Whispers on the Wind (29 page)

Lenore placed a hand on Jon’s chest, feeling the steady beat of his heart, much slower than her own, feeling, too, the despair emitted by the others.

“Lighten up, people.” She stared at them in disbelief of their manner “My supposed child-mind survived the onslaught,” she reminded them. “I can’t believe you would have come so far, and suffered so much, only to fail. I don’t like your defeatist attitude, talking about your
Kahinya
s finding hers and recovering it. It’s almost as if you want to fail!”

“We do not want to fail,” Minton said. “But if all we can recover of Zenna is her
Kahinya
we will have to be content with that. With it, she will never truly die for us, and it becomes clearer and clearer that when Rankin knew we were both here to rescue her, he killed her.”

“That would have been when the avalanche happened?”

Minton nodded.

“But it was after that I had the dream of the child, the one Jon followed me into, the one that alerted Rankin to our whereabouts in Port Orchard. If, indeed, it was the child Zenna who has been reaching out to me, she was alive following the avalanche.”

Jon looked sorrowful. “We know that,
Letise
. We know she still lived then, Lenore, at the time of the avalanche, because Minton sensed her adult presence in the moment of his connection with Rankin. But now...” He shook his head sadly.

“But now...what?” Lenore demanded. “Why are you so sure she has to be dead now?”

“Because there is no sense of her—for me or for Minton, the two closest to her. Her
Kahinya
and mine are intertwined. I cannot find her hidden in any of her memories. Not so much as a hint. There are very few, if any, that the two of us do not share.”

“And my
Kahinya
knows hers intimately, too,” Minton said. “We have
baloka
. After that initial contact, our
Kahinya
s should have kept us within reach of each other if not actually in touch.”

He fingered his, as if searching. “But they did not,” he said, dropping his hand from its play over his beads. “There is a huge void where Zenna should be. What Jon saw, in your dream, was likely nothing more that an echo from her
Kahinya
. It will live on for some time unless Rankin destroys it.”

“He will not,” Jon decreed heavily. “He will use it to draw us in.”

“Dammit, I still think she’s alive. I...sense it somehow,” Lenore insisted.

“If she lived, why would she cloak herself from me, her bond-mate?”

“Or from me, her birth-mate?”

“I can’t answer that for either of you. All I can say is I feel, somewhere deep inside me, that she is alive. Alive and waiting for you to help her. Maybe she’s stuck somewhere in that childhood where she went to hide and needs one or both of you to pull her out of it. It is almost as if I can...see the three of you, reunited.”

She sighed and smiled weakly. “My father would say it is just wishful thinking.” But...deep down, she knew that since her deepest wish was for Jon to somehow be able to stay with her forever, his finding Zenna and the rest of his Octad would make that impossible. So...how could it be wishful thinking?

Jon stroked her brow with his fingertips. “I wish I had the means to see in there without frightening or hurting you. If you have the gift of prescience, you may be right. But as Minton says, why would she hide from us?”

Lenore couldn’t answer that. Nor, it seemed, could anyone else.

She drew a deep, steadying breath and held Jon’s free hand tightly. What if she did she have a special gift that was only now unfolding, like a butterfly from its chrysalis? She had never noticed herself having hints or feeling omens of things to come. But did she, on some level that was only now beginning to blossom, have the ability to sense the future?

It became important to know. It became more important to know than to continue hiding herself from herself.

“I think I would be less afraid now, Jon. Try. Please try. I will do my best to let you search as deeply as you must.”

“Later,
letise
. Now, we will prepare plans for locating our Octad members without alerting Rankin. Fricka must regain much strength, and all of us more geographical knowledge before we can leave here again.”

“How will you approach Rankin?”

“With great care, and with great stealth,” Jon replied. “Fricka’s surround will give us much-needed protection. As we collect the others, their individual talents, added to those we already have, will offer us more defenses, and the greater strength there is in unity.”

“If we can find them,” Lenore said, trying not to allow the guilty hope to arise that they never find the others. To prove to Jon, Minton, Fricka—and to herself—that she would continue to assist with the search, regardless of what the outcome meant, personally, to her, she said, “Where do we start?”

