‘BDL isn’t going to like it.’
‘That’s why I can’t do it,’ Don had whispered. They pretty well control me. I know damned well my Priory reports where I go, what I do. Not just me. All Explorers. No. It’s got to be someone else who does it. Someone BDL doesn’t control.’
Together they had crafted a hasty plan, every step of which made the danger more and more clear. When they parted, it was as co-conspirators. Wheels were in motion, very secret wheels. Donatella returned to Northwest with a sense of mixed relief and apprehension, taking refuge in routine duties, everyday activities. Behind her in Splash One, her friend would move things along.
There had been one loose end. She had had to fill out a ‘lost or stolen equipment’ report to cover the synthesizer that she had taken to Splash One and returned without. But after that, nothing had happened. For weeks, nothing at all.
Until ten days ago when she had been sent out on a routine two-day trip to explore a pocket of deepsoil behind an offshoot ridge of the Redfang Range. It had seemed an odd assignment, even at the time. The offshoot, Little Redfang, was only half a day’s travel from Northwest. The Passwords to a good part of the range were Donatella’s own work, and most of them had been part of the repertory for almost a decade. All that was wanted this time was some minor variation that would get wagons through the Fanglings in a slightly different direction from that taken formerly – a route that Don could see no sensible justification for – and virtually any apprentice Explorer could have done the job.
Still, an assignment approved by one’s Prior was an assignment not to be argued with. She remembered being preoccupied with her personal problem, worrying at it relentlessly as she rode. The plan was dependent on so many variables, so many little things she couldn’t control. She was having second thoughts, trying to decide if she should make another trip to Splash One or whether it was too late at this point to do anything but ride it out. Indecision was not an ordinary thing with Donatella, it irritated her. Explorers couldn’t be indecisive. Those that were didn’t last long. The morning’s trip made the matter no clearer, moreover, and by noon she reached the peril-point and had to force herself to set the subject aside. She told herself she would think about it again that night, over her campfire.
It took most of the afternoon working with synthesizer and computer, trying permutations of a few phrases that seemed likely, to come up with a new score on the music box that quieted things down very nicely. It was a fairly simple variation of a score she knew well, one she felt competent to use in singing herself through the range – just as a test, and certainly not something that was required of an Explorer – and it was early evening when she started.
The way she chose was a narrow ledge along a towering face and above a sheer drop into a gorge of living crystal. The gorge gleamed with amber and hot orange lights through its generally winey mass. All the Redfang Range was bloody, as evil looking in its way as the Enigma, though a whole lot simpler to get through. Her narrow ledge wouldn’t do as a trip-trail, but it would serve to get her into the deepsoil pocket, after which she would find some way out that wagons could travel. As she sang her way along the ledge, she told herself that hell must look much like the gorge below her. The lower the sun dropped, the more it looked as though it were on fire.
She didn’t hurry during the transit. Afterward she realized it was entirely likely that someone had followed her from the peril-point. Certainly that someone knew something about Tripsinging, for the attack came at precisely that moment when she moved out of peril. A black clad, black masked form, barely visible in the dusk, came from slightly to one side and behind her.
If it hadn’t been that she turned just at that moment in response to some tiny sound; if it hadn’t been that the sun glinted on the knife blade as she turned, she would not have seen her attacker at all.
As it was, she dropped without thought, rolled, pulled up her legs to protect her belly and her arm to protect her throat, felt a moment’s searing pain along the arm, kicked up and out with both legs, and saw the figure soar over her into the air above the gorge. She had reacted without thought, reacted as she had been taught, as she had practiced a thousand times in the self-defense courses that, since the Jut Massacre, all Explorers had had to take over and over again.
The weapon clattered onto the ledge, but the attacker fell endlessly, without a sound.
For a short time after that, Don was so busy applying emergency care to her gashed arm that she had no time to wonder about the attacker. When the bleeding was stanched, she huddled over a tiny fire, terrified that the assassin might not have been alone. Then, when no further assault came, she began to wonder why she had been attacked at all.
At first light she had attempted to climb to the place the body lay, so far below as to be virtually invisible. If she could find out who, she might find out the reason.
After an hour or two, she gave up. Someone might get into the gorge with a parachute or a balloon. They would
