Dreamsnake

Chapter 3

They planned to break camp that evening and cross the lava flow in darkness. Snake would have preferred to wait a few more days before moving Jesse at all, but there was no choice. Jesse’s spirits were too readily changeable to keep her here any longer. She knew the partnership had already overstayed its time in the desert. Alex and Merideth could not hide the fact that the water was running low, that they and the horses were going thirsty so she could be cleaned and bathed. A few more days in the canyon, living in the sour stench that would collect because nothing could be properly washed, would push her down into depression and disgust.

And they had no time to waste. They had a long way to journey: up and across the lava, then east to the central mountains that separated the black desert into its western half, where they were now, and its eastern portion, where the city lay. The road cutting through the west and east ranges of the central mountains was a good one, but after the pass the travelers would enter the desert again, and head southeast, for Center. They had to hurry. Once the storms of winter began, no one could cross the desert; the city would be isolated. Already the summer was fading in stinging dust devils and windblown eddies of sand.

They would not take down the tent or load the horses until twilight, but they packed all they could before it became too hot to work, stacking the baggage beside Jesse’s sacks of ore. Snake’s hand limbered up with the heavy work. The bruise was finally fading and the punctures had healed to bright pink scars. Soon the sand viper bite would match all the other scars on her hands, and she would forget which one it was. She wished now that she had captured one of the ugly serpents to take home with her. It was a species she had never seen before. Even if it had turned out not to be useful to the healers, she could have made an antidote to its venom for Arevin’s people. If she ever saw Arevin’s people again.

Snake wrestled the last pack into the pile and wiped her hands on her pants and her face on her sleeve. Nearby, Merideth and Alex hoisted the stretcher they had built and adjusted the makeshift harnesses until it rode level between a tandem pair of horses. Snake went over to watch.

It was the most peculiar conveyance she had ever seen, but it looked like it would work. In the desert everything had to be carried or dragged; wheeled carts would bog down in the sand or break in rocky country. As long as the horses did not shy or bolt, the stretcher would give Jesse a more tolerable ride than a travois. The big gray between the front shafts stood calm and steady as a stone; apart from a sidelong glance as it was led between the back shafts, the second horse, a piebald, showed no fear.

Jesse must be a marvel, Snake thought, if the horses she trains will put up with such contraptions.

“Jesse says we’ll start a fashion among rich merchants wherever we go,” Merideth said.

“She’s right,” Alex said. He unfastened a strap and they let the stretcher fall to the ground. “But they’ll be lucky not to get kicked apart, the way most of them break horses.” He slapped the placid gray’s neck fondly and led both horses back to the corral.

“I wish she’d been riding one of them before,” Snake said to Merideth.

“They weren’t like that when she got them. She buys crazy horses. She can’t bear to see them mistreated. The colt was one of her strays — she had him calmed but he hadn’t found his balance yet.“

They started back toward the tent to get out of the sun as it crept across the afternoon. The tent sagged on one side where two poles had been removed for the stretcher. Merideth yawned widely. “Best to sleep while we have the chance. We can’t afford to still be on the lava when the sun comes up.”

But Snake was filled with a restless uncertain energy; she sat in the tent, grateful for the shade but wide-awake, wondering how the whole mad plan could work. She reached for the leather case to check on her serpents, but Jesse woke as she opened Sand’s compartment. She closed the catch again and moved closer to the pallet. Jesse looked up at her.

“Jesse… about what I said…” She wanted to explain but could not think how to start.

“What upset you so? Am I the first you’ve helped who might have died?”

“No. I’ve seen people die. I’ve helped them die.”

“Everything was so hopeless just a little while ago,” Jesse said. “A pleasant end would have been easy. You must always have to guard against… the simplicity of death.”

“Death can be a gift,” Snake said. “But in one way or another it always means failure. That’s the guard against it. It’s enough.”

A faint breeze whispered through the heat, making Snake feel almost cool.

