Since she was white with exhaustion, I couldn't not do it, though my cousins long ago taught me that kids are fun to carry for about five minutes and then they're wriggly little torture devices. Kaoren looked at me, then past me to two other kids, a curly-haired boy and a short-haired girl both around twelve years old, who were giving me basilisk glares as the girl wrapped her arms around me, sighed once, and fell immediately asleep.
"Your sister?" I asked.
They didn't answer, instead glancing at each other as if deciding on a way to rescue the girl. I figured that Tarens have a pretty bad rep with Nurans, which is going to make this whole mess even more complex.
Kaoren just said: "It will be easier if you adjust your suit into a harness," and I experimented with this for a while, keeping an eye on the worried reaction of the two twelve year-olds to black suit-goop suddenly oozing over their sister. I was also keeping an eye on Kaoren. Walking through deep-space wasn't easy on him – I could see that he was having trouble blocking his own Sights while remaining on alert for attack. I managed okay carrying the girl – the harness helped a lot and she slept limply collapsed. Not that I didn't deposit her in the first dry patch of grass I could find once we were through the rift gate, leaving her to her close-mouthed siblings.
Getting through the gate was a challenge in itself. Third went ahead with all the available Wind talents, who worked up a gale to blow it free of aether while Third searched real-space for predators. But there was just a meadow studded with rocks, and goats, the whole thing slushy with snow melt. It quickly turned to mud as an endless stream of Nurans flooded out across it.
That became complicated, because the kids would rush through the rift gate, blink at all the sunlight and sky and grass and goats, and promptly sit down. After the first few mass tangles, all the Telekinetics and Levitation talents began picking up batches and flying them a short way across the meadow. The other Setari set up a loose perimeter, while the goats sensibly ran away. Then we waited.
Tare sent every available ship as soon as the
Chune
brought word, but even though some of these were larger than the
Litara
, it was hours later, approaching sunset at the rift and well into evening at Pandora, before the last ship was loaded. Most of the Setari remained until the final flight so that, if a Ddura showed up, they had the option of taking everyone still there back through the Rift.
During the long wait the Captains had plenty of opportunity to work down the list of Things We Wanted To Ask Nurans. As soon as everyone was safely through, and the guards sent out, we all gathered around a trio of the Nuran Setari (for they are, apparently, Nuri's version of Setari) on a high pile of rocks with a good view of the meadow. The Captains were streaming the conversation back to Pandora, and to their squads, while clumps of Nurans – mostly teens – gathered in a circle below us to listen, even though we were speaking in Taren. The one called Korinal, my watcher from back on Tare, was designated spokeswoman since she could speak the Taren dialect, though with a very strong accent.
"We have not been unaware of developments on your world," Korinal began, and didn't sound like she was going to go into just how they knew. "As you ventured into the Ena, we saw an increase in the number of Ionoth, and there was much debate as to whether the change was linked, and what damage you might cause. This anxiety only increased when it was reported that you had gained access to Muina, and the reports made it clear that you had done so through a touchstone."
"What does
Nuri know of touchstones?" Maze asked. "And of Gaia, for that matter. Tare and Kolar retained no information of either."
"Of Gaia we know only that the path to it had been lost, but that it was once deeply tied to Muina. Of touchstones..." Korinal turned her head and gave me a long look. A really strange look, as if I was something wondrous but deadly, which fascinated and repelled.
Okay, yeah, that's probably reading a
little
too much into it, but she did stare at me for an uncomfortably long time, and made me glad that Kaoren was at my side.
"It is rare for a touchstone to exist," Korinal went on. "One born with a profound link to the Ena, a focus connecting all that is to all that once was and all that could be."
"That is–" Maze began, and stopped. Which was his polite Maze-ish way of going: "Wut?"
"You have been experimenting with the abilities of the child of Gaia, have seen that this connection can, in a limited way, be used to create objects, even small spaces. And you have seen that the great devices on Muina draw upon the aether. You have not understood the potential of a device powered by aether, and a touchstone."
