Bebe knelt and lifted a tiny eyelid
on the still faerie. “I wish Alithea were here.” Her voice caught and Alpen
reached down and touched her shoulder. “The eye is not fully opaque, so I
agree. Probably a day.”
Drindl extended a branch he had
broken from a nearby bush. “Poison berries?”
Taking the branch, she saw the same
faerie bite marks. She peeled back the eyelid on another faerie, then stood up
and surveyed the tiny corpses. “There are too many. Whatever did this happened
at the same time.”
“The rain?” Alpen asked.
“The air,” Bebe said, then touched
her chest. “What if we are breathing it right now? The Melangi speak of gaseous
vents on the other side of the mountains where they live.”
Drindl scanned the area. “I don’t
see anything.”
Alpen turned to the surrounding
rocks. “Let’s move to higher ground. If there is something, we may get above
it.”
They threaded their way between big
boulders on their way up the slope. Climbing on a boulder, Alpen stopped and
lifted his hand to inspect his palm, then rubbed his fingers together. “What is
this?” He put a finger to his mouth, but Bebe reached out.
“No. What if that is what killed the
faeries?”
Alpen looked to her. “Just a taste.”
He ran his finger on the rock, then touched it to his tongue.
“Spit. It could be poison,” Bebe
said, a worried look on her face.
Alpen spit, then closed and opened
his mouth to feel the residual taste of the powder. He reached down and took
another swipe with his finger and repeated the process but didn’t spit. He
looked puzzled. Turning to Drindl, he said, “You try it.”
“What? Why me?” Drindl asked.
“Just try it,” Alpen encouraged.
“Let’s see if we agree.”
Drindl swiped a finger, touched it
to his tongue and let the taste linger. “It tastes like energy,” he said in a
quizzical tone, looking at Alpen, who nodded.
“I didn’t want to influence you,”
Alpen said. “It has that …” He couldn’t find the words to describe the taste.
There were no words for the taste of energy.
“How did it get here?” Bebe asked as
she put a finger of the powder to her tongue. She had rarely tasted energy, so
she wasn’t sure. “It tastes like when we were out in the desert and we were
really thirsty.”
Alpen and Drindl agreed. “But energy
is not salty like that,” Alpen said. He swiped a palm on a smooth rock and
licked his hand. “We would have to lick these rocks clean to get a warrior’s
size portion of energy, but a little bit might help with the hunger.”
“But there could be other things on
the rock as well,” Bebe cautioned. The thought of easing her hunger pangs won
over caution and she swiped her palm on a nearby rock and licked it. After
several times, her belly no longer twisted in hunger. “How does it work so
fast?”
“Because it’s a powder,” Alpen said.
“Normally, warriors eat the honeycomb, so it takes a while to absorb, I guess.”
He stopped, turning to faeries strewn on the clearing below. “They could have
eaten it, not expecting that it would act so soon.”
“Or breathed it?” Bebe asked. “How
did it get here?”
Drindl had already gone ahead,
scrambling up the steep slope to the ridge above. “You’ll have to see this,” he
called down to Alpen and Bebe. Drindl helped pull them up the edge of the
ridge.
As Bebe stood to survey the area,
she noticed the puffy white clouds in the blue sky. “Beautiful…” Her gaze
drifted down to the ugly scar of the open pit, the rolling valleys and a plain
to the east. “The mine?” She turned to Drindl, who pointed east to the plain. A
caravan of elephants below them trudged away toward the plain, their feet
stirring up a dust cloud that drifted to the northeast. “When the wind shifts
toward the ocean, it brings the dust up here,” she whispered.
“I didn’t think there was this much
energy in the world,” Alpen said. “Where are they taking it? Who could consume
this much energy?”
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