Patternmaster p-1 Page 10

  “She made me eat and took away my weariness and healed the bruises and sprains I had gotten thrashing around during my transition. Then she gave me supplies, put me on a horse, and told me to run. I got out just ahead of the group of Housemasters that had finally—twelve hours too late—realized what was happening.”

  Amber stopped talking and they rode along in silence for a while, urging the horses faster as they came to a stretch of level ground, then

  slowing to climb another hill.

  “She loved you,” said Teray finally.

  “It was mutual. She almost lost her House because of me.”

  “Only almost?”

  “She would have if it hadn’t been for Michael. That’s where I knew him from. She had called for help from Forsyth when I was first charged. Michael was in our area on other business but he had Clayark trouble on his way to us.

  “He arrived and looked at my memories—I was allowed to come back into the sector to be heard. He looked at the truths the Housemasters had ignored, then decided in Kai’s favor. He didn’t make them take me back, but at least he made them leave her alone.”

  “It was too late anyway. You couldn’t have gone back to her then.”

  “I know.”

  “With you stronger than she is and possessing so much of her knowledge and experience … I don’t think she would have dared to take you back.”

  “I’m glad she didn’t have to decide.”

  Teray changed the subject abruptly. “I think I’ve spotted some Clayarks.” He hadn’t had to say it. She was already looking off in the direction of the Clayarks. They were not visible, but there was definitely a group of them ahead, moving toward

  Teray and Amber. They were just beyond the next hill.

  “Only a small group,” said Amber. “About twenty. They might go around the hill and pass us by.”

  “Yes, and then they might notice our trail and follow us while one of them goes for reinforcements. Best to kill them.”

  “All right. You take it.”

  She opened to him as no one had since school, giving him access to and control over her mental strength. It was the way people who were close in the Pattern fought best. The way Joachim’s House fought, the way everyone fought in war when Rayal used the power that he held. But only Rayal could pull all the people together, funnel all their strength through his own mind, focus it on Clayarks anywhere from Forsyth itself to the northernmost Patternist sector. Lesser people grouped when they could with whomever they trusted not to try to make the control permanent.

  Inexpertly, Teray channeled Amber’s strength into his own. Then, almost doubly powerful, he reached out to the Clayarks.

  The new strength was exhilarating, intoxicating. He almost had to hold himself back as he reached the Clayarks. Within one of them he located a large artery that led directly from the heart. He memorized its position so that he could find it quickly in the other Clayarks, then he ruptured the artery. The Clayark stumbled to the

  ground, clawing its chest.

  Instantly the other Clayarks fled, scattering in all directions, but Amber, otherwise inactive, kept track of them, focusing and refocusing Teray on them until all were dead or dying.

  Several minutes later they began riding past bodies. Amber was closed again—as closed as she could be while they were linked—and Teray had returned to her control over her mental strength. That strength was temporarily lessened, of course, as was Teray’s, but the lessening was slight. One of the dangers of lending mental strength to another person was that the other person might use too much of it, might drain the lender to exhaustion and death. But neither Teray nor Amber was anywhere near death.

  Teray stared at the bodies sprawled over the hillside, saw the expressions of agony on many of the Clayark faces, and did not know whether to feel sick or triumphant. Not one Clayark had had time to fire a shot or even get a look at the enemy who killed him. Still, Clayarks too were known to do their killing from hiding. It was strange fighting, repelling somehow.

  “You’ve never done that before, have you?” asked Amber.

  “No.” Teray rode past a Clayark female, dead, with arms outstretched toward a smaller, completely naked version of herself. A relative perhaps. A daughter? Clayarks kept their children with them to be raised by the natural parents. Teray looked away from the pair,

  frowning. They were Clayarks. They would have killed him if they could have. They were carriers of the Clayark disease.

  “I wanted you to handle it because I thought you hadn’t done it before.”

  He turned to look at Amber almost angrily.

  “I wanted to see you fight in a situation where there was no immediate danger,” she said.

  “Did you think I hadn’t learned what to do back in school?”

  “No, I was afraid you had. And unfortunately, you have.”

  “The Clayarks are dead, aren’t they?” He was letting his disgust over what he had had to do spill over onto her and he didn’t care. What was she complaining about, anyway?

  “The last couple of them almost got away.”

  “Almost, hell! They’re dead.”

  “If there had been just one or two more of them, we would have missed them. They would have been out of range before you could kill them. And sometime tonight or tomorrow, they would be back with all their friends.”

  “You’re saying …”

  “I’m saying you’re too slow. Way too slow. A big party of Clayarks would swallow us before you could do anything about it.”

  “You could have done better?” Cold anger

  washed over him but his tone was mild, quiet.

  “Teray, I’d be a little more diplomatic if it weren’t for the chance of our meeting an army of Clayarks over the next hill. But to put it bluntly, school methods just aren’t good enough out here. Will you let me teach you some others?”

