D & D - Tale of the Comet Page 7

  Elda nodded slowly. "I see. Your pardon—for the names I called you, and for thinking so ill of you. It would seem that Randu Dahan has not changed much in the years since my experience with him gave me cause for a challenge."

  "Your experience?" Brinus said, mouth so wide that Ohlt was amazed that he could speak. "You always said it was the honor of a friend he had ill-used—"

  "Nor do I unsay it now," Elda said. She drew her rapier. "This is not the best tool for cutting out waggling tongues, but it will serve."

  "I love you too, sisterling," Brinus said.

  "And I love you, brother," Elda said, with no trace of her brother's edged tone. "Enough to make sure that you do not help me unless I truly need it."

  She turned back to M'lenda. "1 do not hold you to your promise to guide us, M'lenda, if you think we have knowledge that would give us power over you."

  "Don't you think that the rest ought to have their say?" M'lenda asked. She was almost smiling now.

  Ohlt shrugged and said, "I can't speak for Hellandros. I say that we would have the joy of your company, but do not demand it."

  Brinus nodded. M'lenda now smiled and blinked tears out of her eyes at the same time. Ohlt allowed her to lean on his shoulder until she could command herself. Over M'lenda's shoulder, he saw Elda's mouth open, then close again at the look he gave her, bawdy jest unuttered.

  At last M'lenda stood. "Hellandros could explain this better than I," she said. "He is the one who recognized the tongue of the sirines, the one I used with them. It is a wood elf tongue. I do not know if the elves here will accept me. Even those who are my kin through my mother's father's father."

  Ohlt felt as if he was back at boy's school, learning the alphabet. He was expected to grasp something that was obvious to another, but it kept eluding him.

  "They live in the woods, don't they—your kin, I mean?" he asked. "Then are they not wood elves also?"

  "Not all elves who live in forests are wood elves. They may have more than a little high blood among them. Also, not all wood elves are Pengoyin. Indeed, most are not, or say they are not, to avoid shame."

  "What shame?"

  "The shame the Pengoyin bear to the end of time, for losing the Spear." She held up a hand. "No, that is all I can call it, and all I can tell you. To say more is unlawful."

  "For an elf, perhaps," Elda said. "But you are neither—I mean, you are both elf and human."

  M'lenda looked grateful at the unexpected tact, but shook her head. "That means I am bound by the laws of both, as well as the laws guiding both cleric and ranger. It doesn't mean I'm bound by neither law."

  "No wonder you and 1 mix like fire and ice," Elda said, chuckling. "You collect laws to be bound by. I ignore as many laws as I can, and still escape with my gold, and my steel."

  Brinus laughed aloud, then raised his eyes to the sky. "Gods, I call you to witness it. Often have I accused her of feeling so, but tonight my sister, Elda Ha-Gelher, has confessed to holding the law—"

  Then Ohlt saw Brinus Ha-Gelher's face twist and blanch, and in a very different voice, the young man cried:

  "Fall, run, pray! The comet is here!"

  Four

  Fworta came down in fire and thunder.

  Jazra watched through darkened binoculars, wishing that she had the excuse of unprotected eyes, so that she might close them, to not see her ship and comrades die. Instead she watched every yard of Fworta's plunge to earth.

  The ship was still high in the stratosphere when she realized that it was just as well that she had forced herself to watch. Fworta was not coming down at meteoritic speeds, uncontrolled. Some of the ejected hydrogen from the gate disruption must have been having some braking effect. Also, Fworta had fallen into this world's gravity well on an overtaking trajectory. That reduced the velocity differential between orbiting world and crashing starship to a minimum—by astronomical standards.

  Those, however, were a special set of standards. Even with both factors working for her, Fworta still ought to be coming down much faster.

  As it was, her calculated speed was low enough that, with a little more atmospheric braking, and if the hull remained intact, it might be a survivable crash. The Rael would need to be in their shock cocoons, which meant they would be virtually helpless against any of the Overseer's constructs that might be roaming about the ship in the last moments.

