The River Wall Read online

  Keeshah got there first, his bulk and his bloody muzzle between the roguelord and Ligor, who was still held by two of Worfit’s men. Everyone became very still for a moment. Then Keeshah turned his head toward one of Worfit’s men.

  “No!” one of them shouted. “He’s right, Worfit. You are crazy!”

  “We can’t spend your gold in the All-Mind,” the other added.

  They threw Ligor to the ground, turned, and followed the other rogue.

  Worfit slowly, deliberately turned his back on Keeshah.

  “I still win,” he shouted. “You couldn’t have done it without that sha’um. I figure that shows me to be the better man.”

  “How do you figure that?” I asked, circling down from the slope to face Worfit on the relatively even floor of the pass. “You couldn’t have done it without—what? Five men?”

  He made no answer.

  “You think I stopped Keeshah because I was afraid for my life?” I yelled. “If you knew him, you’d know better than that. There’s only one kind of logic that could have stopped him. He held back because he knew—

  “He knew that I wanted you for myself.

  “There are no extra men now,” I said, moving toward him. “Keeshah won’t interfere, no matter what—he has agreed to that.” I drew my dagger, sheathed Rika, then drew the baldric over my head and tossed it toward Ligor. “The odds are even, Worfit. You against me.” I had kept it in check all this time, the anger I felt because of the people who had died as a result of Worfit’s persecution and petty envy. I let it surface now, and I believe Worfit saw it in my face, a look such as a sha’um might wear. “You’re the one who set the stakes, Worfit. Now roll your mondeana in a fair game for a change.”

  Worfit grinned, and settled his thick body into a fighting crouch.

  “You’re a fool,” he yelled. “It’s still my game.”

  I saw what he meant immediately. Markasset had trained in fighting with all weapons, but he had excelled in sword work. Worfit, on the other hand, had learned his skills under life-and-death circumstances, and it was clear that the dagger was his chosen weapon. Only the element of surprise had allowed me to disarm him so easily.

  Worfit tossed the dagger between his hands, feinting at me even as he grasped its hilt. His speed, the whirling sand, and the blurring tears stimulated by the sand all made it difficult to keep track of his movements.

  None of that mattered. I was ready for the end of it, consumed with a rage that matched the roguelord’s obsession. I wanted Worfit’s life, even if it cost me my own.

  We circled slowly, feinting and dodging, each gauging the others skills. Suddenly Worfit lunged forward, his right hand drawn back for a killing body thrust, his free hand ready to grab my dagger wrist.

  I threw myself under his rush, slamming my body against his legs and tumbling him. Through the noise of the wind, I heard him grunt as he fell, but he rolled and was up again before I could grab him.

  Worfit shifted the knife to his left hand. I waited for him, and caught the blade of his dagger against my own. His right hand found my throat and squeezed, and for a moment I was eye-to-eye with his grimace of hatred. Then I brought my left arm up sharply and knocked aside the hand at my throat. Before he could reclaim the hold, I doubled my fist and delivered three short jabs into the side of his broad face.

  The blows surprised him rather than hurt him. He jumped away, then darted back, caught my dagger wrist, and twisted my right arm over his shoulder. I saw the dagger in his left hand, ready to stab backward. I kicked at his heel, knocked him off balance, and fell over with him.

  We hit the rough stone hard. Worfit dropped his dagger and grabbed my knife wrist with both hands. He slammed the back of my hand against the rock, over and over, until that spot of rock was dark with my blood and the pain forced my fingers open.

  Worfit caught up my dagger and rolled his body over mine, forcing me to my back. He pinned my wrists momentarily with his powerful arms. He ducked his head toward my chest, then snapped it up. The crown of his skull crashed into my chin, jolting my head against stone. I felt myself start to go limp.

  Worfit rolled off me and came up again quickly. He had a dagger in each hand and a knee across my throat. He was grinning.

  *Help,* Keeshah offered, his eagerness and fear a living presence in my mind.

