Braxi-Azea - In Conquest Born Part 19

And so the young woman was t.i.tled Temporary Amba.s.sador and received the coveted "Imperial" with which to prefix her name. She quickly won over the Derlethans despite the handicap of being a female amidst a patriarchal society, so much so that they held her back for thirty days while the worst of the weather pa.s.sed over the plains.

She was given unlimited hersu; she chose twenty. She was offered unlimited provisions; she chose instead to fill her sled with the means of hunting native game, recognizing that any attempt to pack a half-year's provisions for her and the animals would be futile. She harnessed the animals as she had learned in the icelands of Luus Five, explaining to the Derlethans, when they asked, why this formation would prove most effective in the crossing. They neither agreed nor disagreed; the technique would prove its worth by getting her across the ice- plains before the winter's cold made even breathing deadly, or demonstrate its failure by her death.

And so she departed from the eastern heights. It was a comment upon her relations.h.i.+p with the Empire that as many people hoped to see her die in the alien cold as prayed for her success.

If Anzha lyu sought to master Derleth's wasteland, it was as she had mastered other terrains-by submitting to them. When she lacked food she hunted; when she was tired of traveling she erected a semi-permanent camp and waited until the motivation to continue returned. Neither pursuit was easy or pleasant; the game was rare, well-camouflaged, and dangerous, and to stop and rest for a day could be deadly in the cold which mimicked warmth as it lulled the unwary traveler to sleep the Long Sleep-as the natives labeled death. But it would be folly to hurtle forward and expect to keep up the pace for half a Derlethan year.

Determination could subst.i.tute for endurance for a while, but in that long a stretch even determination would wear thin. She chose instead to take her time, moving quickly when she could and accepting delay when she had to. Her advisors at the Academy had approved of this approach once they came to understand that the greatest enemy along this route was not cold, but boredom.

Day after day wore on with hardly a break in the cloud-cover. Pale gray faded into dark gray and back again as the Derleth day-cycle continued. Sometimes she dreamed of death and it was warm and welcoming; on those nights she shook herself awake and saw to some menial but comforting task, such as maintenance of her weaponry or repair of her furs.

And she was alone with her thoughts, which she had not been for twenty years.

This is all that matters, she told herself. That I've been given temporary Imperial status and that I will serve the Empire as no one else could have done.

The precedent is all that matters. The people I'm serving will not forget- although the Council of Justice might like them to.

In the long days of endless gray she did not ask herself if she was happy, or even satisfied, with her present lot in life. She had learned never to probe so deeply, lest she come in touch with the layer of pain which, after all these years, was still so near to the surface.

I am, she recited. I strive to enter the military. That's the sum total of my existence. I won't look beyond it.

Her dreams spoke otherwise, as though the featureless regularity of the gray-lit plains had become a canvas to her inner vision. Surrounded by the ice of her waking day, she lay entrapped by surrealistic images that stormed her dreaming mind with reminders of hungers too long suppressed, needs too powerful to lie peacefully submerged within her. They were human hungers but they were unacceptable ones, and they had been cruelly but necessarily denied satisfaction in the waiting game she had learned to play. Azea did not hunger for blood, therefore she would discipline her vengeance. Azea did not thirst for sensation, therefore she would channel her s.e.xual energies elsewhere. I am Azean, she re- peated, and she forced herself to fit that mold despite the price her dreaming mind exacted from her for it. The time would come she could do what she wished.

But that time was not now, and so dreams were her only possible outlet in a world where moderation defined nationality.

Yet even those visions began to weaken, submitting at last to the everpresent gray which was the soul of Derleth. There came a day when she tried desperately to recollect the nightmarish images, to bring some variety, if not to her world, then to her thoughts. But the dreams, like all else, faded into the eternal gray, and their images were lost as the tedium of Derleth became more and more overpowering.

She suffered from frostbite, but not so excessively that it hindered her progress.

Azea could regenerate what died in the cold, provided she survived to get back there to have it done. As for her hunting, telepathy made that as easy as it could ever be in this desolate wasteland. At times she seduced her prey to spearpoint, and at other times cast out mental tendrils over the ice in search of life; there was usually none. At least, she thought, when there's nothing to hunt I don't have to waste time and energy trying to ferret something out.