“What’s wrong, healer?”

“I was afraid,” Snake said. “I was afraid you might be dying. If you were, you had the right to ask my help. I have the obligation to give it. But I can’t.”

“I don’t understand.”

“When my training ended my teachers gave me my own serpents. Two of them can be drugged for medicines. The third was the dream-giver. He was killed.”

Jesse reached out instinctively and took Snake’s hand, a reaction to her sadness. Snake accepted Jesse’s quiet sympathy gratefully, taking comfort in the sturdy touch.

“You’re crippled too,” Jesse said abruptly. “As crippled in your work as I.”

Jesse’s generosity in comparing them that way embarrassed Snake. Jesse was in pain, helpless, her only chance of recovery so small that Snake stood in awe of her spirits and her renewed grasp on life. “Thank you for saying that.”

“So I’m going back to my family to ask for help — and you were going back to yours?”

“Yes.”

“They’ll give you another,” Jesse said with certainty.

“I hope so.”

“Is there any question?”

“Dreamsnakes don’t breed well,” Snake said. “We don’t know enough about them. Every few years a few new ones are born, or one of us manages to clone some, but—” Snake shrugged.

“Catch one!”

The suggestion had never occurred to Snake because she knew it was impossible. She had never considered any possibility other than returning to the healers’ station and asking her teachers to pardon her. She smiled sadly. “My reach isn’t that long. They don’t come from here.”

“Where?”

Snake shrugged again. “Some other world… ” Her voice trailed off as she realized what she was saying.

“Then you’ll come with me beyond the city’s gates,” Jesse said. “When I go to my family, they’ll introduce you to the offworlders.”

“Jesse, my people have been asking Center’s help for decades. They won’t even speak to us.”

“But now one of the city’s families is obligated to you. Whether my people will take me back I don’t know. But they’ll be in debt to you for helping me, nevertheless.”

Snake listened in silence, intrigued by the possibilities lying in Jesse’s words.

“Healer, believe me,” Jesse said. “We can help each other. If they accept me, they’ll accept my friends as well. If not, they’ll still have to discharge their debt to you. Either one of us can present both our requests.”

Snake was a proud woman, proud of her training, her competence, her name. The prospect of atoning for Grass’s death in some other way than begging forgiveness fascinated her. Once every decade an elder healer would make the long trip to the city, seeking to renew the breeding stock of dreamsnakes. They had always been refused. If Snake could succeed…

“Can this work?”

“My family will help us,” Jesse said. “Whether they can make the offworlders help us too, I don’t know.”

During the hot afternoon, all Snake and the partners could do was wait. Snake decided to let Mist and Sand out of the satchel for a while before the long trip began. As she left the tent, she stopped beside Jesse. The handsome woman was sleeping peacefully, but her face was flushed. Snake touched her forehead. Perhaps Jesse had a slight fever; perhaps it was just the heat of the day. Snake still thought Jesse had avoided serious internal injuries, but it was possible that she was bleeding, even that she was developing peritonitis. That was something Snake could cure. She decided not to disturb Jesse for the moment, but to wait and see if the fever rose.

Walking out of camp to find a sheltered place where her serpents would frighten no one, Snake passed Alex, staring morosely into space. She hesitated, and he glanced up, his expression troubled. Snake sat down beside him without speaking. He turned toward her, staring at her with his penetrating gaze: the goodnaturedness had vanished from his face in his torment, leaving him ugly, and sinister as well.

“We crippled her, didn’t we? Merideth and me.”

“Crippled her? No, of course not.”

“We shouldn’t have moved her. I should have thought of that. We should have moved the camp to her. Maybe the nerves weren’t broken when we found her.”

“They were broken.”

“But we didn’t know about her back. We thought she’d hit her head. We could have twisted her body—”

Snake put her hand on Alex’s forearm. “It was an injury of violence,” she said. “Any healer could see it. The damage happened when she fell. Believe me. You and Merideth couldn’t have done any of that to her.”

