by Sharon Shinn
Gaaron pulled back inside, latched the window, and laid himself on the bed. Samaria was in danger from without and within. If they did not take care of the menacing strangers, they would all turn on one another and be destroyed anyway. It was a not a comforting thought to take to bed with him.
The next morning was neither as clear nor as cold, and the heavy cloud cover helped hold a little of the sun’s heat. Gaaron had left at first light, determined to make it to Galo before sundown so that he could search the entire plain if he had to. He had settled into his customary mode of fast travel, his wings working so rapidly that he was not even aware of each separate lift and downstroke. Today, he did not have to fight the wind. He was merely aware of the air as an element he must pass through, feeling it slick and silken against his skin.
He was just south of the mountain when hunger forced him to make a quick landing. He ate rapidly and threw himself aloft again, driven by impatience and something like dread. What would he say to Susannah when he found her—when he insisted that she return with him—when he said, in effect, that he did not care if she was lonely or unhappy as long as she was beside him and safe? There would have to be a better way to put those words. He would have to make her understand.
He came in from straight south and veered a little right to circle the east side of the mountain. That was where Keren had said the camp would be situated, sheltered a little from the punishing winds that blew off the northern coast. He dropped low enough to be able to read the terrain, low enough to see massed tents and moving figures, if there were any, but high enough to catch the currents of the air and gain some altitude when the surface wind made flying treacherous this close to the ground.
When he rounded one of the low shoulders of the mountain, he saw a tableau spread below him, and a single glance was enough to let him take it in.
To the left, an Edori camp. To the right, a line of black-clad marauders. What he had mistaken for an Edori campfire was a burning tent. What looked like snippets of red ribbon were shots of fire streaking from the invaders’ weapons into the Edori camp.
He hovered, for a moment too stunned to react. He could see the frantic figures below, running, ducking, trying to find shelter from the malicious flames. Why had the invaders not destroyed the whole camp with a single blast? Why did they stand there, faces pressed to the long thin barrels of their weapons, careful shots darting out at individual targets? What was there within this Edori campsite that the strangers wanted to recover or preserve?
No time to wonder. No time to think. He had left his sack of rocks behind at the Eyrie, but he still had a weapon of his own, and it was a dire one. Driving his wings down hard against the brittle air, he arched his head back and began to sing.
The prayer poured from his mouth, the music harsher and thinner the higher he climbed. His beating wings created a bellows of air that fed through his chest and erupted in malevolent song. He sang and he sang, the music streaming behind him as he arrowed upward, boring through the thin clouds and the layered atmosphere to a place so elevated it offered no air to breathe. He was so high now he could no longer see the camp below him, with its dark dots of bodies and snatches of flame. He himself was small, a starling buffeted by the god’s own breath, for he was so high that he must be almost at Jovah’s front door. He sang the prayer again, desperately, hopelessly, his booming confident voice a child’s pleading whisper. The prayer that no one ever sang, the request that no angel ever made, the song that he had never, in his entire life, sung straight through . . .
The air split before him in a seam of light. Gaaron tumbled backward as the world broke in pieces, then crashed back together with a noise of falling boulders. Again, an explosion of light followed by a crack of thunder. The air smelled like ozone and sulphur—the god’s perfume, lingering from where he had touched his finger to the earth . . .
Gaaron beat his wings madly, regaining control, regaining altitude, trying to catch his breath. Then he folded his feathers back and dove, crazy to see what was happening. In a few short moments, the earth loomed up below him, alarmingly close, and he spread his wings to halt his careening descent. He hovered a moment, scanning the scene. Four or five bodies lay strewn upon the ground, and the earth itself was seared black by the force of the lightning bolts. There was no other sign of invaders. The Edori themselves were running back and forth between their fallen enemies and their burning camp, shouting out information and instructions. From what Gaaron could see, their camp was only partially destroyed, and there were plenty of Edori left. Perhaps there had really been a miracle. Perhaps none of the Edori had been killed.
He stretched his wings and tilted his body, catching a current that would send him down slowly. Someone glanced up and saw him, and then there were more shouts, followed by another quick gathering of Edori. They came together on their ruined field to witness the sight of the avenging angel come down to give them tidings.
He settled his feet on ground still hot from the lash of the god’s anger and stared about him. Four dead invaders, their black skin singed even darker by fire. Maybe twenty Edori, running toward him, questions on their lips and terror or excitement in their eyes. His gaze went quickly from one face to another, seeking out the only person whose fate truly mattered to him, praying to find her alive and whole among the circle of her friends.
He was more surprised than he had ever been in his life when, among the figures hurrying his way, he saw, not his angelica, but his sister.
C hapter T wenty-eight
Miriam raced into his arms, headlong, burying her face against his chest and clinging to him with a child’s frenzy. “Oh, Gaaron!” she sobbed. “Merciful Yovah, I was so afraid! They had their fire sticks, and they were shooting at us, and there was nothing we could do, nothing, and everyone was screaming—and then the thunderbolt, and everything exploded, and how did you know? How did you come to be here? How did you know where I was?”
