When Kei returned to the outer chamber in the morning, the older of the two intruders had regained consciousness. He was a well-formed black, highly muscled, just at the far edge of his prime. He had a jagged cut on one arm, another on the back of his head, but was not badly hurt. A familiar cast to his ears whispered Levv lay somewhere in his heritage, but the breadth of his chest and shoulders, as well as his scent, plainly stated his matrilineal descent was through another Line. That was all lowlanders counted, the distinctive scent-signature of male descent only being discernible at birth, fading after the first few days of life, and unacknowledged thereafter.
The other male, who so unaccountably smelled of Levv, had not moved even a hair from the spot where Kei had dumped him the night before. Surprised, Kei hunkered beside the still body. It was his blow that had felled the intruder and he had not struck that hard. Beneath the tattered green robes, he saw now an odd shiny black thing encased the male's right leg from knee to ankle. Kei prodded it with one finger; it was hard and cool to the touch with a tiny green light inset close to the knee. The fur behind his ears prickled—it was an Outsider device. The old males had spoken of such before the last of them died fighting to protect Levv. Remembering that day, he rubbed a twisted scar on his own muzzle.
A body-length away, the white-throated male followed Kei's movements with his eyes. "You are Levv."
Kei twitched an ear in acknowledgment. "Why have you come here?"
"He is also Levv." Indicating the Black/on/black with his nose, the male struggled against his bonds to sit up, but fell back against the rough rock floor. His eyes gleamed with desperation. "He is very ill."
Kei examined the unconscious male, seeing how shallow his pants were, how his tongue lolled out on the stone. Resisting the urge to touch that legendary Black/on/black fur, he rose. "Levv is dead."
"And yet you survived." Bunching his muscles, the male managed to flop awkwardly over onto his stomach. "He survived, too, because somehow he left this world for another, but he will not live much longer without aid."
"Another world?" Kei had heard vague rumors of such things. His lips curled back, baring his teeth in a fierce grimace as he thought of the years of scrounging and hiding that had been the lot of the remaining children of Levv. "How?"
"I do not know, and since he came to us looking for answers, I assume he does not know the whole story either." The male hunched up into a sitting position in which Kei knew the tightly knotted vines had to be cutting off his breath. "But he can answer none of your questions, if you allow him to die."
Kei leaned down and pressed his fingers to the Black/on/black's muzzle where the fur was thinner; the other's skin temperature seemed dangerously low. "I did not strike him that hard."
"He is suffering from drawing power without proper preparation."
Kei sat back on his heels; that made sense. He remembered how, in the rain the night before, he'd been forced to use the Old Ways himself in order to capture this one. The Black/on/black had moved with the augmented speed that smelled of power and he had been obliged to do the same himself, or these two would have escaped to take word back to the Lines of their survival, assuring the extermination of Levv.
Kei stood up. "Ais will bring him food when he wakes."
"It has gone beyond that!" The other male tugged uselessly at the fibrous vines. "He has used power constantly through the last few days without preparation of any kind, and with little food or sleep after. He must replace the raw energy he used."
"What makes you think we even have a pool?" Kei's nose twitched at the thought of allowing a stranger into such a sacred place. "And why would we allow him to use it, if we did?"
"He is Levv! He is of your Line!"
"Males have no Line." Kei felt a muscle in his jaw jump. "Is that not what you teach down below in the males' houses?"
"Many things are taught there, including honor/among/ gender." The male stared up at him with angry eyes.
"What do you care?" Kei looked up as Bey entered the chamber, his dark-brown fur contrasting with the two black-coated males. "Whatever he is, he is not of your Line." Bey studied him expectantly, waiting for direction.
"I have sponsored him, because I believe long ago his life was spared for a reason. The attack on Levv was the beginning of a massive, unnamed pattern, unlike anything ever recorded, and he is at its center. He has something important to do. You cannot let him die now!"
Patterns! Kei's ears flattened in disgust. The five older ones who had come back, Nael and Sunet and the rest, had occasionally spoken of such things in an attempt to explain the forces that controlled the universe, from the growth of the smallest plant to the decision of their fellow hrinn to exterminate Levv.
