In the larger cities power changed hands quietly and without much fuss; in the smaller towns and outlying districts the change was noticed even less. In Ommerliss, a sunburned little town sprawling out across the rocky lowlands of Bidewell, named in jest, the war had been something of a disappointment. It had started out as little more than a terrible breathtaking rumor, instilling a confused stew of conflicting emotions--fear, concern, suspense, excitement--and then, with a little pop like a dud firecracker, it had dwindled. The war was over. The wrong side had won.
It scarcely made a difference. Life in Ommerliss went on very much as it always had. In seven years of occupation Catjoe M'Philvers had never even seen a real soldier. But in the year Little Rabbit, under the burning heat of Leaping-Hunt-Moon, all that changed.
Catjoe had spent her entire life in the town. It was an unpretentious place, bordered to the north by the rugged sweep of the Red Hills and to the south by a low swampy area which, in all the many years since Ommerliss had been founded, had yet to be given a name of its own. It was simply The Swamp. Catjoe had grown up in Ommerliss, had gone to school there, had learned there to tug scrawny vegetables from the sandy soil of the backyard garden. She had made and lost friends, had fallen in and out of her share of disappointing love affairs, and had eventually lapsed into the same numbing but comfortable routine as her parents and their parents before them.
It was a harsh life in a harsh world where a person's highest and noblest goal was usually simply to make the best of things, to survive. Catjoe was no different from the rest, putting on a boxy pink uniform--a vicious affair that would have made Dalouine the Earth Goddess look plain--and walking up to Duddy's Drygoods seven days a week to sell lipsticks and cheap perfumes to younger girls still hoping for a miracle. The perfumes, carted in by donkey all the way from Trang City, a hard four days' journey away, were frequently rancid; the colors in the little pots of lipstick were always partially separated and several seasons out of date. You got what you paid for though. Duddy's prices were the best in town.
Catjoe's life was basic and predictable: seven days on, two days off, nine days a week-like clockwork. There was a regular rhythm to life in Ommerliss, a changeless steadiness that gave the little town a feeling of self-confidence and security, with or without the war. Small though it was, and obviously poor, it maintained a sort of dignity. Dry, flat, barren of trees, its uneven backyards spotted with creeping vines of insidious pickweed, punctuated here and there with vicious daggers of drythorn and spineyweed, Ommerliss nevertheless struggled to seem presentable. Its streets were clean and wide, its stores well laid out, and its houses, though they reflected a pinkish glow from the red clay of the neighboring hills, had a warm, fresh-scrubbed look to them. They were orderly.
Life was orderly. In Ommerliss the war was little more than a casual anecdote. There were still the rumors of course, tall tales and bizarre stories whose main purpose seemed to be to frighten naughty children into behaving, but no one really took them seriously. It was generally accepted that in Ommerliss they were vanquished in name only, that the government could change hands many times over but life in the outer regions would go on much the same. Fearless and unconcerned, Catjoe spent her workdays swapping idle commentary with the other women in the shop, convinced as everyone else that if she lived an honorable and blameless life there was no one who would care to molest her.
Seven days on, two days off. Like clockwork. And on weekends she walked the eastbound road to the hospital a few hours away to sit with the young boy Resh, who was dying of the Grayface.
It was hot that year, hotter than any summer Catjoe could remember, and it was always hot in Ommerliss. Rains-Come-Moon had been and gone but the rains had not come. The drought had taken on a personality all its own, stern and punishing. In town the main topic of conversation these days was the vicious scorching sun that threatened to make this year's harvest even thinner than usual. Faces, thin enough already by genetic heritage, were drawn even sharper with new concern.
Catjoe's own scrawny garden was in pitiful shape. With the boy getting sicker every day she never seemed to find the time to tend it properly anymore. She shrugged it off, knowing that soon enough he would be dead and she would have all the time she needed for the garden, and she would hate that even more. She simply made do, getting up ridiculously early on those days she had off and spending the entire morning in the eye-stinging heat, cursing the dirt, the heat, the vegetables, the weeds, and the sun itself. Then, having passed the better part of the afternoon at the hospital, she would return to the garden, working it until well after dark, going by touch.
It was on the hottest day of the hottest year in living memory that everything began to go horribly wrong.
