Charles Ingrid - marked man 02 The Last Recall (12 page)

She set the rat on Stanhope's knees. "I want you to kill it," she said. "Burn an ulcerous hole in its side, turn its flesh to decay. Or maybe you'll choose to close its throat up and choke it to death. Or still its heart. However you want to do it. But kill it.''

The beige furred creature had been somebody's pet, no doubt, for it sat now on Stanhope's lap totally unafraid. It looked up with dark eyes, whiskers still atrem-ble.

"I can't—" Stanhope seemed out of breath. "I can't

do that!"

Thomas stood very still, wondering what her game was. She was a Healer and she had hoped Stanhope would follow in her tracks. Was she trying to show the boy the other side? Or was she speaking to Thomas as well, things she should not be saying to him in front of others. Anger and hurt both welled in him and he fought to keep them from showing. He must not upset or influence Stanhope in any way.

"Of course you can," she coaxed. "Remember when you set that leg. How you felt where it was wrong and you just 'nudged' it back into place. Now I'm telling you to feel where it is right . . . and 'nudge' it out of place."

Stanhope twisted his head to one side. "Nooo," he said. "I couldn't—" His eyes got wide as his thoughts explored the possibilities.

He
could.
Thomas knew the thought as if he'd originated it himself. He could turn the heart inside out instead of calming it. He could shift bones, clench guts or lungs. He could
kill.
He watched as Stanhope lifted a hand and cupped it over the rat, torn between petting it or crushing it.

The boy looked at Lady again. "I—I—"

"You can do it," she said evenly.

She could do it. She had, in desperation once or twice, to save lives. It was not a Talent Blade had or wanted, but it was a Talent that could exist. Why would she think using a Talent to kill any cleaner than using your hands? Why would she expose him to ridicule like this, through a candidate's testing?

Stanhope sighed deeply. Then he sat up straight. "No," he said. "I won't do it."

Lady reached out crisply, scooped up the rat, and deposited it back in her apron. She stood up and walked out of the room without another word.

Stanhope looked after. Then he bowed his head again and Thomas heard the boy begin to sob.

Franklin dropped his hand to his student's shoulder. "We'll be back in a few minutes," he said gently, "to tell you if you passed." He hurried after Lady Nolan.

Thomas hung back. He put his hand on Stanhope's head, over the tightly knit hair. "It's not over until it's over," he said.

The boy looked up, wet streaks over his face. He just shook his head.

* * *

Lady stood in the kitchen, drinking a dipper of water. In the doorway, he caught up with Franklin, who seemed afraid to approach the healer. Thomas good-naturedly jostled him aside. But the young Protector remained in shock. Lady looked over at him.

She set the dipper down on the sink. "What is it, Brown?"

"Good God, Lady. Did you have to destroy him? Wouldn't it have been enough to have just failed him?"

"Who says I failed him?"

"But—but—"

She nailed him with that blue-eyed, brown-eyed stare. "Would you rather find him capable of destroying you? A healer is a healer. Not a murderer. Not a cold-blooded killer. But the very Talent that makes one a healer can be turned inside out, corrupted, misused ... if the person holding it is capable of doing that."

"Shit," Franklin said and sat down weakly on a kitchen stool. "You mean you passed him."

"Of course, I did. With flying colors. He knew exactly what he was capable of, and repudiated it." Lady briskly took the rat out of her pocket and put the animal in a tiny woven cage. She looked at Thomas. "I'd say he passed the Fetch as well, but I'm baffled as to what you were doing."

"Just checking his common sense. Sometimes a Protector has to rely more on that than anything else."

She snorted in a most unwomanly way and added, "You should talk."

He shrugged ruefully, moved past her to the sink, and got a dipper of water himself. The barracks reeked of smoke and it was drying to the throat. He would not say to her in front of Franklin what he wanted to say. Was he such a monster to her that she would scar Stanhope forever to keep him from turning to Blade's path? How could she love him if she despised him that much?

Franklin touched the back of his hand to his forehead. "I judge him passed, as well, then. One down, three to

go."

They reached their last candidate late in the afternoon. Thomas paced unhappily by the open wall as Barbara came in and sat demurely. She was dark-eyed and dark-haired, a homely placid girl, her hair braided back. She was all practicality, always had been. She looked up at him now and flashed a smile that was dazzling.

He did not smile back, but nodded at her. She dimmed her expression a bit, then settled herself in the chair. As the last, shed been listening at the wall while Stanhope had been raked over and then Barnaby and then Sue and now it was her turn. She thought she knew what to expect. Her abilities were bare minimum, Thomas knew. She could Project, Block, and Read the truth—the least that could be asked of a Protector. She might open up some more Talents in her later years, women often did.

Thomas looked out. The troopers had not come back yet and he did not like it. The longer he waited for someone else to do his job, the less his chances of bringing Alma back alive. "Let's get this over with," Blade said.

"What's the matter?"

"I've got two hours of tracking light left. No one's come back yet. I'm going to have to go out and get them."

Lady paused, something unseen passing between them. Finally, she turned to Franklin. "I'll start."

Franklin nodded.

Thomas paid little attention as Lady had the girl Truth-read a statement she made, or as Franklin had her Project the visual hallucination that the wall had been repaired. The illusion was weak, not her best strength, but she also Projected confidence, an emotion with it, something not many could do.

Thomas had not decided yet how to test her as the hallucination faded. The girl swiveled about again to look at him and he stopped pacing as the wall resumed its wrecked appearance, his boots grinding in the debris.

