Читать книгу The Farris Channel - Jacqueline Lichtenberg - Страница 11

CHAPTER FOUR

RELUCTANT FAREWELL

Rimon didn’t see or speak to Solamar again until the funerals. The Tanhara channel had been gone from Rimon’s room when Rimon arrived to wash up, gone from the Dispensary when he arrived to check on things, gone from the hospital when Rimon came to follow up on those he’d treated. Someone said they’d seen him heading for the stables with Kahleen in tow, and Rimon imagined her silent protests. She hated horses. Or rather, they hated her.

So, just before noon, when he saw Solamar standing on the boulder they used for a podium at the edge of the cemetery, Kahleen nowhere evident, Rimon barely recognized the man. He was clean, well barbered, neatly dressed in clothes that almost fit, clothes from Rimon’s own closet, boots from someone else and a wide-brimmed hat he didn’t recognize.

Rimon climbed the steps carved into the side of the boulder and took his place beside the top channels from each of the Forts whose refugees now lived in Fort Rimon. Their Companions and the three people from the Fort Rimon Council who had survived the Freeband attack made a crowd.

Everyone turned toward him as he slid into the group’s complex nageric field. Bruce was late, but that was just as well. Rimon didn’t relish the idea of Bruce’s grief pounding into the ambient nager. Bruce’s nageric field was the only one that could pierce Rimon to the core. He looked around, waiting for Lexy.

It was not noon as originally planned. The sun was lowering swiftly in the leaden winter sky. Might snow before dawn, Del Rimon thought bleakly.

Jhiti moved up behind Rimon and offered, “Losing Aipensha is a terrible blow. Everyone loved her.”

He drew Jhiti up beside him. Jhiti was one of the three surviving Fort Council members. He was a renSime with organizational talent who had taken charge of their defenses. “Yes, her loss is a very serious blow,” Rimon answered steadily. I never should have ventured out of the shelter. She only followed my lead. “Still, overall we were very lucky this time, thanks to your endless drills.”

Rimon carried three large slates with the names of the dead which he would have to read, some of whom had been the leaders of the group so adamantly opposed to letting him direct the channeling staff transfer schedule, sparing Clire and her unborn child on his own judgment. If I hadn’t let them vote—vote!—on Clire’s medical condition, she wouldn’t have been in Need. She wouldn’t have Killed.

Rimon knew, all the channels knew, that even if they got her back now, they could only hope to save her child. She herself would be doomed to a horrible death.

He sucked his gloom in and hid it deeply inside. “Jhiti, your crew did a remarkable job on the cisterns or we’d have nothing but ashes for walls now if any of us even survived. Whoever heard of Raiders using fire-arrows!”

“They must have picked it up from some town, maybe from Gen Territory. It isn’t just that they want our Gens. They hate us. They all hate us.”

Jhiti looked back at the Fort where a stream of people still trudged down the steep hillside toward the gathering group. “We’ll have to build new walls anyway. Have to enlarge the compound. With Tanhara here we’re in a bad way for shelter, stables, water, everything.”

Rimon heartily agreed. Part of the acrimony he’d been facing from the various factions was from simple overcrowding. Simes, sensitive to the life-energy fields of others, the emotions of others, were never meant to live so close together. “I want to get the foundation for a new wall dug before the first bad freeze. We can cut logs and erect them even during the winter, but we can’t expect to dig efficiently after the ground freezes.”

Jhiti agreed with a flick of his nager. “I’ll want to put the new wall at the very edge of the drop-off to the valley floor even though that may be an irregular oval. It will be a little easier to defend, and it appears we’ll grow to fill the whole space and have enough people to defend that much wall. People were sleeping under the weavers’ looms today.”

“We’ll have to hold Fort Council elections again,” replied Rimon heavily.

“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” said Jhiti. “But if you say so, Benart will get it organized. With all these new people, it’ll be complicated.”

“Benart is trying to inventory feed for the animals and figuring rations for the winter. He’s delegated the channeling schedule record keeping to Val so he can straighten out the supply problem.” With so many strange channels trying to work together, it took an experienced channel to keep everything moving, so Val had to add Benart’s record keeping and communicating tasks to her usual job of assigning the channels’ work schedules. The new arrivals were in no condition to help yet.

Jhiti only sighed. “Like I said, elections don’t seem a priority.”

