Forge of Heaven (33 page)

2 1 2 • C . J . C h e r r y h

tion—if he could do whatever he was sent to do tomorrow morning. If he could bring Brazis whatever it was he wanted, then Brazis might be a lot more sympathetic, working
with
his problem, rather than just dealing with it and sweeping him away.

And, always, there
was
Marak to deal with, Marak, who would back him, unless Marak thought he was a fool.

So he daren’t, above all else, blow the assignment he had. He had to come back smelling of success and professional discretion so he could fix whatever Ardath had come to warn him about. Protect his life on the street. And protect Ardath, who would go to war for him, and who by no means should attempt it, against Algol and his ilk.

He looked at the cupboard clock. 0448h. He didn’t dare oversleep.

But dammit, he had to calm his nerves.

He was going back to bed. Lie horizontal. Try to relax his mind.

T H E N I G H T A I R was still. The dust had settled. The sky was clear, sparkling with stars, despite Drusus’s warnings of fog and disaster. The ridges above them were shadow. The distant pans were ghost-white under the stars, a dizzy distance below their feet.

Marak stood at the starlit edge of the ledge and called out to the fugitive beshti—
“Hai, ye, ye, ye!”

Lone voice in the night, provoking echoes. It was the call they gave out when the beshti were wandering. It reminded the fools of food, of sweet treats. On a good day it could call beshti in from the fields, for the rare sugar that could tempt the most recalcitrant old bull into reach of a halter.

He heard distant answers, likewise, lonely in the night, distinct from the echoes.

“By now they have no idea how to get back,” Hati said glumly, from her perch on the rocks nearby, which he was sure was the truth. Far easier to slide down the yielding sand than climb back up it. Their own descent had its perils. They kept careful track of the trail they followed, to be able to find their way back up again, in what might become foul weather.

Their own beshti had heard and smelled the implied offer, and were on their feet. A wise man kept his promises, even overheard Fo r g e o f H e a v e n • 2 1 3

ones, and Marak was ready for them, a couple of sweets in hand, daintily picked off his hand by soft, clever lips.

Then he went to sit by Hati. Certainly the rascals were down there, in earshot, but it was too dark to try another descent until dawn. If they could find no way down, riding, fast enough to get close to them, he might try it afoot. If he could just get his hands on one of the leaders he could get the whole herd up. He didn’t want to shoot the young bull. But he would. He had known that when he asked the boys for the pistol.

He had Auguste for a watcher, now, Auguste who told them nothing, who left them alone, for the most part.

Tonight, in the dark, suspended between the world above and the basin below, he was uneasy, and realized the unease was silly, an ancient fear of vermin, as if deadly surprises might skulk out of the dark places of the rocks. The thought of a foot trek had set off that thought. Vermin had lived in such places as this, before the world changed—

But not now. Tonight it was a foolish fear. The world seemed again what it had been. The hammer had never come down. The world had never broken.

But the vermin were gone. They themselves were the fiercest thing in the world now, he and Hati and the beshti and their kind.

And not a thing moved or crawled, else, on the land, nor had for ages . . . one eerie silence, for all their lives since the Hammerfall, and the great storms. One great loneliness in the land.

And change that moved slowly, until this event Ian had long foretold. The Hammerfall had cracked the world; and the pieces of it drifted on internal fires. And now the Wall had cracked, and the land went on shivering, settling into a new age. The place where they sat would be utterly changed—a seacoast, a sea to the south of the Refuge as well as to the west, across the great plateau. If he lied to his eyes, in that dim view below their feet, he could imagine dark, wind-driven water, water stretching out of sight across the horizon.

Someday, Ian was convinced, life would come crawling up out of that sea and take residence on the land.

Would they personally live that long? Ian said processes of change ran more rapidly than might have been predicted, that this fact itself caused unease in the heavens.

2 1 4 • C . J . C h e r r y h

Lying warm in his embrace, looking above the eroded sandstone, Hati pointed out what might be a wisp of cloud on the dark western horizon, an absence of expected stars.

That, now, that was not good.

“ S E T H A .
S E T H A ! ”

Middle of the night and Judy was standing over the bed in hysterics. Setha Reaux lifted his head from the pillow, squinted, and put up an arm to shade his eyes as his wife ordered the light on.

