Текст книги "Hammerfall"

Автор книги: C. J. Cherryh

сообщить о нарушении

Текущая страница: 27 (всего у книги 28 страниц)

“He’s ashamed. He’s disgraced himself with Kais Tain, he’s alienated the tribes, he’s sold out his own village, and he’s sold himself to you to seal the bargain because he has nowhere else to go. Like me, like me, father, just the same. Don’t tell me otherwise.”

The curtains at either hand stirred. He was not surprised. He assailed Tain and four more of Tain’s men showed up, men whose names he knew, every one: killers, men with machaiin their hands—able to kill the Ila, but bent instead on silencing an unpleasant, unwelcome voice.

And was Tain stronger for their backing? Marak looked his father in the eyes, and they both knew the truth.

“Give up,” Marak said. “The Haga won’t trust you. And I won’t. There isno bargaining.”

Tain drew his pistol, wanting to make him flinch: Marak knew the moment, knew the gesture, knew when his father had done that to other men, knew his father wanted, neededthat moment of fear before he pulled the trigger.

Marak jumped for the wind-stretched side of the tent and the shot burned through his side and through the tent wall as he moved, letting loose a shriek of wind—and off that wall, he lunged not at the men who drew knives, but beyond them, through them, at Tain himself, and his gun.

A machaicaught in his coat and raked his ribs. Another sliced across his back as he seized hold of his father’s left sleeve and wrestled for a grip on the trigger hand.

The gun went off. Went off twice and three times as they struggled for grip and balance: a man swung a machaiat his back and he swung his father into the glancing blade as a fourth shot creased his shoulder. He grasped the gun in Tain’s hand and tried to force his finger into the trigger guard. Fifth shot: it hit something metal and fragile, and he would not turn his back to his father’s men, would not give up, no matter his father had one hand on his face, trying to get a thumb into his eye or a grip on his ear, trying to swing his back to his allies. They had fought a thousand mock fights; they had fought mock fights that turned real, fights he had to lose or have his father’s spite; but not this fight, not this one, not now.

They staggered together into an obstacle, a tent pole, and Tain tried to bash his hand off the gun, tried to break his finger in the process, and kneed him and brought a foot down on his instep, all of which he gave back with a blow to Tain’s head—where his father’s men were in this, what they waited for, he had no idea: he turned, jerked Tain around, looking for enemies in the process.

Tain fell and dragged him down, leaving Marak’s back exposed. Marak rolled, put himself underneath and in the process gave Tain the heel of his hand under his chin with everything he had in his arm. He saw Tain dazed for a moment. Men hacked at the rolling knot of their bodies, and in one moment a machaihacked down into his back, but he had a deathlock on the gun and meant to batter Tain loose from the one weapon that equalized the odds.

“Marak!” someone shouted, a shot exploded near his ear, two shots that had not come from the pistol. In the same moment Tain butted him in the face, but he regarded neither—got his best grip on the gun and twisted, and rolled, turning Tain’s arm under him, seeing in his blurred vision that Tain could notlet go the gun, but had no command of it either. He had a leverage: he had a hand free: he seized Tain’s wrist and rolled loose.

He gained his feet, soaked in blood. He faced his father, half-winded, with the contested gun in hand.

Then he saw Memnanan with a rifle, and three of his father’s men down, and the fourth wounded. The Ila sat on her chair amid all of it, in the most incredible attitude of calm.

The fourth man broke and ran. Marak stared dead-on at Tain and Tain at him. The truth he tried not to betray was that his trigger finger was too mangled to function: maintaining that stare, he changed to a two-handed grip, and Tain returned him that hell with youglare that he turned on any infraction against his authority… that old, old implication of threat and disdain for the odds.

Not beaten, not Tain. Not until he was dead. And it was on him to do it.

“Get out of here!” he yelled at Tain, last chance, last try. “ Get out of here!”

He knew he was a fool when he gave Tain the chance. Tain’s expression changed to that cocksure confidence his enemies dreaded. Tain backed a step and turned.

Memnanan fired, and took Tain dead in the middle, and twice more to be sure. Tain died at his feet, and he stood there, numb.

And after that it was themselves, and the au’it, and the red-robed Ila, who sat on her throne with her hand pressed to her side and dark blood leaking over her fingers.

The Ila looked over the corpses of Tain and three of his men, and then at him and Memnanan. “I still rule this camp,” she said.

