The Fall
THE FALL
Christie Meierz
The Fall
Tales of Tolari Space ~ Book 3
©2015 Christie Meierz
All rights reserved.
Cover art and design by
Thomas R. Peters
Editor:
Phyllis Irene Radford
SMASHWORDS Edition
The Fall
is a work of fiction. It is a product of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to any persons, living or dead, organizations, or events is coincidental.
No part of this book may be used or reproduced without the author’s permission, with the exception of short excerpts used in reviews.
For Andre Norton
whose books introduced me to science fiction
and set fire to my imagination
Table of Contents
Other Titles by Christie Meierz
Coyote is always out there waiting,
And Coyote is always hungry.
Navajo saying
Light, the color of a closed eyelid.
Voices drifted back and forth, across and over Laura, murmuring in words that found no place to land. A man’s voice, there. A woman’s voice, there. An astringent smell, not unpleasant, somehow familiar, but—
Everything lit up, incandescent, resonant with feeling. A radiant presence stood to her left, and on the right, another faced away, preoccupied. A little farther, more presences moved about, their needs and desires pressing in on her, smothering her. In the distance, so many clustered together that a conflagration of terrifying intensity blazed.
She whimpered and retreated into the familiar safety of the darkness. A word she could understand pulled her back.
“Beloved,” a man’s voice said.
It pushed the comforting darkness out of reach. She groaned, and the voice took on a concerned edge.
“Laura.”
Words spilled in slow motion from her lips. “No, let me go.”
She lifted a hand to rub her eyes. The effort turned her muscles to water, and she succeeded only in sticking two burning fingers in one eye. She let the hand drop beside her head.
The air changed. The radiant glow bent over her, his quiet breathing carrying his scent into her face, a light musk filling her nostrils. Irritation prickled up her spine, but amusement came from somewhere to undercut it. The glow chuckled, a rich, masculine sound, and warm fingertips touched her cheek. Love, an ocean of tenderness and affection, flowed from the hand’s owner.
“John?” she muttered, her mouth working a little more easily now. “Is that you?”
She pulled her eyes painfully, crustily open. Fuzzy blobs of green and brown and yellow and white filled her vision. She blinked away the worst of the gritty sting, and the blurs became people, overlaid by the strange glow. Behind them lay white stone walls with a window framing a sky full of puffy clouds and hills covered with something yellow.
Where am I?
It looked like a small hospital room. Above her stood not her husband John, but a man with cinnamon caramel skin and long black hair—
very
long black hair—gathered in complicated knots that fell out of sight past the bed’s edge. He wore a loose, pale green robe, its upper half covered in white embroidery. She focused on his eyes. So dark they almost matched his hair, they crinkled from the smile curving his lips. She couldn’t call him handsome, but his face held her attention. Interest pulsed, and died away. She was a married woman, and even if she weren’t, this man had to be thirty years her junior.
“Who are you? Where is John?” She frowned. Something about her words wasn’t quite right.
Alarm jolted through her and writ itself across the man’s face. He removed his hand from her cheek and looked across her, toward the other presence in the room. “Apothecary?” he asked.
Her heart clenched from shock, but— She frowned. The shock came from… him, this man. He took her hand and enclosed it within both of his, and anxiety spiked through the touch.
“Who are you?” she repeated. She tried to turn her head, but it refused to move, somehow locked in place. She struggled to pull her hand from his grip. “Do I know you?”
Black eyebrows rose. “I am the Paran. You are my beloved. Do you not remember me?”
“No.”
He let go of her hand and straightened. His face went impassive, but underneath… his heartache sat in her chest, as if it were her own. Even as she focused on it, it faded into a feeling of patient resignation.
A rustling sound from the glow on her right drew her attention. She risked a look toward it. A woman with similarly dark skin, wearing a plain yellow robe, stood at a small table next to the wall. Her black hair cascaded down her back, in less complicated knots than the man’s, almost all the way to the floor. She turned and stepped toward the bed. “We expected some measure of memory loss, high one,” she said.
“But she does not know me,” the man replied, in a flat voice. The emotional pain returned and tinted his glow, then faded again.
The woman bent to place a hand on Laura’s shoulder, and glowing, soothing energy flowed from the touch. “Laura, be calm. No one here wants to harm you, least of all your beloved.”
Furling her brows, the woman took a thumb-sized device and what looked like a thin, palm-sized rectangle of stone from a pocket in her robe. She held the device, now humming, over Laura’s head, and fixed her gaze on the tile. Laura bit her lower lip and eyed the humming thing in the woman’s hand.
“I am Syvra, your apothecary,” the woman said. “I mean you no harm. No one here means you any harm. You are safe.”
Safe
. The word rang through her head. She didn’t know where she was, but the woman’s words matched her glow.
She’s telling the truth
.
How do I know that?
Laura took a breath, and sudden knowledge blossomed.
I haven’t always been like this
.
Her husband would know. “Where is my bond-partner?” she asked.
The man’s emotional landscape jolted.