“Setha, she’s
gone
.”

“Who’s gone?”

“I heard the outside door open. I got up and checked. And Kathy’s
gone
!”

Reaux’s heart started a moderately labored beat, enough to persuade him he had to fling back the covers, put his feet on the floor, and dutifully go to Kathy’s room—for what, he had no idea—hardly a chance that she’d be hiding under the bed.

He walked. Meanwhile Judy was shouting something. He tended to screen Judy’s voice out when it reached that frantic pitch, because sensible suggestions never happened when Judy hit that particular note. He just plodded down the hall barefoot at fair speed and looked in Kathy’s room.

Kathy, it turned out, hadn’t been shopping today. She’d said she’d go tomorrow. If she’d sneaked out, she had 500c on a card in her pocket, and a quick riffle through the closet didn’t suggest she’d taken much else with her.

“She’s worn the black pants,” Judy said, making her own search. “Maybe a tee, I can’t tell with those things. And her bag.”

Now he’d reached his own state of incoherency. Black pants and a bag, and 500c on his credit card. He could call in right now and cancel the card’s funds, but
that
was how they were going to know where Kathy had gone. He rather thought he was going to extend that credit infinitely. Every time she used that card, they had another chance to find out where Kathy was, and, knowing Kathy, she wouldn’t do the simple addition until it occurred to her the card had held out far longer than she thought. Then she’d probably know they were tracking her and she’d try to be clever with it, Fo r g e o f H e a v e n • 2 1 5

but she still wouldn’t throw it away. The need for money, and the sure conviction her softhearted papa would go on supplying it, would lead her to go on using it in emergencies—emergencies the nature of which he could only imagine.

“Ungrateful girl,” Judy mourned.

He didn’t say he counted the situation Judy’s fault. Judy’s fault, true; but maybe his genes. Unlike him, however, Kathy had never learned his trick of screening out Judy’s tirades. Or maybe teen hormones just rose up in rebellion when Judy hit that particular note.

“I’m going to the office,” he said.

“How can you?” Judy shouted at him. “Your daughter’s run off and you leave me here with the situation?”

“I’m going to the office,” he said calmly, “where I can engage my staff on a discreet search for our daughter. She has an account on one of my cards. If she buys a blouse or a soft drink on it, we’ll find her.

I have resources there I don’t have here. It won’t take that long.”

“She’s not doing this on her own!” Tears had started. After forty years of marriage, he had the rhythm of Judy’s arguments down pat, and was neither surprised nor moved by them. “It’s that Denny, and Mark!”

“Denny’s fault. Mark’s fault. Let’s not forget Ippoleta Nazrani’s fault.”

“She could do worse than emulate Ippoleta!”

“
Nazrani,
for God’s sake, Judy. And our Kathy has better taste.”

He hated the Nazranis, up and down, and found nothing to admire in their wispy blond daughter. “Denny Ord and Mark Andrews. Phone numbers.”

“I don’t have their phone numbers.”

“Are the boys in Kathy’s sessions?”

“I don’t know. They’re supposed to be in jail!”

“I don’t guarantee they are. I don’t sit on the courts. Give me some help here, Judy, for God’s sake! I need to contact their parents. I need to find out where they are and where they go and get a tail on them.”

“They live somewhere in the Meridian.”

A district about ten blocks by ten. Thousands of people lived “in the Meridian.” He walked out Kathy’s door, bound back to his room, to find his personal phone, to rouse Ernst out of bed.

2 1 6 • C . J . C h e r r y h

“I need two young men tracked,” he said, when he reached Ernst on the house phone, and gave the particulars, the names, the recent arrest, and the Meridian district. Ernst, long-suffering fellow, didn’t object, or protest he’d been waked out of a sound sleep, just said he’d do it. “I need their whereabouts confirmed. I need my daughter tracked. If they’re out of detention, she may be with them. She’s got a Concord Trust card with her with a 500c limit. I don’t want that credit cut off. Extend the credit on it as far as it needs to go. Find out where she’s using it, get somebody down there, and bring her home.”

“Yes, sir,” Ernst said.

While Judy alternately sobbed on their bed and paced the floor.

“Breakfast,” he said, then. Judy just looked at him.

