About an hour after noon, Maia realized something ill-smelling and foul-colored had entered the stream. "What is it?" she asked, wrinkling her nose.
Thalia laughed. "She wonders what the bad smell is! How soon we forget pain when we're young!"
Kiel, too, shook her head, grinning. Maia inhaled again, and suddenly recalled. "Lerners! Of course. They dump their slag into a side canyon, and we must be passing—"
"Just downstream. Helps navigation, don't it? See, we're doin' all right without your fancy stars to guide us."
Maia felt overwhelming resurgent resentment toward her former employers. "Damn them!" She swore. "Lysos curse the Lerners! I hope their whole place burns down!"
Renna, who had been riding to her right, frowned at her outburst. "Maia, listen to yourself. You can't mean—"
"I don't care!" She shook her head, afroth with pent-up anger. "Calma Lerner handed me over to Tizbe's gang like I was a slab of pig iron on sale. I hope she rots!"
Thalia and Kiel looked at each other uncomfortably. Maia felt a delicious, if vile, thrill at having shocked them. Renna pressed his lips and kept silent. But Baltha responded more openly, reigning up and laughing sardonically. "From your mouth to Stratos Mother's ear, virgie!" She reached into one of her saddlebags and drew forth a slender, leather-bound tube, her telescope. "Here you go."
Puzzled, Maia overcame sudden reluctance in reaching for the instrument. She lifted it to peer where Baltha pointed. "Go on, up at that slope, yonder to the west an' a bit north. Along the ridgeline. That's right. See it?"
While she learned to compensate for the horse's gentle breathing, the telescope showed little but jumbled images, shifting blurs. Finally, Maia caught a flash of color and steadied on a jittering swatch of bright fabric, snapping in the wind, yanking at a tall, swaying pole. She scanned and other flags came into view on each side.
"Prayer banners," she identified at last. On most of Stratos they were used for holidays and ceremonies, but in Perkinite areas, she knew, they were also flown to signify new births — and deaths.
"There's yer Calma Lerner up there, virgie. Rotting, just like you asked. Along with half her sisters. Gonna be short on steel in the valley, next year or two, I figure."
Maia swallowed. "But . . . how?" She turned to Kiel and Thalia, who looked down at their traces. "What happened?" she demanded.
Thalia shrugged. "Just a flu bug, Maia. Was a rash of sneezing in town, a week or two before, no big deal. When it reached the hold, one of the var workers got laid up a few days, but …"
"But then, a whole bunch of Lerners went and popped off. Just like that!" Baltha exclaimed, snapping her fingers with relish.
Maia felt dreadful — a hollowness in her belly and thickness in her throat — even as she fought to show no reaction at all. She knew her expression must seem stony, cold. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Renna briefly shiver.
I can't blame him. I'm terrible.
She recalled how, as a child, she used to be frightened by macabre stories the younger Lamai mothers loved telling summer brats on warm evenings, up on the parapets. Often, the moral of the gruesome tales seemed to be "Careful what you wish for. Sometime you might get it." Rationally, Maia knew her outburst of anger had not caused death to strike the metallurgist clan. Yet, it was dismaying, the vengeful streak she'd shown. Moments ago, if she could have done anything to cast misfortune on her enemies, she would have shown no pity. Was that morally the same as if she'd killed the Lerners herself?
It's not unheard-of for sickness to wipe out half a clan, she thought, trying to make sense of it all. There was a saying, "When one clone sneezes, her sisters go for handkerchiefs." It drew on a fact of life Leie and Maia had learned well as twins — that susceptibility to illness was often in the genes. In this case, it hadn't helped that Lerner Hold was far from what medical care existed in Long Valley. With all of them presumably laid up at the same time, who would care for the Lerners? Just var employees, who weren't brimming with affection for their contract-holders.
What a way to go . . . all at once, broken by the thing you're most proud of, your uniformity.
The group resumed riding silently, immersed in their own thoughts. A while later, when Maia turned to Renna in hope of distraction, the man from space just stared ahead as his mount slogged along, his eyebrows furrowed in what seemed a solid line of dark contemplation.
