Forge of Heaven (30 page)

Water itself was not an attraction. A beshta carried water in its blood, and, well watered a few days ago, they were not that thirsty.

But, free now of riders and burdens, they followed ancient instincts for reasons that no longer quite applied to their survival.

And they would, being beshti, go down, and down, and likely easterly across the pans, heading toward their home range, the young bull increasingly anxious to keep his females well separate from Marak’s old one, and maybe smelling him on the fitful wind.

He was taking skittishness to the extreme.

“They made it down that slope,” Marak said to Hati, seeing the evidence of unstable sand, where beshti had clearly fallen and wallowed getting up. “I distrust that slope. Let us go a little over.”

Warmer wind whipped at them, swept up from the depths of the pans. A gust caught the tail of Hati’s scarf and blew it straight up. It had been like that by turns, but this southerly wind brought, rather than sand, a clearing of the air, and the scent of growing things.

They turned about, which, with beshti in a narrow place, was best done slowly, letting the beshti fully voice their complaints and test the rein. A new shiver of the earth underfoot gave them no help in the matter.

“Marak,”
Drusus said.
“Are you hearing me?”

“I hear,” he muttered, fully occupied at the moment.

“We can confirm the Southern Wall has actually cracked, omi. The
Fo r g e o f H e a v e n • 1 9 3

cold sea is pouring into the basin. Meteorology thinks your weather will
change soon. The earliest flood will soak into the sand and much of it will
evaporate and meet cold air aloft. Fog is certain. So is rain. A great deal
of rain.”

“When?” Marak asked, overlooking the distance-hazed pans, and a drop off a sandstone ledge scarcely a handspan from his beshta’s broad feet.

“They think the wind will shift, coming at first from the southwest,
and meeting a front coming down off the Plateau—a great deal of evaporation as the seawater warms on the pans. There will be limited visibility,
wind, and torrential rain, omi. We are watching that situation carefully.

We are in contact with your camp. We have advised them to take extreme
precautions. We urge you consider the possibility of thick fog and very
poor visibility in planning your emergency route back. Above all, you
should not go down onto the pans.”

As the beshti completed their precarious turn.

“We are not on the pans,” he said irritably, and to Hati, “The Southern Wall has indeed broken. The sea is coming in.”

Hati frowned, vexed at their situation. “So let us find these silly beshti before they drown.”

“Drusus forecasts rain and fog,” he said. “As well as flood.”

“Then the beshti may come up on their own,” she said. Beshti from the Refuge had learned good sense about flood, if not about inconvenience to their riders. They had no particular liking for being cold, wet, and unfed, and he agreed: if cold rain came before the fog, the situation could work to their advantage.

“What does it look like?” Marak asked Drusus, aching with curiosity for the sight they had hoped to see themselves, from a safe distance, to be sure. “What can you see at Halfmoon?”

“The two thin waterfalls,”
Drusus said.
“Proceeding from the cliffs.

Clearly seawater has won a passage of sorts through formerly solid rock.

We can’t see the source, which seems about midway up the escarpment,
but clearly a crack has opened between the sea and the southern basin. As
a direct result of the waterfalls, cloud is forming that blocks our clearest
view from the heavens. We’re having to go to other instruments, so our
view is adequate, but not as good as we could wish. We believe the gap
will rip much wider very quickly. The rock there may be the same basalt
as that in the ridge. If it is, we fear it will not hold long against the rush
1 9 4 • C . J . C h e r r y h

of water. And if that happens faster than we think, weather calculations
will change. I cannot say strongly enough, omi, all calculations may
change without warning.”

Without warning. The chance of their being at the right place to see this wonder in person had, over all, been very small, unless they had been willing to camp at Halfmoon for a few centuries and wait for moving plates to move and geology to have its way. Ian had argued it would be later, rather than sooner.

Other decisions—his, among them, a feeling that the frequency of small quakes presaged something—had put them on this slope.

