Forge of Heaven

“If you’re going, I’m going,” he said, trying for steadiness in his voice. “If you’re going onto the street, little sister, so am I.”

WATERFALLS POURED OFF the heights, and the beshti, on their feet now, in the passing of the gust-front, bawled protests about the weather—justified protests, with the racket of thunder. Marak held on to the tarp from one side, Hati from the other, and they kept the worst of the storm off, warming each other, but the beshti remained on their own, outside, in the lightning-lit downpour. Whether the cliffs above them or under them were stable—that was beyond any precaution they could take, but to stay clear of overhangs.

The momentary confusion in the heavens of Brazis’s domain seemed to have settled. That moment when they all, all, from the least to the highest, could hear each other—that was unique in Marak’s experience, and not something he wanted to experience again.

But it had passed as quickly as the front itself, leaving the thunder, the storm, and solitude—a sense of quiet for the first time since he was very young indeed.

He hoped the boys up on the ridge had paid attention to the deep-stakes. The gust-front that had run ahead of this storm, particularly up on the exposed ridge, was a test of their skill. There was a knack to tuning the tent to the wind that gave it stability in weather. It had never been this sorely tested. He hoped the boys had learned what he had taught them.

Equally, he worried about his youngest watcher, who he feared was isolated now in a different kind of storm in the heavens, and who had to fend for himself in the mess up there. He had made his opinions known to Brazis. But in this silence even from Ian, now, his watchers had to watch out for each other. He could no longer reciprocate the favor.

He sat snug against his wife and listened to the beshti. Somewhere near them, loose rock gave way and crashed down the slopes.

“I almost had him,” he said to Hati, thinking still of Procyon, and that moment that everything had crashed open. “I almost had him. Then it seemed I heard another voice. It made no sense at all. If I tried, I might still reach Ian. That way seems open, still.”

“Leave Ian to sort it out,” Hati said, hugging his chilled limbs. “Clearly the boy is alive. Folly to move in this downpour. We might at least get some sleep, husband.”

Hati was never one to batter herself against the impossible. She snuggled close, and he shifted to increase the warmth.

He heard the other beshti complaining in the distance below their perch, a trick of the wind, an echo, it might be.

“Marak.”

Clear and cold. The very man he wanted to hear. “Ian. What happened? What is the sudden racket and silence up there?”

“We have no idea.”

“We have every idea,”the Ila’s voice interposed over Ian’s. “We have a perfectly adequate understanding of what happened up there. The fool director has completely cut us off.”

“Ila,”Luz interjected.

He had been worried because the tap had been silent. Now he had no patience for this bickering. The width of the desert was not enough to insulate him and his wife from the Refuge and its petty politics. “All of you,” he said sharply. His arm had gone to sleep under Hati’s shoulder, and tingled as she stirred. “Settle your differences. I have no interest in all of this, except the safety of my watchers, two of whom are dangerously affected, if not dead, and one of whom is pursued by Brazis’s enemies and now held from talking. Break the system open. Tell Brazis stop this nonsense, use his resources and pull Procyon back to safety. Now.”

“That is the very point, Marak-omi,”Luz said, “that the station wants no contact with us at the moment. Brazis apparently detected a Movement cell active on the station. We believe Brazis is the one who shut the link down, for defensive reasons.”

“We are far from certain,”Ian said.

“Folly,” Hati said disgustedly. She had sat on the periphery of this conversation. But she clearly heard what Ian and Luz said, all on her own. “My husband says it all. We are wet, we are cold, we are at this moment in very ill humor on a cliff that may pitch us down into the basin, and when we get off it, trust my husband will not rest until Brazis accounts for this boy. Ila, we appeal to you.Tell us the truth behind all of this.”

“About fools who call themselves Movement? Who engage in illicit trade and infiltrate new technology into the system? I know nothing at all substantive.”

“We have our deep suspicions,”Ian said.

“Enough!” Marak said, beyond angry at this sniping and bickering and insinuation. “Isit Brazis who shut us off, or is there some other agency?”

A crack of thunder. A gust of wind carried rain under their shelter, threatening to tear the canvas away from the three irons they had embedded.

“We have not the least idea,”the Ila said carelessly. Marak could see the gesture in his imagination, a lift and wave of the fingers, dismissing his strong hint of other interference—or some enemy diverting their attention elsewhere.

“Hati,”Luz said, “Marak-omi, we need you. We need you both. We ask you stay with us.”

Oh, doubtless Luz needed their support in the situation now, Marak thought. Doubtless Luz now repented her bickering with Ian and even more bitterly repented her period of friendship with the Ila. Doubtless Ian and Luz alike dreaded being deserted to the Ila’s society without his mediation. Half a year was already wearing on their close, three-sided society…without him in the Refuge. They were ready to call him back. And if his and Hati’s absence had driven Ian to the far end of the Paradise and actually precipitated this event, he regretted it, but he much doubted that was the case.

Dared he raise the thorny matter of Brazis’s personal faults with Ian now? They all had ears to hear. They all would have heard what he had heard in the system, if they had been listening at all. The three of them at the Refuge had all known, if he had not imagined it entirely, that there was something seriously wrong on the system. They had failed to raise the issue or warn him. Subtlety and subterfuge was at work, and he had no desire to fling sand in the soup before he knew what the new alliances were.

“We have no choice but tend to our own affairs, our way,” Marak said. “We expect others to do what they can.”

With that, he shut the voices down himself, definitively, and possessed a thunderous and rainy silence he had chosen. Let them worry what he knew, and what he might do about it.

He gripped the slit of the tarp against the wind, with his wife warm and close against him, and they looked out on the lightning-lit rain, on rock spires and new streams of water pouring past them—well calculated, where those storm-made streams would run.

The heavens quarreled. At least they knew the relay the boys had set up on the ridge was functioning very well, even in the weather, since the Refuge had come in clear and strong.

This, the thunder and the rain and the constant shivering of the earth, this was reliable and real. The grinding war of shattered sections of the earth were producing something he and Hati had never seen, and despite their danger, even this far away, they shared it. Let the Ila and Ian battle it out with Brazis and the rest. Watchers came and went, sorry as they might be for the loss of three i

But, then—a small thought slithered back into Marak’s mind—if there was in fact someone new in the network, then perhaps something in the long maneuvering in the world above hadtruly changed. Like the cracking of the earth’s plates under the hammerfall, like the rupture of the Southern Wall, an event that, over time sufficient to lift mountains, and bring this weather down on them—change could happen up there. They had feared the water rising from below, and instead were half-drowned by water falling down on them from the sky and the cliffs. Surprise could still happen, on the world’s scale.