forty-eight #2
She would give Mira a moment to sort herself, but after that? We have a lot of work to do. The Relics were stolen. The planet was panicking. They only had a few hours, maybe a day if they were lucky. Then? We’re toast. Sacrificed to the Void via genocide.
“Evacuation.” The word was fresh on her lips when she whipped around, addressing the people still lingering behind her. “We need to start evacuating civilians!”
Giselle, whom Sulim only now recognized from the fray, stepped forward and helped steady her. “We gotta inform the Federation.”
“They won’t help us!” Sulim reminded her.
“But Yahzen might.” Mira joined them, the marble lips still in her hand. “Yes. Get Ramaron here. Begin exoplanet evacuation procedures, whatever that looks like! In the meantime, I need to contact Yahzen!”
“Where on Yahzen?” Sulim demanded.
The chief cast the marble to the floor and watched it obliterate into a dozen pieces. “The High Temple. They’ll have to listen to me. I am the Chief of Second Tribe, a priestess… and the daughter of the man they’ve been after for a hundred years.”
“Mira.”
She turned toward Sulim. “What?”
“Don’t forget…” Sulim bent down, picking up a marble eye. “You’re also Her daughter.”
As she passed it toward Mira, neither missed that the piece of stone now glowed red.
“…Do you really think we’d have anything to do with it?”
The feed to Dunsman Estate was slightly shaky, but the pixelated video of Mira’s grandmother, garbed in dark crimson with her blond hair swept up into a dramatic bun,
did not deter the Chief of Second Tribe from sitting up straight at her desk with the picturesque views of Cerilyn’s jungle behind her.
Despite the terrors befalling the planet, the sky was blue and the sun bright.
“I swear, you’ve lost your whole set of marbles since going to that planet. Do you have any idea how much shame you’ve brought to this family? And I thought your father was… what are you even wearing? Oh, child of my child, you have gone full barbarian!”
“So, you’re not going to send help or talk to parliament. Got it.” Mira cut off the feed to her natal home, since there was no use wasting time getting an earful from Great Dame Josih Dunsman when so much was on the line. “By the way, that shameful despot is your son.”
She knew that Josih couldn’t hear her, but she rather wished that her grandmother could. Too bad Mira had to move on to the next contact since time was so of the essence.
I hope you’re having a better chance than me, asha.
She thought of Sulim while waiting for her holographic computer to connect to House Lerenan.
Currently, while Mira reached out to hopeful help on Yahzen, Sulim was knee-deep in tactical shit with Sonall and Olma, organizing the fastest exovacuation in history.
And since Sulim had the better connections to the other tribes, she and Olma were also tasked with radioing maydays to their chiefs in a desperate effort to get them to evacuate as well.
At least their civilians… All of those maids, cooks, cobblers, and innkeepers—never mind their children—didn’t deserve to go down with the barbarian ship.
They weren’t as accustomed to a violent death on the horizon as mercenaries were.
No deaths on my watch. Mira solidified that notion as she connected directly to her other grandmother’s apartment on Yahzen.
“Mira!” Yariah Lerenan hustled over from the other side of the room, where she must have heard her device buzzing and telekinetically accepted the call. “Thank the Void, you’re still safe. What is going on there?”
While it was gratifying to see the look of maternal distress on Yariah’s face, Mira could not indulge in how badly she wanted to be a scared little girl right now.
I am the Chief of Second Tribe. I do not get scared.
That was her internal mantra as she managed her mien and met her grandmother’s visage in the screen.
“Ama,” she greeted, “this is not a pleasure call. I need help.”
Yariah silently bade her to speak. So Mira spent the next five minutes blabbering about her ascent to Chief of Second Tribe, the visions their genealogical link, the High Priestess, had sent the people who came to Mira’s aid, and what her father had done.
When she got to the events of that morning, Yariah uttered her first sound, which was a gurgle of grief.
“Poor girl!” she bemoaned. “Hannu was an Adelah, you know. My natal House.”
“I know, Ama. She is with my mother in the Void now.”
Something crept across Yariah’s aged face, her black hair streaked with gray that she stopped sorcerically changing when Mira was old enough for the seminary.
She should be enjoying the golden years of her life.
She should be transitioning to Great Dame while her and Aba’s heir takes over.
Instead, Yariah had seen her only child Ascend to godhood, her son-in-law become the greatest criminal in recorded history, and her granddaughter forsake the Temple to become the chief of a Cerilynian tribe. No wonder the woman was gray.
