Starfall (Stealing the Sun Book 3)

by Ron Collins

  He stopped in front of Yanil, who was of the Dareh Family in the Kandar clan, the son of a quadar who did business with several of the council. Yanil had connections. Taranth remembered the whelp’s ma from cycles ago. She had been the head of that household. The Darehs were a Family of power when Taranth was growing up. They were whelplings brought up in Families that were forged on the ideas of building new things, unlike Taranth, whose da taught him to keep reverence for lives that came from the stone and the wind.

  “Do you understand why you need to listen to me?” Taranth said, standing so close he could smell Yanil’s anxiety.

  Yanil stood taller than Taranth, but his shoulders slumped and he seemed to shrink before him.

  “Yes. I understand.”

  “Good.” Taranth returned to the center of the party. “I suggest we do our best to sleep well, then. Tomorrow we will begin our search.”

  The gathering broke, then.

  Taranth stepped toward the horizon where Eldoro had just set and where he would construct his own lean-to.

  Low-voiced conversations were carried away in the wind, which Taranth supposed was all for the better. He did not need to hear what the whelps of the council were complaining about now.

  Later, as the whelps took to their bedrolls, Taranth climbed to the platform at the top of a formation he knew as Lashto’s Break. The jagged slab of rock, nearly twice his height, jutted off into the darkening sky. Old trackers named it for a free-ranger who lived his entire life on the outside of the Esgarat ring and used the break as a primary gathering place for fellow desert-hardened travelers until he just up and disappeared.

  That was how most trackers left the world.

  They died alone in a land that gave no word of their leaving beyond a body that the creatures and plants of the desert would suck up into themselves in less time than most quadars used to build a home.

  The rock that formed Lashto’s Break had fallen from the cliffs above before Taranth had been born. He had played here when he was young and his da had taken him on trips. He remembered listening to the wind and the call of animals, watching the night blooms as they covered the surface of the rock with sweet-smelling leaves and light-colored petals. Sometimes his da would teach him to trap kax and piela. Those were his favorite times as a whelp, trapping in the darkness of Convergence with his da.

  M’ran came to sit at Taranth’s side.

  They dangled their feet over the rocky ledge, a position that should have made Taranth feel young, but instead just reminded him of how old he was. Everything about life made him feel old anymore.

  Neither said anything.

  Just looked out over the Castanda Desert as it spread to the horizon.

  With the dim smudge of Katon as the only heat, the barren land reflected the chalky dome of yellow-gray and brown clouds that were streaked with orange and red. Patches of night bloomers spread their petals to absorb the condensation that was beginning to leak from the air, their fragrance combining with the timeless scent of baked rock in a way that made him feel better. Nearby, rugged havra brush and hoi root were busy clawing their way into cracks in the stone.

  In the distance, dark plumes of rain fell from the highest winds, twisting into burnt yellow columns that disappeared before falling to the surface. The happenstance of perspective made the half-rain appear to mix with ash and smoke that rose from a line of faraway volcanoes.

  “Fire rain?” M’ran said, indicating the cloud with his central.

  “Yes.”

  “Good thing we are not there.”

  “The sky is holding it back anyway.”

  His words didn’t console M’ran, which was good. Fire rain was rare, but when it was cool enough, the orange clouds could open up and drop thin rains of liquid that was strong enough to cut into the bare rock. A smart quadar ran to the caves then, because fire rain could do equally harsh things to skin as it did to stone. As a whelp, he had seen the face of an old plains tracker who had been caught out in such weather. His scars had been deep.

  “Hateri will be a powerful ally when he’s older,” M’ran finally said, his voice as far away as the call of a flying jah.

  “Perhaps.”

  “You don’t care?”

  “I am old,” Taranth said. “Why should I care?”

  M’ran sighed.

  Taranth resisted the urge to spit. Even though it was only Divergence, it was a sorry quadar who let moisture out of his body in the desert.

  Instead he ran his hand over a hoi root growing in a nearby crack.

  “It looks dry and bitter,” M’ran said. “Kind of like you.”

  “This dry and bitter root has saved my life more times than I can tell you about.”

  “And you thought I was being insulting?” M’ran said.

  Taranth laughed, his throat giving an honest clack in response. M’ran was as close to a friend as Taranth had. He was not bad, for a council member especially. M’ran seemed to honestly believe in the idea of combining the clans for the betterment of all, which was different from others who merely wanted to collaborate to extract more commerce in a few specific ways, and considerably different from the staunch holdouts who would rather the entire quadarti population be burned in fire rain than be forced to live and work together.

  “I’m not lying, M’ran,” he said. “I’ve lived off these plants more times than I want to remember. They are as sharp and as bitter as you can possibly imagine, and they make my stomachs bind up after a time. But they have saved me.”

  Taranth took a blade and shoved it into the crack down the length of the root. Then, yanking the hoi back and forth, he plucked the tuber out. “Beautiful, isn’t it?” he said as he ran his fingers over its length, and finally put it into the satchel he had hooked into the belt around his waist. “Prepared is prepared,” he said.