It was one of those impossibly humid mornings that makes a person feel half fish. It was Martyrsday, the last day of her weekend, and Catjoe was in a hurry to round off her chores and go to the boy. She had started early, almost before the sun came up, but already the air was too wet to wick off the sweat. Her thin imarel jersey clung to her body with a lover's devotion, and the spreading dampness across her chest colored the fabric a darker gray-green. Catjoe pulled the collar away from her neck, sighing under the heat. Even her eyelids were sweaty, weighted down with dampness, the lashes sticking together with every blink.
She was fatigued from the moment she got started. A fetid stench drifted over from the swamp, enriched by the heavy air. High overhead a shifwing hovered, circling and banking like a bad omen. "Dead f'shau," Catjoe figured, squinting into the rising sun. She spent a few moments watching the glide of the huge bird, grateful for any diversion. The shifwing's circles became tighter and tighter and at last it swooped, disappearing behind a low hill.
"Ah, well," Catjoe said. Her sympathies lay with the f'shau. Clumsy scissortailed creatures, small and plump with bony armatures, f'shau were rumored to make good eating if you could kill them without activating their scent glands. Otherwise the meat would be contaminated, infused with an unwholesome stench that no amount of preparation could wash off. No one Catjoe knew had ever succeeded in getting an edible one, although she herself had come close once.
She smiled a little at the memory, seeing again the shallow bowl of fermented fruit and her obsessive hours-long vigil, and the cautious steps of the half-grown creature that at last approached the dish, wrinkling its pointy snout in suspicion before taking its first tentative sip.
Its conversion had been almost instantaneous. By the time it finished the brew in the platter the little beast was so drunk it could scarcely remain upright to clean the sticky residue from its paws. Teetering precariously on its back feet, it took a few well-intentioned licks, then lay down heavily on its side and, with a deep sigh of contentment, went to sleep. Catjoe had sat back on her heels, laughing silently at its helpless foolishness. There was no question of eating it now. It had become too much like a chum.
She smiled again, then made a face. There was nothing more to look at, nothing to keep her from her task. She picked up the metal claw and went back to digging at the choking weeds.
It was discouraging work. The only things that grew really well in Ommerliss were the pickweed roots that sucked the nutrients out of the soil, killing the more desirable plants. Catjoe cursed the roots and then, with a penitence she did not feel, offered up the accustomed prayer to Hartan, asking forgiveness for disrupting their life cycle. She swapped the claw for a pointed trowel, hacking at roots as the flies buzzed around her face. The heavy air was dense with their low droning, speckled with the flash of luminous wings.
They were beautiful little creatures for all their devilish filth, their backs shot through with iridescent tones of pink and green and gold. Small and hungry, they went about their business with that fanaticism peculiar to the insect world. Catjoe brushed them away, scarcely paying attention, even when a particularly ravenous one landed on her cheek and began feasting. She smacked it automatically and it fell to the dirt, shuddered, and died. Reflexively she offered up another unfelt prayer and continued digging.
Her long ruddy hair fell down across her long ruddy face, and she pushed it away with long ruddy fingers, drawing a long ruddy streak of dirt across the sweat on her forehead, and she hummed a little measure from the old days, her voice fine and sweet. After a moment she added the lyric, singing quietly and without much thought. "Oh, a life of leisure is the life that's best; take a nap to gather strength to-. Shit."
Swapping the trowel for a pair of clippers, she immediately cursed again. She was barehanded and the long strings of pickweed had already begun cutting into the callused flesh on her palms. Her fingers felt stiff and tired. The roots were recalcitrant, her clippers dull. She tugged and cursed and tugged and cursed and finally threw the clippers down peevishly, crossing her long legs in front of her to sit angrily in the dirt. As she rested there, formulating a new plan of attack, she let her eyes wander above the pink roofs of Ommerliss to the north, to the Red Hills, sprawling like a cast-off bride, dry and unfriendly, inhabiting the spot where the known world ended. At the base of those hills lived the DreamSwallowers, the SpellWalkers, magic women who for a fee would take on a person's most hideous nightmares, saving that person from madness by going mad themselves. But above them, deep within the secret undiscovered places and surrounded by the sunburned rocks, lived the mysterious Snake Vendors.
The mere thought of them filled Catjoe's heart with an inexpressible longing, leaving her confused and irritable and vaguely dissatisfied. The Snake Vendors were the stuff of legend. No one knew much about them, not even how they had come by the name in the first place. From time to time an aging Snake Vendor would come down from the Red Hills, take on the mantle of civilization, and make his way back into the world. Rarely would he talk about his days in the mountains and no one was bold enough to ask. Catjoe was always stirred with a melancholy curiosity when she looked up into the hills. There was drama and romance in a life like that.