As quick as the young people were, they had not yet caught on to the pattern of the three testers. There had to be at least one failed question among the three—to see how the candidates coped with failure as well as success. Stanhope's had been spectacular, the other two very quiet. Barbara had passed both Franklin's test and Lady's. It was now up to Thomas to choose something at which she'd obviously fail, to gauge how she dealt with frustration. For a relatively ungifted Talent such as Barbara, the frustrations would be far greater than her successes.

He paced over in front of her and stopped. He pulled his cuff back, exposing the scarred markings on his wrist. With his left hand he touched first his wrist and then his brow.

"Discern the meanings of my markings," he said.

Barbara looked at him. One of her braids lay over her shoulder. In concentration, she pinched the end of it between her thumb and forehead and absently began chewing on it.

Lady looked at him, her own eyebrows quirked. Franklin leaned against the far wall, boredom overlying his serene expression. He shrugged when Lady turned to look at him.

Thomas blocked himself abruptly before he could feel the first tickle or stir of any attempt to Read him, but the girl did not outwardly appear to notice. She lipped the blunt end of her braid absently as she focused on the problem.

There was a stir at the manor house. Thomas could see doors opening and the patio filling, jostling with people. He stared hard, as if he could see all the more closely what was happening. Lady noticed. She swung around and looked, too. Had someone returned?

The candidate reached out shyly and took his right wrist. "A road is anchored," she said, "by its beginning and end." Reaching up, she touched his brow. "Two more marks you must have to know the road's real destination. Earth and water you are—fire and air you must travel to."

Thomas stood in stunned silence. She could not have passed his block. How did she come up with what she'd said?

Barbara dropped her braid abruptly. "Did I pass?" she said nervously.

As his jaw dropped, Lady snapped, "Of course you have, Barbara."

Before she could say anything further, the room filled with yelling and dancing youngsters. They bore Barbara away as if she'd conquered the world, carrying her still seated in her chair, shoulder-high through the crowd. The three Protectors watched them go.

Lady called after, with little hope of being heard, "The naming ceremony is at sundown!''

Stanhope thrust his head around the doorway. "We know!" He bolted after the confusion.

Franklin said, "I'd better go make sure they live that long." He disappeared as well.

Thomas' gaze met Lady's. Her earth-brown eye glimmered with compassion, but he swore he saw amusement in the blue. "What the hell was that?" he got out.

"Her equivalent of baffling them with bullshit?"

"No." He shook his head in denial. "She was talking about the ghost road, dammit. There was no way she could have known and nothing else she could have been talking about. I kept myself totally blocked and I assume you did, too."

"So we pass her as a Protector and list Prophecy as possibly one of her latent Talents." She hooked her arm through his. "Let's see what's going on. Maybe there's no need for you to take a tracking party out."

Her skin was cool and her manner quiet. She did not expect good from what they walked out to meet. He knew that, and he knew he should be bracing her, protecting her, but all he could think about were the words Barbara had spoken.

"Earth and water," he repeated. "The beast and the dolphin."

"Maybe. It's standard symbolism."

"But how did she
know?
How many people have we told about the road?"

"Only a ghost here and there," Lady said lightly. He looked at her face then and saw the glimmer of an unshed tear in her eyes.

"I'm sorry," Thomas said immediately. "It's not important." At least, not then it wasn't.

Art Bartholomew met them on the pathway. "Riders," he said, "Out front."

"The troops?"

"Some of them."

The man's enigmatic answer perked Thomas' attention. He drew Lady with him, weaving through the crowd that had gathered.

The manor house had lost a turret to the roof fire. As they brushed their way through, its rooms stank also of the smoke and fighting. They gained the driveway and, for a moment, the view stunned him.

The desecration of the chemical fire was vast and ugly, a gouging black stain upon the hillside and slope. The broken roadway had contained it somewhat, but the scarring ran all the way to the butte above the ocean, where a natural lookout cropped over the rock and sand. Charlie would have been appalled. Blade took a deep breath.

Lady nudged him. He looked to his left, where the riders approached. They were ragtag, bedraggled, the troopers, their ponies and mules with heads low, some limping. Bandages wrapped arms and legs, bloodstains the badges of combat. The nesters had led them over hill and dale, and it was a miracle any of them had come back at all.

"I should have gone with them," Blade said.

"You can't be everywhere," Lady admonished. Her voice lightened. "Oh, my God. He's got Alma!"

The lead rider carried the girl across his horse's withers, balanced lightly in front of him. Blade's eyes narrowed. He could not tell if the young man was nester or trooper, captive or rescuer. As they neared, he could see the three other wards had been found as well, riding double behind other troopers.

He did not know the young man in front. The rider carried a nester war lance, feathered with numerous clan fetishes and decorated with fresh scalps. Only, as the rider turned into the manor driveway, Blade identified the scalps as nester. He looked back to the rider, a man no less barbarous than the nester he'd stolen the war lance from.

He was young . . . between twenty years and Alma's age, but he rode his horse with natural grace and he was obviously the leader of this triumphant group. His shirt was of cotton, wide sleeved, open throated, his trousers of soft doeskin bleached almost white by the sun. Lady caught her breath as he kicked his heels into his mount and galloped at them, war lance flashing in the Sate afternoon sun.

"God, he's beautiful," she murmured, then looked guiltily up at Blade. "But arrogant," she added.

Thomas looked back to the youth as he pulled his horse to a plunging stop in front of the crowd. Dark blue eyes, their color as clear as gems under raven wing brows, swept the crowd. He handed the girl down and dismounted. He wore black leather gloves, the cuffs wide and folded back. A headdress of feathers, as thick and luxurious as a mane of hair, swept back from his brow to his broad shoulders. The feathers caught and echoed the color of his eyes, dark blue, dappled with teal and then shot with light gold and turquoise. There was amusement in his eyes as he looked about.