Bhotta's Tears: Book Two of the Black Bead Chronicles (24 page)

She tensed, suspecting she was not going to enjoy this game.

“Relax,” the boy said, tightening his grip. “We just want to see what you have in your pockets.”

The hard fingers ran down her neck and almost immediately found her omeh hidden below the edge of her collar. Bohea’s fingers followed the path of the omeh as it curved around her neck and then stopped over the large lump made by the black bead. She jerked under this unwanted familiarity. Only Amabel touched her omeh and not even Amabel touched the black bead.

Bohea gave her a hard look before he unbuttoned the top button of her tunic. It suddenly became imperative that he not make physical contact with her omeh. She snarled at him, baring her teeth, trying to twist free. Sam’s grip became painful.

Bohea ignored her as he pulled the collar aside to study what lay underneath. She watched his face. The slight shift in emotion was barely visible there; a narrowing of the eyes, an imperceptible hitch in his breath, a tremor in the muscles of his jaw. She felt the skin on her face grow hot, unable to hide her embarrassment. Now he knew the true depths of her shame. She glared at him, daring him to insult her as he had insulted Sam.

Bohea said nothing, nor did he meet her eyes. He merely re-buttoned her button and moved on. His hands ran down her clothing, his fingers quick and sure, as if he had done this a thousand times before. His fingers intruded in places that had not been touched by any but herself since she had learned to bath herself. She froze, shocked to her core. The touching was not the worst of it. The worst part was what was going on in his mind. She might have been a piece of meat for all the emotional involvement Bohea felt towards her. For the first time in her life, she felt less than human. Her distress flashed scarlet across the ambient but there was no one near who could hear her.
 

Chapter Twenty

Bohea emptied her pockets with smooth efficiency, examining each object before tossing it aside. He opened the small tin of dried fruit, dumping most of the contents on the ground at her feet. He did the same with a tin of dried meat. The casual waste was nothing compared to the indignities she was suffering but it outraged her more than her own distress and she clung to that anger in a world that was rapidly descending into chaos.

Forgotten detritus from the deep corners of her pockets found the light of day; her pocket knife, a stub of a stylus, a miniature mapper’s ruler, a handful of bits of stone and shell and an odd feather or two. All but the pocket knife were added to the scattered objects at her feet. The pocket knife went into a pouch on Bohea’s belt. She noted its location for future reference. Hayrald had made that for her with his own hands and she was going to have it back, no matter what.

He pulled a foray form from one of her lower pockets. Cheobawn looked at it in surprise. She had forgotten it was in there. She needed to clean out her pockets more often, it seemed. Bohea pause, unfolded it, and then grunted with surprise.

“What is that?” Sam asked, trying to hold her still against his body so he could get a better view of what the older man held in his hands.

“Looks like a recon map covered in mission notes. Military grade mapping. I thought you said the Highlands had no standing army, boy. This makes me think otherwise.” He looked up with a smile that had not even a trace of humor in it. “Tell me one thing. Has anything you ever said to me been true or should I gut you now and call it even?”

“No, no, you have it all wrong,” Sam stammered. “They are primitives. They have no weaponry more sophisticated than handmade knives and spears.” Sam let go of one of her arms and spun her around. “Tell him. Where did you get the map, Ch’che?” The intensity of the emotion around her surprised her, matched only by her confusion as to its source.

“It is just a blank form to practice on. It is nothing,” Cheobawn said, trying to defuse the tension she felt flying around her. Bohea grabbed her by her collar to pull her out of Sam’s hands, shaking her hard as he waved the foray form in front of her nose. “Who did you steal this from, little thief? Can you read this? Tell me what it means.”

Once more the ambient flashed red with her rising anger. She was starting to tire of the constant physical abuse.

“It is mine,” she hissed, grabbing for it. Bohea jerked it just out of her reach, his reflexes inhumanly fast. Garro drew near, his nose for strife unerring.

“Give her to me, sir. I can make her talk,” he wheezed.

“Do you want that, little thief? Do you? I will let him eat you, starting with your toes,” Bohea said, his own ambient marking him as a liar. Was this a strangely twisted game to him?

