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TALI SPENT THE NEXT three cycles while they helped the Chakka-folk, in near silence, at least when she wasn’t explaining to the carers of the tribe. It seemed they had little concept of healers perse, as hardly anyone got better from anything that ailed them. When the onset of the damage from the Sacred Source or whatever it was, was complete, healing from anything became extremely unlikely. Wounds became infected and quickly too. The colony had resting rooms that seemed to do as makeshift hospitals, but no one seemed to get better in them. The smell inside them was nearly unbearable.
Tali asked for a new room. Ther was no point in making her task any more difficult than it had to be, and she set about training some of the folk, including Chak, how to make the salve. Then she made rounds of the resting rooms with her new trainees to apply it to the sick. In some simple cases, she could help with other things like setting bones and cleaning wounds. It seemed that the Chakka-folk hadn’t developed much medicine at all. In the end, Dun and Padg were roped in too, to teach as many and as much as possible, while moving on as quickly as they could. At no time did they even catch a scent of Jarn. Neither did they find the Speaker again after Tali’s initial audience.
Tali was woken on the morning of their third cycle there, by being shaken firmly by Padg.
“Get off me!” It came out harsher than she’d intended.
“Sorry,” Padg said. “Myrch says we’ve got to leave, now.”
“But there’s so much to do.”
“Yeah, still. He’s been wafting around some kind of hissy gadget, and he says there’s too many rads or something. Anyway, it's not safe to stay any longer, and we’ve got to leave.”
“Okay.” It didn’t sound like she had a choice. Life seemed to be turning out that way a lot.
“You okay?” Padg said.
“Not so much...I—" but then Myrch was there with Dun.
“Come on, you two,” Myrch said.
“Okay!” Tali said.
“What’s up with you? We need to go.” Myrch was short.
“But without Jarn?” she said, really angry now.
“Why do you care?” Myrch said, not a trace of anger in his voice.
“Why don’t you?” she snapped back.
“He was a professional guide, he knew the risks. It’s not like they’re going to eat him.”
“I just worry whether you’d sacrifice one of us so quickly,” Tali said.
“Do you know the risks?”
Tali didn’t even begin to understand the question, let along how to answer it.
She sent a messenger to the Speaker to say they wished to leave and in return. Chak was sent back to them as a guide. They bade what passed for farewells with the folk they’d become most familiar with in their new nursing teams, collected their things, and left.
With a Chosen to guide them, the terrain became much simpler. It seemed they were being led the simplest, not the shortest way out, and they were glad of that. When they camped at the end of their first cycle Tali realized that they had all brought something with them. Every face and every hand, hers most of all, carried a glow from the source they had all brought with them. She quickly made to apply the ointment to all of them. Chak didn’t need any, his wounds healing nicely from the first time Tali had applied the cream. Myrch refused point blank. Tali was half expecting him to before she even offered.
They made good progress, with their Chakking friend leading the way being an efficient guide. Dun couldn’t help noticing more places where that had heat but with no vents. It seemed the source wasn’t the only source. Dun pondered how the heat had gotten there, and what it even was. At the very least, it made an interesting caveat on his ever-expanding map. “Here be source.” He still spent time worrying whether he’d ever get it back to the Bridge-folk to show them.
The last part of their journey through Chosen territory was a perilous descent down a tube that seemed to be part of a giant tunnel network. The Chakkas seemed to have a smoothed pipe gadget that allowed them to clip on to a rope and slide down it, braking their descent by lifting the trailing end of the rope. It seemed that with enough practice more than one of them could rappel down a rope at a time. This must be how the rapid ambushes took place.
As they descended, Dun could hear trickling water from the pipes below, then as he got closer he detected a faint smell drifting up the rope to meet him. Adrenaline banged into his bloodstream. He felt the rush of blood to his face, to his ears. He felt dizzy. Slowly, he realized where he’d smelled that scent before: He’d smelled it in a dream.
“What’s wrong, Dun?” Tali asked.
“That dream, the one of the thing hunting and attacking us?”
“Uh-huh,”
“It took place here.”
“But how could it?” Tali said. “You’ve never been here.”
“It’s foretelling, isn’t it,” Padg said. “That’s what happens.”
“So what happens in the dream?” Myrch said, last to land in the pipe behind them.
“There isn’t really an end to it if that’s what you’re asking. It’s just me sensing what the creature senses and being aware of what it's thinking.”
“What is it thinking? Out of interest,” Padg said.
“Mostly that it wants to hunt and bite and taste blood.”
“Sorry I asked now.”
“Is it in front of us or behind us?” Myrch said.
“I can’t really tell,” Dun said. “Sorry. You still believe me, don’t you?”
“It certainly can’t hurt to be prepared,” Myrch said. “Is it bigger than us, smaller?”
“No, smaller. ?hhhygIts the size of a large rat, but there’s something odd about it. Its mind isn’t like ours.”
“Well, no,” Padg said, “its a rat.”
“That’s not what I meant slick-whiskers, part of its mind is rat-like, I guess. Savage, ravenous, but rat-like. But there’s another part of its mind, somehow inside it, or maybe alongside it, that’s cold, calculating, like its giving instructions, processing. Either way, small or not, it’s fierce and sharp, and its killed things before, lots of things.”
“Then we’d better make sure we’re not on its menu,” Myrch said. “I’ll take the front, Padg, spear out, you’re in back. Tali, anything in that bag of tricks of yours we can use?”
“I’ve still got a couple of compression flasks left.”
“Good. Fish one out, we can do with all the help we can get. Okay.” There was that small metal sliding sound and a click that accompanied Myrch when he was preparing. “Let’s go. Move off slowly.”
“Err, we should say good-bye to Chak first,” Tali said.
“Okay, but hurry,” Myrch said.
Hurried farewells were said, and they moved off into the pipe. The party tried to make less noise than the trickling stream that soaked their feet in the bottom of the pipe, Padg having the least luck on account of him walking backward guarding their rear.