  The constructs were made of sterner stuff than mere flesh, and certainly the Secondary Director, replicators, and any heavy-weapons constructs would have taken crash precautions before now. The Doomed and the spider drones were expendable and would have to take their chances.

  But if the drones were sacrificed, the invaders would have to begin with fewer ground weapons, little air support, and perhaps only local defenses for the Secondary Director and the replicators. If enough Rael survived, and left their cocoons fast enough....

  Jazra told herself not to fantasize ahead of the facts. Her conscience spoke in the voice of an old training sergeant, who had fought the Rael's wars on more planets and aboard more ships than he had fingers and toes. It was probably sound advice.

  She watched the ship's dive angle steepen. The heat pulse blasted over her; she would have been burned without her armor. Dry vegetation burst into flames.

  Then the shock wave hit. It blew out some fires, scattered burning debris to kindle others, and made trees thicker than a Rael sway like reeds in a breeze. Jazra clung to her perch, a boulder that she hoped was too well-embedded to fly down the slope with her crushed remains underneath it.

  Fworta slowed as her bow tipped toward the top of a mountain to the west, as if the inertial repulsors' sensor array had detected the imminent crash and activated them. That was impossible, but so was the ship slowing down so much.

  Then, at last, Fworta's voyage came to an end, as earth and debris, trees, boulders, the bodies or ashes of animals great and small, and a vast plume of steam soared up from the rounded peak. The ship clipped the top of the mountain and slid down the northwestern slope. The whole valley beyond the mountain must have been filled with the hot murk of the venting plasma in less than a second, then scoured clean of life by another shock wave, and the falling wreckage.

  Fworta was down.

  Jazra quickly calculated the distance to the ship. When she saw the figure, she briefly wished that she could radio-com-mand her escape pod to come pick her up. It had just enough fuel for a final flight to the crash site.

  Unfortunately, if the Secondary Director—and whatever communications array it was using, its own or what was left of Fworta's—was functional, it would certainly intercept the command. Then any active weapons would be ready to shoot down the pod—-and active spider drones and Doomed would be closing in on the source of the message.

  Jazra decided that she was not quite ready to be pursued uphill and down, in strange country, at night, by the Overseer survivors of the crash. Though that experience would undoubtedly come she would let it come in its own time.

  Also, the ship's landing had suggested that the engines were damaged, but not dead. Damaged engines had been known to explode. So had ammunition for heavy weapons, both Rael and Overseer.

  Spending the next quarter of the night hiking cross-country to Fworta would give both kinds of explosions time to make up their minds whether to happen or not. If they did go, Jazra might even still be at a safe distance from them. And if she was not, she would gladly join her comrades, if her last knowledge

  was that this world was safe from the Overseer.

  • • •

  Fedor Ohlt said afterward that if one could imagine jumping into a dwarf's forge fire while hearing a thousand wolves howl in his ear, and a thousand thunderclaps crash overhead, and then be struck by not one but a dozen dwarves with hammers . . . one would have some notion of what it felt like to have the comet pass over Aston Point.

  That was an exaggeration, one that Ohlt delivered most often after the second cup of wine. Had it been the truth, Aston Po
int would have been rubble and ashes from the moment of the comet's passing.

  In truth, Ohlt—and everyone else in sight—was slapping at smoldering patches on his clothes, combing embers out of his hair, and shaking his head to see if the ringing in his ears would go away and allow him to hear the person standing next to him. To Ohlt's mind, that indicated that the passage of the comet had been quite cataclysmic enough.

  He lurched to his feet, aware of bruises as well as burns where minutes ago he had been whole. He thought he vaguely remembered, at some moment during the comet's fall, feeling the ground leap up to hammer him in the chest and thigh. He looked around for his companions, and realized that the night suddenly seemed as dark as the Abyss, and not much friendlier.

  The darkness, at least, he understood. They had been living with the growing light of the comet for days, and then been dazzled by its fall. It would be a while before anyone on this side of Paradise Lake could see anything in the dark.

  If only his ears would stop ringing.

