Fire in the Sky

3

The nausea she woke with stayed with Shadith as they left Olterau, nothing serious, just an awareness of her stomach anytime she got near Danor and caught a whiff of the drug whatever it was. She thought about talking with Maorgan about him, but it really wasn’t her business. Besides, she had a feeling he wouldn’t like a mesuch interfering between two Ard. He was pleasant enough, she could feel that he liked her, but she was an outsider.

She glanced at him, suppressed a grin. Anyone talking to Maorgan right now would get a short answer and a sharp one.

Danor was following them this time, taking his turn at leading the packers and the spare mounts.

About an hour after they left the Dumel, the road turned suddenly, angling north and west, the grade increasing to the point that the caцpas started getting balky. And nervous.

Wind out of the northwest was picking up, damp gusts slapping dead leaves and other debris at their feet and flanks, blowing dry weeds past their bobbing noses, making them shy and toss their heads.

“Maorgan!”

The Ard’s shoulders twitched as he came out of the half doze he’d been in all morning and he turned his head, a pained look on his face. “What is it?” He winced, screwed his eyes shut as he waited while she fought to control her caцpa and get him to walk the short distance between them. When she reached him, he glanced at the sweaty beast, then at her. “He giving you trouble? You want to change mounts?”

“No.” She flicked a thumb at the black clouds gathering overhead. “You know this land. When’s that going to hit?”

He tilted his head to inspect the clouds, eased it back down, a muscle twitching beside one eye, stared along the road ahead as it snaked over the hills and finally vanished into trees at the fringe of the great forest that clotted the higher slopes of the mountains. “About when we hit the trees.”

“And the nearest shelter?”

“Inn. About a day’s ride into the forest. We’ll camp rough tonight.”

“And the Eolt?”

“Waiting up ahead. They don’t like to linger over Dumels up here. Some folk don’t appreciate having Eolts around and can get nasty about it. And you do realize they’ll have to get out of the storm’s way? Mmm. Do you have offworld weapons with you?”

“A stunner. It’ll put someone out, but won’t kill them except by accident. Chorek?”

“Back in Olterau they fed me a lot of horrors about a band that’s working the road. I discounted most of it, figured they wanted to hang onto us a while.”

Shadith bit back a grin he wouldn’t have appreciated. “So what do we do?”

“I’ll call Melech to come back while xe can and take a look round, see if xe can spot anyone.” When she looked skeptical, he shook his head. “Their looks are deceptive, Shadowsong. The stings on those tentacles can knock off a dammalt. You haven’t seen those yet, shaggy things the size of a house.”

Danor stopped his caцpa beside them. “Dammalt? Why you wasting time talking about them?”

“Never mind. We’re talking about camping rough and watching out for chorek. What’re you carrying?”

“Airgun. Darts. Minik on the points. Chorek come at us, serves them right what they get.”

Maorgan grimaced. To Shadith he said, “Nerve poison. Fast and nasty. “Well, we better get moving again.” He turned his caцpa, set him to moving at a quick walk.

Shadith rode beside him. “Nerve poison? That something the chorek will have?”

“Probably not. Amikta is a fungus that grows above the glacier line and distilling it is a nervous thing. Only a few can do it without killing themselves and everyone around.”

“Mm. Remember what we talked about at the first lay-by? The mesuchs on Melitoлh could be arming them and sending them against us. No telling what we’ll be facing.”

He grimaced, winced, rubbed at his temple. “Complications. I wish all you mesuchs had never found us.”

By mid-afternoon as the storm still held off, the caцpas had gotten used to the fluttering debris and had lost most of their skittishness though they were still nervous. At their rest break, they munched on the grain and browsed placidly enough on the new growth on the patches of brush at the edge of the small dry meadow. Shortly after Danor started a fire to brew up some cha, the Eolt appeared overhead, staying in place with some difficulty because of the turbulence in the air streams.