  *No!* I ordered. *Leave him alone, whatever happens, understand?*

  *Don’t like,* his mind grumbled, the emotion far more powerful than its expression. *Agree.* Then he added a plea that gave me almost as much strength as our joining might have done: *Don’t die.*

  I lay there, panting, eyes and lungs stinging, and waited for the right moment. It came when Worfit lifted the daggers for the killing thrust.

  I curled my lower body and slammed my knees into his side. Thrown off balance, he still executed the double knife stroke. One blade shrieked harmlessly against the stone. The other caught the side of my thigh in a long, deep gash that sent waves of pain through my body and a wave of fear—not mine—through my mind.

  *Hurt? Help? We come?*

  The cubs also sensed the pain caused by Worfit’s dagger. Their mindvoices roiled and shouted in my mind. I fought against their fear. I pushed through it to achieve, with each of them, the momentary bond of deep understanding I shared occasionally with their father. They saw that their fear endangered me, and they withdrew to the edges of my consciousness. Their concern gave me new strength.

  Worfit still had the daggers, but my hands held his wrists. We thrashed back and forth on the ground. The movement scraped and battered the wound in my leg. I let the pain feed my anger.

  I allowed Worfit to push me to my back and sit astride me. He leaned his weight and aimed his strength against my braced arms. He was panting heavily, but grinning with triumph. His burly arms and wide shoulders gave him the advantage in a contest of strength.

  Instead of trying to force his arms—and the daggers—out away from our bodies, I began to draw them down and in, toward the few inches of dust-blown space that separated our stomachs.

  Worfit’s grin faded, and mine grew, as he realized his mistake. By committing his weight against my arms, he had granted me control. Dropping the daggers would release any hope of advantage. Now he was the one who had to resist—not only my strength, great already in Markasset’s young body and freshly honed by recent hardship, but the burden of his own weight.

  “You thought Keeshah was my only strength,” I said with a sneer. Our arms trembled in the space between our bodies. I twisted his wrists slowly.

  “You bet on the wrong player, Worfit.”

  The daggers pointed at his belly. At the last moment, he tried to release the hilts—but it was too late. I bucked my body, jarred his tenuous balance, and drove the daggers hilt-deep into Worfit’s belly.

  12

  Worfit’s body slumped down on me, and I felt the heat of his blood on my belly. All my anger and all my strength drained away. I suddenly felt the pain of my wound, exposed to the scouring sand. My eyes, my skin, my body—and my mind—ached from the ordeal. I closed my eyes against the sand, but I knew I could never hide from the memory of the killing hate I had felt toward Worfit.

  First Obilin, and now Worfit, I thought, grieving not for them, but for myself. Will it be this way when I face Ferrathyn—no thought given to the greater good, to destiny, to self-defense? Only private, selfish anger?

  Or is the anger part of the destiny? I wondered. Ricardo killed often during the war, but those people were faceless. With every mechanized means at their command, they were trying to kill me and my companions. There were ideals, true—but that was the business of the politicians. In the front lines, it came right down to numbers: every enemy soldier who died was one less rifle firing at me. The men beside me were my friends; the men opposing us were strangers.

  In Gandalara, killing is more personal. Maybe the Ricardo part of me needs the anger to make it easier—even to make it possible. Maybe Rikardon shoul
d be grateful that its necessary.

  Worfit, alone, felt as heavy as had the pile of vineh that had threatened to suffocate me outside of Raithskar. Lack of air and loss of blood made me light-headed, and in the darkness behind my eyes, it felt as if the ground trembled and reeled beneath me.

  The weight vanished from my chest, and I opened bleary eyes to see Ligor stooping over Worfit’s body, which was rolling limply away from me. I took a deep breath, and the searing pain of the sand in my nose and throat jarred me back to wakefulness.

  Yet the world was still reeling.

  In fact, Worfit’s body was not rolling at all, but was resting on its side. Blood was leaking out around the two dagger hilts, and his high shoulder was rocking back and forth. The arm and hand which were balanced across his torso were flapping slightly.

  Ligor was not stooping, but crouching and staggering, trying to keep his feet.