“Stop it!” Sam shouted, upset. He did not like the game, either.

“Mmmm, little girl toes,” growled Garro, pulling out his hunting knife. “Smoke them and wear them as a necklace, I will.”

“Shut up,” roared Sam. Understanding dawned in her mind as she looked between them. It was a game but only Bohea knew all the rules. He used that advantage, pitting those around him at each other so that he could watch the play. She hated this. She needed them to be quiet. She needed them to be calm. She needed them to listen.

Cheobawn did to them what she did to the bat eared fox, only this time so much energy came surging up out of the ambient it almost hurt as it arced through her body and burst out of her.

Sam blinked and fell silent, looking down at her as if she had just screamed at the top of her lungs. Bohea’s pristine box chirped in alarm. The Colonel raised an elegant eyebrow and gave her all his attention.

Cheobawn flinched from that look and turned to see if the scar-faced man had been affected. Garro looked dizzy. He sat down hard on a large boulder. It might have been because of something she had done or it might have been because a gray shadow now stained the edges of his mouth, clear to see in the gathering light. She glanced up at the sky. Dawn. She had run out of time. The mountain whispered things as it moved against them, out there in the shadows. Bear Under the Mountain had been very busy while her attention had been elsewhere.

She turned to meet Bohea’s eyes. He had a smile on his face that bordered dangerously near to being a full blown gloat.

“The Highlands don’t need a standing army, do they, little witch? They have you.” he said, the words purring over all her senses. Cheobawn cocked her head, listening hard as she considered him, in no hurry to set him straight.

“What must I do to make you listen?” she asked.

“You have my undivided attention, Lady,” Bohea said with a graceful bow. She scowled at him. He was playing with her again. Was everything to be a game, then?

“Why have you come here?” she asked him. “You honor nothing, not even death. What did you gain by killing Old Father Bhotta?”

“I came looking for you. The lizard was the bait. Fortuitously, it became the means to and end, as well. One must fulfill all legal contracts or leave oneself open to legal claims, after all.”

“Riddles. They exhaust my patience. Say it clearly or say nothing,” she snapped, only half listening.

Megan had somehow persuaded Herd Mother to let the Pack mount. Herd Mother, having listened most of the night to Cheobawn’s distress, knew exactly where to find her.

“You guessed who I was almost from the start, didn’t you? I have traveled between the stars to find you. I am an emissary. I represent the CPC. I am here at the behest of the ruling family. It is their deepest desire to make themselves known to your people that we might establish diplomatic channels. I believe, now that I have met you, that my mission can be counted as 100% successful. Wouldn’t you agree, Lady?”

“You double crossing son of a whore!” wheezed Garro. “You promised to make me rich beyond my wildest dreams. All we got so far is a handful of nearly worthless stones.”

Bohea smiled. With an elaborate flourish, he waved his hand at the dead Old Father. “There are your bloodstones. The readings go beyond the ability of my sensors to quantify. If you keep hacking away, I am fairly certain you will find your prize.”

“Huh?” Sam grunted in surprise, turning to stare at the dead animal. Garro roared to his feet, his knife in his hand. He staggered around the corpse and disappeared into the gaping wound in Old Father’s belly, the sound of his knife ripping through flesh loud in the still air. Sam took a couple of steps after Garro and then turned to look at her, a question on his face.

“What are we looking for?” he asked.

“There are nodules along all the joints of the spine and a large sac at the base of the skull.” Cheobawn said with a shrug, her eyes never leaving Bohea. “They are without value. The death of Old Father has tainted them beyond recovery. They must be destroyed.”

“Is that how it works, then?” Sam asked, his interest intense, his excitement only apparent to those who could hear him in the ambient. “The lizards gather the stones, depositing them inside an internal organ like a gizzard? So, you hunt the lizards to harvest their bloodstones? Clever.”