  M’ran shrugged. “If nothing else, maybe you can slip it into a pot to give the whelps a surprise.”

  This time Taranth’s laugh was of the full-throated variety.

  “Now you’re just trying to make me happy.”

  They listened to the wind for a moment.

  “I wasn’t lying either,” M’ran said. “Earlier, when I said Hateri E’Lar will be quite powerful sometime soon.”

  “Why should I care?”

  “Maybe you shouldn’t,” M’ran said. He sat silently for a moment, then spoke again. “These whelps are a different breed, aren’t they? Full of movement, not so full of thought. Not like us when we were young, eh?”

  Taranth grunted. He saw where M’ran was going.

  The executive used one finger to pull Taranth’s sleeve up far enough to reveal the edge of the scar he had shown Hateri earlier.

  “If none of the ancients care about the whelps,” M’ran said, “who will teach them the old ways?”

  “That is an old trick.”

  “Sometimes old tricks work.”

  “Not this time.”

  M’ran nodded and let Taranth’s sleeve fall back. He looked out at a jah as it glided on a hot breeze, then he stood, stretched, and crawled off the rock to go back to the camp.

  With nothing else to be done, Taranth watched the jah glide in the lesser light of Katon’s time.

  Tomorrow promised to be long.

  CHAPTER 4

  The first hints of Eldoro were already coloring the eastern horizon when Taranth spoke to the team the next morning. Given that Taranth rarely managed to do more than doze most nights anymore, this meant he was still tired, unhappy, and in no better mood than he had been the night before.

  His wakefulness also meant he knew sleep had been difficult and patchy for most of the others, too.

  Pietha M’ktal woke all night with cramps in her legs, and something was giving Hateri’s stomachs fits—though the dominant council whelp, as Taranth was now thinking of him, was doing well enough to keep it hidden. All Taranth could say for certain was that Hateri’s gastric problems didn’t have anything to do with his hoi root,
which was still resting in his satchel.

  The breaking meal was slow.

  Packing up camp took longer than Taranth thought was physically possible, and then half the team had to change garb into robes that would breathe better in the heat.

  Taranth nearly told them it wouldn’t matter—which it wouldn’t—but he bit his tongue when M’ran caught his gaze.

  Finally, though, they were all gathered and ready to begin the real work they had traveled this way to do.

  “From all reports given by the council it seems likely the Light That Fell from the Sky landed to the west and south of this position.” Taranth swept his hand away from the mountain. “I suspect this thing is a stone, probably black and burnt—as other things I have seen fall from the sky have been. And if it is like other stones that fall from the sky, I would expect it will be considerably different from others in the area. I also suspect it will be several heats’ walk from here, but we will not let such assumptions change how we work. We will gather in groups of two except that M’ran and I will each take a wing on our own. Given the territory, we can put about thirty paces between each group and be likely to find anything unusual.”

  “How long should we walk, Elder?” Hateri said. He held up the timer he had clipped to his belt.

  Taranth bit his lip, unable to hide his horror at the box.

  The devices were new. They were small machines being sold through Waganat Family stores. They used gears and other mechanisms to track the precise passage of the two heats, and then represent time in distinct quantities. Only wealthier Families could afford them now, but if the ways of commerce were followed, the Waganats would make them available to the masses once the currency flow began to dwindle.

  “We’ll head south—away from the mountain—until Eldoro is one-half of one-sixth across the sky,” Taranth said, “which, if you pay attention and if you actually listen to the land around you, you will be able to tell without need to barter over useless time boxes.”

  Hateri glared, but put his machine away.

  Taranth ignored him.

  “After we walk that distance we’ll reassemble, pivot, and return. If we do not find the Stone That Fell from the Sky, we’ll pivot again and repeat the cycle, stopping the last pass on its southern tip so that we can extend away from the mountain each heat. That will give us a path six passes wide with each Eldoro.”

  He had complained to M’ran about taking such a large team, but he admitted now that having more eyes made the search path wider and should reduce the length of the trip by roughly half.

  The expedition seemed to understand his commands.

  He didn’t refresh his warnings about the rela beasts or any of the other animals that could make their lives miserable from this time forward, nor did he cover how to report emergencies again. Two times should be enough.

  “Searching with that procedure will take forever,” Hateri said from his position in the middle of the group. “If we go solo, spread all twelve of us out rather than in groups of two, we can cover twice the ground.”

  “If we go solo, there will be no one to see you fall into a crevasse and die,” Taranth snapped.

  Hateri began to reply but, seeing the set of Taranth’s expression, apparently thought better.

  “Team up,” Taranth commanded. “We will begin our search for the stone now.”

  Voices rose as the twelve began to discuss teams.

  “I will assign your teams,” M’ran said loudly, quieting the conversation. “The council wants us to work together as Families and as clans. We have an equal number of each clan, so I will assign your match as a member of another clan.”

  The news was received with neither great joy nor great angst. Rather, it was as if the collective had almost known it was likely to happen. M’ran spent only a few moments making his assignments, which suggested to Taranth that those assignments had been prepared in advance. He wondered if they were of M’ran’s choosing, or whether the pairings were another aspect of the council’s control.

