Fire in the Sky

8

Ceam whistled a warning to the band following him, flung himself behind a small bushy silver dudur and watched the airwagon go careening over the mesuch fort. Whoever they were in there, the Chave didn’t like them, that was sure.

Heruit crept up beside him. “What’n… what’s that?”

“I figure it has to be the mesuch from Banikoлh, you know, ones Beni told about.”

“Not doing too good, are they.”

“Better them than us.”

“You said it. We were figuring it was going to be easy. I dunno.”

“He’s getting out… aaaahhhhh… right. Ouch. Hit him in the tailfeathers.” Ceam winced as he listened to the prolonged crashing, the sudden silence. “Figure we ought to go see?”

Heruit didn’t answer. He’d gotten to his feet and was staring at the sky.

“Ihoi! Get down before the mesuch spot you.” Ceam looked up, got to his feet. “Chel Dй!”

The sky was so thick with Eolt the air itself turned gold. And still they kept coming, swirling in an immense silent vortex about the mesuch fort, out beyond the reach of the mesuch weapons, round and round, the eyes you never saw only felt fixed hard upon the killing folk. Golden anger. Golden hatred colder than a killing frost.

Sound of feet running.

Ceam wrested his gaze from the spectacle to stare at the man-a stranger with light brown skin and hair like a cabhi’s fleece and a way of moving that said he was very fit and strong. He carried a pellet gun, heavy and ugly with a round drum fixed before the stock.

The man glanced at Ceam as he trotted past but said nothing, made no gesture. He was frowning, an intensity about the way he looked at the mesuch fort that convinced Ceam this was the one in the airwagon. What he couldn’t manage in the air he was going to try on the ground.

He dropped to one knee suddenly, settled the gun against his shoulder, went very still, moved his forefinger to tap a dark spot rimmed in shiny metal.

The pellet gun made an odd spitting sound. A hair later there was a loud blam! and one of the armored mesuch tilted over. Before the last quiver of the sound had faded, he was on his feet again and trotting off to disappear in the shadows under the trees.

A few moments later Ceam heard another blam!, then a third. As the mesuch on the walls started shooting toward the sound, blowing trees apart or slicing them up with cutter beams, he grabbed Heruit who was still watching the Eolt, tugging him deeper into the trees. “Mesuch shooting at each other,” he said. “Them in the fort, they’re getting nervous. Anything that moves they’re going to bang away at.”

Heruit rubbed at his eyes. “Maybe you know what you’re talking about.”

“You didn’t see him?”

“Who?”

“The mesuch out of the flier.”

“I was watching Them. Thousands of them, Ceam. Maybe all the Eolt there are.”

“Cha oy, I know. And madder than wet cats. And they’re going to get killed. Fire in the sky, Heruit. You want to watch? Me, I’d rather not see it.”

Standing behind one of the largest of the kerre trees in the strip of woodland, Shadith watched the two Fior walk off, glanced out at the sky again and the circling Eolt and sighed. Fire in the sky. Goлs, I want it to stop… they won’t listen to me any more now than they did before.

She jumped, caught one of the broad low limbs and pulled herself onto it, then climbed higher into the tree until she was nearly level with the top of the wall. She straddled the limb, looked through the flutter of leaves, saw an armored Chav flicker in and out of view as he ran past the firing slots.

From the shouts and the direction of fire, they were a lot more worried about Marrin and his rifle than they were about the gathering of the Eolt. She frowned as she tried to figure what she could do to expand that worry. If her ability to move small objects had a greater range… She shook her head. Trouble with that was she had to be almost in armreach. The Chave were too far away. She could use the mindride to gather an army of vermin, there were plenty of small lives lying low here in the woodland strip. But she couldn’t see any way it would be worth trying.

Maybe a cutter might…

The tree shuddered as a deep, powerful HUM shook the air around her. The vibration was bearable at first, then the intensity increased as the sound grew louder. The Eolt were singing. Thousands and thousands of Eolt were singing a single note, the sound focused somehow on the Kushayt, battering at the stone walls, vibrating cracks into them.

The HUM shaking her so badly she could barely control her hands, her eyes blurring, her body shivering with it, she managed to scramble from the tree and stumble blindly.

She broke from the wooded strip into an open, cultivated area, nearly impaling herself on a torn-up wire fence and falling on her face into some kind of tuber plant.

When she got to her feet, she found herself standing in the middle of a group of silent Keteng and Fior, drowning in a pool of hostility. A stocky gray-haired Fior woman stepped forward, a middle-aged Denchok just behind her.

“Who are you?” The Fior had to shout to break through the increasing volume of the HUM.

“I am Shadith, a Harper,” she shouted back. “I came with the Eolt from Chuta Meredel.”

“Ah!”

As the chill around her began to bleed off, the young Fior she’d seen before pushed past the woman. “Did Danor reach the Vale?”

“Oh yes. He rode with me and Ard Maorgan to a Klobach of the Meruu. It was his grief that convinced them.” She waved at the throng of Eolt.

“Ahhhhhh.”

The SOUND built and built, then broke off suddenly. Wave on wave the Eolt dived at the Kushayt.

And died. Fire in the sky.

Despite the fire, some Eolt reached the walls. Pairs of them seized Chave guards and carried them high. And let them fall to crack open on the earth. Those Chave that survived this were taken up again, carried out over the Bakhul Sea and dropped to drown there.

Wave on wave, the Eolt dived and died.

One by one the Chave guards died.

Until the walls and watchtowers were free of them, the few left retreating into the buildings where the Eolt couldn’t reach them.

And the fire died from the sky.

The small army of Fior and Keteng waiting in the tuber field shouted their triumph, swarmed through the woods and over the walls. They died also as they pried the last of the Chave from their holes, one, two, six or seven at a time, but by sundown there were no more Chave alive on Bйluchad.