Eolt Melech dipped low, uncoiled xe’s speaking tentacle and draped it around Maorgan’s neck with a proprietary affection that made the Mer-Eolt Lebesair go pursy with disapproval. Xe was also pale and rippling with resentment at being brought back this close to the storm.

For the first time Shadith was aware of the personality differences between the two Eolt. She’d been seduced by their golden beauty, their music, and their untouchable quality into thinking of them as a peculiar combination of god and beast. To see one of them as irritable and petty startled her into realizing she was doing to them what others had done to the Weavers of Shayalin. God or Demon. It seemed every living creature could make one or the other of any species exotic enough in their eyes.

Melech withdrew xe’s tentacle and worked xe’s way upward through the turbulence to join the other Eolt in a quieter air layer.

Shadith walked over to Maorgan. “Well, what did xe say?”

“Melech saw a man riding parallel with us when xe got close enough to see us. Fior, not Keteng. Means we’ve got to watch nights as well. He’d stop on woody hills and use a glass on us, move on to catch up with us and do the same again. Right after the Eolt got back to us, he took off, riding north. Melech tried following for a while, but the currents were wrong and anyway the man disappeared into the forest and xe couldn’t see him any longer.”

The clouds thickened, the wind picked up, and the turbulence up where the Eolt swam grew _so intense they struggled up to their maximum altitude and were blown out of sight.

A raindrop hit Shadith’s nose, another landed in her eye. Her hair was short and close to her head, but she could still feel the wind tugging at it. A flurry of huge drops pounded her back, then no more fell for over an hour.

The caцpas turned fractious again as the road moved from open brushland into the edges of the forest. Sokli started sidling and cow kicking, trying to get his head down, trying to sink his teeth in any part of Shadith available. She hunched her shoulders, booted his nose away from her leg for the tenth time and let her mindtouch bleed into the twilight under the canopy, feeling about for the heatpoints that meant men watching.

The trees whipped about, leaves noisy and agitated, limbs groaning, creaking, occasionally snapping free to go juddering along the ground until they jammed up against a trunk.

Thunder crashed.

The darkness went white, and a tree not far from the road exploded.

Sokli squealed, planted his feet, put his head down, and wouldn’t budge. Behind her she could hear the pack string snorting and squealing.

More thunder. And another tree gone, split apart, half of it crashing across the road. Maorgan muscled his caцpa around, came trotting past Shadith, heading for Danor and the pack string.

Shadith used her mindtouch to soothe the terrified caцpa as a surge of wind tore through the trees, followed a second later by hard, cold lines of rain that hammered into her. “Good, good, you’re doing good, little Sokli. Turn round, I know, rain in the face is no fun, it’s just a little while till we get back with the others.”

The spare moss ponies and the packers were fighting the leadlines, kicking, rearing, bouncing about on stiff legs, snapping out with bared teeth, squealing, eyes rolling, all of them in a blind panic, struggling to escape, to run until they dropped while Danor and Maorgan struggled with equal urgency to keep the lines from breaking and the ponies in a compact huddle.

And the rain beat down.

And the wind blew.

Thunder rumbled.

Lightning danced around them.

Shadith opened herself to the ponies, breathed soothing things at them, calm, quiet, sense of full belly and sun warmth. One of the caцpas shook his shaggy head, snorted, and stopped his struggles.

That was the break. The others began to settle also. Sudden pain seared along the top of her shoulder, the sound of the shot lost in the storm noise.

Sokli squealed, shuddered, dropped as a bullet hit him under the jaw and burst through his neck in a spray of blood and flesh.

Shadith flung herself down, hit the ground rolling, was up on her knees sheltering behind the caцpa’s body, stunner out. She probed the windy darkness under the trees, felt the burn of a life-fire, zapped it with the stunner, and kept hunting for the others as more bullets slammed into Sokli’s body or went past her, aimed at the others.

