by Ron Collins
Never do anything for the money alone, she would have said to him if she was here. But he had never been as strong as she was. It was the greatest failing of his life.
“The Waganats will probably beat us to it, anyway,” he said as he turned to climb into the shaft above.
“Where are you going?” M’ran asked.
Taranth turned back to the council’s executive.
“To the surface.”
“What about the rest?” M’ran peered below.
“They will catch up.”
“What’s your haste?”
“We’ve already lost half a heat. We’ll have to set up our first camp under Eldoro’s highpoint now.”
M’ran looked vacantly at him.
For a moment, Taranth considered explaining, but it wouldn’t serve any purpose. M’ran was—like the others—not used to the desert. He had always lived in the basin where the Esgarat ring cut the weather and where dust storms were fanciful things at best. M’ran didn’t have anything in his past to let him know what the desert’s heat was really like, or how the burning wind hid up in the shifting layers of clouds, waiting there for so long that it lulled to sleep even the best of trackers before arriving with sudden blasts that kicked up walls of dust in less time than it took to suck in a breath, or with gales that tore through the flatlands with force enough to toss a quadar through the air like a child throws her shaker against a wall.
M’ran lived in the shelter of a surface dwelling, and where food was plentiful and well prepared. He lived off the backs of others, playing out the games of a politician or a businessfolk, rather than working as a maker or living in the old style like a true outsider—like Taranth did and like Alena had—taking only from what the land gave. To M’ran, a harsh wind was one that made funny dervishes spin up in a weed bundle, or made a dust shower for children to run through with their primaries shut.
The desert would teach its truth in its own good time, though.
He would learn. They would all learn.
“The sooner we make the surface,” Taranth said, “the sooner we find whatever’s left of this Stone of the Sky your council has such interest in.”
“And the faster you can get back to your dreary old caves?”
“There is that.”
M’ran chuckled. “You are a true ancient, my friend. The quadarti may have crawled from the caves centuries ago, but you would be happier if we still lived half our lives huddled underground like a pack of piela lizards.”
“At least piela lizards know when to be silent.”
“Well,” M’ran said, focusing his primaries on Taranth. “Once you have your bounty for this jaunt you’ll be able to live wherever you want.”
“I already do.”
Having had enough, Taranth turned and climbed toward the surface. The passage opened as the exit grew nearer.
His nerves calmed as he approached the light.
M’ran had pressed many of his pain points, but he had been right about one thing: At the rates the council was paying, finding this stone from the sky would let Taranth live in peace for a very long time.
It wouldn’t, however, be enough to help him forget he was once in love with Alena of the Fex’l Family of the Hlrat clan. And it would never be enough to forget that she was once in love with him.
That was an impossible task if ever there was one.
CHAPTER 3
Eldoro was edging toward its highpoint as the team struggled to the surface and stood in the baking heat.
Each of the council whelps wore tight-fitting, sweat-soaked garb that was now streaked from the caves. A few wore head coverings against the heat and wind that was now only mildly oppressive, yet was still more than any of the whelps were comfortable with. Four were doused in the purple-toned witze oils that marked them as from the Hlrat clan, oils which at their home inside the Esgarat were now considered to be spiritually cleansing and traditional but that here in the desert were still of great value in their more practical role of protecting the skin.
Like most trackers, Taranth carried his own store of the oil for the heats ahead, though his was the natural milky color of the mold and seed compound it was made of rather than the carefully stained concoction the Hlrat required.
He understood tradition. Alena had been of the Hlrat clan, after all.
She had worn her witze oils diligently until the end.
It wasn’t good to dwell on things that reminded him of her, but the oil struck a chord and made it hard for Taranth to keep from examining the young Hlrats.
Pietha M’ktal, daughter of a fabrics Family, was the eldest. The Tael, Parity, and Gash Families were all represented, the latter being too young to be here but almost certainly having been added to the roster at the request of the whelp’s da’s da, the ranking diplomat of the clan.
None came from the Fex’l Family, though. Alena’s Family.
That was probably a good thing.
No one was included from Taranth’s own Melarin Family from the Kandar clan, either. He assumed that was intentional, though it wouldn’t have mattered to him. Taranth had not really considered himself to be Kandar for a long time, having broken from both the Family and the clan when he left. Or perhaps that was a mutual decision. It was just as right to say that the Family had broken with him, too.
Everyone gets to make their own choices.
Behind and to the north of the gathering the peaks of the Esgarat ring swept upward into the sky, their rocky surfaces made of orange and red basalt veined with thick lines of iron ore and flint rock. Wiry brown vines and crawlers of other hardy vegetation clutched at the slopes, growing in cracks and pushing their roots into any depression they could find.
With Eldoro so near highpoint, nothing much moved about. But before the rest of the gathering made it to the surface, Taranth watched the final tendrils of flowering buds of the stray katja roots close up as they retreated from the heats. Their smell was sharp to those trained to find it—sharp enough to attract the insects and the occasional foraging kax, and then use those creatures to spread their seed. The aroma and the sight of their pale yellow petals were a silent welcome, but now the flowers had finished their retreat, leaving the bone-dry plants behind to rasp in the wind until the clumsy footfall of the whelps drowned them out.
