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.

62 - An Ancient Rusting Shield

Diryish settled at his desk, the door locked tight behind him.  This was one of his jobs that was too dangerous for anyone else to venture into with him.  The planetary Hive was only the image he placed on it, he knew very well, but it was necessary for him to have very concrete images to cling to when infiltrating the deadliest programs on the planet.  Especially since the Owner believed he was the only programmer with legitimate access.

He pricked a finger and planted his thumbprint on it, turned to the mirror reflecting his enlarged face, opening his eyes wide and still to ensure correct identification.  “Access Code 2.”  A flash that only he could see and the bees in his Great Hive roared up and soared out over the canyon, making people in the city below exclaim.  “Quiet mode,” he said, imagining shadows pouring over his image, over his head.

A buzz in his inner ear.  “Access granted: User 2.3, Quiet mode engaged." He closed his eyes and withdrew his eyes from the millions of tiny views his bees gave him, of the city, turned inward.

I leave my zardukar programmers behind, protected in their veils and decend into the pit.  I’ve always imagined it so.  The bees go with me as far as they can, as far as I let them.

At the bottom of the stairs, there are three doors.  Owner’s access points.  Door Prime, ten times larger than either of the others.  Strands of light feed in and out of it in a shower of brilliance.  Roads full of insect traffic flow in and out.  It is so bright I can almost not see the door itself.

I always thought it was overdone.  Gold, curlicues, light and arrows and fire bursts exploding thunderously in homage to the Prime owner of the whole enLightened and enDarkened planet. The first Prime... User 1.0, must have had an enormous ego to consider that he deserved to own an entire planet.  And now Prime 1.3 obviously continued to believe he had no reason to hide his hubris.  Once 1.0 thought he’d destroyed the other owners, there was no reason to be modest and had only himself to amuse on this level of programming.

However much he thinks of himself as Prime and only, that access to the main planetary programs is still heavily guarded. The door is set into a burning wall of red hot iron with flames crackling blue all over its surface.  I would not brave the monsters he has set at the doors.

I’ve always seen his mental monsters as fire-breathing dragons on many, many wheeled feet.  Lightning eyes crackle through the darkness that is my protection. Flyers with acid dripping from fangs and wingtips.  Tiny trap bugs whose only function is to die noisily and messily should I be so clumsy as to tread on one.

I ignore the Tertius door.  I’ve always seen it as smoldering rubble off to one side.  Prime pounded that owner into biological goo almost a thousand years ago.  My great grandfather told me all about that fight, with fire dropping from the sky, the ice comets diverted to destroy our homes and labs.

We were just an afterthought when One and Three went after each other. Why bother killing mere people when the planet will do it for you?  Just destroy their homes, all the places they can filter out the toxic dust?

Prime would have no other owner before him. May flesh-eating lice infest his yakis.

I slide carefully past door Prime, right under the nose of a quiescent dragon.  There is a Secundus door still, behind the rubble of Tertius. Shadowed. Rusted. Chained. Locked. Barred and bolted.  Not to me.  I am Secundus.3.  It opens just enough to let me slide in, clicks shut behind me, lets me past the blazing walls.

The garden beyond is full of the planetary programs designed to make this Chishiki, home.  I see the garden but dare not step into the light.  His flying monsters will crush me like a virus.  I keep to the shadows and send my secretly programmed idea bees seeking.

"New patches." I whisper.

They fly out.  One or two are shot down as error codes and crisped wings fall to neatly gravelled, perfectly controlled electrified paths. The stink of burning code bothers me.

I am tired.  This is stressful on my body.  Programming this deep.  Programming this subtle so that Prime does not see that we still live.

The edges of the garden, between the Terran green and blue and the toxic reds and purples of Chishikan wax plants, is a seething mass of chaos.  Here are the working programs, smears of blue, smears of brown like viable earth.  

Waterfalls of blue fall through white and silver filters.

