Starfall (Stealing the Sun Book 3)

by Ron Collins

  He ran his hand over the animal’s shoulder as he released it from the cart, leaving it free to move, knowing the tal beast understood the idea of safety in numbers and that it would stay nearby.

  He found three bodies—Cestral of the Taler Family, Ogala of the Tael, and Gis’le of the Ombat—obviously trampled by the rampaging tal, their exposed faces sandblasted and raw. Supplies were scattered across the plain, as were a few smaller pieces of the Taranth Stone. The wreckage of a second cart was a hundred paces away. He could not readily see the third, but it had been lighter than the others because it had carried supplies rather than pieces of the salvage.

  Hidden inside the folds of the wind, he heard the sound of sobbing.

  He limped to a large boulder and found Hateri sitting against the rock, desolate, head thrown back, and facing the direct heat of Eldoro as trails of tears crisscrossed his dust-caked face. The young quadar appeared unhurt beyond the simple bumping or bruising that was unavoidable in a burning wind.

  Taranth stopped before him, his shadow putting Hateri into darkness.

  “I killed them,” Hateri said when he opened his primaries.

  “No,” Taranth said. He sat down beside Hateri. “If any of us killed them, it was me. I should have been paying more attention.”

  This was the truth, and he knew it. Taranth had grown lazy. He had let the desert bait him. And he had given himself to the fates in another way, too. He should have known better than to become close to the whelps. The desert takes what it wants, and for Taranth the desert had always wanted it all.

  They sat for a while until Taranth spoke again.

  “This kind of thought is useless, though. In the desert we take care of ourselves.”

  “I can’t accept that.”

  “It’s the way of the quadarti.” Taranth said. “Come, perhaps we can find others.” He proffered his hand, and the council member’s son took it. Hateri’s eyes were glassy and his expression seemed etched in stone, but he went with Taranth and together they searched the fields of dust.

  They found Yip Kil had been tumbled to death.

  M’ran was dead from a large piece of broken lumber driven through his chest at a vicious angle.

  A second tal beast survived intact, lifting itself from the ground and shaking sand from its pale mane. Its cart was nearby, still workable with some fixing of one wheel.

  Of the others, they found no sign.

  They made camp and gathered what pieces of the Taranth Stone they could, loading them all onto the two carts that remained, lucky that the largest piece had remained lashed to the most stable of them.

  Hateri turned to the bodies, then, coming to Gis’le first.

  “What are you doing?” Taranth said.

  “Bringing her back,” the young quadar replied.

  Taranth shook his head.

  “We have to bring them back,” Hateri said.

  “The trip is too long,” he replied. “The stench of flesh will bring the rela and the neantha or any one of a hundred scavengers.”

  They argued long and hard.

  Hateri cried.

  Taranth stood firm, though it nearly broke him to see the whelp’s anger. “The desert will claim them either way,” he said. “Better for all if they are left to feed the land this way.”

  When they woke the following heat, the two of them silently loaded everything they had onto the two remaining carts, and yoked those carts onto the two remaining tal beasts.

  Then, together, they made their way toward the One Great Esgarat, and toward the council.

  Just the two of them.

  CHAPTER 13

  They subsisted on almost nothing for five hands of heats. Only a single water catch between them. They huddled with the tal beasts to wait out another of the burning winds. To eat, they had only a few salvaged bags of katja bread and what roots and meats they had found in the wreckage. It was survival the old way, but it was survival.

  They took turns driving the beasts, following paths and crevasses that lined the outer plains until they found the only pass in the mountains that would let the carts through. It was also a pass patrolled by the neantha, a pack of which took one of the tal beasts their first evening there. Both of the quadars had faded to lucid sleep, and the pack came in unfettered. Not that it would have mattered. The neantha singles out the weak first, and that tal beast had been laboring. Taranth and Hateri had already begun to plan how to proceed with just one beast and one cart.

  The pass gave shade, and sometimes liquid would pool in cracks in the rock where they could siphon off enough of a splash to almost fill their mouths, which had been enough, barely, to traverse the pass and enter the Esgarat, to push the tal harder across the inner plain, and finally to arrive at Esgarat City. Together, they had traveled across the desolation of the desert with the tal beast and the cart. Together, they had made it.

  This alone was why Taranth thought the young quadar would survive.

  He had made it this far. The desert did not seem to want him yet.

  Taranth stood at the door of Jafred E’Lar’s private chambers.

  The time was late, and Katon was near her setting point, yet there was still some time before Eldoro would appear to the east. Divergence was drawing to its end. The darkness of this time of the year was not complete, but was still enough that his central gave him the bulk of his sight. Now that the racket of the tal beast and the cart’s creaking wheels were finished, the street around him was silent. The coolness of Esgarat City settled over him.

  He wore only a ragged cloth around his waist now. Dry rotting sandals wrapped around his ankles. They were old and ripped. He had repaired them six hundred times—or was it six million? His skin peeled. His head ached. His body no longer felt like it was his own.

  He did not want to know how he smelled.

