Exiled: Clan of the Claw, Book One (3 page)

He lifted the scepter high. The males of the clan had been talking among themselves, arguing unofficially about what they would soon be arguing about officially. They fell silent when the scepter rose: it marked the shift between the one kind of argument and the other.

“Do you hear me, males?” Rantan Taggah shouted. “Do you accept me as talonmaster of the Clan of the Claw?”

If anyone said no to the second question, the argument about what the clan should do next would be preceded by an argument about under whose leadership the clan should do it. That would not be an argument with words. Rantan Taggah had thrust a spear into the ground behind him. An axe lay beside it. He wore a bronze sword and a broad-bladed gutting dagger on his leather belt. He’d taken special care sharpening his claws. He didn’t particularly expect a challenge, but he believed in being ready even for things he didn’t particularly expect. That was one reason he made a better talonmaster than most.

No one called him out. A few males answered, “We hear you!” Most stood silent, waiting for what would come.

Rantan Taggah raised the scepter again. Eyes and ears not already pointed toward him swung his way. “Warriors!” he said. “Most of you were kits like me when the Old Water finally poured over the Quaxo Hills and started flooding the Hollow Lands. Some of the folk who listen here today fled before the great wave whelmed them. Honor to the memories of the males and females who could not get away.”

“Honor,” the assembled males echoed.

The talonmaster pointed north. “Now the New Water separates us from our fellow Mrem. The Clan of the Claw was always boldest. We were the ones who came out of the Hollow Lands and drove the Liskash before us, even though these warm southern lands suit the Scaly Ones well. We won broad plains for grazing. We won great glory, too.”

He lifted the scepter higher yet. The hollow eye sockets of the Liskash skull that crowned it stared blindly out at the Mrem. The warriors growled approval.

“And we won our own salvation,” Rantan Taggah went on. “Had we stayed down in the Hollow Lands, we likely would have been swept away like so many others. But we were bold. We pushed on. And so we lived.”

He took a deep breath. Now was the time to get down to business. “I know the Clan of the Claw will never be less than bold. Boldness, though, offers us two trails now. We can stay here where we are, cut off from all cousins and kin, and fight the Liskash who surround us on every side but the north for as long as we can. This we have done, and bravely, since the New Water thundered past us.”

“That’s right!” a male called. “And we can go right on doing it, too!”

“
I
hold the scepter, Zhanns Bostofa,” Rantan Taggah said sharply. “Your turn will come, but it is not here yet.”

Zhanns Bostofa glowered but held his peace. No one in the clan denied that he was sly. His bright eyes, his sleek black-and-white coat, and the midsection that was thicker than it might have been all showed he’d done well for himself. That fleshy midsection also said he lacked a certain something as a warrior. Most of the time, he didn’t need to fight to get his way. Most of the time, the clan could go on doing what it had always done. Most of the time, but not always.

Seeing he wouldn’t be interrupted again for the time being, Rantan Taggah went on, “In the end, I think, staying where we are is a losing play. The Liskash nobles hate us as much as we hate them—they hate us even more than they hate one another, which is saying a great deal. They will hurl monsters at us until we are all dead or enslaved—if we let them.

“If we let them,” he repeated. “If we set out to the west, along the shore of the New Water, sooner or later we will come to where it stops. We can go north again then, and join with our own kind once more. The Liskash will not look for this, for they would never think to do it themselves. Like their cousins the serpents, they stay in small spaces and travel little. We will always meet new nobles on our trek—they will not be able to join together against us. It will not be easy, but it can be done. A moving target is harder to hit. I say we should move, as soon as ever we may. Now I have spoken. Who will be next?” He lowered the scepter, showing he had indeed finished.

The prominent males gathered near the front of the assembly all clamored to take hold of it. Rantan Taggah ostentatiously ignored Zhanns Bostofa. It wasn’t so much that he disliked the black-and-white male (though he did)—rather that Zhanns Bostofa had talked out of turn while the talonmaster held the upraised scepter. Instead, Rantan Taggah passed the emblem of authority to a blocky warrior named Ramm Passk’t, a tough, one-eared fellow whose herds grazed lands the Liskash claimed as their own.

