“With any luck, the weather will hold either too wet or too cold for the first
Threadfalls,” M’tal told the watch riders. “Keep an eye out for drowned
Thread or black dust, and let us know immediately.”
“We have Threadfall charts that should tell us when the next Threadfall will
occur once we’ve charted the first,” Kindan added. “But at the beginning of
a Pass, Thread often falls out of pattern.”
“So watch out for it,” M’tal concluded. “Report in to me or Lorana if you
notice anything out of the ordinary.”
“And if you see fire-lizards, stay clear of them,” K’tan warned. “But let us
know of any sightings, too,” he continued. His voice dropped as he added,
“We’re not sure if there are any fire-lizards left.”
“Good flying!” M’tal called, making the arm gesture to disperse the watch
riders. Eighteen riders and their dragons rose high above the Bowl and then
blinked out,
between,
to their destinations.
Gaminth,
M’tal said to his dragon,
warn the watch-whers.
It is done,
Gaminth reported. A few moments later the bronze dragon
added,
Lorana wonders if you will introduce her to the watch-whers.
M’tal picked Lorana out of the crowd and made his way over to her. “That’s
a good idea,” he told her. “But I’m not sure if there’s time.”
“Could someone else train me?” Lorana asked. “From what Kindan has told
me, it seems like it would be a good idea if the watch-whers knew me.”
M’tal rubbed a hand wearily across his forehead. “It would be a good idea,”
he agreed. “But—”
“Perhaps Nuella would teach her,” Kindan suggested, stepping closer to
join the conversation.
“Nuella is at Plains Hold,” M’tal said. “How are you proposing she teach
Lorana?”
“She could come here,” Kindan said.
M’tal shook his head. “We don’t know if watch-whers can catch this illness; I
don’t think it’s fair to ask her to risk it.”
“A good point,” Kindan conceded. “But watch-whers have been around
fire-lizards as much as the dragons have, and I’ve not heard of any
watch-wher getting sick.”
“Could they be immune?” Lorana wondered. The idea surprised
her—everyone knew that watch-whers and dragons were related.
K’tan had zeroed in on the group and joined it just in time to hear the last
exchange between Kindan and Lorana. “If the watch-whers are immune,
could they fight Thread?” he asked.
Kindan considered the idea for only a moment before shaking his head.
“Watch-whers are nocturnal, and Thread falls during the day.”
“It sometimes falls at night, as well,” K’tan disagreed. Something about his
comment troubled Lorana, but she couldn’t determine what.
M’tal’s next comment drove the thought from her mind. “Watch-whers might
well be immune, but that might not stop them from
carrying
the illness.
Bringing a watch-wher here might bring more illness, too.”
Kindan nodded in agreement. “I hadn’t thought of that.” He turned to M’tal.
“You’re right, Weyrleader, this doesn’t seem to be a good time.”
“A pity,” K’tan murmured.
M’tal’s brows creased in thought. “Perhaps we can use Nuella after all.” The
others looked at him questioningly. “She met Lorana at the Hatching, so
perhaps she and Nuella could share images with the other watch-whers,”
M’tal said. He shrugged. “It wouldn’t mean that Lorana could contact
individual watch-whers, but
they
might be able to contact her.”
“That’s a great idea,” Kindan exclaimed. “We’ll get right on it.” He grabbed
Lorana by the arm. “Come on, Lorana, let’s get out of this crowd.”
M’tal waved them away with a look that was nearly cheerful. “That’s one
more thing off of my mind,” he said to K’tan.
“It is, Weyrleader,” K’tan agreed dubiously.
M’tal shot him a look.
“It’s another thing on Lorana’s mind,” K’tan explained.
“Is she overworked?”
“We’re all overworked,” K’tan said. “You more than most, particularly with
Breth gone. But there’s a mating flight soon, and Tullea rides the senior
queen.”
M’tal gave the healer an encouraging gesture.
“And I worry,” K’tan continued, “that Tullea might not appreciate having
Lorana’s abilities become so necessary to the success of the Weyr.”
