Water Witch Read online

  Deza stared up at it awhile, blinking against the bright sunlight, and then crawled back under the overhang. There didn’t seem to be any way out of the sinkhole, but oddly she did not feel particularly worried by that realization. She did not feel hungry, and if she was beginning to be a little thirsty, there was that comforting sound of nearby water to be explored. In fact, considering that she had had heat prostration or something and then fallen twenty feet or so, she felt remarkably well.

  She sat down cross-legged in the sand. The sand still felt warm, abnormally so. Out of the sunlight permanently, it should be clammy and cold. Deza wondered if there were a hot spring somewhere farther underground. She could take a bath, if she could find her way to it. If she could find a way out of this comfortable but cramped hideyhole.

  —You know the way, Deza,—she heard her father say so clearly in her head that she was certain he had spoken to her from the slipspace.

  She was instantly on her feet, nearly cracking her head on the rock. “Father!” she shouted, not caring what avalanches she brought on. “Where are you? Talk to me!”

  There was no answer. No flicker of one. She sat back down and went over the voice in her head till it was clear it had not been her father’s voice, but an extraordinarily sharp memory.

  “He said that to me when we were escaping from the Red City,” she said aloud, and the karst dreams came back to her, not in fevered pieces, as they had forced their way physically into Deza’s conscious mind, but as connected memory now. She wondered why the remembering had been so violent. It nearly killed me, she thought, and found that she remembered that part of it, too, the fever and the dizziness, falling off her pony, the final blackness. The Tycoon didn’t even have to finish me off, she thought, I was already gone. Which made his rolling her over a cliff a little more understandable, but not much. Her father must have kept those memories clamped down tight—post-hypnotic commands, repressive synapses, maybe—so tightly only the scene of the crime was strong enough to force them out, nearly destroying Deza in the process. But why?

  Because I am the princess of the Red City, she thought, and knew it was true. The memory was there, Deza knew, complete now, jumbled forward and then put in access by her hours of exhausted sleep. She had only to sit here in this warm place with her back against the comforting rock and put it all in order.

  There had been trouble for a long time. Deza was too young to understand the meaning behind her father’s unpredictable actions, but she could sense the tension, the uncertainty of each day’s activities, which before had always been so planned. Now Deza might be allowed to go down to the computer grids with Vira or she might be kept at home, and no reasons given. No reason was given either for the sudden move out of their high, balconied apartments to the far darker rooms down on the floor of the canyon and against the overhanging walls. And all the whispered conferences between her father and his lieutenants, between her father and Vira, the bundle of blue cloak, extra clothes and food kept under Deza’s bed, the sound of panic in Vira’s voice when Deza sneaked over to the computer center to play. Certain words floated through the conversation and sometimes Deza’s own name. Her father’s voice was always kind and patient when he spoke to her, but when talking to the others he was abrupt and even unreasonable. And he was gone all the time.

  And then she had found Vira dead, her throat cut in Deza’s bedroom, the cloak and extra clothes scattered around her, ripped and slashed as though the murderers had thought the bundle she carried was Deza herself. Deza’s headlong flight through the darkened rooms, the cold hand reaching out to draw her back into the darkness. Her memories were jumbled, muddied, and Deza sensed they would never be completely clear.

  Only when she had realized the terrifying hand belonged to Chuma, her father’s faithful lieutenant, had her memory taken on any kind of clarity, and by then they were far underground. She must have been handed through some kind of secret passage in the apartment into the solid rock of the canyon behind, which must have been the reason for her father’s moving them there.

  She remembered a long dark stairway down which she held onto Chuma’s hand with one hand and a smooth wall with the other, and then her father’s voice, and she had somehow managed in spite of the dark to wriggle out of Chuma’s grasp and fling herself into her father’s arms.