Far off in the southeastern distance, like an afterthought or a bad copy, lay another set of hills-lower, less abrupt, infinitely more manageable. At the top of the closest one, barely visible behind the scrawny, vine-choked trees, was the hospital where the boy Resh lived these days. It was a walk of about three hours, although in the heat of Leaping-Hunt-Moon it seemed twice that. Squinting into the southeast Catjoe sighed. She wiped the back of her hand across her mouth, rubbing away the sweat and replacing it with another grimy red streak of dirt.
A flash of light up in the hills caught her eye. It was still and airless down here but up there a wayward breeze had parted the trees just long enough to reveal the blue metal of the water tower that served the hospital. She closed her eyes, permitting herself to imagine the cool water rising around her shoulders and throat, lapping gently at her ears, slipping through the hair at the base of her neck. The sun pressed down on her head like a restraining hand. Without even being aware that she did so she groaned.
The sound of it startled her out of her reverie. "Ah, donkey piss," she said suddenly, as much from impatience with her own silly daydreams as anything else. "Hell with these cutters." She stabbed them viciously into the dirt. Even then they cut nothing. "Well. Shit." She stared at them for a moment, watched them as they wobbled like the drunken f'shau of her memory, then toppled and fell in a lifting puff of dust. An unexpected laugh jostled her shoulders and she shook her head, her mouth twitching in something that was almost a smile. Then, letting out her breath on a sigh of annoyance, she deliberately blinked the image from her head. Snatching up the clippers, she shoved them into her back pocket and pushed herself to her feet, striding across the patchy, weed-choked lawn to the tool shed.
The tool shed door was sticking again. "Shit," she said without anger, and put her shoulder against it. It inched open, catching on the tufted dirt beneath it and stopping suddenly with a groan. "And there's another thing that has to be fixed," she muttered. An unaccustomed stink wafted out. It was a smell of death, of decay.
Catjoe wrinkled her nose in disgust. Something was obviously dead in there, and now she had another stupid task that she didn't have time for, but would have to find time for. She wondered what had died and how much trouble it was going to be to find it and remove it. She threw her weight against the door, pushing it open further, noting with annoyance the little fingers of sunlight poking through the holes in the roof. Spiraling eddies of dust swarmed within the light, at first obscuring rather than illuminating the interior of the shed. "And there's another thing that has to be fixed," she started to say, then stopped abruptly as she realized just what the fingers were pointing at.
A man crouched there in the dirt and shadows, pressed tight against the farther wall, his legs pulled up to his chest and his head pulled down between his shoulders. He was motionless, frozen, like a statue or a dead thing, but she somehow knew at once that he was very much alive, very much aware.
Instinctively she grabbed at the fetish pouch hanging at her belt, even though in the same instant that she moved she knew it was useless, knew there was nothing in there that could help her-a few feathers, a pebble or two, a lock of her mother's hair, and a tiny lump of milk-white glass were the only things she carried. But almost as soon as she realized the bag held no protections for her she began to understand that protection was unnecessary. The stranger who cowered in the dirt there was more fearful even than she, one arm up around his head as though he were still trying to escape notice even though he surely knew he was already caught.
He was grotesque, repellent, and the stink of decay rising up from him was dizzyingly strong. Strange little sounds erupted from his throat, a cross between a whimper and a thin strangled gasp. His odor was practically visible, dank and heavy, weighing down the breathable air. Catjoe wanted to stir the air with her hands to brush it away, to make the stench disperse.
She swallowed roughly, uncertain. Her eyes automatically sought out the shovel. It was in the corner, behind him on the other side. She could never reach it; it was no use to her whatever. The metal claw had been left outside, sticking in the dirt. The clippers in her pocket seemed almost to be digging a hole in her back, so forcefully were they reminding her of their existence. Her fingers closed around them. She started to back out of the tool shed but as she did so the man lifted his face out of the protection of his arm and shoulder to look at her, the mute pleading in his eyes unmistakable. Catjoe's face grew stern and the man, like a frightened dog, began kicking his feet against the earth in a futile effort to push himself further back into the corner, his own fear so obvious that hers was swallowed up, giving way to outrage.
"You, then!" she cried out, and she took a step forward, knowing instinctively that in his eyes, lying there below her, she loomed. Her heart was pounding so loudly she was afraid he would hear it, and the minute she spoke it doubled its speed. "Ey, you!"