The ones we stole... or continue to use... are here.  Ancient code, secretly patched with shining gold and silver woven into rusting iron webworks.  I pick and choose the patches I can copy and carry away... to weave into the Hive, my Hive.

Copy.  Copy. I pack them carefully so they do not hatch into larvae and try to patch into each other on the trek home.  I look at the elaborate webwork in front of me and see that this particular evil little wasp program has been encysted but the encyst code is far too complex for the ancient web I wish to weave it into.  I reach to try and copy it, easy, gently, lifting... and I brush one of the red weapons threads.

I freeze as the whole defensive program wakes.  I carefully kneel as the ground rears up all around me, heads of the serpents bursting through the edges between Terra and Chishiki, seeking to rend and bite and pull me into tiny bits of programming.  If I die here, my body dies because my mind is killed.

I hold up my ancient, rusted shield over my head and crouch under it, able to see through the holes in the old code.  I brought no sword of thought here.  I could not fight an entire planetary defensive code.  My only hope is to be un-noticed, or dismissed as obsolete code.

A serpent capable of swallowing me whole sniffs the path I stand upon, and up over my shield, hesitates a long moment and does another huffing pass that presses me and my precious stolen code flat.

61 - Muddy to the Ends of Their Hair

Verpiccaus set to cline the tiny area defined by Ky. That much mud he could handle at his level of training. It sublimated even as Ky went deeper into the tube they were cutting into the mud, water steamed away, evaporating, flowing out from under, the mud became dry dirt, then dust, then blew away completely.

Ilax and Kyrus were working together as if they’d done it all their lives, both of them holding nothing in their hands but air as they carved square blocks out of the side of the mound. A dozen people took the solid bricks they were cutting and hauled them away. Four other air holes were being driven down, to try and reach the survivors, Ky was only vaguely aware, his attention entirely on his own task. Air, they need air, they need air... was the refrain in his head, echoed by the tightness in his own chest.

A long, hot, sweltering time later, Ky’s tool hit something more solid than mud and his cut stopped because it was unexpected -- cutting earth not wood. He dropped to his knees and pounded his stick down against the wood blocking him and was rewarded with a banging from inside and a muffled shout.

“Stand BACK!” he yelled into the hole and drew back. 

“Verpiccaus? Do you have a small enough piece of the wood down there for you to work?”

Ver, his normally petulant face drawn white and exhausted, nodded shortly and pulled in a deep breath. Ky got up, staggering and moved back. Franghad was just as ghastly, pale skin covered with splotches.

“Here, children... rest...” One of the Milari, someone he knew came to take the pole out of his hands and he barely remembered to let go the idea of cutting before it hurt someone and it became mere wood once more. Another Bey came to help Verpiccaus and a See came to make the hole they’d bored into the mud more stable. “They’re through! They’ve got air!”

“Go on over to sit, youngster. You need water and some rest... you can come back in a bit. Good work.”

Someone had set up a place for diggers and manders and cliners to rest. “I wish we had the great manders,” Franghad said, shivering and wrapping her hands around a cup of tea. “They would just have lifted the whole slide and dropped it in a valley somewhere.”

“That’s just a feathered dragon story,” Verpiccaus said from where he was lying flat on the ground, just breathing. "It was probably some person moving a boulder and the tale grew in the telling."

Someone called from the digging. “There are three classrooms... and the private lessons people... we haven’t gotten through to everyone yet but we think they’re all right.”

“Oh good,” Ky said, tiredly. “Oh good.” Franghad burst into tears of relief, water cutting tracks on her dirty face.

Haraklez staggered over and collapsed next to them. “I don’t know where Maks is. Ilia’s down there, but she’s all right.”

“He’s probably in a different section of the building.”

“Yes.” She looked at him and at the toiling people who had not yet come to the limits of their strength, people coming up to take their places. Ilax and Kyrus still working. “So, Ky. That man on the mountain... you know him. Who is he?”

Ky rubbed hands over his face. Even though he didn’t feel so naked as he used to without the veil, he wished for it desperately, even as the muck flaked off. “I...” he looked over where the two were finally giving over to another pair of men who continued their tunnel burrowing into the mudslide toward the biggest group of survivors.

