Nothing, Genley thought. He stood up, scowling, close to shaking, but that would never do. He jammed his hands into his belt.
“Nothing,” Jin said, leaning back. “Later is good enough.” He wrapped the blanket back about himself, looked up at him with a half lidded smile. “Go find yourself a woman. Do you good, Gen‑ley.”
xlv
205 CR, day 48
Cloud Towers
Something was amiss. Elai knew it. It had come in a great wave up the Cloudside, like the building of storm, like the sudden waft of change in the winter wind, like both these things, but this storm was in caliban minds, and moved constantly, so that each day the sun rose on something new in the patterns across the Cloud; so that mounds continually revised themselves and the soft earth churned, collapsed, rose and fell again. The Weirds patterned their distress; Tower‑work grew disorganized, the place grew untidy with neglect. There was winter‑work to do; and riders and craftsfolk tended to it alone, the little mendings of the walls after rain, the bracing‑up with stone.
The Weirds abdicated, mostly; and calibans grew restive; children fretted, sulked, retreated, reading patterns too. Cloud grew irritable; Taem kept much to himself; Din went back and forth between the roof and the depths, a frown between his brows.
There was no staying from the roof: Elai went up to see what was written on the world, compulsively, throughout the day. Others did. And so she found MaGee, staring outward from the rim.
Riders–Dain, and Branch, had paused in their work, bare to the waist and sweating in the unseasonal sun, muddy‑armed from their wall‑mending. Two of her sons were there, Taem and Cloud. The nurses stood forgetting Cloud, while Taem–Taem sat beside an aged Weird, only sat, his naked arms about his knees, in the shelter of the rim.
Elai looked out, past MaGee, with the sun at her back, her shadow falling long over the baked‑clay roof, the irregular tiles scored by generations of caliban claws, eroded by winter rains. A drowsing ariel noticed it was beshadowed and moved aside, sunseeking. Everywhere on the roof ariels shifted, and then calibans moved, for Scar came up from the access, thrust himself to her side, and lumbered to the rim, rising up on one scaly clawed foot to survey the world, then sinking down again, walking the rim, trampling the riders’ new tile‑work, dislodging what they had done.
“Something’s happened,” MaGee said, pointing outward. “The Styx‑pattern. Something’s come out from it.”
“Yes,” Elai said. The wind stirred at her robes, pulled at them, at her hair and MaGee’s.
“What’s going on?” MaGee asked. And when she was silent: “Has something moved from the Styx?”
Elai shrugged. For all the warmth of the day, the wind was chill.
“First,” Dain appealed to her, at her right, with Branch and the others. First, as if she could mend it. She did not look that way. She walked up beside MaGee, rested her hands on the rim, staring outward at the world.
“ Have they moved?” MaGee persisted.
“Yes,” she said. “Oh, yes, MaGee, they’ve moved.”
“They’re coming here.”
Elai looked at her, and a strange sad sweetness came to her. O MaGee, she thought. She had waited for this thing all her life. Now that it was here there was someone it truly horrified. “MaGee, my friend.” She smiled then, not so distraught as she should have been. “You are simple.” But to make it lighter she laid a hand on MaGee’s shoulder, then turned and walked away to the downwards entry, ignoring the eyes of all the rest.
“ First,”she heard MaGee call after her. “ Elai!”
So she stopped, curiously tranquil in this day.
“I have to warn the Base,” MaGee said.
“No. No com.”
“Are they in danger?” MaGee asked.
She stared at MaGee. There were other things to think of. Other folk had begun to arrive from below. Din was one. Twostone was with him. Beside them all stood Dain and Branch, still waiting. “First,” said Dain, fretting at her. “Do what, First?”
Three of the elders had come up, their white hair blowing in the wind. There was Din, her son, who stood with his hands behind him, whose brown had its crest up and advanced stiffly on its legs, very near to Scar.
Whhhhhsssss!Scar moved, seized up the young caliban in his great jaws, and nothing moved on that rooftop for the space of a long‑held breath, until Scar decided to let Twostone go.
So much for juvenile ambition, borne on the moment’s possibilities. Wait your turn, Elai thought with a cold, cold stare at her son, and turned her shoulder in disdain, not even bothering to address her anger to the boy.
This was cruel. After a moment she heard him flee the daylight, a scraping of claws, a patter of naked boyish feet vanishing down into the tower, while Scar’s crest lowered in satisfaction. There was a second, slower retreat, Cloud with his nurses; but Taem, when she looked his way, had stayed, small, bare‑kneed boy, with a Weird’s cool observance of what had passed between her and Din. So she knew this morning that Taem was gone for good, and that hit her unpleasantly, and completed her anger at the world.
That was what it was to be First. From the time that she was small, when Scar had come to her and made her what she was; and now that pathetic brown of Din’s, young yet, and not likely to get older–
Wisest to kill the rivals, with such a winnowing coming. It was not alone that Styxsider she fought. It was far more general a matter than that. Kill the rivals, unite the Towers. That was what Jin had been doing, one by one.
She walked and looked about her, and calibans and ariels shifted, a scaly wave, a refixing of gold and sea‑green eyes all set on her. She looked about her from the Tower rim, to the Patterns, the river, the towers, the bright sea to which the river ran. Go bring, she signed abruptly, facing Dain; aloud: “Paeia.” Dain started away in grim haste. “Taem,” she added, which command turned Dain about at the entry with bewilderment on his face.
“Bring him too,” she said. “Tell him mind his manners. He knows.”
She hoped he did. She seldom felt Taem active in the Patterns. The New Towers were isolate; and for Taem the Twelve Towers calibans made a whorl with a silent center. Paeia they made as sunward, full of activity; but Taem was silence, like his son.
“Bring them,” Dain echoed her, as if he could have mistaken it. “And if they won’t come?”
Taem, he meant. If Taem won’t come.
She gave Dain no answer. Dain went. Perhaps her son had read it all too; perhaps he read his death out there, patterned on the shore.
Violence, his caliban had signalled. Desperate, not comic, a young caliban, too young for such a challenge. Mother, I want to live.
She had waited for this all her life. So had her son. She wanted to be alone now, only with MaGee, and Scar, not under these staring eyes that looked on her now with estimations–whether she would die now, whether that was what she meant by calling in those most dangerous to her life. She was frail; she limped. She ached when it rained. And her heirs were under twelve.
Will you die? their stares asked her. Some might think that safest. But her riders had cause to dread it, having been too loyal, serving her too closely. Change seemed in the wind, hazardous to them.
Give me sand, she asked of the aged Weird; it was Taem that brought it, a small leather sack, and crouched beside her as she stooped and Patterned with it. Others gathered about her, shadowing her from the sun, cutting off the wind.
She made the river for them, recalling the great Pattern on the shore. She made the whorls and mounds with sand streaming from her hand, so, so quickly, and signified Paeia and Taem coming in; their unified advance. Ariels nosed in past human feet, interfering in her work, trying mindlessly to put it back the way it was Patterned on the shore. Futures distressed them: they were never ready to make the shift, being occupied with now. She picked up the most persistent; it went stiff as a stick and she set it roughly back. It came to life again, scuttled off to watch. A gray nosed in, thigh‑high to the watchers.