Ashes and Rain: Sequel to Khe (The Ahsenthe Cycle Book 2) Read online

  Ashes and Rain

  sequel to Khe

  Book Two of the Ahsenthe Cycle

  Alexes Razevich

  Copyright © 2015 Alexes Razevich

  All rights reserved

  One

  A thick, gray silence smothered the world. Silence, and the smell of dirt — wet, sweet, and deep.

  “Khe,” Pradat said.

  Soil — rich and loamy — crumbling between my fingers.

  “Are you all right, Khe?”

  “Fine,” I said.

  The chair beneath me was generously padded and probably comfortable, maybe even comforting, in a different situation. I sat with my back straight, knees together, feet dangling above the wood-planked floor. My nerves hummed and my skin itched from nervous sweat. I coughed into my fist.

  “Do you need water?” Pradat adjusted her machines, small black orbs covered with spindly silver tubes that pinpointed colored lights on my body, and clearstone bowls of purple-red or clear liquids that pumped into my arms. She’d brought her tools with her from Chimbalay to Kelroosh, where I lived now with my new sisters, Azlii and Nez.

  “No,” I said. Better to stifle the cough and finish the treatment sooner — and hear Pradat’s judgment on whether it was working or not.

  It would have been easier for me to go to Pradat, but the doumanas — the females of our kind — of Chimbalay had no love for me. I didn’t blame them; I’d reduced much of their city to ashes when my sisters and I destroyed the lumani, who had been the secret rulers of our world.

  I hadn’t set out to destroy them; I’d wanted only to escape Simanca and her relentless pressure to push the crops to greater yield, even when she knew it was killing me. I’d wanted to find the orindles who might heal me. I’d found Pradat, but the lumani had found me, and had changed me into an abomination.

  Pradat adjusted another light. I flinched at the sudden sting.

  “It’s a good sign that you feel something,” she said. “It’ll be over soon.”

  I had other reasons to stay away from Chimbalay. There were those there who might think what Pradat and I were trying to do was wrong. Those who would say that I’d had my rightful time — ‘see, count the age dots on her wrist’ — and it was unnatural to try to stop the returning to the creator that all doumanas embraced during their thirty-fifth year. But it wasn’t yet my time. It was only thirteen years since I’d broken free of the egg and stood on the world, first as a downy hatchling, and then as an emerged, smooth-skinned doumana. I wanted those years back. It was the most natural want there could be.

  The day was growing old and the room felt chill. Pradat peered at her palm, consulting the instrument she wore strapped around her hand.

  I watched her neck, but with Pradat you rarely knew what she felt unless she told you. It wasn’t that she was unfeeling, not like Simanca or her cold-necked unitmates back at Lunge commune. Pradat had told me once that orindles spent years learning to keep emotions from showing on their necks. A patient could be frightened or get a wrong idea about her health because of an orindle’s fleeting worry or concern. Orindles stifled their emotion spots out of courtesy to their patients — a sacrifice they made for their sisters. No orindle could be certified until she’d proven her control. I’d asked once what the trials were, but she’d pulled her lips into a thin line and refused to speak. I’d not asked her about it again.

  A light-blue circle of light that focused on a spot between my eyes darkened to nearly purple. Heat on the back of my neck and base of my spine told me Pradat had lights focused there, too. I coughed again, harder and longer this time. She came around and stood in front of me.

  “I’m fine,” I said. The shame of that lie didn’t show on my emotion spots. The lumani had changed me so no one would ever see my emotions again.

  Pradat ran her hand over her smooth scalp, turned, and dialed off the machinery.

  I sighed, glad it was over.

  “There’s a chance this worked,” she said as she gently pried the tubes from my arms. “The calculations predict a probability, but I can’t make promises.”

  I rubbed the spots where the tubes had been inserted. My throat prickled again, started to burn. I brought my hand up to my mouth, but couldn’t stop coughing. It went on and on, a deep choking cough, my upper body pounding against the chair-back with each convulsion.

  “Khe?” Pradat said.

