Dragonsblood (59 page)

raised a hand feebly to ward off the blow. “Call them back, Lorana. Bring

them back.”

“I can’t,” Lorana said, her voice choking on tears. “I tried that with Arith and

it didn’t work.”

“You must, Lorana,” Salina said fiercely. “You
must.
Call all the dragons of

Pern. Bring them back.”

Lorana took a deep steadying breath, glanced at the old Weyrwoman, and

nodded slowly. She closed her eyes and reached out, as she had done

before when Arith had gone
between.

This time, however, she stretched beyond the confines of the Weyr,

reaching first to Gaminth, then to all the dragons of Benden and then

beyond—

—to Ista,

—to Fort,

—and to High Reaches.

There were not enough dragons at High Reaches and she found herself

feeling a strange echo. It reminded her somewhat of the echo she’d felt

before, but that other echo had had a feeling of
old
about it—this one

didn’t.

Mentally, Lorana shook the strangeness aside, desperate to find Minith,

Caranth, and the dragons of Telgar. She searched, forcing all the dragons

of Pern to follow her will, to search with her.

They were willing accomplices. She felt the presence of Bidenth, the senior

queen at Ista, and suddenly all the dragons of Ista were behind her, aligned

with the direction of her mind. And then she felt Melirth, the queen of Fort

Weyr, and again the strength of dragons merged with her. For a moment

Lorana felt as though she were exploding, being stretched beyond all

imagining. She fought a moment of panic, won, and redirected her efforts

back to Minith.

There!
She found a faint echo, a spark of the queen dragon. And beside it,

she felt Caranth. She tugged at them, battling them, willing them to obey her

and ruthlessly channeling the power of all the dragons of Pern to her aid.

She could feel Caranth resist, try to slide away from her. She fastened on

to him tightly and pulled against him, pulling him back to
here.
She felt his

resistance crumble, felt a shadow of B’nik as he, too, added a call to his

dragon. Relieved, Lorana allowed her mind for just an instant to range

further, searching for the dragons of Telgar.

She felt a faint echo, a response, and turned all her power toward it,

compelling Minith to order the dragons of Benden behind her, and weaving

Caranth indissolubly into the mix. She reached—

—and felt a shock, a stab of familiarity. Not the dragons of Telgar, but

something different, something she’d felt before.

Garth?
she called. And just then she felt something else, some other

presence. Lorana felt herself opening a door, using all the strength of the

dragons to push it open.

For only a brief instant she felt she had a connection.

Dragons?
The question came to her more as a feeling than a thought.

Sick? How?

And in that instant Lorana knew the answer. Across the link, with the

greatest effort she could muster, she shouted out loud and in her mind,

“Air!”

Kindan felt Lorana go limp and caught her.

“The door!” Ketan exclaimed in awe. “Look at the door!”

The door to the second Learning Room was sliding open.

TWENTY-THREE

Parasite: A life-form inimical to its host, often killing the host to ensure its

survival.

College, First Interval, AL 58

There’s no way we can be
sure
that our future student will be able to
tell
us

which vec—” Tieran halted midword and cocked his head to listen.

“It’s just thunder,” Emorra chided him irritably. “You can’t use that as an

excuse to get out of this argument.”

“Kassa said the weather would be clear tonight,” Tieran replied, still

puzzled.

“And Kassa is always right,” Emorra observed tartly.

“About the weather, she is,” Tieran said. He started toward the door. Grenn

met him, chittering wildly.

“Where are you going?” Emorra demanded.

“I’m going to check on your mother,” Tieran replied, following Grenn as the

little fire-lizard scouted ahead. “Something’s not right.”

“I’ll come with you,” Emorra said.

“She’s not been looking well recently, has she?”

Emorra frowned. “She’s been pushing herself too hard.”

“It’s not like she’s still young,” the two said in unison and then stared at each

other in surprise. Tieran broke the moment with a chuckle and they started

up the stairs toward Wind Blossom’s quarters.

“Air!”
Wind Blossom shrieked.

