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  THE FALL

  Christie Meierz

  The Fall

  Tales of Tolari Space ~ Book 3

  ©2015 Christie Meierz

  All rights reserved.

  Cover art and design by Thomas R. Peters

  Editor: Phyllis Irene Radford

  SMASHWORDS Edition

  The Fall is a work of fiction. It is a product of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to any persons, living or dead, organizations, or events is coincidental.

  No part of this book may be used or reproduced without the author’s permission, with the exception of short excerpts used in reviews.

  For Andre Norton

  whose books introduced me to science fiction

  and set fire to my imagination

  Table of Contents

  COPYRIGHT

  DEDICATION

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Other Titles by Christie Meierz

  About the Author

  Chapter One

  Light, the color of a closed eyelid.

  Voices drifted back and forth, across and over Laura, murmuring in words that found no place to land. A man’s voice, there. A woman’s voice, there. An astringent smell, not unpleasant, somehow familiar, but—

  Everything lit up, incandescent, resonant with feeling. A radiant presence stood to her left, and on the right, another faced away, preoccupied. A little farther, more presences moved about, their needs and desires pressing in on her, smothering her. In the distance, so many clustered together that a conflagration of terrifying intensity blazed.

  She whimpered and retreated into the familiar safety of the darkness. A word she could understand pulled her back.

  “Beloved,” a man’s voice said.

  It pushed the comforting darkness out of reach. She groaned, and the voice took on a concerned edge.

  “Laura.”

  Words spilled in slow motion from her lips. “No, let me go.”

  She lifted a hand to rub her eyes. The effort turned her muscles to water, and she succeeded only in sticking two burning fingers in one eye. She let the hand drop beside her head.

  The air changed. The radiant glow bent over her, his quiet breathing carrying his scent into her face, a light musk filling her nostrils. Irritation prickled up her spine, but amusement came from somewhere to undercut it. The glow chuckled, a rich, masculine sound, and warm fingertips touched her cheek. Love, an ocean of tenderness and affection, flowed from the hand’s owner.

  “John?” she muttered, her mouth working a little more easily now. “Is that you?”

  She pulled her eyes painfully, crustily open. Fuzzy blobs of green and brown and yellow and white filled her vision. She blinked away the worst of the gritty sting, and the blurs became people, overlaid by the strange glow. Behind them lay white stone walls with a window framing a sky full of puffy clouds and hills covered with something yellow.

  Where am I? It looked like a small hospital room. Above her stood not her husband John, but a man with cinnamon caramel skin and long black hair—very long black hair—gathered in complicated knots that fell out of sight past the bed’s edge. He wore a loose, pale green robe, its upper half covered in white embroidery. She focused on his eyes. So dark they almost matched his hair, they crinkled from the smile curving his lips. She couldn’t call him handsome, but his face held her attention. Interest pulsed, and died away. She was a married woman, and even if she weren’t, this man had to be thirty years her junior.

  “Who are you? Where is John?” She frowned. Something about her words wasn’t quite right.

  Alarm jolted through her and writ itself across the man’s face. He removed his hand from her cheek and looked across her, toward the other presence in the room. “Apothecary?” he asked.

  Her heart clenched from shock, but— She frowned. The shock came from… him, this man. He took her hand and enclosed it within both of his, and anxiety spiked through the touch.

  “Who are you?” she repeated. She tried to turn her head, but it refused to move, somehow locked in place. She struggled to pull her hand from his grip. “Do I know you?”

  Black eyebrows rose. “I am the Paran. You are my beloved. Do you not remember me?”

  “No.”

  He let go of her hand and straightened. His face went impassive, but underneath… his heartache sat in her chest, as if it were her own. Even as she focused on it, it faded into a feeling of patient resignation.

  A rustling sound from the glow on her right drew her attention. She risked a look toward it. A woman with similarly dark skin, wearing a plain yellow robe, stood at a small table next to the wall. Her black hair cascaded down her back, in less complicated knots than the man’s, almost all the way to the floor. She turned and stepped toward the bed. “We expected some measure of memory loss, high one,” she said.

  “But she does not know me,” the man replied, in a flat voice. The emotional pain returned and tinted his glow, then faded again.

  The woman bent to place a hand on Laura’s shoulder, and glowing, soothing energy flowed from the touch. “Laura, be calm. No one here wants to harm you, least of all your beloved.”

  Furling her brows, the woman took a thumb-sized device and what looked like a thin, palm-sized rectangle of stone from a pocket in her robe. She held the device, now humming, over Laura’s head, and fixed her gaze on the tile. Laura bit her lower lip and eyed the humming thing in the woman’s hand.

  “I am Syvra, your apothecary,” the woman said. “I mean you no harm. No one here means you any harm. You are safe.”

  Safe. The word rang through her head. She didn’t know where she was, but the woman’s words matched her glow. She’s telling the truth.

  How do I know that?