  I could not see his face clearly through the sand haze, but I knew he was terrified. I knew, because Keeshah’s terror was so intense that, as if he were a child running to a parent’s arms for protection, his mind slammed into mine with thoughtless force, and Keeshah and I blended.

  Powerful muscles, bunched at shoulders and haunches. Claws out, can’t hold, scraping across rock. Fur lifting, ears pulled tight against head. Sand hurts, can’t smell, can’t see. Ground moves. Shift one way, need to shift again. No control. Nothing the same. Nothing sure. Danger. Can’t protect. Danger. DANGER!

  I fought Keeshah for control of our blended thoughts and emotions, but I made slow headway. His panic had brought me understanding, and with it came a panic with a different basis—which restimulated his.

  Earthquake. Bad one. We’re in a steep-sided, rocky valley. There’ll be avalanches, new chasms. Even if we survive the quake itself, the passes could fill in and we might be trapped here for good. We could die here. We’ve got to get out. WE’VE GOT TO GET OUT!

  Can’t move. Ground crazy. Afraid.

  Got to move. Save us!

  Can’t.

  Have to.

  Afraid.

  Me too. Help …

  Yes.

  Keeshah’s teeth closed on the cloth of my tunic. He hauled me up to my feet. It was an odd, surrealistic sensation, being physically separate but mentally together. We felt, equally, the pain of our gashed leg muscle trying to support our weight and the airy, exposed sensation along the length of our fur-fluffed tail. Panic chittered away inside us.

  I fell across Keeshah’s back as he crouched. He surged to his feet as I struggled to straighten myself around. He/we were on the verge of taking off when I/we remembered Ligor.

  I wrenched myself free of the blend and said: *Wait.*

  Now I could feel Keeshah’s panic both through our link—thankfully, not as intensely as when we had been blended—and from the tension and trembling in his body. But he held his place, and I looked around, blinking against the sand, for Ligor.

  Just as I spotted him, another tremor shook the ground. The valley floor cracked right down the middle from the strain, and with a tooth-tormenting shriek of stone grinding against itself, the side of the valley on which we stood shivered upward, rising several inches above its previous level.

  Keeshah and I rode out the upheaval in terror. Ligor was closer to the edge of the shelf, and the violence of the splitting rock knocked him over. He landed on his back and went limp.

  Another shock hit, and the other half of the valley floor moved away from us, groaning like a million creatures in pain. On both sides of the valley, large chunks of rock were shaken loose and began to bounce down the walls.

  *Now, Keeshah. We’ve got to get out of here NOW!*

  Somehow, we made it to Ligor and got his unconscious body face-down across Keeshah’s shoulders. Then Keeshah ran as he had never done before. Laboring for his every breath at this high altitude, dodging a veritable avalanche, stumbling and staggering when the ground shifted, he carried both of us over the high crossing—what remained of it on our side of the still-growing chasm—into the Chizan Valley.

  It looked as if the entire Chizan passage were splitting apart. The break seemed to be a little south of center. We had been fortunate to be on the northern, larger side in the narrow Zantro Pass. On the wider floor of the Chizan Valley, as the aftershocks diminished in strength, we were relatively safe from the falling rocks that rained over the area closer to the northern wall.

  Keeshah’s mind was still in a panic when his body started to give out. He slowed and staggered, gasping for air with a horrible rattling sound in his chest. My own panic eased up as I felt the strain he was suffering, and I ordered him to stop. He stumbled on. I slid my leg over his hindquarters and slumped off his back, dragging Ligor with me. When the weight left his back, Keeshah surfaced from the fog of fear, paused and turned back.

  *You have to rest,* I told him. *We’re as safe as we can be, right here. Rest.*

  I had the feeling that he complied more out of necessity than choice, but I could also feel his trust in me overcoming his fear as he collapsed to the rocky valley floor. The awful sound of his panting eased, even as I lowered Ligor to the ground and flung myself down beside him.

