True Son (5 page)

“What happened after you went to the temple?” Taemon asked.

“It was horrible,” Vangie said. “The food was disgusting. And they treated me like a slave. They brought in all those books, and they made us go through them, looking for certain books they wanted.”

Amma gasped. “You saw the books? In the temple?”

Vangie nodded. “I was one of the few people who could read. Did you know hardly anybody in the city can read? So I had to do almost all of it. Skies, there were so many books!”

“Elder Othaniel made you do all this?”

“Yes,” Vangie said, her eyes flashing with hatred.

“The books.” Amma’s eyes were wide, and she was almost breathless. “What happened to the books?”

Vangie frowned and shook her head. “So many strange things happened just before The Fall. They made us work all night sorting through the books. Then Elder Othaniel came in and told us to get a couple of hours of sleep. When we came back, the books were gone. All of them. And no one could find Elder Othaniel, either. Elder Naseph was furious, storming around, blaming everyone. Then the power went out and everybody panicked. I’m telling you, it was like an asylum in there. And that was
before
the earthquake.”

“So the books were not in the temple when it was destroyed?” Amma asked.

“I don’t see how they could have been,” Vangie said. “Naseph had people searching the temple from top to bottom looking for those books. They never found them.”

Amma fell silent, her mouth agape. There was only one person who could have taken the books from Naseph: General Sarin. And Taemon would bet his last lamb that Amma was thinking of a way to get them back.

The leaders of the colony and the city had made a habit of meeting in Hannova’s office to discuss problems and coordinate plans. Hannova called it the council, and somewhere along the way, Taemon and Amma had become part of it. Maybe it was their journey over Mount Deliverance last autumn and the fact that they were the only ones who had been to Kanjai. Maybe it was Amma’s knack for problem solving or the fact that Taemon had psi. While this wasn’t public knowledge, most of the leaders knew it.

Today’s meeting began with excited talk about the running water. “And not a moment too soon,” Solovar said. “This more than anything will give everyone the feeling that things are getting better.”

“People can deal with almost anything when their toilets flush,” Amma said.

Solovar laughed. “We’re not quite at that point, but we will be in a few more weeks. We’re making great progress.”

“Indeed we are,” Hannova said. “What’s next? Does anyone have anything else to report?”

“There’s something I’d like to bring up,” Taemon said. All eyes turned toward him. “I think we should write a peace proposal to send to Kanjai.”

The room fell into complete silence.

“A peace proposal?” Amma’s father said. “Do you think they’d even read it?”

“It’s a good idea,” Da said. “What would the proposal say?”

“I think the first step toward peace is to talk to each other,” Taemon said. “We could work out some ground rules, some boundaries, with the goal being to live side by side without fighting.”

He looked at the faces in the room — Hannova, Solovar, Challis, Mr. Parvel and Amma, Da, and Drigg. Frowns, mostly, and knitted brows, but an encouraging look from Amma.

“Do you really think they’re still going to attack us?” Challis asked. “Seems to me that if that was their plan, they would have done it by now.”

“The last thing Gevri said to me was a vow to come back and destroy Deliverance,” said Taemon. “I’m pretty sure he meant it.”

Hannova leaned forward in her seat. “Yes, but Gevri is not in charge of the army. He doesn’t make all the decisions. Besides, people say unreasonable things when they’re angry.”

Da spoke up next. “Let’s say for the sake of argument that Hannova’s right and the Republik has no plans to attack. Wouldn’t it still be a good idea to work out an understanding between the two countries?”

Taemon was not sure that the Republik thought of Deliverance as its own country. More like a no-man’s-land. But Da’s point was a good one.

Drigg scowled. “If we were to write this peace proposal, how would we get it to General Sarin? Someone would have to take it.”

“I suppose we could send a runner,” Mr. Parvel said. “We know the way to the tunnel by now.”

“No,” Hannova said. “We have no idea how General Sarin feels toward us right now. We’ve had absolutely no communication since the attack last winter, and I won’t send someone into an unknown situation like that.”

Taemon’s heart leaped. He wasn’t even sure if anyone would go for the peace proposal idea, and now it seemed they might actually do it.

“I’ll take care of that,” Taemon said.

Hannova wagged her finger at Taemon. “Oh, no. You’re not going to Kanjai again so soon. Not until we know more about the situation. You barely got back alive last time.”

“That’s not what I meant. I’m not planning on going there — I promise. I have an idea.” It would mean using psi, but he didn’t mention that. He still felt uncomfortable talking about his psi to others — though they probably guessed that’s what he meant.

“I suppose it can’t hurt,” Solovar said. “It’s either that or do nothing and hope for the best.”

After the meeting, Amma’s father had stayed to talk to Solovar, and Taemon walked Amma home.

“I think the peace proposal is a great idea,” Amma said. “Is that what you came up with when you were up on the mountain?”

“Cha, sort of.” It was his own answer to what the Heart of the Earth had asked of him, but that seemed too complicated to explain.

“Well, it’s brilliant.” Her words brought a warmth to the back of his neck. He wondered if it showed.

Amma kept talking. “If we can just talk to General Sarin, and maybe Gevri, too. If we can just sit down and work things out, I’m sure there’s some way to . . .”

Amma trailed off. They were almost at her house now, the one that had been rebuilt after Yens and Naseph had destroyed her family’s home that hid the secret library. Amma ran ahead and picked up something that lay next to the door. “What’s this?”

