by Jo Clayton
8
Ceam whistled a warning to the band following him, flung himself behind a small bushy silver dudur and watched the airwagon go careening over the mesuch fort. Whoever they were in there, the Chave didn’t like them, that was sure.
Heruit crept up beside him. “What’n… what’s that?”
“I figure it has to be the mesuch from Banikoлh, you know, ones Beni told about.”
“Not doing too good, are they.”
“Better them than us.”
“You said it. We were figuring it was going to be easy. I dunno.”
“He’s getting out… aaaahhhhh… right. Ouch. Hit him in the tailfeathers.” Ceam winced as he listened to the prolonged crashing, the sudden silence. “Figure we ought to go see?”
Heruit didn’t answer. He’d gotten to his feet and was staring at the sky.
“Ihoi! Get down before the mesuch spot you.” Ceam looked up, got to his feet. “Chel Dй!”
The sky was so thick with Eolt the air itself turned gold. And still they kept coming, swirling in an immense silent vortex about the mesuch fort, out beyond the reach of the mesuch weapons, round and round, the eyes you never saw only felt fixed hard upon the killing folk. Golden anger. Golden hatred colder than a killing frost.
Sound of feet running.
Ceam wrested his gaze from the spectacle to stare at the man-a stranger with light brown skin and hair like a cabhi’s fleece and a way of moving that said he was very fit and strong. He carried a pellet gun, heavy and ugly with a round drum fixed before the stock.
The man glanced at Ceam as he trotted past but said nothing, made no gesture. He was frowning, an intensity about the way he looked at the mesuch fort that convinced Ceam this was the one in the airwagon. What he couldn’t manage in the air he was going to try on the ground.
He dropped to one knee suddenly, settled the gun against his shoulder, went very still, moved his forefinger to tap a dark spot rimmed in shiny metal.
The pellet gun made an odd spitting sound. A hair later there was a loud blam! and one of the armored mesuch tilted over. Before the last quiver of the sound had faded, he was on his feet again and trotting off to disappear in the shadows under the trees.
A few moments later Ceam heard another blam!, then a third. As the mesuch on the walls started shooting toward the sound, blowing trees apart or slicing them up with cutter beams, he grabbed Heruit who was still watching the Eolt, tugging him deeper into the trees. “Mesuch shooting at each other,” he said. “Them in the fort, they’re getting nervous. Anything that moves they’re going to bang away at.”
Heruit rubbed at his eyes. “Maybe you know what you’re talking about.”
“You didn’t see him?”
“Who?”
“The mesuch out of the flier.”
“I was watching Them. Thousands of them, Ceam. Maybe all the Eolt there are.”
“Cha oy, I know. And madder than wet cats. And they’re going to get killed. Fire in the sky, Heruit. You want to watch? Me, I’d rather not see it.”
9
Standing behind one of the largest of the kerre trees in the strip of woodland, Shadith watched the two Fior walk off, glanced out at the sky again and the circling Eolt and sighed. Fire in the sky. Goлs, I want it to stop… they won’t listen to me any more now than they did before.
She jumped, caught one of the broad low limbs and pulled herself onto it, then climbed higher into the tree until she was nearly level with the top of the wall. She straddled the limb, looked through the flutter of leaves, saw an armored Chav flicker in and out of view as he ran past the firing slots.
From the shouts and the direction of fire, they were a lot more worried about Marrin and his rifle than they were about the gathering of the Eolt. She frowned as she tried to figure what she could do to expand that worry. If her ability to move small objects had a greater range… She shook her head. Trouble with that was she had to be almost in armreach. The Chave were too far away. She could use the mindride to gather an army of vermin, there were plenty of small lives lying low here in the woodland strip. But she couldn’t see any way it would be worth trying.
Maybe a cutter might…
The tree shuddered as a deep, powerful HUM shook the air around her. The vibration was bearable at first, then the intensity increased as the sound grew louder. The Eolt were singing. Thousands and thousands of Eolt were singing a single note, the sound focused somehow on the Kushayt, battering at the stone walls, vibrating cracks into them.