The hard muscles in his forearm relaxed. Snake took her hand away, relieved. Alex’s stocky body held so much strength, and he had been controlling himself so tightly, that Snake feared he might turn his own force unwittingly back on himself. He was more important to this partnership than he appeared, perhaps even more important than he himself knew. Alex was the practical one, the one who kept the camp running smoothly, who dealt with the buyers of Merideth’s work and balanced out the romanticism of Merideth the artist and Jesse the adventurer. Snake hoped the truth she had told him would let him ease his guilt and tension. For now, though, she could do no more for him.

As twilight approached, Snake stroked Sand’s smooth patterned scales. She no longer wondered if the diamondback enjoyed being stroked, or even if a creature as small-brained as Sand could feel enjoyment at all. The cool sensation beneath her fingers gave her pleasure, and Sand lay in a quiet coil, now and then flicking out his tongue. His color was bright and clear; he had outgrown his old skin and shed it only recently. “I let thee eat too much,” Snake said fondly. “Thou lazy creature.”

Snake drew her knees up under her chin. Against the black rocks, the rattlesnake’s patterns were almost as conspicuous as Mist’s albino scales. Neither serpents nor humans nor anything else left alive on earth had yet adapted to their world as it existed now.

Mist was out of sight, but Snake was not worried. Both serpents were imprinted on her and would stay near and even follow her. Neither had much aptitude for learning beyond the imprinting, which the healers had bred into them, but Mist and Sand would return when they felt the vibration of her hand slapping the ground.

Snake relaxed against a boulder, cushioned by the desert robe Arevin’s people had given her. She wondered what Arevin was doing, where he was. His people were nomads, herders of huge musk oxen whose undercoats gave fine, silky wool. To meet the clan again she would have to search for them. She did not know if that would ever be possible, though she very much wanted to see Arevin once more.

Seeing his people would always remind her of Grass’s death, if she were ever able to forget it. Her mistakes and misjudgments of them were the reason Grass was gone. She had expected them to accept her word despite their fear, and without meaning to they had shown her how arrogant her assumptions were.

She shook off her depression. Now she had a chance to redeem herself. If she really could go with Jesse, find out where the dreamsnakes came from, and capture new ones — if she could even discover why they would not breed on earth — she could return in triumph instead of in disgrace, succeeding where her teachers and generations of healers had failed.

It was time to return to the camp. She climbed the low rise of jumbled rock that covered the mouth of the canyon, looking for Mist. The cobra was coiled on a large chunk of basalt.

At the top of the slope Snake reached for Mist, picked her up, and stroked her narrow head. She was not so formidable unexcited, hood folded, narrow-headed as any venomless serpent. She did not need a thick-jowled head, heavy with poison. Her venom was powerful enough to kill in delicate doses.

As Snake turned, the brilliant sunset drew her gaze. The sun was an orange blur on the horizon, radiating streaks of purple and vermilion through the gray clouds.

And then Snake saw the craters, stretching away across the desert below her. The earth was covered with great circular basins. Some, lying in the path of the lava flow, had caught and broken its smooth frozen billows. Others were clearer, great holes gouged in the earth, still distinct after so many years of driving sands. The craters were so large, spread over such a distance, that they could have only one source. Nuclear explosions had blasted them. The war itself was long over, almost forgotten, for it had destroyed everyone who knew or cared about the reasons it had happened.

Snake gazed over the ravaged land, glad to be no nearer. In places like this the effects of the war had lingered visibly and invisibly to Snake’s time; they would persist for centuries beyond her life. The canyon in which she and the partners were camped was probably not completely safe itself, but they had not been here long enough to be in serious danger.

Something unusual lay out in the rubble, in line with the brilliant setting sun so it was difficult for Snake to see. She squinted at it. She felt uneasy, as if she were spying on something she had no business knowing about.