He looked up at her, timid as a mountain rabbit, and the adrenaline surged into her mouth, tasting like vinegar and iron. It filled her with a strange blend of terror and self-confidence and she moved swiftly to him, giving his leg a smart kick with the toe of her boot while her heart pounded with perverse delight. "Who the hell you think you are?"
He scuttled backwards, tighter and tighter into the corner, still frantically kicking at the earth. His donkey-hide boots, two sizes too big, flapped loosely as he kicked at the soil. Scrabbling in the dirt there like an overturned beetle, bizarre and pathetic, he hid his face in his shoulder. "Help me," he whispered.
She straightened her back, oddly calmed by his helplessness. Immediately the rapid beating of her heart became steadier, more rhythmic; the noise of it evened out, becoming an accompaniment rather than the song itself. It felt good to be in the power position, frighteningly good. Pressing her lips tightly together Catjoe cocked her head to one side, surveying him coldly. Then she shrugged, her lips twisting into a sneer. "Why?"
The man said nothing but his eyes pleaded eloquently. Catjoe folded her arms and leaned back, studying him in the half-light.
He had a fevered look about him, a look of ill-health, of disease long untreated. Beyond that he was an unimpressive man, nondescript and gray-seeming. Even if he had been her own uncle she might have had trouble remembering his face. He was thin and sickly-looking, unwholesome, with a soft ashen pallor, the sort of thing one might expect to find after turning over a rock. His clothes were faded and travel-stained, stiff with sweat, and his face was covered with several days' worth of grime and stubble. Dirty brown hair hung around his collar in lank clumps. Catjoe found him completely unremarkable. In fact the only thing about him that seemed even remotely unusual was the brightly-patterned rag he wore tied around his head and pulled down close to his eyes. It was giddy and devil-may-care with an aggressive dappling of eye-bending colors in the hottest, most acidic tones of orange, pink, violet, and yellowish green, and it seemed especially incongruous in light of the man's fear and exhaustion. It was disconcerting to see such a colorless person under such a gaudy cloth.
"Help me," he said again.
Catjoe made a face. "Get out of here," she said. "Go on, git." She gave him a moment then, when he made no move to leave, kicked him again.
The man gasped in surprise and pain, reaching out instinctively with both hands to ward off yet another blow. Just for an instant a thin vapor of light-headedness swirled down around Catjoe's shoulders. Then it dissipated, leaving her staring clear-eyed at the thing at the end of his left arm. She shook her head in disbelief. In the semi-darkness of the tool shed his hand glared out like a pulsing torch.
It was huge, shockingly nasty, its flesh swollen, its color an unnatural bluish-gray. Wriggling through the holes in the roof the fingers of sunlight wrapped themselves lovingly around it, dancing across the bruised meat. Beneath the meat, in a corresponding dance, damaged nerves shimmied and twitched. But the true horror of it all was due to something else entirely, something that made Catjoe's mouth go dry, something that prompted a clutching in her throat, and a corresponding one in her stomach.
It wasn't a hand at all, not really; not anymore. The flesh of each finger had been slit open at the side, stretched, and then sewn to the flesh of the neighboring finger, the edges trimmed away and smoothed down to shiny angry scars. It left the hand looking webbed, reptilian, except for the tags of heavy black thread sticking through at odd intervals. It was less a hand than a paddle or a mitten. Her own hands twitched, the fingers grabbing reflexively at the air beside her in search of something to hold on to. For a minute she said nothing at all, her mind too completely filled with shock to leave room for words. Then she swallowed and took a deep breath, letting it out slowly. The sweat on the back of her neck felt suddenly cold. "Shit," she said, and then, "Hartan. God."
The stranger looked at her accusingly, his eyes watery. They were doll's eyes, crystal blue, incongruously beautiful, deep and liquid and almost feminine. A rim of dark lashes encircled them, so solid it might almost have been painted on. There were secrets buried there, frightening secrets, secrets so daunting that looking into those eyes was even more disconcerting than looking at the ravaged flesh of the hand.
Inexplicably embarrassed she looked back at his not-quite-fingers, then at the ceiling, then past his eyes and a little above to the knot of the bandanna where it tied at his ear. She stared at the knot, frowning, becoming oddly fixated by it and by the swirling dancing patterns in the bandanna fabric, only half-seen in the pale dappled light.