The HUM shaking her so badly she could barely control her hands, her eyes blurring, her body shivering with it, she managed to scramble from the tree and stumble blindly.
She broke from the wooded strip into an open, cultivated area, nearly impaling herself on a torn-up wire fence and falling on her face into some kind of tuber plant.
When she got to her feet, she found herself standing in the middle of a group of silent Keteng and Fior, drowning in a pool of hostility. A stocky gray-haired Fior woman stepped forward, a middle-aged Denchok just behind her.
“Who are you?” The Fior had to shout to break through the increasing volume of the HUM.
“I am Shadith, a Harper,” she shouted back. “I came with the Eolt from Chuta Meredel.”
“Ah!”
As the chill around her began to bleed off, the young Fior she’d seen before pushed past the woman. “Did Danor reach the Vale?”
“Oh yes. He rode with me and Ard Maorgan to a Klobach of the Meruu. It was his grief that convinced them.” She waved at the throng of Eolt.
“Ahhhhhh.”
The SOUND built and built, then broke off suddenly. Wave on wave the Eolt dived at the Kushayt.
And died. Fire in the sky.
Despite the fire, some Eolt reached the walls. Pairs of them seized Chave guards and carried them high. And let them fall to crack open on the earth. Those Chave that survived this were taken up again, carried out over the Bakhul Sea and dropped to drown there.
Wave on wave, the Eolt dived and died.
One by one the Chave guards died.
Until the walls and watchtowers were free of them, the few left retreating into the buildings where the Eolt couldn’t reach them.
And the fire died from the sky.
The small army of Fior and Keteng waiting in the tuber field shouted their triumph, swarmed through the woods and over the walls. They died also as they pried the last of the Chave from their holes, one, two, six or seven at a time, but by sundown there were no more Chave alive on Bйluchad.
10
“… so the attack is over now, the Kushayt cleaned out.”
Marrin was sitting in the wrack of branches and leaves at the base of the tree where the flikit was still balanced precariously overhead, talking into the com. He looked up when he saw Shadith coming through the trees, nodded somberly and continued with his report. “How many dead? Maybe in the thousands for the Eolt, as to the others…”
Shadith said, “Fifty-nine.”
“Shadow says fifty-nine Keteng and Fior dead from the cleanup.”
Shadith dug into the branches and lifted the harp-case she’d hidden there, slung the strap over her shoulder. Then stopped, appalled at what she heard coming over the com.
“… too bad. All those deaths really weren’t necessary.”
Marrin’s face paled. “What! What do you mean, Goлs Koraka?”
Shadith came to kneel beside him, her hand on his shoulder.
The small voice spoke again, calm and musing in a way that brought the hairs up on her spine. She closed her fingers tighter, felt Marrin wince, took her hand away.
“I tried to get hold of you, but I couldn’t get an answer. We got a call here about an hour and a half ago. From the Chave docking station. It was the Highborn Genree ni Jilet in a panic. The docking station’s kephalos was going insane, the argrav was turning lethal, they didn’t know when or where it would dip to nothing or max out on them, crushing whoever happened to be standing in the wrong
place. And the life support systems were shutting down. He wanted us to come get him and the others.” The Goлs’s voice vibrated with malicious glee. “He didn’t want to tell me why all this was happening, but I wasn’t about to put my people in harm’s way so he had to convince me it wasn’t a trap.” He started talking faster, the words pouring out of him as he relished the telling of his enemy’s humiliation.
“The Ykkuval made a pet out of one of the locals, one of those harp players like the one we dealt with. Thought he was tame and harmless. Well, the harmless pet picked the moment when the Ykkuval was linked to the kephalos to shove a poison dart in his neck and toss some sort of spores to contaminate the circuits. Even the fuel cells were corrupted. Everything went blam. The techs cleaned the kephalos up and got it running again, Genree took over and had the Security chief shot for negligence. Then things started breaking down again, so he and the other highborn took off to the Docking Station where they could be comfortable, forgetting, I suppose, if they ever knew it, that it was Chave policy to keep the station slaved to the downside kephalos.