  “You want to teach me others?” he said in mock surprise. “Not handle the fighting yourself from now on?”

  “Yes. You ought to have a chance to survive this trip even if something happens to me, or if we separate.”

  “And I won’t without your teaching?”

  “That’s right.”

  “The hell with your teaching.”

  She sighed. “All right then, you owe me this much. The next Clayarks we meet, let me handle them.”

  “So you can show me how good you are at it. And I can change my mind.”

  “No, Teray, so I can be sure of us living at least that much longer.” She spoke wearily, her words reaching him both through his ears and his mind. She was open again. And with his mind, he could not help but be aware of her absolute belief in what she was saying. In spite of her manner, she was not boasting. She was afraid. Afraid for him.

  He felt the anger drain out of him to be replaced by something else. Something he could

  not quite name but that was far less comfortable than even the anger had been.

  “Could you make it, Amber? Alone, I mean, from here to Forsyth.”

  “I think so.” She was closed to him again.

  “You know so.”

  She said nothing.

  “You’ve done it before.”

  She shrugged. “I told you I was an independent. We travel.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “Why should I have? The fact that I’ve done it before doesn’t insure that we’re going to make it now.”

  “Especially not with me acting as a brake.”

  Again she said nothing.

  “We’re about the same age,” he said. “I’m the son of the two strongest Patternists of their generation, and I’m strong enough myself to succeed the Patternmaster. Yet here you are with your fifteen years of someone else’s memories and your four or five years of wandering….”

  “Would you rather travel with somebody who was deadweight?”

  “I just don’t like feeling that I’m deadweight myself.”

  “Don’t worry. With
your strength, you aren’t. I

  would never have invited myself along with you if I had thought you would be.”

  He looked at her sharply.

  “No, that’s not the only reason,” she said, smiling. “You’ve got a few other good points.”

  He sighed, and gave up without quite realizing that he was giving up.

  “Like your tractable nature,” she said. “Open and let me show you how to kill Clayarks quickly.”

  He obeyed, watching her with the same mistrust that she had shown for him earlier.

  Chapter 6

  “You see,” Amber was explaining, “we can’t afford to waste our time and strength punching holes in the Clayarks. That’s what they’re trying to do to us with their guns. Fight them on their own terms and sooner or later they’ll get you. There are just too many of them. In a large attack you’d have some of them blasting you apart while you were trying to punch holes in others.”

  Teray only half listened. His ears were full of the unfamiliar sound of the surf. He had spent all his life no more than a day’s ride from the beach, yet he had never seen the ocean through his own eyes. He had seen it through the eyes of others in the learning stones he had studied, but that was not the same. Now, as he and Amber rode down toward the oceanside trail, he gazed

  out, fascinated, at the seemingly endless water.

  He could see tiny rocky islands off shore. Nearer, the waves broke against sand and rocks with a noisy vigor that sometimes drowned out what Amber was saying. But that did not matter. She was only emphasizing the information she had already given him mentally. Mental communication detracted from their awareness of the had—and possibly the Clayarks—around them. Thus she was repeating, summarizing aloud.

  “I can do it,” he told her.

  “Try it as soon as possible.”

  “The next time we meet Clayarks.” But he was not eager to try her method of killing, or any method of killing, again soon. In his mind’s eye, he could still see the Clayarks he had already killed. Maybe it would be easier if they were not human-headed or if he had not had a conversation with one. But she was right. He would not only have to get used to killing them, but he would have to kill more efficiently, in the way that she had shown him, if the two of them were to survive. He recalled the memory that she had given him of herself on foot, alone, running for the safety of Redhill two years before. She had been wounded but she had kept going. Her healer’s skill had kept her alive and conscious. And she was still killing, limiting the area of her perception to a long narrow wedge, sweeping that wedge around her like a hand of a clock. The Clayarks she touched in the deadly sweep

  convulsed and died. By the time they were dead, she had swept over six or seven more. They had managed to shoot her by firing from beyond the range of her sweep. But such long-range shooting required marksmanship that not all of them—not enough of them—possessed.

  Her sweeps turned the Clayarks’ own brains against them. She used their own energy to stimulate sudden, massive disruptions of their neural activities. The breathing centers in their brains were paralyzed. Their hearts ceased to beat and their blood circulation stopped. They died, almost literally, as though they had been struck by lightning. Or as though …

  Teray frowned. “You know,” he said after a while, “your way of killing Clayarks isn’t that different from the way we Patternists kill one another.”

  “It’s not different at all,” she said. “You just focus differently to kill Clayarks. You focus directly on the Clayark’s body—his brain—instead of focusing on his thoughts.”

  “But… Then why do they teach us in school that you can’t kill a Clayark the same way you kill a Patternist?”

