Текст книги "Forty Thousand in Gehenna"

Автор книги: C. J. Cherryh

сообщить о нарушении

Текущая страница: 21 (всего у книги 22 страниц)

“I will see to it,” Parm persisted, further abasement.

“Do that.” Jin looked at him. There was no reprieve. The man had lost his usefulness; now he lost his threat as well. Jin breathed easier still, assumed an easier expression; but Parm knew him. This was a frightened man. And would die before he recovered from it. Jin rose and dusted off his breeches, looked at the starmen.

Mannin snuffled. Kim stared, with dark, measuring eyes.

“These caused the trouble,” Jin said, snapped his fingers and pointed at Kim. “Kill that one.”

Kim started to his feet. A knife was in his back before he made it. He tumbled backward, and hit the ground the while Mannin simply stared, on his knees, stared and hugged himself and trembled.

“Now you see how it is,” Jin said, squatting down, face to face with Mannin. “Genley’s dead. Now you’re what I have.” He stood up again, looked round him at the hunters. “This man’s sick. Don’t you see? Keep him warm, put him near the fire. He’ll want something to eat. He’ll know not to run again. And you’ll know how to treat what’s mine.”

Faces met his, settled faces, things secure again, men certain they had taken the stronger side. He walked away to the other fire, to let Blue deal with smaller things, like being rid of Kim.

A waste, that. And not a waste. They did not mistake him now. Perhaps the killing of Genley was no accident. Perhaps Parm misjudged, how important starmen were to him, or where in matters they fitted.

There was respect around him. He was sure of it again.

“In the morning,” he muttered, for those who stood by to hear. “ In the morning,”others echoed, and it went through the camp–enough delay, enough of waiting on Elai’s coyness.

In the morning, revenge, blood, promises kept: no real opposition. He would not sleep this night; he wanted to see this thing done at last, Cloud put under his feet, Parm most deftly scotched.

Genley my father.

He mourned. His mourning confounded itself with his rage. He clenched his hands and thought on killing, on killing so thorough none of Cloudside would survive. They would tell tales of him, the things that he had done.

“Jin,” a man said, bringing him a thing, a sodden mass of pages. Genley’s. He had seen it often. He looked at it, the crawling marks that made no sense to him, dim in firelight and in the fading. His history.

“Give this to Mannin,” he said. “Tell him it’s his.”

lii

205 CR, day 114

Cloudside

Calibans moved, running through the camp in the dark before the dawn, a sound of heavy tread, of whispering of scales through brush. “ Hai, hey,”a voice yelled.

Riders scrambled for weapons. McGee collected her spear, her kit.

“Up!” Elai was calling to them; “up!”

They ran, confused in the dark; calibans nosed past riders. Dain doused the embers of the nightfire: the tumult ran down and down the shore, a murmur of voices in the night, the hisses of calibans as if some strange sea were breaking at their backs. “Hup, hai!” someone cried, near at hand, a man’s voice. “Up, up, up!” There were splashes from the river–not attack: McGee had gained a sense of this–it was another sudden move. But something was close. She clutched at her clothes, hurried for the shore in the dark, skipped as ariels flowed like water about her feet, avoided stepping on one somehow.

“Brown,” she called; it was all the name it had. Brown, don’t leave me here! She whistled as best she could in panic. Riders were moving out, in the dark, no sense or order in it. “Hey!”

A shape came toward her, a tongue quested, found her. A head‑butt followed, and that was Brown, all slick with water–had to be Brown. McGee clambered doggedly up with a ruthless spring onto Brown’s foreleg the way the riders did it, her spear in her hand and her bag of belongings slung about her with her precious notes. Brown started to move along with the others, confused as the others, shouldering others in haste–

Going where? McGee wondered, clinging in the dark, clinging to the spear, the casual way the riders carried it: she had learned to ride with it, balanced herself with it when Brown was in a hurry, with that sinuous rocking fore and back, side to side in a rhythm that had its highs and lows, its pitches into which the riders settled as if they were born to it.

But this was real. This was the last move, the last plunge into dark and war and no one was ordering this thing, except that Elai was up ahead with Taem, with Paeia by her side, no less her enemies in potential… Dain would go to Elai’s side: Dain’s caliban went where Dain told it, and he would get himself to the fore, while Brown–

I’m scared, I’m scared, I’m scared, she told herself to the rhythm of their moving. This is no way to fight a war. There ought to be lines, generals, orders; someone ought to set this thing up. We’ll all be killed.