  Her voice sounded far away. My earholes felt on fire. A ringing in my head grew louder and louder. I couldn’t breathe.

  No! Not yet.

  Thirty-five dots showed on my wrist. I’d known this was coming — had chosen to wear the scarlet gown of a Returning doumana last Commemoration Day, when we honored those who would leave us during the coming year. I’d thought — I’d believed — I would shoulder right up to that day before I fell.

  Pradat moved quickly, laying things on the back of my neck, trying to put something in my arm, but I was coughing so hard and shook so violently that she couldn’t set in the tube.

  The room spun and grew dim, the walls and floors fading from my sight.

  The smooth, gray silence settled over me again. The smell of loam, of Lunge commune; I welcomed it, and sank into the silence, sighing the word, “Nez.”

  Two

  “Wake up. Get up,” Pradat was saying. “Open your eyes.”

  It was sweet and peaceful here. I didn’t want to leave.

  “You want to see Nez again?” Pradat said. “Your other sisters? Larta? Azlii? Then you need to come back.”

  I did want to see them, be with them, live with them. I did. But it was soft here. So pleasant…

  Pradat hit her fingers hard against my wrist. “Talk to me. Where is Kelroosh going next?”

  “Two-ling commune,” I muttered, surprised it was that that brought words back to me. Because it was merely factual, I supposed. Easy. “It’s near planting time. The doumanas there need to order seeds and fertilizer.”

  I pried my eyelids open — like prying up a deeply buried stone. Pradat’s face was only finger-widths away from mine. My head felt stuffed full of sand, my chest cramped by panic.

  I grabbed her hand. “Did I Return to the creator? And then come back here?”

  “You lost consciousness, that’s all. Your day to Return is not this day.”

  A shaky sigh rattled through me.

  “Keep talking,” Pradat said. “Tell me about corentans. What are they like?”

  I laughed a little under my breath. It made my head hurt but it was good to laugh, even that small bit.

  “Corentans don’t value work the way we set-place doumanas do, as a measure of our worth. They work hard, but think harmony of life matters more than anything.” My voice grew stronger. Normal. “Azlii says all the doumanas and males of the world were like them before the lumani came and set about controlling our lives.” I gently rubbed my left wrist, where my age dots were, but didn’t look at them. “Now that the lumani are gone, I wonder if we’ll all start thinking like corentans again.”

  That didn’t seem likely though. We’d been set-place so long. Still, in the seemingly endless nights when I didn’t sleep, I often wondered what we’d become in this new world. What I’d become, if I lived long enough to find out — if I wanted to know.

  Pradat raised her eyebrow ridges. “Azlii says a lot of things.” She touched my neck. “You’ll be all right now. Safe journey, Khe. We’ll do another treatment when Kelroosh lands near Chimbalay kler again. I’ll make sure you don’t pass out next time.”

  I put my hand over hers, keeping it on my neck.

  “You coul
d come with us,” I said. “You’ve seen more of the world than most doumanas, but there are still parts to discover.”

  Pradat lowered her hand. “I have work to do in Chimbalay. Everything’s different now. Without the lumani to guide our every move, it’s hard sometimes to find our way. I should stay with my sister-orindles. It’s where I can do the most good.”

  It was my achievement that the lumani were gone. Or my fault. I didn’t regret what I’d done.

  “Do you miss them?” I asked.

  “The lumani?” Her too-large-for-her-face brown eyes widened. “No. I defied them, too. For much the same reasons you did.”

  But her neck showed a faint trace of the orange-yellow of confusion. Maybe she did, in some small way, long for the security of those times. She wouldn’t be alone in that.

  “I’ll miss you,” I said, and slid off the chair. It felt good to be closer to the planet, even with a wood floor under my feet.

  “I’ll miss you, too. But you have Azlii and Nez.”

  My throat warmed and I smiled at the mention of Tanez.

  None of Pradat’s emotion spots were lit. I tried to see with the new sight being changed by the lumani had given me — a way to perceive even the most hidden feelings — but that sight came and went as it pleased. I saw nothing now.

