Pe Choi touched the sleeping slave boy’s face gently with her chitinous fingers and went away.
Chnesuru soon appeared to give the command to march. He kept a stolid, impassive face and said nothing of the night’s events. The overseers caught their master’s mood and lashed the caravan into almost a trotting pace. They made excellent time. On this morning, however, the skies chose to grieve: slow, warm rain fell, and tatters of cloud clung to Thenu Thendraya’s skirts, sometimes drifting aside to reveal seamed black cliffs like the cheeks of an old woman. Around noon the sun appeared and turned the air into gasping, dripping steam.
One day went by, and then another. The mornings continued to weep grey rain-tears, while the afternoons were humid and sticky beyond endurance. They marched through a silent landscape upon bridges of wet, black timbers, over waters that were sheets of muddy agate. All around were thickets of impenetrable marsh-reeds: ominous, full of eyes, and creatures, and the promise of secret death. It was enough to make one believe in the legends of the Tsoggu, the drowned corpses who wandered the wastes all covered with slime and burning green lich-fire…
Tlayesha could stand it no longer. When they camped on the last night before reaching Purdimal she brought the slave boy into the tent and confronted Itk t’Sa directly. She sat the Pe Choi down and made the slave squat before them both. Then she told Itk t’Sa some of what had occurred since he was brought to the caravan outside Bey Sii. She omitted mention of the Zu’ur- victim, and of the terrible things the youth had told her there upon the road platform. Those matters-and certain of her gloomier suspicions-were too dangerous to reveal to anyone as yet. Itk t’Sa heard her out, then said only, “It is as I had seen it.” “You knew something all along? Why-?”
“I want no involvement in the plottings of men. Some of my race take part in your doings. Others do not.” The Pe Choi hesitated. “Why I am here is intelligible only to one of my people and concerns no one else. My life is one of silence. Were I to speak, it would be otherwise. ‘A stone thrown into a stream cannot help but make a splash.’ ”
“But-”
“There is a reason, however, for me to speak now.” Itk t’Sa raised a porcelain-white, many-jointed finger. “You must have heard that we Pe Choi suffer from a sense of empathy: the ability to feel-and endure-the emotions of those we meet. In some cases this amounts almost to telepathy, particularly amongst our females.”
“You can see minds, then? Like a sorcerer?”
“Not the same. Not as some humans do, who pierce through the many skins of reality to draw force from the Planes Beyond. What I experience is different. When you first brought the slave into our tent-do you recall it? — you asked him to come inside, and I awakened from sleep to look upon him.”
“Yes?”
“For a moment, when he stood before me, I thought to see a Pe Choi, one of my own race.”
“A Pe Choi? A shape-changer? A Mihalli-!”
Itk t’Sa shook her long head, a very human gesture. “Not so. It was as though there were two beings there: a young male of my race and this youth of your species. When my eyes focussed the illusion was gone.”
“You spoke to him in your own tongue.”
“Yes, I was off guard. It was the Ch’ketk N’tu, the feeling, the empathy-there is no word… I felt that this slave was one of my own people, even though I knew this could not be so.”
Tlayesha turned to look at the slave. He sat by the tent-flap, attentive, without trembling. His eyes were fixed upon Itk t’Sa.
“I cannot enter his mind. Yet I know-I feel-that he is the victim not of a disease but of sorcery.”
“Sorcery! Oh, if only he could speak! I have tried everything, even simple gestures of yes and no, but each time he tries to communicate in any way he suffers a seizure.”
“More proof. Not damage to the brain, but a spell that binds him. Yet I think he has improved since he came to us?”
“Yes, much. When I first saw him he shook almost constantly, and he could neither eat nor hold his bowels. Now he is almost normal-until he is addressed…”
The Pe Choi rose and took up the lamp. She held it close to the slave’s eyes and moved it from side to side. Then she spoke again in her own harsh language. The slave’s pupils dilated, wavered. He tried to speak, but Itk t’Sa laid bony fingers upon his lips. “Whatever the spell is, it wears off. Slowly, slowly. In time… I can help him.”
