“Just excited?” Mirrim pursed her lips the way Lessa did when she knew someone was evading her. “Where’s Canth? Why ever did they leave you alone?”
“Mirrim!” Brekke’s tone brought the girl up sharp. She flushed, looking down at her feet, hunching her shoulders in the self-effacing way Brekke deplored. Brekke closed her eyes fighting to be calm although the distress of the five fire lizards was insidious. “Please get me some strong klah.”
Brekke rose and began to dress in riding clothes. The five lizards started to keen now, flitting around the room, swooping in wild dives as if they wanted to escape some unseen danger.
“Get me some klah,” she repeated, because Mirrim stood watching her like a numbwit.
Her trio of fire lizards had followed her out before Brekke realized her error. They’d probably rouse the lower Caverns with their distress. She called but Mirrim didn’t hear her. Cold chills made her fingers awkward.
Canth wouldn’t go if he felt it would endanger F’nor. Canth has sense, Brekke told herself trying to convince herself. He knows what he can and can’t do. Canth is the biggest, fastest, strongest brown dragon on Pern. He’s almost as large as Mnementh and nearly as smart.
Brekke heard Ramoth’s brassy bugle of alarm just as she received the incredible message from Canth.
Going to the Red Star? On the coordinates of a cloud? She staggered against the table, her legs trembling. She managed to sit but her hands shook so, she couldn’t pour the wine. Using both hands, she got the bottle to her lips and swallowed some that way. It helped.
She’d somehow not believed they’d see a way to go. Was that what had frightened Grall so?
Ramoth kept up her alarm and Brekke now heard the other dragons bellowing with worry.
She fumbled with the last closing of her tunic and forced herself to her feet, to walk to the ledge. The fire lizards kept darting and diving around her, keening wildly; a steady, nerve-jangling double trill of pure terror.
She halted at the top of the stairs, stunned by the confusion in the crepuscular gloom of the Weyr Bowl. There were dragons on ledges, fanning their wings with agitation. Other beasts were circling around at dangerous speeds. Some had riders, most were flying free. Ramoth and Mnementh were on the Stones, their wings outstretched, their tongues flicking angrily, their eyes bright orange as they bugled to their Weyrmates. Riders and weyrfolk were running back and forth yelling, calling to their beasts, questioning each other for the source of this inexplicable demonstration.
Brekke futilely clapped her hands to her ears, searching the confusion for a sight of Lessa or F’lar. Suddenly they both appeared at the steps and came running up to her. F’lar reached Brekke first, for Lessa hung back, one hand steadying herself against the wall.
“Do you know what Canth and F’nor are doing?” the Weyrleader cried. “Every beast in the Weyr is shrieking at the top of voice and mind!” He covered his own ears, glaring furiously at her, expecting an answer.
Brekke looked toward Lessa, saw the fear and the guilt in the Weyrwoman’s eyes.
“Canth and F’nor are on their way to the Red Star.”
F’lar stiffened and his eyes turned as orange as Mnementh’s. He stared at her with a compound of fear and loathing that sent Brekke reeling back. As if her movement released him, F’lar looked toward the bronze dragon roaring stentoriously on the heights.
His shoulders jerked back and his hands clenched into fists so tight the bones showed yellow through the skin.
At that instant, every noise ceased in the Weyr as every mind felt the impact of the warning the fire lizards had been trying inchoately to project.
Turbulence, savage, ruthless, destructive; a pressure inexorable and deadly. Churning masses of slick, sickly gray surfaces that heaved and dipped. Heat as massive as a tidal wave. Fear! Terror! An inarticulate longing!
A scream was torn from a single throat, a scream like a knife upon raw nerves!
“Don’t leave me alone!” The cry came from cords lacerated by the extreme of anguish; a command, an entreaty that seemed echoed by the black mouths of the weyrs, by dragon minds and human hearts.
Ramoth sprang aloft. Mnementh was instantly beside her. Then every dragon in the Weyr was a-wing, the fire lizards, too; the air groaned with the effort to support the migration.
Brekke could not see. Her eyes were filled with blood from vessels burst by the force of her cry. But she knew there was a speck in the sky, tumbling downward with a speed that increased with every length; a plunge as fatal as the one which Canth had tried to stop over the stony heights of the High Reaches range.
And there was no consciousness in that plummeting speck, no echo, however faint, to her despairing inquiry. The arrow of dragons ascended, great wings pumping. The arrow thickened, once, twice, three times as other dragons arrived, making a broad path in the sky, steadily striving for that falling mote.
It was as if the dragons became a ramp that received the unconscious body of their Weyrmate, received and braked its fatal momentum with their own bodies, until the last segment of overlapping wings eased the broken-winged ball of the bloody brown dragon to the floor of the Weyr.
Half-blinded as she was, Brekke was the first person to reach Canth’s bleeding body, F’nor still strapped to his burned neck. Her hands found F’nor’s throat, her fingers the tendon where his pulse should beat. His flesh was cold and sticky to the touch and ice would be less hard.
“He isn’t breathing,” someone cried. “His lips are blue!”
“He’s alive, he’s alive,” Brekke chanted. There, one faint shallow flutter against her seeking fingers. No, she didn’t imagine it. Another.
“There wasn’t any air on the Red Star. The blueness. He suffocated.”
Some half-forgotten memory prompted Brekke to wrench F’nor’s jaws apart. She covered his mouth with hers and exhaled deeply into his throat. She blew air into his lungs and sucked it out.
“That’s right, Brekke,” someone cried. That may work. Slow and steady! Breathe for yourself or you’ll pass out.”
Someone grabbed her painfully around the waist. She clung to F’nor’s limp body until she realized that they were both being lifted from the dragon’s neck.
She heard someone talking urgently, encouragingly to Canth.
“Canth! Stay!”
The dragon’s pain was like a cruel knot in Brekke’s skull. She breathed in and out. Out and in. For F’nor, for herself, for Canth. She was conscious as never before of the simple mechanics of breathing; conscious of the muscles of her abdomen expanding and contracting around a column of air which she forced up and out, in and out.
“Brekke! Brekke!”
Hard hands pulled at her. She clutched the wher-hide tunic beneath her.
“Brekke! He’s breathing for himself now. Brekke!”
They forced her away from him. She tried to resist but everything was a bloody blur. She staggered, her hand touching dragon hide.
Brekke. The pain-soaked tone was faint, as if from an incalculable distance, but it was Canth. Brekke?
“I am not alone!” And Brekke fainted, mind and body overtaxed by an effort which had saved two lives.
Spun out by ceaseless violence, the spores fell from the turbulent raw atmosphere of the thawing planet toward Pern, pushed and pulled by the gravitic forces of a triple conjunction of the system’s other planets.
The spores dropped through the atmospheric envelope of Pern. Attenuated by the friction of entry, they fell in a rain of hot filaments on the surface of the planet.
Dragons rose, destroying them with flaming breath. What Thread eluded the airborne beasts was efficiently seared into harmless motes by ground crews, or burrowed after by sand-worm and fire lizard.
Except on the eastern slope of a northern mountain plantation of hardwood trees. There men had carefully drawn back from the leading edge of the Fall. They watched, one with intent horror, as the silver rain scorched leaf and fell hissing into the soil. When the leading Edge had passed over the crest of the mountain, the men approached the points of impact cautiously, the nozzles of the flames throwers they carried a half-turn away from spouting flame.