To the south the Castanda desert, which was their true destination, stretched for as far as a quadar could see. The sky, as always, was a thick mass of shifting clouds, pale orange now, fading to pink marked with a billowing brown front coming from the west.
A gust of wind whipped up, providing relief from Eldoro’s heat as it beat down upon them.
Gis’le of the Family Ombat raised her face to the breeze, closing all three of her eyes and smiling. “That feels wonderful,” she said.
The rest were not as charitable. Satrak, a sullen member of the Waganat Family, merely scowled.
“You are all lucky it is the time of Divergence,” Taranth said, scanning them. “With only Eldoro at highpoint, it is merely hot.”
“We are not imbeciles,” snapped young Hateri E’Lar. “You do not need to lecture us on the effects of Eldoro and his sister.”
Taranth focused his central on the whelp, feeling the muscles around the eye grow tense.
The lands of the quadarti had two heats that crossed the clouded sky. Eldoro, the larger of the two, was a bright smear in the clouds that filled the sky and marched in a straightforward path through each heat. Katon, the smaller of the two, moved in a path that was just as certain, but held wilder swings over the cycle.
Convergence, that time when Katon joined her bigger brother in the sky, was the harshest season, a period of hot and bright heats followed by dark nights cold enough to freeze a quadar who was foolish enough to get caught out.
Divergence was the period when the two heats were separated.
At this time of the year, Katon rose late in the time of Eldoro, which meant the fully dark times would be of short duration. But it a
lso meant that the heat, as oppressive as it was, would be slight in comparison to the summers of Convergence.
“Perhaps you know the cycles,” Taranth said to Hateri. “But you don’t know what they mean.”
The whelp’s primaries let Taranth understand the youth had the ability to hold his tongue, but was not happy doing so.
“We’ll make camp here for now,” Taranth said, “and begin the search by the first lights of new Eldoro.”
“Isn’t it early to pause?” Hateri E’Lar said.
“This is your first heat on the surface,” Taranth said. “It is time to learn how to stake our ground while there is time to fail. If any of you grow heat-addled, tell someone, then go back to the caves to cool yourselves. I don’t want to kill a council member’s whelp before we get started.”
A few in the collection chuckled, which made Taranth happy.
His sense of humor often left scars he did not intend.
“We have half of Eldoro left before us,” Hateri challenged Taranth again. “And then Katon will help, too. That’s a lot of light left.”
Taranth’s central tightened as he contemplated young Hateri E’Lar.
The whelp was a gawky male of the Terilamat clan.
He stood there, tall and angular, with his walking stick at a jaunty angle and the wind drumming his loose jacket against his chest. The others of his clan deferred to him because he was the son of Jafred E’Lar, the North Slope council member who had proposed this quest to begin with. Hateri would be an important quadar in the future, and even whelps from the other clans knew it. Several females in the group had eyes for the young E’Lar, and the young E’Lar knew it.
This last realization burned Taranth’s hearts.
The world was different now.
Cross-clan relationships were, if not the norm, at least accepted.
The mere idea of a Terilamat like Hateri E’Lar pair-matching with Pietha M’ktal of the Hlrat or Cestral Taler of the Kandar was no longer so unusual. But no matter what Taranth thought, he didn’t need these kinds of passions creating problems on this expedition—at least that’s what he told himself, and what he would tell M’ran later when the council member called him on his own vengeful form of bias.
Right now, however, all Taranth cared about was that Hateri E’Lar was a renegade vine in need of trimming.
“Do you think I cannot track Eldoro?” Taranth said.
“That’s not what I meant.”
“Because I learned to track both Eldoro and Katon from my da’s da, back when I was a whelp a third your size and half your age.”
“I said that is not what I meant.”
Taranth raised a finger of both hands and modeled the heats.
“I learned how the two heats play together in the sky even before I made my first crawl out of a cave. How Eldoro marches in his predictable path and how Katon dances around her brother, sometimes together, other times shunning him as if she were the great heat’s lover rather than his sister.”
The whelp bit his lip. His primaries grew wider as he looked for help from the others, or maybe he looked to see if the others were watching—which they most definitely were, a fact that seemed to make Hateri E’Lar fidget with his walking staff as Taranth came to stand before him.
Taranth broadened his stance into a frame like the thunderous tal beast does when faced by a pack of ravenous rela.
“My da taught me how the dance is repeated each year,” he said, “and how to trace that dance as it moves through the sky in its twenty-two-year cycle—perhaps you’ve heard of those? I learned to tell shade time at a glance the first time the desert baked my feet, which was cycles before your feet ever existed. So, tell me, Hateri E’Lar, son of the great council member Jafred E’Lar, and possessor of what are most certainly an uncountable number of scholarly records, can you tell me what year of the cycle we are in by the shadow Eldoro casts now?”
Hateri was still silent.
Taranth pointed to a fist-shaped stone at their feet.
“Look at the shadow of that rock. Can you tell me precisely where that shadow will fall at this same time next cycle?”
