Ashes and Rain: Sequel to Khe (The Ahsenthe Cycle Book 2) (16 page)

Jonton wobbled and stumbled the few steps to me, the ground still shivering lightly beneath us. She closed her hand around my wrist and pulled me to my feet. Larta sat up and rubbed her leg where a chunk of fallen ceiling had hit her. A couple of helphands bustled Nez and Azlii out of the room. I pulled free of Jonton’s grip and crouched next to Larta. She’d tugged off her hipwrap and was using it to mop up the blood leaking from the gash on her leg.

“Are you badly hurt?”

Larta’s neck showed the gray-green of disgust. At herself, I guessed, that she, the First of the guardians, charged with protecting the doumanas of Chimbalay, was the only one injured.

She wadded up the soiled hipwrap. “I’m fine. Now help me up.”

I stood and held my hand out. Larta gripped it and helped herself up, using me as a counterweight. When she let go I slipped and knocked against the machine. I heard a loud whoosh, like steam escaping, and smelled, oddly, the same, sharp ozone scent of Weast. I jumped away, though the machine didn’t feel hot to the touch.

Jonton grabbed my arm and tugged me further from the machine.

“What?” Larta asked.

“This room’s integrity might be compromised,” Jonton said. “The structure technicians will say when we can come in here again.” She pushed me toward the door, but not hard. “We need to get you out of here, Khe, before more ceiling falls.”

Why was she so anxious to get
me
out? Shouldn’t she have said ‘you both out’ or ‘we all need to get out’? But it was my name she used, and me she nudged toward the door.

Larta caught it too. “Do go. I’ll hobble on behind as best I can on my own.”

Jonton gave her a hard look but called to one of the helphands to come to Larta’s aid.

Outside the room, technicians had arrived and were already examining fresh cracks in the greenish-blue walls of the hall. As soon as we were out, three techs in black hipwraps picked up the kits they’d set on the floor and hurried into the room. The door irised closed behind them.

“We’ll return to the receiving room to talk further,” Jonton said, and sidled past the techs, helphands, Nez, and Azlii who stood between her and the stairwell.

Back in the receiving room, Jonton didn’t invite us to sit or offer refreshments. She herded Azlii, Larta, Nez, Pradat and me together, and dismissed her helphands.

“You’ve heard what I have to say.” Her voice was quiet and calm, her eyes focused on me alone. “You have seen what we can do.
Some
of what we can do. There’s more. Much more. In time, once the orindles have moved to a position of bringing order, we will show you other wonders, things that will amaze and please you. We’ll meet again in the morning, after Khe’s treatment.”

“Larta needs treatment now,” Pradat said. “I’ll see to her wound before these doumanas leave.”

“Of course,” Jonton said, and looked at Larta as if only now realizing she was hurt. “You will all stay here at the research center tonight. The streets are wet. The night is cold.”

Two spots on Nez’s neck showed the blue-red of anxiety. Larta didn’t seem to like the idea much either.

“A quick stick job will take care of Larta’s injury,” Pradat said.

“And then we’ll be on our way,” Larta said.

Jonton nodded. “As you wish.” She looked at me again for a long moment, then clapped Pradat’s shoulder. “I leave them in your care. I know you will do what’s best.”

“First off, Larta needs to sit and stretch out her leg,” Pradat said, and pointed to the chair she wanted her to take.

Jonton nodded. “Whatever needs to be done.” She turned and glided away, her feet barely lifting from the floor as she made her way out.

The feeling in the room changed the instant Jonton left. Azlii exhaled, and her hitched up shoulders came down a finger’s width. No one spoke while Pradat fixed Larta’s leg, pinching the wound shut and sticking the ragged skin back together with a yellow plaster she cured with a small green light.

The hard storm had passed, leaving a soft drizzle behind, but the streets were slick with water. Our progress was slow, made slower by Larta’s injury. The tall obelisks that provided light gleamed bright-pink in their watery coats. The rain had pooled in low spots. We had to watch where we stepped or find ourselves plunged into water halfway to our knees.

