She wiped the com off, wiped her hands, slid the cover off the sensor plate, and touched it. The working light didn’t come on; that worried her, but she tapped the sensor again and waited for the squeal the recorder back at Alsekum used to acknowledge a call.
Nothing.
“Well, if anyone bears this, we’ve got trouble and need help. Attacked by chorek. Maorgan and Danor seriously wounded, need doctor bad. Cad/3as dead or run off. Come get us soonest.”
No response.
“Gods. The wet shouldn’t have damaged you, you’re supposed to be sealed against damp, good to half a mile down in your average ocean. Even the moss pony falling on you shouldn’t have knocked you out. Must have been defective to start with. Cursed cheap trash!” She was about to pitch it through the crack in the doorflap, shook her head and dropped it beside the sodden saddlebag. “Get some cha in me first, some food, then I’ll give you a look again, see if there’s some way I can jar you alive.”
She dug a pot from the gear pushed up against the side of the tent, pushed it outside to collect rainwater, then crawled over to check her patients.
A touch told her that the fevers were still going strong, maybe getting worse. She didn’t have a baseline temp for Fior, so she couldn’t be sure how bad it was. Stupid, stupid that Koraka hadn’t bothered to get a medkit calibrated to Fior metabolism. “Not only the Goлs. Why didn’t I think about that?”
Her own body was from a distant offshoot of the Cousins, far from the standard model. Add to that the time the Fior had been here, separate, in what was apparently a mutagenic environment-the moss ponies and other things she’d noted were evidence of that-and she didn’t dare try her own spraycopeia on them. Or wouldn’t until one or the other of them seemed about to die.
Such a simple thing. Ride along a peaceful roadway, traveling by invitation and under escort. Into the back country where neither Yaraka nor Chandavasi had penetrated. What could go wrong? She only had her medkit along because Aslan had insisted. She certainly hadn’t expected to need it. I can take care of myself She remembered saying that. Look, Aslan, you don’t know what I’ve survived without all this fuss. “What was I thinking of? Gods!” Why didn’t I say something about the Fior? Gods! Talk about stupid…
As the night wore on, Danor’s fever fluctuated and he slid in and out of delirium. Maorgan was very quiet, settling deeper and deeper into coma. She grew afraid that both would die on her before she could collect the caцpas and haul them to help. The years in the diadem and the talents of the brain she’d inherited when Aleytys slid her into this body had given her the translator (which was convenient), the ability to mindride beasts (useful and occasionally a pleasure), and a touch of telekineses; she could nudge forcelines if they weren’t too strong and play about with small objects, but Aleytys’ healing gift hadn’t transferred. This wasn’t the first time Shadith had mourned that fact.
She bathed Danor and laid damp compresses on his brow; she worried over Maorgan and added water to the cha pot, and when she had a moment, held the handcom and tried to feel her way into it, to find the break or the short or whatever was keeping it from working. These were throwaway units, sealed and meant to be replaced when they malfunctioned. Nobody said what you were supposed to do when you were sitting in a storm out in the back of beyond with two potential corpses on your hands and no ‘tronics store within a dozen light-years.
The crash of the rain shifted suddenly to a faint patter and the wind dropped until the flutter of the leaves above the tent was audible over its whine.
She crawled to the door flap and pushed it back enough to let her see out.
The sun was up and the clouds overhead were ripping apart. The puddles in the glade glittered silver where they puckered from the last of the raindrops. The cold was retreating, too. The air smelled of green and wetness, invigorating as cold cha.
She pulled the flap to, gave Danor another bath, replaced the cold compress on Maorgan’s brow, then pulled on a shirt and pair of shorts and went out to see what else she could find to help them survive this impossible situation.
She was stripping the rest of the riding gear off dead Sokli when she saw Eolt Melech coming against the wind, pulling xeself along with xe’s tentacles, tree by tree fighting xe’s way toward her. Xe’s dread slapped at her, so powerful it was almost strangling.
Xe saw her and called out, a bass organ note that hammered against her heart. Then xe was singing to her, demand and plea at once, chords of meaning.
Where is he? My Sioll. He suffers.
I throb to it I am wrung with it
Where is he? My Sioll. Bring me to him.
“Follow,” she sang in approximation of the Eolt song/speech. She left the dead ca6pa and moved into the trees to the glade.
Working to the sung instructions that battered at her with their urgency, she lifted Maorgan from his blanket cocoon, carried him from the tent, and laid him on the mud and grass close to one of the trees.
Eolt Melech grasped the branches with xe’s holding tentacles and brought xeself down until xe could touch Maorgan. Shadith could feel xe’s terror at being so close to earth. If xe’s lift failed or a windshear developed, xe could be dashed to the ground and xe would die there, slowly, agonizingly, xe’s membranes rotting while xe still lived.
She watched, worried. Maorgan had said the Eolt weren’t as fragile as they looked, but it was like watching a glass vase she valued rocking back and forth on the edge of a shelf.
Xe unrolled a tentacle different from the others, one xe had kept tucked up and hidden in the rootstock of the many other trailing tentacles. The end touched Maorgan’s face, splayed out across it, the translucent flesh conforming to the bumps and hollows of the Fior’s face.
For a moment nothing happened, then she saw that the skin on the tentacle was pulsing, in out in out and it glowed then went dull in the same rhythm, light and not-light, in and out. The tentacle flushed to pale pink, the pink to blood red.
The pulse quickened.
In her half-sync with the Eolt she felt Maorgan reacting, something was happening in him, she didn’t know what. She had to trust Melech, she knew the strength of the bond between xe and Maorgan, she knew he wouldn’t harm his sioll, but it was a strange thing to watch.
The edge of the sun passed into the widening rift in the clouds, the glade went suddenly much brighter. Melech’s battered, wrinkled membranes plumped out and began to glow again. Xe was golden and strong, xe sang as xe went on with what xe was doing.
The tentacle mask came free with a faint sucking sound and Melech let xeself float upward. Xe sang xe’s triumph, wordless organ notes that filled the space beneath the sky. Shadith turned her face upward, her whole body throbbing to the glory of that sound.
When she looked down, she saw that Maorgan’s face was dotted with tiny red spots as if a hundred black biters had settled on him to suck a meal. His eyes were closed, he was breathing slowly in the shallow breath of sleep. As she watched, he sighed, moved uneasily on the muck he lay in, but didn’t wake. She knelt beside him and checked his pulse. It was strong, steady. When she set the back of her hand against his face, the tight hotness of fever was gone.
Tired, irritated, and at the same time happy that one of her problems was lifted off her shoulders, she hoisted him again, carried him over to the tent. She eased him onto a bit of canvas from the packs, washed the muck off his body, then dragged him inside and wrapped him in his blankets again. He sighed a few times as she did this, muttered and twitched, but didn’t wake.
The second throway was beginning to flag. She sighed, took the hatchet and went out to cut some wood; her patients were going to need the warmth and whatever food she could get down them.