The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction NovemberDecember 2017 (The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction Book 133) by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Spilogale, Inc.
Published: 2018-01-15T23:00:00+00:00

* * *

"You can't leave me when I'm quitting you!" Sister Quills cried sourly.

Plenth awoke abruptly from a deep, exhausted slumber, finding herself in the shadow of the caravan under whose sheltering bulk she had cast herself near dawn, now that she remembered. Gorlen's bedroll, a tangled clot, was there beside her. Gorlen himself appeared before her second blink, holding out a cold cup of strong sallowgrass tea. She had wondered if he would be there at all when she woke, or if another phase of solitary peregrinations was in the offing.

"What's going on?" she asked as he sank cross-legged beside her, setting a small plate of bread, beetle-cheese, dried fruits, and cactus-leather between them.

"Looks like the Drover-Abbess is breaking camp," he said. "Those who want a ride are advised to join her now. Quills is none too pleased, an attitude she shares with many of the pilgrim passengers."

The surly mood of the camp now made sense, although the Abbess's motives did not.

"The festival has been a disappointment," said Gorlen, "but I gather she fears it will worsen."

"Aye, that's right," Quills said, straddling their view. "The inventory she expected to carry back home has all been drunk up. She hauled these extra wagons for no reason! But that's never why I'm here. There's a sacrament to be had. Visions. Transformation! That's what the pilgrimage is about." She turned and shouted to someone unseen. "You're shortsighted! It's not all about profit! You'll see!"

The Abbess was far too busy to reply.

Quills stooped to scrounge a bristly emphig from their plate and munched it loudly. "So what'll you two do? Where's your stone friend?"

"There's nothing for us where we came from," Gorlen said. "We…well, I can't speak for Plenth."

"Cantcha? I swear I heard talk in the night that you was the father."

Gorlen grew noticeably paler. "Even if that were the case—"

"It's no business of yours, Sister," Plenth said. "We'll make our own plans, if it's all the same to you."

"Well," said Quills, and stomped off.

"Where is Spar, anyway?" Plenth asked. "Whatever plans we mean to make, I'd prefer to have him be part of the discussion."

"Spar will say, as I do, that you have our full support. Whatever you require of us. It…it still does not seem possible, but I admit I see the sense in it."

The "sense" that had occupied their long night of conversational grappling was this: Gorlen's nature had been sufficiently admixed with Spar's, at the time of Gorlen and Plenth's couplings more than a decade before, that the child of their union must be considered two parts human and one part stonewight.

Plenth had reached this conclusion years ago, and had it confirmed by a conclave of midwife sibyls whom she attended high in their aerial colony of Kyeer. She had known herself to be pregnant within weeks of Gorlen ditching her in the festival town of Revellium, but more than a year had to pass before she could begin to understand the nature of the child she bore.

"I've already carried the child more than twelve years," she had told them in the night.

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