Even on the street we didn’t feel safe to talk. Doumanas were about, wrapped up tight in warm, unseasonable Barren Season cloaks, grumbling among themselves about the rain. Any one of them could be a spy.

Azlii pitched her voice to a whisper. “We should go to Kelroosh.”

It was a long, wet walk to the gate, and then a cold, wet walk across the plain. Azlii’s comment was the last thing said among us until we were safely inside Kelroosh’s walls. Home threw open the door before we’d even reached the far corner of our structure, as glad to see us, I thought, as we were to see it. And thoughtful, having warmed the room.

Everyone but Nez sat and pulled off our foot casings. Nez paced the room, her wet casings still on her feet.

“Orindles,” she said, her spots blazing brown-black with anger and gray-green with disgust.

Larta raised her eyebrow ridges. “Good thing Pradat stayed in Chimbalay.”

“I’ll make something warm for us to drink,” Azlii said, and headed toward the little communiteria off the receiving room. I looked at her neck to see what she was feeling, but the only color there was the ocher of impatience. For all that we could see how our sisters felt, we couldn’t guess at what was in their minds or hearts — what caused the emotions.

“Pradat’s only half an orindle, as far as I’m concerned,” Nez said. “She’s kind. Besides, she’s helping Khe.”

“And why do we think that is?” Larta asked. “Did you notice how, when the world shook, the only one Jonton worried about was Khe?” She looked at me. “Remember, Pradat and Jonton are sister-orindles.”

“Pradat came to warn us that the orindles wanted control,” Nez said. “She wouldn’t do that if she were fully in harmony with Jonton.”

“She’s not,” I said quietly. Pradat had put herself at risk to save me from the lumani. There was nothing false about her.

Larta hiked up one shoulder in a partial shrug. “Maybe so.”

Azlii returned, pushing a rolling cart containing a steaming pot and four cups.

“It’s always about Khe, though,” Larta said. “First Simanca, then the lumani, now Jonton. Everyone wants her for themselves.”

Nez reached over and stroked my throat. “It’s not Khe’s fault. She never asked for any of this.”

Except that I had. I’d wanted the original surgery to restore my ability to feel Resonance. I’d enjoyed — reveled in — my ability to push the crops. I’d asked — demanded — the chance to live my own life, under my own control. And what had it led to? The destruction of the lumani, harm to Chimbalay, and maybe harm to our entire world. All because I wanted to mate. Because I wanted to be normal.

Azlii poured a red liquid from the pot into the first of the four cups. “Warm zwas. I figured we could use a cup or two to shake off the cold, and Jonton.”

I wasn’t sure something intoxicating was the best thing at this moment, but I took the cup when she handed it to me.

Nez cradled her cup between her hands. “If the rain doesn’t stop, what will happen?”

“We’ll starve,” I said. “None of our crops can take that much water and thrive. The lumani tricked us. By engineering a perfect world, they engineered our end when that perfect world went away.”

“Pftt.” Azlii handed the last cup to Larta, took her own, and settled onto a floor pillow. “It’s Jonton who’s destroying our world, not the lumani. It’s Jonton who has to be stopped.”

Larta’s lips turned in the slightest of smiles. “No thought to giving the orindles what they want?”

Azlii hiked up one shoulder in a shrug. “Doesn’t affect us corentans one way or the other, no more than the lumani did. What about you, guardian? Do you look forward to being Second under the orindles’ rule?”

“I look forward to again serving superior minds,” Larta said, and grinned.

A sudden chill rolled through me. “Commune structures. They aren’t built like structures in a corenta or a kler. They aren’t made to withstand this kind of weather. If it keeps raining, they’ll dissolve. Commune doumanas won’t have food or shelter.”