Cheobawn laughed. She had no time to explain the physiology of an entire ecosystem so she pressed an image into Sam’s mind. Of a bhotta grazing upon every living thing of the mountain, converting the trace amounts of aluminum salts that tainted the meat into liquid crystal, the furnace inside the lizard’s fourth stomach refining the salts, the liquid filling the bloodstone sacs, building the crystals one molecule at a time, one layer at a time, year after year, excreting the excess stones in its dung, to be gathered up by the children of the domes, a game of find-the-button as wide as a planet, played with bloodstones. The best stones were the ones plucked from around the bleached bones of bhotta who died of old age, the dens hunted out in the high mountains, the sets prized because the bhotta had tuned the stones with its life and its mind. If one knew the trick, one could make them sing in harmony.

“They are organic?” Sam said in disbelief.

“They are bhotta poop,” she said and then she began to giggle at the look of repugnance on the boy’s face.

Chapter Twenty One

Sam stared at her, thinking perhaps that she was playing a joke on him. “Go. Look, if you don’t believe me,” Cheobawn said. “It would not take much to finish what you started with the skull. The best ones lie just at the top of the spine.”

Sam spun around, searching for something. Spying what he needed, he crossed to the jumble of downed trees and jerked on the handle of a small hatchet imbedded in the remains of a tree trunk. Crossing to Old Father Bhotta’s side, he began chopping away at the jagged edges of the skull. She looked away, unwilling to watch. Old Father felt like a friend now. It was hard watching his body be defiled.

Garro found his first stone. Holding it up in the soft light of dawn, he whooped in ecstasy. From the frenzy in his voice and the tones that bled into the ambient, it seemed as if he liked bloodstones more than he liked hurting small things.

“Walk with me, Lady,” Bohea said, holding out his hand. She considered the man before her. He was not to be trusted, no matter what he said, but what would it hurt to listen? Perhaps she would find truth between the lies. She was in need of an Elder who was not afraid to tell her everything she needed to know.

She shrugged and gave him her hand. He tucked it into the inside of his elbow and guided her away from the sounds of carnage. His feet followed the great curve of the stream bank, his manner relaxed and casual, as if the sand bar had become an elegant garden in his mind.

“May I ask you a few questions?” he asked politely. She peered quizzically into his face, wondering at the abrupt change in his manner towards her.

“Only if you answer my own,” she said.

“It would only be fair,” he agreed. “Where to start? There are so many things that itch at my curiosity. Why are the stones useless?”

“They cannot be tuned. Old Father’s death has become imbedded in the matrix of the crystals. No priestess would dare touch them.”

Things moved impatiently in the shadows under the leaves on the other side of the creek. She chose to ignore them for now.

“So. The stones the Highlands trade are not raw stones. They have been altered in some way. Is that right? How?”

“Who can tell? The Mothers are full of secrets. All Mora will tell me is that what goes down the Escarpment has no value. Perhaps they are merely orphan stones, pretty but otherwise useless. What do Lowlanders do with bloodstones?”

“Mostly,” Bohea said, his voice filled with disdain, “they end up in the collections of obscenely wealthy men to be draped about the necks of their vacuous wives and mistresses. The industrial grade stones are scooped up by electronics industries, the red stones ending up as robotic components. The Scerrons like the rarer dark bloodstones so much they take stones in lieu of credits as part of the payment on their contracts.”

“I do not understand what you are saying, sometimes,” she said, keeping a tight rein on her annoyance. “What is a Scerron?”

“They are a sentient, non-human species hired by the CPC to act as pilots and navigators, making star travel possible,” he said succinctly. “They do their job well because they are adepts.” He said the last, giving her a pointed look, as if she would understand his meaning.

“What is an adept?” she asked patiently, trying to peel back the layers of his answers.

“They are like you. Psionically gifted. It is part of the reason they are immensely skilled at grabbing a point in space and dragging a ship across an almost infinite distance in the blink of an eye.”

Listening to Bohea was like listening to a bad recording in which every other word turned into static but she understood something very important. The High Mothers were sending dark stones down the Escarpment. Even if they were raw and untuned, their psionic properties would be considerable. Was it by accident or design that they found their way through the labyrinth of Lowland society into the hands of a race of off-world Ears? Cheobawn wondered at the nature of the games the Coven played. For all that Mora pretended to be a parochial matriarch, it seemed she was in fact playing a game that spanned all of human space. Until Cheobawn knew more, she could not reveal the nature of her Mothers’ subterfuge.