M’tal’s lips thinned as he slowly nodded in agreement. “She hasn’t been the
same since High Reaches closed their Weyr, three Turns ago.”
“Perhaps she had a lover there,” K’tan mused.
M’tal snorted. “If she did, I’d never heard of it.” He shook his head. “From
what I’ve heard, they still take their tithes, but that’s all.”
K’tan cocked his head at the Weyrleader. “Do you suppose they guessed
about the illness?”
M’tal frowned thoughtfully, then shook his head. “I can’t see how,” he said.
“D’vin and Sonia were always a bit odd, maybe they just got . . . odder.”
K’tan shrugged in turn. “Well, I need to get back to the Records,” he said,
turning toward the First Stairs.
“Speaking of overwork,” M’tal quipped. The Weyr healer flashed a smile
over his shoulder, and the Weyrleader waved him away genially.
“And there are no fire-lizards left at all?” Masterharper Zist asked Harper
Jofri. The harper nodded.
“I’d heard that the Weyrs have banned them,” said Bemin, Lord Holder of
Fort Hold. “But I don’t think any were left by then.”
He had lost his marvelous brown Jokester. After the Plague had carried off
his wife and his sons, the loss of his fire-lizard had been easier to bear, if
still painful, but his real distress had come in comforting his young only
surviving child, Fiona, on her loss of her gold fire-lizard, Fire.
“I’ve heard some people say that the dragonriders were jealous and
bothered by the fire-lizards,” Nonala, the Harper Hall’s voice craftmaster
added.
“I think it’s mostly grumbling,” Jofri said. “When people are upset and
worried, some like to complain.”
“Nonetheless, it is a very real concern,” Bemin said. The others looked at
him. “Holders and crafters pay their tithes to the Weyrs and wonder what
they get for it.”
He drew another breath to continue, but the Masterharper suddenly raised
his hand and the others cocked their heads, listening.
“Dragons? Dead?” Nonala gasped as the drum message rolled in.
“Ista, Benden, Telgar,” Jofri added in a whisper.
“Benden’s queen,” Zist said, with a pained look on his face.
Bemin looked from one to the other as they spoke. It was a moment before
he could find his voice. But when he did, it was to declare with the heartfelt
pain of a father who has lost children, of a husband who has lost a wife, of
someone who knew something of the pain the bereft riders must be
feeling, and—last of all—as the Lord Holder of Pern’s oldest Hold.
“Whatever I can do, or my Hold, you—or the Weyrs—have only to ask.”
At lunch the next day, Kindan bounded into the Records Room to tell
Lorana breathlessly, “Fort Weyr has reported black dust!”
Lorana was up on her Records enough to realize that black dust was what
happened when the weather was too cold and Thread froze on the way to
the ground.
“When?” she asked.
“M’tal says that K’lior’s watch riders noticed it just around dinnertime—that
would make it around lunchtime here,” Kindan said. “M’tal says we can
expect Thread to fall from the shoreline over the Weyr and on to Bitra nine
days from now.”
Lorana stifled a groan and buried herself back in her Records.
The morning bustle was louder than usual nine days later as the Weyr
waited for its first Threadfall. Lorana had just managed to get Salina back
into a fellis-laced, troubled sleep when the alert came:
Thread falls! Thread
falls at the shoreline!
The alert woke Arith out of a fretful sleep and Lorana spent precious
moments calming her beloved dragon before she could race down the
stairs to help.
“Go back to your rest,” M’tal said when he saw her. “Tullea will handle this.”
Lorana’s eyes widened in surprise at the suggestion, for Tullea was
nowhere to be seen. She waited until a disheveled B’nik appeared beside
an even more disheveled Tullea, whose mouth smirked at the expressions
of the other dragonriders. As their faces remain fixed in disapproval,
Tullea’s smirk changed to a pout.
“We were just getting to bed,” she said defensively.
“Thread falls at Upper Bitra,” M’tal told her. He looked past her to B’nik, “Is
your wing ready?”