“We go back to where Zareth was,” Jon said. “Even cloaked, as he must be, he surely felt my command. He, as are the others, as Minton did when he learned the perils of translation within the field of Rankin’s enhanced range, will be making their way overland in search of me. He will not have traveled far.”

Zenna awoke to another desert dawn with a glowing golden sky streaking high above sharp, black mountain-peaks, visible through the narrow window across the single room. Glesta, still sleeping, lay curled beside her, tight fists nestled under her chin. She soothed the sleeping child’s troubled mind, casting strong reassurance over her, promises she knew not if she would be able to fulfill. But she must try!

Rankin, as exhausted as any of them by the travails of the previous day, still slept, the amplifier cradled as close to him as Glesta was to her. Could she get it?

Stealthily, leaving Glesta on the bed, she slid off, crept across the floor, careful not to stumble on the hard-packed earth floor, littered with detritus blown in on the desert wind, just as careful to keep from crossing the narrow band of sunlight beginning to peek through the window in the adobe wall. She wanted to cast no shadow, to cause not change in the level of dimness. Three steps away...two...one. A swift lunge, and she would have the amplifier. Another, to grab her child, and she and Glesta would be gone.

Patán
! She berated herself silently. Why had she not carried Glesta with her? Did she risk waking her now and having her make the leap to her side? Glesta had some levitation abilities—more than Zenna herself—but were they developed enough yet? In secret, she had been working with her daughter to help her enhance the talent. But could she expand the privacy bubble wide enough to reach out now to Glesta, or would her probe escape, alerting the sleeping men?

She hesitated, deciding, one foot poised to place itself in position for the final stride that would put the amplifier within her reach.

The time was now! She made that last long stride, grasped the amplifier and as she did so, heard Glesta cry out. She whirled.

B’tar held the child, one arm around her middle, clutching her struggling body to his, oblivious of her heels drumming against his thighs, her torso twisting as she flailed her arms in a futile attempt to claw at his eyes.

“Mama! Make him put me down!”

“You heard her,” Rankin said, and she tore her gaze from the sight of her child captured and held, saw him still lying in exactly the same position, but now with his eyes open, a baneful smile on his face. “B’tar will let her go—when you return the amplifier to me.”

Still, Zenna hesitated. She held it. She controlled it. Could she, somehow, use it to translate the four of them back to Aazonia, this minute? She fed her mind into it, linked with its intuitive fibers and felt it waver. She backed out of it swiftly. No! It lacked the stability to translate four minds.

Translating only two with it was perilous enough. She could not, would not, risk her daughter’s life this way. Slowly, defeated, she held out the amplifier to Rankin.

He smiled again, sitting up, then standing. He shook his head, refusing to accept it. “You wanted it,” he said. “So you keep it.” He crossed the room and lifted the still struggling child from B’tar’s ungentle hold. “I,” he added, “will keep this. Fair trade?”

“No!” Zenna shrieked, flinging herself bodily at him.

He sidestepped her, allowing B’tar time to block her physically. “Oh, I think you’ll agree. I think you will have to. The device grows more unstable with each interworld translation, does it not? Even I can sense that. It requires tuning, Zenna. Tuning only you can perform, since it is keyed primarily to your mind.”

“I can tune it no further,” she said. “It is going to die, and those connected to it, also. If not in the next translation, then in any one soon after that.”

“You will have to tune it differently, then. Already, it has the power to amplify my thoughts, to cast my net wider. Now I want more from it.”

“It has no more to give!”

Rankin tossed a terrified Glesta toward the overhead beams, and caught her as she came down, holding her upside down by one foot, swinging her from side to side like a pendulum, eyeing the thick adobe wall as if measuring the arc of travel her head would have to make in order to miss—or hit it.

Zenna sent quieting thoughts to her daughter, whose struggles ceased as she slid into a safe place. Zenna sent her even deeper, into a place Glesta had never been before, into one of her own hide-outs, one where she had even, on occasion, hidden from her brother, just to tease. There, she knew, not even Jonallo could find the child.