The word—she hadn’t used the right word. The word for
husband
wouldn’t come. She frowned again. Her husband’s face was… was… His name was John. They had children. Grandchildren. She pummeled her memory. Their names remained just out of reach.
Syvra glanced up at the man, then went back to examining her tile, forehead wrinkled and brows pinched together.
“That was not the right word,” Laura muttered. “I cannot find the right word. I want my… my...” She scrunched up her face. Frustration sizzled along her nerves. “What happened to me?”
“You fell,” the man said.
He laid a hand on the bed beside hers, not touching. His whole presence yearned toward her, but especially along that arm.
He wants to hold my hand
. As she watched, his glow shrank back, and he returned his hand to his side, his glow suffused with disappointment. Biting her lip again, she glanced into his face. He liked it when she looked at him. He liked her eyes, her hazel eyes, brown in the middle, green around the outside. Her breath caught in bewilderment.
How do I know what he likes?
“You fell from the stronghold roof,” he went on, his eyes growing distant. He clenched his jaw and shivered as jabs of distress pierced him. “The apothecaries almost could not save you. You walked close to the dark.”
“The dark?” she murmured. Her mind filled with images. Mama’s grave. A military funeral. This man, dressed in dark red, standing before a red stone pillar, filled with grief. “But—” The thought wandered away, and came back. “Is that why I feel so weak?”
This…
Paran
bent and pulled a chair forward to seat himself. “The apothecaries kept you in a deep sleep while they healed your body and the injury to your brain.”
“How? What? When?”
“Ten days have passed.”
“Ten
days
? I—that cannot—only ten?”
“Rest now, beloved,” the man said.
She took another deep breath and let it go. No pain. No discomfort. She felt weak, but nothing hurt. She gazed at the ceiling, wondering where she was, until she realized that the Paran and Syvra had been talking for some time, in words that didn’t make sense.
She closed her eyes and rode the sound of their murmuring into sleep.
Before
Laura plummeted down the vertical shaft leading from the Sural’s stronghold, safe in the belly of a living crystal transport pod. Her Tolari hosts used this as a fast and efficient method of entering the underground tunnel to the city. They also considered it fun, or so it looked to Laura Howard, former Earth Fleet ship’s wife, former… human.
Her Tolari companions thrummed with enjoyment. The brown-clad woman seated against the egg-shaped pod’s opposite wall, who had introduced herself in the transport room as Azana, was… Laura dredged about in her memory. The serene, willowy woman was a conjectural mathematician, with eyes the color of good Scotch whiskey and a quick intelligence. The Paran had sent her to Suralia with a real, honest-to-goodness, handwritten letter for Laura, who had been trapped there by her extreme empathic sensitivity, unable to tolerate travel through the provincial cities. It had taken time to learn how to protect herself from the fierce glow generated by hundreds of thousands of living beings gathered in one place.
The dark, almost black shaft walls flew upward, but her stomach remained undisturbed and her behind firmly planted in her seat. Some kind of clever technology implanted in the living vehicle insulated the interior and protected its occupants from the long drop’s worst effects. On her first journey by transport pod, when the Paran brought her home to his stronghold, she had asked about it, and he said something about... something inert? or damp? He’d had to look up the English, and her memory for technical terms had never been good.
The mathematician sat, staring through the transparent floor, a smile on her lips as she watched the bottom of the shaft approach at an alarming rate. The black-robed woman guiding the pod, even in her trance—or whatever it was—glinted with pleasure. Laura rolled her eyes. It was a wonder the Tolari had never invented amusement parks. They would
love
the monster rollercoasters on Far India.
Come to think of it, Laura rather enjoyed those herself, but it didn’t make the inhabitants of Beta Hydri IV any less a people of strange contradictions. They possessed technology far more advanced than Earth’s, but they lived, with exceptions such as this pod, as if they’d never made it out of the High Middle Ages of Earth’s distant past. They had developed a peaceful society devoted to science and the arts, yet their ruling caste didn’t hesitate to kill.
As she knew from bitter personal experience.
The shaft walls slowed, then stopped, and they hovered above the rock floor at the shaft’s base. The pod turned to point its nose into a long tunnel, lit from no obvious source. Laura brushed an imaginary speck of lint from her deep purple robe and leaned forward, grabbing the edge of her seat as she peered down the tunnel. “And now we pass under the city?”
“Aye, ma’am, and we enter the city transit hub before we can dive down into the deep tunnel to the next province,” the servant said, over her shoulder.
Laura nodded. “I remember.” She took a deep breath. “All right, then. Let’s go.”
Laura
saw
the servant give an empathic caress to the waiting pod.
It leaped forward and sped toward the fierce radiance of Suralia’s city, emitting a silent, happy croon. Laura took another breath and reached for a strand of the glowing communal net the
hevalra
—she remembered the word!—had created, wrapping herself in it the way the great whale-like creatures had shown her to do. It cocooned her from the terrifying blaze created by hundreds of thousands of souls living together. She leaned back into the seating as it faded to something tolerable. This kind of shield took energy and concentration to use, but the transport pods were fast, and she needed only to hold it hard for long enough to clear the city. Then she would be safe once more.