“...um...”

Both Ilax and Kyrus accepted water and then tea... and sank down next to the group of children. Ky swallowed and took another deep drink of water. “I... can’t answer you, Haraklez. I...”

“Good work, children,” Ilax said quietly as he settled down, interrupting Ky. “Very very good work. People have air and we’re getting close to getting everyone out." He gathered Haraklez under one muddy arm. Ky thought he should be grown up about things, but his father gathered him in a hug under one arm anyway, without asking.

Werfas’s mother sat down beside them as well. “We’re getting there. We need to get our strength back and get back to it.”

“Yes, Zazh,” Ilax said quietly. “We’ll be on our feet again in a moment or two. I know, you have...” He was silenced by a tense, hissing argument between the Rumon and the Nadumarian who ended up throwing off both their robes at once. Ilax started up, obviously afraid they had come to some kind of breaking argument, but rather than drawing their weapons they clasped hands and wrists, as stiff and bristling as if a strange dog and a wild cat were asked to sit together.

Ilax rose all the way to his feet with more calm. “I’ll be right back, Hara.”

“Sure, Pa.”

“What are they doing?” Ky whispered to Kyrus. “Do you know?”

Haraklez looked back at them, moved to sit next to Ky. I shall die of mud-covered embarrassment, except my father surely knows about this girl. He suddenly felt her warm weight leaning against him on the one side, and his father’s arm around him from the other was the most right thing in the world.

“It looks like the two ambassadors have some skill that might help us, if they can set their differences aside. Pa is going to try and smooth things out.”

The three people stood in a quiet circle, speaking low enough that Ky couldn’t hear a thing. He thought he could tell the problem, the Nadumarian kept crossing his arms and standing tall as if he could actually get taller than the Rumon woman, who overtopped him by a bare three fingers. She and Ilax were both waving their arms around at the disaster... people trying to get up to help too soon, someone carried off the slide, fainting.

Everyone was the same colour the same texture, all coated in mud. Everyone who was not muddy to the ends of their hair were only so because they’d gotten clean to make drinkable tea and were working on a clean broth that would be hopefully needed to combat shock and give diggers and workers some of their energy back. The mud slide had made everyone the same.

It was a long moment before Ilax touched the Rumon on the shoulder and she dropped her hands, but not in frustration, just letting him do his job. The surdeniliarch pointed out another of his people who had collapsed and was being carried away. His hand indicated the whole extent of the slide... the number of people available to provide rescue. The Nadumarian finally relented.

“Everyone pull back! Get down!” Ilax shouted and the cry was passed on up the slide. People looked up, startled but moved off onto solid ground when his call was repeated. 

“We’re going to try something.” It was obvious, but people liked to hear their thought confirmed.

“Oh, my.” Kyrus said, his voice a rumble in Ky’s ear. “It looks like we might have everyone out in a few minutes if they can get that to work.”

60 - Trying to Fix Sub Program 485 V43.8.4.1

Yasna... I was ambitious.  I thought if I could be the one to fix the scorpions, the detoxifiers, I would be famous, acclaimed, worthy of my love.  I was warned. I was warned and warned and warned.  Scorpions sting.  Without a whole team, a single programmer, a single dreamer couldn't hope to fix the problems bequeathed us by the owners.

I was stung.  Detox program, sub-program four hundred eighty five, verison 43.8.4.1.  Run code, error 4404, code not found.  The virus programs swarmed me.  I was bugged.  I am bugged. They attempted to erase me.  Toxic, substance arsenic, trace amounts, acceptable. I am acceptable.  They only erased part of my control programs.

Yasna said they were recoverable. They are being recovered.  But I have to stop the endless information dumps.  They corrupt my code all over again, except for the firewalls he erects so carefully in my head.  Cleaned code is behind those walls, safe.

