01
The girls were up before me, so I found myself alone in the gig. There was a thin trickle of light falling down through the open hatchway as I stepped into the forward compartment. Looking up I saw that Cin had cut a long tunnel through the debris we were buried in to reach the sunlight. I called out, but she didn't reply, so I made a stop at the sanitary compartment to freshen up and then climbed up the narrow tunnel of singed vines - some ten meters of them - to reach the sunlight. The air was bright and flower scented; the fresh breeze swirled leaves in and out of the crevasses of the canyon we'd come to rest in. What was left of Tumbleweed Island had ended up wedged in the end of a narrow canyon under a large pile of torn up trees, vines and assorted storm blown debris. Vine covered canyon walls rose on either side to the pale blue-green sky.
'Naylea?' I called out, startling some storm battered birds who flew up squawking.
'Up here.'
Looking up, I identified the likely ledge she had called from and carefully pulled myself up the canyon wall using tattered vines. I found her on a narrow ledge, surveying the island with her glasses. Siss was nowhere to be seen.
From the ledge, the island spread out before us. We were perhaps 250 meters above a broad plain, in the rugged folds of a miniature mountain that arched out of sight behind us. Below, the lower foothills were clothed in a kilometer of jungle, now torn and twisted by the storm. Beyond the jungle lay a flat savanna, five or six kilometers long by three or four kilometers wide which narrowed to a blunt point at its far end. The edge of the savanna ended abruptly, with no hint of what lay below the edge and out of sight. Clumps of fist-trees and fern-topped trees were scattered across the savanna, many stripped bare of leaves or uprooted, clinging to the island by a few roots. The usual bright feathered birds and lizards soared in the fresh breeze around us and over the plain. What was strange, however, was that the sky was empty of any islands, an unbroken vault of pale, brassy luminance.
''Morning, Cin. Any sign of inhabitants?
She shook her head and lowered the survey glasses. 'No, but there may be some wreckage at the far end,' she said, handing me the glasses. 'By that last clump of trees. It looks to be pieces of metal.'
I brought the glasses up and zoomed in on the large clump of twisted trees she pointed out - half of which may've been partially uprooted by the storm, making them an entangled mess. 'Aye, I believe you're right. Nothing moving. How anxious are you to check it out?'
'I'd say checking it out and getting a better look at our new home is our first priority, don't you?'
'Second. Breakfast first.'
She shook her head sadly. 'You've no sense of adventure.'
'I avoid it when I can, and face it with a full stomach when I can't - given a choice. Where's Siss?'
'Like you, I suspect she's looking after her stomach.'
I showered and changed out of the jumpsuit I'd been working in and back into my armored uniform, trousers, shirt and jacket while Cin assembled a hot meal. After we ate, Cin showered and changed into some armored clothes as well. Before we went out, I pocketed the light line with a little grapple and grabbed my walking stick with a hook on the end, both of which I'd brought along for hiking on Redoubt Island. I had not needed it until now, since we'd done very little hiking on Tumbleweed Island. I then climbed up to the ledge and studied the island while I waited for Cin.
A sentry-serpent swam up from the jungle below.
'Siss?' I was pretty sure it was her, but then my experience in sentry-serpents was limited to her and her youngsters, on Redoubt Island. I wasn't sure I could tell her apart from any odd sentry-serpent.
It growled menacingly, and then she barked her laugh as I slowly reached for my darter.
'Very funny. Do it again, and I'll give you a dart just for laughs.'
Cin joined us shortly afterward and we set off down the rough mountainside, and then along the top of the storm battered jungle, since trying to hack through it would have been far more work. Siss took the lead, and occasionally she'd hiss us a warning - once for a long red feathered serpent that slithered away through the twisted branches, and once for a five-meter-long, but dying lizard, half crushed between two tree trunks. Cin drew her darter and shot it to put it out of its pain, without comment.
Travel was much easier and far more pleasant once we reached the broad savanna. The tough, thick grass of the savanna made walking so easy our walking sticks were largely unnecessary. Though we kept an eye to the brassy-green sky and a prudent distance from the cliff edge to give us some reaction time should a dragon appear, we felt it likely that the storm swept the skies clear of dangerous dragons. It was, in short, a carefree stroll, the wind fresh but mild, the hidden sun warm, but not oppressive, the calls of the birds cheerful, and the company very pleasant and comfortable. It was good to be so free after being confined to the little island for several weeks.