With a thin groan the intruder pushed himself up into a more dignified position, wiping his mouth with the back of his good hand. She could see that even that was an effort-his head was wobbly with exhaustion and snapped back and forth with an almost rhythmic motion. His mouth flopped open like a gasping fish.
"Fench," he began, but before he could even quite finish the syllable he was overcome by a great shudder of exhaustion that washed down across his body and into his arms. He waited for it to pass, watching his useless hand as it opened and closed, the muscles still responding to the commands of the nerves even if the fingers could not. "Fencio," he tried again after a moment. "My name. My name is Fencio. Help me."
Still she hesitated, taking a step backward, out of the shed, out into the dazzling sunlight. There was no telling who this man was or what sort of trouble he was in.
Catjoe was frightened and at the same time she was fascinated. A dozen voices clamored at her brain, each one giving loud and conflicting advice. She had a brief annoying vision of her already limited respectability being clouded in the town where she had spent her entire life. She was not well-liked there; she had never fit in. She stood there blinking and watching him, and another great shudder poured down over his body. She could hear him panting. The high-pitched gasps were full of phlegm and torment, sounding like rocks shaken in a bag.
"Shit," she said again. Resh would be waiting, increasingly impatient. She couldn't just leave this man here, though, dying by degrees in the airless shadows. She took another step backwards, casting furtive looks about her to make sure no one was watching. A large, skinny brown dog trotted decisively up the middle of the street, its destination clearly firmly in mind. Down the road in the other direction Amblio Heshon was feeding his chickens.
Amblio Heshon, Catjoe's nearest neighbor, was the poorest man in town, and the only person to live nearer to the Swamp than she herself. Old and friendless, he spent every day, sunup to sundown, toiling in his garden, coaxing out the vegetables one thin meal at a time, speaking to them in low wheedling tones.
It did him no good. No matter how thickly he supplied his garden with donkey dung and grass clippings the soil still remained too lean and stingy for most things to take root. As a young man Heshon had once made the long trek to Shantu in the northeast for a cartload of composted manure and vegetable clippings well-salted with worms. It had been in the middle of summer, in the full of No-Mercy-Moon, and no rational person would have attempted the trip at all.
If Heshon had headed east first, making his way to Shantu by way of Trang City, he might have had better luck. But Heshon had had more determination than logic; hoping to shave a few days off his journey he had made a direct line toward his destination, striking out across the harsh ragged terrain with an independence that bordered on foolhardiness. Two donkeys had died on the way in and one on the way back and in the end it was all for nothing. The summer rains came, the compost turned to slurry and washed away, and the worms all drowned.
The Heshons had been rich merchants but Amblio's gamble had translated into a huge debt. He had had to sell off the family land, a tract now sniggeringly known as Amblio's Folly, and move to the south end of town in direct line with the noxious fumes that rose from the Swamp. A newcomer lived on the old Heshon property now, an outsider from the east.
People blamed Amblio's misfortunes on Wyelan, the goddess of ill luck. Privately they considered it his comeuppance, his deserved penance for being so odd and antisocial, without remembering that before his bad fortune he had been as friendly and approachable as any in Ommerliss. "Shund'ha been content just to buy worms," Hupt Maggses sniggered. "Should'ha gone right on ahead and bought the god damn dirt as well." He said it loudly and often and to anyone who would listen. It always got a big laugh, and not just because Maggses owned the local bar and it paid to stay on his good side. It seemed to most people genuinely foolish to waste good honest money on dirt, although privately Catjoe thought it might not be such a silly idea at that. Why not ship in dirt, good dirt, rich heavy dirt, dirt with a proven reputation for making things grow? Dirt to stud the local dirt, to breed dirt the way they bred dogs and donkeys? She kept her opinion to herself. The townspeople considered her odd enough as it was, odder even than Heshon.
She looked out at him now, nervous, but he was feeble and shortsighted and his attention was firmly centered. He was completely unaware of her. She could hear squealing children at play in the neighboring streets. That was all. It was early and it was hot and anyone in Ommerliss with sense was indoors. Catjoe wet her lips nervously. She could smell the stranger from out here.
"All right, then," she said at last, and the instant she spoke a strange little thrill erupted in her throat and she felt herself consumed irresistibly in the event. "I don't know you from Hartan's housecat," she said. "But I'll take the risk." She gestured and the stranger started to rise, but even as he hoisted himself the strength in his arms gave out and he fell back in the dirt.