A fragment of owner English in the mess “... damned low-balling contractors.  This software is so crappy it may as well be electronic goo poured into my goddamned brain.  Not only does it not do its job, it fucks up other functioning programs and we are parsecs away from being able to walk into Bio-Savvy’s office and get a patch! The God-damned Owner won’t even give us packet time to download something from home! Sweet fucking, pigeon toe-walking Jah this piece of crap is going to kill us all...”

I don’t understand. The owner bought something from a zardukar?  A low baller?  Is that sex or programming? My son, I’m dreaming of boulders raining from the sky.  The stars fall every night and sometimes twinkle bright in the blue day sky.  Ice falling out of the sky to bring us water.  It will be years before the water is flowing, covering the toxic sand deep as legends of home oceans.  Like full Basins but all over the planet.  Not just in tiny lakes or at the poles.

We are all lost in the desert.  I see a drift of code go by and refrain from seizing it, trying to fix it. Yasna says they are scorpions and venomous serpents and lizards and birds buried in the biomass, waiting to strike if I take the bait.

I ran a jumble of glass and metal flakes through my fingers and the tiniest of black beads began to acrete into scorpions, but they are and were deformed, legless, or legs only on one side.  Stingers longer than their bodies, they twitched sideways trying to stand up for me.  My bugs.  They turned their malformed heads to me as if in pain and I let them disintegrate into their bits before I could see into their shining eyes, the reflections of my ambition and my headstrong stupidity.

I should not say I was stupid.  If I had finished my training... if I had gone with my sisters as a team we might have fixed this problem, but I was young and stupid with hormones and desperately wanted Kyrus’s father to see me as worthy of his son.

I am only worthy of myself now.  Yasna says I always was worthy of myself.  Kyrus said I was worthy and I shouldn’t try so hard I’d run myself off a cliff.  The dust is thick today as if a wind-devil had thrashed it all into the air somehow.

I am dreaming of being crushed by the earth, my Kyrus buried in wet mud.  Why?  Wet?  There is no mud here.   

Water sinks into the sand and vanishes, leaving the surface powder set but dry. It is Milar, trying to kill him.  Light and Dark preserve my son.

**

Kyrus hefted the probing pole in his hands as he ran, tried to take a deep breath, choked and tried again. No wonder Milari are such warriors... He didn’t want to think about what they’d find under the mud. It would be like a sandstorm, only worse.

The mud that hadn’t buried that end of town was slowly oozing between buildings now, water running out before it. Tree trunks from the edge of the town dotted the mass of mud and stones. Crushed vegetation of all kinds and twisted mud-covered shapes that he didn’t want to look more closely at. Broken red roof tiles. Parts of the skeletons of buildings, the glitter of razor shards of glass here and there, a strangely clean broken blue tile.

Dotted here and there were knots of people probing where they thought their houses had been, searching for loved ones who had been home sick, but most of the town was gathered here, for their children.

Someone up ahead yelled “They’re buried, but everyone’s alive!” What? Oh, thank Light and Dark. People shouted back, scrambled up the syrupy slope, sludge flowing away under their feet as they tried to climb. “It’s the teachers! There’s at least one Dee making the mud flow elsewhere!” It was one of the professional manders a Seemander, lying pressed to the muck, hands buried to the wrists as he struggled to extend his feelings. “That’s all I can get!”

“Keep trying, Aetava. Ky... here work with Verpiccaus and Franghad! We need to get a hole open to them, for air if nothing else.” Ilax took Kyrus the Elder’s elbow. “Here, let us begin here.”

People were probing but the mud was liquid enough to fill every hole and every shovel taken away slumped full of muck from higher up.

“I can’t decline a whole mountainside,” Ver said worriedly. “My little sibs are in there.” 

Some cliners needed specific edges to work and break down and remove material. The mudslide was too big for them to remove at once, no one could hold that much mass at one time. Ky firmly set aside his last lingering horrors of his own mandery. He manifested an edge to the pole in his hands that shimmered faintly in the sun. Franghad, on the other side, set her mind to ‘becoming the mountain’ so that whatever Kyrus and Verpiccaus did would not slump into uselessness the moment they tried.