To Fort Rimon natives, maybe it isn’t, thought Del Rimon, but every decision he made without Council backing would be chalked up to some strangely twisted motive and by spring the Tanhara folks would be taking sides, splitting and fracturing the temporary unity forged during this emergency. He supposed the distrust of him arose because none of them could zlin him, Lexy or Aipensha well enough to know how he really felt about things. Not to mention how I just ignored the Fort rules, climbing the walls during an attack.

He swallowed hard and tried not to think of Aipensha as he watched people gather at the edge of the ever-growing cemetery, grouping themselves around the flat boulder as they had too many times recently.

He scuffed at the boulder’s surface, noticing that someone had chiseled it flatter here and there.

Just after noon, they’d held a brief ceremony over the mass grave of the Freebanders. Raiders never collected their dead.

The dead stock animals had been stripped of all useful parts and the remains buried down past the fields.

Four more of the injured had died, so the ceremony had been delayed to dig the additional graves.

Now three long, neat rows of new graves had been opened with a few others scattered about next to previously deceased family members. Some of those graves were for tiny bodies. Eighty-six had died, including the Tanhara dead, plus a hundred ninety-two Freebanders. And Clire.

The bodies were laid out beside their respective resting places, shrouded in plain cloth. Rimon heard the rhythmic tap of hammers doing emergency repairs of burned sections of the Fort. Guards were posted on the walls, and around the cemetery to protect the path back up to the stockade in case of another attack.

Several search parties, foraging parties and scouting parties were out. Rimon had seen to it that all those missing the funeral had volunteered to do so, and not because they couldn’t yet face their grief.

Finally, Rimon saw Lexy and Kahleen coming down the hill. He stepped up front and signalled the musicians. They struck a low, long chord of howling grief, a cry of bereavement, the traditional opening to funerals.

Rimon grabbed the ambient nager to inject his own sick loss, anguish, shock, and ragged disbelief into the emotional atmosphere, working them toward the catharsis they’d been suppressing since the previous day.

He had watched Clire Farris Kill Solamar’s Companion, Losa. His daughter, Aipensha, had been trampled to death trying to save Clire from her kidnappers. Neither would have been outside the shelter if it hadn’t been for his disregard for the oldest of Fort laws.

Solamar stepped up beside him, and joined as they had when the two of them had stood upon the Fort wall and become a beacon of blazing Gen nager for the Raiders. Only now, they raised grief, shame, remorse, guilt and all that went with being unable to save a loved one.

Kahleen joined Solamar, dressed in her best and flipping her unbound auburn hair behind her shoulders. Lexy slid against Del Rimon’s other side, her field work impeccable, blending her channel’s nager into theirs seamlessly. She took a moment to mutter, “The selyn audit is finished. Tanhara lost a lot of renSimes, so they’re arriving here Gen-high. We’ll have enough selyn to support the workers and get the new buildings done. The Companion situation looks good too with Aipensha....”

She just plain blew the fields to pieces sending shards of flashing emotion slicing through the crowd. In that split second, Rimon was undone.

He turned in front of Lexy, grabbed her tight to him, rolled so his back was to the crowd and tried to block all Lexy’s Farris nageric power from the crowd while he rocked against the hollow pain they shared.

It’s not your fault, Father.

It was a whisper on the wind, an icy twist to the ambient. He looked over Lexy’s bent head with eyes and Sime senses. At the edge of the graveyard, near the Farris plots, mist oozed from between the tall evergreens. Against that mist, made of that mist, shrouded in misty nageric clouds, stood Aipensha clinging to Zeth Farris, her grandfather.

Behind her gathered rank after rank of the dead. Rimon recognized many from the names on the slates he held and others from his own distant childhood. The wraiths whispered as if singing to the music. “It was not your fault. You saved the Fort. Live now, grow stronger.”

Aipensha’s voice led them, her accent, caroling her irrepressible joy in life. His father’s voice blended with hers. Behind Aipensha the chorus chanted her words, an echo that passed back to the farthest rank under the trees, in the depths of growing shadow. “Father,” she sang. “Del Rimon,” sang the others. “Rimon Farris!”

A stiff breeze whirled through the valley, rattled the trees, dispersed the tendrils of mist as if they’d never been. The musicians fell silent.

Kahleen and the other Companions on the boulder beside them had moved to contain the raw nageric outburst.

Rimon, still sheltering Lexy, turned to the gathered mourners to see what they had made of the mist turning into people who spoke as if chanting to the music of grief. The audience looked up at him with no trace of awareness of what he’d seen. Seen not zlinned he realized. There had been nothing to zlin. There had been nothing there.

Beside him, Solamar whispered, “Who was that?”