“How can you be so cold?”

“Because I’ve already done something,” he said, not nicely, though he thought Judy probably didn’t take it as personally as, at the moment, he meant it.

He wasn’t pleasant when he waked to news like this. He was a slightly overweight, well-over-fifty, sedentary man, but he hadn’t always been what he was now, and sometimes the combative instincts were twenty years old again. Sometimes he didn’t have as perfect a rein on his temper at home as he had to have on the job.

He tried not to let fly now, made an effort to pat his wife on the shoulder and take a conciliatory tone. “We’ll find her, Judy. Just make me a bowl of cereal, will you?” Not that his arm was broken, but Judy needed to do something besides sob and wail, and
she
didn’t have any friends she could call for help at 0500h. “No. I’ll tell you what you can do to help: go through the clothes she had and if that tee had any figure on it, describe it.”

“I’m sure I don’t know what’s on those wretched black things. I try not to look!”

“Do you know where she’d shop?”

“Decent shops are closed at this hour!”

“Judy, she’s not going to go to Hampton’s, for God’s sake. Do you know any of the shops the kids go to?”

“
No,
I don’t know those places!”

“I want my breakfast,” he concluded, putting his temper on autopilot, just a steady low-key response she couldn’t ruffle. “In an Fo r g e o f H e a v e n • 2 1 7

hour, Ernst may have found something. At least he’ll be at the office. Meanwhile we’ll find out what she’s buying. She’s in a finite number of places. It’s not the apocalypse.”

He made his own breakfast while Judy hiked upstairs and went through the closet. As best she could figure, when she came down, it was a gray plain shirt and her makeup kit. Black pants, underwear, black three-strap shoes. Wonderfully descriptive. But Ernst had Kathy’s picture, by now, in the hands of every agency on the station, and the card number set to report to security on every use.

He hoped the Earth ship wasn’t tapping into station communications, and he feared it was. It wasn’t going to look good for him, with a daughter running wild in questionable areas of Outsider fringe society. But it couldn’t be helped what they heard.

He had half a cup of caff more. Judy was calling her mother, and the tears had started again. It was 0548h, and he decided it was a good time to go to the office. There was a chance, if Kathy was on the outs with her mother, she might call there to complain. He hoped she would.

“Stay here,” he said to Judy, putting on his coat. “In case she calls.”

“Where are you going?”

“I told you. To the office.”

She wasn’t happy. He didn’t listen to it. He headed for the door.

“I need you!” Judy yelled at him, and cried.

He couldn’t afford to listen. He left, wishing, not for the first time, that he dared actively shut down the ship’s probing into station’s communications, Earth sipping delicately and routinely at this and that tidbit of people’s lives whenever one of their ships docked. He didn’t dare prevent it, beyond the fact that the station’s automatic defenses and a battery of technicians routinely defended them against some of the best crackers working.

Dammit, this scandal would be a nice mouthful for station gossip.

But what could the Earth ambassador say about it to damn him with authorities on Earth? The governor has domestic troubles with his teenaged daughter? He wasn’t the first and wouldn’t be the last father in that situation.

He went to the office, not letting himself be distracted, confident 2 1 8 • C . J . C h e r r y h

that Kathy would use that card, sooner or later—as fast as she could get to a shop.

He didn’t use the phone. He reached the office. Ernst had made it in first.

“Any card use?”

“Not yet.”

“She’s still shopping, then. She goes by Mignette on the street.

That’s M-i-g-n-e-t-t-e, I have no idea why Mignette and not Katherine, but she likes it.” He watched Ernst take notes. “Any news on Denny Ord and Mark Andrews?”

“Denny’s in jail for petty theft, still awaiting arraignment. The Andrews boy was sent home.”

“Marvelous! Theft? What in hell? No, don’t tell me. Let Ord loose and track both of them. I don’t care how. Hold it. Are they tapped?”

Ernst called up a record. “Yes.”

“Damn.” By no means respectable Earther boys. And tap traffic was a lot harder to follow. “Physical tail, then. Go ahead and let them go. Mark their ID cards and get a trace on them. If we’re unlucky they’ll reform and stay at home. But let’s just do this practically. She’ll turn up. Have we heard this morning from Mr. Gide?”