The world is edges, limits, this side and that side. A whole may be divided into two pieces, two pieces into four, four into eight. His idea of a sharpened pole... the whole length of it plunged into the mud, cut a circle in the muck. He could feel Franghad holding the edge he created, somehow it was as clear as a diagram in his head.

59 - Encaustic Moths and Mordant Ants

Diryish looked down at the ball of bees, no longer spasmodically convulsing. His hands were gentle as he lifted mats of bees from his arms and head and neck. “Shh. Shh little sisters. You did your job. I’m safe. I’m safe.” 

He felt odd speaking to the bees but even more odd if he did not and he'd been speaking to the bees for many, many years. They responded to his voice and spiralled up in a misty cloud, heading for the outer hive once more.

The room was hot, almost glowing as if someone had lit a brazier immediately beside the bed. The centre of the ball of bees was dead. As the outer layers dispersed, like buzzing fog, the mass fell apart, gems and gold trapped in the centre clinking and chiming as cool air hit them. The abdomen was a melted puddle of goo. The pearl pieces lay scattered, trash in the midst of brittle, disintegrating bees but not for long. The live bees came to clear away their dead, leaving the mess of gem chips, cracked glass, tarnished metal and melted atomizer scrupulously alone on the bedside rug.

He drew in a deep breath and whispered a request. A dozen bees circled up and darted away. As he sat, the hive outside began fanning hot air out of the bedroom, letting in the cold from outside. The temperature in the room had dropped by the time a phalanx of glittering little Mordant ants swarmed in from the balcony, completely ignored by the bees.

On their tiny amber heels, Mariush slipped in from the secret ways that honeycombed the Sunrise Loggia.  She looked a bit green, over her translucent face veil, having been woken up but she was the closest of the investigative programmers.

“Diryish are you all right?”  She knelt on the edge of the rug where the remains of the spider lay, setting her wax lamp to cast its light across the remains of the ruined assassin machine.

“I’m fine.  The hive protected me.  The alarms were set off the instant it moved from innocuous things to that.” He pointed with one knob-knuckled, beringed finger.  “I sent for Shashi as well.”

Mariush nodded, not looking up from where her jewelled ants were hard at work laying the various gems and broken, melted pieces out on the rug.  “Good.  Maybe this time we can find out which owner’s-smegma stain has been trying to kill you.”

“Now, now.”  That was Shashi, bare-faced, in her sleeping gown, ghosting up into Diryish’s bedroom as quietly and secretly as Mariush had.  “Mother would be horrified at your language.”

“Only because she didn’t say it first.”

Shashi sank down to the floor next to her friend, but looked up at Diryish before she opened up to help Mariush try to ferret out the programming behind the attempted killer.   

“You need to stay out of this, Uncle.  Your deenay would contaminate the sample since it was targeted on you.”

He waved a hand.  “I shall be content to watch your expertise.  I’m not a young warrior who insists he can fight all battles all by himself and am resigned to delegating what I am not good at, Niece.”

She smiled at him and called up her programming machines, the tiny black Encaustic moths.  They drifted down to where Mariush’s ants worked.

Where the moths landed, they tasted with their feet and not every gem that had made up the mal-spider hissed or smoked in pin-holes and were hauled to one side by the ants.  At last there were no more reactions and Shashi sat with her arms wrapped around her middle. Mariush held her shoulders and for a moment they rocked together, moths resting on the backs of ants.

Shashi took a deep breath and opened her eyes to find Diryish holding a honeycomb to her.  “It was hard, I take it,” he said.

She accepted the honey and wax and bit into it, slurping to catch the dripping sweetness.  “Whoever it is, is good.  I could follow the programming bits left but they were burning even as I tried to catch them.  No surprise that they are your deenay, Uncle.” She touched a burnt opalene.  “This was a gift from General de M’olf.”  Her finger moved over to a fragment of emerald necklace.  “This was from me, but my protections for you were overwritten with other code to make it part of this.  I am not trying to kill you Uncle.  Daddy would never forgive me.”