The days became shorter. Although she had kept count of them, that number was a theoretical thing; the winter-length day was more real in terms of her inner calendar. Soon the storm-winds would come and the blizzards of Derleth would slow traveling to a crawl. If she didn't reach the far mountains by then she probably wouldn't do so at all.

And then the kisunu came.

It is curious that in the face of danger the telepath dreamed of love. It was a foreign concept to her and not one she fully understood; whatever memories of human affection she retained from her youth had been blocked from conscious recall by that same process which dealt with her period of trauma. Certainly her recent life, filled with the scorn of her fellow students and the everpresent hatred of Azea's Council of Justice, was not the place to learn of such gentle emotions.

But in her sleep she lay in another world, cradled in the arms of a man who was marked with her own alien stigma-the blood-red hair of an unknown heritage. "I know you face an unknown and possibly terrible future," he whispered, "I know you're more accustomed to hatred than respect, and have been raised to be ignorant of more gentle human interaction. But know now-and remember when the pain becomes too great-that one man cared deeply enough for you to call you mitethe. You know my language. You know what the word means."

And as she reached to embrace him she awoke suddenly to cold darkness, and to the scent of death.

Kisunu.

Her mind had touched a carnivorous instinct and applied the proper Derlethan label. Kisunu-the ice-killers. Wolf-like predators who hunted in packs and who, needing little food to fuel them for long periods of running, were capable of hunt- ing down and patiently driving to despair any creature unfortunate enough to come across them.

They were intelligent. Anzha cla.s.sified them instantly with her telepathic sensitivity and was unnerved by her conclusion. They were chaotic in nature and lacked any physical structures to stand as monuments to their intelligence, but despite this they could not be cla.s.sed with common animal life. They had a culture; Anzha sensed she would not understand it, but there was something in them which tasted of more than simple pack mentality.

And they were very, very hungry.

She built a fire; they backed away warily, but displayed none of the instinctive fear one might a.s.sociate with such creatures. Two reasoning species on the same planet? It was rare, but not unheard of.

But why hadn't the Derlethans told her?

Perhaps they didn't know.

Impossible, she corrected herself. One couldn't evade these creatures without comprehending that they had more than animal intelligence.

Yes, the Derlethans knew. And those who understood survived the half-year journey through the heart of kisunu territory.

Again she reached out a tendril of thought; quickly she drew it back, burned by the touch of animal hunger and the promise of a mind so alien that no human could hope to understand it.

Very well, she thought. I will speak the universal language.

She chose a bow from among her possessions and lined up arrows, heads imbedded in the snow, before her. Yellow eyes regarded her with unblinking intensity and the creatures took one or two steps backward, alert and ready. It was clear they expected her to aim. It was fortunate she didn't have to. With one motion she lifted the bow and left fly a well-feathered shaft; it embedded itself in the torso of a surprised kisunu and evidently lodged itself in a vital organ. The creature howled shortly and fell; blue-black blood stained the snow in splotches and his death cry resonated in the gray emptiness.

She waited, tense, for a reaction.

And they studied her. They now knew how fast she could move, and if they were indeed capable of advanced reasoning they would know just how accessible those upright arrows were. I will take you with me, Anzha's action promised, not one or two but many. And who will be the first to come at me, in that case?

One by one they turned away from her, still wary but with their attention focused elsewhere. Each went up to his fallen fellow and laid his great teeth against that one's hide, then each ritually gave way to the next, and he to the one after, and so on until all members of the pack had performed the ritual action.

This confirmed Anzha's suspicions, for mere animals do not indulge in death- rites. And starving animals more often eat their dead than revere them. The gesture of the kisunu seemed almost deisgned to say, "Although I starve, I will not eat my kind. This sets me above the beasts of the ice." Hasha, she thought.

Predators with moral instincts.

She set a circular fire about her camp and hoped they would be unwilling to cross it. The Derlethans had given her skins filled with flammable powder and now she understood the reason for it, for no fuel gathered from this desolate place would burn as brightly; the native branches which occasionally broke through the ice were good for heating dinner but would scarcely frighten a high- grade predator.