A shot had hit her in the stomach. She was still sitting upright. She was still on her throne. The au’it clustered around her as if they foresaw and dreaded her fall.

What was there for them to say? That the Ila was the one name that tribes and villages alike knew as authority?

That no one outside these canvas walls knew what had transpired in this tent?

His own blood was leaking fast from a dozen wounds. The fever was coming on him, the healing fever. He wanted to go lie down. He wanted Hati, and to lie still under a friendly roof and let the makers work, if they could heal so many wounds, with such scant resources left.

Marak, Marak, Marak, his voices said: and they wantedthe Ila, they wantedher life as they wanted the east.

Memnanan had made his own choice, and stood now with the rifle aimed at the floor, deaf to voices, not knowing now what to do.

“Go to your wife,” Marak said. “ Sheneeds you. You have an obligation.”

Memnanan hesitated, perhaps weighing his choices, and asking himself where right was, or what he intended. Memnanan to this hour had not left the Ila, had not left the authority he had served, and defended, and obeyed all his life. And the storm still raged beyond the walls.

“Tell him to go,” Marak said to the Ila. ”His wife is in labor. She needs him. There’s a guide rope still at the door.“ Came a crash in the heavens, and a battering blast beat against the tent. ”Ila, tell him that. The sky’s getting worse. Send him! You owe him that!“

The Ila lifted her hand, red glove stained dark with blood, signaled Memnanan’s dismissal. That was all. The hand fell.

A breath more Memnanan hesitated, then turned and, hesitating for a last look, went back to the outer door.

Marak, the voices said. Marak.

And Marak reached down and drew the Ila to her feet and into his embrace, close, closer, body against body, blood into blood. He knew what the voices wanted. He knew what he had done with Lelie, and why Lelie had lived.

The Ila, no fool, must know. They stood that way for a long time, they stood there while the fever came, and the blood beat in Marak’s ears.

“This is war,” the Ila said in their long standing there, so that only he could hear. “This is war, Trin Tain.” Her lips met his and opened, and her mouth was moist, water-rich as his was dry. Blood mixed. Incredibly, there was passion in the kiss.

Au’it and servants moved around them, and Marak, his voices said, Marak, Marak. It waswar. His hands and arms and back took fever-fire. Pain enveloped him, enveloped her, a shared environment, and the ache in his side and his skull fed her hurts.

If the makers in his blood bred and multiplied to heal him, he thought they must exist in hordes and clots by now, his whole body become a furnace of healing.

And they met the Ila’s makers, and hers met his.

Marak, his voices said, thrumming in his head, Marak.

It might be his imagination, but the voices seemed perilously fainter, perhaps failing him—or appeased at last by what he had done, or perhaps just preoccupied.

He felt the ground. He had gone down on one knee and dragged the Ila with him, locked in his arms. He heard Norit in that moment as if she were right beside him. He was aware of Hati, and Patya and Tofi being near her.

Hati knew what had happened: she knew about the fight, about his father. Norit did. Memnanan told them. Memnanan, for some reason, was dripping wet; and when he wondered he knew what Hati saw, looking out, knew that that crack was lightning, that, outside their struggle, water poured down in sheets and blew in veils. They welcomed Memnanan into the tent. They besieged him with questions that made no sense.

Marak, his voices said, but he made no sense of what followed.

The water kept coming on the roof, and made pools and puddles. He heard it. The Ila did.

Luz knew. Luz told them.

The fever built in him, threatening to sweep everything away. Hati was running, alone, through the cold wet, and then Patya and Tofi had overtaken her, and they sprinted, soaked as they were, through a murky grayness and a grayed red of puddles. Norit came after, holding Lelie, all of them drenched.

Marak, his voices said, and he was aware of the Ila’s limbs, fever-hot, and the war they fought, each holding the other up.

“Why take up my father?” he asked, and, for his pride’s sake: “How long?”

The Ila laughed, not a pleasant laugh, near his ear. “During your search, mymen found him. I’ve always taken alternatives. Always alternatives. He was in and out of my tent, from time to time. He followed, outside the column, in a Haga’s robes. I’m tired. Lie down with me. See which of us wins.”

It was easier to sink down, both on their knees, then on the carpet, twined together. After a time he saw them lying there like the dead, two bloody figures locked in embrace. He saw, and knew he looked from outside himself, and that it was a vision of sorts, Luz’s vision, what Luz saw of him, but he had no idea how she saw.