  Brinus was helping M'lenda to her feet. All four of them turned about, each to see that the other three were alive and intact. Then they saw, just uphill, a man and a woman hurrying out of their cottage toward their byre. It was half-collapsed, and the thatch had taken fire.

  A moment later four goats scampered out, and the man darted into the byre, in spite of his wife's effort to hold him back. Another moment, and he was out with a fifth goat, both goat and man no worse than singed.

  Ohlt stepped toward the man and shouted, "Is there anything we can do?"

  The man shook his head. "Nothing, I thank you. The byre's past hope, but the goats are out, and the house won't fall or burn."

  "Aye, hut it's still more wrath than blessing, I'd say," the woman put in, half-whining. "We kept Simplicity for years, and what do we have falling down on our heads? I'd truly like to ask someone that. Someone who might answer."

  Ohlt gave a don't-look-at-me shrug, and led his companions away. They could hear the woman for a considerable distance, but by the time they had gone fifty paces downhill, other matters drew their attention.

  Indeed, Aston Point looked as if it had been visited by drunken, if not wrathful, gods. Chimneys were cracked, leaning, or fallen entirely. Shutters and doors dangled or lay on the ground. Tiles, planks, and everything else that might be knocked or blown off a building were scattered in the streets. Every animal from horses down to mice was giving tongue to fear and confusion, and a good part of the human population was joining this nightmare chorus.

  They could see all this, too, because although the comet was gone, it had left far too many fires in its wake. Dry thatch, stacks of hay or straw, old wooden shingles, and even the occasional wood pile were smoldering or burning outright. No doubt a good few coals had been knocked out of hearths, and more houses were on fire within.

  Elda and Brinus set people to collecting buckets, filling them with water, and emptying them on the nearest fires. Then they started to collect ladders and farm implements, to pull down burning thatch and shingles, scatter burning fodder stacks, and so on.

  Elda might say too much, and Brinus too little, but when dire events came around, they both said exactly the right amount, and people listened. A man could very surely pick far worse companions.

  M'lenda tried to use her ranger's keenness of scent to find hidden fires, but so much smoke filled the air that all of Aston Point seemed one great bonfire. She spat on the ground at that knowledge, clearing soot from her mouth, but seemed calm enough for Ohlt to leave her.

  He mounted a ladder placed against the eaves of a barn whose thatch was trickling smoke, then poured buckets as they were handed to him. He had emptied the seventh bucket, and the fire was almost out, when he saw that the person on the ladder below him, who had been handing him buckets of water, was Seldra Boatwright.

  "Don't waste your breath apologizing, friend," she said, grunting as she handed up the eighth bucket. "I can tell that fighting a man the size of Randu Dahan is an urgent engagement."

  "Thank you." Ohlt emptied the bucket, then dropped it to the ground for refilling. "Did you see what happened to the other three men?"

  "The one you head-butted came around pretty quick, then all three of them wanted to know where you'd gone. Cumbry Stoos said he'd tell them if he knew, after they took out their chief's body. They made some talk about rites before they moved him, and Cumbry told them to get out, body or not. Mongo picked up the body, and made as if to throw it out the back door, into the midden pit. The last I saw of them, they had Dahan's body more or less picked up, and were trying to carry it, rather than drag it, out the door.

  "I haven't seen them since the comet came by. I had to see to my house and yard, and the harbormaster's office. Then I went to look for Mackree, to make sure he hadn't passed out on the way home and had something fall on him, but I met somebody who'd already found him and taken him in, so I came up here."

  "I hope your house and yard fared well," Ohlt said.

  Seldra stopped to hand up another bucket. "The house is going to leak, a shed's down in the yard, and a boat's blown over. Nothing much, compared to some people."

  She watched Ohlt empty and drop the bucket. "Best you keep an eye on one another's backs, you and your friends. Dahan was Gyotsi, I'm thinking, and they don't go adventuring without companions who swear blood oaths."

  "But it was a challenge of honor."

  "So Elda says."

  Ohlt's hand came up, and Seldra raised both of hers, palms outward. "Enough," she continued hastily. "I know that lying about a challenge of honor is cursed and punished, and all the rest. And you know Elda better than I.