  She shrugged. “Probably because they don’t know any better. Most Patternist nonhealers don’t have any idea why other Patternists die when they hit them in a certain way. And they don’t care, as long as it works.” She frowned, and thought for a moment. “The focus is everything, Teray. Of course, we can’t lock in on Clayarks the

  way we can on each other. We can’t read their thoughts or even sense that they have thoughts, so we can’t go after one of them the way we’d go after one of our own.”

  “What happens if you try—if you focus on a Clayark by sight, or you sense his physical presence and then hit him as though you were hitting a Patternist?”

  “What would you be hitting?”

  “His head, of course.”

  “I wouldn’t,” she said. “You might give the Clayark time to put a bullet through your head. The only people we can hope to kill by just mindlessly throwing our strength at them are mutes and other Patternists. With Clayarks, you have to know exactly what you’re doing, and do it just right, or you’ll get killed.”

  “A Clayark wouldn’t be harmed at all if you hit him?”

  “If you hit him—his head—with all your strength, he might have a seizure. But for most people, nothing.”

  Teray frowned, not understanding but not wanting to question further.

  “Feel the wind?” she said.

  “What?”

  “The wind. There’s a pretty good breeze blowing in from the ocean. There’s a lot of power in the wind—even in a breeze like this. Ask Joachim.

  His House uses windmills. It doesn’t usually seem like much power, though. Not until you find specific ways to use it, ways to make it work for you.”

  “I understand,” he muttered.

  “If I hit a Clayark as though he were a Patternist, he’d notice it about as much as you noticed the wind before I mentioned it.”

  “I said I understood.”

  “All right.”

  It was the disease again, blocking the way. A disease that protected its carriers and killed their enemies. The disease of Clay’s Ark, brought back hundreds of years before, so the old records said, by the only starship ever to leave Earth and then return. A starship. A mute contrivance that had supposedly ended the reign of the mutes over the Earth they had sought to leave. That part of history had always held a grim fascination for Teray. His own race had been small then, scattered, disunited, a mere offshoot of the mutes. His people had been carefully bred for mental strength—bred by one of their own kind who happened to have been born with as much mental strength as he needed. One whose specialty had not been healing, teaching, creating art, or any of the ordinary talents. The Founder’s specialty had been living. He had lived for thousands of years, breeding, building the people who were to become Patternists. Finally, he had been killed by one of his own daughters—she who first created and held a Pattern.

  And meanwhile, mutes had been building a society more intricate, more mechanized, than anything that had existed since their downfall. Some Patternists refused to believe this segment of history. They said it was like believing that horses and cattle once had mechanized societies. But in Coransee’s House, Teray had seen for himself that mutes were more mechanically inclined than most Patternists. And mutes were intelligent. So much so that Teray would have enjoyed challenging them—letting them have more freedom, encouraging them to use their minds and their hands for more than drudgery. Then he could find out for himself whether the inventive ability that had once made them great still existed. After all, even now it was the mutes who handled what little machinery there was in Patternist Territory. And the Clayarks, who were only physically mutated mutes, were said to use simple machinery in their settlements beyond the eastern mountains. On the western side of the mountains, however, Clayarks produced nothing but weapons and warriors. At least, that was all Patternists had ever known them to produce. Yet Teray found himself thinking about the Clayark he had talked to. The creature had known Teray’s language, at least enough to communicate. But Teray, like most Patternists, knew nothing of the language the Clayarks spoke among themselves. Patternists almost never let Clayarks get close enough to them to hear them talk. Patternists and Clayarks stared at each other across a gulf of disease and physical difference and comfortably told themselves t
he same lie about each other. The lie that Teray’s

  Clayark had tried to get away with: “Not people.”

  That night another group of Clayarks drifted near them. Teray and Amber were camped on the beach, back against a hill. Amber had checked the horses over very carefully in what was to become a nightly ritual. She healed any injuries she found before they became serious, seeing to it, as she said, that they did not wind up on foot, and Clayark bait. They saved their rations and ate quail that Teray had mentally lured from one of the canyons in the hills. The Clayarks came into range behind them while they were eating.

  Amber, aware of the danger the moment Teray sensed it, opened to offer him her strength. He accepted it, and used it to extend his range.

  At once, he could sense the entire group of Clayarks walking toward them, moving through the hills rather than along the trail. Very shortly, those in the lead would see the two Patternists’ fire.

  Swiftly Teray reviewed the technique he had learned from Amber, then he swept over them like an ocean wave. A wave of destructive power, killing.

  The Clayarks had almost no time even to scatter. The group was slightly larger than the one they had met earlier. But Teray handled it in a fraction of the time he had needed to handle the first group. He handled it using less energy, since he was not required to puncture or tear anything. And since he handled it so quickly, he did not need Amber to spot potential escapees for

  him. There were no potential escapees.

  Since he would never see them physically, he swept over them once more to see that they all were dead. There was no movement at all.