Machine component. As job descriptions go, that one is probably the worst so far.
"In truth, we barely understand it ourselves," Korinal went on. "The device makers died with the Shattering, and we retained little of their craft. But it is known that a touchstone existed at the time of the Shattering, and we believe that touchstone was used to create the Ddura." Korinal glanced back at me, expression closed, evaluating. "Among my people, there are those who believe that that touchstone was responsible for the Shattering."
Kaoren slid his hand into mine, though my reaction was delayed trying to unravel her accent. Once I understood, I immediately wanted to change the subject, so I said: "What are the Cruzatch?"
"That we do not know," Korinal said. "We have encountered the Ionoth known to you as Cruzatch in two separate spaces, and also as travellers. The behaviour of those generated by spaces is distinctly different to those which travel through the Ena. We suspect that the Cruzatch linked to spaces are memory-imprints of the travellers, while the travellers–" She paused. "There are a number of theories, but it appears that the traveller Cruzatch are active in real-space, possibly on multiple worlds."
"Active how?" asked Raiten Shaf, moving a little closer. The Kolaren squads had followed the Taren squads' lead during the battle, but as Senior Captain of the Kolaren Setari, Shaf had been biting his lip holding back questions. "Were they active on Nuri?"
"That – my senior, Inisar, spoke of them when he released us, but there was no time, and I could not–" Korinal paused, and I could almost see her push back what had to be overwhelming horror and shock, struggling to regain the detached tone she'd been using. "If they were, we did not suspect it until this day," she went on. "But for some time Inisar and others among us have been trying to unravel strange dealings on Nuri. Our people have been fractured by differing opinions about the strain within the Ena, and underlying that has been a strong sense of deceit. We thought it political, a struggle between the two with the greatest chance of succeeding to the leading House of Nuri, and when word of the touchstone on Tare arrived that impression strengthened. The urgency of the command to retrieve the touchstone, and Inisar's return empty-handed, brought many arguments. Inisar was sent again, this time only to observe, and did not return."
"So you were sent," Kaoren said. "And yet, there was some aspect of constraint."
Korinal nodded. "A Command. Created by a device of the Lantar brought from Muina during the evacuation and formerly rarely used. To place one under Command indicates a lack of faith, a cause for distrust. We were told that the divisions of opinion made it necessary, but it was a grave insult."
She stopped speaking, looking past Maze at the field of Nurans: those watching and listening, and those clumped in sleeping piles, curled on grassy tufts, tucked against tumbled stone.
"We did not look hard enough, allowed ourselves to be distracted by immediate concerns, even when among our own ranks there were those whose behaviour would have required investigation in less difficult times. Constraint. Yes, that is a word for it. Perhaps they, too, were under a Command. I returned to Nuri when it became obvious the child of Gaia had been removed to Muina, and found my people hard-pressed by Ionoth. And then the Dazenti – a type of Ionoth which has periodically plagued us in recent years: small, swift-moving, attacking in swarms, and capable of phasing so that even walls could not keep them out. The swarms have been growing more frequent, of ever-greater numbers, and though we were equal to tracking and dealing with them, the number of deaths among those we protect had become so excessive that it was necessary to create shelters. When the alert was given, all not capable of defending themselves evacuated to the shelters, and the walls charged with a shielding we had only recently discovered–"
She broke off, because half her Setari audience had reacted: a scatter of quickly-controlled movement and murmurs.
Maze, a muscle jumping in his cheek, said: "What you describe seems to resemble a place we found on Muina: an underground installation, the walls shielded, and many people trapped within, who died suddenly."
Nuri's spy system plainly hadn't passed on details about Arenrhon to Korinal. Her head went up and back, confusion plain, and she looked away from Maze, staring again at the clumps of children all around us.
"Were there large stones in their depths?" Taarel asked. "Dark green, smooth, perhaps two persons' height in diameter?"