The body of a horse, decaying in the heat, lay crumpled at the edge of a crater. The dead animal’s rigid legs poked grotesquely into the air, forced up by its swollen belly. Clasping the animal’s head, a gold bridle gleamed scarlet and orange in the sunset.

Snake released her breath in a sound part sigh, part moan.

She ran back to the serpent case and urged Mist inside, picked Sand up and started back toward the camp, cursing when the rattler in his mindlessly obstinate way tried to twine himself around her arm. She stopped and held him so he could slide into his compartment, and started running again while she was still fastening the catch. The case banged against her leg.

Panting, she reached the tent and ducked inside. Merideth and Alex were asleep. Snake knelt beside Jesse and carefully pulled back the sheet.

Little more than an hour had passed since Snake had examined Jesse last. The bruises down her side had darkened and deepened, and her body was unhealthily flushed. Snake felt her forehead. It was burning hot and paper-dry. Jesse did not respond to her touch. When Snake took her hand away the smooth skin looked darker. Within minutes, while Snake watched, horrified, another bruise began to form as the capillaries ruptured, their walls so damaged by radiation that mild pressure completed their destruction. The bandage on Jesse’s thigh suddenly reddened in the center with a stain of blood. Snake clenched her fists. She was shaking, deep inside, as if from penetrating cold.

“Merideth!”

In a moment Merideth was awake, yawning and mumbling sleepily. “What’s wrong?”

“How long did it take you to find Jesse? Did she fall in the craters?”

“Yes, she was prospecting. That’s why we come here — other artisans can’t match our work because of what Jesse finds here. But this time a rim gave way. We found her in the evening.”

A whole day, Snake thought. She must have been in one of the primary craters.

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Tell you what?”

“Those craters are dangerous—”

“Do you believe all those old legends, healer? We’ve been coming here for a decade and nothing ever happened to us.”

Now was not the time for angry retorts. Snake glanced at Jesse again and realized that her own ignorance and the partnership’s contempt for the danger of the old world’s relics had unwittingly granted Jesse some mercy. Snake had treatments for radiation poisoning, but there was no treatment for anything this severe. Whatever she could have tried would only have prolonged Jesse’s death.

“What’s the matter?” For the first time Merideth’s voice showed fear.

“She has radiation poisoning.”

“Poisoning? How? She’s eaten and drunk nothing we haven’t tasted.”

“It’s from the crater. The ground is poisoned. The legends are true.”

Beneath deep tan, Merideth was pale. “Then do something, help her!”

“There’s nothing I can do.”

“You couldn’t help her injury, you can’t help her sickness—”

They stared at each other, both of them hurt and angry. Merideth’s gaze dropped first. “I’m sorry. I had no right…”

“I wish to the gods I were omnipotent, Merideth, but I’m not.”

Their conversation woke Alex, who rose and came toward them, stretching and scratching. “It’s time to—” He glanced back and forth from Snake to Merideth, then looked beyond to Jesse. “Oh, gods…”

The new mark on her forehead, where Snake had touched her, was slowly oozing blood.

Alex flung himself down beside her, reaching for her, but Snake held him back. He tried to push her away.

“Alex, I barely touched her. You can’t help her like that.”

He looked at her blankly. “Then how?” Snake shook her head.

Tears welling up, Alex pulled away from her. “It isn’t fair!” He ran out of the tent. Merideth started after him, hesitated at the entrance, and turned back. “He can’t understand, he’s so young.”

“He understands,” Snake said. She blotted Jesse’s forehead, trying not to rub or put pressure on her skin. “And he’s right, it isn’t fair. Who ever said anything was fair?” She cut off the words to spare Merideth her own bitterness over Jesse’s lost chances, snatched away by fate and ignorance and the remnants of another generation’s insanity.

“Merry?” Jesse groped in the air with a trembling hand.

“I’m here.” Merideth reached out but stopped, afraid to touch her.