Solamar saw that? I don’t believe he saw that. “Aipensha. My daughter. Zeth, my father. Others who died yesterday, or years ago. They’re together now.”

Their eyes met, and he knew Solamar had seen.

While he stared at Solamar, Lexy pulled herself together, hugged him one last time and stood away. The three channels once again orchestrated the tenor of the ambient nager in a more staid fashion.

Nevertheless, they had shared their naked grief and guilt with everyone there, heaping it on top of what others felt. Rimon was ashamed.

He began the ceremony. “We gather to bid farewell to eighty-four of the finest people who have ever lived and two of our children. They gave their lives so that we could go on and realize their dreams. We stand as one with them all, carrying the responsibility they so ably shouldered.”

He brought up the slates. The light was dimming fast now, the air cooling. First came the Tanhara dead, and leading that list was Losa, Solamar’s Companion.

Solamar had to be prompted to step forward and say a few words on her behalf while she was lowered into her grave, and the attendant, a Tanhara Gen, began covering her over with reluctant strokes of his shovel.

Before they’d finished, Rimon read the next name, and very quickly Solamar picked up the rhythm of it. Rimon went through the dead of the other Forts among them, each with a channel to speak for them, and finally came to Fort Rimon’s own dead. Benart had listed Aipensha last, right after Clire, or Rimon would never have gotten through his part of the eulogies.

By the time Aipensha had been lowered into her grave, they were standing in the dark, a full moon on the horizon. Still the sound of shovels echoed. They couldn’t walk away from these graves only to fall to bickering again. The world inside this Fort had to unite against the groups arrayed against it from outside. Rimon spoke.

“Fort Intalace was the first to be overrun. Clire Farris arrived here with four others from Intalace who gave their lives defending Fort Rimon leaving her the sole survivor. Intalace was destroyed by the juncts of the town they had settled near.

“Fort Butte was defeated by drought and a bout of plague and sought refuge here last year.

“Fort Unity, a large and thriving community, attracted the attention of the territory junct government and was taxed to death before floods and mudslides wiped out their crops. Freeband Raiders, accidents and disease nearly took them all before they arrived here this last spring.

“Fort Veritt was almost wiped out by raids from the Gen army because they settled too near the Gen Territory border and the local Sime town wouldn’t turn out to protect them from the Gens who thought Fort Veritt was the source of the raids into Gen Territory. Most of the Veritt refugees here still have nightmares about the last Gen raid that caught most of their channeling staff in the open and burned down their Fort and all its crops.

“Fort Tanhara,” he gestured to Solamar, their ranking channel, “I’m told was overrun by Freeband Raiders and town juncts who worked in concert to destroy the Fort. That is the most frightening development so far.

“The town juncts and Freebanders hate us more than they hate each other. They hate us because we don’t Kill our Gens. They hate us because we are not addicted to Gen pain and fear and death, not dependent on the Kill to garner enough selyn to live for another month, not junct. They hate us because we are perverts.

“Freeband Raiders have never been any kind of organized menace. Here in the mountains, they’ve never been more than small packs of wild animals that swarm over any unsuspecting road party. Now suddenly they’re mounted, and they shoot fire-arrows to destroy our buildings, cooperate to scale our walls.

“Our scouts report the town of Shifron has been attacked by a very large, organized band of Raiders. A small part of that band split off and chased Tanhara here wanting their Gens for the Kill. Theory is they have taken the town’s Gen Pen and are settling in for the winter. Scouts report the town’s ordinary junct population has fled south.”

Rimon paused to let that news sink in. From Shifron the Freebanders could raid Gen Territory for fresh Gens to Kill during any break in the weather. The Gen civilization out there allowed no Simes to live among them, and kept a standing army to enforce that. But to selyn starved Freeband Raiders who often Killed two or three times a month instead of the normal junct’s one a month, Gen Territory was filled with herds of Wild Gens, not people living as best they could in a harsh environment.

If there was no break in the weather, those Raiders would come to Fort Rimon for their Kills. By spring, perhaps the more peaceful, disciplined junct residents of Shifron would return with the Sime militia to take their town back.

Shifron had been making a good living between furs, lumber and pine nuts. They’d want their town back.

“Rimon Farris,” Del Rimon said, “my grandfather, the first channel, discovered how to avoid Killing Gens, how to take selyn from any Gen and transfer it to any renSime, letting the Gen live to produce more selyn. Most of you are the fourth generation of this dream of a world where no Gen has to fear the Kill and no Sime has to fear dying of Attrition. But in only four generations, we are failing.”