They climbed through brush, making noise, breaking branches, caring nothing that they were heard. Treelimbs raked her; she fended with a leathered arm, kept the spear along Brown’s side.

I’m going to use this thing. She flexed her fingers on it, the smooth wood: the head was venomed; an ugly thing, to counter other weapons bound to come her way. Panic gave way to certainty, like some long, long dive which had its own logic, its own morality. Life seemed precious and trifling at once. Dain. Elai sent him. Her messenger, after all. She laid her heels to Brown, clutching the spear the tighter, half crazed, drawing great breaths and anxious only to get on with it.

Life, she kept thinking, like a talisman, to keep herself alive.

Dain– Hardly started in his life. The rest of us– all caliban‑bait. The thought enraged her, and the spear was like her arm, an extension of herself. The sky was going lighter, the shapes of calibans more definite, the rhythm of Brown’s strides more certain.

Kill them, kill them, kill them. That’s what’s left to do.

liii

Message Alliance HQ to Gehenna Station

Couriered by AS Phoenix

…inform you that pursuant to the agreement worked out in the commercial exchange treaty a limited access will be extended Union observers for several worlds of the Gehenna Reach, specifically to the reserve on Gehenna and the study program there. Gehenna is required and requested to provide such documented personnel access to quarantined areas, specific operations to be approved by the Base Director. Union observers will at all times be accompanied by Bureau personnel.

In the spirit of detente and in pursuit of mutual interests, a reciprocity has been arranged in the opening of Union records…

liv

205 CR, day 114

Cloudside

The morning came up gold and placid as they moved among the trees, beside the river, in the changes calibans had made in the land. Ridges hove up, freshly dug and showing the roots of overturned trees, the hollows between them pocked with seepage from the river, and Elai read the patterns through which they moved, shaped them with her mind.

Jin is this way, they said. So she knew the time they would meet. Ahead lies the alien. We surround you, go beneath you in harmony,

Cloud‑towers‑clustered‑Hillers

well‑ordered toward the

Green‑nest‑aggression

It spiralled off into gilded distances, the wreckage, the patterns building about them for days.

Where? she had tried to ask of Scar last night; but Scar ignored the stones, ignored her, as if he had said it all. When?

They moved when it was time; and calibans knew that time when they saw it, when the Pattern shaped itself, that was all.

Cloud against Styx.

One way against another.

There was logic in it. It had compelled Paeia, brought Taem to her side. Perhaps Weirds on both sides had shaped this confrontation: there were hints of this in the patterns…that Weirds knew no tower‑loyalty.

There was herself; there was Jin.

Two kinds; and calibans brought them both, here, to this place, long‑appointed. She had her spear in hand, her darts slung to her side. Her mates, her rivals were by her, joined with her, like Taem, who had said nothing of why he came, not the deep reasons: only he was there, and the pattern agreed with that, shaping no other way for him to go. They were Cloudside; and the whole Cloudside pattern was being shoved at now.

Not a matter now of driving them off a time. She read that too, the way she read the land. Jin took the high ground, to push. She knew what he would do, and by that what they would do, surely as the sun came up–if flesh was strong enough.

She put forward her spear in the dim dawn, in the quickening of Scar’s pace. There was no time now to order things. She gave a fleeting thought to MaGee and wished that she had had Dain put her somewhere, but MaGee would fare as they all fared, and there was no helping it. Pattern against pattern. The calibans had made MaGee part of it: part of her; that was the way of it. Grays joined them, plowed the earth like the currents of the sea. Their powerful claws found places to probe in the mounds: they dived in earth and surfaced again, hissing and whistling, but the long‑striding browns scrambled across soft ground, four‑footed and stable, bridging the gaps with the reach of their limbs, treading the grays down with grand disdain, in silent haste.

The sun arrived, spread its rays through the ruin of a forest before them, where the trees had been cast down, undermined. They plunged over this, like a living torrent, with hissings and scramblings; but greater were the rocks down by the sea that she had climbed on Scar. Grays, not their own, vacated the Pattern and fled before the browns, through the brush, over the ridges, among trees still standing.

Scar’s collar flashed up. Taem’s brown plunged ahead. The hisses of browns broke like water hitting hot metal.

Her riders surged about her. Whistles split the air; younger calibans took their riders to the fore as they climbed the mounds, refusing the patterns they met now.