  The door swung open.

  A servant stood there, his robe hastily thrown on and his eyes still clouded with sleep.

  “I have come to see the council member,” Taranth said.

  “It is late,” the servant replied, scanning Taranth with clear suspicion. “The council member is sleeping.”

  “He will want to speak with me.”

  The quadar looked at him.

  Their one remaining animal and its cart stood behind Taranth, dusty in the distance, nibbling the tender grasses that grew under a well-pruned grisa tree. The cart, loaded down now with the entire remains of the Taranth Stone, was still lashed to its harness. Hateri, also sprawled in the back and hopefully still asleep, could not be seen. The animal was past the point of exhaustion, as was Taranth. The young E’Lar would probably survive. He was breathing, anyway, though he had nothing left.

  Taranth’s bones ached as he stood before this servant. His head pounded. He wanted only for this job to be finished.

  “I can see if he has an appointment tomorrow,” the servant said, beginning to close the door.

  “What is your name?” Taranth replied.

  “Pana.”

  “Well, Pana,” Taranth said, making his voice as sharp as he could. “If you put me off until tomorrow, I will tell council member E’Lar it was your doing that he was unable to see his son for an extra heat. Given the state he’s in, I hope you are prepared to pay that price.”

  Pana hesitated, but Taranth could tell his resolve had already crumbled.

  “Wait in the garden, please,” the servant said.

  Taranth sat on a bench in the silent and still air while he waited for the servant to wake the council member. The sensation of nothingness was familiar to him now. He felt like he wasn’t there, like he wasn’t even inside his own skin. When he listened closely enough, however, he realized he wasn’t alone at all. Wind whipped over buildings and brought a soft clatter from the lines strung with drying cloth hanging free. Strange noises like that. Noises you don’t hear on the desert plains. Noises you don’t hear in the core of the caves.

  The bench was made of cast metals.

 
; Its edges pressed into the bony ridge of his spine. The surface felt odd to him, too, smooth and soft despite their edges, painted with a thick coat of white. The stones that covered the path below his torn sandals were soft and pebbled. The aroma of flower buds, open for the evening air, gave the garden a scent that Taranth found to be too sweet. The idea that quadars lived like this was hard for him to grasp.

  The scratch of a lizard rushing over the pebbles came as Jafred E’Lar raced across the manor yard, the tails of his robe flying free behind him, and two other servants just behind the tails.

  “Where is my son?”

  Taranth levered himself to stand up, then nodded to where the tal beast and its cart stood.

  “In the back.”

  “Thank the old gods,” Jafred replied. “Where is the rest of the team?”

  “Dead.”

  Jafred’s face paled.

  “All but your son,” Taranth added.

  The council member ground his teeth, but was already rushing to the cart.

  By the time Jafred slumped onto a bench across the path from him, darkness was at its depth. The council servers had brought Taranth water and food—baked bread with havra and fresh hard nuts. Despite his hunger, Taranth ate sparely, knowing his stomachs were not ready yet. He drank the water though, emptying several decanters.

  “He will make it?” Taranth said after Jafred appeared, concern etching his face.

  The council member nodded. “He needs water, food, and rest. But he should heal.”

  “His body, anyway,” Taranth said.

  “Yes, his body, anyway.”

  “I have completed your assignment,” Taranth said.

  “Tell me about it.”

  Taranth wrapped his six fingers over his knees and used his central to stare into the darkness.

  In a quiet voice, he told Jafred about his son’s work.

  “His team loved him,” Taranth said at the end of the story. “They would have torn down the Esgarat Mountains if he had asked them to. If he can overcome this moment, he will make a difference.”

  “Thank you,” Jafred said.

  Taranth understood the conflict he saw in the council member’s primaries. In the morning, Jafred would have to tell his fellow council members that their sons and daughters had died while his own survived.

  “What is that?” Jafred said, glancing at the cart as if he had just noticed it now, a restraint that impressed Taranth.

  “The Light That Fell from the Sky. What is left of it, anyway.”

  The council member went to examine it.

  Taranth followed him, already feeling better for the new liquid in his body.

  Jafred’s eyes grew wide with wonder as he took in the salvage.

  His hearts pounded as he put his hand on the sandblasted surface. His skin tingled in the near-damp air of Katon falling. Even in the darkness, Jafred could see strange boxes inside the shell, boxes filled with equipment and wires and other pieces that thrilled him and scared him at the same time. The burnt places on the outer shell of the biggest piece reminded him that the light was said to blaze like fire in the sky.

  After all this time, those stories had actually given him to wonder about gods, both old and new, but the equipment laid out before him now spoke only of engineers and inventors.

  He flashed on Taranth’s story of Hateri and the guns.

  The guns hadn’t surprised him. Nothing the Families did would surprise him.

  This device, however…

  Jafred had already seen enough of it to know that no quadar of any Family could have done the work it took to make it.

  The Light That Fell from the Sky had come from someplace else.