How Tieran covered the remaining distance to Wind Blossom’s room, he

could never recall, but he was in the room and at her side instantly. Emorra

arrived only a fraction later.

Wind Blossom looked up at them, panting for breath.

“It must be a seizure!” Tieran declared.

“No, a heart attack,” Emorra said.

Wind Blossom pierced them with her gaze. “I heard her,” she told them. “I

heard her, she said
air
!”

“Who said air, Mother?” Emorra asked.

“The girl from the future,” Wind Blossom said. “She found me. She was so

strong.
I have never felt such power. She must have harnessed all the

dragons of her time.” She glanced at them, eyes saddened. “She was

looking for missing dragons. A lot of missing dragons—”

“A thousand?” Emorra asked fearfully.

Wind Blossom ignored the question, concentrating her strength on asking,

“She
knew,
somehow she knew that I had a question—how did she?”

Tieran and Emorra exchanged looks.

“I’ll write a song, Mother,” Emorra said. “I’ll write a song to ask the

question.”

Wind Blossom brightened. “Yes, a song!” she agreed. She smiled up at

her daughter. “Write a good one, love.”

The breath left Wind Blossom’s lungs and she fell back to her bed with a

surprised look on her face. Feebly she beckoned Emorra toward her.

“Mother?” Emorra cried, arching forward, her ear close to Wind Blossom’s

lips.

“And then you’ll be free,” Wind Blossom whispered. Her last flickering

thought was triumphant: There, Mother! I have freed them from you and the

Eridani curse.

For a long while afterward, Emorra stood over her mother’s bed, eyes

streaming with tears.

Then, without saying a word, she moved to her mother’s dresser, opened

the top drawer, searched quickly, and pulled out the yellow tunic. She

returned to her mother’s side and gently lifted the lifeless body, deftly

maneuvering it until she had exchanged the yellow tunic for the white one in

which Wind Blossom had died.

“I
did
notice,” Emorra whispered, tears streaming down her face. Tieran

laid a hand on her shoulder, and she grabbed it tightly with her own.

“I don’t understand. Why did Wind Blossom need this clue?” Seamus

asked M’hall. Everyone from the College and the Hold had gathered to

mourn Wind Blossom’s passing, and Seamus had joined his brother,

Torene, Tieran, and Emorra to find out what was going on with their

research.

“The gene mappers can only store so much information,” M’hall explained.

“In order to eliminate unnecessary information, it was necessary to know

whether the disease is spread by air, food, or water.”

“And how do we know that this future rider understood the question

correctly?” Holder Mendin, who had wandered over in time to hear the

conversation, asked with a smirk.

“We don’t,” Tieran answered. “If we find more dragons or fire-lizards

dropping in on us, then we’ll find out that we’re wrong.”

“If we do nothing,” M’hall added, “then we’ll only find out when our dragons

become infected.”

Mendin smiled, waving a hand toward Tieran and Emorra. “Well, surely

these two marvelous youngsters will be able to whip up a cure in no time.”

“No,” Tieran said. “We’d have to relearn what the future rider already

knows—and we don’t know how long it’s taken her—”

“Her?”

“She rode a queen, Holder Mendin,” Emorra reminded him.

“So our only hope for the dragons of Pern is to trust that you two”—Mendin

gestured to Tieran and Emorra—“can complete the work that Wind

Blossom had only just begun before her untimely demise.”

“I’d say that they are the only hope for
all
of Pern,” Torene replied.

Mendin quirked an eyebrow in amazement. “Indeed? And have they got the

training that Wind Blossom did not?”

“Wind Blossom had started on a line of inquiry which is proving quite

fruitful,” Tieran said. “And, as always, she had a fallback plan prepared.”

“Really?” Mendin asked. “And why not just use this fallback plan and save

yourselves more trouble?”

“Because the fallback is a method to make a watch-wher into a dragon,”

Tieran replied. From the looks of the dragonriders, and Mendin himself,

Tieran regretted his impulsiveness. “And that assumes that the

watch-whers prove immune to whatever is attacking the dragons.”