  He gave way completely. She could not, from all her conscious memories, remember any time, no matter how filled with emotion, when her father was not sardonic, almost offhand with her. But then he had been nearly hysterical. He blubbered out something only half-intelligible about Vira and the open door, and the grown Deza realized he must have thought it was she that had been murdered and not her nurse.

  Of course! It had to have been the little girl Deza they were after. She had assumed for some reason through all the trauma of the visions she’d had on the karst that it had been her father in danger, she escaping with him. But it was the other way around. Children’s nurses are not murdered in order to find out where the father is. And Vira had not told—Deza wondered if the game of hide-and-seek had been a last minute hopeless attempt to get the little girl to hide. She shuddered at how close her cheerful playing had brought her to Vira’s murderers. And Vira, cruelly murdered to save her. She had always thought (correction: had been carefully taught by her father) that she must trust no one, that she must rely only on her own wits in trouble because ALL men could be bought if the price were high enough. What about Vira? she asked silently. What about Chuma, who led me to you?

  Deza’s father had seemed almost unable to speak, and when Deza had patted his shoulder in the dark, her hand had felt as it had when she touched Vira. She had started to cry, and her father had squeezed her hand and whispered to her not to say anything about the wound.

  After that, her memories were not so much unclear as unformed. With no light to make touchstones for the mind to remember, the long trip underground was like time spent in a closet. Chuma led the way. Deza remembered that once he suggested lighting a torch that he had brought along. Her father had objected strongly, saying there was too much risk while they were still so close to the Red City. Deza, remembering, wondered if the wound he had not mentioned was the reason. Chuma had not pressed the point, and had begun a stream of quiet conversation with Deza as they felt their way along the passages.

  Deza sat up, hunching against the rock for warmth against a sudden change in the air outside. Trust nobody, her father had said, because everybody can be bought. What about Chuma, Deza thought, did he betray us, too? Then she was drawn back into the memory almost against her wishes because she knew now what was coming.

  Chuma had offered to carry her at some point in the endless blackness, and her father had said no, so that she was very angry with her father because she was so tired and to be carried piggyback by Chuma was just what she had been wanting. Even when he explained that Chuma needed to keep his hands free for sudden dropoffs, that she might hit her head on an overhanging rock, that soon they would need to crawl and possibly even swim and Chuma was not to be burdened with her,. she had sulked over it, and her legs had seemed as if they wouldn’t hold her up.

  She had dragged behind, whining, and her father had come back and given her a swat on the rump that had echoed like a terrible beating against the rock. She had cried, an awful sound underground, and then trudged on between Chuma and her father, with an occasional hiccupping sob that was supposed to elicit pity.

  It did. Her father gave her a stick of something sweet to suck on, and Chuma began a comforting monologue that cheered her immensely. He told her about the dark passages they were travelling through and about the wonderful places they would be coming to, silver steps and rooms filled with stone snow and glittering ice, a lake so deep and clear no one knew its bottom except the flashing fish, pale as ghosts, that swam in it.

  Once or twice her father interrupted the narrative, concerned that they had taken a wrong turning. “We should be coming to the steps soon.”

&nb
sp; “Of course,” Chuma said. “We have not come as far as you think. The long corridor comes first.”

  “But it should have narrowed by now.”

  The arguments led nowhere. Her father was not willing to risk a light, which was the only way to determine their location, and Chuma was unwilling to waste valuable time by turning back. He maintained angrily that he knew where he was, and finally Deza’s father gave in, and they trudged ahead through the impenetrable dark.

  “Soon we will reach the great crystal lake, little Deza,” Chuma said, “where stone flowers bloom beneath the clear surface like a garden of jewels. It is a great lake, so far across that we must take a little boat with a bottom as clear as the lake so that it is like sailing on air.”

  “No,” the sturdy little girl said and stopped so short her father nearly crashed into her.

  “Deza!” her father said irritably. “This is no time to be naughty. We’re almost there.”

