Guardian of the Storm (17 page)

“What thoughts trouble you?”

Tempest glanced at Kiran a little guiltily, partly because her thoughts were so far from what he was sure to consider the far more important issue of ‘the prophesy’. If it came to that, she was inclined to think it was, too. After all, they all lived on Niah. What happened to Niah was as important to her people as it was to his.

Part of it, though, was the realization that he had to sense that she was trying to push him away, to distance herself from him. Even if he didn’t particularly want her himself, had no interest in her as companion, he was bound to feel at least mildly offended that she’d clung to him with grim determination and now seemed as eager to be rid of him as she had been to cling to him before.

She shrugged instead of answering, unwilling to risk angering him.

Not that that worked, she saw wryly. His expression tightened and she had a feeling it was because he knew the direction of her thoughts.

To her relief, he didn’t pursue it. Instead, he grabbed his pack and sorted through the modest rations that remained from the food the Mordune had given them. Pulling off a small portion of hard bread, he cut two thin slices of equally hard cheese and handed her half. In silence, they nibbled at the bread and cheese while they waited for the meat to cook.

Talore, the great red moon had risen above the horizon by the time they’d finished their meal. By the moon’s light, Tempest made her way to the small pool Kiran had told her about. When she’d taken care of her needs, she squatted beside the pool and washed her face and hands and then scooped up water in her palm for drinking. It was tepid, warmed by the sun of the day.

She stared at the glassy surface for several moments when she’d finished drinking, feeling the unaccustomed urge to strip her clothes off and submerge herself. It was a wicked thought, of course, wicked in the sense of decadence even to her mind, though she didn’t doubt the Zoeans would consider it just plain sacrilegious. Yet, the experience she’d had bathing before tempted her, lured her.

Knowing she shouldn’t, she peeled her garments off, shook the accumulation of dust off the best she could and carefully folded them. Settling her garments on a rock, she gingerly stepped into the pool, feeling the water against her flesh with a strange mixture of guilty pleasure and revulsion. Wading out only so far that the water was lapping at her knees, she crouched down, submerging her lower body and then cupping water in her hands and scrubbing it over the rest of her body. It chilled her skin, making it pebble uncomfortably, and yet her awareness of every square inch of her skin was magnified.

It startled her when she looked up as a shadow fell over her and discovered that Kiran had followed her to the pool. She couldn’t tell anything about his shadowy expression, but guilt rose in her and she surged upward, shivering as the water rolled off her skin and the night air kissed it.

Without a word, he reached for the ties of his loincloth, pulling at them jerkily until it fell to the ground at his feet. Her breath caught in her throat as he moved toward her. Halting when he was mere inches from her, he lifted his hands and skated them lightly down her damp arms and then upwards again, curling his fingers around her shoulders.

Dragging her upwards even as he pulled her firmly against his length, he dipped his head and covered her mouth in almost the same motion.

It was nothing like it had been before. His touch was neither tentative nor coaxing, gentling. His mouth was hot, hard, filled with a raw hunger that was possessive, demanding as he parted her lips and plunged his tongue into her mouth, boldly laying waste to her senses. With his first touch, he sent her reeling out of control.

His hands seemed to be everywhere at once, kneading her flesh, strumming it until every nerve ending in her body vibrated and heated need poured through her in beguiling waves. Breaking the kiss almost as abruptly as he’d begun, he scooped her up and strode from the pool. When he reached the pallet she’d spread on the ground, he sank to his knees, settled her on it and covered her body with his own, wedging his narrow hips between her thighs in almost the same movement.

She gasped as she felt the probe of his thick flesh, digging her fingers into his arms. “Kiran?”

He released a shuddering breath, hunching his shoulders to nuzzle his face against her throat. “
Zheri Cha
,” he breathed hoarsely, cupping his hips to drive more deeply inside of her, shaking all over as he strained to fill her.