Elai clamped her knees taut as they met soft ground where grays were at work and Scar lurched down and up again, past the roots of overthrown trees, past brush that raked harmlessly on her leather‑clad legs.

“Hai!” She caught the fever and shouted with her young men’s cries, with the high‑pitched yelps of the young women as they came down the banks among grays that froze under the browns’ scrabbling claws, confused and immobile. She couched her spear, held her seat, for now other shapes hove up, rider‑bearing calibans, shapes bristling with raised collars, with spears in human hands. Darts flew, struck her leathered arm.

She shouted, not knowing what she yelled, but all at once the fear was gone, every dread was gone. “ Ellai!” she was yelling at the last, which was her mother’s name; and “ Cloud!”

More darts; she shook them off; they struck Scar in vain, useless on his hide. Lesser browns fled Scar’s approach, bearing their riders out of his path. Scar trod others down, mounted over them, clawing their riders heedlessly underfoot, with riders yelling and calibans lurching this way and that through the ruin of trees.

Scar lurched, taxed her weak leg. She held as the earth opened, and grays came up, some calibans losing their riders as they slid into the undermining, and over all the hisses and the screams.

But she knew where she was going. Paeia was beside her, was delayed by one of the Styxsiders so that she lost that guard; but then came a clearing of bodies, a withdrawing except for the rider coming toward her, a caliban larger than the rest.

Jin.

Scar lurched aside, almost unseated her. One of her riders rushed by in the whirl of day and trees and plunging bodies. Her spearshaft cracked hard against another, and Scar bore her out of the path of that attack as another of her riders took it. Taem was out there, Taem’s brown trying Jin’s, circling.

“Scar!” she yelled, her spear tucked again beneath her arm. She drove with her heels, less to Scar’s tough hide than the darts that spattered about them. “Scar!”

Scar moved, shied off as Jin overrode Taem, kept retreating, retreating, disordering their lines.

Jin’s brown scrambled forward, lunged low as Scar shied off, presenting his belly. Elai fought for balance, dug with her heel and rammed the spear at the Styxsider; but Scar was still rising, up and over the collar crest of Jin’s caliban.

The lame leg betrayed her as Scar twisted, as he reared up with the Styxsider in his jaws and the Styxside caliban lunging and clawing at his gut. She hit the ground, winded, tucked low as a tail skimmed her back, melded herself in the gouged earth as it came back again, as the battle rolled over her. She spat mud from her mouth and scrambled for her life as the feet came near, as the rolling mass lashed the ground and calibans raked each other.

She fell again, legs too shaken to bear her weight, used the spear to lever herself up, sorted caliban from caliban in the mass and the one with the throat‑grip had a starlike scar shining on his side. She rammed the spear into the soft spot of the other’s neck, heaved her weight against it, and the mass all came her way: a tail hit her, but she was already going down, half‑senseless as calibans poured over her, to the sharing of the kill.

She scrambled out of the mire–wild, blind struggle: hands seized her, pulled her to safety, and she leaned on offered arms–Dain was one. They pulled her further, away from the heaving mass that had become a ball of calibans, huge browns biting and rolling like ariels about a prize. She could not see Scar.

“They’ve run,” Maeri said, one of her own. “First, they’re down.”

There was chaos everywhere, no rider able to stay mounted, calibans pursuing fugitives, fighting each other, humans in pursuit of humankind, the earth thundering to the impacts of the massed bodies in that knot before them. She saw Scar pull free of it, saw him seize another throat in his jaws and plunge into the mass.

Alive, then, alive. And Jin was under that. She began to shiver, unable to stand.

They brought her an accounting of the dead: Taem was one; but she had known that. There were other names. “MaGee?” she asked. “Where’s Paeia?”

“Paeia’s hunting,” the man told her, kin of Paeia; and with a grin: “MaGee fell off way back. Must be safe.”

“Find her,” Elai said, never taking her eyes from the feeding that had begun on this hillside above the Cloud.

There were other things to do, but the calibans would tend to them; and the most of her young folk would not go so far as the Styx. Some would, to be sure the Pattern there shaped the way it should. Most would come back to her, here, in good time.

She gave a whistle, trying to retrieve Scar; but that was useless yet. It would be useless until there was nothing left but bones. So she sat there on the trampled hill to wait, numb and cold and aching when she moved. They brought her drink; they brought her the prizes of Jin’s camp: she took little interest in these things.