  “No,” Deza said stubbornly, and folded her arms across her chest. ‘Don’t say anything more,’ the remembering Deza cautioned, but she already knew that the little girl, by some incredible luck, had thought that by saying ‘no’ she was being perfectly clear. And by some even more amazing coincidence, her father had done exactly the right thing.

  “Go on ahead, Chuma,” he said. “See if the boat’s there. Deza and I are going to have a little talk.” He had said it with just the right touch of exasperation, and Chuma had no argument for not moving ahead, his steps echoing on the loose pebbles of the passage.

  Deza’s father took the little girl by the shoulders and said, “You are heading for a spanking, young lady, unless you get moving immediately. Don’t you want to get to the lake?”

  “We’re not going to the lake,” Deza said, and felt her father’s hands tense on her shoulders. “It isn’t this way.”

  “How do you know?” her father said in a deadly whisper.

  “There isn’t any water. There has to be water for a lake, doesn’t there?”

  “You can feel the water?” her father said in disbelief. “How long have you been able to feel it?”

  Deza frowned. “Always. Can’t you?”

  “Where is water?” her father asked, fumbling for something in a pocket.

  “Behind us,” Deza said, and her father felt the direction she was pointing along the length of her outstretched arm.

  The passage flared suddenly into light and as suddenly went dark again. Deza had only the briefest impression of rock walls with a high ceiling before her father had put the tiny pocket flare out again. Then her father’s hands were on her shoulders again, clutching at her. “Deza,” he whispered urgently. “You must stay here and you must be very quiet.”

  “I’m afraid,” said Deza, answering him in that same terrible whisper that echoed ominously from the rock. He lifted her into a niche in the rock. “Wait for me,” he said, and went to kill Chuma.

  That’s me now, Deza thought. Surely I didn’t know that as a child. She tried to remember what she must have felt, huddling in the high narrow niche, but she could not separate it from the truth of what her older mind could make of the memories. The brief moment of light had shown her father all he needed to know. Even though the little girl had never been in this vast labyrinth of underground rooms and passages, she was able to glimpse that the corridor they were in was manmade. It looked no different from any of a hundred corridors Deza had played in in the Red City. Chuma was not leading them to safety. He was simply marking time until the soldiers arrived, or worse, leading them straight into the arms of Vira’s murderers. One memory was definite: even at age three, the little girl knew exactly what was going to happen next. She was not shivering at being abandoned or left to shapeless monsters in the dark. She was only afraid that her father might not be able to kill Chuma and that the hands that lifted her out of the niche would smother her again with their immenseness.

  I was a very smart little girl, Deza thought. She wondered momentarily at her father’s shock when she told him she could feel the water through her cheeks. It must have been the first time she’d told him about it, though she could not reach farther back to remember a time when the water-readings had not been a part of her. Her father had seemed inordinately excited, as if her gift were something extraordinary. He had always told her later that it was the result of her Red City ancestry, that everyone from the Red City had it, hinting that it was through her mother that her inheritance came and not her father. He had always given her the impression that he had never even been there. These memories contradicted that. And Radi and the others from the Red City had shown no aptitude for water-witching, though Radi was posing as a priest.

  Radi. Deza had not thought of him since that last urgent message to Edvar. The Tycoon had said he’d left the compound with Harubiki, and Deza had known that was a dangerous thing for him to do, that Harubiki was his enemy as well as hers. But, oddly, she could not feel any panic now, even though he might at this moment be more helplessly trapped than she was.

  “There is a way out of this,” her father seemed to say, though now she knew she was not really hearing his present voice, “and you can find it.” She felt no urgency for anything except the memories which she was ravelling like a long string with some treasure at the end of it.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Something was wrong. More wrong than his being captured by Sheria and her accomplice the Tycoon.