“What’s the matter? Why do I…” She blinked slowly. Her eyes were bloodshot.

“Gently,” Snake whispered. Merideth enfolded Jesse’s fingers with hands soft as bird wings.

“Is it time to go?” The eagerness was tinged with terror, with unwillingness to realize something was wrong.

“No, love.”

“It’s so hot…” She started to raise her head, shifting her weight. She froze with a gasp. Information entered Snake’s mind without any conscious effort, a cold inhuman analysis she was trained for: bleeding into the joints. Internal bleeding. And in her brain?

“It never hurt like this.” She glanced at Snake without moving her head. “It’s something else, something worse.”

“Jesse, I—” Snake was first made aware of her tears by the taste of salt on her lips, mixed with the grit from the desert’s dust. She choked on words. Alex crept back into the tent. Jesse tried to speak again, but could only gasp.

Merideth grabbed Snake’s arm. She could feel the fingernails cutting her skin. “She’s dying.”

Snake nodded.

“Healers know how to help — how to—”

“Merideth, no,” Jesse whispered.

“ — how to take away the pain.”

“She can’t…”

“One of my serpents was killed,” Snake said, more loudly than she had intended, belligerent with grief and anger.

Merideth did not make a second outburst, but Snake could feel the unspoken accusation: You couldn’t help her live, and now you can’t help her die. This time it was Snake’s gaze that fell. She deserved the condemnation. Merideth let her go and turned back to Jesse, looming over her like a tall demon waiting to fight beasts or shadows.

Jesse reached out to touch Merideth but drew her hand sharply back. She stared at the soft center of her palm, between the calluses of her work. A bruise was forming. “Why?”

“The last war,” Snake said. “In the craters—” Her voice broke.

“So it’s true,” Jesse said. “My family believes the land outside kills, but I thought they lied.” Her eyes went out of focus; she blinked, looked toward Snake but did not seem to see her, blinked again. “They lied about so many other things. Lies for making children obedient…”

Silent again, her eyes closed, Jesse slowly went limp, one muscle at a time, as if even relaxation was an agony she could not tolerate all at once. She was still conscious but did not respond, with word or smile or glance, as Merideth stroked her bright hair and moved as close as was possible without touching her. Her skin was ashen around the livid bruises.

Suddenly she screamed. She clamped her hands to her temples, pressing, digging her nails into her scalp. Snake grabbed for her hands to pull them away. “No,” Jesse groaned, “oh, no leave me alone — Merry, it hurts!” Weak a few moments before, Jesse struggled with fever-fired strength. Snake could do nothing but try to restrain her gently, but the inner diagnostic voice returned: aneurism. In Jesse’s brain a radiation-weakened vessel was slowly exploding. Snake’s next thought was equally unbidden and even more powerful: Pray it bursts soon and hard, and kills her cleanly.

At the same time that Snake realized Alex was no longer beside her, trying to help with Jesse, but had crossed to the other side of the tent, she heard Sand rattle. She turned instinctively, launching herself toward Alex. Her shoulder rammed his stomach and he dropped the satchel as Sand struck from within. Alex crashed to the ground. Snake felt a sharp pain in her leg and drew back her fist to strike him, but checked herself.

She fell to one knee.

Sand coiled on the ground, rattling his tail softly, prepared to strike again. Snake’s heart raced. She could feel the pulse throbbing in her thigh. Her femoral artery was less than a handsbreadth from the puncture where Sand had sunk his fangs into muscle.

“You fool! Are you trying to kill yourself?” Her leg throbbed a few more times, then her immunities neutralized the venom. She was glad Sand had missed the artery. Even she could be made briefly ill by a bite like that, and she had no time for illness. The pain became a dull, ebbing ache.

“How can you let her die in such pain?” Alex asked.