Home sent,
Thank
you
for
thinking
of
the
structures
,
Khe
.
We
seem
to
be
forgotten
in
your
conversations
.
Corentan
structures
are
strong
,
but
even
we
will
crumble
if
enough
water
falls
on
us
.

Azlii’s hand was at her mouth, holding the cup she was about to empty down her throat. She sent her gaze my way. She’d obviously heard what Home had sent, but finished her drink before setting the cup beside her on the floor. “Then we must stop the rain.”

Nez nodded. “But how?”

“Not by blowing up a part of Chimbalay again,” Azlii said. “Someone is going to have to convince Jonton to give up her dream.” She looked at Larta. “Or maybe the guardians can help. Can’t you just seize her and hold her someplace?”

Larta scratched a spot near her earhole. “Stopping Jonton won’t stop the rain. Not if she has the machine already programmed. We don’t know that she’s the only one who can work it, either. She said there were doumanas helping the lumani. They would know how. She could have trained any number of her orindle-sisters.”

“If we could find the ones who helped the lumani,” Nez said, “they could stop it.”

My throat felt scratchy. I stood and walked toward the rolling cart and the last of the zwas, cold in its pot now from sitting. “We’d have to get into Research Center Three. Jonton said the doumanas who served the lumani never left once they entered, which likely means some are still there. Jonton could have moved them out, but that would be the place to start.”

“I doubt Jonton is going to let anyone wander around inside, tapping on doors, to find them,” Azlii said.

I shrugged and filled my cup. “Maybe Pradat could. I think Jonton still trusts her.”

“Even if we could find one,” Larta said, “she’d have to be willing to help. And Jonton would have to be confined — all of the orindles, since we don’t know which would fight to carry out Jonton’s plan. And every helphand. It would be impossible. Plus, we need the orindles and helphands. Doumanas get sick, they become injured — someone has to care for them.”

Hard, fat raindrops pinged against the windows. Four heads turned to look as the water sluiced down the pane.

“We have to destroy the machine,” I said.

Larta turned her gaze back to me. “We’d have to figure out how to destroy it first. And then, same problem: we’d have to get into the research center. We’d have to get to the machine.”

Slowly, slowly, Nez shifted around to look at us. “I think I know how to destroy it.”

The room was quiet. Even Home held its breath, I think.

Nez hunched slightly into her shoulders. “Water. The machine must use electricity. All the water that’s filling the streets — we route it into the machine room and drown it. It’ll go down in a giant sizzle.”

Larta drummed her fingers on her thigh. “That’d be quite an undertaking. We’d have to find a pool of water deep enough and figure out how to transport the water to the research center, how to siphon it down into the room. The room is below ground. There aren’t any windows.”

“But it could work,” Nez said, the greenish-blue of hope firing into color on her neck.

“It could work,” Larta said. “But the logistics. I don’t know how we’d get it done without being seen and stopped.”

I sat up very straight. “Maybe we could turn the machine on itself. Did you notice that when the rain was falling at its hardest, that’s when the planet shook? I think maybe the machine is causing it. If that’s so, we could make the rain fall so hard that the machine collapses the room around itself.”

“How would we make the machine work?” Azlii asked. “We don’t know how. We’d have to make Jonton do it, and I doubt she’s going to help us.”

Kroot
Kroot
, Home sent, wanting our attention.

Do
you
have
an
idea
,
Home
? Azlii sent.

Sadly
,
no
.
Pradat
is
coming
.
Walking
very
fast
through
Kelroosh
.

Azlii pulled herself to her feet. “I’ll warm some more zwas. I think we’re going to need it.”

No color showed on Pradat’s neck to tell us what she was feeling as she rushed into the receiving room, swept off her wet cloak and removed her sodden, muddy foot casings. I wondered what it had cost her to hide her emotions like that? She had no need to hide them from us, yet I think the habit was so strong in her that to let her spots light took conscious effort.

“You have news,” Azlii said, pouring a cup of zwas for Pradat.

