Fire in the Sky

1

Ceam stood in the gloom under the trees and watched smoke rising as the mountains burned. The fire the airwagons set was eating toward them, but it was still miles off and not yet dangerous.

“So you made it.”

He turned.

Leoca stood with her arm around the shoulder of her Keteng companion, her face weary. Engebel looked bleached, xe’s lichen brittle and gray. Behind them, in among a patch of half-grown guma trees, the three meloach in their klid were squatting on the mossfern groundcover, huddled together like new-hatched kerrut.

“So I did. You look like you had a hard run.”

“Yes.” After a minute, she added, “But we didn’t lose anyone.”

He took a last look at the peaks, moved into the shadow toward the two once-teachers. “How many made it here?”

“Twenty-three, and you’re one of the last we’re expecting. Eolt Kitsek said that was all he dared take time to find.”

“Had a long way to come. With all that fire, seeing xe was shall we, say a surprise.”

They walked together through the trees with the meloach following silently behind. Ceam took a drink from his flask, offered it to Leoca and Engebel, they declined, so he slapped the stopple back in and hung it from his belt. The flon burned hot in his belly, gave him the illusion of energy, and helped him hide from himself how bad the situation was.

The saboteur klids and the solitary spies met beside a spring that welled up between two roots of the largest oiltree for miles around. A double dozen weary and angry Bйluchar, about half Fior and half Keteng with a scattering of children among them, sitting silent and grim among their elders.

For some time most of what happened was irritated wrangling, none of them willing to give up the right to speak or give way to any of the others; most of them came from different Ordumels in different sections of Melitoлh, some of these traditional rivals. And the times had made them suspicious of strangers. All the rules were washed away. If there’d been an Ard left on Melitoлh, the harper would have had their deference, but most of the Ards had died from heart attacks brought on by unbearable pain or by their own hands when their siolls burned. The few that were left were like Ilaцrn and Danor, crazy or caged.

After a while, though, Leoca and Engebel moved to the center of the surge, touching an arm here, whispering there, spreading a calm, bringing order out of chaos with the skills they’d learned in fifteen years of teaching.

Engebel stood on a root beside the spring, the height raising xe’s head above the rest. “It would be a shame,” xe said, a dark sad note thrumming in xe’s voice. “If we destroy ourselves before the Chave can do the job. You, Ceam, you Heruit, you Deдnin…” Xe named them all and with the names, caught them in xe’s web. “You all… we all have hurt the mesuch or they wouldn’t have done that horror. Cha oy, we

Jo Clayton just have to hurt them more. Heruit, sounded to me like you’ve been thinking about something. Tell us.”

Heruit was a Fior with a freckled bald head and the remnants of a comfortable plumpness. “We started this to run them out of profit and patience. Ihoi! we’ve done the second all right, but the first doesn’t seem to have happened. I don’t really care why, I make this point only to remind you all why we’ve left the center of poison alone. The mesuch fort. I say that is our target now. There’s not much worse they can do to us, so there’s no further point to forbearance. Ard Ilaцrn has done well for us, let us ask him to do more.”

With a slash of his hand to say he was finished, he dropped to a squat on the mossfern.

Engebel pointed a blunt finger. “Rebek.”

Xe was a small, wiry Denchok, thinner and shorter than most. “I think we’re agreed there. It’s just a matter of how we do it. What with this and that, I was run into the Meklo Fen a few tendays ago. Some of my budline are living in there with a clutch of swampies. Saw a patch of hokori ripening nicely in the Meklo Fen, so that’s useful. And there are other things in the Marishes that we can use to fight with. The swampies were telling me about the trading they’re doing with the mesuchs…”

The mention of trade brought some of the listeners to their feet roaring with outrage.

Leoca jumped up beside Engebel, thrust her fingers in her mouth, and cut through the noise with a piercing whistle.

When Leoca brought her hands down and dropped to sit on the root, Engebel said very softly, “Quiet. You’re acting like fools. Xe has a point, let xe make it.”

Rebek nodded. “Xe is right. The swampies trade fruit and dried shroon and fresh fish for whatever they can pry out of the techs and Drudges around the mesuch fort. And they make quite sure that some of these things have dormant chiro spores in them. A portion of the spores will pass right through whoever eats them, maybe contaminate the water system, maybe not, but some will set their hooks. I would not like to be a Chav with chiro worms growing in my gut.”

Heruit chuckled, then he whooped, slapped his thighs, jumped to his feet and hugged Rebek, startling the little Keteng. Still chuckling he stepped back. “What a ploy! What a demondream of a ploy! Who thought that one up?”

Rebek coughed, patted xe’s mouth. “From the little I know, I’d say it just sort of happened. And that is not the only thing they are passing on. But that, while pleasant to contemplate, is not why I brought the matter up. Even with Ard Ilaцrn inside the walls, we don’t know enough about that fort to attack it with any hope of real damage. We need information first. And we need to get it without having the mesuchs suspect what we’re up to. It is Summer Day today. Did you remember that, all of you? Summer Day. You know what that means. Hot and humid and the Scacca wind blowing day after day off the Bakuhl Sea. They’ll start going crazy when mold grows on their hides and every surface around. They’re desert folk, Ard Ilaцrn has told us that. They won’t stay trapped behind those walls. They’ll want distraction, amusement, anything to cut through the whine of that wind and the stink of the mold. I say, think about that.”

Engebel swung xe’s fingers, deliberately choosing a Fior woman this time. “Deдnin.”

Deдnin was a stocky woman in late middle age, her hair cut short and mostly gray, her face lined, her eyes almost lost in nets of crows’s-feet. “Before I came to the mountains, they set me to running their whorehouse in Dumel Dordan-that-was, the house that Drudges used. You don’t want to know what a rutting Drudge is like. Male or female. Rebek is right. When the Scacca blows, that’s when we have a chance, but we have to be ready to take it. Before I came away, I saw Drudges and techs both drinking smoke. That’s the trade we can work on, get them so drugged with smoke they get careless. The big Muck, he’s trying to get hold of the trade all for himself, he’s trying to cut off the techs’ supplies, it’s like he’s working for us. Let them think they ashed most of us with the trees. Let them think what’s left of us have gone tame with terror. Let them get real comfortable. Then we hit and we wipe them off Bйluchad.”