  Laura took a breath, and sudden knowledge blossomed. I haven’t always been like this.

  Her husband would know. “Where is my bond-partner?” she asked.

  The man’s emotional landscape jolted.

  The word—she hadn’t used the right word. The word for husband wouldn’t come. She frowned again. Her husband’s face was… was… His name was John. They had children. Grandchildren. She pummeled her memory. Their names remained just out of reach.

  Syvra glanced up at the man, then went back to examining her tile, forehead wrinkled and brows pinched together.

  “That was not the right word,” Laura muttered. “I cannot find the right word. I want my… my...” She scrunched up her face. Frustration sizzled along her nerves. “What happened to me?”

  “You fell,” the man said.

  He laid a hand on the bed beside hers, not touching. His whole presence yearned toward her, but especially along that arm. He wants to hold my hand. As she watched, his glow shrank back, and he returned his hand to his side, his glow suffused with disappointment. Biting her lip again, she glanced
into his face. He liked it when she looked at him. He liked her eyes, her hazel eyes, brown in the middle, green around the outside. Her breath caught in bewilderment. How do I know what he likes?

  “You fell from the stronghold roof,” he went on, his eyes growing distant. He clenched his jaw and shivered as jabs of distress pierced him. “The apothecaries almost could not save you. You walked close to the dark.”

  “The dark?” she murmured. Her mind filled with images. Mama’s grave. A military funeral. This man, dressed in dark red, standing before a red stone pillar, filled with grief. “But—” The thought wandered away, and came back. “Is that why I feel so weak?”

  This… Paran bent and pulled a chair forward to seat himself. “The apothecaries kept you in a deep sleep while they healed your body and the injury to your brain.”

  “How? What? When?”

  “Ten days have passed.”

  “Ten days? I—that cannot—only ten?”

  “Rest now, beloved,” the man said.

  She took another deep breath and let it go. No pain. No discomfort. She felt weak, but nothing hurt. She gazed at the ceiling, wondering where she was, until she realized that the Paran and Syvra had been talking for some time, in words that didn’t make sense.

  She closed her eyes and rode the sound of their murmuring into sleep.

  Chapter Two

  Before

  Laura plummeted down the vertical shaft leading from the Sural’s stronghold, safe in the belly of a living crystal transport pod. Her Tolari hosts used this as a fast and efficient method of entering the underground tunnel to the city. They also considered it fun, or so it looked to Laura Howard, former Earth Fleet ship’s wife, former… human.

  Her Tolari companions thrummed with enjoyment. The brown-clad woman seated against the egg-shaped pod’s opposite wall, who had introduced herself in the transport room as Azana, was… Laura dredged about in her memory. The serene, willowy woman was a conjectural mathematician, with eyes the color of good Scotch whiskey and a quick intelligence. The Paran had sent her to Suralia with a real, honest-to-goodness, handwritten letter for Laura, who had been trapped there by her extreme empathic sensitivity, unable to tolerate travel through the provincial cities. It had taken time to learn how to protect herself from the fierce glow generated by hundreds of thousands of living beings gathered in one place.

  The dark, almost black shaft walls flew upward, but her stomach remained undisturbed and her behind firmly planted in her seat. Some kind of clever technology implanted in the living vehicle insulated the interior and protected its occupants from the long drop’s worst effects. On her first journey by transport pod, when the Paran brought her home to his stronghold, she had asked about it, and he said something about... something inert? or damp? He’d had to look up the English, and her memory for technical terms had never been good.

  The mathematician sat, staring through the transparent floor, a smile on her lips as she watched the bottom of the shaft approach at an alarming rate. The black-robed woman guiding the pod, even in her trance—or whatever it was—glinted with pleasure. Laura rolled her eyes. It was a wonder the Tolari had never invented amusement parks. They would love the monster rollercoasters on Far India.

  Come to think of it, Laura rather enjoyed those herself, but it didn’t make the inhabitants of Beta Hydri IV any less a people of strange contradictions. They possessed technology far more advanced than Earth’s, but they lived, with exceptions such as this pod, as if they’d never made it out of the High Middle Ages of Earth’s distant past. They had developed a peaceful society devoted to science and the arts, yet their ruling caste didn’t hesitate to kill.

  As she knew from bitter personal experience.

  The shaft walls slowed, then stopped, and they hovered above the rock floor at the shaft’s base. The pod turned to point its nose into a long tunnel, lit from no obvious source. Laura brushed an imaginary speck of lint from her deep purple robe and leaned forward, grabbing the edge of her seat as she peered down the tunnel. “And now we pass under the city?”

  “Aye, ma’am, and we enter the city transit hub before we can dive down into the deep tunnel to the next province,” the servant said, over her shoulder.

  Laura nodded. “I remember.” She took a deep breath. “All right, then. Let’s go.”

