Snare. Katharine Kerr
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rustled, shook, and lifted. Ammadin came in, then let the flap drop behind her. She set her hands on her hips and studied his face.
‘What’s wrong?’ she said. ‘Did you have bad dreams?’
‘In a way,’ Zayn said. ‘Uh, what I told you? About the demon spawn and all of that?’
‘I’m not going to mention it to anyone else. I don’t want to see you stoned at a horse fair because someone slipped and told your secret to a Kazrak.’
The fear left him, and he managed to return her smile. ‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘That was on my mind, all right.’
‘I thought it might be.’
‘But they wouldn’t stone me. They’d turn me over to the Council, and I’d be burned alive.’
‘It’s hard to say which would be worse.’
‘Well, yes. I’d just as soon not have to choose.’
Ammadin smiled briefly. ‘Tell me something,’ she said. ‘Your father. You said he was still alive, right?’
‘Yes. He’s become a hermit.’
‘A what?’
‘A holy man. He lives in the hills near the border, in fact, in a hut. It’s near a mosque, and the men in charge bring him food and keep an eye on him.’
‘How very strange! Why did he do that? Do you know?’
‘Yes, I asked him when I went to see him. He says it’s in penance for having fathered me.’
‘Oh gods! I’ll never understand you people.’ Ammadin paused, her mouth twisted in disgust; then she shrugged. ‘About your supposed demon blood – is your memory for words your only talent?’
‘No. I can draw pictures, too.’
‘So? A lot of people can do that, some badly, some well.’
‘I mean, I can glance at something like a diagram in a book or a decoration on a wall and then draw it again months later. It’s odd. I can see the design in my mind, and then if someone hands me some rushi and a pen, I can sort of push the design out through my eyes onto the rushi and copy over it.’
Ammadin considered this for a moment. ‘That is odd,’ she said at last. ‘Not demonic, mind, but odd. It’s still a memory talent, though.’
‘Yes. I can learn just about anything fast. I can repeat whatever it is, word for word, picture for picture – even if I don’t understand it. And music, if I hear a song or something like that once, I can sing it back.’
‘What else is on that list?’ She paused for a smile. ‘I’m assuming you can remember.’
Zayn laughed, astonished that he could laugh, and so easily, over a joke that would have seemed deadly just the day before.
‘I can, yes,’ he said. In his mind he could see the page in one of his father’s holy books, black letters, as curved as sabres, damning him. ‘The twelve forbidden talents of memory, the twelve forbidden warrior talents, the forbidden talents of perception, and so on. I can recite them all, if you’d like.’
‘I would. I – what’s that?’
Outside someone was calling her name. She raised the tent flap and peered out.
‘Maddi, he’s awake, yes,’ Ammadin called in return. She dropped the flap and turned back to him. ‘They want to strike this tent and pack it. You’d better go eat. We’re riding out as soon as the wagons are loaded.’
‘All right.’
As he left the tent, Zayn was hoping that she’d just forget about the rest of the impure talents. Merely thinking of them filled him with a profound unease, born of long years of fear and scorn. You’re a man like any other, just with an odd turn of mind – or so she said. He looked up at the silver sky.
‘Oh God,’ he whispered. ‘Can it really be true?’
No answer sounded in a booming voice, no lettered banner appeared in the fog. He laughed at himself and went to find Dallador.
The Great River ran shallow where it issued from the Mistlands, allowing the comnee to ford safely and head east. As usual Ammadin rode at some distance ahead, but she kept watch for Zayn’s enemies. One of her spirit crystals, the one she’d named Sentry, made a humming sound whenever the Riders appeared in the sky, even during the day when no one could actually see them. At the sound Ammadin would halt her horse and dismount. She’d take another crystal, Spirit Eyes, out of her saddlebags and unwrap it. For as long as the Riders were overhead, Spirit Eyes would show her a vision of the territory around her, as much as a walking person might cover in a morning. Once the Riders had passed below the horizon, the spirit in the crystal would fall asleep and refuse to wake, no matter how many times she chanted the magical commands.
In the crystal Ammadin would see a circle of purple grassland, overlaid with pale yellow numbers that seemed to float in the air. She would see her horse and herself as a tiny black dot in the centre of the field of vision. The moving comnee, a tiny blotch of herds and wagons, would appear just at the edge, under one of the spirit numbers etched around the crystal’s equator. If she called that number, the view would shift, and the comnee would reappear in the centre of the circle. She could then see the country around them on all sides, or she could refocus her eyes and magnify the image in the centre until it seemed large enough to show every detail. Once she’d finished her scan, she would carry the crystal in one hand as she rode on, holding it up to let the spirit feed on the sunlight as its reward. A shaman who forgot to feed her spirits would soon find herself with dead crystals.
Three days out from the Mistlands, Sentry sounded his alarm not long after she’d left the comnee behind. As she stared into Spirit Eyes, Ammadin thought she saw a group of figures, or their smudged, tiny images, riding and leading pack horses at some long distance from the comnee. When she tried to transfer the vision to look straight down at them, Spirit Eyes made a sharp chirping little cry.
‘You can’t see that far?’ Ammadin said. ‘Or is nothing really there?’
Once more she tried to scan; once more the crystal chirped.
‘Never mind,’ she said. ‘If they’re that far away, they’re not a real threat anyway.’
The next time that the Riders appeared overhead, Ammadin saw a far stranger sight than the men who might have been Zayn’s enemies. Her crystal showed her three ChaMeech loping along through the grass, again, at the very edge of its range. Although she coaxed the spirit with commands and praise both, it simply could not show her more than three tiny ChaMeech shapes moving fast. From then on she kept a watch for them as well. That afternoon, not long before sunset, they reached the Blue Stone River, running from the north-east to the south-west. Near the river lay a regular Tribal campsite, but the surrounding grass, standing high and untrampled, told them that no one had passed that way for months. While the women tethered out the horses, the men began cutting down the grass to clear the areas around the stone fire-pits. The comnee would be making a full camp and raising all the tents. Apanador and Ammadin walked into the meagre shade of a stand of spear trees to talk.
‘My wife says that some of the mares are ready to drop their foals,’ he told her. ‘And there’s no meat left. We’ll have to stay here for a couple of days.’
‘Good. I have some work I need to do.’
‘What about those Kazraks? Zayn’s enemies.’
‘They’re following us, but they’re clever. I only catch glimpses of them now and then.’
‘I’ll tell Zayn to stick close to the other men when he goes hunting.’
Once the men finished raising the tents, Ammadin carried her saddlebags into hers. Zayn had already laid the floor cloth and spread out her blankets on one side of hearth stones under the smokehole and his own bedroll on the other. She set up the god figures