Diryish let a trace of a smile cross his face.  “If you were trying to kill me, Chicklet, I’d be dead by now because you are competent.”

“Oh, Uncle...”  But she didn’t smile back, licking her fingers clean and taking a cloth from Mariush.  “This pearl was a gift from General Emrad, and I checked it out as safe myself.  I remember Daddy giving it to me as a test, but Emrad died seven years ago and this isn’t the same programming that my father and I both cleared.  I could tell that even as it’s rotting in place.”  She paused.  “There’s a single deenay sequence driving the whole thing but it is crashed and burned. I can’t tell even the sex of the programmer.”

“It’s all right Chicklet,” Diryish said, and turned to Mariush.  “Did you decode anything, my dear?”

“Two things, Diryish,” she said softly.  “Firstly, the chemical reaction to create poison was out of two separate fluids, neither venomous.  I believe it was two of your perfumes.  It was someone who knows you that well so I guessed and tried to match Zivrush’s signature programming style to it, but it wouldn’t work.  That’s the second thing.  It wasn’t your vizier behind this attempt.  That’s all I can tell.” 

The Encaustic moths flew up like a sooty veil in the wind, settled onto Shashi’s night robe, around the neck and cuffs, becoming only decorative beads and embroidery once more, even as Mariush's ants clambered up and resumed their guise as veil weights.

Mariush pulled a handkerchief embroidered with both Mordants and Encaustics, ants and moths both, out of her sleeve.  “I’m going to give you this, Diryish.  I know the hive is protecting you but let me add ours to that.”

He took the square of cloth softly and kissed it.  “Thank you my dears.”  Then he hung it on the veil hook where so recently she had hung her veil.

“We’ll report to Mother, but you can trust that no one else will know about this, until Daddy does,” Shashi said. "I have a plan or two to try and catch our Eight Hundred Spined snake."

“I am safe in my sisters’ hands,” he said and laid himself down again.  “You and your babies should get some sleep if you can.”

Mariush snorted.  “Shashi is the one being kicked open from the inside.  This little one is still too tiny to be fractious.”

He smiled but didn’t open his eyes.  “Good night.  I believe that is called a hint.”

Shashi had the bedside rug bundled around the spider trash.  Mariush had her lamp. She sighed loudly.  “That Uncle of yours... sleeping, sleeping, sleeping... all the time sleeping...”

“Go, before I hurl a pillow at you.”

“Yes, your Radiance.”

I ache so badly that I almost wish the spider had succeeded.  I’m tired.  But the city still needs me, worn out old mechanism that I am.  The paper is now coming from Trovi.  The problems with free-flowing, non-fading ink are finally being worked out.  We will have printed books soon.  Printed pamphlets.  Libraries.  But not yet.

58 - In the Open

“Ky!” It was his father, in the open, bare-faced, even his beard caked with filth, yelling in Milari, waving them over to where he could help them to more solid ground. “This way! You can get down much faster this way!” The edge of the slide was like an oozing wall at his head height, stones locked tight against the ruined baffle wall. He picked Jashi right up off the edge, setting him down. Kyrus slid down into his father’s frantic one-armed hug, Haraklez taking his other hand. 

Werfas's feet hit the ground a bare fraction later.

The toxic underlayer of dirt was still roiling through the air, filling lungs with choking, settling more slowly than the heavier clay that had fallen off the mountainside.

My da is out. In the open where everyone can see him. “Ilax was supposed to be at the Unity,” Kyrus Sr. said. “We have to get people out, fast. Did you see how many houses were inundated?” Haraklez and Werfas and Jashi barely glanced at him, a muck-caked scarecrow, they didn’t recognize, as they ran down the mountainside.