The only sound was the rhythmic snick-hiss-thud of the shoveling.

“Our failure stops today. Today, over the open graves of our parents, children, siblings, and loved ones, we pledge ourselves anew to my grandfather’s vision.

“Fort Rimon will survive this winter, and by spring we’ll be bigger, stronger, and better than ever. Come spring, we’ll clear more land, plant and prepare for the following winter. And we will help the citizens of Shifron take their town back from the Freeband Raiders. Shifron will have no reason to ally with the Raiders against us.”

They might do it anyway, thought Rimon. “To achieve this, we must re-unite these six Forts!”

“Seven,” interjected Solamar.

“What?”

Projecting his voice to the crowd, Solamar said, “...these seven Forts united. I am the last survivor of Fort Faraway. I arrived at Tanhara just after their last battle.”

“What happened to Fort Faraway?” asked Rimon loudly enough for everyone to hear while he masked his renewed grief. Faraway gone too!

“Forest Fire. Just before harvest, a huge firestorm swept down the canyons driven by fall winds. We rode ahead of the fire and then made for Tanhara. We survived junct towns, Freebanders, wild animals, even a Gen army patrol, and then plague destroyed us last spring. I made it to Fort Tanhara with two children and my Companion, but they died within a few days.”

Rimon zlinned that there had to be a lot more to that story than Solamar was telling.

“Seven Forts United,” proclaimed Rimon. “We will be as one, solid, strong, and vital. Our walls will not be broken, our hearts will not weaken.”

The shoveling fell silent, the diggers standing to attention beside the fresh graves. With dense clouds rolling over the surrounding mountains, Rimon signalled the musicians for the final tribute so people could file past the graves, winding through the graveyard to visit each of the fresh piles of earth, murmuring their farewells then starting back, each walking alone in the dark, heading up to the small door in the wall on this side of the Fort.

The Simes lingered to help the Gens who didn’t have the Sime ability to zlin through darkness. The Gens gravitated to the Simes who could use the invisible selyn-glow of the Gen bodies to discern the path back to the Fort. They didn’t separate themselves by their Fort of origin.

* * * * * * *

Solamar was exhausted. After the funeral, he had done a stint in the Dispensary giving transfers of selyn to fatigued renSimes in Need because they had been augmenting, using up extra selyn during the battle or its aftermath so they could work faster and stronger. It was nearly midnight and this was the first moment he’d had to breathe since they’d first spotted Fort Rimon with the Freeband Raiders chasing them.

He’d sent Kahleen, a truly remarkable woman, an exemplary Companion, to get some sleep and knew he had to rest a bit before letting himself grieve for Losa.

He pushed open a wide door in the side of the Dispensary building, a long, flat fieldstone building with a slate roof. It let him out into a space next to the wall. The patrollers atop the wall noticed him immediately and saluted nagerically. He crunched on through the ankle high snowdrifts, hands tucked inside the cloak someone had loaned him.

The Fort was so crowded, it seemed there would be no place for even a moment’s solitude to just let his nager expand without fear of hurting someone. But with the snow and cold wind, he thought perhaps the cemetery would be deserted, so he walked along the wall to the small door. The cemetery would be a good place for dark thoughts.

He heard the donkeys trudging around the well, though it was out of sight across the compound. He’d seen two wagons filled with kegs of river water parked by the stables earlier, and some of that hammering in the distance was the repair crew working on the well outside the walls. How long will the water last with all these people?

He heard a second pair of animals being led out to the well. He walked past the building that housed Rimon’s office, the infirmary, and sleeping quarters for the channels. Someone was emptying chamber pots into the privy pit behind the infirmary. Sanitation. Feed for the animals. It was going to be a very hard, very busy winter and he was already too exhausted to think.

Near the door out to the cemetery was recent construction, rows of family housing right across from the wing of the infirmary. Piles of dirt, split logs for the walls, and detritus surrounded the new buildings. Tonight, each one was accommodating three times the number it was designed for. People were tending crying children, nursing headaches, avoiding nightmares, trying to grieve silently.

He waved a tentacle in greeting to an old man sitting on the steps of a new house whittling what looked like a toy.

The small door in the Fort’s wall was barred with three hardwood planks and guarded by two young renSimes.

“Tuib, the order is that nobody is to go out until dawn after the scouts return. All the gates are shut.”

Of course. “Yes, that’s good. Thank you,” he said as he passed by without breaking stride. A little further on he came to a stair and mounted to the top of the wall where guards paced, zlinning the distance.

