Forty Thousand in Gehenna

“MaGee,” she said, suddenly, thinking on this, “you’re not in the Pattern. Not really. Tell me in words what you’d do if you were me. Maybe it would confuse them.”

For a moment then MaGee looked less than confident. “No.”

“Then you do know something.”

“What would I know? What would I know that calibans don’t? Oh, I’d confuse things. Maybe not in a way you’d like. Don’t make me do that.”

“My rivals would take you,” Elai said, “Jin, Taem, Paeia–They’d want you to use. Taem and Paeia’d treat you all right. But Jin’s another matter. They have different ways on Styxside. Do you want that? Give me advice.”

MaGee set her jaw and ducked her head, then looked up. “First thing, I’d get the conflict out of here. Away from the Towers and the fields. But that, you’re going to do.”

“Calibans say that much.”

“What else do they say?”

“We’ll meet upriver.”

“What kind of war is that,” MaGee exclaimed, “when you know where you’ll meet? That’s not war, that’s an appointment. They’ll kill you, Elai, you know that?”

Elai felt a chill. “Come with me. Come with me to meet with Jin, my friend.”

“Up the Cloud? To fight a war?”

Elai made the affirmative. MaGee thrust out her lip, a pensive look as if it were just some ordinary venture she were considering.

“Oh, well,” MaGee said, “sure.”

And then, from nowhere: “You should have built your ships, Elai.”

“What’s that mean?”

“You should have, that’s all.”

“You think I’ll die?”

“What would you leave behind you?”

MaGee had a way of walking ground others knew better than to tread. Elai lifted her head and stared at her like some drowsing old caliban. “Don’t know that. No one does, do they?” She walked away, beside Scar’s huge length, stopped near his tail‑tip. “Never wore leathers myself. Got some, though. Wished I could, now and then, just take Scar and go.”

“Ships,Elai .”

She stared at this insistent starman. “Was that what I was supposed to do? Was that what you were waiting for?” She recalled a day on the beach, the launching of her boats, a starman watching from the shore. “Of course,” she said softly when MaGee answered only with silence. Her heart plummeted. Of course. Scar had chosen her for one reason; of course starmen also came equipped with reasons. She was the creature of others. That was what it was to be First. She was self‑amused and pained.

And she walked toward the wall, stood there looking seaward. “Give Jin ships?” she asked Magee. “If I’d made them, he’d have built them too. He’d have patterned how they are. We talk to each other–have for years, back and forth. Takes days. But I always know where he is. And what he’s doing. And he knows me. Hates me, MaGee. Hates me. Hates what got from the fingers of the Styxsiders. Ships. That could be something. He wants the world, he does. Wants the world. He’ll break those men.”

“Who? Genley?”

“Don’t know their names. Three of them. His starmen.”

“How do you know these things?”

There was dismay in MaGee’s voice, in her eyes when Elai turned around. “Calibans talk to you,” Elai said quietly. “But you don’t hear all they say. You don’t know everything, starman. Friend.”

“I’ve got to warn the Base, Elai.”

“You keep quiet with that com. They’d do nothing, you say. That true?”

“I think it’s so.”

Elai looked her up and down. “You’ve gotten thin, MaGee. Leathers might fit you. You come with me, you keep that com quiet. You’re mine, you hear?”

MaGee thought about it. “All right,” she said.

Later that day, Paeia came, grim and frowning–came, quite tamely, into hall, her caliban behind her. She had not brought her heir, came armed with only a knife; and stood there in front of the chair she had stood behind so often when Ellai had ruled.

“You’ve read how it is,” Elai said, from the authority of that chair. “I’m going upriver. You too.”

Elai watched Paeia draw a breath, a long, slow one. Paeia folded her arms and stared. Her face might have been stone, seamed and weathered as it was. She had braided her grizzled hair, with beads in the strands. Had taken her own time about coming, to look her best. Had thought long about coming, maybe–whether it was a trap, whether she might die.

“With you,” Paeia said.

“I’m no fool,” said Elai. “I don’t want us weak. You tell me you’ll be by me, I don’t ask any other promises.”

Paeia went on thinking a moment. “I’ll be there,” Paeia said. And truth, there were no other promises she could have asked. Both of them knew that.

“Taem’s coming,” Elai said.

“Then, First, you are a fool.”

Elai frowned at that. She had to, being First; and smiled after, bleak and cool, amused at Paeia warning her. “But he’s coming,” she said. “I asked him to.”

Taem took three days, with the pattern growing worse each one of them. But come he did, with his riders across the Cloud, enough to raise the dust, to veil the shore in amber clouds.

He crossed the Cloud alone then, just himself with his caliban.

“Been a while,” Taem said when he stood in hall where Paeia had stood.

It had. He had not changed. The presence was the same. But it added up differently. There was no son. And she herself had changed. She met his eyes, saw him for what he was worth in the daylight as well as dark. He was straight and tall. Ambitious. Why else had he wanted her, in those years? She had no grace, was not fine to look on. He was.

Din’s father–he had come too, and stood by her now, one of her riders, nothing more. Din was there, against the wall; and Paeia stood close by her side. And Cloud and Cloud’s father, one of the long line of Cloud, same as Paeia, but of Windward Tower–he had come. So all her men were here, and their kin; and two of her sons.

“Why didn’t you kill me?” Taem asked her outright. And that was like him too.

205 CR, day 51

Notes, coded journal Dr. E. McGee

Elai has called the seaward towers to her aid, brought in this former mate of hers… Taem’s father. Taem Eldest of New Tower. He’s dangerous. You can see the way the calibans behave, up on their four legs, crests up. His caliban is trouble, Elai said once. I see what she means This manis trouble.

“Why didn’t you kill me?” he asked her right there in hall, and everyone seemed to be asking himself that question. I think he was insulted she hadn’t tried. He came with all his riders, all of them just across the river, but he came into First Tower alone, and that took nerve, the kind of craziness Calibans instill. I think he was reading Patterns all the way, that he could get away with it. That he had to come because she wouldn’t come out to him; that he had to swallow the fish’s tail, they say on the Cloud, when they mean that’s all you’ve got left for choices. It galled him.

Elai just looked at him, never getting up from her chair, and made some sign I couldn’t read all of, but it was something like dismissing him as a threat, which didn’t please him. “This isn’t Styx,” she said then. “I don’t have Jin’s ma

“How’s the boy?” Taem asked then.

“He’s well,” she said. Taem had to know about his son, that Elai’s Taem had gone down to the Weirds; too much news travels unspoken, everywhere. But news about the Weirds, that have no name–well, that could be different. “I saw him this morning,” Elai said.

He’s a handsome man, this Taem. I see what attracted Elai to him in spite of other troubles. He’s none so old, this Taem Eldest: good‑looking, straight and mean and trim; wears his hair braided at the crown, and a tot of ornament: he’s rich as a Cloudsider can, be, and those riders of his are part of it. I never saw a man move like that, like he owned whatever space he was in.