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survived hunger and she d survived thirst. She settled herself to endure.
And grew bored with that in minutes. She began making tiny tentative nibbles
at the forces binding her, testing her various skills to see if a possible
ignorance of such skills could give her a window to work through.
Each small nibble brought a response from the women; they blocked access to
her talents, blocked all attempts at outreach. She had the reserve pool
seething in bare control, knew how dangerous the powerpool could be if she
held it unused for too long, but it was her greatest chance for survival so
she refused to bleed it away.
Her passive receptors worked well enough, although somewhat numbed and slow.
She could sense the hostility in the women guarding her, a hostility
especially hot in the younger one who watched her with a personal rancor
Aleytys couldn t understand. What surprised her more, though, was the lack of
curiosity, especially in the elder zel. It seemed to her that curiosity should
be a driving force in any intelligent being; the probing of the Blight for new
plants and animals and insects had to be the result of some sort of curiosity.
Perhaps curiosity wasn t quite the right word. Perhaps that search was so long
institutionalized into the culture of the tribe it was in a way instinctive.
Wasps, she thought. Complex behavior that looks like intelligence but is only
wiring, a program. That doesn t seem to fit what Esgard wrote. Or does it?
Don t know enough to judge.
Her Wolff implants were powered up, the sensors drawing in data without
disturbing her guardian zel; she located a score of large lifeforms moving
past her tree or lingering near it. Three or four more moved about above her,
something that would have puzzled her except for her dredged-up memories of
Maeve s forest people. She slanted a glance at the chanters and smiled,
knowing she could stun them if she could just free herself from the vine.
The zel sat cross-legged murmuring a near inaudible series of nonsense
syllables. Aleytys knew it as nonsense because her translator didn t manifest
itself; even the most effective psi dampers she d come up against had never
managed to suppress its operation. The young one glanced at her, hate in her
dark eyes, went back to rubbing her thumb over and over a small shining
smoothstone, her chiseled lips moving about the nonsense syllables, tasting
them with a sort of triumph.
She edged onto one buttock and swung her tethered ankles around so she could
reach the coils of clingvine binding those ankles. She felt it throb and jerk
a little as she stroked her fingertips along the uppermost sections, teasing
at the vine a little with the tractor function grown into the fingers of her
left hand tiny fibers wound round the stunner fibers (their minute projectors
nested flat beneath her nails), reaching up her arm and down her body to the
organic power cells implanted in her buttocks. The Wolff surgeons had worked
their minor magic mostly on her left hand which was marginally clumsier and
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weaker than her right. She came close to being ambidextrous but was not quite;
there was a measurable difference between her right- and left-hand skills. She
stroked her right hand (with its heat and depth sensors) along the coils and
sought to probe into the vine by a mixture of active and passive perceiving.
But the zel by the door grew rapidly aware of what she was doing and clamped
the net tighter on her brain.
She sighed, stretched her legs in front of her and wondered what she could do
to escape a growing boredom almost as numbing as the drugged smoke.
She tried again to reach Harskari. Again there was nothing. She examined the
zel. The painting on their shaven heads was an intricate knotting of vines
outlining eyeshapes with flowers, insects or small beasts painted in the
openings. The design on the heads of the two zel were similar but not
identical. Motifs were the same, but the hands that painted them were
manifestly different. On the elder s head there was an infinity of fine,
almost finicky detail with delicately shaded colors. On the other the vines
had vigor and simplicity, as if drawn with slashing strokes that only a
skilled hand kept from disaster. The colors were bold, unshaded, demanding.
The robes they wore were crudely made, far more so than the fitted leather
tunics of the warrior band. Two rectangles of coarsely woven white cloth, sewn
at top and sides, leaving holes for head and arm. There were wrinkles and
stains on the white, especially under the knotted belt tied round the waist.
Hand loomed, uneven, weaving of the simplest kind, no sort of embroidery. The
robes weren t even hemmed; threads straggled out from the ragged edge, bits of
yellowed grass were caught by the cloth fibers. It had to be deliberate, this
roughness, something to do with their calling, their talent.
But that was speculation. Aleytys smiled. Angels and pin-heads again, she
thought.
The eyes of the younger zel came back to Aleytys again and again, dark eyes,
darker even than the chocolate brown of Shadith s new eyes. They had a matte
umber flatness that was as opaque as a stretch of obsidian. The elder zel s
eyes were a mud color with a bit of yellow in them when the light hit them
right.
The younger zel radiated a fierceness barely controlled. She d cut my throat
in a minute if something weren t stopping her. The older was not filled with
hate so much as with a sheltered, shuttered certainty of rightness. It oozed
from her like melted butter from a biscuit. She was gelled, immobile, no
feeling in her, no emotion in her to be directed toward Aleytys. As far as
Aleytys could read her, she simply refused to admit the outsider to her life.
Neither one offered much opportunity for rapprochement, but Aleytys began
after a while to think that she preferred the younger one s active malevolence
to the utter indifference of the older. She closed her eyes; her head felt
thick and drear, scattered haphazard into bits and pieces. She drew in a
breath, filled her lungs, drew her shoulders up and back to pull in more air.
She held the breath, seeing the lined gentle face of the man who d taught her
how to calm her anger so long ago. Several lifetimes ago, she thought,
remembering the sullen lonely child she d been. She emptied her lungs,
scolding herself for inattention, focusing in on the exercises until she was
purring along at a slow calm pace, most irritations brushed aside, all of her
focused on her breath.
And a yellow glow lit the back of her mind, a glow that wavered then
strengthened to become Harskari s bright amber gaze.
Aye, Mother, Aleytys said aloud, her voice and her body tranquil. The two
zel stirred as she spoke, the older settled back without further reaction,
though the younger scowled, perhaps because she didn t understand the words
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