The Hero Strikes Back (18 page)

The noise was getting louder, and I thought I could discern what the sounds were. Voices, shouting. I couldn't hear the exact words. It brought back memories. I suppressed a shudder.

We were almost home. Which gave me a really bad feeling. And then Karish and I skidded to a halt.

“Flaming Zaire!” Karish swore. He took my hand again, and I let him.

I had never seen so many people in one place. Angry, screaming people. Attacking the Triple S house with axes and picks and hammers, pulling off lengths of wood to add to a pile in the middle of the street. A pole rose up from the middle of the pile, from the top of which hung the emblem of the Triple S.

Someone was trying to light it. On fire.

It's raining, you moron.

What the hell was this? Were they insane? Tearing down our emblem? Trying to destroy our house? All because we couldn't fix the weather to their specifications? What was wrong with everyone?

Shoes, human and horse, sticks, rocks, bowls, chunks of wood, were flying through the air. Hitting people. Sputtering torches were waved about. Runners, on horses and on foot, pushed their way into the crowd, clubbing people and dragging them away. It was brutal.

And the Runners didn't seem to be having much of an effect. They dragged off a couple of people at a time, and sometimes they couldn't even manage that much. A captive's comrades would beat off the Runner, sometimes even dragging the Runner off his or her horse.

The noise was painful to hear, dribbling into my brain and stirring it around until I couldn't think. I swallowed and found myself clutching Karish's arm with my free hand. “Let's get out of here.”

“Wait a moment.” He tapped the shoulder of a chap standing near him. The man swung around, a fist raised. Karish backed off immediately, hands held up in surrender. “I'm just wondering what's going on.”

The gossip will reach us tomorrow, Karish!

The man relaxed, grinning. And if his grin was manic, well, that was just one more thing to be nervous about. “Those Triple S whores,” he announced gaily. “Sent 'em a clear message, we did.”

I saw Karish swallow hard. “What about the Pairs?”

The man lost his good humor, taking on an expression of disgust. “Scampered away like the rats they are, didn't they?

“You didn't manage to catch any of them?”

“Not a one.”

Thank Zaire. At least no one was getting hurt.

But what they were doing, it felt bad enough. That had become my home. I had been learning to relax there. I had been thinking of my suite as
my
suite. I knew where almost everything was in the kitchen. I'd even picked up some decorative stitch work and had it framed and hung in the common room.

I could see one of my shirts in that pile of wood. They'd were going through the interior of the house, throwing personal items out the window.

I didn't understand. I really really didn't. How could they hate us so much? All of a sudden? It was crazy. They'd all gone crazy. And they were scaring the hell out of me. I pulled at Karish's sleeve. “Come on, Karish. Let's go.” Though I had no idea where.

The man's eyes narrowed. He looked more closely at Karish's face, looked at me, then looked back to Karish. “Karish?” he echoed, his voice flat and cold.

Hell. Me and my enormous mouth. Where did my brain go while I wasn't looking?

“Hey!” he shouted to someone.

We started running. At least Karish wasn't going to try the aggressive male role this time.

“We've got one of them here!”

Oh gods, oh gods, oh gods. Tears pressed at the back of my eyes.

Aye, that would accomplish a lot.

And there were steps ringing behind us.

There was nowhere to go. The Runners weren't at their headquarters and they were overwhelmed. We couldn't lead them to a friend's house, and I had a nasty feeling we wouldn't find sanctuary in any of the shops.

I glanced back. I felt my eyes widen. It wasn't two or three people behind us. There was at least a dozen. Some of them had lengths of wood.

Terror clogged my throat. There was no way out of this.

We ran. It was hard. Hampered by the slickers. My skin was too hot, but my blood felt so so cold. Rain flew into my eyes, into my nose and mouth. It was hard to breathe through a throat that felt like it had tightened to closing, into lungs that had turned to ice. I'd had nightmares that had felt exactly like this.

I followed Karish. I hoped he knew where he was going. He took corners like he knew. Or maybe it was all at random. What difference did it make? We had nowhere to go.

Really, really, really had to learn something about weapons. Though even that might not have helped us out right then.

Karish turned to look at me. Look ahead! Looking back slows you down.

He looked at me. In the eye.

That was all the warning I got. Then his Shields dropped.

He was
channeling!
Idiot! Right, fine, this was the first natural disaster to hit us in months. Very exciting. But we weren't on duty, and we were a little busy.

A moment later I realized what he was doing. The forces were running the wrong way. Being pulled in to him, being stirred up, not rushing about us as they naturally did. It had been almost a year since I'd felt him manipulate the forces that way, but I knew what it meant.

He wasn't responding to a natural disaster. He was creating one.

Was he insane?

Were we in that much trouble?

Wasn't this a little drastic?

He was insane. I was insane. The whole world had gone insane.

Shield, shield, shield.

The ground started to shake. I almost lost my footing. Karish fell into the wall next to him. I grabbed at him to pull him upright. My fingers slipped on his slicker.

It was really hard to shield and run at the same time. The fact that the ground was shaking beneath my feet made it a real treat. So we stopped running. Our hunters had stopped running, too.

He was pulling forces into himself. It felt random to me, like running through the streets had been, but I knew nothing about it. I held off the forces he didn't touch, the forces he somehow knew not to touch, and stopped them from rushing into the vacuum Karish created within himself whenever he channelled. And through him I felt the raw power he could control with his mind and sheer strength of will.

Sometimes I envied Karish so much, for what he could do, for his being able to feel the forces that moved the world. Did he have any idea how fortunate he was? Did he have the most remote inkling? And did he ever realize that I was almost sick with the longing to be able to do what he could do? What he had been born being able to do?