Catjoe felt a thrumming in her ears like the buzzing of flies. Something dangerous was happening here, something real and exciting, the sort of thing she had dreamed of as a young girl. She felt close enough to the magic to touch it, and her eyes sparkled as they had not done in many years.
It was the allure of the Vendor, the Rebel, the Outcast-a powerful thing. The very forbiddenness of it made it tantalizing. With one last cautious look around she slipped back into the tool shed and knelt at Fencio's side. His odor was as tangible as a slap. She recoiled from under it and then, steeling herself, she hefted the man to his feet and supported him, lurching, through the weeds to the chunky little box she called home.
Catjoe's house, like many of the houses on the Swamp End of Ommerliss, was stolid and plain, bringing a joyless, no-nonsense approach to the business of living. It was a struggling white color, the underlying layer of pink shining through with grim determination. She had tried to spruce it up with personal touches-flowers in the window box, bright cheerful curtains-but it was about as convincing as a tight gown on a fat housewife. Catjoe didn't mind it too much usually. She didn't spend a great deal of time there anyway.
Grunting, she helped Fencio into her kitchen. It was a long narrow room with one small window facing south. White paint covered the walls, slathered on so poorly that all the brush marks showed. Marching up the wall beside the sink basin were a number of badly framed art prints, cheap pictures of eastern flowers and botanicals whose similarity to anything existing in nature had to be taken for granted. Catjoe sat the man down at the kitchen table and, pumping a kettle-full of water, brewed him a cup of aromatic leaves, not so much for their purported medicinal powers as to mask his stench. Then, setting the mug down in front of him, she sat on the other side of the table and waited for him to begin. Her chest was tight with the excitement of her own unfolding adventure.
There was something frighteningly close to madness in the unsteadiness of Fencio's gaze and the odd swaying motion of his head. His hair hung out from beneath the bandanna in thin ragged patches, like fraying bits of ancient tapestries. His eyes, darting here and there, never quite seemed to focus, and his breathing was heavy and labored. He coughed wetly and another shudder washed down his body like a great surging wave, and then he began shaking his head more quickly, as though even he could not believe the story he was about to tell. Outside she could hear the high clear sounds of children laughing.
"It was Doboro," he began, whispering. She looked again at his spatulate hand, vaguely reminded of an old fingerplay she had learned as a kid: Rowing to Mand'nalaika. Fencio, with his ready-made oar, would have been a natural for the paddling motion. He was talking and, with effort, she was able to tear herself away from the bizarre appendage and focus attention on his words. "It was at the hospital. In Trang City." He paused, nervously collecting his thoughts. "I wasn't sick. Not really. Then the Victors-the D'jiaf'han-they came and they took over the hospital. I wasn't expecting that. No one was." Fencio was restless, pushing the mug back and forth across the table as though the dry scratching noise it made were somehow a comfort to him.
"Called us malingerers," he went on. "Fakes. And there was this woman. Doboro. She liked me." His voice trailed off and he was silent for a moment, gazing into his memory. His head hung heavily as though at any moment the very weight of it might snap his neck. Catjoe looked at him closely, Rowing to Mand'nalaika still playing in the back of her mind. She tried to visualize Fencio healthy, with clear skin and full hair and without that hellish stench, and still she found him wholly unimpressive. She wondered what Doboro had seen.
"And then this Doboro-she was a doctor. And she liked me." His eyes flickered towards hers for a moment, then flickered away, becoming oddly fixed on some small crawling thing in the dust on the table top. "Seven years of occupation. They never even showed their faces. Then this." He lifted the misshapen hand, cradling it with the other as though it were a thing of great preciousness and fragility that he offered her.
Catjoe frowned. "I'm not--I don't follow you."
"They're doctors," he said, as though that would explain it. "Scientists." He took a deep breath then hurried on, glancing around anxiously as though he feared being overheard. "There were people nailed to the walls there," he whispered suddenly, and now his voice was harsh and taut, and the blue eyes wobbled behind unshed tears. "Pounded in with pegs." Gazing off into the middle distance he seemed to be seeing it still. "There. In the hospitals. In Trang City. Moaning and crying and screaming in pain and anguish." His voice became higher and thready, taking on a strangled quality, and the words tumbled out, spilling over one another in their eagerness to escape. "And the doctors, the doctors-poking them with needles and injecting their veins and their eyes with acids and the gods know what." He sucked at the air with panting gasps, the fingers of his good hand fluttering ceaselessly. His cheek was twitching with a life of its own.