“It’s like Rantan Taggah says,” Ramm Passk’t declared in a raspy, carrying voice. “If we stay where we’re at, we sit still so the Liskash can aim whatever they want at us. They always have the edge that way. If we’re on the move, we surprise them instead of the other way round. And they’re slow—you all know that. They don’t like surprises, Aedonniss bedevil their scaly hides with ticks. That’s how it smells to me.” He lowered the scepter.

More shouts from other males who wanted to sway the assembly. Reluctantly, Rantan Taggah pointed toward Zhanns Bostofa. Both sides needed to be heard. Better, he hoped, to get it over with and then turn the heavyset male’s arguments against him. Ramm Passk’t stumped over and handed Zhanns Bostofa the scepter. A greater contrast between two males would have been hard to imagine.

“Thank you,” Zhanns Bostofa said sardonically as his clawed hand folded over the staff. He raised it high. “I have my reasons for thinking your plan is foolish, Rantan Taggah. First is a plain fact: we are still here. The New Water poured into the Hollow Lands years ago now, and we are still here. The Liskash have fought us, and we have fought them, but that is so whenever Mrem and Scaly Ones meet. I daresay we have given them as much as they want, and more besides.”

Rantan Taggah wanted to shout to the world what an idiot Zhanns Bostofa was. But the other male had the scepter. The talonmaster had to hold his peace…for the moment.

“Leave that out of the argument, though,” Zhanns Bostofa said with what he wanted to sound like generosity. “It could be that the Liskash will concentrate more against us as time goes by. I do not believe it, but it could be. What I want to know is, what happens to us if we pack up everything we have and start off on this smerp-brained trek Rantan Taggah is so wild for?”

Of themselves, the talonmaster’s claws shot out. Had Zhanns Bostofa said something like that without upholding the scepter, in short order he would be lying on the ground with his throat bitten and his guts torn out. He had to know it, too. But no male could be challenged for what he said with the scepter in his hand. Most of the time, Rantan Taggah thought that was a good rule. Most of the time, but not always.

“Rantan Taggah says we will surprise the Liskash nobles by moving from our longtime grazing grounds. He might be right—they could be surprised to find us so foolish,” Zhanns Bostofa said. “He might be, and they could be. But he is not, and neither are they. And I can prove it. Grumm, come forward.”

His bulk and the presence of his retainers had concealed the sorry starveling male who now stepped out from behind him. A shudder ran through the assembled warriors as they stared at the runaway slave of the Liskash. When a scaly noble took a male of the Mrem as his own, he sorcerously ate the Mrem’s surname. Even if the poor fellow somehow escaped his master, as Grumm had, he was never the same again. Part of him was gone forever.

Making as if to give Grumm the scepter, Zhanns Bostofa asked Rantan Taggah, “May I?”

“Yes, go ahead,” Rantan Taggah answered harshly. “If, that is, I may have leave to question him along with you.”

The black-and-white male inclined his well-groomed head. “But of course.” He handed Grumm the scepter.

Before raising it, Grumm stared into the eye sockets of the Liskash skull. His lips skinned back from his teeth; it was as if he confronted a live noble, not one long dead. Rantan Taggah was far from sure Grumm’s twiglike arms
could
lift the scepter. After that anxious moment, though, Grumm did raise the scepter high. He seemed easier once he was no longer eye-to-eye with the skull.

“I am Grumm,” he said in a dusty, defeated voice: the kind of voice no Mrem should ever have used. “I was Sassin’s slave. I
am
Sassin’s slave, even here among you. Some things do not go away.”

Sassin! Well, of course he would come from Sassin, since he’d fled out of the southwest. Sassin held the lands west of those that belonged to the Clan of the Claw: the lands through which the clan would have to pass as it began its journey, in other words. “And so?” the talonmaster asked Grumm. “What do you say about Sassin? Or what does the Scaly One say through you?” His nose twitched. He imagined he could smell the rank reptilian stink that clung to the Liskash. It was only imagination, of course. Grumm would be clean of that reek by now. But the impression did not want to go away.

“He knows your plan,” Grumm answered. “He knows it, and he laughs at it. He wants you—he wants the Clan of the Claw—to try to cross his lands. He has been readying himself for the fight for years. All manner of scaly monsters await you: everything from snakes on the ground to crocodiles in the rivers to the terrible hunters of the plains to countless thinking Liskash, all moving under a single controlling will: his.”

“There!” Zhanns Bostofa said. “Do you see? Do you hear? Do you smell? Only death and destruction will meet us if we set forth. You said the Scaly Ones would not be ready for us. You said it, but that did not make it true.”