But morning would come and she would have to move on, and if the kisunu would not let her do so she would surely die. Not that day perhaps, but later, when food and fuel ran out and she was at their mercy. She would have to deal with them tonight-establish some kind of working relations.h.i.+p that would allow her to continue. The western mountains couldn't be far off now; surely if she could buy a few days' time she could reach them.

She walked over to where the frightened hersu were huddled. With a telepath's hand she calmed them, and then with surface a.n.a.lysis chose the two most paralyzed by fear. They would do her the least good in the days to come and should be the first to go. With a steady hand she removed their harnesses.

It seemed to her the kisunu were smiling.

She placed a mittened hand behind each of the animals and pressed against them, thinking threat as loudly and as primitively as she could. They bolted forward in blind terror and jumped the fireline; by the time they were free of her imposed fear they had fallen, and the hungry kisunu made short work of their gentle but muscular bodies.

I have made you an offering, she thought, and I'll make more if I have to. And none of you need die for this.

Is it enough?

Apparently it was, for as the kisunu finished eating (and she noticed they divided the animals evenly among them) they withdrew to a safe distance and stretched out on the snowy surface, to nap or to wait as each one desired.

It was the first of many long nights during which she would not sleep.

They did not leave her in the morning; she had hoped they would, but not really expected it. Again she sent out mental tendrils among them, and again drew them back quickly. The hunger evident in their surface minds was less demanding, but it remained. It was only a matter of time, then: a single woman and eight pa.s.sive fersu could not hope to stand against an entire pack of carnivores, intelligent or no. There might have been some hope for her through her telepathic skills, but the kisune mind was evidently so alien that she would not be able to hold on to it long enough to establish control.

Because there was nothing better to do, Anzha repacked the sled and hitched the fersu up to it once more. To her surprise the kisunu parted before her, encouraging the progress of the sled by lack of interference. Not one to question small favors, she headed dutifully westward.

Previously she had napped while traveling. Now she dared not do so. The ice- fields were smooth and without creva.s.ses, the armor-barked branches which breached its surface exceptions rather than the rule. It was a very different place than the cracked-glacier surface of Luus where she had done a terrain interns.h.i.+p.

This, in its way, was almost more dangerous, for on Derleth there was no need for the constant alertness that kept one's mind occupied and fought back the edge of madness. She allowed herself to smile. There was little risk, now, of seeing boredom drive her to insanity. A little more risk of being eaten, perhaps, but that was in many ways a preferable death to slow torture by unending gray tedium.

"Yes," she said aloud, surprised to find herself talking. "I should be grateful to you. You've spared me something very terrible, without even knowing it."

And for the first time in that half-year, human laughter resonated in the ice- laden wastelands.

"Such a polite enmity, my gentle escorts! The Braxins would like you." She was talking as much to herself as to them, discovering that any human voice-even her own- was welcome in the gray emptiness. "They make a ritual of enmity, and devise rules by which to control hostility and drag it out for the lengthiest possible enjoyment."

She looked over the pack, a good thirty strong if not more. She had no desire to count them. "A race, then. I think we understand each other. I will feed you for as long as I can and you'll play escort while I do. And the question is, which comes first-the western mountains or the last of the hersu?"

But long before that, she thought, I'll be walking.

Time enough for that when it comes.

She camped before nightfall and built a small fire, saving most of her flame- dust for when she might need it later, to drive back death. Then, acting as though nothing in the world had changed since yesterday, she slaughtered another of the sled-animals and spent an evening rendering it into its component parts. With the rich organ meats she fed herself and the remaining hersu, upon whose strength she was coming to depend more and more. The majority of the meat she flung to the waiting pack.

"Your share," she muttered, watching the ritual division.

It surprised her, in the days to come, just how strong the hersu were. Not until there were only four left did she need to start lightening the sled, a painful task, since everything in it was vital to survival. The kisunu could run long days on little food, and so were satisfied to lope along beside her in the rapidly shortening days. She fed them when she sensed their hunger, and she fed the hersu regularly, lest they be too weak to carry her forward; herself she fed only when she had to, and sometimes less often than that. Over and over she repeated, Azean medicine can undo all of this. So she bribed the predators to keep their distance and sacrificed her own strength for forward motion, in the desperate hope of getting home.

