His whiskers twitched. He was too polite to come right out and say he didn’t believe her, but he obviously didn’t. Since she hadn’t been telling more than a quarter of the truth, she couldn’t very well blame him. He pointed back toward the Dancing ground. “Things didn’t go well?”
“No,” she said before she could help herself. Then her eyes narrowed in annoyance-whether at herself or at him she wasn’t sure. The Clan of the Claw needed a clever talonmaster. The New Water and all the trouble it had stirred up meant the clan needed a talonmaster of that stripe more than ever before. But did Rantan Taggah have to go and show off his cleverness?
“Why?” he asked bluntly. “Has Assirra turned her countenance away from us? Will she not speak to Aedonniss on our behalf?”
Enni Chennitats’s claws shot out. Her finger twisted in a gesture that averted evil. A moment later, Rantan Taggah made the same gesture. But he still stood in front of the priestess, waiting for her reply. “Say not so!” she told him. “No, we have no sign of that. But magic is an uncertain business-for us, anyhow.”
He showed his teeth. “Would you rather be a Liskash?”
She made the apotropaic gesture again, more vigorously this time. “You know better than that,” she said, and waited till he dipped his proud head to show he did. Then she went on, “They must be demons. Otherwise, how could one of them hold as much magic as a whole troupe of Dancers?”
Rantan Taggah shrugged. “I don’t know anything about that. I don’t much care, either. All I know is, if you shove a spear into one of them, he’ll die. That’s the only thing I need to know.”
“If he doesn’t spell you into spearing a clansmate instead, thinking it’s him,” Enni Chennitats said.
“Yes. If.” Rantan Taggah scowled. “Well, we’ll have to figure out how to keep that from happening, because we’ll be traveling through Liskash country-through a lot of it, I’m afraid.”
“We are going to travel, then?” The priestess had known it was likely. Hearing it would actually happen still felt like a punch in the belly, though. “We had a good life here.”
“We had one, yes,” Rantan Taggah agreed. “No more, not with the New Water at our backs. We’re cut off from all the other Mrem in the world. The only reason the Scaly Ones didn’t jump on our backs before this is that they’re hatched cowards.”
It was more complicated than that. Enni Chennitats knew as much, and the talonmaster surely did as well. The Liskash rarely hurried in anything they did. She wondered if their being kin to lizards and snakes and other crawling things accounted for that. Lizards and snakes had no will to overcome their natural deliberation. The Liskash did-if Liskash nobles were anything, they were creatures of overwhelming will-but usually stayed slow all the same.
“Some of our clansfolk won’t want to travel into the unknown,” Enni Chennitats said. Liskash nobles weren’t the only ones who kept on doing what they’d always done whenever they got the chance. The Mrem also like to curl up and go to sleep in their old, familiar haunts.
“Well,” the talonmaster said, “we’ll have a clan meeting tomorrow to hash things out. The way I see it, if we don’t move when we want to, we’ll move when the Liskash force us out of here-if we can move then. Better to go on our own terms. That’s how it looks to me, anyhow.”
“What if the clan sees things differently?” Enni Chennitats asked.
He shrugged once more. “Then they’ll have a new talonmaster tomorrow night, that’s all. I won’t be sorry, or not very. If there’s anything more wearing than doing things for males and females who don’t want them done, curse me if I know what it is.”
“But you’ve done a good job,” she said. “I can’t think of any other male who’d be better. I can’t think of anyone else the whole clan would follow, either.”
“To tell you the truth, neither can I.” Rantan Taggah was not a modest male even by the modest standards of the Mrem. He turned to go, then checked himself. “Oh, and a male just came in from the southwest. A runaway Liskash slave, he says. He’ll know more about what’s going on with their nobles than we do now.”
“He says,” the priestess echoed. “How far can you trust him?”
“About as far as I can fling a mammoth,” Rantan Taggah answered cheerfully. “But we’ll want to hear him out any which way. And we’ll want your priestesses somewhere not far off-someplace where you can Dance. If he is under a spell, maybe you can draw him out of it.”
“Maybe.” Enni Chennitats knew she sounded troubled. If the Dancing today went so poorly with nothing at stake, how could she count on it to beat down whatever magic the Liskash had loaded onto this poor “escaped” Mrem? She couldn’t, and neither could Rantan Taggah. Still, it was what they had. Without it, the Liskash would have devoured the Mrem centuries before. With it…
They may devour us yet, she thought miserably. Part of her knew that was a reaction to the failed Dance. The rest knew as much, too, but was not reassured by the knowledge. If the Dances failed, the Scaly Ones triumphed. They might triumph all the same. She had reasons for her misery, sure enough.
As Rantan Taggah had looked out over the New Water, so he stared out at the sea of Mrem faces at the clan meeting. The males of the war band looked back, some at him, some at the scepter he held. It was the length and thickness of a good mace. Instead of being topped by a head of flanged, sharpened bronze, though, it was surmounted by a Liskash noble’s skull. Those large eye sockets, the domed braincase so much like a Mrem’s, the projecting snout with the sharp teeth all just alike…
Only the male who held the scepter could address the meeting. So said ancient clan custom. Most Mrem wandering clans and city-states had similar rules. Rantan Taggah’s hand tightened on the scepter; the reddish wood was worn smooth by many generations of palm pads.
Off to one side stood males who had joined with the Clan of the Claw but had not joined it. They were refugees from the clans and small towns that had lived down in the Hollow Lands. No more, no more. Some of them had fought alongside the Clan of the Claw’s warriors and shown their own courage. Others would, when and if they got the chance. Rantan Taggah thought they would strengthen the clan if they became part of it. Another thing to decide on one of these days…
He lifted the scepter high. The males of the clan had been talking among themselves, arguing unofficially about what they would soon be arguing about officially. They fell silent when the scepter rose: it marked the shift between the one kind of argument and the other.
“Do you hear me, males?” Rantan Taggah shouted. “Do you accept me as talonmaster of the Clan of the Claw?”
If anyone said no to the second question, the argument about what the clan should do next would be preceded by an argument about under whose leadership the clan should do it. That would not be an argument with words. Rantan Taggah had thrust a spear into the ground behind him. An axe lay beside it. He wore a bronze sword and a broad-bladed gutting dagger on his leather belt. He’d taken special care sharpening his claws. He didn’t particularly expect a challenge, but he believed in being ready even for things he didn’t particularly expect. That was one reason he made a better talonmaster than most.
No one called him out. A few males answered, “We hear you!” Most stood silent, waiting for what would come.
Rantan Taggah raised the scepter again. Eyes and ears not already pointed toward him swung his way. “Warriors!” he said. “Most of you were kits like me when the Old Water finally poured over the Quaxo Hills and started flooding the Hollow Lands. Some of the folk who listen here today fled before the great wave whelmed them. Honor to the memories of the males and females who could not get away.”
“Honor,” the assembled males echoed.
The talonmaster pointed north. “Now the New Water separates us from our fellow Mrem. The Clan of the Claw was always boldest. We were the ones who came out of the Hollow Lands and drove the Liskash before us, even though these warm southern lands suit the Scaly Ones well. We won broad plains for grazing. We won great glory, too.”
He lifted the scepter higher yet. The hollow eye sockets of the Liskash skull that crowned it stared blindly out at the Mrem. The warriors growled approval.
“And we won our own salvation,” Rantan Taggah went on. “Had we stayed down in the Hollow Lands, we likely would have been swept away like so many others. But we were bold. We pushed on. And so we lived.”