And by Drusus’s report, they were all running short on luck. The pans below them now looked entirely ominous, and fog and torrential rain was not good news. The descent after the fugitives was a maze, difficult to navigate among the spires, and the slots in the terraces hanging above their heads and the spires around them had not gotten there by dryland erosion. Rain pouring onto the bare surfaces up there would quickly find the best channels down. Streams of water would come off those cliffs in their own miniature waterfalls. He was bitterly frustrated to be in this predicament.

But frustration meant that they were alive, and still had choices, no matter they had missed the breaking of the Wall, which did not look to be a long process after all.

In his long experience, survival was always preferable to a good view of events.

N O AC C E S S TO T H E TA P, no contact, no information, nothing to do but sit on his hands and avoid contact with everyone he reasonably wanted to have contact with. At very least, Procyon thought, they could have rushed him off immediately to this meeting with the all-important Mr. Gide and been done with it, but he supposed Mr. Gide wanted to rest.

So he had to avoid contact with his ordinary associates, stay out of his ordinary comfort places, all the while having indigestion from sheer fright . . . and sit and wait until tomorrow, until Mr.

Gide was in the mood.

So he poured himself an uninspired fruit drink, settled down in Fo r g e o f H e a v e n • 1 9 5

front of his extravagantly expensive entertainment unit and scanned fourteen channels of Earther-managed news for information that very obviously wasn’t going to be there, not in any degree of detail he wanted.

It was hell, he decided, being at the epicenter of information that the news itself didn’t know—you couldn’t learn a thing beyond what you knew, and you couldn’t get any decent sleep on what you did know.

The ambassador’s arrival—that was covered by cameras as the ambassador had left the ship. The usual trundling machine was gold, however, instead of silver. And it was different beyond that.

The blue reflection on its surface seemed to have nothing to do with the lights of dockside, actually something to do with the metal itself, by the way it looked. It seemed to fume with cold.

Interesting effect. Even scary. But not at all informative in what the commentators had to say about it, except that one suggested it was some sort of new material.
New material
probably made customs nervous. But the news didn’t manage an interview with anyone who had real knowledge, no, the news instead interviewed a shopkeeper down on Lucid, a shoemaker who thought the arrival was a strong signal to the government, a threat to get Concord to abandon the trade agreement with Orb.

Well, was it possibly that? Procyon wasn’t convinced. The Orb agreement might be a hot topic with the import-export offices and the shops that dealt with goods. But the merchants saw every political sneeze lately as somehow part of a plot involving Orb, and the gullible news agency had either fallen into it, or took their orders from someone with money in those ventures. As if the Orb-Concord situation was a reason for an Earth mission of some kind to come all this way with a special ship. He didn’t think so.

But was he a reason? He didn’t think that, either.

Concord’s merchants, the expert said, might go to Apex for backing if Earth tried to squelch that agreement with Orb. But Earth wouldn’t give a hiccup. A merchant protest would only annoy the governor.

And ultimately Concord’s trade with Orb would just burrow itself new accesses and get around whatever regulations existed, and the only ones to profit would be smugglers—who, if they got 1 9 6 • C . J . C h e r r y h

too wealthy, wouldn’t stick at piracy, either, when authorities tried to shut them down. Hadn’t they, at the end of the last Isolation?

He’d read his history. That could be tolerably serious, given enough heat under the situation.

But if it was trade Earth came here to talk about, the ambassador didn’t need to talk to a Project tap and annoy the Apex Council for starters. Even a junior tap could figure that out. Whatever Earth did want here wasn’t to be found in a shopkeeper’s worries.

It was all in one confused junior tap and the mistake he’d made going to a few meetings.

He’d like nothing more than to go for a drink down at La Lune and call in his friends, who roundly loved an intellectual debate, to hear
their
opinion on the ambassador’s mission here, and to ease the willies dancing in his stomach. But he was directly ordered not to do that.

The news, he decided, was hopeless. The alternatives he could find were chat, fashion, drippy drama, and, at last, at the very last, an intersectional ball game.

Which proved a no-contest, a 118–50 disappointment by the last quarter. He gave up on the massacre in disgust.