He had never understood, though, how something without substance could supposedly make him act in any way other than what he'd originally intended. At every turn, from his earliest seasons, he'd had charge of his life, deciding where to go, what to kill, how to protect the others. In the end, he had discounted such stories as tales fit only for the smallest of cubs. He believed in what he could smell and see and touch, nothing more. With a snarl, he bent down and cut the damp, shredded robes from the motionless black body and cast them aside into a sodden heap.
The stranger was black from the tips of his feetclaws to the end of his nose. Kei sat back, thinking. He was Black/on/black himself, except for faint buff streaks behind his ears. Missa said Levv had always bred many fine black-coated hrinn, marked with only modest amounts of white or brown, but this one was more. Not even a single off-colored hair marred his perfection. To the eye, he did appear to be the Black/on/black straight out of legend, predestined for greatness . . . sacred.
Which, like patterns, was only more nonsense, but noses did not lie. Whatever else he might be, this one had been born of Levv, and so few were left that none could be spared.
He turned to Bey. "Release that one."
Bey reached for his knife as Kei bent over the Black/on/black and sawed through the tough vines with his own blade, salvaged long ago from the ruins of Levv. He could feel Bey's curiosity, but he had no intention of trying to explain any of this to the others now. He didn't even know how to explain it to himself.
The rich smell of coffee filtered through the muzziness of sleep and Mitsu stirred. Someone must have been down to the mess already. Time to roll out. She pried open her right eye, but her left one seemed swollen shut. Had she been fighting again? A woman's oval face framed in long dark hair moved into her field of vision. "Well, hello. I'm Dr. Alvarez. You're going to be all right, but you took some bad licks and have quite a shiner there." She touched Mitsu's left eye.
The gentle pressure hurt like hell, bringing back the pain of the last few terrifying days, her injuries, the hrinn. Her heart began to race. "Blackeagle?" she managed in a voice like rusty nails.
The doctor studied her with concerned brown eyes. "Sergeant Blackeagle went back out to find you, and no one has seen him since."
"Damnation!" The word came out in a hoarse half-whisper. "My fault! He told me—" She would not cry! With an effort, she took a steadying breath. "I would kill for a cup of that brew."
Dr. Alvarez poured a steaming mug of coffee, then raised the bed and loosened the blanket so she could sit up. "What happened to you?" She perched on a stool beside the bed as Mitsu sipped the strong dark liquid. "You've been out—what? Three or four days now?"
Mitsu tried to think back, but it was mostly all just a blur of cramped earthen rooms combined with pain and fever. "I don't know." The coffee warmed her throat, making words a little easier. "Someone jumped me outside the males' house, but then afterwards they tried to patch me up."
Dr. Alvarez sipped at her own mug. "Strange. Hrinn are very wary of humans. They don't like anything about us, especially the way we smell. I can't imagine why they would take care of you, instead of just abandoning you or bringing you back here."
"Yes, Doctor," a polished voice spoke from the doorway, "why did our furry friends insist on entertaining the young lady so long?"
Mitsu stared at the stubby silver-haired man entering the room, then finally put a name to his stony face: Eldrich.
"How nice that you're feeling better." He helped himself to a mug of coffee. "I need to talk with you a few minutes."
Dr. Alvarez glanced up, disapproval tightening her lips. "She's been through the wringer. She needs rest."
Eldrich's gray eyes drilled Mitsu over the top of his mug as he sipped his coffee. She felt unaccountably cold as he murmured, "We have to clear up a few matters."
"Five minutes then." Dr. Alvarez crossed her arms. "But try not to tire her out."
Eldrich sat on the edge of the counter. "Run along, Doctor."
Alvarez's head jerked up. "What?"
"If you wish to continue your employment here, you will give us some privacy." He glanced at the door. "Have I made myself understood?"
She hesitated, then palmed the doorplate and stalked out. Eldrich waited until the door slid closed behind her. "Now, Corporal Jensen, tell me again why you and the departed Sergeant Blackeagle came to Anktan, and this time I want the truth."
Unnerved, Mitsu drained the last of her coffee. Damn, her first impression of this glacial bastard hadn't done him justice. Blackeagle might well be dead, as a result of her stupidity, and he was just standing here, radiating cold interest like a monument chipped out of ice. "Sergeant Blackeagle wanted to search for his family."