“So why would she do that?” Mendin asked. “If the watch-whers could

succumb to the same illness?”

“Well, they might not,” Emorra said. “Mother made some alterations to the

watch-whers to make them somewhat more self-sufficient than the

dragons.”

“In case something happened to the dragonriders?” Torene murmured.

Emorra nodded glumly.

“Wise,” Torene decided with a firm nod.

“So, as you can see,” Tieran said, “we still have to provide a cure for the

dragons.”

“Hmm,” was all Mendin said in response, his eyes flickering darkly as he

wandered away.

M’hall waited until Mendin was out of earshot before he turned back to

Tieran and Emorra. “Can you do it?”

“Well . . .” Emorra began, temporizing.

“We can do it,” Tieran declared. Emorra gave him a surprised look, which

he quelled with a firm look of his own.

“Good,” M’hall said, even though the byplay was not lost on him.

“I’ve been thinking of some things that might help,” Seamus interjected.

“We’d be glad of anything,” Tieran replied.

“Help how?” Emorra asked.

“Well, there are several things,” Seamus expanded. “I’ve got one of the old

RTG’s stored away. It’s not much use by itself because it’s low-powered,

but there is one storage array still working, so I think I can couple the two of

them—”

“Excuse me, what’s an RTG?” Tieran interrupted.

“Radio Thermal Generator,” Emorra replied. When she saw Tieran’s

confused look reflected in the faces of M’hall and Torene, she added, “It’s

a power generator with a long-lasting supply.”

“But the overall power’s not that great,” Seamus said. “So it’s not much use

for most things. I think it’ll be ideal as a power source for these Training

Rooms, however.”

“Then we can run lights, right?” Tieran exclaimed happily.

Seamus nodded and opened his mouth to say more, but Emorra cut him

off.

“You said there are several things—what else?” she asked.

“Well . . . I’ve managed to save some of the old powered doors,” Seamus

replied. “And I noticed that your mother recovered a voice recorder. I’ve

been thinking of ways we could hook that up to a loudspeaker—”

“Why would you want to do that?” Tieran asked.

“So that we could speak to our students,” Emorra answered immediately.

“I got Wind Blossom to show me how to use it,” Seamus added. He pulled

from his pocket a small object that fit in the palm of his large hand. “She

agreed that it would be an excellent idea, and she even recorded a short

introduction.”

He pressed a button on the object’s side.

“Welcome,” it said in Wind Blossom’s voice. “I am Wind Blossom. If you

have come to these rooms for an emergency involving the dragons, then

please step inside. If not, please leave immediately.”

“Will that do?” Seamus asked, looking up at the others.

Tears streamed from Emorra’s eyes.

“That will do fine,” Tieran said emphatically.

“Can you make three rooms for us?” Emorra asked through her tears.

“We’ll have one for the lectures, one for lab work, and the final one for

constructing the cure.”

“How big do you need the rooms to be?” Seamus asked, pulling on his chin

thoughtfully.

Emorra and Tieran exchanged looks.

“How many people would you say?” M’hall asked them.

“I doubt more than fifteen,” Emorra said. “Any more would be too many.”

“Fifteen’s a lot,” Tieran said dubiously. He pursed his lips for a moment and

then nodded. “Fifteen’s the upper limit, then.”

“No one’s used the stonecutters in a decade,” Seamus said, temporizing

his answer. “But all the same, I think we can do that.”

“Excellent,” M’hall replied, clapping his younger brother on the shoulder.

“When can you start?”

“Those doors,” Tieran interjected suddenly. “Can you control when they

open?”

Seamus frowned. “I could, but there’s always the danger that the controls

would freeze,” he replied warily. “Why do you ask?”

“I don’t think it’s a good idea to let our students into the lab or the workroom

until they know what they’re doing,” Tieran replied.

“So you want some way to test them before they get in?” Emorra asked.

Tieran nodded. “Exactly.”