Last resort, he rented a highly recommended drama off the net, which engaged his attention no better than the ball game. Or he wasn’t paying adequate attention tonight. He flatly forgot to watch the ending while he was getting himself an early supper—with cake and berries for dessert—and he didn’t actually care when he got back and found the drama was over. He ate his dinner to the accompaniment of an astronomical documentary on the Betel-geuse anomaly, took things back to the kitchen, tidied up, and put the remnant of the cake back in the fridge.

It balked. The red light went on, and blinked, and it passed the cake back out.

That did it. He slammed his hand against the fridge—which set off his own intrusion alarm.

“Damn! Sam, kill that thing! Kill it! Alarm off!”

“Confirmation?” Sam asked.

He flung the closet door open to provide a finger-scan, to shut the alarm down, then tapped in to the agency—not an alarm com-

Fo r g e o f H e a v e n • 1 9 7

pany:
Project
Security—and informed them he’d set it off himself, like a fool.

After that he had a drink, two drinks, a third, and went upstairs, hours early to bed.

Long hiatus, brute alcohol-induced unconsciousness.

Then the burglar alarm sounded again and scared him out of the bedclothes, barefoot and confused, on his knees in bed. “Damn!”

he shouted at the idiot alarm, and staggered out of bed, facing the red glowing display of the clock.

“Damn!” he said to the situation in general. “Sam?” He stormed down the stairs in full dark to deal with the malfunction.

Folds of cloth and a slim body blocked his way midstairs. He yelped, backed up a step and tried to convince his confused body to raise a proper self-defense.

“Procyon?”

Flicker of blue and gold lightnings grew on a face he’d seen transit from sister to someone half a stranger. His sister. Here. In the dark. Wrapped in enveloping black cloth that now acquired constellations of stars.

Fright only half ebbed. He’d yelped like a five-year-old and backed up his own stairs rather than use his hours of defense classes. That was vastly stupid.

Maybe she’d just smelled right. Maybe some hindbrain, primi-tive sense hadn’t let him hit her.

Who didn’t belong here. Who wasn’t supposed to be here. Who could get him in a lot of difficulty.

And the damned alarm was still going off. Sam was asking, brilliant question, “Is there a problem?”

“Wait,” he told Ardath, and slipped past her on the stairs to get down to the kitchen, where the physical cutoff was, apart from Sam’s systems. “Sam,” he said, at Sam’s third or fourth inquiry, “shut up.”

Then he tapped in to tell government security he was alive and well. “Same mistake,” he said, acutely aware he wasn’t supposed to be seeing friends and family and knowing the whole apartment was surely monitored. But he couldn’t come out with the truth.

Daren’t. For Ardath’s sake. “Sorry.”

“I’ll have to report it, sir. Confirm your code.”

1 9 8 • C . J . C h e r r y h

They knew
who
he was. Tap didn’t lie. This time they wanted a code to tell them he didn’t have a gun to his head. He gave it, so as not to bring an armed team in on the situation, just to cap it all. Arrest on his doorstep wouldn’t add glory to Ardath’s résumé or his own reputation.

The last light quit blinking on the alarm console. He reached out distractedly for the physical light switch and moved it to half, a twilight in which his sister descended the last step of the stairs to join him, wrapped in stars, skin flickering with pale blue.

“I’m not sure I like the color,” he said, irritated into a truth he’d never told her, and immediately wished he hadn’t said that.

Blue flicker turned to gold and magenta pink. He liked it less.

Pink wasn’t Ardath at all. He doubly wished he hadn’t said anything.

Meanwhile he found a cup and stuck it under the caff spigot, ordering a full cup. “Want one?”

“No.”

“I do.” Dammit, he was wide awake. Adrenaline was pumping.

He couldn’t drink another three vodkas to put himself back to bed or he’d have hell’s own hangover when he had to be sharp. He didn’t want to resort to pills because it was 0405h in the bleeding morning. He needed his sleep so he could get dressed in four hours and face the damned ambassador with his wits about him at 0900h.

His nerves were completely jangled. He took his cup to the small, two-seat table and sat down. “Go back to the blue and gold.