Plain-necked or not, Pradat wouldn’t have rushed here without news.

She took the cup and swallowed down a deep drink. “I’m not sure where to begin.”

“The beginning is usually a good spot,” Azlii said.

Pradat laughed under her breath, poured a swallow or two more of zwas into her cup and downed them. She placed the cup back on the rolling cart and finally settled onto an empty pillow next to Larta.

“I’ve been told something. I’m not sure what to make of it.” Pradat ran a hand over her scalp. “We all saw how Jonton rushed to protect Khe when the planet shivered.”

“Trah,” Larta said, and waved one hand as if flicking Jonton away from her. “I could have lain on the floor bleeding until next Barren Season and she wouldn’t have noticed. All her concern was for Khe.”

Pradat raised her eyebrow ridges in agreement. “She knows Khe is back in Kelroosh. I think she’s afraid the corenta will leave and she’ll lose Khe forever. Jonton has asked that Khe come again to Chimbalay. Alone. She says if Khe does, and listens to what she has to say, she will stop the rain.”

The room was warm, flames crackling and popping in the firecave near where I sat, the smell of burning wood pleasant. I kept my feet together, my eyes cast down the way I would when called to Simanca’s dwelling in the old days at Lunge — but now it was a way to observe without seeming to.

Pradat stood just inside the door chatting with the two orindles and a helphand who’d escorted us to the room. I didn’t know why we needed three doumanas to escort us two, and I didn’t think the casual sound of Pradat’s conversation with her sisters was the whole truth. No spots lit on any of the well-trained orindles’ necks. The helphand showed only the slightest trace of purple-gray concern. Concern for what? At Lunge, with sisters I’d lived with all my life, whose experiences were nearly identical to mine, any of us could see that color and know its cause immediately. But not here, not among strangers who saw through eyes educated by different experiences, minds filled with other ways of thinking.

Rain fell outside, steady rivulets running down the outside of the windows — rain that had begun only moments after Pradat and I had entered the research center.

The door irised open and Jonton came in. The three escorts left the room, leaving Pradat alone by the jambs. Jonton nodded as she passed Pradat and walked quickly across the room to where I sat. She reached out a hand and I feared for a moment she was going to stroke my neck as though we felt warmly toward each other, but she swept into the chair next to mine without our skins touching. The door shut with a whispered whoosh.

“I’m pleased you’ve come, Khe.” She smiled, and her eyes flickered to my throat and mouth, waiting. I didn’t give the return smile or warm emotion colors she clearly wanted. She closed her own smile down and said, “You are a very interesting doumana, but you already know that. You know you are different — have been different from the beginning. But not static. Not unchanging. Oh, no.” She tilted her head. “Do you know what possible clay is?”

“No,” I said.

“It’s dug from the banks of only one river, a long way from here. The clay is naturally black but can be stained any shade. The black doesn’t dim the color — it enhances it, makes it shine. Its particles are fine, smooth and densely loaded, very strong. Almost anything can be made of it. Whatever size or shape or color thing you dream up, with this clay, it’s possible to create it.”

“Oh,” I said, not seeing the connection.

Jonton leaned forward and patted my knee. “I was close to the Powers, you know. One of the few privileged to receive direct communication from them, to know their secrets. I know what was done in the special room in Research Center One.”

I held very still and listened.

“You are the possible clay,” Jonton said. “You were infertile, but we orindles changed your shape and you laid your egg. You were angry, and you changed your own shape and ran off to Chimbalay. The Powers found you — the lumani — and they changed your shape again to suit their own purposes.”

My neck flamed. No one knew what had happened in that room — no one but Weast and the other lumani, and me. If Jonton knew, really knew how Weast had used its machine to form its dreadful egg in me, how could I bear that shame? I glared at her, glad that she couldn’t see on my throat the anger and disgust I felt.

“The question now, Khe, is what shape you will take finally. In the end, you are the shape of our future — but what will you be? What will we be? That question must be answered.”

