Forge of Heaven

And if something up in the heavens had finally cracked, then they were no longer in an endless loop, one set of known forces against another. If something up there had cracked, then, up there, as below, plates might have begun to shift, bringing chaos and real change in the heavens.

“What are you thinking, husband?” Hati, close against him, could surely feel his heart, and the tension in his arms. It was never a good plan to lie to her.

“A stranger. A stranger seems to have arrived in the heavens. Or something has shifted.”

A deep breath. Hati was considering that notion.

“They do not affect us,” she said.

“Indeed,” he said. “And the uplink is still in our hands.”

Brazis might have silenced the downlink, as he could, but not what ascended to the heavens. He knew the Ila’s tricks. He knew what she had done to get into Brazis’s system: trip switch after switch, locking the relays open, and move like quicksilver, difficult to stop. That was the way.

And use not the ordinary contact codes, but the emergency ones, the ones just very few people alive remembered, the ones intended to allow them to reestablish contact in an inert system if something did go wrong in the heavens.

The master codes. He had never forgotten them, from the earliest days in the Refuge, when the earth and sky were broken. He lived his long life assuming something, at some time in all eternity, would surely go wrong, and he tested his memory of them from time to time.

He did it now. “I think I can get through,” he said to Hati.

“Forbear,” Hati urged him. “Watchers have died of mistakes. Ca

He sat with his eyes closed, deaf and blind to the storm, quietly testing his limits, probing the relay, ru

The beshti set up a sudden raucous clamor that shattered his effort, a clamor that, under the roar of the rain, found an answer in the dark. Beshti talked to beshti in the storm.

Now— now,cold and hungry, soaked and deafened by thunder, their fugitives had become agitated enough to break from the young bull’s rule. His own beshta sent out a loud warning into the dark, overruling the young bull’s orders to the females.

Hati had not disturbed him with that news. He heard it for himself. He got up, and Hati—after so many years they had no need to discuss the necessities—Hati was right beside him, leaping up into the driving rain, both of them quick to lay hands on the old bull’s halter before he ripped the deep-irons right out of the rock, double-tether and all, and ran off to kill the young thief.

“Hyiii-yi-yi!” Hati yelled her own summons out into the dark, and beside them the herd matriarch bawled out her fury at the robbery. The young bull had thought the string were all his females until two arriving senior riders brought in this senior bull and a ca

So now, fleeing an uncertainty in the weather and the earth, the females who had run off with the young bull had turned, evading calamity they might feel in the earth itself, disaster reeking in that icy wind.

Not at a convenient moment for their return, no. They had rather have found their fugitives by daylight, on easy ground. In the stormy dark, beshti saw ghosts and devils at every turn, and every fleeting notion was an enemy.

The females came, nonetheless.

So the young bull was going to come up that rain-soaked slope. He had no choice.

In the uncertainty of the night, they had left the beshti saddled, the leather under weather cover, and Marak ripped the plastic cover free, losing it to the wind as he tried to gain footing to mount, as shadowy huge figures came bawling and braying up among the shadowy pillars, out of the rain, driving the bull into a circling struggle to get free.

“Let go, woman!” he yelled at his wife, worried for Hati’s safety, but there was no chance Hati would let go her hold, though the old bull threw his head up, lifting Hati completely off her feet as Marak grabbed at the rein.

Beshti milled around in the lightning and the rain, squalling and bawling to drown the thunder. One silly cow fouled their tether-line, trying to cross it, tangled and threw Hati half to her knees.

“Unclip!” Marak yelled, half-turning toward Hati as he got a hand on the rain-slick saddle, and Hati risked one free hand, lifted a knife, shining in the lightnings, and began to saw the taut tether-line, no wrestling with the halter clip against the beshta’s irate strength.

Marak swung up and landed astride as the bull snapped free with a rolling shake of his long neck.

“Hya!” he yelled, and popped the old bull hard on the rump with his quirt, disabusing him of any thought he was riderless. His vision was all a blur of lightning-lit rain as the old bull spun about, threatened from the dark, with an unexpected problem on his back. He was all puffed up to fight, and had a rider with a loaded quirt and a taut rein complicating his headlong rush for trouble.

The young bull lunged out of the rainy dark toward them, teeth bared.

“Hai!” Marak yelled, pulled his beshta’s head aside by main force, jerking himself out of the way, and hit the young bull hard across the face when the youngster tried to sneak a bite.

The young bull, veering off, shouldered them hard in the movement and came in again. Where the cliff edge was, Marak had a guess, but only a guess. Marak laid on a second blow, and a third, the rascal thinking to snake his head under to nip the old bull’s throat. The old bull fought to turn under the rein and come full about for a neck-blow that could kill. For a moment it was all a squalling mill of turning bodies and diving heads, and Marak plied the loaded quirt on their young attacker with all the force in his arm, until the young bull finally felt the blows and shied back, flash of the white of one eye in the flickering lightning.

The old bull lunged to give chase. Marak hauled his head around and back, which forced the old bull around and around in a circle. Pops of the quirt stinging his rump kept his rear dodging sideways to escape those blows. This proved too many diversions at once for the old fellow’s brain, and he grudgingly resigned the fight, puffing and blowing, on the very edge of the cliff.

There was a great deal of grunting and blowing all around, and complaints out of the dark, complaints from the young bull, complaints from the herd, rumbles of thunder from the rock walls above them. The earth itself jolted, one sharp thump, and the panicky herd milled and squalled in confusion.

Another rider showed in the lightnings. Hati had gotten herself up to the matriarch’s saddle, and applied her quirt liberally wherever a beshta showed a disposition to break out of the herd and start a panic or a fight with the matriarch.

They were soaked to the skin. Their tarp with their supplies inside was flat, trampled in the confusion. He had the gun. He had never thought to use it.

But they had the herd back in their control.

13

THE HOSPITAL DIDN ’THAVE a feeling of shattering crisis as Reaux arrived. Two volunteers stood just past the foyer, chatting idly by the lift, then stopped their conversation and stared, openmouthed, recognizing their governor, and security.