Jo Clayton - Fire in the Sky

He smiled and his mustache ends wiggled absurdly. “You can join me for a glass of brandy at Seim’s Tavern and you can explain to me what is this flikit thing.”

She smiled. “If you’ll allow me to buy the brandy. The explanation comes free.”

The sun was low in the west, what was left of the day hot and still. The road was little more than a pair of faint ruts winding through the forest, rising at an increasingly steep angle. Shadith was in the lead, weary to the point of nausea. The litter discarded, Danor was tied to the saddle, clinging to the pommel with both hands, his face set, his eyes fixed on the twin peaks crawling so slowly higher as they neared the pass; Maorgan followed with the pack pony and the spare. They’d gone watch on watch since they left the dead chorek, snatching a few hour’s sleep each night. The moss ponies were tough little beasts, but even they were close to quitting.

Shadith’s mindtouch brushed repeatedly against men moving through the trees parallel to them, but each time she dismounted and left the road to go after them, the touches faded away. They were being watched, but so far no ambushes had been set. She began to hope they’d make the pass without more trouble.

“You’ll probably know one of us, our harpist, was invited to speak to the Meruu Klobach.” Aslan took a sip of the siktir brandy and smiled at Laцful, amused by the skill with which he maneuvered his own drink past his beard. The brandy was rather too sweet for her tastes but produced a nice glow as it went down. She made a note to ask the Denchok taverner about his brews and where he got the distillates. “She took a communicator like the one you heard in the conference room and reported her observations of the day’s journey to us each night. Not quite a tenday ago the reports stopped. Cha oy, one day was no worry. Things happen. Two days of silence and we started wondering. Three days and we knew we had to do something. It was a matter of finding transport and security. Hm. A flikit is a small flying machine. You’ve no doubt seen them buzzing about around the Yaraka Enclosure.”

He brushed lightly at the short bristly hairs in the middle section of his mustache, then smiled again. “It will make searching for your friend much easier, so I’ll not complain though I’ll miss the conversations we might have had. The little harpist, I hope nothing has happened to her. I heard her play with Ard Maorgan and the Eolt on the day you first came here. She is a wonder, that one, she would be Ard if she weren’t a woman and a mesuch.”

Shadith dragged herself from the blankets, huddled shivering and half awake as she tried to get herself together enough to wash her face and give her teeth at least a cursory brush to get the taste of too many nightmares out of her mouth. She looked up as Maorgan came out of the shadow under the trees, Danor leaning heavily on his arm. He helped the older man sit, then went to check the pot of water he had heating on the fire, scowled down at it, touched it with the tip of his forefinger. “Barely warm and it’s boiling.”

“It’s the altitude,” she said. “We won’t have a really hot cup of cha till we’re on the other side of the mountains.” She yawned. “Anyway, I’ll take it however I can get it.”

“Mm. The peep still hanging around?”

She closed her eyes, pressed her palms against her temples and got her mind touch moving, slowly and creakily at first, barely beyond the trees, then more surely as the effort completed her waking. “Yes. Fidgeting. Mm. Two of them, actually. Up ahead. They seem to be watching the road. Road, hunh. Beats me how they get supplies in to Chuta Meredel.”

“Free Eolt carry things when they’re needed.” He finished filling the pot and set it aside to steep. “The Meruus don’t want to make it easy to reach the valley.”

“I see. Thus anyone who comes to them with a complaint has work for his hearing.”

He got to his feet, shrugged. “I suppose. I’ve never thought a lot about it.”

While he fed the moss ponies and gave each of them a mouthful of corn, she lay back on her rumpled blankets and made a wider sweep of the area. There was a blurred response out at the very edge of her reach. She thought it was a band of men, but they never got close enough for her to tease out the various life strands. It bothered her that they seemed to know so much about her abilities. Then her hand closed in a fist and she cursed her stupidity in every language she knew.

That chorek set his ambush in a tree because people just don’t look up. I saw him there. I knew why he did it. I congratulated myself because I wasn’t such a fool. Fool! Gods, I keep forgetting what he said. The Chav spy has a miniskip. And of course he’ll have spotting equipment. He’s been up there in the clouds watching us. Watching me. He knows…

She got to her feet and began twisting through warm-up exercises she’d neglected because she’d been too tired to bother with them. By the end of the day they should be in the pass. Whether that meant more danger or less she wasn’t prepared to say. Still, there should be some sort of guard posts if choreks were as thick in these mountains as everyone said. And I can get some rest.

The day unreeled like the past several, plodding uphill through hot still trees, sweat rolling down the back, matting hair to the head, walk a stretch, ride a stretch, Shadith stumbling along, eyes drooping half closed as she kept the sweep fanning back and forth back and forth, worry rising as the amorphous shape paralleled the track, peaking as the pair ahead of them stopped for whatever reason. Stopped, but always moved on before she decided to go after them.

The three were silent when they stopped to feed and water the ponies, Danor hoarding his strength, Maorgan growing morose as the separation between him and his sioll stretched out, Shadith too tired to bother talking.

Clouds occasionally blew thicker above them but didn’t stay long enough to lessen the sun’s heat, just tore apart and flowed on westward. New clouds came to be shredded in their turn. There was no wind, though, beneath the canopy. The air was still, it felt stale, stagnant, the breaths she took brought no refreshment, as if the air were so old and used up it wasn’t any good any more.

The forest began to thin, the trees grew shorter and more frail, twisted by thin soil and storm winds; their leaves hung limp and the needles of the conifers were still and gray with old dust. A saddle began developing between two peaks, one lower than the other. Thin straggly grass dried yellow by the summer sun began to fill the space between the trees. The fungi were suddenly much smaller, ankle high at best, or climbing the sheltered side of trunks. The lichen webs that hung from tree limbs were paler and more thready.

Danor shriveled as the sunlight strengthened until all that was left of him were bones and a pair of-burning eyes focused without deviation on the saddle ahead where Medon Pass was bound to be.

Maorgan brooded. The opening out of the canopy gave him more sky to watch, a sky without Melech hovering overhead.

Shadith relaxed a little and dropped the frequency of her scans. She could see far enough around to pick out possible ambush sites and probe them at need.

They reached Medon Pass shortly after noon, left the stony, barren slopes to ride along a track between crumbling stone walls, moving carefully past falls of scree. Stone and more stone, lichen, moss and assorted mycoflora she couldn’t put a name to, clumps of yellow wind-dried grass, patches of low-growing twisty brush. The clippety-clip of the moss ponies’ hoofs echoed loudly along, overhead a flier shrieked and plunged out of sight, rose again with wriggling in its talons. On and on they went, the Pass replaying the same themes in their varied permutations.