But they found MaGee, finally; and MaGee sat down near her in the dim morning with the calibans dragging the bones toward the river, leaving the trampled ground.

She offered MaGee her hand. MaGee’s eyes were bruised‑looking, her face scratched and battered. Her hair hung loose from its braids, caked with mud.

So was her own, she reckoned.

“You’re all right,” MaGee said.

“All right,” she said, too weary to move an arm. She motioned with her eyes. “Got him chewed down to bone, that Thorn.”

Something distressed MaGee, the blood maybe, or getting thrown. Her mouth shook. “What happened?”

“Got him.” Elai drew a hard breath. Her ribs hurt. Clearly MaGee failed to understand much at all. She whistled up Scar, levering herself up again with the spear, because there was something starting on that bank, a new altercation among calibans–some of the Styxside lot, that might be, or some of their own from Cloudside, testing out who had the right to shove and who had to take. She was anxious. She wanted Scar out of there, but calibans were snapping and lashing at one another and she did not want the quarrel moved their way either. She could see Scar among the others; could see Paeia’s big brown throwing her weight around, sweeping lessers out of the way with her tail. The sniping attacks went on, lessers’ jaws closing on a hind or forelimb, dragging at the skin, worrying them from this side and that–

He’s old, Elai thought. Her fists were clenched. That Thorn got him in the belly. She saw Scar bowl a rival over and get him belly up, after which the rival ran away, but others worried at him: he swept them with his tail, whirled and snapped. It went on.

“Is he all right out there?” MaGee asked.

“Of course he’s all right.” Elai whistled again. Others called their mounts, and some of the quarrelling quieted. But there was no recalling them, not yet. She turned, motioned with her spear downriver, and others gained their feet, of the elders.

“What now?” MaGee asked.

“Nothing now,” Elai said, looking at her in bewilderment. “Don’t you know? That’s Jin down there. We’ve won.”

lv

Message: Gehenna Station to Base Director

Survey notes two movements this morning–one on a broad front toward the Styx and a second, smaller and more compact movement up the Cloud. The Styxward movement is of greater speed. Survey suggests contrary to expectations that the invasion may have been routed…

lvi

205 CR, day 215

Cloudside

Someone whistled, to the rear of the column, and heads turned: McGee looked, the while she limped beside Elai over the sand beside the Cloud: the calibans had come, swimming effortlessly down the current.

“Do we ride?” McGee asked. It seemed madness that they had left the calibans behind; or not madness: for her own part she had taken one fall, and that was enough for her bones. One fall; one nightmare of Brown trampling down a man. But no one said anything; they had left the calibans behind and walked at Elai’s order, as if it were sane; and she was not sure of that, was sure of nothing now.

Still the silence. Elai said little on the walk, nothing but monosyllables, stayed lost in her own thoughts, unlike a woman who had just won the world entire, who held all Gehenna in her hands.

The calibans paced them in the river, that was all.

“No,” Maeri answered her question, Dain’s sister of First Tower. “Don’t think so.”

They walked further. The calibans dived and surfaced, not coming in, but at last Scar did, strode out on the shore ahead of them.

Riverweed, McGee thought at first. But it was his skin, hanging in rags about his belly, about his limbs. He walked with his collar down, his tail inscribing a serpentine in the sand.

Elai whistled then; and Scar stopped. He’s hurt, McGee opened her mouth to ask, to protest; but she stood still, watched with dismay as Elai approached him, touched him, climbed up to her place despite the hanging skin.

They began to walk again, in Scar’s tracks on the shore, at Elai’s back, no more cheerful than Scar himself, while the calibans sported in the river.

They would know, back in Cloud Towers, who had won, McGee reckoned; the calibans would get there before them: ariels would pattern it, grays would build it for the people to see, out beyond the rows of dry fishnets.

But she looked at Elai riding ahead of them, at bowed shoulders, both rider and caliban hurting.

She was afraid then, the way she had been afraid before the battle; in a way that wiped out nightmares of what had been.

What’s happening? she wondered. She stalked Dain, walked beside him in hope of answers, but he had none, only trudged along like the rest.

They camped early; more calibans became tractable and came in, seeking out their riders. Scar sulked alone, down by the riverside, and Elai huddled by the fire.

“Is everything all right?” McGee asked at last, crouching there.

“Jin’s dead,” said Elai tonelessly. “Styx towers will fall now.”