  Laura saw the servant give an empathic caress to the waiting pod. It leaped forward and sped toward the fierce radiance of Suralia’s city, emitting a silent, happy croon. Laura took another breath and reached for a strand of the glowing communal net the hevalra—she remembered the word!—had created, wrapping herself in it the way the great whale-like creatures had shown her to do. It cocooned her from the terrifying blaze created by hundreds of thousands of souls living together. She leaned back into the seating as it faded to something tolerable. This kind of shield took energy and concentration to use, but the transport pods were fast, and she needed only to hold it hard for long enough to clear the city. Then she would be safe once more.

  As they exited the mouth of the tunnel from the stronghold and entered the city transit hub, the pale blue robes of Suralian guards flashed by on ledges to either side. These guards didn’t bother to camouflage. If they’d been human soldiers, Laura would guess the Sural put them there as a show of strength, a visual display to would-be invaders. I don’t need to hide my assets, it seemed to say.

  The pod slowed and floated across the smooth floor of the huge, circular space, weaving between smaller and larger pods carrying all manner of goods, or people, or both. Workers in dark green robes gathered in clusters around pods and cargo, sparing Laura and her companions barely a glance. A long distance pod carrying a servant, a scientist, and an artisan, even an artisan with exotically fair skin and chestnut hair, excited no particular interest in the midst of a busy day’s work.

  The pod reached a large shaft on the far side of the hub and dropped headlong into it.

  “How many stops are we making?” Laura asked. They were passing directly under the city now. She could sense it, a scorching bonfire outside her shields, waiting to burn her senseless should she be so foolish, or so exhausted, as to let go the thread of protection.

  “Three,” Azana answered. “Will that suffice for you?”

  “It will have to.” Laura wiped her forehead with a cloth. She’d begun to sweat from the effort of keeping the empathic blaze at bay, but she’d get through this trip somehow. It helped that they’d planned those three rest stops along the way—Azana needed to consult with mathematicians at strongholds close to their intended route. Something about a project the respective rulers of Suralia and Parania, the Sural and the Paran, had dreamed up together, though Laura would lay good odds it could be better described as a plot they’d hatched. Tolari rulers did love to scheme, and those two were on better terms with each other than most. After all, they were brothers.

  Half-brothers, anyway. They shared a common father, though they didn’t put it that way. Kazryn, the Sural’s father, had fathered the Paran but wasn’t his father. That made no sense to Laura, but one ruled Suralia and the other Parania, so she guessed the details didn’t matter very much. The Sural didn’t even know the woman who had mothered him. It made her fingernails itch to think about it.

  The glow above faded as they sped away from the city. Laura rolled her shoulders to loosen the tension in them and, carefully, lowered her shields. Exquisite awareness of the other two women in the pod came crashing in, but at least they’d cleared the city and its searing radiance. She needed only her normal empathic barriers now. She wiped the sweat from her face once more, imagining herself deep within a stone pyramid.

  “I think I should rest,” she said. Without waiting for a reply, she quit the bench and made her way to the rear of the pod, where mats, pillows, and cushions covered the transparent floor. It wouldn’t take much more than an hour to reach the next city, and less than that before they crossed the border into the province to which it belonged.

 
; Laura stretched out on her back, pulling a coldpack from one pocket and a communications tablet from another. She gave the coldpack a pinch, and it frosted over. With a sigh, she draped it across her forehead, enjoying the delicious cold, and contemplated her tablet.

  Though the Tolari normally used very little technology, they made an exception when it came to the lovely little device. It measured the size of her hand from heel to fingertip, a slim, elegant rectangle with rounded corners which might pass for a polished stone tile, until someone tapped it just so. Laura tapped it, and it came alive with symbols and sigils and things she couldn’t understand despite her language lessons.

  Two sigils sported tiny labels in English, just for her: Language Exercises and Casey Public Library. She pursed her lips. She should have worked on the language exercises while she visited Marianne and her new baby, but it just wasn’t any use. Over the years, she’d spent more hours studying and stammering than she cared to admit, but she never got past the most basic phrases in any language she tried to learn. She hadn’t done any better with the Paranian she studied now. It was all she could do to remember the simplest greetings. She had left the exercises undone. She could already hear Kellandin, her tutor, clicking his tongue.

  The second sigil was a gift from Marianne. It contained the entire fiction collection from Marianne’s hometown library, tens of thousands of books, more than Laura could read in a lifetime, even a lifetime extended another 300 years by the Jorann’s blessing. She touched the sigil, and the novel she’d been reading opened, a cracking good adventure about a girl stranded by herself among aliens. It was so engrossing, in fact, that she almost missed it when something… changed.

  She frowned and sat up. The coldpack plopped into her lap.

  Azana’s fingers, which had been dancing over her own tablet in a frenzy, came to an abrupt halt, and she turned her large whiskey-brown eyes on Laura. “Artist?”

  “I—” She frowned again. “What’s different?”