Then Norit came and touched his forehead ever so gently. His wives and his sister Patya and his brother-in-law Tofi all came to that bloody place, and sat down near him and waited, and waited. They expected—they feared, perhaps, for him to lose consciousness in fever, or to die. The Ila’s servants moved about them. The au’it were there, perhaps their own au’it as well.

A moment of darkness. “Marak,” a voice said then, asking his attention, and someone lifted his head and gave him water, an abundance of water, as many drinks as he wanted. He was fever-hot. Heat swept through him then like a furnace, as if water were all the makers had waited to have.

Thunder walked overhead. Water dripped somewhere. It sounded like a fountain, dripping and gurgling like the Ila’s Mercy-water, the universal condition of life, had become that abundant.

Someone came at that point, someone who wanted Hati, and Norit, wanted them urgently. He thought it was Patya. He dreamed it was Patya, who bent and kissed him before she took away all his help, all his protection, leaving him entirely alone with the Ila.

But shadows immediately came and peered down at him, a handful of veiled, armed shadows, who had no possible reason for being where they were, in the Ila’s tent.

They retreated and sat, with their weapons, and they watched… Keran, he was sure. But were those Haga, sitting with them?

“Your helpers,” the Ila said to him, faintly, wryly, from beside him, in this makeshift bed they shared, of pillows and blankets and blood-soaked carpet. “I made a good throw, didn’t I? Now, one way or the other, webecome allies… and what will we dowith Luz, do you think? Or what will Luz do with you and me?—Or what, do you suppose, will we alldo with the ondat?”

“I don’t know,” he said, in pain, not knowing where to take the Ila’s words, or how to answer. The fever produced unbearable headache, and swelled the flesh around the wounds. He had nothing to do with the Ila’s questions. The makers were at work. He had to endure it.

And the way he had held Lelie, and shed makers into her blood, he had pressed his wounds to the Ila’s wounds, and hers to his—both of them, makers shared. Makers at all-out war not only with the wounds… but with each other, live or die, win or lose.

He understood the Ila’s dealing with Tain, when she caught him. What else was she to use for weapons, when her makers had consistently lost their battles with Luz’s makers?

What else was she to use, when Tain fell into her hands?

Tain, being Tain, to be sure, meant to seize power for himself… he had not made his move yet, but that had been his intention, and surely the Ila knew it, being old as the world and still alive.

But Tain was also her weakness: Tain had notknown how far Memnanan had allegiances elsewhere. Tain had not known how much a man could love a wife, that a man could have a friend against his own interests. Therewas Tain’s downfall, in every canny truth he thought he knew, in every lesson he had tried to teach his son about the world.

Kaptai, against all odds, had taught him otherwise.

His head throbbed. Pain shot through his ears and eyes. It might have been a skirmish his makers had just won. Or lost.

One au’it among the lot of au’it, perhaps their own, wrote and wrote. He was aware of the movement. The drip of water. The rumble of thunder.

And he became aware of Hati, of Hati and Norit, near Memnanan, and he saw a vision, Tofi struggling to heat a pan of water.

Hati’s impatience came through. And Norit’s.

They were not in his war. They had Luz’smakers in them. And he heard them, saw them.

They shoved Tofi sharply aside.

“ Push,” the women cried together. “Push! Now! Now, woman!”

Came a woman’s shout, then, and cries from the others, and then from the men.

A newborn baby cried protest, newly arrived, as the heavens poured.

“ A boy!” Memnanan’s mother cried above a crack of thunder. “My son has a son!”

Chapter Twenty-Five

« ^ »

Things change. That is what I arrange to happen. In a limited system, in an alien environment, that means frequent intervention, with only my returning nanoceles to report on the local health of the system. That means I am the living template, and in my own cells I assure a standard. Whenever I am tempted to create a match for myself, I ask myself whose would be the standard then? And would they understand at all what I have done, and why I have done it, even if I told them?

–The Book of the Ila

Visions ceased, the providers of visions grown exhausted, and resting. The dark lost all feature except a red glow that pulsed, more and less, more and less, like the fire that burned through his veins.

Marak lay still, measuring his breaths until the pain became bearable. He heard thunder. The rush of wind.

But the tent ropes held. The canvas did.

Marak, the voices whispered, wanting his attention, and visions claimed him.

It seemed the stars came out in this vision. Then a strange thing appeared in the night, white, and looking like a village from a distance.

He drifted closer.

It glittered with lights, some that blinked, others that lit its walls.