Sinking dizzily beneath the waves of pleasure, Tempest clung to him tightly as he moved over her and inside of her, relishing the sense of being surrounded and filled with him as if he was a part of her. He began to move with a rhythmic thrust and retreat once he’d completely filled her that made anticipation build inside of her, growing tighter and tighter with each stroke that sent waves of pleasure rippling along her channel.

Her throat closed at the exquisiteness of the sensations, her lungs labored with the effort to drag in enough air and then, when she’d begun to think she couldn’t bear anymore, the pleasure reached a summit and exploded beyond the boundaries of her body. The explosion of rapture dragged a mindless cry from her throat.

He shuddered, groaned, and began to move faster, pumping into her almost desperately until he reached his own crisis and drifted downward from there with her into oblivion.

* * * *

As it turned out, to Tempest’s immense relief, the confrontation with the priests at the temple didn’t come to violence. The ‘priests’ didn’t fit Tempest’s concept of holy men. They were armed and made it evident that they were willing to die to defend the Temple. However, they didn’t expect to be attacked. As she and Kiran presented themselves at the gate, Ta-li and his men went over the wall. The priests were surrounded and subdued before they had fully realized the Temple was under attack.

Once they had rounded them all up and locked them in one room, she and Kiran began their search of the sacred Temple. They found the Keepers of the Memory in the catacombs beneath the main Temple, accessible through a set of doors that only opened to the code of the crescent.

Tempest turned to look at Kiran with startled eyes when the doors opened. “You’re a priest of the Temple.”

Kiran glanced at her. “Yes.”

The implications made her feel ill, but she dismissed them as the full magnitude of the implications struck her. “They lied to you. The whole thing—all of it was a lie and they knew it for a lie. You weren’t born with the sign. They took you to that place … They must have.”

Kiran’s expression was grim, but he shook his head. “I do not know. I was not born into the priesthood as they were,” he said, jerking his head in the direction of the room where they had locked the priests. “I was brought to them as a young boy after the death of my parents. They said that I was born with it.”

Tempest frowned. “But… if the priests are the only ones who can access this chamber, then they must either know of the code and machine … or it’s in their genetic line. Which means your father, or grandfather, would’ve been a carrier of the gene.”

Kiran shrugged dismissively. “It is not important now. We need to learn what we can from the Keepers and leave before it is discovered what we have done.”

It hadn’t occurred to her that it might be discovered, at least not while they were still there. She’d thought the greatest danger was in seizing the temple to begin with. She should have realized before that Kiran had a very good reason for sending Ta-li and his men to take another path. “The people come here often?” she asked in alarm.

“When they make camp here, yes,” Kiran said, grasping her arm and striding down the dimly lit corridor. It seemed to go on for miles, in a slight, but steady descent.

Tempest’s alarm grew as they went. She was fairly certain that it would’ve unnerved her traveling so far underground anyway, but knowing they might be discovered at any moment, and that there was only one way in, or out, scared her far more. It didn’t help that it occurred to her that it was a very strange place for anyone to live and she couldn’t help but worry that they were risking their lives for something that might not even exist.

They came at last to a vast chamber. As they had at the sacred temple of Zoe, lights flickered on before them, keyed to sensors that detected their movements.

The vast computer at the back of the chamber came to life, as well.

Chapter Fourteen

Despite the fact that she was very familiar with such things, Tempest felt her heart jerk to a standstill as two ghostly men appeared before them and began to speak. Stunned, she walked toward them slowly, not even realizing that Kiran had stopped until she waved her hand through the images and turned to look for the projector. “Holograms. I’ve never seen anything quite like this, though.” She moved away and studied the images and the strange garments they wore.

“What are they saying?” she asked, turning to Kiran.

He frowned. “Some of the words are familiar, but they speak strangely.”

Tempest looked at him in dismay. “You can’t understand them?”

“Some.”

“Ask them what happened to Niah.”

