Heights of the Depths Page 5

  “But why? Why would he have been talking to the Piri?”

  “No idea. Not my job to—”

  “Look!” one of the youngsters suddenly called out. “It’s the captain!”

  He was right. The captain of the guards was coming through the woods toward them. Berola and Turkin, who had been sitting, were promptly on their feet, shoulders squared, trying to look like capable members of the Crusade.

  And then the captain began to stagger.

  “Captain?” Berola said. “Is something wro—?”

  “Stay back,” said the captain, his voice thick and raspy. He’d been standing in the shadows of the trees, and the moon was covered by a cloud, but now it emerged from hiding and the children gasped. Even from the distance they were at, they could see his skin was blackened and peeling and falling off. His teeth were gone, and his eye looked like it was cracking.

  “Don’t…go back,” he managed to say. “Nothing for you…everyone dying…all of them…all…dying…”

  “Dying?” gasped Turkin. “Of what? Why? From what?”

  “Humans,” the captain of the guard managed to get out, and then he collapsed. Several of the children cried out as he fell, and they started to move toward him.

  “Don’t touch him!” shouted Berola, and the children froze.

  They heard the captain wheeze horribly for long seconds, and then there was an ugly rattle, and then nothing.

  “Is he okay now?” asked one of the children, and another one hit the first child upside the head and said, “No, he’s not okay, he’s dead, stupid!”

  And then came wailing and sobbing and cries from all the children that they wanted to go home, that they had had enough, that this was all too terrible. “Shut up!” shouted Berola, putting her hands to her head. “We…we just need to think!”

  “Think about what?!” Turkin was clearly starting to panic. “You heard the captain! We can’t go back! Everyone…everyone is going to be like him—!”

  “I want my mother!” cried one of the children and they started crying all over again for their parents, and Berola and Turkin looked helplessly at one another. Because, really, all they wanted to do, deep down, was break down and start sobbing as well.

  And that was when a voice shouted over all of them, “You don’t have mothers, you don’t have fathers, and you’re not going back!”

  They turned and stared, and Berola felt a surge of fear bubbling up in her throat. Turkin tried to control a similar sensation. It was all he could do not to bolt and run. Collective gasps were ripped from the throats of the remaining children.

  A female Piri was standing there. She was tall and elegant, but had a haunted look. “All you have,” she said softly, “is me.”

  “You?” said Turkin, trying to sound confidently arrogant. “You’re…you’re a—”

  “I know what I am,” she said. “But you don’t know what I am. I’m your salvation.”

  “You’re not serious,” said Berola.

  The Piri nodded. “If you come with me, now, I will protect you from the others of my kind. I can do this for you. And I will train you and help you…and, in time, you will help me. We will be able to protect each other.”

  “Us protect you?” asked Berola. “Why should we?”

  “Because,” said the Piri, “like it or not…you’re the last of the Ocular. And you’re in trouble. And I’m in trouble.”

  Berola studied her, tried to get some sort of sense of her. She noticed the Piri’s left hand. “What happened to your little finger?” she demanded.

  “Nothing. It’s fine. It’s just not on my hand.”

  “What’s your name?” asked one of the younger Ocular.

  “Don’t talk to her!” Berola ordered.

  But the Piri ignored her. “My name is Clarinda. What’s yours?”

  “Kerda.”

  “Kerda…will you come with me?”

  “Will you hurt me?” Kerda asked guardedly.

  “No. Never. I swear.”

  “All right,” said Kerda.

  Clarinda nodded, and started to walk off into the dark of the forest. Kerda followed her, and the others started to as well.

  “Are you insane!” shouted Turkin. “We were being trained to kill her kind! You can’t…this is crazy! Berola, tell them they’re crazy!”

  “You’re crazy!” Berola called.

  But the youngsters didn’t stop, following Clarinda. And as the last of them disappeared into the woods, Turkin and Berola exchanged nervous looks, shouted as one, “Wait for us!” and sprinted off after them into the endless night of Feend.

  ii.