“Don’t know,” Ky said. There was another rumble and with a single sweep of his arm Kyrus shoved all of them into the lee of the last baffle above the town, crouching with them, obviously hoping it would hold, hoping the mud would flow somewhere else. There was another slide, but east, not a direct threat. Ky could feel tears running down his face, though the dirt, could hear the others sobbing, even as they waited, in agony to find out if their families were all right.

“Werfas! Your house is still standing, I can see it,” Ky said through chattering teeth. And Jashi’s place is right near the Hall... Your parents would all be at the Unity.” There was dirt between his teeth, on his tongue, gulped in, breathed in. He spat and spat again. He didn’t even notice the ferret’s claws dug into his neck he hurt so much all over.

“And Maks and Ilia would likely be in class.”

“The school is under the mud,” Haraklez sobbed. “I saw… I saw…”

The rumbling, hissing snake voice of the slide subsided again and they emerged from their dubious shelter and ran once more. Ky’s lungs burned and his heart felt like it was going to pound out of his chest. He tried to rub the grit out of his eyes but there was just more grit on his hand. Only tears helped. 

“We need to go to the Unity first,” the elder Kyrus said. “We need to be organized to save as many people as we can.”

The crowd of Viltarians milling around the Unity were being formed up, starting to move purposefully when they came pounding up to the steps where Ilax was snapping out orders. 

“Manders, Cliners to the fore, we don’t care if you’re a bare Ahy, you can help.”

Haraklez thew herself into her father’s arms and he folded them gratefully around her. “Oh, my Ancestor’s ghosts, I thought I’d lost you.”

The Ambassadors from Rumon and Nadumar, normally so tense and prickly, stood side by side, unnoticing. The Charnan Ambassador had thrown off her Robe of Ceremony and she and her entourage were helping hand out shovels and probing sticks. All ceremony was set aside as far as she was concerned.

Werfas scanned the crowds, looking for his parents. “Ma! Ma! I’m all right!” He obviously saw them, jumped down and went pushing through to reach them.

“Jashi, stay here,” Ilax commanded. “Your parents will come to you. Don’t run off.” This without letting go his eldest. “Oh my dead and ghostly ones, Haraklez, I thought I’d lost you.” Then his head snapped up. “Inamor! What? Why?—“

“—We can explain everything later. I had to. We need every hand now to get everyone unburied.”

With a snap of a nod Ilax went from father and lover to commander once more. "Grab those poles. There are shovels enough. Let’s go.” In the sea of faces, some muddy, all distorted by fear, by concern, by hope and despair both at once, no one looked twice at another warrior rushing to help, first to the mandery school, to rescue their children.

57 - Terra Infirma

Jashi grinned wide all across his face, plunked himself onto the overlapping blankets between Haraklez and Kyrus and popped his jug open, obviously feeling very grown up. “I did, didn’t I? Werfas you shouldn’t let anybody see you taking the farva jug out.” He used the Milari word for the alcohol, brewed from fermented goat and sheep milk.

“Right, squirt. You must have been hiding when I did that because I made sure no one could see me!” 

Tizrav was refusing to settle down on any of her favourite people. Since Kyrus had started training with and staying with his father more often, she’d adopted him and often rode in and slept in his shirt. This time she was restless, even for a ferret.

**

One never knows the trigger for some things. No human foot could have set it off, on the brutal razor-edged slopes of Hvardehaye mountain. Perhaps a neovole ran over a rock. Perhaps a gust of wind finally set up a wave. Perhaps a Milari Ancestor ghost finally managed to affect the physical world.

The mountain groaned a note so deep it was almost unheard. The voles tried to hide in their hole, frozen, even as it collapsed in on them, a hand-span of motion that crushed their tiny lives. A small shift.

The crows and ravens leaped for the sky, screaming, while a stork and his mate shrieked as their nest, on a massive boulder tipped, burying their eggs in the muck as the foreign biomaterial slipped on the substrate.

Muck. Mud and water slipped a double hand span on the mountain. Then a full man height and the height of a hundred men, faster and faster, the groan spiralling up as mud and stones and water at first scraped, then banged then tumbled against one other, a churning, boiling, crushing mass.