“No,” Hateri finally answered.
“Have you ever seen a rela beast up close?”
Taranth raised his arm and let the sleeve of his tunic fall to reveal a jagged scar of whitened skin that ran the distance from his elbow to his wrist.
“Have you ever been so close to one that you can smell the wetness of its breath and feel the orange of its fangs as it gouges you?”
Hateri was silent again.
Taranth’s hearts pounded.
“Pah!”
He grimaced and turned away from the whelp, rubbing the back of his hand over his lips as stepped away.
Council members.
Taranth’s da’s da had been a philosopher. Taranth’s da had been a scientist. Philosophers, scientists, and priests for that matter were all the same as far as he was concerned—but council members, whose only desire was to tell him what he had to do, were the worst.
He glanced at M’ran, feeling the stares of the rest of the company as they stood in silence.
“Get the camp set up,” he said.
Then Taranth stomped away, heat growing inside him that had nothing to do with Eldoro.
By the time Taranth regained his calm, Katon had crested to the east.
Eldoro was nearing its end and the cooler winds had picked up, though they were only strong enough to cool his cheeks and the back of his neck where he had left his plates exposed. Still, the winds brought relief from the heats.
He would never understand the allure of the surface.
The twelve young quadars sat together, gasping for breath after working in the desert furnace to pitch their camp.
Taranth examined the work.
The lean-tos were mostly rigged against the steep walls of the largest crevasses the whelplings could find. They had each stored their travel rolls against the windbreak of the rock. They had set a sentry schedule to guard against the snout-nosed neantha beasts and muscular and toothy rela that stalked the nighttime plains. This close to the mountains, Taranth thought a sentry was less necessary, but practice was important. Three of the team built a water catch to draw liquid from the air overnight.
It wasn’t a bad camp, but it wasn’t a good one, either.
He considered showing Hiva Hen’tal, of the Kandar clan, how the covering he put up would allow any number of the night critters that were soon to emerge from their shelters to come into his sleeping roll, and how Hiva would be better served to wrap the covering of the whole shelter around to form a floor as the others had done. But Taranth stopped himself. That lesson would most likely cost only a painful sting or two and would be better learned through experience.
Instead, he pointed up the rocky surface where the highest of the shelters had been built.
“Those two are open to the west,” he said. “They will have to be redone to keep them safe from the night winds. The others will do now, but you’ll all have to anchor them better when we move away from the mountains. Without rock to break its teeth, the wind will shred a shelter if you build it in the wrong line.”
One of the collective raised her hand. Gis’le, a female of the Ombat Family and of the Terilamat clan, was small, but sat with an upright bearing that gave her presence a calm aura even though she rarely spoke.
Taranth pointed at her.
“My ma said the winds can pick you up and carry you to the cloud.” The worried tremble of her voice belied her calm exterior.
“The wind on the desert can pick you up,” Taranth replied. “But don’t expect to be soaring with the jah anytime soon.”
The laughter was wrapped in anxiety. Now that they were on the desert, the gathering was actually listening.
“Your mother’s warning is a good one, though.” Taranth cut their nervous laughter short by raising his voice. “If we get a true wind—a burning wind—it can pick you up and smas
h you against rock if you are not diligent. If that happens, I promise you would rather be with the jah.”
“So,” Hateri E’Lar said, scowling, “what do you want us to do, tie ourselves to the nearest boulder?”
Taranth focused all three of his eyes on the young quadar. “What you will do is speak to me as your elder,” Taranth said.
The whelp said nothing as wind rasped over stone.
Taranth stepped nearer to Hateri again. His patience was beyond thin.
“I do not have time to deal with disagreement here,” he said, waving a crooked finger and ignoring M’ran’s silent expression of reprimand. “On this mission, you are my subordinate. So you will speak to me as your elder.”
Hateri’s lips puckered, and he ran one hand over his hip in a nervous gesture.
“I am pleased to accept your complaints about our efforts,” he finally said. “And I apologize for my brashness. As your subordinate on this mission, what can I do to help you?”
“That is better.”
Taranth strolled among the party.
“You’ll listen to me,” he said loudly to the group. “I’m here because your fathers, your mothers, and your friends on the council know this will be a rugged trip, and that I can keep you alive. Do you understand?”
Ogala, the daughter of council member Tael from the West Slope, nodded with her wide central showing fear. Her primaries looked at Hateri with a sense of excitement, though, and her face, covered with Hlrat witze, made Taranth’s first heart skip. Ogala’s eyes were dark, almost black, like Alena’s had been. Though her face was a different shape, the resemblance was more due to the shell of hardening oils over her cheeks, chin, and jawline.
Jasneed of the Parity Family, a male from the same clan as Ogala, shrank back from his seat on a rocky ledge. His oils were also hardening to light blue shells and beginning to flake in the dry air of the surface—though he wore his only over his forehead and bald skull in the way of Hlrat males rather than as a full covering.
Taranth continued. “I was not making humor when I told you that quadarti die here in the desert. Bodies shrivel in the heat. Bones fall into cracks and get sucked back to the soul of the land where we all come from.”