  I could feel the ground shivering underneath me. It seemed less an aftershock of an earthquake than a human reaction to the quivering pain that follows recognition of a severe injury. As Keeshah’s breathing slowed, I felt the turmoil in my mind recede, and calmness crept in with an irresistible coolness. It was not that I felt safe. It was only that I felt safer than I had a few moments earlier, and that small sense of security was enough to let my battered body claim its turn for attention. I tied my desert scarf over the bloody gash in my leg. Then I passed out.

  I woke with a start that set the pain in my leg ringing. I groaned and sat up, looking around for Keeshah and Ligor. They had not moved, and I wondered how long I had been out. I rolled over and examined Ligor. He had a lump on his head, but he was breathing all right, and there seemed to be no bones broken. As far as I could see he and Keeshah were just resting.

  Like I should be doing, I thought. The ground’s quiet; even the avalanches seem to have stopped. What woke me?

  As there seemed to be nothing in the physical environment that would have disturbed me, I looked inward—and found the awareness of the cubs crouching and whimpering in distress.

  *Koshah, Yoshah,* I called to them. There was no reaction.

  Damn! I swore to myself. I never gave a thought to them or how they would be affected by my panic. I must have given them a hell of a scare.

  I forced myself to be calm as I reached out to them again.

  *Kids? I’m here, I’m okay. Answer me—Koshah? Yoshah? Hey, it’s all right.*

  Only it was very much not all right, as I learned when I finally broke through the wall of fear that surrounded them. I was touched by their joy as they became aware of me. There was also a sense of relief, but not, as I had expected, from terror I had inspired. They were suffering from their own terror, which had been compounded as they had reached to me for comfort and had found me inaccessible and as frightened as they were.

  I learned all this in the moment it took for us to reopen our conscious link, and I was busy for the next few minutes trying to calm them. I felt from them the same kind of all-consuming doubt of their environment that had swept through Keeshah during the earthquake.

  All of Gandalara probably felt that shock, part of my mind thought, while I was soothing the cubs and trying to explain what they had experienced. And as far as I can tell from Markasset’s memories, it’s a new experience for everybody.

  *Better now?* I asked the cubs, and received a shaky affirmative from the male. *Yoshah?* I prompted, and finally let myself ask the questions I had been holding back until they were calmer. *Is your mother all right? Is Tarani all right? Where are you?*

  *In house,* she answered, meaning the house specially built outside Thagorn for Tarani and me. *Woman, mother gone. Mother said stay.*


  Along with the concept of “stay” came a flash of memory: Yayshah, with Tarani riding, whirled back from the edge of the clearing which surrounded the house. The brindled female snarled and slapped Yoshah clawlessly, driving her and her brother back into the clearing. With a final growling comment, the female had carried Tarani off toward Thagorn.

  I may not be a sha’um, I thought, but I think I’d get the message to “stay” too.

  *Go after?* Koshah asked hopefully.

  *No, you follow your mother’s orders and stay near the house. Understood?*

  *How long?* asked Koshah’s mindvoice, sounding petulant. It was hard to imagine the fear I had sensed from him only moments before.

  They don’t really understand what I’ve told them about the earthquake, I thought. They just know that I understand it, and that’s enough for them. That means they either trust me completely, or they figure anything I can understand can’t really be worth worrying about.

  *Trust,* came Koshah’s mindvoice, surprising me. I had not realized that I was developing the same quality of rapport with them as Keeshah and I shared, and that they could occasionally follow my thoughts when we were in close contact.

  *Thank you, Koshah,* I said.* Trust me now, and stay near the house. Hunt if you get hungry, but don’t—I mean this—do not go into the main valley unless Tarani and Yayshah come back for you. I think they’ll probably be back soon*

  *You come?* Yoshah asked. *Father come?*

  I started to reassure them, but hesitated when it occurred to me that the other end of the Chizan passage had probably been badly hit by the quake, and I had no guarantee we could get through it. As I thought about the possibility, I sat up and looked westward as if I might be able to see, from a distance of some six mandays, whether the Zantil Pass was clear.

  The horizons in Gandalara were strange in the high passes. The grayish rock edged upward until it met the grayish cloud cover, so that the demarcation was often more a matter of visible texture, rather than a color difference.

  Not today.