“You mean that’s where the others went.” McGee pursued the matter, knowing it was fragile ground. Elai held out her hand and opened the fingers. End of the matter. McGee sat and hugged her knees against her chest, in the fire warmth, surer and surer that something had been lost.

Scar, she kept thinking in growing chill, and restrained herself from a glance toward the river; she knew what she would see: an old caliban on the last of his strength, a caliban who had done well to survive his last battle. Some other caliban could take him now. Any other. If one were inclined to try.

Paeia–off hunting still. Paeia would come. Maybe others.

She lowered her head against her arms, feeling all her aches, a nagging sense that all the ground she relied on was undermined.

Other riders came before the dawn, quietly, bringing Styxsider prisoners who came and sat down across the fire, a handful of youths, sober and terrified. Elai thought about them a long time.

Speak up for them, McGee thought; it was outsider‑instinct. And then she clenched her fist in front of her mouth as she sat there and pressed her fist against her lips to hold herself from talking. I could get Elai killed with wrong advice.

But it was Elai let the boys live after all, with a gesture of her hand, and they sat there and shivered, all tucked up looking lost and scared and knowing that (if Elai told truth) there was nothing left to run to.

So other riders brought other prisoners. One ran: Parm was his name, at whose name the riders hissed…he took off running and the Calibans got him, down by the river in the dark.

McGee sat there and shivered, the same way she had sat through the rest, as if some vital link had been severed. She betrayed nothing, had no horror left.

It’s cold, she told herself. That’s all.

She had learned to be practical about death, in these days, to deal it out, to watch it. It was like any other thing, to listen to a man die, a little sound, a little unpleasantness. A small, lost sound, compared to the battle on the shore, the earth shaking to the fall of the great browns. The air filled with their hisses. Soon done. Forgettable.

But they brought Mannin in, and that was different… “Found one of the starmen,” Paeia said, who had come with that group. And what they brought was a leather‑clad, draggled man who did nothing but cough and shiver and tucked himself up like the teenaged boys. This thing–this wretched thing–she stared at him: it was only the dark hair, the height, that told her which it was.

“Let him live,” she said to Elai, in a voice gone hoarse and hard. So she discovered the measure of herself, that she could bear the death of natives, but not of her own kind. She was ashamed of that.

“He’s yours,” Elai said.

“Give him food and water,” McGee said, never moving from where she sat, never moving her fist from her chin, her limbs from the tightness that kept them warm. She never looked closely at Mannin, not being interested any longer. It was a horror she did not want, at the moment, to consider, how she had come to sit here passing life and death judgments, in the mud and the stink and the Calibans milling about ready for the kill.

It did not seem likely then that she could ever go back to white, clean walls, that she could unlearn what she knew, or be other than MaGee. MaGee. Healer. Killer. Dragon‑rider left afoot. She saw the sunlit beach, there in the night, herself young, Elai a child, old Scar in his prime again, his hide throwing back the daylight.

Here was dark, and fire, and they collected the leavings of the war.

Perhaps they would find the rest, Genley; Kim.

“Ask him,” she asked one of the riders at last, “where the other star‑men are.”

“He says,” that rider reported back to her, “that this Jin killed the rest.”

“Huh,” she said, and the dried fish she was eating went dryer yet in her mouth and unpalatable. She found another depth of herself, that she could still harbor a resentment toward the dead. But she did. She wished in a curious division of her thoughts that even Mannin would try to run; that the whole matter might be tidy. And that horrified her.

“Someone should take Mannin to the Wire,” she said, for Elai’s hearing.

Elai waved a hand.

So a rider named Cloud did that, who had a caliban who was willing to go. They went off into the dark and the last of the starman matter was settled.

It was not what mattered, on the Cloud.

lvii

205 CR, day 168

Base Director’s Office

“…It’s down,” the secretary said, wild‑eyed and distressed, breathless from the other office, leaning on the desk forgetful of protocols. “The tower, sir–it’s down, just– fell. I looked up in the window one minute and it was going down–”

There were scattered red lights on the desk com. One was an incoming station message, on that reserved channel; more were flicking on.

“The Styx tower,” the director said, striving for calm.

“The face of it–just hung there a moment like gravity had gone, and then it went down in all this dust–”

The account went on, mild hysteria. The Director pushed the button for the fax from station.

“…Urgent: your attention soonest to accompanying survey pictures. Styx towers eight, six, two in collapse…”

The door was open. Security showed up, agitated and diffident, red‑faced in the doorway.