“All you’d give her with Sand is more pain.” Disguising her anger, she turned calmly to the diamondback, picked him up, and let him slide back into the case. “There’s no quick death with rattlers.” That was not quite true, but Snake was still angry enough to frighten him. “If anyone dies of it, they die from infection. Gangrene.”

Alex paled but held his ground, glowering.

Merideth called him. Alex glanced at his partners, then stared at Snake again for a long challenging moment. “What about the other serpent?” He turned his back on her and went to Jesse’s side.

Holding the case, Snake fingered the catch on Mist’s compartment. She shook her head, pushing away the image of Jesse dying from Mist’s poison. Cobra venom would kill quickly, not pleasantly but quickly. What was the difference between disguising pain with dreams and ending it with death? Snake had never deliberately caused the death of another human being, in anger or in mercy. She did not know if she could now. Or if she should. She could not tell if the reluctance she felt came from her training or from some deeper, more fundamental knowledge that to kill Jesse would be wrong.

She could hear the partners talking softly together, voices, but not words, distinguishable: Merideth clear, musical, midrange; Alex deep and rumbling; Jesse breathless and hesitant. Every few minutes they all fell silent as Jesse fought another wave of pain. Jesse’s next hours or days, the last of her life, would strip away her strength and spirit.

Snake opened the case and let Mist slide out and coil around her arm, up and over her shoulder. She held the cobra gently behind the head so she could not strike, and crossed the tent.

They all looked up at her, startled out of a retreat into their self-sufficient partnership. Merideth, in particular, seemed for a moment not even to recognize her. Alex looked from Snake to the cobra and back again, with a strange expression of resigned, triumphant grief. Mist flicked out her tongue to catch their smells, her unblinking eyes like silver mirrors in the growing darkness. Jesse peered at her, squinting, blinking. She reached up to rub her eyes but stopped, remembering, a tremor in her hand. “Healer? Come closer, I can’t see properly.”

Snake knelt down between Merideth and Alex. For the third time she did not know what to say to Jesse. It was as if she, not Jesse, were becoming blind, blood seeping across her retinas and squeezing the nerves, sight blurring slowly to scarlet and black. Snake blinked rapidly and her vision cleared.

“Jesse, I can’t do anything about the pain.” Mist moved smoothly beneath her hand. “All I can offer…”

“Tell her!” Alex growled. He stared as if petrified at Mist’s eyes.

“Do you think this is easy?” Snake snapped. But Alex did not look up.

“Jesse,” Snake said, “Mist’s natural venom can kill. If you want me to—”

“What are you saying?” Merideth cried.

Alex broke his fascinated stare. “Merideth, be quiet, how can you stand—”

“Both of you be quiet,” Snake said. “The decision’s up to neither of you, it’s Jesse’s alone.”

Alex slumped back on his heels; Merideth sat rigid, glaring Jesse said nothing for a long time. Mist tried to crawl from Snake’s arm and Snake restrained her.

“The pain won’t stop,” Jesse said.

“No,” Snake said. “I’m sorry.”

“When will I die?”

“The pain in your head is from pressure. It could kill you… any time.” Merideth hunched down, face in hands, but Snake had no way of being gentler. “You have a few days, at the most, from the poisoning.” Jesse flinched when she said that.

“I don’t wish for days anymore,” she said softly.

Tears streamed between Merideth’s fingers.

“Dear Merry, Alex knows,” Jesse said. “Please try to understand. It’s time for me to let you go.” Jesse looked toward Snake with sightless eyes. “Let us have a little while alone, and then I’ll be grateful for your gift.”

Snake stood and walked out of the tent. Her knees shook and her neck and shoulders ached with tension. She sat down on the hard, gritty sand, wishing the night were over.