  It wasn’t just my new lumani vision that changed how I saw things. There was too much hard knowledge shoved in between the Khe who’d run from Lunge commune and the doumana now talking with Pradat for me to be the same. Sometimes I wanted to be that innocent again, to believe with all my heart in the joy of assigned work, The Rules, and the kindness of all doumanas toward one another.

  Pradat’s smile returned and her voice was light. “Could you ask your dwelling to open the door and let my helphands in? They’ll carry the instruments back.”

  I didn’t have to ask. Home had been listening and swung open the front door. The three helphands in their yellow hipwraps moved efficiently, gathering up the delicate instruments with a practiced skill that looked casual, but I knew wasn’t. Helphands studied for years to be nearly invisible as they went about their work. They finished packing and carried the boxes out, leaving Pradat and me alone. I felt my neck warm at the sorrow of parting. It didn’t matter that Pradat couldn’t see my emotions on my neck; she felt them, I was sure of that.

  Kelroosh rumbled, groaned, and shimmied — the buildings, soil, and surrounding wall of the mobile trading village shaking free of the land, aching for the sky. My stomach lurched as the corenta raised itself into the air and sped across the plain toward the hills surrounding the wilderness.

  An entire village of structures and beings shouldn’t be able to pick up and move whenever it felt like it. It should stay in one place, like a commune or kler, but all corentas skittered here and there over the plains. Sometimes, like now, they rose into the air to clear hills or mountains, on their way to pick up raw materials in one place and take them to another, or to gather finished goods to be delivered someplace else. It was a strange village I’d come to call home — this corenta, Kelroosh. But I’d come to love it the way I’d loved my commune, to love the corentans who seemed now more my sisters than maybe my commune-sisters at Lunge had ever been.

  Freed from the grip of the land, Kelroosh usually skimmed along inches above the greening fields, the ride smooth, the sensation of motion hardly there if you could stop thinking about the unnaturalness of it. Rising was a different tale — just enough shake that you couldn’t ignore it, couldn’t be unaware there was no solid world underneath. Wall had said Kelroosh loved to fly, loved to take sudden turns or dips, to feel the air blowing past its structures, to sneak up on flying birds or beastlets and give them a little scare. All the structures of Kelroosh had bent personalities. Kelroosh, being the sum of every structure and all who lived there, was very definitely bent.

  As soon as Kelroosh steadied, Azlii asked Home to draw back the metal screen that covered a layer of clearstone in the ceiling. I kept my eyes on my hands. I didn’t like to see clouds and sky or stars whizzing by, though in truth it was Kelroosh soundlessly whizzing, speeding along an arm’s length above the ground, now that we’d cleared the hills. If we opened the windows, plenty of sound would come in. If we opened the windows, maybe we could smell the scent of aromatics as we passed over a field. That would be nice, but then the wind would blow things around the rooms and I supposed small flight-beasts or birds could be sucked in, and no one wanted that. The windows stayed closed.

  “As fine a day for traveling as ever there was,” Azlii said, tilting her head to look through the ceiling window, giving us a view of her stretched throat and the two emotion spots there lit with the pale-green of contentment. “Makes me glad to be corentan, and not a set-placer.”

  Nez and I had been set-placers until not long ago — she from Chimbalay, and I from Lunge commune — but I knew Azlii meant no offense. Corentans just naturally thought they and their lifestyle were superior. Thought Nez and I should feel privileged to share it, too, no doubt.

  “What would happen if we went outside?” I asked, partly to make conversation and partly to distract Nez, whom I knew didn’t like flying. The true soil of Kelroosh was only about fingertips-to-shoulder deep. It seemed logical that if someone went outside while Kelroosh was traveling, she would fall through the soil.

  “Pftt,” Azlii said. “You think of the oddest things, Khe.”

  Nez tightened her grip on the pillow. “Why don’t the structures fall through?”

  Azlii regarded us thoughtfully. “I don’t know. It’s the way corentas are. Practically the first thing corentans learn as hatchlings is not to go outside during travel. It’s one of the few strict rules we have. I’ve never wondered what would happen if someone did — it’s inconceivable that anyone would.”