Ahead. Two of them. Each side of the road. Gotcha! One down. Two. Other side. Gotcha! Last one… kat’kri! Must be sheltering behind a trunk thick enough… youch! Minging bastard… Bleeding from a crease dug into hair and skin just above her ear, she flung herself over the caцpa’s back legs, crawled round his hindquarters, and hunkered down as she scanned again for the shooter.

He started moving, darting for another tree so he could get a better angle on her.

She smiled, tracked him a beat, and zapped him.

Another scan confirmed he was the last. She got to her feet. Five of the moss ponies were down, one still alive but bleeding copiously from a shattered leg, screaming piteously. The others had run off. Danor was sitting up, cursing a steady stream, pressing his fist against a wound in his shoulder. Maorgan was sprawled on the road, facedown in a pothole that was filling with water.

Shadith swore and ran to him, the jar of her feet on the pavement sending pain shooting through her head. She knelt beside him, lifted his face from the water, sighed with relief as he coughed, then vomited water and bile over her knees. There was a hole in his arm, nothing serious, and a wound on his head, deep enough to show the white of bone, not a superficial crease like hers. It was hard to tell in the rain and dark, but what she read of his body signs told her he was in shock and in serious trouble. And there was nothing she could do except keep him from drowning.

Blinking rain out of her eyes, she left him lying face up and hurried to Danor who was close to passing out, hanging on with grim determination not to bleed to death. She sliced off one of his sleeves, folded it into a pad, then cut a strip of cloth from his shirt to bind the pad in place over the wound. “Danor, if you can shift yourself, get under the trees and out of the rain. I don’t want you getting pneumonia.”

“You kill them?”

“No. They’re just stunned. Be out for around half an hour. I’ll have to do something about that in a few minutes, but I want to get canvas up first, get the two of you into some kind of shelter.”

“How many and where are they?”

“Four. Two on each side of the road, all of them ahead of us.”

Her mouth set in a grim line, tears mixing with rain on her face, she cut the throat of the suffering packer, then checked to see what was left of their supplies.

The missing moss ponies were two of the packers and the three spare mounts. She felt almost a traitor when she felt a surge of joy that Brйou was one of them. Fortunately, what they’d lost to the runaways was mostly feed grain and some tools. The rest of their gear was on the dead packers.

The wet had made the ropes swell and the sheepshanks wouldn’t pull free; by the time she got the tent pack loose and hauled it into the semishelter of one of the trees, Danor was gone. She swore softly, having a very good idea what notion he’d got in his head. She opened the pack and started trying to raise the tent without getting it soaked inside as well as out.

She dragged Maorgan inside, stripped and wiped him dry, wrapped him in a blanket, then went hunting for Danor.

The first chorek was a burly man, short, a greasy beard covering most of his face, his clothes filthy enough to stand on their own if he’d ever taken them off. He was also very dead, a black dart in the center of one bulging eye.

She found Danor sprawled beside the last dead chorek, the darter clutched in his good hand. “Gods! What am I going to do with you?”

He didn’t answer, being too busy dying…

Working carefully so she wouldn’t dislodge the filthy, sodden bandage, she got him draped over one shoulder, powered herself onto her feet, and staggered back to the tent.

With the two unconscious men wrapped in blankets, their wounds coated with antiseptic and bandaged with sterile pads from her medkit, she stripped off her saturated clothing, hung it over branch stubs, hauled the rest of the packs inside the tent, set up a throway heat pac and hung a glow bulb from one of the tent poles. Aching with weariness, the crease on her shoulder sorer than a rotten tooth despite the plasskin she’d sprayed on it, the pain from the crease on her head beyond description, she swallowed a painpill from her personal pharmacopoeia, pulled the last blanket about her, and sat a moment gathering strength before she even tried to think of what else she should do.

The rain pounded down on the canvas, a soothing steady beat, the heat eddied from the throway, seeping into her muscles and bones. Sitting up was too much trouble, she shifted position, shifted again, curled up beside Maorgan, closed burning eyes for just a moment…