“Has Ma visited you in your dreams, Ama?”
Yariah’s fuzzy gaze was trained away from the camera capturing her image. As she fidgeted with her zatbah stone ring, she muttered, “No. I have heard and seen nothing. Yet you are here, asking for my hope. I will take that as the sign. What do you need?”
Mira knew that House Lerenan did not have the government contacts that House Dunsman did, but they did have contacts with the Temple.
Yariah alone represented the holiness that both House Lerenan and House Adelah courted, although the latter was the one associated with the priesthood.
Since my mother, though… House Lerenan had entered the canon of holy Houses.
Yariah was the mother of a god, and that opened a hundred doors in Garlahza.
So, when Mira asked her to speak to the High Priest and tell him what Nerilis was up to, and what was about to befall Cerilyn, she agreed—all while looking sicklier than a woman with the plague.
“You be careful,” she urged Mira, who did her best to not betray the anxiety in her stomach. “I will not lose another daughter, Mira. Not to the Void. It’s my turn. It’s my turn to die when the time comes!”
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“I know, Ama. I wish that for you as well. And the chances of that happening are stronger with the Temple on my side, even if it’s just for this.”
“I will go immediately.”
Mira didn’t want to hang up on her grandmother so quickly, but there was no time.
Just like there had been no time for her to personally teleport to her grandmother’s apartment on Yahzen and speak to her candidly.
I might be needed here. She had told everyone she would be in the office making calls for aid, so if something happened, they knew where to find her.
Nevertheless, she gave herself a moment once her holographic screen turned off. She buried her face in her hands, steadied her breath… and parted her fingers to see Ramaron standing before her desk.
“How goes it?” he asked.
Mira lowered her hands to her desk and said, “Lady Lerenan is heading to the High Temple as we speak. Great Dame Dunsman was more concerned with chastising my existence.”
“Anyone else?”
She sighed. “No. You’re the one I would call next.”
“Well, I have some good news. House Vallahar will aid us. It helps that Master Janush goes along with anything your father and I say, Void willing. And since he’s a Master Healer, he will have his clinic at Vallahar Estate on standby for any injured here.
He also offered to send some of his family to help with the evacuation. Particularly, they will teleport those deemed too fragile or sick to make the exoplanet journey.”
“Thank the Void. That is good news, indeed.”
Ramaron pulled out a chair and helped himself.
“The humans are very well organized. They’ve already put out the call to the other tribes and are in the process of beginning the evacuation order on your behalf.”
He grinned. “That Sulim is quite something when under duress. She reminds me of your father.”
“Don’t you dare.”
“Besides being fair-skinned and blond, there’s the take-charge attitude, especially when it’s something they’re quite knowledgeable about. Leaders, I suppose I should say. Except Sulim doesn’t treat it as a burden on her head. Not like your father and the golden diadem.”
“Dad treated us all like a burden. Everyone but Ma.”
That wiped the wistful look off Ramaron’s face. “That’s not true.” He settled his cane across his lap so he could cross his legs, only slightly wincing from the pain his hip gave him. I wonder where his dog is. Knowing Ramaron, as soon as things got heated, he took the canine home where it was safe.
“In the other reality…” Mira swallowed the voice in her head that told her to mind her business when other matters were at hand. “You didn’t have a cane. Or a chronic injury.”
“Well! Good for me, I suppose.”
“You’ve never told me how you got it in this one.”
The cane lightly tapped against the armrest as Ramaron considered his answer. “It was a few centuries ago. I did something reckless, and paid for it.”
“But not in the other reality.”
“Yes, well… in the other reality, your mother was still with us.”
At least that was a tidbit of information Mira could suck on. “What does that mean?”
“In this world, there was no Joiya to keep your father tethered to reality.”
That lump Mira had swallowed now sank to the bottom of her stomach like a stone. “Did he hurt you?”
“Yes. No. Not directly. It wasn’t his intention.”
Mira recalled the old stories of how Ramaron and Nerilis used to practice together at the Academy, sparring for fun and for their progress reports.
“Your father sent me to the infirmary more than once,” Ramaron often mused.
“It became a joke after a while.” Ramaron often attributed his strong defensive wards to having gone up against Nerilis’s formidable offense.
“Did he attack you?”
“No.”
Mira loosened her limbs as she fidgeted with the items on her desk, most of them holdovers from Olma’s tenure.
The paperweights, pens, and plain stationery had nothing to do with Mira’s tastes.