  "But just remember that Gyotsi don't recognize anybody else's honor customs. Oh, they'll bide by them in the towns and settled lands, knowing they'll be cut down if they don't. Out here, beyond everything, and with three different claims on the

  land—well, just expect the worst, and you won't be surprised."

  ® « ®

  Jazra propped herself against a fallen log, which helped the ache in her back. Nothing helped the ache in her head, or her sore feet.

  The headache, she knew, was mostly stress. She could swallow a stressfighter tablet, but that would slow her down. She could not risk that. End of discussion.

  Her feet were another matter. She unsnapped the boots from the leg armor and shook the boots. Nothing fell out. She could have sworn that several large rocks or twigs, and a few biting insects, had crept into the boots.

  She peeled open her boot linings and wriggled her bare toes in the night air. The sensation was like a drink of cool water after an all-day march in the desert.

  She took time to smear her feet with salve, in case there was damage she could not feel or see. Then, reluctantly, she began pulling her boots back on.

  She had pulled on one, and had the other in her hands when she realized that she was no longer alone. She froze, knowing that her darkened armor would finish the work of concealment—unless her visitor was a construct with heat sensors.

  It was nothing of the kind. It was only a large, fur-covered quadruped, with claws on each foot, teeth that had to be a carnivore's, and warm blood. The eyes set above the pointed muzzle were small, suggesting that it was a diurnal creature driven from its lair by the crash of Fworta.

  The creature rose on its hind legs. Standing upright, it was as tall as a Mosershi, two feet taller than Jazra. Was it sapient? Those feet didn't appear made for grasping, but. .. .

  The creature growled, deep in its throat. Its eyes turned an incandescent blue. Jazra would have stopped breathing if she could.

  The creature began to change. The muzzle and the tearing teeth shrank. The legs became thinner and longer, while the body became shorter. The head turned from elongated to round. The fur disappeared, and so did the claws.

  Now Jazra did stop breathing. Before her, where the big animal had stood moments ago, now stood one of the natives. Taller than average, with long brown hair and
a long beard; that meant a male. She would have been able to tell his sex even without the beard, since he was totally unclothed. It appeared that the reproductive anatomy of the natives was similar to that of the Rael.

  The man who had been a wild predator fell to his knees, as if exhausted. Another figure stepped into Jazra's view, this one female, judging from her pectoral configuration and attire. Her hair, shorter than the male's, revealed ears which, magnified, were unmistakably pointed.

  Another native race? Or rather, two more, since the ordinary natives plainly did not go about in the form of large carnivorous quadrupeds.

  The pointed-eared female now approached the male. He was sitting cross-legged, still unclothed. Jazra wondered if they were mates or at least near-kin, since the natives seemed to have a fairly strong nudity taboo. Or maybe it was only the climate of this part of their world, which was definitely too cold for going about with neither clothing nor fur.

  "Did you find anything, Drenin?" the female—"woman" in the native tongue—said to the male.

  "I went as close as I could without burning my paws," the man said. "Nothing moved and nobody attacked me. Either they're all dead, they've already left, or they didn't recognize me as a danger."

  The woman shrugged. "Can we do anything save wait to learn which?"

  "Asrienda, I have to go back to the grove. Without me there, all the foreign treasure hunters out from town won't recognize it, and my protective spells may do them some harm.

  "If you want to warn your people at the Fox and Feather when you go back to town, feel free to do so, but they may not believe you. I'm not sure I believe what I saw myself. Somebody made that comet. Call them gods, giants, wizards, or men living among the stars, but their work is among us."

  The woman named Asrienda seemed to have no reply to that, but instead unslung her pack and emptied it. Drenin rose and pulled on a loinguard, then a long white robe. He slipped animal-hide sandals on his feet and tied around his waist a belt from which dangled a long, curved blade on a stick. At the last, he stepped out of jazra's field of vision for a moment, and returned bearing a carved wooden staff as tall as he had been when, as a beast, he stood on his hind legs.