He came up to the first one who stood with his hands tucked up in his sleeves and asked, “Mind if I walk the wall for a while?”

“You’re that new channel from Tanhara,” the renSime identified. “I’m Filo. Sure, go ahead as long as there’s no Raiders out there. How far can you zlin?”

Channels could zlin much farther than renSimes, but some channels were more sensitive than others.

“There’s nobody this side of that ridge.” Solamar indicated the low hill between the Fort and Shifron.

“Then it’s all right for you to be up here.”

“Good,” he told the guard. “I just wanted to breathe fresh air, move a little.” Outside the Fort walls, horses were tethered to a line, and a large herd of sheep was watched by four dogs and two renSimes. He’d heard people talking about the main herd of sheep being wintered in a nearby canyon at the edge of the valley. Some loose cows had snuggled up to the lea of the wall. Tanhara’s stray chickens roosted under the bushes around the Fort’s hen house.

“You just want to zlin the distance instead of the wall in front of your nose?”

“That’s the idea.” Solamar didn’t mention how easily he could zlin through the Fort’s walls.

“Guard duty has its good points!” agreed the man. “Just mind that ice where Jokim spilled his tea. Kick the snow down where you find a drift. Someone will be up to shovel it soon no doubt. Everyone’s sleeping in shifts because there’s no room, so plenty are working even now.”

“They’re talking about new buildings already.”

“Been building for months. Now with Tanhara added, we’re hauling river water from the irrigation canal for tonight and we won’t be able to do that all winter. They’re going to start a new line of privies tomorrow morning and another new well.”

“Tanhara is very grateful for your hospitality and sorry for the losses our arrival has cost.”

The guard gathered himself, nager shaded with grief. “We’ll get through this. Rimon will see us through it. I have to get on about this patrol. Just let us know if you zlin anything out there, then get down fast. We dare not lose any more channels.”

“I’ll do that.”

The guard headed off toward the woman patrolling the next section of wall, and Solamar turned in the other direction. He circled back, walking over the arch of the gate leading out to the cemetery

Just short of the privies, halfway to the next guard’s beat, he stopped and leaned against the outer rail to stare out into the night throwing his attention into the lonely silence out there.

The ambient behind him felt crowded. At least nobody was actively paying attention to him now that the guards had zlinned his presence.

A crack in the clouds let moonlight through, sparkling off the snowflakes drifting on a light breeze. He let himself go hyperconscious, shutting out awareness of sight, hearing, smell, touch and taste and focusing on the selyn fields interacting to form the ambient nager. He scanned the wilderness seeking peace among the trees beyond the cemetery where he had seen the dead walking, summoned by Rimon Farris’s grief and guilt.

He had intended to meditate then grieve for Losa before considering that development. What have I done?

Clearly, Rimon had not experienced anything like that vision before. Solamar knew that the kind of deep nageric interaction they had shared twice that day might have sensitized Rimon to planes of existence beyond the scope of most people’s awareness, if Rimon had the talent.

Sudden expansion of a channel’s awareness could be deranging or even deadly for one as sensitive as Rimon.

Why did I ask him who they were? The words had just flown out of his mouth, in simple curiosity, not to validate Rimon’s perception. Still, it had been a dreadful error.

Behind him, a Farris channel nager slid out of the infirmary door, instantly spotted Solamar and headed for the stair next to the privy. Solamar greeted Rimon nagerically, but kept his attention on the landscape. Moments later, Rimon joined him at the high rail, breath puffing in clouds visible in a narrow shaft of moonlight.

They stood side by side, zlinning distant nothing, not thinking, just breathing quietly, letting awareness slide away. Solamar let the strong, steady Farris presence wrap him in quiet. It was almost as good as solitude.

Ever so slowly, they both surfaced to full awareness of their surroundings, with no shock of a new sudden emergency. Solamar thought Rimon would just let it stay that way, a restful interlude. But no.

“So,” Rimon said at last, “you saw them too.”

Solamar considered denying that, claiming ignorance, but a Farris would zlin right through any deception. “I thought I saw, well, they’d be ghosts, if they were your father and your daughter.”

A frisson of anguish flickered around Rimon at the word ghosts. “Did you hear them speak?”

“Maybe. Maybe I just have a vivid imagination.”

Rimon turned and inspected him visually as well as nagerically. “You do. You didn’t imagine hearing what I clearly heard, seeing what I saw but couldn’t zlin. Nobody else saw what you saw. Why?”

“I wish I knew. I don’t generally go around seeing ghosts.” Solamar shivered, and not from the cold.

