Forge of Heaven by C. J. Cherryh

Author:C. J. Cherryh [Cherryh, C. J.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: C429, Extratorrents, Kat
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

THE NIGHT AIR was still. The dust had settled. The sky was clear, sparkling with stars, despite Drusus’s warnings of fog and disaster. The ridges above them were shadow. The distant pans were ghost-white under the stars, a dizzy distance below their feet.

Marak stood at the starlit edge of the ledge and called out to the fugitive beshti—“Hai, ye, ye, ye!”

Lone voice in the night, provoking echoes. It was the call they gave out when the beshti were wandering. It reminded the fools of food, of sweet treats. On a good day it could call beshti in from the fields, for the rare sugar that could tempt the most recalcitrant old bull into reach of a halter.

He heard distant answers, likewise, lonely in the night, distinct from the echoes.

“By now they have no idea how to get back,” Hati said glumly, from her perch on the rocks nearby, which he was sure was the truth. Far easier to slide down the yielding sand than climb back up it. Their own descent had its perils. They kept careful track of the trail they followed, to be able to find their way back up again, in what might become foul weather.

Their own beshti had heard and smelled the implied offer, and were on their feet. A wise man kept his promises, even overheard ones, and Marak was ready for them, a couple of sweets in hand, daintily picked off his hand by soft, clever lips.

Then he went to sit by Hati. Certainly the rascals were down there, in earshot, but it was too dark to try another descent until dawn. If they could find no way down, riding, fast enough to get close to them, he might try it afoot. If he could just get his hands on one of the leaders he could get the whole herd up. He didn’t want to shoot the young bull. But he would. He had known that when he asked the boys for the pistol.

He had Auguste for a watcher, now, Auguste who told them nothing, who left them alone, for the most part.

Tonight, in the dark, suspended between the world above and the basin below, he was uneasy, and realized the unease was silly, an ancient fear of vermin, as if deadly surprises might skulk out of the dark places of the rocks. The thought of a foot trek had set off that thought. Vermin had lived in such places as this, before the world changed—

But not now. Tonight it was a foolish fear. The world seemed again what it had been. The hammer had never come down. The world had never broken.

But the vermin were gone. They themselves were the fiercest thing in the world now, he and Hati and the beshti and their kind. And not a thing moved or crawled, else, on the land, nor had for ages…one eerie silence, for all their lives since the Hammerfall, and the great storms. One great loneliness in the land.

And change that moved slowly, until this event Ian had long foretold.

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