Tlayesha took a deep breath, made up her mind, and launched into the rest of the story. This time she omitted nothing.
No one moved when she had done. The Pe Choi was a graceful statue of buttery-gold lamplight, the boy kneeling before her a mural from some temple wall.
“There are those in Purdimal who might aid you-him,” Itk t’Sa said carefully. “I cannot read your heart, yet I think that your motives are plain-to me, even if not to you.”
“My motives? Concern for a patient-fear for this poor boy-” “Cha! What is he to you? Go to the Palace of the Realm in Purdimal, girl, to any officer of the Omnipotent Azure Legion. Let them have this slave and do as they will! Or leave the matter to the soldiers of the Worm Prince-or to the Mihalli, or to the Yan Koryani, or to the Hu- bats! Is you Skein of Destiny so wretched that you would see it so soon tom asunder?’ ’
“I cannot! Never-!” Tlayesha felt hot anger rushing into her cheeks. She knew not what more to say.
“You see,” Itk t’Sa said dryly, “your motives are unclear to you-or were until now. My words were but a test.” She curled her tail around herself, as if to prepare for sleep.
The slave moved, then, and came forward to sit close before Tlayesha upon the sleeping mat, his eyes pools of shadow. She could not read his expression. He raised an arm and pointed to the Pe Choi.
“I do not think she will-can-aid you, at least not now,” Tlayesha said, “nor am I sure that I should. Whatever is woven for you lies in the hand of the Weaver. I am not able to do much myself, alone, one poor woman, not very brave-no mighty Hrugga to rescue you from whatever has been done to you.”
The boy cast about, then took one comer of her blue veil into his hands. Again he gestured, this time beyond the tent, toward the sleeping encampment. His lips moved, but no words came.
She did not know what he wanted. To see the deformity of her face-? That was the thing that always leaped first into her mind! She pulled the veil from his fingers. Or did he mean the colour! the blue of the Imperium, of the Omnipotent Azure Legion? His eyes held a hurt look, and she softened toward him.
“I did not mean it like that,” she exclaimed. “You-you know that I do not show my face? You have heard?”
He shook his head, but she could not tell what he meant. Then he reached out once more, very gently this time, and touched the edge of her veil. She did not snatch it away.
“I do not know what you want!” she cried almost despairingly.
But she knew what she wanted, what Itk t’Sa had hinted. She glanced over at the Pe Choi to see that the creature had turned away, head down upon her little upper arms, apparently asleep. Slowly, trembling herself, Tlayesha undid the clasp that held the veil to her hair. She drew it away from her face.
For a moment she saw admiration in his eyes, the look of any man who sees a lovely woman before him. Then, as always before, his eyes widened, and he made a gesture toward the lamp. Despair, self-loathing, hatred, all blew up before her as do leaves in a wind. Abruptly she raised the light and held it close before her face.
“You see!” she hissed. “You see!”
Her eyes were not brown, or black, or hazel, or amber, or even green, like the eyes of all the rest of humankind. They were a light sky-blue!
She expected the boy to recoil, as so many others had done. She found herself waiting, almost hoping, for him to shudder and turn away. Blue eyes, they said! Blue eyes! the sign of an impure child, the curse of Lady Avanthe! A witch, a loathsome and evil thing! The stylised villains of all of the rustic puppet shows had blue eyes! The legends abounded with monsters and sorcerers whose eyes were always blue!
But the boy did not retreat. He stared. Then he touched her hand. Suddenly he was the physician and she the patient. Two tears found their way down her cheeks, but his fingers came up to catch them there and wipe them away.
Slowly, as though she dreamed, Tlayesha let her veil fall away completely. She undid her tunic and helped the boy out of his clothing.
Itk t’Sa arose in the night to find the slave boy curled next to the human girl upon her mat. Feeling carefully with her mind, the Pe Choi sensed the passion, the release, and the calm that now covered them both as a blanket enfolds a child. She squatted down again upon her own mat and slept.