  The echoes from the guards’ boots had been sharp and close, and flambeau light glinted off flecks of quartz in the limestone walls instead of being gobbled by darkness as happened in the caverns of home, but even though these caverns beneath the Tycoon’s compound were not so immense, they were as cool as a wine cave under the Red City. Too cool, cold. The manacles they clamped to his wrists were made of Kalmarran steel, but they felt like ice and their touch wracked his body with painful shivers. The smell of mbuzim was strong in the chilled air and sometimes Radi could hear the distant bawl of a lonesome kid, or was it the sounds of his own moans he heard?

  “Radi! Radi, wake up!”

  I wasn’t asleep, he thought, then knew that he had been asleep for a moment, just like a babe who didn’t have a care in the world. This was no way for a soldier from the Red City to behave. He struggled to sit up, wondering when he’d lain down, or fallen.

  “Drink.” Edvar was forcing the vinegary wine from his flagon into Radi’s mouth. “More,” the boy commanded. “Every drop. There’s a peketa wound on your neck.”

  Finally Radi understood. He was cold in cave air temperatures he should be accustomed to because he was sweating away his body’s moisture, his sweat glands running amok from the peketa ‘s poison. The treachery of the little devils’ bites was that they were not painful. Deza had played her little swindle at the compound gate just right. He hadn’t felt the bite at all, though he must have gotten the bite while he was buried. But the drilling tail didn’t even sting, and if the victim’s mind were preoccupied with other matters like treason and a faithless woman who was also princess as Radi had been, he did not stop to wonder that he needed to urinate frequently. Now he realized that his bladder ached, as if he’d been drinking beer all night. He hadn’t had enough of Edvar’s wine to make him feel that way. The peketa’s poison had stimulated his kidneys like adrenalin stimulated the heart. Radi drained Edvar’s flagon. Better his innards worked hard on liquid he could afford to lose than sponge it from his already thirsting tissues.

  “You’ll need more,” Edvar said. His chains rattled as he shook the last drop into Radi’s mouth.

  ”They’re not likely to bring us more,” Radi said. Edvar nodded glumly. “I think my father will make them let me go in the morning, but…”

  “I won’t last that long without more to drink,” Radi finished for him. Again Edvar nodded. “Don’t look so sad, my young friend,” Radi said. “We’ll just have to recycle what we do have.”

  “Pardon?” Edvar said.

  “You heard me. If y
ou did indeed travel with the desert hunters, you must know how they manage to survive a peketa bite.”

  Edvar frowned. “I saw a man bitten. They gave him mbuzi blood to drink. That was bad enough.”

  Radi grunted. “Well, this is worse, but it works. Hand me the empty flagon.”

  Edvar did as he was bade, but turned his back while Radi filled it. For awhile his bladder would cause no discomfort, but filling the flagon did nothing to slake the sweat, nor did it ease the pain in his lower back. A soft cushion would be nice for the pain, but there wasn’t so much as a rag to comfort him in these deep caves. At least they had left a round flambeau behind. Radi was no stranger to the utter black of caves, but that would have been small comfort. It worried him, too, that any enemy would be thoughtful enough to light a dungeon. Maybe prisoners were allowed to see their surroundings to convince them there was no hope of escape. The heavy manacles were chained to the limestone by bolts burrowed deeply into the limestone, their grip expanded by explosives, and as if that were not enough to hold them on their tiny ledge, an impossible crevasse separated the cell from the main tunnel. A bridge of waffled metal had been drawn to the other side and lay there tantalizingly. Edvar followed his gaze.

  “Even if the chains were long enough to allow it, neither of us could possibly jump that far,” he said. “Can’t climb down either. But I’m sure Father will let me go in the morning. He’s just trying to frighten me. Sometimes he thinks that’s more effective than punishment. It’s like the time he sent me out into the desert with the hunters because I spoke up for a native servant. He…”

  “He murdered Deza,” Radi said. The wine he’d drunk was beginning to clear his head of the fever throb, but remembering that Deza was dead almost made him wish the fever would rise and burn out the ache in his mind that was Deza. Thinking of her was more painful than any physical ills could be.