“I don’t think we can,” he said, dashing my hopes. He had curled the tip of his tail around my ankle, as usual, and the glow of the markings on his body added to the cozy atmosphere inside the small control room. “Auby, can you control the Burrower, sorry, I mean Digger?” he asked, but I had a feeling that question was almost performative; he already knew the answer somehow.
Auby sat down with a thump on his haunches, the middle pair of his six legs splaying wide, while the front pair raised his chest and head. He flicked back his ears and looked extremely dejected, a soft mooing kind of noise escaping before he said, “No, I can only open the Digmaster 6-20D. I cannot steer it. That was the task of my previous companion.” Which meant we could not dig out my ship right now, not until we figured out how this machine worked ourselves.
I eyed the massive array of buttons and controls with dismay. That was going to take a while. Damn it.
Chapter 9
Levant
The inside of an actual, massive Revenant. I never thought I’d see such a thing, but here I was. Too bad my ears were still ringing, and blood had dried, sticky and itchy, on my neck. “Auby,” I said carefully as I inspected the many screens and their displayed readings. Temperature controls, climate readings, an energy lock. There was even a feed of the outside, small, as if it were not important.
I had not sensed it, but it appeared that the Revenant had continued on its path after Auby had shut the hatch behind me. We were in the tunnel that passed Felicia’s ship. It was only because I was looking right at the screen with the energy lock readings that I saw it abruptly jump. From a signal nearby, it leaped to something much fainter and definitely very distant.
“What is it, Master Levant?” Auby asked. He had come to stand next to me, his front hooves on the console right next to the screen with the energy lock, his long ears pointed forward. Master? Really? I was used to people calling me Shaman, even though I was very familiar with the Serqethos Clan, and most just called me by name. Master? That was what I’d call one of the leaders of the Shaman Council, an Elder like Chen or Fraersosh. Never myself.
“Next time you use your sonic weapon, please warn me so I can brace myself,” I told him, and I swiped my fingers through the blood to show him. His lavender eyes went huge inside his pale purple face, his pink nose wobbling as he sniffed. The only wayto describe his expression was contrite, and I was beginning to believe that wasn’t merely simulated but real.
“Oh…” he said in such a small voice that I felt bad for even telling him. “I shall remember that, Master Levant. Is there anything I can assist with?” I sank lower on my tail, checking the energy lock of the Burrower to assure myself it was still on that distant point and not on Felicia’s ship. With a hand, I patted his soft head, and he eagerly leaned into the touch.
“No, it’s fine. Please don’t call me Master. I’m just a Shaman,” I told him. That energy lock changing… was that what had happened last time it passed by Felicia’s ship, too? The energy signal I’d been drawn to had vanished, but my sensors weren’t powerful enough to pick up something as distant as whatever the Burrower was chasing now.
“Okay, Ma… Levant,” Auby said, already back to sounding cheerful. “What’s a Shaman?” he asked next. His tail wagged, brushing against my coils, soft and sweet. I twisted to look from his curious face to Felicia. She had sat down on the floor behind me, a sad expression on her pretty face that I didn’t know how to handle. I didn’t like that she was sad, but I was relieved that I couldn’t rescue her ship right now. That felt selfish, but it was the truth.
“Yeah, I want to know too, Levant. What’s a Shaman? You look a little too advanced to be one.” Her words seemed to imply that shehadheard the word, but at the same time, it appeared to make little sense to her. It surprised me that we hadn’t discussed it yet, had I not explained anything to her?
Curling my tail across the smooth but slightly warmed floor of the control room, I wrapped it around her, then under her. She shouldn’t be sitting on the hard floor when she could be cradled gently in my coils. She allowed me to do that with a casualness that took my breath away, like she was already used to my touch.
“A thousand years ago,” I said quietly as I relaxed beside the console. “Right around the time your ship arrived on our planet, calamities struck Serant: civil war, a shift of the poles, and a botched attempt to reach space despite the natural EM field that surrounds our planet. They all brought about the end of our civilization. Through the centuries, it has been the task of the Shamans to preserve the knowledge of our ancestors and guide our people.”
“And you are such a Shaman?” Felicia asked. Her expression was grim again, which I hated. She could not help but realize that the arrival of her ship was too much of a coincidence not to be related to the massive chaos that had descended on our planet. I nodded slowly, my tail pressing against her in what I hoped she understood was an offer of support.
“Yes, but I think this situation is going to warrant a call to the Shaman Council. The Elders must know of these developments.” I needed to explain to them about Felicia and her ship. The powerful energy fluctuations from her ship’s engine might very well be what was affecting Serant’s EM field and causing more ships to crash. Then there was the Revenant we were now inside, and the discovery of a functioning companion Revenant, Auby. All these things would need to be studied. Most of all, they needed to know about the savage, pale blue-and-white Naga Clan we’d discovered. A lost Clan? It was almost unthinkable.