  Did it matter?

  Would it matter if Jasneed Parity walked beside Yip Kil, or if he were paired with Gis’le Ombat instead? Did it matter that Satrak Waganat, Terilamat, walked with one of the Kandar clan or the Hlrat?

  How could one tell?

  Regardless, the teams lined up.

  As they started the search, the blot of the greater Eldoro colored the haze of the clouds to the east a dark tone of red.

  By the time Katon appeared again and they built their second camp, the entire group was hobbling from blisters and moaning about exhaustion. Without the shade of the mountains, the soil gathered the heat and served to bake the bottoms of sandals. The wind scrubbed their skin raw, even the Hlrat, who were constantly stopping to repair the witze oils that cracked and peeled to expose skin.

  They complained of strained muscles, and of their water that was warm and stale.

  They complained about the sandflies that were invisible until they bit with acidic stings. Taranth didn’t tell them that the ache would last for at least a full heat. Let them find these things on their own, just as his da had let him discover them.

  They complained about each other.

  They complained about Eldoro and Katon and the harsh roots that tripped them when they weren’t watching close enough. They complained about the sand that got everywhere.

  The desert teaches, Taranth thought as he compared their bickering to the bravado of the whelp’s first days. He could not help but take some satisfaction from their misery, though he knew it was wrong to do so.

  The farther they walked from the mountain peaks the more the whelps came to understand that their food might run thin, and that the only water they would have was in the packs they carted on their backs and the few drops they could take from their nighttime water catches.

  Yet Taranth held them together with his own brand of quietly intimidating professionalism. With a word here or an idea there, the group’s suffering became a bonding.

  Shared suffering, it seemed to Taranth, was the purpose of life.

  When Eldoro rose again, the team was as fatigued as it had been the previous evening, but it got itself ready to go more rapidly than it had the heat before.

  The process of picking their way over the ground began again.

  Scan south, pivot.

  Scan north, pivot.

  Do it again.

  When Eldoro hit highpoint, they rested.

  When the wind blew, they leaned into it. When the dust made it impossible to see, Taranth walked the line to make sure they were all hunkered down safely before finding his own thin depression to weather the storm in.

  When Katon appeared, they made camp.

  During the fourth heat out, they came upon the pride of rela.

  Taranth spotted them from his position on the wing.

  They were resting in shade created by a meandering ridge of raised surfaces in the broken ground. A mass of dry brush that grew along the upper ridge of that line extended the shade farther.

  Taranth had seen this pack before: five males and eight females, not counting the Dominant, which was the female leader of the pack whose gender changed to neutral after she ascended to her role. They lay on their bellies or on their sides, panting, the short hairs of their burnt orange pelts shimmering in the semi-light of the shadows. It was just past breeding season, and Taranth counted six pups now. The pack would be hungry, but it was also Eldoro highpoint.

  The Dominant was watching them.

  Taranth felt her calculating the mathematics of the desert.

  Was the exertion of a hunt in highpoint heat worth the chances of coming up empty?

  Taranth made the whistle and gesture that was the signal for the team to come to a halt, and was stunned to see Hateri E’Lar quickly lean into his teammate, Cestral of the Taler Family. The minstrel’s daughter whistled and Hateri used the proper hand signals to direct the entire left wing of the search grid to halt and remain motionless—just as
Taranth had taught them.

  The rest of the wing came to an immediate stop.

  Taranth reached for the knife he kept strapped to his calf.

  Held firm in the palm of his hand, his knife was warm and dry like everything else in the desert. His blood pulsed through his palm as he gripped the knife harder. His sense of smell grew sharp, and the skin of his heat plates burned.

  They stood like that for several beats—rela and quadar staring at each other as the Dominant finished her calculations.

  Finally, the Dominant rolled to one side, her back to him.

  He gave Cestral and Hateri the “clear” signal, which they passed down the line.

  As he slid his knife back into its sheath, Taranth saw that Hateri had shrugged his pack to his side but was shuffling it back to his normal configuration. It told Taranth that the whelp had a blade, too, which was wise. Most of them carried small paring knives as tools, and in fact Hateri had such an instrument dangling from his belt. But his readiness to reach into his pack told Taranth that he was carrying more than a simple working blade.

  It made him wonder, but instead of dealing with it there, he motioned the group to move on. Which they did, slowly. Carefully. Making no move that might be seen as aggressive.

  He didn’t want to be in the area if the rela Dominant changed its mind.

  Later, when the crevasses that the rela had been using were far behind, they stopped at a place where three havra bushes grew together to make for a useful shelter. The party sat in its cool shade, sprawled out in much the same fashion as the rela had.

  “Did you see them?” Ogala said after she chewed on a chip of moss bread and sipped at her water bladder. The witze that covered her face was cracked and peeling, but she was smiling. “They were beautiful.”

  “All I saw was fangs and beady eyes,” Gis’le replied. “They made me want to lose my urine, if I hadn’t already sweated it out.”

  “I hope this is worth it,” Satrak Waganat added. “I don’t want to get eaten out here in the desert.”