"The shield generators," Korinal said, exchanging a glance with her two fellow sword-wielders.
"The Cruzatch use the stones as gates," Taarel explained. "We have found two on Muina thus far, and do not know whether the Cruzatch were involved in their origin, or merely take advantage of them."
Korinal, after a long moment, simply went on with her story. She doesn't seem to be a type who likes to speculate.
"A swarm warning was called this morning in First Home, our oldest and largest city, during the preparations for the yearly March of Dawn. We oversaw – our first duty is to protect the evacuees into the shelters, and then we hunt, clearing all the Dazenti. But Timon, one of our own, he–" She paused. "I will hope he was under a Command. I prefer that to thinking he betrayed us. He lured us into the smallest of the shelters, claimed it was breached. And sealed it."
She let out her breath, as if she had passed some hurdle she had dreaded. "It is not possible to teleport through the shield, and we could not reach the generator. But then there was Inisar. He was burnt, starved. Filthy. But he was outside the shield, able to activate the release we use when the swarms are over. He ordered us to open all the shelters, to get everyone as far as possible away from them. He said they were a trap.
"We had barely begun – only a handful of shelters were open when we found the releases wouldn't respond. There was a rising, overwhelming, sense of danger, and we concentrated on racing those in the open shelters to the surface."
"And then the end," said one of the other Nurans. "The death of Nuri." He was speaking in his own dialect, but it wasn't too hard to work out.
"The shelters exploded," Korinal continued, her voice thin. "All who were in them – there could be no hope. But it did not stop there. The sense of danger only increased, and the explosions did not cease. Stronger, deeper. We could see the far reaches of the city...vanish, dropping downward. The rift was the only place to go, and only those from the nearest of the shelters had any hope of reaching it. We sent them running, carried who we could. The ground began to open – we lost hundreds within a stone's throw of the rift – they were still pouring through and I was one of those just within trying to keep the movement flowing when it all – when – no more came through."
Someone was crying, down below, and luckily a new ship arrived to distract us all from thinking about what happened on the far side of Nuri's rift gate, to all those running people. I've never been so close to so much loss, and felt inadequate and overwhelmed, and was glad when Maze only asked a few more questions after the ship was loaded.
The explanation for most of the survivors being kids turned out to be the ceremony I'd seen at Kalasa. It's called the March of Dawn, where all the children of the city carry flowers to symbolise the new year's blessing. The Nurans hold a form of the ceremony on the anniversary of their arrival on Nuri, and they'd just been preparing to march when they'd been sent to the shelters. Korinal didn't know if the timing was deliberate, or if there'd been any purpose in having all the children gathered in one place.
I keep picturing a trail of crushed flowers through deep-space.
When the captains had run out of immediate questions for Korinal, I asked Kaoren to take me to find Lohn, who I felt a great need to hug. Mara had been treated in plenty of time, but the wounds were deep and her arm's badly broken and if she'd been a fraction slower the swoop would have had her neck.
Lohn was so upset. Everyone is, shocked and jumpy and made small by an event so large, but Lohn's fear for Mara was something I felt more equal to approaching. He didn't say much at all, but he half broke my ribs squeezing me back, and Kaoren and I stayed with him being perimeter patrol as ship after ship came and left, until the
Litara
finally returned from Pandora to gather up everyone who remained. I was tired out by then, and dozed off sitting beside my favourite seat in the packed common room where most of the Setari had gathered, only to be woken by my flower-giver climbing into my lap.
She latched her arms around my neck, and it was the weirdest sensation because she was shaking as she hid her face against my throat. Not sure if she'd had a nightmare, or was just reacting to the day's horrors, I looked about for her two shadows and found them coming into the common room. That gave me another strange jolt, because the pair – who had been so silently possessive of the younger child and spent most of the walk through deep-space glaring at me when they thought I wasn't looking – were barely recognisable. Eyes down, faces blank, hands and shoulders held so that – it's hard to describe it – like they were trying to be completely
nothing
.