“What could he have seen?” N’ton demanded urgently, tapping F’nor’s shoulder to get his attention.
“Clouds,” F’nor said, stepping back to let N’ton in. “Like a fist. Which turned into a dragon’s eye. Clouds, that’s all he could have seen, over backward Nerat!”
N’ton looked up from the eyepiece, sighing with relief.
“Cloud formations won’t get us anywhere!”
F’nor held his hand up for Grall. She came down obediently and when she started to hop to his shoulder, he forestalled her, gently stroking her head, smoothing her wings flat. He held her level with his eyes and, without stopping the gentle caresses, began to project the image of that fist, lazily forming over Nerat. He outlined color, grayish-red, and whitish where the top of the imagined fingers might be sun-struck. He visualized the fingers closing above the Neratian peninsula. Then he projected the image of Grall taking the long step between, to the Red Star, into that cloud fist.
Terror, horror, a whirling many-faceted impression of heat, violent wind, burning breathlessness, sent him staggering against N’ton as Grall, with a fearful shriek, launched herself from his hand and disappeared.
“What happened to her?” N’ton demanded, steadying the brown rider.
“I asked her,” and F’nor had to take a deep breath because her reaction had been rather shattering, “to go to the Red Star.”
“Well, that takes care of Brekke’s idea!”
“But why did she over react that way? Canth?”
She was afraid! Canth replied didactically, although he sounded as surprised as F’nor. You gave vivid coordinates.
“I gave vivid coordinates?”
Yes.
“What terrified Grall? You aren’t reacting the way she did and you heard the coordinates.”
She is young and silly. Canth paused, considering something. She remembered something that scared her. The brown dragon sounded puzzled by that memory.
“What does Canth say?” N’ton asked, unable to pick up the quick exchange.
“He doesn’t know what frightened her. Something she remembers, he says.”
“Remembers? She’s only been hatched a few weeks.”
“A moment, N’ton.” F’nor put his hand on the bronze rider’s shoulder to silence him for a thought had suddenly struck him. “Canth,” he said taking a deep breath, “You said the coordinates I gave her were vivid. Vivid enough – for you to take me to that fist I saw in the clouds?”
Yes, I can see where you want me to go, Canth replied so confidently that F’nor was taken aback. But this wasn’t a time to think things out.
He buckled his tunic tightly and jammed the gloves up under the wristbands.
“You going back now?” N’ton asked.
“Fun’s over here for the night,” F’nor replied with a nonchalance that astonished him. “Want to make sure Grall got back safely to Brekke. Otherwise I’ll have to sneak in to Southern to the cove where she hatched.”
“Have a care then,” N’ton advised. “At least we’ve solved one problem tonight. Meron can’t make that fire lizard of his go to the Red Star ahead of us.”
F’nor had mounted Canth. He tightened the fighting straps until they threatened to cut off circulation. He waved to N’ton and the watchrider, suppressing his rising level of excitement until Canth had taken him high above the Weyr.
Then he stretched flat along Canth’s neck and looped the hand straps double around his wrists. Wouldn’t do to fall off during this jump between.
Canth beat steadily upward, directly toward the baleful Red Star, high in the dark heavens, almost as if the dragon proposed to fly there straight.
Clouds were formed by water vapors, F’nor knew. At least they were on Pern. But it took air to support clouds. Air of some kind. Air could contain various gases. Over the plains of Igen where the noxious vapors rose from the yellow mountains you could suffocate with the odor and the stuff in your lungs. Different gases issued from the young fire mountains that had risen in the shallow western seas to spout flame and boiling rock into the water. The miners told of other gases, trapped in tunnel hollows. But a dragon was fast. A second or two in the most deadly gas the Red Star possessed couldn’t hurt. Canth would jump them between to safety.
They had only to get to that fist, close enough for Canth’s long eyes to see to the surface, under the cloud cover. One look to settle the matter forever. One look that F’nor – not F’lar – would make.
He began to reconstruct that ethereal fist, its alien fingers closing over the westering tip of grayness on the Red Star’s enigmatic surface. “Tell Ramoth. She’ll broadcast what we see to everyone, dragon, rider, fire lizard. We’ll have to go slightly between time, too, to the moment on the Red Star when I saw that fist. Tell Brekke.” And he suddenly realized that Brekke already knew, had known when she’d seduced him so unexpectedly. For that was why Lessa had confided in them, in Brekke. He couldn’t be angry with Lessa. She’d had the courage to take just such a risk seven Turns ago, when she’d seen a way back through time to bring up the five missing Weyrs.
Fill your lungs, Canth advised him and F’nor felt the dragon sucking air down his throat.
He didn’t have time to consider Lessa’s tactics because the cold of between enveloped them. He felt nothing, not the soft hide of the dragon against his cheek, nor the straps scoring his flesh. Only the cold. Black between had never existed so long.
Then they burst out of between into a heat that was suffocating. They dropped through the closing tunnel of cloud fingers toward the gray mass which suddenly was as close to them as Nerat’s tip on a high-level Thread pass.
Canth started to open his wings and screamed in agony as they were wrenched back. The snapping of his strong forelimbs went unheard in the incredible roar of the furnace-hot tornadic winds that seized them from the relative calm of the downdraft. There was air enveloping the Red Star – a burning hot air, whipped to flame-heat by brutal turbulences. The helpless dragon and rider were like a feather, dropped hundreds of lengths only to be slammed upward end over end, with hideous force. As they tumbled, their minds paralyzed by the holocaust they had entered, F’nor had a nightmare glimpse of the gray surfaces toward and away from which they were alternately thrown and removed: the Neratian tip was a wet, slick gray that writhed and bubbled and oozed. Then they were thrown into the reddish clouds that were shot with nauseating grays and whites, here and there torn by massive orange rivers of lightning. A thousand hot points burned the unprotected skin of F’nor’s face, pitted Canth’s hide, penetrating each lid over the dragon’s eyes. The overwhelming, multileveled sound of the cyclonic atmosphere battered their minds ruthlessly to unconsciousness.
Then they were hurled into the awesome calm of a funnel of burning, sand-filled heat and fell toward the surface – crippled and impotent.
Painridden, F’nor had only one thought as his senses failed him. The Weyr! The Weyr must be warned!
Grall returned to Brekke, crying piteously, burrowing into Brekke’s arm. She was trembling with fear but her thoughts made such chaotic nonsense that Brekke was unable to isolate the cause of her terror.
She stroked and soothed the little queen, tempting her with morsels of meat to no effect. The little lizard refused to be quieted. Then Berd caught Grall’s anxiety and when Brekke scolded him, Grall’s excitement and anguish intensified.
Suddenly Mirrim’s two greens came swooping into the weyr, twittering and fluttering, also affected by the irrational behavior of the little queen. Mirrim came running in then, escorted by her bronze, bugling and fanning his gossamer wings into a blur.
“Whatever is the matter? Are you all right, Brekke?”
“I’m perfectly all right,” Brekke assured her, pushing away the hand Mirrim extended to her forehead. “They’re just excited that’s all. It’s the middle of the night. Go back to bed.”