Taemon hurried to catch up. Amma held an unusual package. It was wrapped in colorful flowered fabric, perhaps a scrap from an old tablecloth, with a piece of twine wound around the package diagonally. Into the twine, little sprigs of wildflowers had been tucked and arranged carefully.

“I think it’s from Vangie,” Amma whispered.

It made sense. Vangie’s birth sign was Flower, and she did everything with an artistic flair.

Amma turned the package over and pulled out a note tucked in the twine. She had it open in a blink. Taemon read over her shoulder.

She had drawn a flower with a stem that looped around her name.

Amma let the fabric and the twine fall to her feet. She now held an ancient leather-bound book. “
The Mind That Unlocked Psi
, by Kertrand Lasky,” she read from the spine. “What in the Great Green Earth?”

“Have you ever seen that book before?” Taemon asked.

“Not that I remember. Maybe my da will recognize it.” She hugged the book to her chest. “Someday I hope we’ll get all the books back from the Republik. I’d like to think this is a start. My family was charged with preserving the history of Deliverance. I still need to carry that out as best I can.”

“I’d like to help,” Taemon said.

“Thanks.” She beamed at him, which made his neck heat up again; then she ran into the house with the book. Taemon walked home, wondering who Kertrand Lasky was and why Elder Othaniel had been so interested in books about Nathaniel.

Taemon sat alone in his room in Drigg’s house, staring at the peace proposal in his hand. It had been a week since the meeting, and everyone seemed to warm up to the idea of a peace negotiation. Hannova had proposed it to the council, and they had given their approval. Now it was up to him to get this message to General Sarin.

He stared at the words and repeated the message to himself until he had it memorized.

One sentence. He’d made them trim it down to one sentence; it was the most he thought he could send. That had caused a lot of argument, but Taemon insisted that details could be worked out later. This was just the first gesture.

Taemon let out a big breath. Time to get to work.

Using clairvoyance, he began sending his awareness along the route that led to the tunnel, through the mountain, into Kanjai. He stretched his psionic senses as far as he could. But the farther he went, the dimmer his awareness felt. He broke the connection. That wasn’t the answer.

Time to try something new. He’d been to Kanjai. He knew the building where General Sarin trained the archons. If he could imagine that place, recall it in his mind in great detail, maybe he could send his awareness directly there instead of trying to stretch it out over a long distance.

It took him a few minutes to fully create the scene in his mind. He found it was easier if he focused on one small part of the building. He picked one wall in the building that he had walked past many times during the time he spent in Kanjai, the wall between his cell and the training gym.

He pictured it clearly, in every detail, just as he would if he were trying to use psi to move it. He gathered psi and tried to make a connection with the wall . . . and there! The connection was made.

Next he pictured the words of the peace proposal written into the paint on the wall. He told himself this wouldn’t be that hard, that it was just like changing the colors of the holes when he used to play psiball. All he had to do was picture the words on the wall and change the color of the gray paint to . . . blue. That was his old psiball team color. He pictured the letters in neat, tidy handwriting, so it wouldn’t look too much like vandalism. He wasn’t trying to deface property; he just wanted to get the message to the general. He was just going to paint the words on the wall.

He imagined the gray wall with the blue words on it. Held it in his mind. Every
i
dotted and every
t
crossed. When he had it clearly in his mind, he gave the order.
Be it so!

And the words were there. He couldn’t say exactly how he knew it had worked, but he was certain it had.

Now what?

How soon would General Sarin respond? And how would he send his reply? The Republik used their strange-fangled devices, radios and phones, to send messages. But of course there were no radios and phones in Deliverance. Not even in the days of psi. Those kinds of things had never appealed to psi wielders, who distrusted mechanical devices, especially those designed to transmit information.

Taemon took a deep breath. They would just have to wait and see how Sarin chose to respond. For now, he should probably report back to Hannova and tell her that the message had been sent. He slipped out the back door of Drigg’s workshop and into the afternoon heat, heading toward Hannova’s place. He took all of three steps before he stopped cold.

A message. Gouged into the stucco of the back wall of Drigg’s house. Not neat little words printed onto the wall, but deep, slashing letters scored into the plaster:

The quickness of the response wasn’t the only thing that disturbed Taemon. Whoever had used dominion to carve those letters had to have seen Drigg’s house, which meant that General Sarin’s spies hadn’t been restricted to the temple.

The transport vehicle jostled and bounced the young archons along the endless road. Gevri watched the billowing dust the tires stirred up, glad it wasn’t his job to drive. On a flat, featureless road like this, surrounded by eternal fields of wheat stubble, driving was the most boring job he could think of. Two soldiers sat in the front seats: one off duty and dozing, the other at the wheel.

Three days of land travel would get them back to Kanjai, where they would stage the attack on Nathan’s people. In the old times, the army would have used planes to transport soldiers, but the Nau had dominated the airspace for some time now, and the army allowed only fighter planes in the air. All troop movements were safer by ground. In this case, Gevri had mixed feelings.

The bad part was that Jix refused to travel with them. To her, a vehicle was just another cage, and she would have none of it. She knew how to get back to Kanjai, and she preferred to travel on foot and on her own. Being separated from her for that long made him uneasy, but there was no arguing with a jaguar.