63 - Great Dees?

“What are they going to try?” That was Werfas, asking.

The Rumon took hold of the Nadumarian’s wrist and he, hers. With some adjustment and a minor tug back and forth they stood with Ilax’s hand on that joined wrist, finally relaxed. They stretched their free hands out and up, from a point where they touched to where they reached at furthest stretch and back again. For a long moment nothing happened. 

“They cannot work together it looks like,” Kyrus said. “That’s a sha...” That was the instant the two found a rhythm, a harmony between them. Perhaps it was Ilax, perhaps they found enough common ground in the face of disaster and injured children.

The wind rose with a wild roar, spinning up from the ground in front of the two whose actions now seemed like plucking, and casting motions. A dust devil grew and then became a solid whirlwind stretching higher and higher over their heads. Clouds shifted in the sky and it became a muddy, snaking column. Thunder rumbled and lightning. The air grew thick enough to make one’s hair stand on end.

The snaking funnel cloud now reached almost as high as the roof peaks of the Training Hall and with an odd pausing step, the ambassadors walked forward as if in procession, their created whirlwind carving a way straight into the mudslide, tearing the loose mud up off the road where they stood and when the first bits of wood wrenched from the school flew up they stopped and the funnel bounced up cutting into mud alone, broadening to a wide path.

Tons of earth were whisked up into the air and the ambassadors turned, apparently guided by Ilax’s hand on their joined wrists, and the cyclone kited the muck up into the air and down onto a barren shale field further down the mountain, where it collapsed, burying the stone in a layer of wet earth, but with no village below it should it slip again.

The whole ruined, crushed, smashed top of the school was exposed. The ambassadors’ control of the funnel had been surprisingly delicate for the amount of anger in them. People rushed to pull the wreckage loose to get their children and their teachers out. Ilax bowed fully, the full salaam to each of the ambassadors and kissed their hands.

Screams of ‘I’m here, mama! and “Papa/auntie/grandma/child/love/sweetness echoed over the mountain where before people had said very little but for worrying sounds and tried to keep their breath for digging. Now the tears were of relief. Now there were more people to help find the last isolated buried and to begin the slower job of digging out without spectacular help.

Kyrus waited until his ears had popped, before he turned to Haraklez. “You were saying something about having Great Dees?”

"Pa! Maks and I are all right!” Ilia ran from the hands of the person who pulled her out of the shattered school, to her father, pulling her brother along by the hand and he caught them up tight. Haraklez hadn’t heard, didn’t answer, for she’d gotten up and run, or rather limped over to her family.

Ky felt his father’s arm tighten around him as Ilax held his youngest two children in his arms, as tired as he was. He set them down and knelt to not let go of them, throwing an arm open to include Haraklez in the familial knot.

“I’m so glad you were not hurt in that,” Kyrus said.“I’m so glad. But we are still going to have a talk, young man, about what you were doing out on the mountain outside the baffles. I saw where you came down from.”

“Yeah, da. But that might have to come after the fact that you’re... um... not a secret any more.”

His da didn’t say a word to that, until Ilax got up again and turned toward them.“Here comes the first charge,” the older Lainz finally said, and got to his feet as if he were an old man.