And this place, above all visions he had seen, was ominous to him. He had no trust in Luz, that the vision would prove harmless.

Ondat, his voices said to him.

“Do you see it?” he asked Luz in a whisper, and then, thinking that someone else, perhaps Hati, was close to him. “Do you see a village in the night sky?”

“I see something white,” Hati said, and a hand rested on his shoulder, comforting him. “It could be a village. But its towers go off in every direction.”

“Like the tower,” Norit said, from behind her. “It’s a tower in the sky.”

Luz warned them: the ondatwere here. Somehow the ondathad established a village that had no ground under it, and Luz showed them this sight to amaze them.

“What does it mean?” he asked Luz in that absence of other questions. “What are they? Where are they?”

Up, that strange sense of direction told him, as it had at other times told him east. This time it was up, up, up, when he knew there could be nothing up there but the sky and the stars.

Perhaps the ondathad breached their treaty and taken over.

Perhaps after all they would destroy Luz and her tower, and with Luz, their refuge, and all of them would die.

Perhaps their real safety, now that the hammer had fallen, was not the tower, but to scatter into the low desert, and hide in caves, hoping to live in whatever circumstances they could.

“What do you want us to do?” he asked Luz in a whisper, as he always had to speak to Luz aloud to be heard.

He only felt a direction, and that direction was what it had been. East. East.

East.

He felt someone rest a hand on his shoulder. Tofi was there. The tent above him seemed far less fine. Daylight came only from an open flap. There were no lamps lit.

“We’re in danger of drowning,” Tofi said. “We’re going to move the camp.”

“East,” he said. The vision of the tower in the stars broke apart, became irretrievable, something beyond imagination.

“East,” Tofi said, and that satisfied him. Satisfied Luz.

It dawned on him the plain tent above him was his own, and that Hati and Norit were on his other side, with Lelie, and that there were, unaccountably, more points of contact than the three of them. Four, one in this tent, largely unaware, asleep. Five, the last at a little remove from him.

That one was aware, and in pain. It was the Ila.

“We’re going to have to pack the tents wet,” Hati said to him, businesslike. “We have to move. There’s water just flowing through, washing out some of the tents. It’s become the one thing we’re not short of.”

“I probably could ride.”

“Probably you could,” Hati said. “But you’re not going to.”

He shut his eyes.

Eventually they moved him onto a litter, and wrapped him in two blankets and a piece of canvas, and carried him out into the light.

The world had changed its coat. It had been all blowing sand. Now it was murky grays, sandy mud, and a dull sheen of reflections off rain-pocked water. It was as if a well had overflowed. Some water—au’it had not been doing her job.

He shut his eyes. They balanced the litter on two bundles of baggage. Hati bent and kissed him. He heard a small baby crying. Then Lelie set up a howl. A new baby had come out of nowhere and cried, taking attention, and Lelie, he thought, was jealous, and angry.

He went to sleep again. When he waked, he saw tribesmen carrying the litter, tribesmen afoot and walking. He found that curious and went back to sleep.

Mostly he slept, and waked again, once as the earth shivered, then again at a change of bearers.

Then, a distant whisper, he heard his voices. Marak, they said. Marak, Marak.

Calmly. A part of the world. Contact, with Luz.

He drew a wider breath, ignoring the pain in his ribs. He reached up an unwounded finger, pulled down the stiff canvas that covered him above the chin, and gave a critical eye to the world.

It was unremitting gray overhead. The sun went veiled. He ventured more of his hand into the sunlight, and realized then something strange about his hand, as if it was suddenly someone else’s. It lacked the killing-marks. He extracted it completely from the canvas, held it up to the light, and saw only the reddened trace of the marks that had existed on his fingers.

A part of him, a part of his former life, was wiped out.

He shoved the canvas farther back, blankets and all as the bearers carried him, heedless, and he looked at the skin of his chest, which showed only the faintest trace of the abjori mark, as his hands showed the redness of healing cuts, and the wound in his side was sealed, swollen, painful.

“Lie still,” Hati said from the lofty height of her saddle. Her besha moved with lordly ease beside the struggling bearers. “Don’t make trouble.”

“What happened to the Ila?” he asked, but once he asked, he knew, he knewher location, as he knew Hati’s, Norit’s, Lelie’s, at every moment he was near them. And the new one.

“You beat her,” Norit said, also from above. She was riding on his other side, with Lelie on her saddle. “She’s with the priests. Memnanan’s gone to see to her. We knowwhere she is. Always.”