I wanted to say that she was wrong, that I was Khe, just as I’d always been, but that wasn’t true.

Jonton turned up her palms. “Pradat and I don’t have exact harmony of feelings about you. She wants to prolong your life and send you off to do whatever little things you might with your time. But, Khe — look at you. You’ve already developed the ability to see far distances and have superior hearing — yes, we know about these. You rarely eat or sleep.” She smiled kindly. “Don’t be angry at Pradat. She is quite observant, and it’s her duty to report all her findings.”

I knew all about duty; Simanca had been brilliant at using our natural sense of it to get what she wanted. I wasn’t angry with Pradat. I understood her.

Jonton leaned toward me. “Think what can be accomplished without those needs. I believe you will develop a heightened mind as well. Like the lumani, you will see what needs to be done and the way to do it. Think what that will mean when all of us are like you — the solutions we will find in a fraction of the time it takes now.”

Color had begun to show on her throat as she spoke, the bright-blue of excitement and the greenish-blue of hope.

“Think on this, too,” Jonton said. “Only you can give this gift to all your sisters and brothers. It is the perfect atonement for what you did in Chimbalay.”

I thought of Marnka and the other weather-prophets the lumani and orindles had tried to ‘improve.’ They’d become babblers, their minds, and ultimately their lives, lost. Was Jonton one of the orindles who’d helped the lumani in those experiments?

I glanced at Pradat. She’d been silent while Jonton spoke. I’d seen into her, though, the ambivalence she felt — wanting to spare me from Jonton, but wanting to know the same things Jonton was curious about.

I thought quickly, wondering how much I could wring from Jonton’s greed to have me.

“I’d like to know the answers to your question as much as you do. I’ll stay and help and do my best on two conditions. One, Pradat will be allowed to finish her treatments.”

“Of course,” Jonton said. “We want you healthy, to become what you will become. Resonance is next year. We want you to be here to feel it, and go to your nesting site, mate, and lay your egg as is the right and duty of every doumana. We want you to live your natural span, which is also the right of every doumana, barring accident or illness.”

I brushed my hand over Jonton’s knee. The touch made me cringe, but I knew it would make her feel connected to me, and more willing to give what I wanted.

“The other thing is the weather machine. It intrigues me. I want to learn everything there is to know about it. How to run it, of course, and how it works, and its history — how it came to be here. Every day I will give my time and myself to you and Pradat, and you will train me on the machine.” I handed up a smile. “Seems a fair trade to me, though you gain most of the advantages.”

Jonton crossed her arms over her chest.

“It can’t be just you with the knowledge,” I said, pushing gently. “What if you fall ill, or are injured?”

She waved off the worry with a flick of her hand.

“What you want,” I said, pressing on, “is an apprentice. And people to spread the word. It doesn’t matter if you can control the weather if no one knows.”

Jonton sniffed, and I thought I’d caught her attention, but she turned away and stared into the distance.

“More than that,” I said, “you could demonstrate the machine, on the visionstage, to the settled world, with your apprentices beside you. Kler and commune doumanas would see your power and ability, your willingness to teach. They would see that it’s you and the orindles who should lead us.”

Slowly, so slowly that she could have been mechanical instead of living, Jonton turned her gaze back to me.

“Do you believe the orindles should lead, Khe?”

“A great leader,” I said, “shows her power by what she is willing to share.”

Jonton laughed quietly. “If I teach you to work the machine, you will endorse our leadership. Who are you that anyone should take your opinion to heart?”

“No one,” I said, “but sister to Azlii. You know how corentans are — stubborn for the sake of it. She’ll keep quiet just to spite you, but she’ll tell the other corentans if I ask her. I am also sister to Larta in Chimbalay, and sister to all those at Lunge commune, which has some influence in the region.”

A small smile turned her lips. “You are very clever, Khe. And you make some good points. We’ll discuss this more tomorrow.”