Nylan shrugged and walked out into the drizzle, then looked back at the tower. The walls seemed solid and the foundations untouched, although the open casements on the upper levels were dark with moisture. His eyes went higher. From what he could tell, only the lower line of slate tiles on the east side had been damaged, and about half, a good twenty, were either askew or missing.
Nylan hoped the laser lasted longer, because trying to hand bore or punch those slates would create a lot of broken tites-and more than a little wasted effort for Weblya, Huldran, and Cessya.
“Shit!” Huldran’s voice was bitter.
“That’s only a handful of roof tiles,” Nylan pointed out, turning back toward the landers and trying to ignore a sense of loss as he plodded through ankle-deep water and mud. He didn’t know what he should-or could-do, but he needed to find out the rest of the damage.
“Yes, ser, but we didn’t need any of this.” Huldran walked at his elbow.
“Probably not. We should have expected it, though. I imagine fall, winter, and spring are all this violent, if not worse.”
“Hate this place.”
“You’d rather be down on the plains, melting into a pile of goo?”
“The whole friggin’ planet, ser.”
“None of us planned this. We do what we can.” And hope that it’s enough and that we didn’t do anything too stupid, he added to himself. “We’ll need to run wider diversion ditches around the field to stop this sort of thing.”
Heaps of hail lay strewn everywhere across the meadow, and the drizzle that kept falling was tinged with ice flakes.
Ryba looked up from a prone figure where she and Jaseen, the combat medtech, struggled. “We need dressings, Nylan. Gerlich’s out hunting, and he knew the storage plan by heart. Try lander three. Huldran, can you take charge of the diversion in the fields so that we don’t lose any more crops?”
“Yes, ser.” The blond marine was moving as she spoke.
“Will do.” As Nylan turned to go for the medsupplies, he asked, “What happened?”
“One of those skinny little trees with the gray leaves-the storm ripped off a top branch. Kadran didn’t even see it coming in the wind and rain. Went through her shoulder like a set of barbed arrows.”
Nylan winced, but stepped up his pace.
He was halfway through the second bin in lander three when Ayrlyn joined him and started at the other end of the bins.
Nylan ran through an emergency medical kit. “There are a couple of modules missing here.”
“Don’t bother with that, Nylan.” Ayrlyn frowned. “Great help here. This one says it’s the emergency surgery section, and here’s the section for emergency childbirth. Someone’s been into it, but it’s been resealed.”
“Be a while before we need that.” Nylan glanced through the lander door, but did not see the all-too-visibly-pregnant Ellysia. “How Gerlich …” He turned back and discarded the single remaining bone-splint kit.
“There are some stupid ones left. Every generation there always are. Not many, but she’d never considered birth control. Now, what about this-standard first aid-”
“That’s it. We need to run that over to Jaseen.”
“I’ll do that. See if you can find any more. We might need them. Who knows what happened to those who were caught out in the open?” Ayrlyn grasped the sealed package and left while Nylan carefully worked through the dwindling medical supplies, before finding another sealed package of surgical dressings. He decided against taking them, but set the package in the now-empty first bin before leaving the lander.
In the short time he’d been in the lander, Ryba had managed to start the process of restoring order. Kyseen was rebuilding the cook fire, and straightening up that area, while Huldran had managed to divert the main flow of water from the bean field and had a crew working on the potatoes.
Ryba was checking over the mounts, and Istril headed off with two others to see about rounding up two mounts that had left the makeshift corral.
Everything, except the tower, it seemed, was makeshift, and he still didn’t have the demon-damned thing finished-or even the plans worked out for the bathhouse and laundry addition and the jakes in the tower.
Slowly he walked back to the tower, where the lower level lay filled with puddles, one of them almost a half cubit deep. Drains. He had forgotten drains-another mistake to be rectified.
When he reached the tower yard, and the slowly vanishing puddles, he turned and looked up, studying the rain, now only falling steadily in a form somewhere between a fine mist and a heavy drizzle. The piles of white hailstones, like bleached bones, stood out on the green of the meadow.
Then he walked up into the tower and started up the stairs to check on the damage to the east roof.
As he climbed, he wondered about his brick-making and the crude oven, then shook his head. That had been low tech, and if the rains had carried it away, he would find a way to rebuild it.
XXIX
HISSL STARES INTO the glass, looking at the waving stalks of grass, and at the burned fort, with the few wisps of smoke still threading into the sky. Concentrating again, he waits for the image to re-form, and it does, showing an empty road that would lead to Berlitos, should he desire the glass to follow the track.
There are no signs of the Jeranyi. Hissl tugs at his chin. Ildyrom must have pulled back a long ways, perhaps as far as Berlitos.
The wizard frowns, and the white mists fill the glass, eventually showing a line of horse troopers trudging down a forest road behind the fir-tree banner. Since there are no forests near Clynya, that means Ildyrom has in fact stopped pressing his claim on the grasslands-for now.
The white wizard shakes his head. “You’ll be stuck here for seasons-seasons, angel-damn!” His words are low, but they hiss with frustration.
He looks around the small room, then out the narrow window into the blue of the morning and over the low thatched roofs of Clynya toward the West Fork he cannot seefrom the second story of the barracks. As he does, the image fades from the glass.
“Terek … with you scheming in Lornth, how will I ever get out of here? If I’m successful, Ildyrom won’t get the grasslands back, and I’ll be stuck here. If I’m not …” He shakes his head and looks down at the blank glass.
In time, he studies the mirror once more, and the mists swirl, and in the midst of the swirling white appears the Roof of the World, and the black tower that stands, despite the storm, and the silver-haired figure in olive-black who trudges up the stone steps. The glass also shows the aura of darkness that surrounds the man in the glass.
“A mage, and he knows it not.” After a time, Hissl gestures, and the image vanishes, leaving only a blank and flat mirror on the small table.
Finally, he smiles, tightly, thinking about bandits and the Roof of the World.
XXX
STANDING OUTSIDE THE lander, with the light wind that promised fall ruffling his hair, Nylan slowly finished the gruel that passed as morning porridge, along with cold bread, his thoughts on the tower once more.
Huldran and the others had been less than pleased when Nylan had insisted on putting a drain in the bottom of the tower, nor had Ryba been happy when he had used the laser to drill through some of the rock.
“A waste of power …”
Nylan disagreed-the lowest level of the tower needed to be dry. Dampness destroyed too many things. He swallowed the last bite of the lumpy gruel with a shudder and glanced toward the tower. At least the roof and doors were in place, and he could concentrate on making the place livable. Outsidethe front door, Cessya and Weblya had already begun to haul stones in to fill the space between the walls of the causeway.