Looking back and around, I said, 'Still no islands in sight. We seem to have this corner of the Pela all to ourselves.'
'It's probably for the best. We've no need of company.'
'True, I have all the company I need,' I said beaming, though it earned me a halfhearted dark look.
'You can take that to mean Siss,' I said, 'If you care to.'
Siss, sailing on ahead of us, barked a laugh.
'I will,' Cin replied tartly, but we soon fell into chatting again as we strolled along.
The two days of enforced togetherness, and Cin's revelations about her family and past, had broken the last barrier of reserve. Oh, she'd catch herself being too friendly every so often, scowl and give me a halfhearted promise of revenge, get briefly angry when I laughed at the prospect, and soon we were either chatting again, or walking in easy silence - shipmates at last.
It took an hour to reach the distant clump of trees that held the wreckage. We circled around them to reach the wreckage, bringing us within fifty meters of the island's edge. The wreckage was widely scattered and buried in the grass and amongst the tangle of trees and underbrush. It looked weathered and old, scarred with old dents, though the freshly turned earth and shattered trees clearly showed that it arrived with the storm.
'It looks to have hit the island pretty hard. We were lucky to have a cushion of vines and the chance to bounce a bit, slowing us down, before hitting the canyon wall,' I said.
'We may have hit later in the storm, when the winds were dying,' she said.
'True. In any event, we're unlikely to find survivors.'
Even as I said that, out of the dark shadows of the trees came a low scream and a rustling of leaves and snapping of branches.
Siss gave a loud, alarmed hissing warning
Two large, blood-red shadows emerged from the trees with a sweep of their broad wings - a pair of storm battered talon-hawks. Though both showing signs of having been handled roughly by the storm - many feathers askew, they were just as blood-thirsty as ever. Beak to tail, wingtip to wingtip, they were twice as tall and broad as a man. They had claws on their wingtips as well as on their rear legs, and were as savage a beast as you'd find in the Pela. Both gave a savage, shrieking call of eager delight on seeing us, and extending their hind legs, dived for us - only to be bathed in blue flames as Cin calmly put a lethal dart into each. They shot overhead, smoldering, to disappear beyond the edge of the island.
'I'm sorry. Were you planning to negotiate with them?' asked Cin turning to me - who had only managed to grasp the handle of my darter by the time she was finished dealing with them.
Siss, recovered from her fright, barked a laugh.
'Feel free to handle all our negotiations with talon-hawks,' I replied. 'That's why I keep you around,' and then, added. 'Or rather, why I keep around you.'
She just shook her head. 'Shall we see who or what they were dining on in the woods?'
It was my turn to shake my head. 'Count me out on that. I'm going to look over the flier.'
'Come along Siss, let's see who or what we're dealing
with,' she said, and started for the trees, her darter still in hand.
I drew my darter as well as I walked over to the half-buried wreckage amongst the moss and underbrush under the trees. It was pretty shattered, but I saw a bit of fuselage that was some four meters in diameter. All the pieces showed old scars and scraped off pale blue paint. It may well have been a derelict long before it was driven onto the island. Leaning against the trunk of a fern topped tree was part of a wing, twisted at an awkward angle, with a three-meter-long pod at its tip. The pod had been shattered on impact to reveal an intricate arrangement of bars and coils whose purpose I could not discern, perhaps some sort of magnetic field drive or maybe a weapon. Darter in hand, I pushed deeper into the tangle of underbrush. There I found a large unit in a tangle of wires.
'Anything interesting?' said Cin, behind me, as I spun around.'
'Interesting, but mysterious. This looks to be a power unit of some kind. Perhaps a reactor. I didn't see any rockets or engines, at least that I could identify. Clearly advanced technology, though it looks to have been a derelict long before it ended up here. How about you?'