**

Haraklez sat up abruptly. “What’s that?”

Jashi jumped up as Tizrav screamed and darted away from them. Werfas caught her with one outflung hand, as Kyrus and Haraklez seized Jashi and each other as the ground began to shake under them. Werfas looked up, his eyes growing round and appalled, even as he hurled the ferret toward Kyrus and himself after, arms spread to pin everyone against the vertical face of the rock behind them.

Mud and water and stones and boulders exploded past them on either side, thundered up over their heads, arching over them, traveling far faster than a Moa could run, carrying rocks the size of small houses, all around them as they cowered against the meagre lee of outcropping. If anyone screamed anymore it was completely lost in the monster roar of the mud-slide batting aside the outer baffles, roaring down to devour part of Viltaria.

The noise went on and on and on, the dirt and rocks and water roaring like a mountain bellowing, a basso hiss as well, and with it the pounding, crushing, sensations battering them from three sides as the slide leapt over their heads and down, curled in-grasping fingers from either side. Kyrus struggled to breathe, clinging hard to unseen arms and backs and the whole world full of muck and water and stones. He jammed his nose tight, tight to his chest, trying to draw air out of the gap between his arm and his chest. If anyone screamed or yelled or sobbed, it was lost in the howl.

Then it stopped. Not all at once. The fading echoes of disaster cracked back and forth through the valleys drawing out the earth’s apparent rage. Stones clicked and settled slowly. Water and mud that had been kicked into the air rained down on the scar across the mountain, a brown, gray, red, black, dirty white flood, now almost motionless. In the distance the ravens and crows were a distant and retreating screeching. A weird silence held for a long, long moment.

Jashi stirred, coughed, coughed again and struggled to stand up. 

Kyrus unlocked his fingers slowly, one at a time, felt everyone doing the same, raised his head slowly, pried his glued together eyes open and looked up into Werfas’s dazed face, Haraklez’s closed eyes. Everyone coughed. “Tizzie bit me,” Jashi said. “She bit me!”

The four of them were buried almost to the waist in mud where it had flowed in on either side of them and over their heads as it plunged down the mountainside. A stone the size of a head rested just beside them. “Ouch.” That was Werfas. “If she bit me I don’t know it. I hurt all over.” His head had been jammed tight against the outcropping and so spared but his back had taken a beating as he’d hunched over them.

“I’m scraped and bashed,” Haraklez said. “But nothing’s broken that I can tell.”

Jashi managed to stand up in the middle of the protective knot, thrashing, took a step and fell down on hands and knees, vomiting muck, dirt pouring out of his mouth and nose. Haraklez set her hands on the new surface of earth and pulled herself out, groaning.

The three of them checked Jashi who managed to get all the dirt out of his throat and mouth and lungs and stomach, crying. Tiz dragged herself up Kyrus’s muck-solid shirt and plastered her drying mud self under his drying mud hair. The surface of the mud was just beginning to steam. Screams from below echoed up to them as they struggled out of the dirt. Screams and cries and a wild, drawn out wailing, the echoes making all words disappear into a broken cry of distress, rising louder and louder.

Half of the ancestor stones were buried by the mudslide. The avalanche baffles had almost done their job, the first dozen angled stone walls that could re-direct snow and ice had been overwhelmed by sliding earth and water. A muddy figure fought its way out of the half buried crack in the rock face.

The four on the mountain took in the extent of the devastation. “Oh Light and Dark!—“ “--Ancestors!” “—oh shit!” Haraklez heaved herself up to her feet, painfully, bruised. “Maks! Ilia! The house! The town! Oh, my Ancestors!” They could see that the west end of town, the scattering of houses, had vanished under the mud. She half fell, scrambling down the mountain. 

“Wait! Careful!”Werfas yelled hard enough that she stopped. “Remember! It can slide again! Stop!” As much as she wept and wanted to run down at top speed, they had to test each foot, pick their way to the edge of the flow, toward the first of the baffles that had held.