"They think we can't feel it," he said. "Not like them anyway. Not so much. Not so deep. They think our systems are too primitive." The fat tears welled up in his eyes, slipping out onto his cheeks. He seemed not to notice. "They think it's instinct makes us struggle and fight. Just instinct. Reflex." Fencio had become more and more agitated as he spoke and now he pushed away from the table, rising to begin pacing back and forth across the room, back and forth, his body seeming almost bulky in the tight claustrophobic little space that separated the table from the wall. His hands flailed and his breath came thin and ragged.
"It was Doboro," he said. "Doboro and Cripp."
"Cripp?" She was startled. She knew the name.
"Cripp. A soldier. One of us. A traitor." His thoughts were moving too swiftly now for the words to keep up, and he paced in smaller and smaller circles. "They have to be stopped. They have to be stopped."
Catjoe watched him in amazement, a germ of disbelief growing in her mind. He was obviously mad. The strange injury to Fencio's hand must certainly have happened in some more reasonable way. "Nutball," she muttered, but so softly that she scarcely heard it herself. With a flash of annoyance she began to resent this man's intrusion into her home and her life, her routine. "Here, take it easy," she said impatiently.
He put his good hand up to his forehead, then pulled it away in sudden shock and revulsion, as though the bandanna were crawling with ticks. For a moment he simply stared at the fingers, his eyes glazed and dilated, his despair almost tangible. Then he took a shaky breath, lowering the hand slowly as he looked around himself, scarcely seeming to know where he was. "Oh God," he said, whispering. "I'm afraid I'm going to lose my mind."
"I'm thinking it's late for that," Catjoe said flatly. She knew it was rude but she couldn't help herself. She forced a laugh, nervous and insincere, trying to soften the words, but he seemed not to hear, pacing to and fro with an odd shambling gait. "Fencio. Ey, Fench." As he made another pass in front of her Catjoe stood, moving out from behind the table to catch his arm.
Alarmed, the man flinched. With a sharp intake of breath that was almost a squeal, he pulled away in fear, staggering backward, his head snapping back against the kitchen wall with a dull crack. Mouth slack, eyelids fluttering, Fencio slid down the wall, and as he slid the movement forced the brightly-colored bandanna to ride up his scalp until it sat foolishly on top of his head like a little peaked hat. For a moment it balanced there jauntily then, drooping, it slithered across his face and on down to the floor. Catjoe's world stopped dead as she stared at the top of Fencio's head.
Part of it was normal, natural, reasonable still. But part of it--.
She put one hand against the air, as though to ward off phantoms, and she stared down in confusion at the sharp-faced creature at her feet.
Almost a quarter of his skull had been cut away, replaced with a curving piece of clear sheeting like a window into the man's brain. Most of the joins were seamless, perfectly flush with the rest of his forehead, not even the slightest indentation to suggest that the presence of the thing was anything other than normal. Just over his left eye though, a virulent, seeping crust had formed, yellow, dotted with black, and the flesh below it was angry and red with the shiny intensity of a chemical burn. Catjoe's eyelids fluttered and as soon as she fought down the dizziness it was replaced by a surge of nausea that pulled against the corners of her mouth. It was ghastly, vicious, fascinating. Scarcely breathing, she knelt down for a closer look.
It was horrible. It was amazing. It was ghoulish and fantastic. Revulsion vied with admiration as she stared at the bizarre thing in Fencio's head. It was as perfectly shaped as a wedge of pie, the base of the cutline extending from the center of his forehead to a spot just above the left ear, the perpendicular going to the exact top of his head. The hair surrounding the window had been shaved away, but carelessly, ropy lank patches and individual strands emerging here and there to join with the rest of his hair. One or two thin straggling wisps, sweat-soaked and dirty, clung tenaciously to the window, winding themselves across it in calligraphic tendrils.
The sheeting was of a material unfamiliar to Catjoe, a synthetic that had the look of glass but whose gleam under the light was not quite so cold, not quite so brilliant. It was as clear as glass though, and served the same purpose, allowing her to look inside the man's skull, to see the clean smooth line where the bone had been sawed away, to see beyond that into the very network of his brain.
She swallowed, feeling dizzy and sick. She could see that small chunks had been cut out of the brain itself. As appalled as she was, she could not help marveling at the kind of science that could make such a thing possible. That Fencio could live and breathe, that he could have traveled by foot all the way from Trang City, avoiding capture--that even a well man could have survived the desert and the heat was impressive but this-this was an absolute miracle.