“You have a way to reach them from here?” she asked, as if surprised. It was getting warm beneath all the layers of fur. This control unit had been icy when we entered it, but it appeared to have begun heating itself to a more pleasant temperature now—an automated response triggered by our arrival. I shrugged out of my tunic, then pulled the communication device from my pouch and held it up to her.
“Yes, I am always in contact with my fellow Shamans, even when most of us are assigned to Clans as caretakers. A lonely task,” I explained. Not so with the Serqethos Clan, which had felt like home to me. I had been lucky that way, because there were far fewer Shamans than there were Clans. Most, like my friend Artek, served multiple Clans and thus lived in a neutral place all by themselves. I had only ever been there to serve the Serqethos, and thus I’d felt like I’d been part of them. Their Queen was also sweet, kind, and enlightened. A throwback to the way Naga females used to be before the Calamities.
I felt like I was under a lens, stared at with full curiosity by both Auby and Felicia. Raising my communicator, I hailed theAmarathasfirst, because there was almost always someone on the bridge. It was the fastest way to get hold of the entire council, because all three Elders lived on the ship together.
My call was answered by a Shaman in training, a young male called Codish. If I recalled correctly, he was close to finishing his training and had a real aptitude for healing. Erish had taken a special interest in him. “Shaman Levant!” the young male said in greeting, and he dipped his head in a deep bow. His image was only visible as a small slice on the device, but I knew I was being projected across the massive viewscreen in the Amarathas right now. It took up most of the front of the ship’s bridge.
“Codish, please ask the Elders to gather; I have news,” I said gravely. I was keeping my device angled so that neither Felicia nor Auby were visible, but I could feel my mate crawl closer, her hands sliding over the still-fur-wrapped coils of my tail. She’d pulled her tunic, hat, and scarf off, and freed her hands from her mittens. Her pale hair was a frazzled halo around her sweet, dotted face.
“Did you find out what causes the EM field to be unstable? There was another skyship crash to the west, in Revenant territory, only a few hours ago.” That sounded too close to when Felicia’s ship powered down for it not to be connected in some way. But it was dangerous to assume causality when two events only seemed to correlate.
“Just get the elders, Codish. If they want you to hear my news, they will let you know.” He grinned, still young and eager, and took no offense. Codish seemed impressed with my recent round of rebellion rather than shocked. The hint of hero worship in his eyes made me a tiny bit uncomfortable, but thankfully he slithered away to do as I asked.
“The Digmaster seems to have locked onto a different energy target, Auby. Do you know what it is looking for?” I asked while we waited. I freed myself of the last of my furs and tailwarmers as I spoke, then assisted Felicia in getting out of the crude leg coverings I had created for her. Both of us watched Auby curiously as we waited for him to consider his answer. He was taking his time, which made me wonder if he was hiding something on purpose or trying to find away around some kind of ancient command from his previous master.
“My mission was a secret,” he said, puffing out his chest so obviously that it was clear he was proud of that fact. So I was right, he was trying to circumvent a command to keep the purpose of the Burrower secret. “I have no exceptions for this situation, but I assume that the status of “secret” expired upon the death of both my creators, the builders of the Digmaster, and my previous companion,” he announced.
He launched into a very complex explanation that made even my eyes glaze over just a little bit. Felicia stared at him a little longer, but it was obvious she understood even less than I did, her head cocked at an angle and confusion written all over her pale, human face. It was cute and distracting, and it didn’t help me understand Auby’s ravings about energy and synergy and gravitational forces, and an eye-watering amount of statistics I’d never heard of.
“Hang on,” I said, in a bit of a rush, because I knew it wouldn’t be long before the Elders reached the bridge now, and I wanted to have a grasp on this before they did. “Are you saying the Digmaster, you, and your companion were sent to the pole to search for that specific energy signature? To study it?”
“Yes,” Auby chirped cheerfully. Well. He could have just said that. Just in time, because I heard the shuffle of scales against metal. Chen, Frearsosh, and Erish arrived, huddling close together so all three were visible to me on my communicator’s small screen. Chen was in the middle; he was usually the more vocal one, though he was the youngest of the three. Erish had only milky-white eyes that were supposedly sightless, but we all knew to tread carefully around him anyway. It was Frearsosh who held the true power. He was the decisive vote in everythingthey did, and he was the one I needed to convince of the importance of what I’d found.
“Levant, you have news?” Chen said, his eyes twinkling in a way that made you think he was laughing at you, but kindly, not like he was mocking you. Chen had always been my favorite teacher when I’d trained at the Shaman Training Grounds. I had definitelynotbeen his favorite student; I made too much trouble for that. Those twinkling eyes seemed to say: clearly, you haven’t learned your lesson yet. His mouth said, “Have you found the source that’s destabilizing Serant’s natural EM field?”