“You’ve seen it,” the man said.

“My secretary saw it go. What’s going on out there? Station says we’ve got more towers down. Maybe others going.”

“Try Genley again?”

The Director considered it, thought it through, the governing principle of all dealings across the wire. “Try any contact you like. But no one goes outside.”

“If there are injured out there–”

“No aid. No intervention. You’re sure about our own subground.”

“Systems are working.”

“Try McGee again. Keep trying–Get back to work,” he told the secretary, who went out a shaken man. He wanted a drink himself. He was not about to yield to that. He wanted the pills in his desk. He withheld the reassurance. The desk com was still full of red lights, not so many as before, but still a bloody profusion of them. Another winked out.

“Prepare a report,” he told Security. “I want a report. We’ve got observers coming in. I want this straightened up.”

“Yes, sir,” Security said, and took that for dismissal.

More of the lights were going out. His secretary was back at work. Things had to be set in order: there had to be reports with explanations. His hands were shaking. He began to think through the array of permissions he had given, the dispatch of agents. Those would be reviewed, criticized. There had to be answers ready, reasons, explanations. The Bureau abhorred enigmas.

McGee, he thought, cursing her, setting his hope in her, that all reports now indicated that the Cloud was unaffected.

One native site to show the visitors. One native site to showcase; and McGee could get access to it–surmising McGee was still alive.

He started composing messages to the field while the reports came in, one and the other of the Stygian towers going down.

Everywhere. There was death out there, wholesale. Optics picked up the movements of calibans. The two settlements went to war or something like a war and calibans went berserk and destroyed one side, overthrowing towers, burrowing through planted fields, everything, while the apparently solid earth churned and settled.

“There’s a rider coming to the wire,” they told him later that day, when he had sent message after message out. “He’s carrying someone.”

And later: “Sir, it’s Mannin.”

“What happened?” he asked, brushing past the medics, shocked at the emaciation, the slackjawed change in the man on the stretcher, there in the foyer of the med building. “Mannin?”

He got no sensible answer, nothing but babble of riversides and calibans.

“Where did you come from?” he asked again.

Mannin wept, that was all. And he deputed someone to listen and report; and came back later himself only when the report began to be coherent, news of going upriver, of seeing McGee, of Genley and Kim murdered in cold blood.

So he went to hear it, sat by the bedside of a man who had gone to bone and staring eyes, who looked the worse for being shaven and clipped and turned into something civilized.

“Going to shuttle you up to station,” he said when Mannin had done. “There’s a ship due. They’ll get you back to Pell.”

Maybe names like that no longer made sense to Mannin. He never even reacted to it.

lviii

Message: Base Director to E. McGee, in field.

Urgent that you report in: the Styx towers have all fallen. We see refugees but they do not come near the wire. We have recovered Dr. Genley’s notes, which shed new light on the situation. We assure you no punitive action is contemplated…

Message: Base Director to E. McGee, in field

Did you receive the last message? Please respond. The situation is urgent. Bureau is ferrying in an observer from Unionside, with documents that may bear on your studies. The situation for the mission is quite delicate, and I cannot urge strongly enough that you put yourself back in contact with this office at once, by whatever means.

lix

205 CR, day 172

Cloud Towers

“No,” Elai said. “No com.” And McGee did not dispute it, only frowned, sitting there in the hall of First Tower where Elai sat. Elai had a blanket wrapped about her. She had not combed her hair; it stuck out at angles, webbed like lint. Her eyes were terrible.

Her heir was there–Din, who crouched in the corner with his juvenile caliban, with his eyes as dreadful as Elai’s own–frightened little boy, who knew too much. Din had his knife. It was irony that he was here, an heir defending his elder; but this seven year old had the facts all in hand. This seven year old had an aunt ready to take him when she could, to her own tower, to what befell a seven year old heir to a line that had lasted long on the banks of the Cloud.

Scar was dying–had never come up to First Tower, but languished on the shore. Elai only waited for this, the way she had waited for days, eating nothing, drinking little.

Quiet steps came and went, Weirds, who tended Elai. Taem never came; the nurses had Cloud kept somewhere away, as much in danger, but ignorant. A baby. Likeliest catspaw for Paeia if Din came to grief.

There was Dain, always Dain, at the doors below. Dain’s sister Maeri. The Flanahans were loyal still; would die in that doorway if they must. They were armed–but so were all the riders. And so far one could come and go.