  You are out of your mind.

  The thought kept flitting through Clarinda’s head as she led the Ocular children away from their ancestral home without the faintest notion of where she was leading them to. The only thing she knew that was important was that she had to get them as far away from the immediate area as possible.

  She heard huffing and groaning from the children after the third hour of the rapid pace she was maintaining, and she turned and looked at them with obvious annoyance. “I thought,” she said tersely, “that you were all supposed to be warriors. What is all this whining I hear? This complaining?”

  “We’re tired,” moaned one of the younger males. Clarinda hadn’t taken the time to learn all their names. There were several dozen of them. Chances were she would never need to know. As soon as they had gotten her clear of Feend, beyond the reach of the Piri, she would take her leave of them and that would be the end of that.

  Before Clarinda could chide her, however, the younger female, Kerda, cuffed the complainer on the side of the head. The complainer stopped and looked balefully at Kerda with his single eye. He was at least a head taller than she, but she wasn’t the least intimidated by him. “Stop it,” she said. “Clarinda is doing the best she can.”

  “How do we know that?” he said, rallying. “How do we know what she’s doing? She’s a damned Piri! A ground-dwelling, blood-sucking Piri! Are we so desperate for leadership that we’re following our enemies into who-knows-where?”

  “Leadership? You think I give a damn about leadership?” said Kerda heatedly. “Right now I’d just be happy to be with someone who knows what she’s doing! Who knows something about the world!”

  “And you think she knows aught of the world? She lives underground, for gods sake! What is someone who roots around beneath the dirt supposed to know about anything above it?”

  Clarinda hated to admit that it was a perfectly valid question. She had been to various places in the Damned World, but consistently had remained underground. Even when she had wandered so far afield that she had wound up in Trull territory, she had remained safe within the cooling confines of subterranean lairs.

  When her mind wandered to her explorations in the land of Trulls—the Underground, as the residents had so dubbed it with the characteristic Trull lack of imagination—naturally her thoughts turned to Eutok. As they did so, her hand drifted to her belly. There was not yet any telltale bulge or swelling as a result of the tiny half-breed dwelling within her. The only reason she knew for certain that his issue was growing within her was what her mother, Sunara Redeye, Mistress of the Piri, had told her.

  Sunara had known. No shock there; Sunara always knew.

  Clarinda had paid dearly for the knowledge that Sunara had acquired through simple observation. Sunara had tied her up, beaten her so badly with lashes across the back that Clarinda would have collapsed to the ground had ropes not bound her tightly to an upright rock. And then, in order to coax the name of the father from her, Sunara had bitten off the little finger of her left hand and assured her there would be more dismemberment if the name were not forthcoming. Clarinda had screamed then, louder than ever before, and she had howled, “Eutok! Eutok of the Trulls! We met and he was my lover and I did it because I hate you, mother! I hate you! I hate our race! I hate this life! I hate living in fear of mating and being mutilated and turning i
nto a sick, twisted, perverted monster like you and why not just kill me now and get it over with!”

  In that moment of heat and passion and livid fury toward her mother, she had meant it. The life of the Mistress of the Piri, the title and rank that was hers because of her birth, was not one that she coveted. For the Mistress of the Piri was supposed to be all things to all her people, and thus was required to be turned into some…some asexual thing. Once it was her turn to take on her birthright, she would have her breasts removed, and her nether regions would be burned away, leaving nothing but a scarred and desensitized mass of flesh. She had wanted no part of that, and if her dalliance with Eutok was a means of rebelling against it, well, so be it. She hated her life, she hated her people, she hated the fate that awaited her.

  And yet, insanely, for all that, she still didn’t hate her mother. Even though she had said it at the time. Even though her mother had beaten her and maimed her.

  What the hell is wrong with me, she wondered, that even after everything she did to me, part of me still wants her approval?