I heard him chuckle. How could he be laughing? “What?” I demanded.

“She's fighting me.”

“Huh?”

“Kyna. She's trying to channel the forces away from me.”

“Does she know it's you?”

“No reason that she should.”

Well, he had felt that it was Creol causing the disasters that had been threatening High Scape the year before. And he hadn't told anyone, because it was supposed to be impossible, and he'd known no one would believe him. But what if Riley felt differently? What if she felt that Karish was responsible for this earthquake, and she started telling people? That was exactly what he was afraid of, wasn't it?

The stone beneath my feet shifted. Karish reached out to catch me, though I would have regained my balance on my own in a moment. “Don't get too enthusiastic,” I warned him.

“If I do it right, it might clear up the riot. Everyone will get scared and go home.”

“One problem at a time, Taro.”

He didn't listen to me. Of course not.

The forces roared on, going the wrong way. It was as though he were pulling them from the sky and directing them at the ground, where they churned up the soil and tore stones apart. And we were trying to channel and shield and keep our balance.

And it was wrong. Unnatural. Not the way we were supposed to do things. It went against years of training.

Yet it felt so good. Handling all that power, doing things with it no one else could do. Should I be worried? Afraid that I was liking this too much?

Far beyond the earth moving and the leather of Karish's slicker and the rain and Karish himself and the forces and my shields, I could feel Riley. Faint. Like looking at a person through fog, the fog I'd seen that morning. She was grabbing at the forces, pulling at them, trying to redirect them, and having no success with it.

I spared a thought to how this was going to shatter her confidence. And she would never know the true reason why she'd failed.

“Do something!”

I heard the shout from somewhere. Off to the side.

“Not too long,” I said to Karish. Good as it felt, it was tiring. And dangerous.

“Just a bit longer.”

What a mess. How had this happened? Creating a disaster to protect ourselves from our own people. It was crazy.

A particularly violent buckle under my feet. That sent me to the ground. I hung on to my shields, though. Good for me.

“Lee!”

“I'm fine. Don't fuss.”

He slowed the forces down. Imposed his will on them, clamped it around them, pulled them away from the ground. And then he let them go. They screamed back into their natural courses. Karish allowed his internal shields to slip back into place. The ground settled down. It was over.

I scrambled to my feet and we started running, just in case. No one chased us, and after a few streets we had to slow down, but we didn't stop running.

I peeled off to head towards the Lion. It was the only place I could think of to go. Karish followed.

We met no one on the way. Good. I didn't think I could deal with people. We ran into the Lion. Karish slammed the door shut. People inside, somehow ignorant of the chaos happening only a short distance away, stared at us. We ignored them.

It was silent inside the Lion. While before my mind had felt bombarded by all the noise and activity, now it was so quiet it made my ears hurt.

I bent over, my hands on my knees, and tried to breathe into painful lungs and settle the sharp stitch in my side.

Karish pulled his slicker off, then helped me out of mine, draping them both over a nearby chair. Then he grabbed my arm and pulled me into a tight embrace.

He was shaking. I didn't ask him why, if it was a reaction to what had happened outside or if he found the boarding house too cool. Possibly he was hoping I wouldn't notice.

I pressed my cheek against his chest. He felt good. Healthy and alive and solid. I felt my muscles relaxing, the tension draining from my shoulders. How strange it was, even though that was what was supposed to happen. He was like some kind of medication, soothing and warm.

He soon stopped trembling. Poor excitable boy.

“You're right, Lee.”

“Aren't I always?” I quipped. “Tell me about what, in particular, this time, so I might gloat.” At least I could get out a coherent sentence. Good sign.

He chuckled, a weak sound. “We have to do something about all this.”

Finally. “Well, we're trying.”

“Aye, but I've been dragging my feet,” he confessed. “I didn't think there was anything we could do. Or, if we could, whether we should.”

I pulled away enough to look him in the face. “Why shouldn't we?”

He cocked his head to one side, a slow considering gesture. “It's dangerous, what we're thinking of doing,” he said. “Manipulating the forces in ways we weren't trained to. That sort of thing, it can have serious repercussions. Dangerous repercussions.” He bit his lower lip, something I'd never seen him do before. “I started an earthquake today.”

“You've done it before.”

“Aye, but at the time I thought I'd never have to do it again. But I have, and I have no idea how much damage I've done. I might have destroyed things. Homes. I might have hurt people.” He swallowed. “What if I've killed someone?” he asked in a whisper.

I didn't think that was likely. The earthquake hadn't been that severe. Still, I could appreciate what he was saying. Drawing outside the lines could have frightening consequences. But I didn't know what else we could do. We had to do something. If for no other reason than that the residents of High Scape weren't going to let us do nothing.

Chapter Eleven

The exterior of the house was in pretty bad shape. Every window smashed, the doors ripped off their hinges, and chunks of the siding chopped out. The interior was a mess, with dishes and decorations smashed, tar splashed around here and there, drapes and clothes slashed and torn. The building was still structurally sound, meaning we didn't have to move out, and there were a couple of Runners wandering around nearby, so no more damage would be done. It didn't make me feel any better.

Everyone was shocked by the riot, including, we were told, the people who participated in it. No one knew how it had started, or why. It just happened.

Contributors to the newspaper decried the action as a disgusting descent into violence. Still, one could, apparently, understand the motivation. After all, people's lives were being destroyed, and we were doing nothing. I didn't see that as a reason to start destroying property, but it seemed that I was in the minority.

Six of the seven Pairs stood in the common room, just looking at the mess. Riley actually had enough initiative to make some tentative swipes at cleaning up. I couldn't make myself help. I was too shocked. And unnerved. And a little angry.