’s eyes, wondered if he asked for her to come with him only because he was jealous.

  “Now?” she asked.

  “Yes,” Phylomon said. “It’s urgent.”

  Darrissea went to the mammoth, took a running leap, and grabbed onto the hair on its left haunch, then scurried up to the top of the hump on its back and clung to Fava’s waist.

  Phylomon kicked the mammoth’s ears, and it headed north, through the camp.

  Allon was with her odd friends, and all of them were watching Darrissea leave, all six strangers. Darrissea shouted, “Quit staring at me, you mutants, or I’ll take my knife and abort your mutant asses!”

  Yet the strangers watched her still.

  Phylomon, Fava, and Darrissea rode north at a trot for two hours, to a small frozen lake, and the mammoth waded through a tangle of scrub until Phylomon reached some rocks—four monoliths standing a dozen feet tall.

  A fifth flat slab covered the others, forming a small enclosure. They dismounted.

  “What is this place?” Darrissea asked.

  “Upon this slab,” Phylomon said, “eight hundred years ago, we built a pyre for Theron Major. His bones are buried here beneath our feet. I thought we should come and pay homage.”

  Theron Major, the first human Starfarer to begin teaching the Pwi, was a man of peace; he was also the first human to be gunned down by the Slave Lords.

  Darrissea felt privileged to be here, but was still curious as to why Phylomon was being so demanding—and so secretive.

  Darrissea wondered if Theron would ever have guessed that in Smilodon Bay alone, his deeds would be so well remembered that a dozen men would be named for him.

  “Did you know him?” Fava asked.

  “Very well,” Phylomon said. “I was young when Theron ran his school in South Bay. We had heard rumors that the Starfarers were taking slaves. We came on an expedition from South Bay, flying in hovercrafts. At Bashevgo we found many Pwi who had been taken as slaves to work as farmers, miners, and laborers. Theron tried to talk our people into setting them free. We th
ought we’d succeeded, but here the slavers ambushed us and murdered Theron.”

  “Is this the same path you took to Bashevgo back then?” Fava asked.

  “Yes, roughly,” Phylomon whispered. He stepped outside the small structure and looked up. A red drone shone in the sky, palely visible even in daylight, a spear of white. Phylomon muttered, “The world is only so large. I sometimes seem doomed to travel the same paths, over and over, as if retracing my steps.”

  “What do you mean?” Darrissea asked.

  Phylomon said, “That summer, I traveled these same plains with Theron, and afterward I learned to hunt slavers in the darkness. Three hundred and sixty years ago, I came here leading Terrazin Dragontamer to our first battle on the north rim of the Mammoth Run Plateau. Now I’m circling round to Bashevgo again. It feels like some great cosmic chase, a spiral, an endless battle between enons.”

  “Enons?” Darrissea asked.

  “An old term,” Phylomon said. “A concept borrowed from our friends the Eridani.” He nodded up into the sky at the red drone. “Enons are opposing combatants that can never win, never dominate. You would think that the Eridani, with their communal minds, would have reached some consensus on issues such as justice and mercy, good and evil. But they haven’t. They view the universe in terms of competing opposites, called enons. In the physical universe enons are observed in the form of matter and antimatter. Creation and chaos. Enons appear to do battle, but their forces remain equal. That is the way I feel about the Blade Kin. I and they are enons. I battle them, hack them down. Always they come at me again, as if freshly created only to bloody my sword.

  “Anyway,” Phylomon added, “to work. For over three hundred years, I have kept some armaments hidden. But now I must unearth them. I wanted you to be here with me, to see where the cache is. That way, if I die, you will know what is available to you.”

  Phylomon walked into the brush and set his hand on a huge boulder; then Phylomon had Darrissea and Fava place their hands beside his, and he asked each woman to speak her name.

  Last of all Phylomon spoke his name.

  The boulder collapsed into dust, and a great stone box appeared. The mammoth, only a few yards away, trumpeted in fear, and Darrissea fell back in surprise. Fava felt her own stomach fluttering.

  Phylomon spoke to the box in English, saying “Open,” and the lid slid away to reveal odd devices—rods, medallions, strange guns. The box emitted a rotten odor, like some long-unused pantry. Fava stepped back a dozen yards, terrified.

  For a long time Phylomon studied the great box, and then he pulled out a tiny black cube and swallowed it.

  “What is that?” Darrissea asked.

  “A weapon that will remain hidden in my stomach until I call upon it,” Phylomon said.

  He pulled out eight white rods and one blue one, like long pipes, and he gave three each to Fava and Darrissea. “These were not made as weapons,” he said softly. “Originally, when our forefathers terraformed Anee, the planet was very unstable. Situated as it is, the largest moon circling a gas giant, it undergoes phenomenal gravitational stress, causing volcanoes and earthquakes and tremendous tides. Those stresses were necessary for the planet to build an atmosphere, but they are also inconvenient. So we used harmonic resonance rods”—he held out the sticks—“to trigger earthquakes and relieve the tectonic plates so that we could build our cities.”

  Phylomon looked at the two women and must have realized that neither of them could understand him. “When we get to Bashevgo, we may need to breach the walls to the city. To do so, you must plant the rods in the wall and twist. Plant all eight white ones first, and the blue one last. Within a few minutes the walls will shatter.”

  “These start earthquakes?” Fava asked, her eyes widening in a mix of wonder and fear.

  Phylomon nodded gravely. “Bashevgo is fairly stable. I don’t know exactly how much damage we could cause. But in some other cities—down in Greenstone where they are closer to the fault lines—we could level the entire countryside.”