“That’s what it was? Ghosts.”

“You said you recognized Aipensha. But she’s dead. So what you saw was her ghost.”

“You didn’t see Losa’s ghost, did you?”

“No.”

“But...?” prompted Rimon.

“I wasn’t feeling guilty about her death, just appalled, horrified, shocked, all the usual when someone you know and like, someone who’s a part of your life, dies.”

“I was feeling guilty.”

“I know. I could zlin that much.”

“You could?”

“Well, I don’t get much from you,” admitted Solamar, “your showfield zlins like solid stone most of the time, unless you’re projecting. I can’t zlin your primary fields. Still, when you were so upset, I picked up on some of it. I’m sorry. They were after all your ghosts, not mine.”

Rimon grinned into a gust of snowflakes.

“Now why would that make you happy?”

“I have a theory that the people from the other Forts who’ve ended up here don’t trust Lexy and me, don’t trust our judgment because they can’t zlin us clearly. Maybe you won’t distrust us just because we’re Farrises. Maybe they’ll listen to you. Maybe things will get better here.”

“Things weren’t good here before we arrived?”

Snow spackled them while Solamar listened intently to Rimon’s summary of events leading up to Clire’s Killing Losa. “That explains a lot. Clire was a Farris. Losa was a good Companion for me, but not up to what a pregnant Farris would need.”

“So you see, Solamar, we must hold new elections for a Fort Council to include Tanhara.”

“I hope Tanhara can help unify these groups.”

“We must become not seven Forts, but just Fort Rimon, one united community.”

“Rushing to hold elections won’t create that unity. We should hold elections when we’ve finished digging privies, wells, and post holes before the hard freeze. Right now, no one from Tanhara would know who to vote for, and the rest don’t know who from Tanhara to vote for.”

“That’s what I thought when there were just three Forts here. It didn’t work, and things have become worse.”

Solamar took a chance. “Seven is a better number for this than three, more idealistic.”

“A number can’t be idealistic!”

“No?” He conceded with a shrug. “Perhaps not.”

Rimon zlinned him, and Solamar dropped his showfield and opened himself to the Farris perceptions.

Then Solamar zlinned the Farris back, and was treated to a view of the depths of that formidable channel’s soul.

Rimon laughed as he disengaged their fields. “Well, perhaps a number can be idealistic. Stranger things have happened today!” He turned to go back down the stair, then paused. “My father, Zeth Farris, saw ghosts too. They say it drove him to his death.”

Solamar felt the apprehension in the man. He stepped forward and gripped the bony Farris shoulders. “You are forgiven by your ghosts. You are not imagining that. You couldn’t have done anything else with Clire under the circumstances. We have to prevent such a circumstance from developing again. What began in Fort Freedom with your grandfather, is vitally important to the world. We will not fail.” That is my mission, thought Solamar.

“You believe in ghosts,” Rimon accused.

“Yes. Only...I’d rather that weren’t generally known. No one in Tanhara knows.” He’d been sworn to secrecy about what he knew, what he could do, before he’d been trained, and until now he’d never broken that oath.

“You believe in life after death?” asked Rimon.

“...uuuhhh...yes.”

“It really is real,” he half asked, half begged.

“Yes. We were not hallucinating. They came because you were hurting so very much and they love you. They had to tell you that they know it wasn’t your fault.”

“Yes. And they did that. So they won’t come again.”

“Probably not.”

“Only probably?

“I can’t foretell the future.”

“That would be a handy skill.”

“Probably not.”

Rimon laughed, a short, harsh, bark. “Good point. I don’t want to know how I’m going to die, or when.”

“It will be at the right time. That much we know.”

“Do we?”

“Yes.”

“You’re positive.”

“Yes.”

Rimon scrutinized him in every way. “I believe you. I don’t know why. But I do.”

“Good. You won’t discuss it with anyone else?”

“No. No, I won’t.”

It had the weight of a solemn oath. “I’ll sleep better knowing that.”

Rimon nodded slowly, still studying Solamar. “Take your turn in the room first. I’ll catch a few hours right after dawn. I left Bruce tending a renSime who may be permanently crippled from his injuries. He’s one of our best weavers. And I have to see to that Freebander we saved.”

Rimon picked his way down the snow covered stairs, kicking the treads free as he went. Solamar followed.

Zeth Farris had died seeing ghosts. Who would have thought! Now he’d introduced Rimon to the idea ghosts were real. I’ve made a grave mistake here already. But dissembling to a Farris would only make things worse.