  The young Ocular were still arguing and the noise brought her attention forcefully back to their situation. “Shut up,” she said tiredly. “Just…shut up.”

  To her surprise, that brought the young Ocular to a halt. They stopped their arguing and stared at her expectantly.

  They want you to say something. They’re an aspiring army and you’re their leader, and they’re waiting for you to rally them.

  She spoke without actually knowing what she was going to say.

  “You’re all tired. You’re all hungry. I understand that. We have no shelter. Get used to it. For the time being, we’re going to be living under the stars. As for food,” and she paused and then continued, “which of you is the best hunter? Or at least fancies himself as such?”

  Turkin’s hand immediately shot up. A couple of the others were more tentative but joined him in claiming that dubious title.

  “All right, then,” she said. “You three head off into the woods. Stay together; this is no time to separate from each other. See what you can find in terms of game for the rest of us.”

  The young Ocular had spears and wooden swords, the simple weapons that they had been given by their trainers who thought they would have a lot more time with them before meeting their demise. But they also had bellies that were becoming more familiar with the pangs of hunger with each passing hour, and Clarinda knew that that could be a superb motivator. They headed into the woods, disappearing with as minimal sound as giant beings could make.

  “What should the rest of us do?” said Kerda.

  “Make yourselves comfortable. We’re going to be here a while.”

  “Why here?”

  “Why not?” she said reasonably. “Have you a better idea as to where we should be?”

  “Back home,” one of the Ocular males said. There was both challenge and frustration in his tone.

  Clarinda was in no mood for arguing. “If you wish to return home, feel free to do so. You should be able to find it without too much difficulty. There. You can see the glow in the distance.”

  “The Captain said not to,” Berola said firmly. “Or have you forgotten that, you great addled fool?”

  “What if he was wrong?”

  “You saw what happened to him. You saw how sick he was.” Berola strode toward him and stood there with her hands on her hips, her single eye glaring balefully at him. “You want to end up like him? Do you?”

  The male met her glare for a time and then lowered his gaze. He did not respond. He didn’t need to.

  Clarinda felt the eyes of the Ocular upon her. Furthermore, she was feeling as hungry as any of them, but she knew that—presuming the others found any game—it would very likely not satisfy her. She had neglected to tell them to bring it alive, and she was not ecstatic about the notion of drinking blood from something dead. The blood of dead creatures, even if the source was only deceased for a few minutes, had a rank and bitter taste to it. Cold blood held no allure for her; she needed warm blood.

  And even if they did indeed bring something to her alive, she was not comfortable with the notion of eating in front of the young Ocular. She knew that many of them were still uneasy with the fact that one of the predatory Piri was now in a position of leadership. They might well start to worry that she would turn on them in their sleep and feast on their blood while they lay helpless.

  For that matter, she had no more reason to trust them than they had her. She could no more do without sleep indefinitely than they. All that was required was one suspicious Ocular—and there were quite a few to choose from—who would take the opportunity to dispatch her while she slumbered, figuring that it was wiser to take their chances with the evils they didn’t know than with the evil they did.

  Taking all that into account, Clarinda felt that at the very least it would be wise to hunt and eat separately from the rest of the pack.

  “Stay here,” she said to Kerda. “I will be back.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “I have matters to attend to.”

  “What sort of—?”

  “Gods’ balls, girl, stop asking questions and learn to do as you are told! If you do not, then rest assured that I will put my back to you and you can just as easily tend to your own needs for the rest of what will assuredly be your short lives! Do you understand?”

  Although she was still a child, Kerda was a head taller than Clarinda, and she was one of the shorter ones. It was a ludicrous sight, the pale Piri bellowing at creatures that towered over her as if she could somehow physically dominate them. Yet they recoiled from her and Kerda said meekly, “Yes.” The others bobbed their heads in unison.