She looked up at the sky, a thin strip edged by the walls of the canyon. The clouds seemed peculiarly thick and opaque tonight, for though the moon had not yet risen high enough to see, some of its light should have been diffracted into sky-glow. Suddenly she realized the clouds were not unusually thick but very thin and mobile, too thin to spread light. They moved in a wind that blew only high above the ground. As she watched, a bank of dark cloud parted, and Snake quite clearly saw the sky, black and deep and shimmering with multicolored points of light. Snake stared at them, hoping the clouds would not come together again, wishing someone else were near to share the stars with her. Planets circled some of those stars, and people lived on them, people who might have helped Jesse if they had even known she existed. Snake wondered if their plan had had any chance of success at all, or if Jesse had accepted it because on a level deeper than shock and resignation her grip on life had been too strong to let go.

Inside the tent someone uncovered a clear bowl of lightcells. The blue bioluminescence spilling through the entrance washed over the black sand.

“Healer, Jesse wants you.” Merideth stood outlined in the glow, voice stripped of music, tall and gaunt and haggard.

Snake carried Mist inside. Merideth did not speak to her again. Even Alex looked at her with a fleeting expression of uncertainty and fear. But Jesse welcomed her with her blinded eyes. Merideth and Alex stood in front of her bed, like a guard. Snake stopped. She did not doubt her decision, but the final choice was still Jesse’s.

“Come kiss me,” Jesse said. “Then leave us.”

Merideth swung around. “You can’t ask us to go now!”

“You have enough to forget.” Her voice trembled with weakness. Her hair clung in tangles to her forehead and her cheeks, and what was left in her face was endurance near exhaustion. Snake saw it and Alex saw it, but Merideth stood, shoulders hunched, staring at the floor.

Alex knelt and gently raised Jesse’s hand to his lips. He kissed her almost reverently, on the fingers, on the cheek, on her lips. She laid her hand on his shoulder and kept him a moment longer. He rose slowly, silent, looked at Snake, and left the tent.

“Merry, please say good-bye before you go.”

Defeated, Merideth knelt beside her and brushed her hair back from her bruised face, gathered her up and held her. She returned the embrace. Neither offered consolation.

Merideth left the tent, in a silence that drifted on longer than Snake meant it to. When the footsteps faded to a whisper of sand against leather, Jesse shuddered with a sound between a cry and a groan.

“Healer?”

“I’m here.” She put her palm under Jesse’s outstretched hand.

“Do you think it would have worked?”

“I don’t know,” Snake said, remembering when one of her teachers had returned from the city, having met only closed gates and people who would not speak to her. “I want to believe it would have.”

Jesse’s lips were darkening to purple. Her lower lip had split. Snake dabbed at the blood, but it was thin as water and she could not stop the flow.

“You keep going,” Jesse whispered.

“What?”

“To the city. You still have a claim on them.”

“Jesse, no—”

“Yes. They live under a stone sky, afraid of everything outside. They can help you, and they need your help. They’ll all go mad in a few more generations. Tell them I lived and I was happy. Tell them I might not have died if they had told the truth. They said everything outside killed, so I thought nothing did.”

“I’ll carry your message.”

“Don’t forget your own. Other people need…” She ran out of breath, and Snake waited in silence for the command that would come next. Sweat slid down her sides. Sensing her distress, Mist coiled tighter on her arm.

“Healer?”

Snake patted her hand.

“Merry took the pain away. Please let me go before it comes back.”

“All right, Jesse.” She freed Mist from her arm. “I’ll try to make it as quick as I can.”

The handsome ruined face turned toward her. “Thank you.”

Snake was glad Jesse could not see what was about to happen. Mist would strike one of the carotid arteries, just beneath the jaw, so the poison would flow to Jesse’s brain and kill her instantly. Snake had planned that out very carefully, dispassionately, at the same time wondering how she could think about it so clearly.

