Maybe if Rory couldn't think consciously they couldn't find her . . . .
Another flare of burning, agonizing pain. In a minute they'll have the feel of it. They can keep it going . . . .
Without warning, Harker slugged McLaren heavily on the jaw and dragged her away to where the rock was firm. She did it all with astonishing strength and quickness. There was no need to save herself. She wasn't going to need herself much longer.
She went away a hundred feet or so, watching McLaren. A third attack struck her, sickened and dazed her so that she nearly fell. Rory McLaren was not touched.
Harker smiled. She turned and ran back toward the rotten place in the cliffs. A part of her conscious thought was so strongly formed that her body obeyed it automatically, not stopping even when the flames appeared again and again on her flesh, brightening, growing, strengthening as the thought-energies of Button's people meshed together. She flung down one teetering giant of stone, and the shock jarred another loose. Harker stumbled on to a third, based on a sliding bed of shale, and thrust with all her strength and beyond it, and it went too, with crashing thunder.
Harker fell. The universe dissolved into shuddering, roaring chaos beyond a bright veil of flame and a smell of burning flesh. By that time there was only one thing clear in Matty Harker's understanding—the second part of her conscious mind, linked to and even stronger than the first.
The image she carried with her into death was a tall mountain with snow on its shoulders, blazing in the sun.
It was night. Rory McLaren lay prone on a jutting shelf above the valley. Below her the valley was lost in indigo shadows, but there was a new sound in it—the swirl of water, angry and swift.
There was new life in it, too. It rode the crest of the flood waters, burning gold in the blue night, shining giants returning in vengeance to their own place. Great patches of blazing jewel-toned phosphorescence dotted the water—the flower-hounds, turned loose to hunt. And in between them, rolling and leaping in deadly play, the young of the Swimmers went.
McLaren watched them hunt the forest people. She watched all night, shivering with dread, while the golden titans exacted payment for the ages they had lived in darkness. By dawn it was all over. And then, through the day, she watched the Swimmers die.
The river, turned back on itself, barred them from the caves. The strong bright light beat down. The Swimmers turned at first to greet it with a pathetic joy. And then they realized . . . .
McLaren turned away. She waited, resting, until, as Harker had predicted, the block washed away and the backed-up water could flow normally again. The valley was already draining when she found the pass. She looked up at the mountains and breathed the sweet wind, and felt a great shame and humility that she was here to do it.
She looked back toward the caves where Sim had died, and the cliffs above where she had buried what remained of Matty Harker. It seemed to her that she should say something, but no words came, only that her breast was so full she could hardly breathe. She turned mutely down the rocky pass, toward the Sea of Morning Opals and the thirty-eight hundred wanderers who had found a home.
Artwork by Suicide Girls
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THE END
JEKKARA PRESS
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Coming Soon
The Adventures of Bulays and Ghaavn
The Impossible Venusian – Tara Loughead
Slave Ship of Space – Tara Loughead
The Gender Switch Adventures
The Blue Behemoth Regrown – Lee Brackett
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