So did he. She was behind him in the line. As weak and sick as he was, he thought, and with the remnant of a hellish headache.

He lay back and drew up the blankets against the chill in the air. He slept again, slept until they camped and raised the tents.

By then the rain had stopped, but a nearby pan had become a pool of water, safe, at least, for the beshti; and the tents went up with the lighter stakes this time, a quicker job.

Hati offered him a drink of sweet water, and he drank, and slept—and waked in the enclosed dark of the tent as the earth shook.

The baby born in the storm—Memnanan’s son—let out an infant cry of disturbance. That point of awareness was active. Then the Ila waked, elsewhere. Hati and Norit were much closer.

Thunder rumbled. The whole world felt strange, the air choked and thick with damp.

Marak rubbed his ears, rubbed his eyes, decided he could sit up, and did. Hati set her hand on his arm.

He moved that arm, embraced her shoulder, drew her close. They sat that way a while, one leaning on the other. Norit slept with Lelie across her lap.

He felt exhausted, drained of all the strength he had ever had.

Marak, Marak, Marak, the voices said. Luz said. Or whatever it was that droned on that way. The world had reached a sort of exhausted peace. He saw Norit wake, and he put out a hand and caressed Norit’s knee without resistance. Norit set her hand on his, looked at him, for the most part sane.

They rested that way until the light crept back, slowly, sullenly.

He decided finally that it was morning enough, and that today he would get on his feet and get into the saddle again.

It took two tries to get on his feet. Hati braced herself and pulled and he made it up, and walked, and passed the tent flap to the outside, into what passed for a dawn.

The air was cold, bitter cold. The sand was wet. He wrapped his coat about him, and saw others stirring out of their tents. He walked past the edge of the tent and looked around the camp, all around, seeing tents as far as he could see. After the wind that had blown over them, after seeing the scoured bone that had landed at the edge of the Ila’s tent, he had feared far worse was the case. Beshti, some of them, bore cuts and gashes. Some were burned over part of their skin, the hair simply gone. They were a sad-looking lot, and some might have died.

Tofi came out of the tent. Patya did. “You’re all right,” Patya said.

“Well enough,” Marak said, and heard the voices to distraction: Luz was nagging him. Luz wanted something that did not involve the east, rather north. North. Not far.

He looked, saw the Ila’s tent, and walked that way without a word to anyone. Hati and Norit went with him, perhaps under the same instruction, hearing the same voice. The au’it was not with them. He had no idea whether the au’it still attended them. Or whether the Ila, on second thought, neededan au’it with them any longer.

They went into the Ila’s tent, and inside, Memnanan was there, just putting on his belt. With him in crowded circumstances, in the tent foyer, were three of his men, an au’it, and two tribesmen, one Haga, one Keran—neither Aigyan nor Menditak, it seemed, had left anything to chance, or to the Ila’s goodwill. They had slept there, and had just begun to prepare for the day.

“Marak Tain,” Memnanan said, looking at him as a man might look at the risen dead.

“Alive,” Marak said. And added: “Grateful.”

Memnanan nodded slightly, acknowledgment.

Hati said darkly. “My husband saved the Ila’s life. But I doubt she’s grateful. She’s awake. I think we need to see her.”

Memnanan indicated the way, the curtain. “My men take my orders. The priests… have come here. They’ve been about. I haven’t let them in—waiting yourorders, omi.”

The priests: a reservoir of the Ila’s own makers, a source, like a well, of her former independence.

But there was, he suspected, no renewal there: if they were overcome in her. Luz’s would win, every time, now, and every priest who took in the Ila’s makers would now take in Luz’s. That was the truth his own body told him. That was the answer the world had, from now on.

He pushed the curtain back. The Ila’s servants, rising up to bar the way, saw him and hesitated. He simply walked through with Hati and Norit, in Memnanan’s witness, and the tribesmen’s, and flung back the last curtain.

The Ila, aware of them as they were of her, sat in her chair, waiting for them. Au’it attended her. Her white skin, the red robes—those were the same. But bones stood out in her hands as they did in his. They both had given up substance to the struggle.

Hati and Norit stopped one on a side of him. They were alike now, all together, all part of a set.

The Ila moved her hand, and the au’it settled on the mats on either side of her and opened their books.

“You’ve had your way,” the Ila said. “You think you’ve won.”

“ Luzhas won,” Marak said, but he was unwilling, himself, to concede that without limits. He added, for himself: “So far.”