  This was the moment, he would tell his son later, that the world felt somehow bigger, this moment when it felt to him that something important was waiting for them, something bigger than any quadar, be they scholar, philosopher, council member, or priest, could ever know.

  This was the moment, also, when he understood that the Light That Fell From the Sky had to remain a council secret.

  The device could not be given to any single Family. That much was obvious. And to discuss it publicly would be to set the Families onto a squabble that would result, eventually, in the find being cut up into small segments that each could exploit to their strengths.

  That was the quadarti way—or at least it had been in the past.

  Jafred took a long time to examine the full nature of the find.

  Upward, backward, he bent and stooped to examine each piece with intensity.

  The device was remarkable.

  Finally, however, Jafred’s curiosity was sated.

  He turned to tell Taranth that his payment would be delivered at the time when Eldoro rose. He turned to say that he wanted Taranth to stay in his quarters for this night and for as many nights as he would—because this was perhaps the most incredible thing he had ever seen, and because Jafred wanted Taranth to brief him about everything that happened, where exactly it had been found, how exactly the storm had come, what exactly they had left behind.

  But when he turned to tell Taranth these things, he found himself alone.

  The guide had left the garden.

  Honoring the Fallen

  CHAPTER 14

  Hateri woke to the smell of boiled havra and spiced tea.

  His first thought was that he was dreaming, but the breeze came through his second-floor room like it had always done before the expedition, and he recognized his closets and the study desk still covered with the assignments he had left undone prior to leaving. Those assignments seemed trivial now. Stupid. Who cared which Family owned the making of draperies or which constructed building foundations?

  His second thought was that everything about him hurt with a version of pain that began with deep stabbing in his chest and ended with a scour that burned over his cracked lips. The skin around his forehead was stretched thin and too small for his head. A memory of gouging his leg came to him. But none of these could compete with the pain that struck when he thought about Pietha and the others.

  He was wearing sleepskins.

  Another moment of absurdity. One minute he was in foul-smelling rags and falling to the ground, the next he was here, in these sleepskins.

  Then, for a moment, Hateri panicked, searching the room until he saw his belts and their pouches hung over the back of the chair in the far corner.

  “You’re awake.”

  Chanzi, the council member’s cook, placed a tray filled with bowls, plates, and a cup of tea on the stand next to Hateri’s bed. The aroma of havra became suddenly stronger. A napkin sat at the tray’s edge, folded properly.

  It all seemed so absolutely surreal.

  “I’ll call your father.”

  “Where is Taranth?” he said, his voice still thick with sleep. He drew a deep breath and winced as his ribs burned. Moving hurt.

  Chanzi wagged a finger in his direction. “Don’t go trying to get me into trouble. You know I’ll be leaving the answering to your father.” Chanzi helped him sit up in the bed, and put the tray near him. Then he left to ring the council member.

  Hateri’s stomachs throbbed with the anticipation of food. When he brought the spoon to his lips, the spicy sting of havra soup against his lips nearly made him weep. His skin was stretched across his cheekbones, and it hurt to twist his face into any expression. He wondered what he looked like. Probably not good.

  After three spoons, he sat back to rest.

  He wanted to drink the tea, but the idea of more hot liquid on his lips made him cringe. He drank water instead, finishing all of it, though at first he used the smaller sips he had learned to take in the desert.

  Footsteps pounded in the corridor outside.

  “Hateri!” his father’s voice came just as he stepped into the room. “How do you feel?”

  “Sore.”

  “The medics say you should stay in bed for several heats, and it could be several hands of heats before every
thing comes back. You are a pretty sick quadar.”

  “Where is Taranth?”

  His father pulled a seat forward and sat down beside the crèche. “He left.”

  Pursing his lips sent a flare of pain across Hateri’s face. He couldn’t imagine Taranth staying in Esgarat City, but to not have him here felt wrong.

  Hateri closed all three eyes.

  The last heats of the trip were still a blur, but the rest was coming back.

  Every step had been filled with pain, but Taranth prodded him, kept him going by goading him and pushing him. He kept Hateri talking about Pietha by telling him about Alena, a female Taranth himself had once loved. Taranth forced him to eat, made him drink. He was pretty sure Taranth loaded him onto the back of the cart at one point, but he couldn’t be certain. All he remembered for sure was coming to consciousness with the flat boards of the cart jostling below him and the hard surface of the Taranth Stone pressing him up against the rails.

  These were tough, painful memories. But they were easier to deal with than the images of his friends lying facedown, arms outstretched in the sand, waiting for the desert to reclaim them as he pulled away.

  “Are you all right, son?”

  “How could he do that?”

  “Do what?”

  “How could Taranth leave?”

  His father sighed, and shrugged. “What can I say? He’s of the desert. He didn’t even take his payment.”

  Hateri sighed against pain. Taranth was gone. The idea suddenly hurt him more than anything else.

  “Tell me about your trip.”

  “He didn’t even stay to tell you what happened?”

  “He told me what happened.”

  Hateri sat back. At least there was that. “Then I don’t want to talk about it.”