Kyrus
sat, drying off his neck. Even in the depths of the bird barn there
wasn't a dry space. Everything was wet. It was odd and spooky.
Only in Milar had he encountered quite this much water and that was
in a solid form that you could put somewhere. He tried not to think of the smell.
“Kyrus!”
Da called him over to the largest hole in the roof, where they
hadn't been able to mander anything more than stable edges on the
hole, since the water was coming down fast enough that it kept
washing things away. They didn't have any cliners who were strong
enough to remove the water faster than it was coming in.
“Yes,
da?”
“I
need you and your mother. She's just coming in from riding.” He'd
been trying to ignore the noise and mess kicked up when any birds
came in, much less a dozen. The end door had just been closed and
the girls and boys were all giggling and making a silly fuss over
their rain veils. Lainz had them but tended not to send troops out
during the wildest of the rains. They were as translucent as the
best third veils that women wore, but were water phobic and strapped
around legs or to saddles, glistening and shimmering with the last
beads of water and mud-balls bouncing off them.
Dag
settled her face veil and held the back of her sarband away from her
neck, shook it and let it settle. She was smiling. He could tell.
It made him happy but it made him uncomfortable at the same time.
She was the ma who he'd listened to before things fell apart. Guano,
she was a mama whom anybody would
listen to. Somehow she'd gotten stronger after he left. Wilder.
Scarier. That's my ma. He
let the sneaking pride gather in his torso. I am so proud
that she's my ma.
“Riding,
in this,” was all he said.
Da
smiled sideways at him. “Not proper for a woman?”
“Daaaa!”
Why does da have to poke me like that? Then
a thought struck him that stopped him, just for a moment. Perhaps he
was just saying what made him uncomfortable?
Kyrus blinked and looked back and forth between his parents.
His
father just smiled at him from where he sat, cross-legged on his
saddle pad. The lin box was in front of him, but there was no fibre
in it, just water, almost still. “Sit down, would you, son? I
need you to mander some of this water around for me.”
“Sure,
da.” Kyrus twitched another saddle pad from the rack next to them,
and settled down. Even if it was damp it was better than the
constantly squishy floor. “I'd like you to set up a mist curtain
here in the box for me.” He indicated the lin.
It
was right next to the waterfall from the ceiling, so Kyrus ringed the
hole with a hollow to gather the water, run it along the ceiling to
over the lin and then out through myriad tiny holes and over
hair-thin threads to break up the larger droplets. The water began
falling into the lin, coiling down till it shimmered on the water
already in the box. Da reached out and drew a finger in the sand
around the lin and connected it up with the drainage lines in the
floor.
“In
a day or two the rains will stop, I am sure,” he said. “Then
someone will have to pour or pump water through here to do this, but
at least... ah, Dag. Please sit down, Nasera.”
This
is so strange. My father and my mother, both sitting down next to
each other. Both working together for the good of Lainz, but...
well... I'm here too because they slept with each other before ma got
lost in code and ran afoul of lung clot. They never married.
They... well, they look like friends. Good friends. Ma looks good
but then she's always hanging around that Yasna fellow and the other
chickriders. Da's always with Ilax and the other Asses of Lainz.
I... I suppose... His thought
cut off as Dag drew on code and drew on the mist curtain with her
finger. “Contact open,” she said. “Waiting contact.”
It
was odd, it was as though she stared into the code world, not seeing
the stinking bird-barn at all. The mist curtain showed a circle
where she'd interrupted the falling water. The rest was gray, the
centre of the circle was black and had small crackling lightning all
around the edges. Then there's a hum and a picture sitting in the
middle of the curtain. A moving picture of the throne-room at Lainz.
Is that a hole through...
“Hello,
Radiance,” Nasera Basserus said, through the mist curtain. “We've
figured out how to make the lin broadcast moving images and sound.”
“Excellent!”
Da smiled big enough to see under the veil and the dim light. Ma was
still, apparently holding the connection in code. “Tell me
everything I've missed while I've been out here.”
“Yes,
Brilliance! We are about to get some of our informants back from
Xanadu, along with a refugee from Prime. Hara has presented us with
amazing developments...”
She
kept talking as da kept nodding and Kyrus just had to stop and repeat
that in his head. He knew that Hara was a smart girl. He knew that
they'd left her behind with Mother Thriti and the Head of the School
but... she'd come up
with things? All by herself? Oh, he was never going to live it
down... he and Werfas stuck out here hauling people out of the mess
by the scruffs of their necks, being the muscle boy, and she
was busy solving their Prime
problem?
I've
got to talk to Werfas about it.
___________________
Apologies for posting this late. My internet went down last night. More later.
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