“So far.” The Ila’s voice was weak, but edged. “I gave you your freedom. I gave everyone in the world their freedom, such as we had, so long as it lasted. Now there’s one way, one blood, and one tribe in the world, and we’vejoined it.” She drew breath, and her eyes held the old fire. “So let the ondatworry about that.”

“So you have secrets,” Norit said. “You change your makers at will. You’re trying to change them now, but so far, it’s not working, is it? We’ll understand how you do that. Sooner or later, we’llknow.”

“Luz.”

“Yes?” the answer came.

The Ila smiled… smiled with chilling serenity. “We’ll see. Granted we have an immediate problem… still, we’ll talk.”

“We arepragmatists,” Luz said from Norit’s lips. “You can’t feed this mass of people, or shelter them. We can. You think you can change my makers, given a hundred years, or two hundred, or three. Try.”

“’I assure you, I’ll try.”

“We should go,” Marak said to his wives, and took them each by an arm and walked.

He had seen enough to satisfy himself the Ila was alive and that she had become one of the mad. But she was not content to be that—she never would be content. She meant to change the order of the world, and now meant to do it from inside their ranks.

Luz then would change it back, and so it would go, by degrees as tiny as the makers themselves. Now there were two gods on the earth, and neither one was, or would be, perhaps for all time to come, completely in power over the other.

There might be gods in the heavens, too, the ondat, watching to see how it all came out: he believed his vision of the tower in the stars.

But the ondatcould scarcely observe a war of makers, carried on in the veins of two determined women.

Himself, he had done with gods, and had no desire to contend with makers. He put an arm about his wives, one on either hand, and went out through the curtain, taking one combatant out of speaking range, at least for now. It might be a while before the Ila heard the voices he heard, if she ever did.

He gave Memnanan a passing courtesy, and went out into the morning. An au’it followed them, and took up her duty.

They packed up and they rode, a long, weary line of riders.

They went in a kind of twilight, the air cold, the sun thickly shrouded in slate gray cloud.

But the light was enough, finally, to show them a strange, up-thrust shape on the horizon.

It was the tower on its hill, on the rim of the land they, could see.

“We’re almost there,” Marak said, and pointed it out to his wives, who already knew.

Chapter Twenty-Six

« ^

Another year is gone, as much as that means.

–Marak’s Book

The air was cold and clear, breath of man and beast frosting on the wind… it was noon, though anyone who remembered the sky as it had been would never know it. Snow had fallen in the morning, and lay all about… more boded in the west, out of which all weather came, but Marak Trin had seen the stars scream down from the heavens. That was hazard. He had seen the deep snows. That was hardship. This little spit of snow failed to daunt him.

More, he was on his way home, and going home, in a logic that defied the tower’s careful teaching, all distances were shorter.

Once a month at least he saddled up Osan and rode out as far as the cliffs of the Lakht.

Once a month he surveyed the lakes and the pools below the rim, gathered samples… and came back again, surrendered himself and Osan to Ian’s examination. Luz wanted to be sure he had picked up nothing new and unplanned in his blood.

He had that examination ahead of him, a small price for his freedom. And he was as interested as Ian and Luz in the quality and persistence of the makers. That his so ably survived reassured the ondatin their sky perch—the ondat, who were coming to understand the Ila’s methods themselves, and who therefore might feel less threatened by the wide expanse of… all Luz said existed out there among the stars.

His own travels were to the rim and back. That was enough.

Sometimes Hati came with him. Sometimes Norit joined them both. They had seen the whole world change, and skies darken, and the snows pile up.

Then they had seen them melt.

The tribes had spread a few tents outside now, weary of the confinement, and there were a few structures outside, these days, outposts from which trained observers watched the changes in the world. But it was the tents that the tribes longed to see. Aigyan and Menditak talked about establishing outlying camps, and seeing what living could be made out there, given adequate supplies, but Luz said it was too early, that they had yet to release the living things they had engineered… that was their word for it: engineered. Everything would fit together. The tribes would have their livelihood. There would be a place in the world for them.

There was no sign of vermin. Nothing grew, but a handful of small things that had greatly interested Luz… he had brought those back years ago.

But of larger life, nothing moved.

He argued for making the trek up to Pori, such as remained of it, if anything remained on the Lakht. He found it hard even yet to think that nothing at all had survived. Luz sent her fliers up there, and they found nothing different than what was below, but Marak thought a man might see more, do more, find out more.