Snake began to speak soothingly, hypnotically. “Relax, let your head fall back, close your eyes, pretend it’s time to sleep…” She held Mist over Jesse’s breast, waiting as the tension flowed away and the slight tremor ceased. Tears ran down her face, but her sight was brilliantly clear. She could see the pulse-beat in Jesse’s throat. Mist’s tongue flicked out, in. Her hood flared. She would strike straight forward when Snake released her. “A deep sleep, and joyful dreams…” Jesse’s head lolled, exposing her throat. Mist slid in Snake’s hands. Snake felt her fingers opening as she thought Must I do this? and suddenly Jesse convulsed, her upper spine arched, flinging her head back. Her arms went rigid and her fingers spread and tensed into claws. Frightened, Mist struck. Jesse convulsed again, hands clenching, and relaxed completely, all at once. Blood pulsed in two thin drops from the marks of Mist’s fangs. Jesse shuddered, but she was already dead.

Nothing was left but the smell of death and a spirit-empty corpse, Mist cold and hissing atop it. Snake wondered if Jesse somehow had felt the pressure grow to breaking point, and had stood it as long as she could to save her partners this memory.

Shaking, Snake put Mist in the case and cleaned the body as gently as if it were still Jesse. But there was nothing left of her now; her beauty had gone with her life, leaving bruised and battered flesh. Snake closed the eyes and drew the stained sheet up over the face.

She left the tent, carrying the leather case. Merideth and Alex watched her approach. The moon had risen; she could see them in shades of gray.

“It’s over,” she said. Somehow, her voice was the same as ever.

Merideth did not move or speak. Alex took Snake’s hand, as he had taken Jesse’s, and kissed it. Snake drew back, wanting no thanks for this night’s work.

“I should have stayed with her,” Merideth said.

“Merry, she didn’t want us to.”

Snake saw that Merideth would always imagine what had happened, a thousand ways, each more horrible than the last, unless she stopped the fantasy.

“I hope you can believe this, Merideth,” she said. “Jesse said, ‘Merry took the pain away,’ and a moment later, just before my cobra struck, she died. Instantly. A blood vessel broke in her brain. She never felt it. She never felt Mist. Gods witness it, I believe that to be the truth.”

“It would have been the same, no matter what we did?”

“Yes.”

That seemed to change things for Merideth, enough to accept. It did not change anything for Snake. She still knew she would have been the cause of Jesse’s death. Seeing the self-hatred vanish from Merideth’s face, Snake started toward the crumbled part of the canyon wall where the slope led up to the lava plain.

“Where are you going?” Alex caught up to her.

“Back to my camp,” she said dully.

“Please wait. Jesse wanted to give you something.”

If he had said Jesse had asked them to give her a gift, she would have refused, but, somehow, that Jesse left it herself made a difference. Unwillingly, she stopped. “I can’t,” she said. “Alex, let me go.”

He turned her gently and guided her back to the camp. Merideth was gone, and in the tent with Jesse’s body or grieving alone.

Jesse had left her a horse, a dark-gray mare, almost black, a fine-boned animal with the look of speed and spirit. Despite herself, despite knowing it was not a healer’s horse, Snake’s hands and heart went out to her. The mare seemed to Snake the only thing she had seen in — she could not think how long — that was beauty and strength alone, unmarked by tragedy. Alex gave her the reins and she closed her hands around the soft leather. The bridle was inlaid with gold in Merideth’s delicate filigree style.

“Her name is Swift,” Alex said.

Snake was alone, on the long trek to cross the lava before morning. The mare’s hooves rang on the hollow-sounding stone, and the leather case rubbed against Snake’s leg from behind.

She knew she could not return to the healers’ station. Not yet. Tonight had proved that she could not stop being a healer, no matter how inadequate her tools. If her teachers took Mist and Sand and cast her out, she knew she could not bear it. She would go mad with the knowledge that in this town, or that camp, sickness or death occurred that she could have cured or prevented or made more tolerable. She would always try to do something.

She had been raised to be proud and self-reliant, qualities she would have to set aside if she returned to the station now. She had promised Jesse to take her last message to the city, and she would keep the promise. She would go to the city for Jesse, and for herself.