"An interesting fiction." Eldrich moved from the counter to the edge of her bed. "But you and I both know this culture possesses nothing resembling family in the human sense of the word." His fingers drummed on the blanket. "I want to know your real mission here on Anktan."
A bead of sweat broke out on Mitsu's forehead. "I don't know what you're talking about."
He wrenched her wrist back. "What have you reported?"
With an oath, Mitsu twisted her arm free. "Don't touch me, unless you're ready to die!" A buzzing white mist sprang up behind her eyes. The breath rasped in her chest. The claustrophobic memory of her time underground swept back over her, a dark and airless universe of pain. She locked her hands to keep them from shaking. "Look, no one sent us. We came here for our own damnfool reasons, which you already know, so there's nothing to tell. What do you think we want?"
"Stop playing games. Either you level with me now, or you'll have to answer to someone higher up later."
The room began to swim. Mitsu lay back and pressed her fingers over her eyes. "This is stupid. I don't know anything. I just came here to back up my partner."
"Fine." Eldrich's voice became smooth again, like a wall with no doors. "Hold to that ridiculous fiction for now. We will continue this conversation later."
Ankt's red eye glared down balefully as Khea came back to herself. Head swimming, she sagged against the red-orange wall of rock towering over her, shivering, despite the mounting heat. Tiny black wind-nits buzzed around the clotted blood on her throat wound, but the effort to brush them away seemed too great. She wasn't far enough from Vvok though. Someone might still come upon her, so she summoned her last shreds of energy and climbed the next boulder. Ahead, a low whitestone roof shimmered in the morning heat. Heart pounding, she ducked back into the shadows. After wandering all night, she had no idea where she was, but the best she could expect from any Line, especially Vvok, would be death, and it was much more honorable to seek that on her own terms.
Low voices echoed through the rocks; she saw red and brown fur appear as someone approached her through the maze of stone. Frantic, she turned and climbed back through the boulders, a scarlet mist rising behind her eyes.
"Khea!"
She had been recognized. A vast river of shame flooded through her; she could not bear for anyone she had known before to look upon her now. She was outcast, unclean, unfit to live.
Claws scritched over stone in pursuit. "Khea, wait!"
She looked back over her shoulder into a tricolored face. It was Cimmi, who had tended the Outsider alongside her just—yesterday? Frantic, she redoubled her pace, unwilling to face her, or anyone of the Restorers' Guild. She wanted only to hide in the rocks and wait for death.
As she tried to climb, the redness behind her eyes thickened until she couldn't see and her legs buckled. Warm wetness soaked her gashed throat as she fell backwards. She lay there panting.
Running feet padded up behind her, worried voices whispered. She caught Cimmi's scent again, this time mingled with another's. Raking her handclaws into the stone, she tried to rise. The scents behind her grew stronger, and she made out Vexk, the one person she could not bear to see now. With a convulsive effort, she rose to her knees, then wavered, unable to go farther.
"Youngling, wait!" Vexk called in a breathless voice.
"No!" Khea labored to say, but her voice was no more than the faintest whisper.
Vexk dropped to the ground and touched her clawed face. Khea dropped her head back to bare her slashed throat. "Take my worthless life so no one else can look upon my shame!"
"No, child, your death is not part of this pattern." Vexk ripped a piece of her own robes to staunch the blood from her throat, then drew her upright.
The redness behind Khea's eyes was spinning, pulling her down into an angry vortex of pain and despair. "You do not know what I have done!"
Vexk urged her onto her feet, then supported her as her legs almost gave way again. "By coming to us, you salvage Vvok's honor. Nothing else matters."
Unable to protest, Khea allowed herself to be led away, but she knew that later, when they understood what she had done, they would deal with her like the nameless thing she had become.
A hint of warmth crept back into the freezing universe of blue that imprisoned him on every side. Heyoka's nose and fingertips tingled, then he flexed his fingers and the circulation surged in an agonizing wave that convulsed his muscles and tied him into knots of pain.
"Lie still!" The words were spat in Hrinnti close to his ear. He relaxed and the pain ebbed, although the blood thrummed through his hands now, and he began to feel his arms again. The air was dank and vaguely sulfurous. Water lapped against stone somewhere close-by but he couldn't summon the strength to open his eyes.
