by Ron Collins
“I commend our friend for his work, and I agree with his commentary wholeheartedly.
“Just as I agree also with council member Gash from the Hlrat clan, who provided us with the ancient myth of Mandrath to remind us of the heroism embedded in the histories told on the Western Slope, and who described the Hlrat clan’s own unique histories of exploration and bravery.
“I, however, come from the Terilamat clan. So, you might expect me to have a different opinion.”
A proper smattering of something approaching laughter filled the aisles.
“We are three quadarti: Hlrat, Kandar, Terilamat. We come from three different places,” he continued, using the laughter as a springboard to give his words momentum. “We think in three somewhat different ways. But we are also each bounded by the great ring of mountains around the One Great Esgarat and each of us is gifted by the same heats of greater Eldoro and lesser Katon. This very council at which we speak now, and to which I and council member Gash have been honored to serve, was founded on the idea that if we allow each of our Families to use their strengths to their best advantage, then these Families would save us all.
“No one can dispute that this idea has worked miracles. No longer do we find any quadar at war with any other quadar. No longer do we see Families of my own Terilamat clan wasting time achieving things the Kandar and the Hlrat clans have already achieved. And no longer do we see the Families bickering over their properties.
“Our people have come together.
“Our Families trade strength for strength under the agreements and guidelines set forth in these very chambers. Indeed, the location of these chambers in the shadows of the One Great Esgarat, equally near each clan, tells of our binding.”
Jafred paused.
“Now, however, we are faced with assigning the salvage duties related to this Light That Fell from the Sky to a single clan—or, more exactly, a single Family within a single clan.”
He felt the power of the gathering’s attention flowing with him.
He heard the sounds of bodies edging up on their benches.
“This is the way of the quadarti: commerce based on this separation of ownership. And yes, it has worked for many years. But I think we have come to the time where we need to look at our reflections and admit that this way has also brought us to this point where our Families hold an awkward grip on our society as a whole, where many of us have become hostages against technologies that the most powerful of Families own, where we must pay to use the lands that they dwell upon. This leads me, for example, to commend my compatriot, poor Ambassador Tacor of the Kandar clan, whose travel time was doubled by his need to traverse the high mountain roads when he could not pay the new rate that usage of the lower roads entailed.”
Jafred appreciated the startled look on Ambassador Tacor’s face. The expression said he had been unaware his predicament was known, and told Jafred he would have to reward his own investigators for being properly covert.
“I must now admit that I find this practice of individual assignment…quaint,” Jafred said.
He used his central to focus on his notes as his primaries scanned the faces of his audience, noting the few who sat in stoic disagreement as well as the many who nodded or fidgeted with discomfort at the accusations he was apparently taking so little care to hide. The ideas behind these words were, admittedly, not completely new to the gathering. Fear and distrust of the most powerful Families had been whispered of for years, though only recently had those whispers gotten loud enough to catch the ears of those Families themselves, and only recently had violence sprung up to quell such words. Only recently had that fear and distrust ever been mentioned in council business, even in passing.
He looked up to see Gash and Estant-etan of the Hlrat clan staring with quizzical expressions. Tacor himself sat stoically in his seat now, perhaps among the few who were actually stunned at the direction Jafred was headed. Chief Councilor Pelorit seemed intrigued, and Jafred’s own Terilamat cohorts shuffled nervously in their chairs.
“We are no longer the ancient creatures we were when we crawled up from the caves,” Jafred said, carrying on toward the climax of his effort, surprised that the words came so easily now. “I think it is time for a change. For the good of all quadarti, I think it is time we take the next step, time for the council to take a more active role in governing our interactions rather than rely upon the Families.”
“So I propose a new approach for finding this Light That Has Fallen from the Sky.”
Jafred stood tall, then.
The usual groups of the most active ambassadors wore the usual expressions of committed acceptance on their faces, but this time more of those from the opposite frame of mind closed their primaries in careful thought. He saw the idea falling into place even before he said it, felt the unspoken fear that each of his quadarti associates had felt—fear that one Family and one Family only was going to come out of this session happy, and they didn’t know what that might mean to the people of their clans if that one Family did not come from their clan.
He knew then that the bout was over.
From this quick count, and from the feeling of true correctness that came from the depths of his four hundred bones, Jafred E’Lar believed for the first time that, while he would still have struggles to fight, the answer was going to go his way in the end.
“I propose,” he said, “that we do it together.”
The Expedition
CHAPTER 2
Taranth Melarin wrapped his hand around a stony knob and pulled himself through the tight opening. He could feel the cave breathing here. This vein was the final stage of the climb. He clenched the slab to his left with his knee, then wedged himself into the slot beside him, and dragged his kit up from behind. This he placed in a crack in the stone to his left.