Kiran’s brows rose, but he asked the question. A hologram of the solar system appeared. The men spoke in droning voices for several minutes. Then the image of Niah was enlarged and they began to gesture at certain points. The image enlarged again, zooming in on particular areas as the dialogue continued. After a few moments, the image of the globe disappeared and a collage of other images began to flash and disappear. Even without a grasp on the language, Tempest began to get some idea of what had happened just from the images.

The planet had become destabilized at some point. It wasn’t clear how that had happened, perhaps because the Niahians themselves weren’t certain. One thing was evident, however, and that was that the destabilization had created killer storms, widespread flooding, and great loss of life. There’d been a global war, but Tempest couldn’t tell whether the war had caused the destabilization or if the war had arisen out of the chaos of the breakdown of the ecosystem, possibly because the survivors were fighting over the limited resources that were left.

She was on the point of telling Kiran to stop it when another image flashed into view, zooming in on a map location and then zooming closer still to show a building much like the temple of Zoe. This one, however, was in the side of a mountain that had two peaks. A wide valley separated them.

Kiran tensed. “The secret valley,” he murmured.

The image disappeared and was replaced by the interior of a building, the ‘temple’ Tempest presumed. The two men reappeared, walking in the building and gesturing to points of interest.

“That’s it!” Tempest exclaimed. “Tell them to zoom out and show us the location on a map.”

The computer complied and Tempest and Kiran both moved closer, examining it. “Does any of this look familiar?”

Kiran frowned, but after a moment he shook his head. “There is no place that looks like this .... Now.”

Tempest thought it over. “Tell the computer to show us this place in relation to the hall of records.”

Nothing happened. “Try, the government center.”

The map remained unchanged and Tempest frowned in frustration, then rolled her eyes as it occurred to her that she was using the wrong reference point anyway. “Tell it to show the facility in relation to our current location.”

An image was promptly displayed and Tempest felt a spurt of excitement and triumph. “Now overlay with cardinal compass points—now scale the distance.”

They studied it for some time. “How far, you think?” Tempest finally asked Kiran.

He shrugged. “Two days with the
aquestans
. Five walking.”

“Do you think Ta-li will let us take the
aquestans
?”

Kiran was quiet for some time, thinking. “We don’t know what will happen when we release this … whatever it is. Perhaps nothing at all, for it is ancient.” He looked around as if he’d suddenly become aware of the passing time. “We should leave here. We can decide what we must do when we are in a safer place.”

A flicker of reluctance leapt in Tempest, almost a sense of urgency to see if she could learn more while they had the chance, but Kiran’s reminder of the danger tamped it before it fully blossomed. Turning, they hurried back the way they had come. Tempest had to stop several times to catch her breath, however, for the climb back up was far more difficult than the walk down. When at last, they reached the main chamber of the temple once more, Ta-li met them, speaking rapidly.

“Mer-cay!” Kiran snapped. “We’ve been discovered. A group from the encampment is already on the way up.”

Abandoning the Temple abruptly, they raced through the outer gates. The Zoeans in the lead spotted them and, shouting furiously, charged. Kiran grasped Tempest’s hand and ran. As frightened as she was by the pursuit, however, Tempest was already winded from the long climb back up the corridor. She stumbled, almost falling. Without a word, Kiran caught her, tossed her over his shoulder and rushed onward. The impact of hitting his shoulder knocked the breath from her and black spots swam before her eyes, growing larger until they completely filled her vision and awareness drifted away.

When she became aware of her surroundings once more, she discovered that she was atop one of the
aquestans
, cradled against something hard and warm. She lifted her head and looked up at Kiran, still more than a little dazed. “What happened?”

“We managed to out distance them … most of them. Two of Ta-li’s men were killed.”

Tempest bolted upright with a gasp of horror. “Fighting?”

“Not much. They stayed to hold off the men in the lead. They were overwhelmed.”

Tempest looked at the men accompanying them and the three saddles, now empty, stunned, disbelieving. “But … we’re only trying to help … everyone.”

Kiran’s lips tightened. “You are naïve, star child! You did not think they would simply listen, did you?”