“They’re down here now, not liking it much, but alive. All the locals had to do was starve the Chave out, they wouldn’t last long with no power and not much food. It’s too bad we missed connections. You’re hard on flikits, Aide.” He was almost giggling now, he was enjoying this so much. “I’ll send another for you and the Harper. I hope you don’t mind if I insist my pilot do the flying.”
11
In the blaze from Bйluchad’s starfield the ceremony for the dead began.
Marrin sat on the crumbling Kushayt wall with a Ridaar remote flaking the scene, while Shadith moved into the middle of the white ceramic landing pad, stood with head back, her harp at her feet, the case transformed, her sleeves ripped off, and her arms held out from her body.
Singing in muted mode the Eolt swarmed overhead, dipping to brush her with their speaking tentacles, sending shudders of pain/joy through her body at the touch, sharing with her infinitesimal bits of Eolt energy.
She settled herself on the transformed case, took up the harp and touched the strings, searching for the song that would gather the grief and say it for all of them. There were no Ards here, bonded in sioll; she was all they had.
This great death by fire became for her the death of her homeworld which was also a death by fire when Shayalin’s sun went nova. It was real for her for the first time in the twenty millennia since she’d got word her home was gone. Her eyes filled with tears and she wept, grief for Shayalin mingled with grief for the death of the Eolt. For them and for herself, she played the Death Song the Weavers of Shayalin made for their own.
The Eolt sang, blending their great voices around her small one.
The Fior and Keteng knelt beside the bundles of their dead and listened to the Requiem.
And Marrin recorded it, his face grim with anger, grief and regret.
12
Shadith stood on the beach watching the starlit shapes of the Eolt drifting away, north south east west riding the winds to the places they’d come from. She started at a touch on her shoulder, looked around. Marrin.
“It’s time to go,” he said. “The flikit’s here.”
Epilogue
Harpcase on the platform beside her, Shadith stood looking out over the mirrored city, watching wearily the glory that was sunset on Helvetia. Light in crimson and gold ran like water along the slippery surfaces, flickered erratically off shattered diamante walls, was thrown in fire spears mirror to mirror, mirror on mirror on the walls of the costliest city in known space, mirror mirror everywhere, spears of gold, spears of blood, going here, going there as the mirrors changed their inclination. Gradually muting as the sky turned purple then darkened further to indigo.
“From a battle that didn’t need to happen to a fizzle in court.”
Aslan turned from the city, dropped a hand on Shadith’s arm. “Not really, Shadow. Helvetia set their grip on Chandava Minerals where it’ll hurt the most. Blood money to Yaraka Pharmaceuticals. Endangerment recompense to University for the Endowment. And Chandava is barred from University for ten years. Those aren’t small things.” She smiled. “Something you don’t know. An hour ago the Regent’s Rep got me to a privacy alcove and gave me some messages. First, you get your stock. Two shares, not one. And the Regents are putting a commendation on your record. And Burya Moy says get your tail back home, he’s seen the flake of the Eolt Requiem and he wants you working on a polished version soonest.”
Shadith watched the colors start to glow in the Darklands. University pulled at her for a moment, but only a moment, because she’d been happy there. No more. Bйluchad had taught her that. Music was as necessary as breathing, but it wasn’t enough to fill her life. “No,” she said. “When I get back from Quale’s place, I’m going to work for Digby. It’s all arranged.” She listened. “That’s my shuttle. Thanks, Aslan. You did me a favor when you brought me to Bйluchad. Greet Maorgan for me when you go back, tell him I may drop by again one day to hear the songs he’s made.”
She worked the strap of the harpcase over her shoulder and walked away without looking back.
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