Despair flooded her. The amplifier could be fine-tuned no more. She had done as much as she could to it. It was due to fail. It would fail. And if Rankin continued to insist she repair it so they could make one more trip, she also knew she—and he—could die. She flicked an exploratory thread into the cesspit that was his mind and knew, knew he expected only one more translation out of the amplifier.

His escape trip.

That he would readily sacrifice B’tar, she had long known. He had no scruples. B’tar, who considered himself Rankin’s partner, was nothing but a tool, however weak, to use. He would abandon him in a flash, if that best served his own purposes.

The only way Rankin could get back to Aazoni and his amassed wealth was with the amplifier—and Zenna—even, maybe especially—if it killed her in the process. The one holding the device, the one whose mind was linked most intimately with it during translation, was the one most at risk. The passenger—Rankin in this case—would likely survive.

Unless—The thought horrified her. Unless he tried to link himself to it and took Glesta as the supporting mind.

So. It was to be now. Or was it? That fine connection she had maintained, however horrible it was, with his mind, told her he had a germ of a plan. She couldn’t begin to read what it was, but sensed his glee, his growing belief that there was another way.

What other way, she could not ascertain. Nor could she trust Rankin’s machinations...

Deep within the cocoon of safety where she had sent Glesta, she fed the knowledge that her own time was nearly over. When it was, when her maternal signature was no longer a part of Glesta, then the child was to slip out of that safe place and find The Other. That Jon might be in contact with the potential foster mother was a chance she had to take.

Surely, he would be compassionate with an innocent child, even if he was sure her mother had betrayed every code of honor. And Minton...he would want their daughter. Even if, without the amplifier, it would be impossible for him to take Glesta home, he would want her safe and loved until she was old enough, strong enough, to make the translation as part of an Octad. Minton, or Jon, or both, would return for Glesta in time.

Her preparations, her decision, had taken only a split second, and now she looked again at Rankin, still swinging the apparently lifeless child in ever widening arcs. Her tawny hair whipped against the pale wall. With the next swing, her skull would connect.

“All right!” She leaped to catch Glesta in mid-arc. “What do you want me to do?”

Moments later, as Rankin finished explaining, Zenna gasped. “I cannot do that!”

“You will,” Rankin informed her, holding Glesta’s limp form, upright now, but with one hand at the back of her fragile neck, the other cupped around her chin. “And you will do it now.” He nodded at the amplifier. “Tune it as I have ordered.”

“If I do, then you will never get home.”

His smile sent a shudder through her. “When I have your brother, your bond-mate, and whoever else they may have brought—or the other amplifier, if that is how they traveled, then I shall have no difficulty in returning to Aazonia.”

Still, she dared to defy him. “Where you will be captured and put to death if you refuse repatterning.”

“Repatterned, I would have no knowledge of the life I now enjoy. Repatterned, I would be unable to make use of my wealth.” He tightened his hands perceptibly around Glesta’s neck. “I will not be captured, Zenna. You will see to that.”

He flung a vicious mental stab at her which, amplified, sent her reeling outside through the partially opened door, to fetch up with her back against a tall saguaro. Its spines dug into her viciously, but their pain was nothing compared to the pain of watching Rankin stride through the door with her helpless child still dangling from between his hands, heading toward her threateningly.

Scrambling to her feet, she left her
Kahinya
to take care of her physical wounds, and ducking past Rankin, returned to the hut. There, she wove her mind into the intricacies of the amplifier, creating from it an entirely different device.

Rankin knew when she had succeeded. There was no way she could prevent that. As the amplifier caught Jon’s essence, it transmitted that to Rankin, who laughed in soft triumph and tossed the child like a rag doll to B’tar, who nearly missed.

Put her inside the other hut,
Rankin ordered
. Keep her out of my sight. And away from her mother.
He snatched the amplifier from Zenna’s hand and let his mind bite into it, mentally projecting all it permitted him to see—simply to torment her.

Helplessly, Zenna tried to block out what Rankin blared forth, but was unable. She yearned to hide far down inside herself, to join Glesta in oblivion, but could not.