Legacy - Lois McMaster Bujold [79]
And Dirla lunged forward onto a stump and plunged Mari’s sharing knife into the malice’s back.
Dag felt the dying enter his own shredding ground, cloudy and turbulent as blood poured into roiling water. For a moment, he shared the malice’s full awareness. The world’s ground stretched away from their center for miles, glowing like fire, with slaves and mud-men moving across it in scattered, blazing ranks. The confusing din of their several hundred, no, thousand anguished minds battered his failing consciousness. The malice’s vast will seemed to drain from them as Dag watched, leaving blackness and dismay. The irrational intelligence of the great being snatched at his own mind, hungry above all for understanding of its plight, and Dag knew that if this malice took him in, it would have nearly all it needed, and yet still not be saved from its own cravings and desires. It is quite mad. And the more intelligent it grows, the more agonizing its own madness becomes to it. It seemed a curious but useless insight to gain, here at the end of breath and light.
The malice screamed again, its voice rising strangely like a song, wavering upward into unexpected purity. Its beautiful body ruptured, caught by its clothing, and it fell in a welter of blood and fluid.
The earth rose up and struck Dag cruelly in the back. Stars spun overhead, and went out.
Fawn shot awake in the dark and sat up in her lonely bedroll with a gasp. Shock shuddered through her body, then a wash of fear. A noise, a nightmare? No echoes pulsed in her ears, no visions faded in her mind. Her heart pounding unaccountably, she slapped her right hand over her left wrist. This panic was surely the opposite of relaxed persuasion and openness, but beneath her marriage cord her whole arm was throbbing.
Something’s happened to Dag. Hurt? Hurt bad…?
She scrambled up and pushed through her tent flap into the milky light of a partial moon, seeming bright compared to the inky shadows inside. Not stopping to throw anything over her sleeping shift, she picked her way across the clearing, wincing at the twigs and stones that bit her bare feet. It was all that kept her from breaking into a run.
She hesitated outside Cattagus and Mari’s tent. The night was cool after the recent rains, and Cattagus had dropped the porch flap down. She slapped it as Utau had theirs on the dark morning he’d come to wake Dag. She tried to guess the time from the moon passing over the lake—two hours after midnight, maybe? There was no sound from within, and she pounded the leather again, then shifted from foot to foot, trying to gather the nerve to go inside and shake the old man by the shoulder.
Before she did, the flap moved on Sarri’s tent, and the dark-haired woman emerged. She had paused for sandals, but no robe either, and her feet slapped quickly across the stretch between the two tent-cabins.
“Did you feel that?” Fawn asked her anxiously, keeping her voice low for fear of waking the children. And then felt utterly stupid, for of course Sarri would not feel anything from a marriage cord wrapped around someone else’s wrist. “Did you feel anything just now?”
Sarri shook her head. “Something woke me. Whatever it was, was gone by the time I’d gathered my wits.” Her right hand too gripped her left wrist, kneading.
“Razi and Utau…?”
“Alive. Alive. At least that.” She shot Fawn a curious look. “Did you feel something? Surely you couldn’t have…”
She was interrupted by a grunt from the tent. Cattagus shouldered through the flap, tying up his shorts around his stout middle and scowling. “What’s all this too-roo in the moonlight, girlies?”
“Fawn says she felt something in her cord. Woke her up.” Sarri added, as if reluctant to endorse this, “I woke up too, but there wasn’t…anything. Mari?”
The same gesture, right hand over left, although by putting on an expression of exasperation Cattagus tried, unsuccessfully, to make it not look anxious. He shook his head. “Mari’s all right.” He added after