still bleeding blood and selyn, yanked herself free of the renSimes who were trying to help her into the shelter and plunged toward the Farris woman, stepping on the piles of bodies, staggering as dead flesh shifted under her boots. Off balance, she gave one last lunge toward the Farris, offering all her selyn in a Companion’s instinctive response to a channel’s Need.
The Farris turned. Solamar saw it all in slow motion, flash-burned into his eyes, his memory forever. His own Companion whose selyn was meant only for him, his source of life on earth, offered it all to a Farris channel, with no frisson of fear or even caution. No Farris would Kill. Everyone knew that.
The Farris handling tentacles, four on each arm, twined themselves around Losa’s Gen forearms. The Gen arms were so inviting without tentacles but rich with swirling selyn fields.
Time had stopped for Solamar as his thighs bunched as if to propel him off the wall in a mad flying leap toward his Companion.
The Farris woman’s lateral tentacles emerged at the sides of her arms, two slender pink-gray organs with no real strength, rich in nerves that could draw selyn from the Gen body, drawing a month’s life into the void of a Sime’s Need.
Solamar felt strong Farris hands clamp rigidly onto his shoulders, pulling him back from the suicidal leap.
The Farris woman’s lips sought the necessary fifth contact point as her four laterals seated themselves against Gen flesh. Losa turned her face toward the woman in Need, offering her lips, the best, most nerve-rich contact point that gave the channel the best possible control of the speed of selyn draw.
And it was over.
Losa dropped dead at the Farris woman’s feet.
Solamar was only dimly aware of his body drawn back hard against the trembling Farris channel behind him. Shock held him rigid. The noise of battle receded. The boiling chaos of the ambient nager, riven by his Companion’s deathshock slammed into his nerves, his mind, his emotions, his innermost self.
Outside, the retreating Raiders, scrabbled over the wagons to flee the only thing they feared more than death by selyn Attrition, the supernatural wer-Gen and forced transfer from a channel.
Behind them, Jhiti pinned a Raider to the planking and broke his neck. Solamar remembered he had intended to take that Raider down himself, had planned the move in fact, and forgotten all about it in an instant. That death was near enough for Solamar to feel it against the general background of death and dying, but it barely registered under Losa’s searing, shattering deathshock.
Jhiti looked up to find Rimon still alive, holding Solamar back from the edge of the wall. Jhiti straddled the corpse and yelled, “Rimon, what are you thinking? You two shouldn’t have done that! You shouldn’t be up here at all.”
Guilt suffused the ambient, quickly damped under the channel’s control. “Yes, Jhiti, I know. We’ll discuss it later. See what can be salvaged from the wagons and round up the rest of the stock these people brought before the Raiders get them. We’ve got a winter to face soon.” To Solamar, he said, “This way. We have work to do.”
“Work....” repeated Solamar in a whisper.
“She’s dead. I’m sorry. I’ve lost a Companion to Raiders too. We’ve lost a top channel in this. Maybe you and I can still save some lives.”
“Save lives....” Solamar heard himself repeat those words, but his mind couldn’t understand them.
In the yard below, the hatch to the underground shelter opened, and people swarmed over the refugees, separating the animals from the people, sending riders out into the gathering dusk to collect the animals that had been cut loose, and other squads out to chase the retreating Raiders and to hunt for survivors.
As he followed Rimon down the ladder into the yard, the fire brigade dragged two donkeys into the yard and hitched them to the well’s wheel. Before long water was flowing. Solamar heard some renSimes and Gens banging pot bottoms and calling all cooks to the cookhouse. If nothing else, the Gens and children had to be fed.
The Fort Rimon channeling staff swung into practiced motion, separating the injuries into type and severity, and rushing them off to treatment. The Tanhara channeling staff was swept into the organization as if they’d lived in Rimon all their lives.
As Rimon Farris ploughed through the courtyard, one arm around Solamar’s shoulders, order was left in his wake. The Fort Rimon organization made this major disaster look like a routine drill until Rimon got to the hatchway to the underground shelter where the channels had set up their main hospital.
The Farris channel cast about among the bodies, the seated wounded, the milling and the dazed. Finally he snagged a Gen man who was clearing bodies. “Where’s Clire?”
The man stopped, emitting grief laced with fear. “She’s gone.”
“She didn’t die. I’d have....”
“No. The Raiders got her. A squad followed them to rescue her, but they haven’t come back. I’ve been here the whole time. I’d know if she’d been brought in. She’s not down there.” He gestured to the hospital. “Lexy is though. She’s working on Aipensha...she was alive last I heard.”
It was Solamar’s turn to support Rimon’s weight as shock took all the strength out of his knees.
Solamar sought his internal time sense, so reliable in any Sime. It had ticked off the seconds while his mind had stopped and now it told him nearly an hour had passed while they worked across the yard from emergency to emergency.
The Gen explained to Solamar, “Lexy and Aipensha are his daughters. Aipensha was trampled by a horse trying to catch Clire....”
Rimon bolted for the hatch.
CHAPTER THREE
FORT RIMON
I’m too late.
Rimon knew it the moment his head cleared the stairwell. Lexy’s nager dominated the long, narrow space lined with stacked cots, filled with the desperately wounded, the smell of wet earth, lamp oil, blood and death.
Aipensha’s nager was nowhere to be zlinned. Lexy was bent over a bloody pulp of a dead body lying half on a cot near the back. He knew the corpse had been Aipensha before he got there.
He grabbed his living daughter away from her sister’s body, held her tight. His only living daughter.
A chasm opened inside him and swallowed him whole.
He clung to Lexy, letting his nager penetrate hers, soaking up her pain, giving her the peace he didn’t have. His gut insisted his life had ended. He couldn’t tell his feelings from Lexy’s, and, for that moment, he didn’t care.
So many. I’ve buried so many. I’ve lived too long.
Gentle hands came, bundled Aipensha’s body in a blanket and cleaned up the puddle of blood. The hands belonged to the new channel whose wondrous skills had saved the Fort. Now he graced the dead with dignity.
Finally, two Gens took Aipensha away. Rimon clung to Lexy with one arm and reached out to stop the blond man. “What’s your name?”
“Solamar.