He braced himself as he looked down.
“Through,” he called. His voice echoed through the shaft.
“Following!” his friend M’ran Kat’all called up.
Taranth sat back and waited for the others.
He was small for a quadar, which was an advantage he liked. His skin was darkened from years traveling the exposed wildlands outside and south of the Esgarat ring where no civilized quadar would want to live, and rugged from untold expeditions spent mapping the caves of what he considered his homeland. His sweat smelled of the dust that filtered through the crevasses and coated the shaft here.
Yes, he thought. We’re nearing the surface.
His primaries noted the split in the rock above. A slice of sky showed beyond. His central focused on the path he would take to get there. The triad of his eyes worked together to give him both heat sight and sharp sight, which his brain combined to create a precise mapping of the caverns. This late in the heat, the rocky pathway glowed with uneven heat, something that made movement easier.
He didn’t need the image, though.
Like most old trackers, Taranth knew this rock better than he knew the veins that ran across the back of his hand. Unlike the string of his clients that straggled along behind him, he could have made his way up this shaft without any vision at all.
He rested in the hot air.
He coughed, and used the moment to drink from his bladder.
How could anyone with even a single reasonable bone in their body have any desire to live on the surface? Even the breeze that came off the mountains in the evenings and the hours of shaded light from the peaks that allowed for what some called “comfort” couldn’t make him have any interest in the surface.
When he was a whelp Taranth had scoured the deserts that lay above with his da and his sisters, mapping its expanse and looking for valuable kado root that grew in its shadowed crevasses. He had been so young back then. The entryways to the surface had been exotic. The idea of roaming the flatlands with his da had made his hearts pound so hard he felt the chambers vibrate in his chest.
Now it was just work.
Dangerous work at that.
/> Taranth licked his lips as he put the bladder away.
He would have to pay attention to the group’s water on this trip. These clients were dangerous, too. He should have said no, but M’ran had been insistent and had promised a significant payment. Three times more than the already bloated price Taranth considered asking. So Taranth had agreed to take a batch of Family whelps outside the ring.
He was an idiot.
Perhaps he would eventually be a wealthy idiot though.
After all these years, that might be something interesting.
The plan was to avoid a steep climb under the heats by using the caves to traverse the mountain range, then rise up in the southlands that led to the heart of the desert. There they would create a search pattern, find this Light That Fell from the Sky, and return by retracing their footsteps. It was a basic plan, simple as far as plans go. Taranth had been on such expeditions in the past.
But the plan assumed some level of competence, and this party was a mismatched collection of council members’ whelplings, all young and from highly connected Families, all with more education than intelligence. They were twelve “adventurers,” four from each clan, handpicked for whatever purposes those clans might have for them in the future.
Before the “adventure” had begun, these intrepid travelers had spoken boldly of the future. They laughed with voices that were too loud, and they joked with each other about which of them would survive and which would be left for the rela and the neantha beasts to feast on. As if any of these whelps would ever make it through an encounter with either a rela or a neantha. The closest any of them had ever come to such an animal was in their bedtime stories well before they had come of any age.
They carried their overstuffed packs with vigor on the initial walk, and most continued to wear them for even the first stages of the descent into pathways under the peaks. But as Taranth led the party away from the quadarti mainlands and toward the southernmost foothills of the great ring, and as they descended into the caves, and as the caves wore on and the passages grew more rugged, his boisterous adventurers began to complain. They grew tired of the pace, and they dropped things from their packs, a can of hanta bread here or an extra pair of socks there in order to lighten their loads.
Taranth listened to them and shook his head.
“We haven’t even gotten to the difficult part,” he told M’ran during one of their many breaks.
From the beginning these whelplings behaved as though they were on a simple trek to pick up a shiny trinket, a simple jaunt that would let them fill their journals with stories that would turn them all into heroic figures. He had seen it before. They were here to make their marks on history more than they were here to survive, but nothing in those journals they slaved over would help them deal with what they were going to run into, and no words they could put into those journals would capture the feeling of what it was like to be alone on the dry, cracked lands of the open plains with nothing but the open skies and whatever you could carry to protect you from a world that did not care if you lived or if you did not.
Pah! he thought as he waited.
Only a few generations on the surface and the quadarti had already lost touch with who they were.
Thinking about the material the whelps had been dumping from their packs along the cave route made him smirk. Any true tracker of the ring would be able to follow their path and get rich doing it.
M’ran wriggled through the hole in the shaft.
His frame was wider and softer than Taranth’s. His eyes were purple and wide in the dimness of the cavern. His layer of shirts, now torn and streaked with sulfur stains, were open around the neck to expose the upper reaches of his heat plates.
Unlike the adventurers, M’ran was a representative of the council as a whole. That meant that he was at least theoretically neutral.