Sometimes she slept. She tried not to, but exhaustion would beat her down until she awoke suddenly, finding she had napped without knowing it. The days dragged on without end and hunger was a constant companion. She ceased to look for the mountains; they had become a dream of the past, something which stirred in her memory but which took too much effort to identify. An eternity had pa.s.sed on the ice and the rhythm of it, chilling and regular, had finally conquered her.

Too soon only a pair of hersu remained, and they could not pull the sled without killing themselves in the process. Resigned, Anzha strapped those items of vital necessity to her back, improvising leashes for the frightened animals and continued, determined, on foot. The yellow eyes of her enemies seemed to be filled with derision. It had only been a matter of time all along, they taunted. In the still of the Derlethan night she heard the words as though they had been spoken, and in the voice that spoke them there was no inflection she recognized, nor any hint of a language she could relate to.

Each night when she camped she cast forth her thoughts in search of possible game; each night the ice-fields proved barren of any life outside of her own hostile gathering. If a snowsnake had moved in the distance she would have tried to hunt it, trusting to her guardians' sense of amus.e.m.e.nt to let her do so, but there was not even that. If the kisunu did not eat her they would not eat at all- and that left very little room for bargaining.

Soon the last of the hersu was gone.

"This is it, my friends." She had gotten used to the presence of the pack and talked to the kisunu with some regularity. Painfully, she looked out over the ice fields. Half a year . . . it was a much longer period of time than she had thought possible; when one lived it day by day without variation it became an eternity.

"This is it. . . ."

Far to the west, the cloudcover broke. She had come to turn away from the brilliant flashes of sunlight, for their promises were empty and hope, in this wasteland, was only cause for torment. But as light danced over the ice-fields she stiffened, seeing something in the distance which had pa.s.sed out of her imagining.

Then the clouds closed overhead and the mountains pa.s.sed into grayness again.

She found she was trembling.

"Hasha . . ." she whispered, and in that nearly forgotten name was a link to a people she had lost all hope of ever seeing again. They would be waiting for her there, along with the natives, spread out in a band along the foothills to welcome her wherever she happened to arrive. It was within sight-and it was beyond hope. The kisunu would never let her get that far, and even without them she doubted she could walk the distance without sustenance.

Have you come all this way to give up now? she asked herself. Remember that the issue is not your own life, which you never wanted, but the revenge you hope to earn. Remember that all that matters about Derleth is the Imperial sanction granted you and the influential people who will owe you favors. That's all this ever was. The kisunu were watching her.

Her people would be waiting at the mountains with food; that was the ultimate irony. A short journey westward and she could feed these predators until they burst. If only she could make them understand!

She reached out with her mind, and once more she touched something so alien that she could not endure the contact, but instinctively withdrew. No.

She gritted her teeth and tried again. This time she touched a kisune soul and held onto it. Alien awareness flooded her being and she shook with the strain of maintaining the link. Then, with great suddenness, there was no contact at all.

"d.a.m.n!"

It was going to be harder than she had a.s.sumed. At the Inst.i.tute they trained certain instinctive responses into the telepathic subconscious; one of them, Distinction Discipline, was automatically cutting off her access to the kisune minds. The Inst.i.tute's intentions were good; the Discipline was meant to interfere any time a telepath became so engrossed in another personality that he began to lose his own, or when a telepath reached out to a mind so alien that any contact would be harmful.

"But a lot of good that does me now," she muttered.

She would have to override a Discipline-and that had never, to her knowledge, been done.

She closed her eyes and concentrated.

Anzha lyu was not a Probe; she did not have the ability to deal with abstract thought without the aid of visualization. Perhaps a Probe could have contacted the kisunu without damage, able to absorb kisune thought-patterns without the need for more familiar images. Anzha lyu could not. Nor could she antic.i.p.ate the reaction of one of these creatures to a mental invasion such as she was about to launch, and if their minds were alien to her, hers was equally so to them.