'Nothing but blood drenched feathers. Not enough to say what the talon-hawks were eating. Could've been a broad-feathered fellow, but then again, could have been a local dragon killed by the storm. Unless you want to investigate further, let's take a peek over the side and see what the rest of the island looks like.'
'Lead on,' I said, and we turned to the island's edge.
'That's weird,' I muttered as we reached the end of the savanna and looked "down". We found a rugged, nearly perpendicular cliff, 200 to 300 meters tall, etched with cracks and ravines and laced vines that ended with the sky at its bottom. Except for a few overhanging trees, we could see nothing of the rest of the island. It seemed to have ended abruptly at the bottom of the cliff.
'It looks to be just a sliver of an island,' Cin said.
'Rather like one of the shell reef plates.'
'Well, let's find an easy path down and see what the flip side looks like. I don't relish walking on bare rocks,' said Cin, glancing about.
We walked along the cliff edge until we reached a ravine filled with vines that our toe-claw boots could cling to and started down. Of course, since there was no gravity, a soon as we stepped over the edge and took two steps in, the cliff changed to a narrow, ravine scarred plain. We followed the ravine to the other edge. Since we were near the tip of the island, the cliff stretched into the distance on our left, but to our right, it ended with sky close at hand.
On reaching the other side, we found its character to be completely different. It was a thick, vine-laced jungle, looming dark and forbidding over us as we stood on its edge. The storm had battered the trees along the cliff, piling them into an almost impregnable wall of vines, shattered trees and underbrush. Only by walking along the edge for a while did we get glimpses of the dark, dense and uninviting jungle beyond.
'We got lucky,' I said. 'I don't think I'd have liked landing in this jungle. This may be where the talon-hawks came from.'
Cin considered the jungle for a while. 'May not have been luck. If the storm we experienced is not all that rare, our side might be the windward side of the island, which would explain why its savanna rather than jungle.'
'True. Though I don't like the idea of frequent storms very much. I rather doubt our gig would be any match for a storm like that.'
She shrugged. 'A storm every ten years could make the difference. I'll be on my way before the next one comes around.'
I grinned. Veiled threats were now mostly a joke, even for her.
Having seen enough of the jungle, we headed back "up". And then drifted back towards the miniature mountains at the far end of the island. We'd gone only half way when we came upon something unusual.
'That looks rather unnatural,' I said, pointing ahead to a low hill with a rock outcropping or wall peeking over the top of it.
Cin drew out her survey glasses and studied it. 'It is. It looks to have carving on it,' she said, handing them to me.
It may've been a natural rock ledge but it had been carved into intricate patterns. 'We're only seeing the top of it. It's worth a look,' I said, as I swung the glasses around, but could find no other evidence of habitation.
The low hill turned out to be a large, probably natural, crater, which had been shaped into an amphitheater. The wall we saw was the top of five narrow terraces faced with stone carved in flowing, organic designs, that stepped steeply down to a flat stage some 15 meters in diameter. Facing the terrace on the other three sides was a broad, grass covered slope down to the stage. Given the weightless conditions, pavement or stone seating would be out of order, so its grass covering said nothing about its age. Indeed, nothing hinted as to its age, since we knew so little about the Pela's climate. Nor could we come to any conclusions as to its purpose, given the apparent isolation of the island and the lack of any other signs of habitation - houses or fields.
'I suppose it could be a ceremonial or religious center,' I ventured, as we climbed out.
'For whom?'
'The islands might be only a couple of days' journey away and they'd be out of sight. Or maybe it drifted away from the civilization that built it many eons ago. Glen Colin said the islands of Cimmadar changed positions fairly rapidly.
'Ceremonial or sacred centers usually have attendants and facilities for the crowds they attract. Even the most isolated ones,' she replied. 'I don't see them or any sign of structures.'
'How long would wooden structures last?'
'Even wood structures leave mounds or patterns we should see in the grass.'
'Maybe they're here, living in the jungle, or in caves along the cliff, or beyond the mountains. We may be seeing only the tip of a much larger island.'
'We'll need to find out.'
And so it went - a lively discussion as we continued on our way back to the foothills and the little mountains that rose up and spread out a bit at the other end of the island. Though we looked, we found no other evidence of habitation.