Taranth had worked with him before.
M’ran was no explorer, but he was a far sight better than the whelplings.
“We are strung out,” M’ran said, leaning his elbow on the lip of the passage and breathing hard with exertion after he pulled himself nearly level to Taranth. “It would be wise to wait.”
“What do you think I’ve been doing?”
M’ran straightened his back.
“I should never have accepted a team of council whelplings,” Taranth said.
“Don’t complain. If this works out, you’ll be known as the guide of the first mutual exercise in history.”
“And that brings me such joy.”
“It had to be this way, Taranth. Even a free-range relic like you can see that, right? Each clan wants a part of this discovery, and each Family wants a share of the proceeds.”
“Proceeds? From a stone?”
“The council thinks this Light That Fell from the Sky is important.”
“Thinking something is important does not make it so.”
“The holy ones think it’s important, also.”
Taranth ignored that comment completely. He had lost interest in what the holy ones thought a long time ago. “The Families don’t really care,” he said. “And they are the ones who would use it to turn profit.”
M’ran grinned. “They care.”
“Not a single one contacted me.”
“We beat them to you.”
Taranth focused all three eyes on M’ran, noting his friend’s smirk.
“What do you mean?” he said.
But he knew exactly what M’ran meant.
While the council managed behaviors, penalties, and justice between the three territories, the Families controlled business. The Banit Family, for example, owned agriculture. The Waganats lived from developing appliances from newer technology. The Amat’tesh controlled the new field of fuel liquids that were, in turn, providing for new inventions at an alarming rate. He could go on. Garments. Footwear. Tools. Hundreds of products, hundreds of Families—the council arranging for the barriers and assessing claims.
Outside the Families were the parasitic free-sellers who worked alone, and the monolithic Marketelles who worked in tandem with the Families to package products and provide simple commerce for the average quadar, all for a cut of the shares, of course.
Anything for a cut of the shares.
The council, which M’ran was an executive for, had always seen that what was best for the Families was best for the council, so what interested the Families on the scale of commerce eventually became important to the council—just as what interested the church eventually became important to the council on the scale of belief. What happened when the scales of commerce and belief came together was not something Taranth cared to discuss even in impolite company.
Eventually, however, was the key word.
The council was well known for dallying on minutia. Justice, they figured, took time. The council could be depended upon to dither away at least three yields of the moss Taranth grew in his home caves before making a decision on anything of import.
The Families’ drive for profit made them move more quickly than the council, and the lack of any particular moral constraint beyond increasing commerce allowed them to do it at all times.
So Taranth had been amazed that the council got to him first.
Until now.
The depth of M’ran’s smirk told Taranth that his friend had more information. He widened the skin around his primaries.
“Are you going to tell me what you’ve done or do I need to leave you and the whelplings alone in the cave together?”
M’ran’s smile glowed warm in the coolness of the shaft.
“You, my crotchety old friend of the caves, are the best quadar for this job. I knew that from the minute Councilor Pelorit asked me to manage this. So, the council made it known to the Families that they had hired you immediately after the Light Fell.”
Taranth was confused.
“But you didn’t even attempt to touch base with me until three heats ago.”
M’ran turned his head
to the side and shrugged.
“You lied to the Families,” Taranth said, fuming as his gut feeling was proven correct. “You directed the council to tell them I was no longer available, so the Families never attempted to contract me.”
M’ran raised his hand in a way that indicated guilt.
“That is underhanded, even for a politician,” Taranth said. “You cost me a commission.”
“The council paid considerably more than your normal fee.”
“And the Families would have doubled that.”
A clatter came from below. One of the young quadars in the party dropped something that clanked and rattled as it fell.
Taranth shook his head.
“We’ll be lucky to survive even a single heat on the surface.”
“They’re not that bad.”
“Pah! They’re worse than a den of kensha pups before their skin has grown tough. Listen to them. Squawking and waddling behind. They don’t know anything. It’s like watching a brace of jah chicks stuffed into their nests, staring up with open mouths, just waiting for their mothers to fill them to the brim with sandbugs.”
“They’re just not as comfortable underground as you are.”
Taranth craned his gaze upward to the patch of sky that showed beyond the open crescent. “They’ll find the desert’s worse than the caves.”
The thought of Alena crossed Taranth’s mind, then.
He saw her at the corner of his perception, her familiar shape with her thin shoulders and her head at just the right angle. He saw her covered in the purple witze oils her clan used to protect their skin from the power of Eldoro and Katon when they went to the surface. The image was strong enough to bring him the coarse odor of that oil, and the feel of it, how it had been both gritty and slippery between his fingers as he lathered it onto her.
It had been too long since that had happened.
He pressed his lips together and gave a sigh through his nostrils.