J’tol, B’nik’s wingsecond, appeared beside him. “Just ready now,
Weyrleader,” the sturdy brown rider said, his gaze focused directly
between the elder M’tal and the younger B’nik, as if casting doubt on whom
the title should be conferred.
M’tal chose to ignore the taunt. “Good, good,” he said, moving toward
Gaminth as the bronze glided to a landing beside him. “We’ll form up at the
Star Stones and go
between
on my coordinates.”
K’tan says that there are thirty-one dragons with the illness,
Lorana heard
Drith say to Gaminth.
And they are spread throughout the wings.
Tell him that it can’t be helped, we’ll sort it out later,
was the reply
Gaminth relayed from M’tal.
Kindan, who had started laying out the healer’s medical supplies, saw
Lorana wince and approached her. “What is it?”
“The sick dragons are flying, too,” she reported dully.
Far above them, over Benden’s Bowl, wings formed into Flights, and
Flights arrayed themselves in attack formation. And then, in one instant,
three hundred and fifty-eight dragons disappeared—
between.
For over twenty Turns M’tal had led Benden Weyr. In all that time, he had
had just one thought: to prepare for Thread. This day—now—was the
culmination of all he had worked toward.
It was a disaster.
Three dragons failed to come out of
between.
Their loss cast an
immediate pall on the fight.
Worse, it threw off the organization of the wings.
The teamwork that M’tal had drilled his riders so assiduously in maintaining
fell apart before the first of the Thread arrived. Ruefully, M’tal reflected that
he had not considered training his dragonriders in sustaining losses.
M’tal’s own wing had lost blue Carianth and his rider, G’niall.
“Close up!” he shouted. “Gaminth, tell them to close up.”
M’tal cast a glance ahead and up, toward where Thread should be falling
momentarily, and then another at the dragons in his wing as they re-formed
without the blue. M’tal had had the Weyr arrayed in a line of multiple V
formations. Now, with Carianth gone, the V of his wing was shorter on the
left than on the right.
“Thread!” M’tal heard W’ren cry from behind him. He turned, following
W’ren’s arm, and saw them—up high, silvery, shimmery wisps floating in the
morning sun. Gaminth let out a bellow, echoed triumphantly in challenge by
all the dragons of Benden Weyr, and craned his neck back to M’tal for a
mouthful of firestone. M’tal found that he already had some in his hands, not
remembering when he pulled it out of his firestone sack, and fed it to the
bronze without thinking. That much of the training worked, he thought with
bitter satisfaction.
As one, the dragons and riders of Benden Weyr rose to meet the incoming
Thread. In unison, the dragons belched their fiery breath into the sky. Gouts
of flame met clumps of silvery Thread, and the Thread wilted, charred, and
fell harmlessly to the ground below.
The ease of the destruction of the Thread elated M’tal and all the riders.
The dragons roared and charged to assault the next wave of Thread.
And then everything unraveled. The first cry of a Thread-scored dragon
seared M’tal’s ears like a hot poker, thankfully cut off as the dragon went
between
where the freezing cold would destroy the Thread.
Then another dragon went
between,
and another—and that one did not
return.
M’tal issued sharp orders to his wingleaders to regroup, but try as they
might, the increasing casualties meant that they never quite recovered from
the initial disorder.
The battle against Thread turned more dangerous, desperate. Worse,
Gaminth informed him that many of the dragons going
between
and not
returning to the Fall had not returned to the Weyr, either.
The pain of that additional loss weighed heavily on the remaining riders.
Those riding ill dragons responded by doing their best to avoid going
between
—often with worse results. Four, then five dragons were Threaded
at once and went
between
so terribly Thread scored that M’tal
knew
nothing could be done to save them.
And then it was over. The Thread tapered off until there were no more in
the sky.
M’tal, struggling to create a tally of dead, injured, and able dragons found
himself trembling with relief, rage, sorrow, and overexertion.
Have L’tor send out sweepriders, order K’tan back to the Weyr, and let’s
go home,
M’tal said to his dragon.
He
knew
that Thread had got through their flight and had burrowed into the
grounds of Upper Bitra, where great stands of trees grew up toward the