"Black/on/black—I still don't know if I believe it." The words, spoken behind him, echoed as though in a large enclosed space.
"Black/on/black and Levv, think of that," said a second, more distant, voice. "Do you believe what the other one said, that he was sent to us?"
"Don't be stupid. If the Voice meant to help us, why wait until now? It would have happened long ago."
The tips of Heyoka's ears hummed with returning circulation now. One of them twitched involuntarily, sending pain down through his neck and jaws. He convulsed, then choked on an unexpected noseful of water.
A hand braced his head back. "Idiot! I told you not to move."
The pain retreated, leaving in its place the slow advance of warmth into his toes and feet, which then seeped into his legs. He pried his eyes open and gazed blearily around. He was floating in a vast pool of some sort in a cavern hewn out of dark rock. Several torches had been wedged into holes high up on the walls and burned with a steady yellow-green light. The water was oven-hot, obviously a hot spring of some sort, enveloping him up to his neck and steaming into the cooler air. Stretching cautiously, he found he could move his fingers now with less pain.
And the world was colored normally. Somehow he had escaped the terrible blueness without dying, but where was he—and what had happened to Nisk? They had been camped on the side of the mountain, then the others had come upon them. He remembered being struck down, nothing after that. "Where—is this place?" He tried to twist around and see who held his head.
The hands released him, but the water was quite buoyant and he floated on his own. A black-furred hrinn with a wild, unbound mane and a scarred muzzle swam to the edge of the pool and heaved out, water streaming from his black fur. Another male, shorter, with dark-brown fur, sat on his heels by the wall, a spear in one hand, watching him with an avid expression.
Heyoka dug his handclaws into the rock at the pool's edge to keep from being washed under. His head felt stuffed with mud. He had no idea what he was doing in this pool, or who these hrinn were. "Why have you brought me here?" he asked. "What do you want?"
The black-furred male, much deeper than he was through the chest and more muscled, shook himself, sending drops of water flying through the air. His black eyes burned down at Heyoka like pools of molten obsidian. "Fool! We want nothing from you. We merely brought you here to save your life. Levv, or not, I should have left you to die out in the storm."
Levv. The scent of the other's wet fur permeated the air, oddly familiar. Images swept through his mind. Angry, snarling voices . . . pain . . . sliding down steep inclines . . . falling, running until he thought his lungs would burst . . . falling again—
The male stared down at him, nostrils flaring. "The other said you fled to another world. I find it hard to believe a Levv would disgrace himself by running away like a frightened yirn!"
"I did not—run away." Heyoka flopped up onto the rock shelf at the pool's edge, then lay there, trembling from the effort. The water, reflecting the black of the surrounding rock, washed over the ledge, then subsided into diminishing waves. "I was taken prisoner and made a—" He hesitated. There was no precise analog for slave in Hrinnti. "—an unnamed servant to another species."
The other's ears flattened. "Only the earliest culls become servants!"
Heyoka shivered as the cool air penetrated through his fur to his wet skin. The male scowled, then kicked him unceremoniously back into the water. "I did not spend half the day sweltering in that pool just so you could kill yourself now. Stay in there until I say you are fit to come out."
Heyoka choked as his head went under, then flailed for the side and hung by his clawtips. Through layers of exhaustion, the long-suppressed violent other in the back of his mind surfaced. How dare this hrinn, this savage, treat him so? He was their kinsman, unjustly forced into slavery, now—against all odds—returned from the vastness of space. They should be welcoming him, not abusing him. His lip curled in a silent snarl.
The male snatched a heap of discarded brown cloth off the floor. "I am Kei, Leader of what is left of Levv." His head brushed the top of the cave. He had to be the tallest male Heyoka had seen yet, a good nine inches taller than himself.
He pulled the shaggy, wet mane back from his face, revealing an ugly black scar that snaked across his muzzle from right eye to left jaw. "Stay in that pool, or I will shred your ears and feed them to the females." Ducking his head, he disappeared around a bend in the rock wall.
Heyoka stared after him as the significance of that twisted, shiny scar penetrated his brain. It matched the one he bore on his leg. He'd stake his life that Kei had suffered a laser burn across his face.
A flek laser burn.