  “Good,” said Clarinda, who momentarily felt sorry for snapping at them. They had, after all, been through a hell of a lot. They had lost their parents, their homeland, everything in one stroke and were still trying to cope with it. But then her regret passed as quickly as it had come. She had her own problems to worry about: She was hungry, she was pregnant, she was tired, and she had left her people behind for an uncertain future.

  She turned away from the Ocular and headed into the forest.

  iii.

  Hunting was a new experience for her. As a privileged child of the Mistress, obtaining sustenance was never anything that she had needed to concern herself over. There were others in the tribe who attended to such things. But she had every confidence that she would be more than up to the task.

  She penetrated deep into the forest, further and further until she felt that she had left enough distance between herself and the Ocular. She felt no need to mark the trail, confident that she would be able to find her way back.

  Clarinda believed she could count on the fingers of one hand (even my left hand, she thought ruefully) the number of days that she had spent outside. The vast, vast majority of her existence had been underground, hiding away from the upper world with dirt just everywhere. Dirt under her fingernails, dirt permanently staining the bottoms of her feet, the smell of dirt so pervasive that she felt as if she could smell nothing else.

  She stopped and looked toward the skies. The stars glittered down at her.

  They made her wonder.

  Her mother seemed unable to understand that Clarinda aspired to so much more than Sunara’s view allowed for. She wondered if perhaps that was because of the circumstances under which they lived. Dirt in and of itself was not the end of things, because it was possible to cultivate the dirt, grow things on it, bring life from it. But beneath the dirt was indeed the end of things. The dead were buried beneath it, and when you lived in Subterror, there was darkness and limited vision. You couldn’t look up. And when you couldn’t look up, that was somehow, in some way that Clarinda could not articulate, the end of aspirations. The skies were limitless, and represented equally limitless possibilities. They were the beginnings of dreams. They practically cried out, “What if?” and dared you to aspire to them. A perpetual roof of dirt
over one’s head was antithetical to dreaming.

  It was nothing short of remarkable that she had encountered another soul—Eutok—who seemed to feel the same way. Trulls were as loathe to engage the surface as Piri, although the sunlight wasn’t as damaging to the Trulls as it was to the Piri. The great burning orb in the sky was hurtful to Trulls’ eyes, whereas for the Piri it was painful head to toe. Still, Eutok likewise dreamt of more than the life that he led dwelling beneath the ground. She knew that his goal was to become leader of the Trulls so that he could in turn lead them to a greater and glorious destiny than was available to them as permanent cave dwellers.

  At least that’s what he tells you. Who knows what is truly in his heart?

  Suddenly a scent wafted to her, causing her to salivate and driving all other thoughts from her mind. She wasn’t accustomed to hunting, but she certainly knew the range of animal scents since hunters brought food to the colony. She quickly identified it as a creature known as a bir. It was big, covered in brown fur, and absolutely filled to the brim with blood. Birs were huge favorites of the Piri since, even when they had been dragged down into Subterror and were half dead, they still tended to put up a struggle. That naturally made the feasting all the more worthwhile.

  Best of all, she was downwind of it. The breeze was bringing its scent to her, but it was unaware of her presence.

  A tall tree stood nearby. It was the Piri way either to attack in numbers, or else hide below and try to pull the prey down to them. Neither option presented itself to Clarinda, and so she chose a third option: Height.

  She leaped upward, light as air, gripped the lower branches of the nearest tree, and quickly gained some altitude. Then she crouched there, immobile, cloaked in shadow. She heard a distant growling and her fingers wrapped tightly around the branch. Poised in a feral crouch, she remained unmoving. Clarinda was amazed to discover just how much she was enjoying the sensation of the hunt.

  She heard the bir drawing ever closer and slowed her breathing so that she wouldn’t be rushed. She knew she had to time this perfectly. Birs were big monsters with impressive strength. Once she had seen one on the edge of death, and yet a random sweep of its paw had been sufficient to crush the skull of a Piri that had gotten careless.