  I smiled at that. Corentans had few rules, but couldn’t imagine breaking them. At Lunge, we’d had a whole book full of rules, yet I had broken many, as had Simanca, and I didn’t think either of us regretted it.

  Nez’s neck showed her confusion and her curiosity. I smiled at that as well. Nez liked to know the why of things. We had that in common.

  Azlii hiked up one shoulder and sent to Home, Care to explain?

  The sound like wind that was Home’s laughter blew through the room. Do you ask why your eyes don’t fall out of your face? When a new structure is completed, it becomes part of the corenta, part of the whole. We are all different — Wall, the hatchings’ place, the sales troughs, myself, Community Hall — as your arm is different from your neck or foot, but all of you is Azlii, and we are all Kelroosh, each part making the whole greater than each part is alone. You, Khe, and Nez became part of us that night.

  We didn’t talk of that night often — the immediate aftermath of the destruction of the lumani. Pradat, Nez, Azlii, and I had fled across the plain while Chimbalay’s energy center exploded behind us. Nez and I hardly knew each other then, and yet she’d volunteered to come fight the lumani. She’d known Larta and Azlii long enough, though, and it was those two who’d known the truth of the lumani and wanted them gone. I was only the final ingredient in their explosive brew.

  We’d made it through Kelroosh’s gate just as the corenta was rising from the plain, heading for Hawnya kler. It seemed a lifetime ago, but it was only most of a year. The plain was icy that night. The ice and snow of this year’s Barren Season had melted now, and the sun rose higher above the horizon every day. The sharp, brown needles of wilderness sprout had begun to poke through the soil. Red-and-white striped buds were swelling on the awa trees.

  Home made the little kroot kroot sound that meant it wanted our attention. I caught the look on Nez’s face as Azlii and I looked up, waiting to hear what Home had to say. Moments like this were when she felt alien still, a stranger in Kelroosh, not a true sister. Corentans talked with the structures as if they were just another doumana. I’d come to think of the structures as friends, but Nez had never got the hang of it. She’d confid
ed that sometimes she’d thought she heard whispers behind her, “Kler-born,” as if she were less than a corentan, and it hurt her. She said I was as set-place as her, or Larta, or Pradat, but I’d managed to learn. Except that I hadn’t. It had come along with my ability to push the crops — part of the same thing, I thought, but I couldn’t explain any of it.

  Setting down soon, Home sent.

  I repeated Home’s words aloud for Nez.

  Azlii was out the door the minute Kelroosh settled. I hauled myself to my feet to follow her, but Nez grabbed my hand. I looked down at her, where she sat on the bright-blue pillow.

  “Pradat?” she asked, meaning what was the chance of the treatment working, of my living out my natural lifespan.

  I held my breath, thinking of what to say. Nez’s neck glowed with the dark-gray of worry and the muddy-brown of fear. I exhaled — all the emotion that didn’t show on my throat plain in the sound of my breath. “She doesn’t know.”

  Three

  Azlii turned her head, glancing around the nearly full communiteria. “Quiet in here today.”

  Usually the doumanas of Kelroosh were boisterous after a landing. There was still talk, and sudden laughter, but it fell away, leaving empty spots that yearned to be filled.

  “Tense.” Nez’s shoulders hiked up as she said the word.

  “Mm,” Azlii said. “But not tense enough to raise color on anyone’s neck.”

  “Annoyed,” I said, my mind partly on the unusual occurrence but mostly on this morning’s treatment, the desperate hope that it would work.

  The meal line wasn’t long by the time we took bowls and spoons and joined the quickly moving queue. The plant-like scents of vero, the spice of morning stew, and the woody smell of bejong boiling on the cooker filled the air. I wasn’t hungry, of course. I came to the communiteria at mealtimes because I liked the company — being commune-raised, alone was not something I ever wanted — and I still liked the scents of freshly prepared food. Odd that food smelled good to me when I didn’t need to eat it — another change the lumani had made in me.