Patternmaster

“Don’t worry. With your strength, you aren’t. I

would never have invited myself along with you if I had thought you would be.”

He looked at her sharply.

“No, that’s not the only reason,” she said, smiling. “You’ve got a few other good points.”

He sighed, and gave up without quite realizing that he was giving up.

“Like your tractable nature,” she said. “Open and let me show you how to kill Clayarks quickly.”

He obeyed, watching her with the same mistrust that she had shown for him earlier.

Chapter 6

“You see,” Amber was explaining, “we can’t afford to waste our time and strength punching holes in the Clayarks. That’s what they’re trying to do to us with their guns. Fight them on their own terms and sooner or later they’ll get you. There are just too many of them. In a large attack you’d have some of them blasting you apart while you were trying to punch holes in others.”

Teray only half listened. His ears were full of the unfamiliar sound of the surf. He had spent all his life no more than a day’s ride from the beach, yet he had never seen the ocean through his own eyes. He had seen it through the eyes of others in the learning stones he had studied, but that was not the same. Now, as he and Amber rode down toward the oceanside trail, he gazed

out, fascinated, at the seemingly endless water.

He could see tiny rocky islands off shore. Nearer, the waves broke against sand and rocks with a noisy vigor that sometimes drowned out what Amber was saying. But that did not matter. She was only emphasizing the information she had already given him mentally. Mental communication detracted from their awareness of the had—and possibly the Clayarks—around them. Thus she was repeating, summarizing aloud.

“I can do it,” he told her.

“Try it as soon as possible.”

“The next time we meet Clayarks.” But he was not eager to try her method of killing, or any method of killing, again soon. In his mind’s eye, he could still see the Clayarks he had already killed. Maybe it would be easier if they were not human-headed or if he had not had a conversation with one. But she was right. He would not only have to get used to killing them, but he would have to kill more efficiently, in the way that she had shown him, if the two of them were to survive. He recalled the memory that she had given him of herself on foot, alone, running for the safety of Redhill two years before. She had been wounded but she had kept going. Her healer’s skill had kept her alive and conscious. And she was still killing, limiting the area of her perception to a long narrow wedge, sweeping that wedge around her like a hand of a clock. The Clayarks she touched in the deadly sweep

convulsed and died. By the time they were dead, she had swept over six or seven more. They had managed to shoot her by firing from beyond the range of her sweep. But such long-range shooting required marksmanship that not all of them—not enough of them—possessed.

Her sweeps turned the Clayarks’ own brains against them. She used their own energy to stimulate sudden, massive disruptions of their neural activities. The breathing centers in their brains were paralyzed. Their hearts ceased to beat and their blood circulation stopped. They died, almost literally, as though they had been struck by lightning. Or as though …

Teray frowned. “You know,” he said after a while, “your way of killing Clayarks isn’t that different from the way we Patternists kill one another.”

“It’s not different at all,” she said. “You just focus differently to kill Clayarks. You focus directly on the Clayark’s body—his brain—instead of focusing on his thoughts.”

“But… Then why do they teach us in school that you can’t kill a Clayark the same way you kill a Patternist?”

She shrugged. “Probably because they don’t know any better. Most Patternist nonhealers don’t have any idea why other Patternists die when they hit them in a certain way. And they don’t care, as long as it works.” She frowned, and thought for a moment. “The focus is everything, Teray. Of course, we can’t lock in on Clayarks the

way we can on each other. We can’t read their thoughts or even sense that they have thoughts, so we can’t go after one of them the way we’d go after one of our own.”

“What happens if you try—if you focus on a Clayark by sight, or you sense his physical presence and then hit him as though you were hitting a Patternist?”

“What would you be hitting?”

“His head, of course.”

“I wouldn’t,” she said. “You might give the Clayark time to put a bullet through your head. The only people we can hope to kill by just mindlessly throwing our strength at them are mutes and other Patternists. With Clayarks, you have to know exactly what you’re doing, and do it just right, or you’ll get killed.”

“A Clayark wouldn’t be harmed at all if you hit him?”

“If you hit him—his head—with all your strength, he might have a seizure. But for most people, nothing.”

Teray frowned, not understanding but not wanting to question further.

“Feel the wind?” she said.

“What?”