Jo Clayton Diadem 08 The Snares of Ibex (v1.1)

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hurricane?
Ah. He straightened, swung around, clasped his hands behind him and began
examining the sky and the herringbone clouds that were beginning to take over
the blue. Blow coming? He answered himself. Long swells. That sky. He
sniffed at the air. Uh-huh. He swung back around. I ve seen a blow or two,
here and there. Now and then. What about this one? Coming at us? He scratched
at an eyebrow. At us or by us?
Lee s taking a look. I think it s awhile yet before things start kicking up.
They re tricky. He looked down at Aleytys. She doesn t look bothered about
much.
Shadith shrugged. Whatever. We better get started roping things down.
A pulse rippled along the powerful black body. Aleytys smiled. Never even when
she blew the Tikh asfour to dust and radiation never, ever, had she had such a
feeling of power. The squale hummed with pleasure as she stroked his brain,
she swore he was purring or was it singing? She nudged him out of the stream
and sent him straight to meet the storm. Despite his great size he was young,
not at his prime even yet, and he liked to play and his body was a delight to
him, so he was easy enough to send into a race against nothing but his own
strength.
He dropped lower, tasting the water until he found a layer he liked where he
was clear of the surface turbulence and went flashing along, brushing the
edges of the current, going faster and faster until he was far outpacing it,
driving through the water with powerful snaps of the mighty arms, faster and
faster until Aleytys was gasping and clinging to the brain, too numb to do
more than cling and exult in that speed and the violence of his passage, then
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he was flashing up, arcing through the air, expelling the air in his lungs,
sucking in fresh, arcing down again, plunging down and down, going down and
down endlessly and then he was curving up again, up until he was back at his
chosen depth, flicking along beside the stream, singing now, low creaking
basso songs, singing for sure, throwing out to the ocean and everything in it
the magnificence of himself. He was king of everything in range of his voice
and he knew it and he reveled in it and he made sure the rest of the world
knew it. Aleytys cheered, caught up in that overweening joy. The water grew
turbulent. The squale dropped lower, then lower again. He was getting restive.
And hungry. That bulk took a lot of feeding. Aleytys sighed and put away her
pleasure. Business now. Too bad. She drove her reluctant mount around and
around the turbulence, estimating time and using his length to measure how
broad it was, how fast it was traveling, what direction it was going. Two
hundred kilometers from ripple to ripple, the squale going his own length once
a minute roughly. She ducked him under and up into the eye so he could breath
and she could get a look at what was happening on the surface. Out of the
water his vision was less acute but still good enough to give her details of
wind and clouds and surging water, the feel of the monster, how it was
organized, what seemed to be driving it, enough to show her the books had not
exaggerated and neither had Shadith. The only thing even remotely comforting
was the direction of the storm. The eye was north of the current and traveling
just a hair north of east, so it and the strongest of the winds would pass
them by, but even the fringes were enough to turn her hair white. She expanded
her senses, trying to grasp more of the storm, but it was like trying to close
her hand about a shadow and the power in it rasped at her nerves.
The squale was buckling under her hold, losing his temper with this gnat
pricking at him. She held him until she had as much as she could grasp, then
let him flop over and go deep. Before she left him, she tickled him back to
his pleasure in himself until he was drifting lazily through the calm and
friendly deep, sniffing about for food to fill his demanding belly. With a
last affectionate touch, she floated loose then snapped back into her own
body.
Little, weak, ineffectual, clumsy, she sat up, ruefully comparing her present
form to the one she d just put off. It was not a cheerful thought, nor was the
information she had to report.
.
day 37
They huddled together in the shelter, Linfyar shaking with terror, all his
senses overwhelmed by the clamor outside, blind now as he d never been before,
blind as the others were in the blackness inside the groaning walls. He
climbed into Aleytys s lap and pressed against her shuddering and near
hysterical. The trees outside groaned and creaked and even over that noise and
the noise of the wind and the noise of the sea, she could hear crashes and
explosions as tree after tree broke and tore apart. The shelter made its own
noises, a continual creaking and thrumming, the wind breaking past the trees
to slam against the walls and pluck at the roof. And the island twisted,
rolled, bucked beneath them, beneath Aleytys, rain hammered at them. And the
storm roared, most of all it roared, engulfing them; they drowned in noise,
the small personal sounds of living utterly lost so that Aleytys had now and
then to touch herself to reassure herself about her reality, to convince
herself she hadn t melted away and become one with the storm.
And it went on and on endlessly until it seemed impossible that anything could
sustain that level of violence. On and on and on. Morning came, a subtle
graying of the blackness inside the shelter. Aleytys held Linfyar in her lap,
his small soft body lying hot against hers. She cupped her hand over his curls
and held his head against her breasts, slid her other hand up and down the
narrow back, soothing him, whispering comfort he couldn t possibly hear though
he was relaxed now, limp, heavy, hot against her, his ears pinched tight
against the clamor of the storm. He was asleep, deeply, profoundly asleep,
insulated by that sleep from the things that terrified him. And her leg was
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asleep. She didn t want to move it and disturb Linfyar, but the niggling
little pain was rapidly growing unbearable. She straightened her leg, the
splash and brush of the movement lost even to her ears in the storm noise,
clenched and unclenched her toes, tightened and loosened the muscles until the
tingling numbness went away. Linfyar moved and grumbled a few shapeless
sounds; she heard those. Mother s ears, she thought, smiled, but the pull of
her face told her it was more a grimace than a smile. She eased Linfyar onto
her other shoulder, rubbed at her back, wriggled about in the mud sloshing
under her. It seemed to her the noise around her was growing louder, the
roaring of wind and water against them almost but not quite swallowing the [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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