He was more careful of his speech when he wasn’t holding the scepter. More careful, but maybe not careful enough. At another time, Rantan Taggah might have decided he’d bent the rules and call him out. Not now. Now there were more important things to worry about.

The talonmaster pointed a clawed forefinger at Grumm. For an instant, Rantan Taggah seemed, at least to himself, the literal embodiment of his clan. Whether anyone else felt the same way…Again, he had more important things to worry about. “You have heard what you say from Sassin himself, I gather?”

“I have,” Grumm said.

“And you know it is true because…?”

“Talonmaster, he let me—no, he made me—see through his eyes, feel through his hands.” Grumm shivered at the memory. Rantan Taggah wanted to shiver with him. Mrem were not made to be subjected to minds like that. The Liskash were too horribly different. Gathering himself, Grumm added, “He showed me the truth. I saw it as he saw it. I felt it as he felt it. If the Clan of the Claw tries to cross Sassin’s land, the scavenger birds and leatherwings will gorge themselves on our carcasses.”

“There!” Zhanns Bostofa said again. “Who knows more of what this Liskash intends than one who has seen and felt for himself?”

“What the Liskash intends is to put us in fear,” Rantan Taggah replied. “Plainly, he has done what he intends with you, at least.”

“Sometimes being afraid is sensible,” Zhanns Bostofa said. “We have to teach our kits to be careful, or none of us would live to grow up.”

“They don’t need to jump in the air at every passing shadow, though,” Rantan Taggah said. “That is what you…may be doing.” He left it there. He could have said something stronger, but he might have been wrong. Sassin might really be as strong as he claimed.

Or, no matter what Grumm had seen or felt, the Scaly One might not.

“Will you risk the clan on the strength of your whim? Will you risk our hangers-on?” Zhanns Bostofa’s wave took in the males who’d made it out of the Hollow Lands alive. “Will you risk all the Mrem on this side of the New Water? That is what we are—you said so yourself. Is your whim alone so strong?”

“Not my whim alone, by Aedonniss,” Rantan Taggah said. The other male talked too much, and gave him time to think. “Let us test poor Grumm here. Let the Dancers see if they can undo whatever magic Sassin worked against him. If they can, if the Liskash was lying, we go forward as I proposed. If not…If not, let it be as you say, Zhanns Bostofa.” The words tasted like rotten meat in the talonmaster’s mouth.

The plump black-and-white male inclined his head. “Agreed.”

Rantan Taggah would have agreed in his place, too. Zhanns Bostofa had by far the better half of the bargain. If Sassin was telling the truth, the plump male would get what he wanted, and the Clan of the Claw would stay where it was. Even if Sassin was lying, if he was a strong enough sorcerer his spell would prevail against everything the clan’s Dancers could do to oppose it. Only if he was lying and they had the power to beat down his lies would Rantan Taggah get to do what he was convinced needed doing.

Why Aedonniss had made the world so one Liskash noble had at least as much magic at the tips of his scaly fingers as a clan’s Dancers could muster all together, why Assirra hadn’t softened her divine mate so he showed the Mrem more mercy…Rantan Taggah shrugged yet again. Wonder why the gods had done what they’d undoubtedly done and you headed straight down the track to madness.

* * *

Enni Chennitats eyed Grumm with pained sympathy as the escaped slave took his place in the center of the clan’s Dancing ground. The male left with half his name exuded misery just standing there. Even with the Dancers all around him, he looked more alone than anyone else the priestess had ever seen.

He gnawed on a scrap of smoked meat. He seemed to eat all the time. If he kept it up, before too long he wouldn’t be skin and bones any more—he’d get as remarkably fat as Zhanns Bostofa. And then…And then he would be fat and miserable instead of scrawny and miserable. Maybe that was better. More likely—or so it seemed to Enni Chennitats—it was only different. Confusing better with different was likely to make a new misery.

She wondered whether Rantan Taggah’s plan to set the Clan of the Claw on its great trek was better or only different. She wanted to think it was better. Priestesses traveled from clan to clan, bringing news and sharing knowledge (males called it gossiping, but what did males know?). Like most of her sisters here on the Dancing ground, she felt trapped by being confined to a single clan. She craved the trek in a way most of the clansfolk would never understand.