Free Crecheling by D. J. Butler Page A

over to Jak and shimmied up the rope. He was surprisingly agile, given how tentative and feverish he seemed, and given that he had recently lost half his arm. But he gripped the rope with his feet and his one hand, and in short order was scrambling onto the ledge above.
    “It’s like that old riddle,” Dyan said, remembering a brain-teaser a former Magister of hers had once told her. “You have a cabbage, a sheep, and a wolf, and you have to get them all across the river in your canoe, only your canoe only holds one of them, and you can’t leave the sheep along with the cabbage, or the wolf alone with the sheep.”
    Jak snorted. “Except in this case, the two wolves have to get the two sheep up the hill without leaving them alone.”
    “Ha!” Cheela snapped. “In this case, two really stupid sheep have gotten in way over their heads and kidnapped wolves. And if the sheep had an ounce of sense between them, they’d drop their weapons right now and run for the Wahai.”
    Jak laughed. “Give me the saddlebags,” he ordered his prisoners. Dyan and Cheela did, and he slung them both over one shoulder. Their combined bulk made him seem small and frail, but he held up under the weight.
    “Send them up!” Eirig called down in a stage whisper that echoed loudly in the chimney.
    “You first, wolf girl,” Jak prodded Cheela, and up she went.
    “I don’t hate you,” Dyan said softly, watching Cheela’s coat billow out and swirl in the moonlight. “I don’t think you’re a bad person. It’s just the way things are. It’s just the requirement of the System.”
    Jak spat into the river. “You Systemoids are totally crazy.”
    Dyan faltered. “Don’t you … kill sick animals, to protect the herd? Burn pest-infested fields?”
    Jak’s laugh was hollow and cynical this time. “Do I look like a weevil to you? Was my sister a sick animal? Or does your precious System just kill to remind everybody that it can?”
    Cheela disappeared over the lip of the ledge.
    “The herd is more important than individual animals,” Dyan tried to insist. In her heart, she felt a pang of doubt about the truth of her own words. “The System isn’t a bully. It doesn’t need to prove anything to people.”
    “She’s tied!” Eirig called down.
    “Yeah? Tell that to my sister.”
    Dyan wanted to say something, but didn’t know what.
    “I thought so.” Jak pointed at the rope. “Up!”
    Dyan climbed. Being shorter and scrawnier than Cheela at least gave her an advantage at this, and she was quickly up the chimney to the height of the bats’ ledge. The physical demands of climbing, and the attention it required of her, gave her something other than Jak’s words to think about it, for which she was grateful.
    The ledge was narrow, just a strip three feet wide and jutting up like a defiant lower lip over the river, but at its base the cliff face was cracked and the ledge slid back into darkness. Sour-smelling bat guano carpeted the ledge and the crack, and the furry creatures flapped in the gloom about Dyan’s head.
    Eirig crouched on the ledge, more rope coiled in his one hand and at his feet.
    “Where’s Cheela?” Dyan asked.
    “I ate her.” Eirig grinned, his expression revealed in a strip of moonlight that cut across his face. He nodded at the crack. “She’s inside. Now come on, turn around, or I have to throw you into the river. Hands behind you.”
    Dyan turned around. She put her hands behind her back, trying to look as cooperative as possible, but also tensing her muscles. The Magisters had never taught her anything about escaping from bonds, but she’d seen a few funvids, and more than once the captured, outgunned Outrider escaped from her captivity by tensing her muscles while she was being tied up, so that when she relaxed them later she gained a little slack.
    Eirig fumbled a bit in tying her up, but only a bit. Again, Dyan noticed the heat of his touch, and felt terrible.
    Two days ago, she thought,