  Fava set her rods on the ground, gingerly, as if afraid of them.

  Phylomon reached into the box and pulled out other objects—five guns, exactly half of those in the box. “So little left,” he mused, and he held them out to Fava.

  She would not touch them. “Those are evil weapons,” Fava said. “They are not friendly to me, I can tell.”

  “I offer you portable laser cannons, and you decline? What will you do, fight the Blade Kin with spears and swords?”

  “If I must,” Fava said, but Darrissea took the guns, carrying them like an armload of firewood.

  Phylomon studied Fava a moment. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to frighten you. Perhaps I can find some friendly weapons for you.”

  He pulled out a shining bow of silver with two knobs on each end. “That looks friendly,” Fava said.

  “No, we would need an allosaur to use this. It’s a tamer, used to control such beasts. It attaches to the allosaur’s brain, and when you speak commands, it translates them into impulses that the allosaur can react upon. When I was young, we used to bring allosaurs over from Hotland to race. The Slave Lords used to have their captains ride them.”

  He pulled out three pieces of green leather—two inches wide and a foot long, like pieces of dry jerky. He studied each in turn, peering at them closely.

  “What are those?” Darrissea asked.

  “These are the cauls of the symbiotic skins taken from dead Starfarers. Unfortunately, these were not available when my first wife was alive. Only after the Talent War, when the Starfarers died. You see, sometimes a body is so destroyed that even the symbiote cannot regenerate it. Then the caul separates, and the symbiote must wait to reattach to a new host. Would you be willing to wear a skin like mine?” Phylomon looked up at Fava and Darrissea, held out the strips of jerky. “You need only cut yourself and place the caul on the cut so it can feed on your blood. Once it drinks a few drops, it will cover your skin, and thereafter it will feed primarily on your sweat.”

  Darrissea’s heart pounded. She knew what he was offering—immortality, and possibly his love.

  His eyes showed pain, loneliness. She had thought that she only imagined jealousy in his eyes when he caught her with Stavan. She suddenly saw that the Starfarer must be so alone, living forever in his cage of flesh. In a way, Phylomon did not live, but merely existed.

  “No,” Fava said, and Darrissea waited, considering. Phylomon’s loneliness should not have mattered to her at all, did not really matter much.

  Darrissea had found Stavan now.

  “Wise choice,” Phylomon said when she did not reach out to take one; he smiled down at her, and his cerulean eyes were ancient.

  “I never would have chosen to live my life either. When I was young, we slipped symbiotes on and off with hardly more thought than you would change your clothes. Unfortunately, these cauls have died over the years and will do no one any good.”

  He crushed the strips of leather in his hand. They crackled and tore like chaff, and he let them float on the wind.

  Phylomon searched the remaining pile of odd boxes until his eyes settled on a small bundle of wrapped leather the size of a loaf of bread. He picked it up, as if testing its weight, then looked steadily at Fava.

  The leather bundle was crudely tied, as if by a child. Darrissea could almost imagine that the leather protected some girl’s wooden doll.

  The Starfarer held it out for Fava. “You wanted a friendly weapon. This is not a weapon, but it is friendly. Unwrap it.”

  Fava tried to unwrap the bundle, but the leather straps broke easier than they untied. Still the leather smelled sweet, as if it held some treasure. Inside was a small silver flask and a beautiful ivory broach with a leaping sabertooth carved into it.

  “You have heard of faders, those of my people who it was said could ‘walk invisible.’ Would you become one?”

  “Would I be invisible?” Fava asked.

  “No, not really,�
�� Phylomon said. “The fader distorts time. It causes an intense energy field around you, warping time. While others live in our time stream, you can speed up.”

  “I don’t understand,” Fava said. “What would happen to me? Would I speed up forever?”

  “When you activate the fader, for a brief moment, a few seconds, time would seem to slow around you, and you’d move quickly. The air would seem thick and unyielding, like water. Perhaps this would frighten you, but as long as you move slowly and breathe deeply, you will be all right.

  “As the rest of the world ages three seconds, you will have about five minutes in which to work. You could retreat from danger or cross a wide field unseen. You could walk so rapidly over water that you would not sink, or you could kill enemies.

  “In these ways, Starfarers who wore faders served as spies. I think that since you are both already disguised as Blade Kin, Fava, you would make a good fader.”

  Fava nodded dumbly, and Phylomon opened the silver flask, had her drink the fluid, then fitted the ivory medallion to her cloak. “The fluid from the bottle takes two days to become absorbed by the cells in your body. After that you can activate the fader by pressing the medallion hard between your fingers,” Phylomon said. “But remember, the medallion requires a great deal of energy, which it gathers from radiation.”

  “Light from the sun?”

  “No,” Phylomon said. “This radiation blows through our world day and night, never slowing as it passes through the planet. Still, the fader must gather energy from these particles, and it takes several hours to recharge. You must use the fader sparingly, and rely on your wits more than on technology.”

  From the box Phylomon pulled out several large white plates, then took one small black one.

  “Hover mines,” he explained, and he pulled his knife, slit open his left arm, then placed the small black hover mine in the incision.

  His symbiote healed the incision immediately, concealing the weapon. The women watched in horror, and Phylomon said, “I carry more weapons this way than you know. Now that we are going into battle, that is exactly as it should be.”

  He looked at the box one last time, said the word, “Close,” and the great stone slammed shut. He said, “Conceal,” and all around them motes of dust seemed to flow upward, like millions of ants crawling atop each other, until the dust closed over the boulder.