Not that he was likely to survive much longer. If he did not die of the wounds themselves Catjoe had no doubt that he would shortly die of the sheer horror of them. Never had she seen a face so close to madness.
Probably for the best anyway if he were to die, she thought with a twinge of guilt. Better off dead, a thing like Fencio.
She was ashamed of the thought but as she looked at him lying there, the gruesome left hand flopping about uselessly in the dust and the crumbs of the kitchen floor, the flesh over his eyes practically quivering with infection, she knew that the kindest thing she could do would be to put him out of his pain. Once again she became uncomfortably aware of the clippers in her back pocket.
Almost as if he had read her thought Fencio's eyes flickered open and, as they focused on the gaudy bandanna lying beside him, a look of infinite and tragic revulsion crossed his face. "Sorry. I'm sorry," he whispered in shame as he fumbled to cover the exposed hideousness of his head.
Catjoe pretended indifference. It took a tremendous effort, but she pulled it off. There was a little slang action she had picked up from the local kids, a small movement, simple and spare, that she had adopted for her own. With an index finger you would make a little upward motion as though flipping on a power switch. Then you would flip the switch back off. "Click click," you would say, meaning "Big deal" or "Tough shit," and the very tinyness of the movement, the stinginess in the amount of energy you were willing to expend, proved how little you cared. "Click click," she said now. "Click click."
Trang City was betrayed. No one even knew it. It was incomprehensible. Catjoe spent the morning in a daze, pacing, wandering from room to room trying to assimilate it all. Fencio lay twitching in her bed, his thin cheeks puffing and fluttering with every breath. She went in from time to time to check on him, feeling helpless and inept. She had no idea what she ought to do but she felt that she had to do something. She had tried to feed him, opening up a tin of salted pigmeat carted in from TakeTown, the steaming crotch of the known world. But he had shuddered so violently that he had been unable to eat and eventually she was obliged to give up on that notion. So she spoke to him softly in gentle whispers, mostly variations on "Hush now" and "There there." She even managed to force herself to stroke his head, her fingers trembling.
She cleaned the grime from his neck and chest with the tenderness of a mother and then, somewhat reluctantly, she turned her attentions to the misshapen thing at the end of his arm. She washed it as best she could, relieved when he lost consciousness and could not see the loathing on her face as she tended his deformities. She tried to control it but all the pity in the world could not govern her gag reflex, nor could shame keep her from recognizing that she did not want him dying there in the room where she slept.
But what could she do? She could cast all her grain in two piles on the ground and send the chickens in to feed, and maybe the grain they left behind would spell out her answer and maybe it wouldn't. She wondered sometimes if the gods used a different alphabet than the people, perhaps even spoke a different language altogether. The priest Kimday had a divining board of the finest craftsmanship with four white roosters to feast upon it, with a north-south axis inlaid in tovril ore and all the letters and numbers fashioned from shining chips of white rock from the east, and he had fat blue candles for prayer and a cloth of the most delicate silk tracery for the laying out of meats to appease the spirits of the gods and still sometimes his answers seemed wrong. Catjoe had access to nothing so sophisticated as the priest. What good would it do her anyway? In the end, no matter what her answer, she would question its authority. Sometimes a yes answer, acted upon, yielded terrible results.
Of course there was no knowing how much worse the results would be if the answer were not acted upon. There was no certain knowledge of anything in the spiritual world, of that she was fairly sure.
It was a pointless point anyway. There was a madman dying in her bedroom and she could not leave the house to get help for him without running the risk of putting him in even greater danger than he was in already, assuming he told the truth. And then there was herself to be considered: might not she be in danger too? Better to sit quietly and wait for a better answer to reveal itself. Fencio moaned and Catjoe, flinching, set her jaw. Her best hope was that he would make it through the day and, come nightfall, she could move him somewhere else, somewhere safe.
She hadn't quite figured out where. Cripp, the name Fencio had mentioned in connection with Doboro, was very much a local name. There were Cripps all over Ommerliss, one great sprawling family after another, all of them interrelated and all of them nosing into one another's business, and everyone else's as well. If one of them was a collaborator it was a sure bet that the rest of them knew it, supported it perhaps, possibly even were traitors themselves. If even one person in Ommerliss knew about Fencio's presence in Catjoe's house and word got to the Cripps, it could go very badly for her. Catjoe paced.