It was instinct, at first, to calm her, to enclose her in his arms and murmur soothing phrases. How many times had he comforted her in just this way over the past nineteen years? But there were so many questions to be asked, and he had more than she did. When she had stopped shaking and stopped pouring out her incoherent phrases, he pulled back a little and looked sternly down at her.
“Miriam,” he said. “Why are you here with the Edori? We thought we left you safe in Luminaux.”
She looked up at him, wariness instantly chasing away the relief and gladness on her face. How many times, too, had he watched that change in her expression as he scolded her for one of her misadventures? “I didn’t want to stay in Luminaux,” she said sulkily. “I wanted to be with my friends.”
“Your friends! You don’t even know any Edori.”
“Susannah took me to meet the Lohoras. I wanted to stay with them, and they were happy to have me. Gaaron, let all that go! I have so much to tell you! But first, you tell me. What are you doing here? How did you know I was here?”
He released her and looked around at the ruined camp. The Edori who had headed his way when he landed seemed to have dispersed as soon as they realized who he was—and whom he had found in their camp. They had managed to put the fires out, but half a dozen tents were still smoldering. The men were standing in one huddled group, conferring, while the women were examining cook pots and calling out useful finds to the others in the camp. He thought he recognized a few faces from his brief sojourn with the Lohoras, nearly six months ago, but no one looked over in his direction. No one appeared to be listening to this conversation.
“I didn’t know you were here,” he said distinctly. “I thought you were in Luminaux. I was looking for Susannah.”
“Susannah! But she’s not here. She’s not at the Eyrie?”
“Obviously not. She left a few days ago while I was at Windy Point. No one seems to know where she’s gone.”
“And she didn’t tell you? Didn’t leave you a note or something?” Miriam’s sharp eyes fixed themselves
on Gaaron’s face. “Did you argue with her? Gaaron, what’s happening?”
“We didn’t argue,” he said, though he could feel the heat rise in his cheeks. To have to explain himself to Miriam! That would be the height of embarrassment. “There may have been—a misunderstanding. But it is dangerous on every road these days, and I wanted to see her returned to safety.”
“Well, she’s not here. Maybe she went to the Tachitas.”
A couple of months with the Edori and already she was talking like one. Gaaron took another moment to survey her. Was this really his spoiled and wayward sister? She was dressed in a somewhat ragged jacket thrown over a shapeless dress, and the shoes she was wearing could not have come from any fashionable cobbler. Her glorious hair was braided away from her face and didn’t look as if it had been washed in a day or so, and her face was smudged with soot. She looked thinner than he remembered but healthy, he thought. Her dark eyes were snapping with interest.
“I don’t know where she went,” he said slowly. “But I am glad, even if I have lost her for the moment, that I have found you. Had I known how much danger you were in these past few months, I don’t believe I would have slept a single night. Miriam, there have been so many deaths upon the road—so many Edori and Jansai killed, and even small towns sent up in smoke. You have no idea how lucky you are that you are still alive. And to think that I happened to arrive just as your whole camp was about to be destroyed—”
“For the second time,” she interrupted.
“What?”
She nodded. “We were attacked before by a group of raiders, but we were lucky then, too. I frightened them, and they accidentally shot at each other—oh, it’s a long story. But I don’t think this group today was trying to destroy us. They could have killed us all in five minutes, but they didn’t. I think they wanted something from us.”
“Wanted—what could they possibly—”
She took a step away from him and motioned in the direction of the camp. He had been so focused on his sister’s face that he had not been paying much attention to the people a dozen yards away, trying to set the camp to rights. Now he saw that one of them had stepped close enough to hear their discussion: a black-skinned, flame-haired, and absolutely motionless young man, watching Gaaron with the still intentness of a predator.
“Miriam,” Gaaron breathed, but the sight of the nearby invader did not discompose her.
“I think they came back looking for Jossis,” she said.
Over the protests of the Edori, Gaaron had insisted on raising a plague flag to call the attention of any passing angel. “There is no plague here,” he was informed very politely by the burly man he was reintroduced to as Bartholomew. “And Edori are not used to asking for help from angels.”
“But I am used to it,” Gaaron said, “and I need some aid. Let’s just see who might come down and investigate.”
He had offered to pitch in and help, but Miriam had caught him by the arm and pulled him to one side. “No,” she said. “You come talk to me. They’ll come get us if they need us.”
“It seems rude,” he protested as she tugged him away from the main activity of the camp.
“Everyone will understand.”
They settled finally about fifty yards away from the camp, sitting on a couple of tattered tarps that Miriam had brought with her. Gaaron spread his wings carefully behind him, not exactly pleased with the sensation of feathers in snow but otherwise not particularly discomfited by the cold. Miriam made sure to sit in a patch of sun, but seemed comfortable enough in her oversize jacket and heavily padded shoes.
“Now tell me,” he commanded. “What in the name of the god above is going on here?”