But it is that or death, she reminded herself grimly.

Deliberately she opened herself, pulling down all her natural defenses and leaving nothing to stand between her and the subject of her telepathy. Then, tentatively, she reached out toward the kisune she had approached before.

Again there was a terrible feeling of foreboding, and like a sliding wall something in her mind started to break off the contact. She struggled against it.

Its strength was tremendous, but her will was no small thing. Soon she had lost awareness of the kisune altogether, caught up in an internal struggle for conscious mastery of her telepathic potential. She held back a wall-she bound a struggling animal-she frayed a tightening noose. All these images and more, until she lay panting on the floor of her inner mind, secure in the knowledge that she was strong enough to do the one thing the Inst.i.tute sought to make impossible-attempt telepathic suicide.

Again she reached out to the kisune.

This time there was no interference. She was astounded to realize how much of that had been due to her training, and how little was due to any personal unwillingness to mindshare with an alien. With her training stripped away, she faced the predator's mind as she would a new frontier, dangerous and seductive, deadly and fascinating-a challenge; no more, no less.

The kisune welcomed her.

She hunted on the ice-field as it glowed with qualities she could not name, radiating heat in minutely small bits which her yellow eyes interpreted. Through her paws she could a.n.a.lyze vibrations from a long day's running distance, and could tell through that wonderfully sensitive tactile ability what was in the distance, and how far. Through means of an organ whose function she did not understand she sensed the presence of life, and distinguished between edible and inedible, intelligent and unreasoning, as easily as an Azean would distinguish between red and green. She found no color sense as such; what was the point? On the ice-plains there was no color, only the varying intensity of infra-red radiation which laid out before her eyes a landscape of wondrous variety, a subtle and wonderful place where the ice glowed for having been trod upon and bodies darkened to white as they died.

She did not share her own senses with the kisune; she was embarra.s.sed by their paucity. How could she have called this place tedious, a place so filled with wonders? Had the sky in truth been monotonous? Now it radiated distinctions of density and degrees of warmth, and was as rich to her kisune senses as a sunset would be to human eyes. Had the planet been uniformly cold? Sensory threads in the white-furred coat saw as well as felt minute variations in temperature so that there was warmth in the breeze, chill in the still air, waves of variety pouring forth from every warm-blooded thing which one ate, or accompanied, or mated with.

She knew the kisune hunger for what it was, remembering the feeding. How good it would be to feel that again, not only renewed strength but the ecstacy of absorbing living warmth and watching it radiate through her system-of having her own body transparent to her life-sight-of sharing the boundless pleasure of feeding with one's pack-mates. What stronger bond could there be in the universe, and what richer world to inhabit?

Motionless upon the ice, the fur-clad woman whom Azea had sent to Derleth sat quietly on the cold white plain, surrounded by kisunu. She had ceased to monitor her metabolism and it slowed to the rhythm of the kisune system. Her hands were limp by her sides and her eyes closed, as if nothing she could ever see or touch would again be of consequence. She was, in all things and in all ways, silent and still.

In the distance, sunlight kissed the planet. Such warmth, though momentary, was painful to the heat-sense of all the creatures of Derleth. Those who saw it strike turned away from it, grateful when it pa.s.sed for the return of that quiet regularity which allowed them to enjoy the subtle beauty of their world.

At the western edge of the great ice-plain, within sight of the bordering mountains, a pack of thirty-five kisunu sat in silence. One by one they arose, and one by one turned westward. Then, as if it were one individual creature, the entire pack set off toward the mountains, under the rich cloud-canopy of Derleth.

It would take them many days to get there. But the Kisunu could run far on little food and had all the patience in the world; thus it was that day after day the pack drew closer to the foothills . . . where the aliens, presumably, were waiting.

In the distance, for a moment, the sun flashed silver on the ice-field.

It was only a brief annoyance.

Ivre ver Ishte was tired of waiting.

He had been on this dreary planet since the Academy's young student had taken on the burden of native tradition. That was . . . what? Half a local year ago?

Nearly three Standard Years, at any rate.