The Dawn Country(101)

As Gannajero headed for the clearing, her rage grew to a conflagration. Her brother thought he could trap her by sending her the sacred gorget! And it had almost worked. All of her life, she had dreamed of that gorget. Her earliest memory was of her mother slipping it over her head and saying, “Someday this will be yours.” Though Gannajero wasn’t allowed to play with it, she used to sit next to her mother in council and stare at it. She had counted the stars and knew every graceful curve and color variation in the carving. Deep inside her, in the dark space between her souls, the gorget’s voice lived. It had called to her for thirty-two summers. Even when she was far away in distant alien empires, it begged her to come home. That’s why twenty-five summers ago, she’d made an exact copy for herself. Carved it from memory with painstaking attention to detail. Though she’d known it wasn’t the sacred artifact, it had comforted her. At least until her demented brother stole it from her.

Her gnarled hand rose to caress the gorget where it lay upon her chest. So many times she had tried to get home. Once, when she’d seen sixteen summers, she’d made it to the gates of her village—by then it was called Atotarho Village—only to be told by her brother’s henchmen that she was an imposter. The Wolf Clan said that Atotarho’s only sister was long dead. They’d dispatched a war party to drive her away.

“My brother, the great Atotarho, couldn’t stand to look into my eyes.”

She followed the trail through the brush, and when she emerged, movement on the far side of the clearing caught her eye. It resembled a black spider stepping across the snow on three enormous long legs. Occasionally beads or shells flashed in the moonlight. Then she realized with a start that the “legs” were actually long shadows being cast by three—

A single high-pitched cry of recognition pierced the trees. She gasped and ran. Feet thrashed the snow behind her. Wailing at the tops of their lungs, their voices blended to create one inhuman cry. She kept stumbling over roots and rocks hidden beneath the snow, falling and dragging herself to her feet, plunging on.

Her legging caught on a piece of deadfall and flung her forward. Before she could thrust out her arms to cushion the fall, she hit the ground hard, and the platter-sized gorget made a loud crack.

“No!”

When she sat up, she saw half the gorget shining in the snow. Her hand shot out to retrieve it … and they closed in around her.

Their pale faces seemed to have no other features than eyes. Huge black eyes. Their chests were rising and falling swiftly.

They were just children. Little more than scared mice. Gannajero rolled to her knees and shouted, “Get away from me before I witch you and rip your hearts from your bodies, you stupid brats!”

That high-pitched scream erupted again. It was earsplitting. With one hand, the boy swung a war club over his head and charged her. The Flint girl, whose name she couldn’t recall, followed him swinging an ax … and Chipmunk Teeth leaped forward with a stiletto clutched in her fist. The other two girls stood by with stunned expressions. The pretty little girl that she’d had such high hopes for had a vague sweet smile on her face.





Forty-seven

The child’s scream momentarily froze Koracoo in her tracks; then as recognition filtered through her shock, she shouted, “Odion!”

Her feet kicked up puffs of snow behind her as she rounded a clump of brush and dashed headlong toward the snow-bright clearing ahead, where dark patches—people—moved against the white. CorpseEye had gone fiery in her grip, leading her on.

“Koracoo?” Sindak called. “Wait! This could be a trap!”

She didn’t even slow.

An eerie chorus of children’s screams rang through the night, possessing a terrifying animalistic rage—pure emotion without reason or remorse.

She charged across the clearing toward where the children stood, calling, “Odion? Odion, answer me! Are you all right?”

When she was twenty paces away, her son turned to look at her. He blinked as though awakening from a dream and seeing her for the first time. Even in the soft moonlight, she could tell that he was drenched in blood. It covered his face and cape as though poured over his head. His left arm was hanging limply at his side, but in his right hand, he carried a war club clenched in his fist. The expression on his face wasn’t that of a child, but of a victorious warrior standing over the dead body of the man who’d killed his family.

Baji stood beside him with a dripping ax, and Zateri stood two paces away with a stiletto. A short distance away were two other girls. She did not know them. One was standing. The other, younger, lay on her side curled in the snow. She had a finger tucked in her mouth, sucking it as an infant would.