Miriam leaned forward, her face a study in excitement and intensity. “I told you. Our camp was attacked—oh, fifty miles south of here. Or more. I don’t know. We were able to frighten off the attackers, and most of them just disappeared, but one of them was injured almost to the point of death. And so we nursed him back to health.”
“Of all the stupid, unthinking, disastrous—”
“Yes, but Gaaron, he’s just a boy—my age, I think, or something like it. And we’ve learned so much from him! I helped take care of him, and I started to teach him words, and I’ve learned a little bit about the world he came from. I think it’s—”
“The world he came from,” Gaaron interrupted. “You’re certain he and his friends aren’t from somewhere close? From another part of this world?”
“I know it’s incredible, but I think they traveled here from some other place—much like the original settlers did—”
Gaaron nodded. “That’s a theory Mahalah proposed a few weeks back at Windy Point. We haven’t been able to prove it or disprove it.”
“It’s what he told me. And the world he comes from is full of violence and hatred, and Jossis was happy to get away, but he did not realize that violence and hatred would come with them to a new place—”
“He’s told you all that? You are able to understand his language?”
“Well—not entirely. I have learned a few of his phrases and we act some things out—but the part about the violence, that I’m sure of—”
Gaaron thought privately that the concepts she was discussing would be hard to convey through gestures, but he was willing to believe Miriam had established a kind of rough communication with the foreigner. If anyone could, Miriam could. “Why have they come here? Did he tell you that?”
She shook her head. “I cannot tell if they are looking for a new world to live on—”
“As the original settlers did here.”
“Yes. Or if they are just—the kind of men who like to go places and hurt other people. Who just like to destroy things. There are people like that, even in Samaria.”
He nodded. “And what did you say his name was?”
She looked even more excited. “Jossis. And, Gaaron, isn’t that odd? It sounds almost like Joseph. And every once in a while he says a word that sounds familiar to me, or I say one to him and he is nodding before I can even define it. And—this was the strangest thing—one night before the campfire, he sang the Bacha Ode. Note for note. Where could he have learned something like that?”
He looked at her for a long time without speaking, the thoughts spinning in his mind so quickly it was hard to pin them down. Well. They had always known there must be other humans, other creatures like them, somewhere in the universe. Jovah had plucked them from one world and placed them on another; wasn’t it possible that he had done the same for other races, other communities? The Librera hinted that, after Jovah took them away from their first world, that world had destroyed itself with its excess of rage, but Jovah may have rescued hundreds, thousands, of others before that planet burned itself up. On Samaria, they had chosen to turn their backs on technology, to ignore both its siren lure and its demon fire, but others might not have chosen the same path. They might have left a life of violence and re-created it in a new place. They might have learned nothing from their past at all.
“Gaaron,” Miriam said, when she finally got tired of his silence. “Don’t you see? I think we must be in some way related to Jossis. To all of them.”
He nodded slowly. “I think you could very well be right,” he said. “That does not mean we are in any less danger from them, however. And I think you have been unforgivably reckless in attempting to make friends with someone so unpredictable—”
She shook her head impatiently, not even willing to take the time to argue. “Jossis will not hurt any of us. You have to talk to him, you will see how much you can learn from him—and you’ll like him, I know you will—”
He could not help but smile at that. There was no likelihood he would like a bloodthirsty young invader who had been dropped by chance into his lap. “I seriously doubt that I will be able to converse with him well enough to learn any useful information,” he drawled. “But I think I know someone who can.”
Miriam looked instantly suspicious. “W
ho?”
“Mahalah. If he speaks any language derived from the settlers’ speech, she will be able to understand him.”
Miriam stood up. “Then go get her. Bring her here.”
Gaaron stood as well. “Oh, no. I will take him to Mount Sinai.”
“You can’t! You can’t take him away from me!”
Gaaron spared a moment to wonder just how deep this supposed new “friendship” had gone, and then decided he did not want to know. And that it didn’t matter. “I can and I will. But I’m not leaving you here with the Lohoras to be murdered in your sleep.”
She crossed her arms and gave him a mulish look. “So there. You can’t take both of us away. Even you couldn’t carry two of us all the way to Sinai.”
“That’s true,” he agreed. “We’ll just have to wait.”
“Wait for what?”
“For whoever spots the plague flag and comes down to investigate.”
Naturally, that sent Miriam stomping straight back to camp to try to haul in the flag. It was a makeshift signal, a ripped red shirt tied to a fire-shortened guy line, and Gaaron had tied it to a tree halfway up the mountainside. Miriam was furious when she couldn’t make enough headway through the tumbled stone to get close to the tree. Gaaron watched her thrashing up the mountain—saw the flame-haired Jossis go hurrying after her—and turned his attention back to the Lohoras and their ragged camp.
They’d made remarkable progress in the thirty minutes he and Miriam had been in consultation. Not every tent had been burned, it seemed, not every cook pot demolished. He returned to a small but bustling little enclave where tarps were being thrown over freshly cut poles and unusual ingredients were being mixed into cauldrons. Everyone seemed hard at work and no one seemed too devastated by their recent brush with annihilation.
