Bhotta's Tears: Book Two of the Black Bead Chronicles Read online

  Bhotta's Tears

  Text copyright © 2016 by J.D. Lakey

  Cover & Illustrations copyright © 2016 by Dylan Drake

  All rights reserved. Published by Wayword Press

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval without permission in writing from the author or publisher.

  ISBN-13: 978-0692610084

  ISBN-10: 0692610081

  Book Website

  JDLakey.com

  Contact:

  [email protected]

  Illustrator Website:

  DylanDrakeDesignInc.com

  Printed in the U.S.A

  Second Edition, January 2016

  Other Books in the Black Bead Chronicles:

  Black Bead: Book One

  Bhotta’s Tears: Book Two

  Spider Wars: Book Three

  Trade Fair: Book Four

  Dunauken: Book Five

  For

  Dylan, for being a rock, Daris for being constant, Liz for being patient, and Tomas for believing in the impossible.

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty One

  Chapter Twenty Two

  Chapter Twenty Three

  Chapter Twenty Four

  Chapter Twenty Five

  Chapter Twenty Six

  Chapter Twenty Seven

  Glossary

  Rank & Dome Affiliation

  About the Author

  “… so there we were, stuck on a world not of our own choosing, running down a track hellbent on destruction with our heads so crammed full of the thoughts and ideas of others there was no room for our own; everyone telling us what we should be thinking, ought to be thinking, needed to be thinking, trying to climb into our minds and down our throats, choking us with their tyrannies disguised as theologies and their theologies disguised as dogmas and their dogmas disguised as civil law. Well, we had enough, didn’t we. The staying felt worse than the leaving. We turned our backs on that life and we walked down the road and out of the world. Some say we invented a new way of living. Human Evolution, they called it. Piffle. That is the hubris of hindsight. I think what we did was far more subtle. We forgot. We embraced our collective amnesia, wiping the slate clean so that we could remember what had been long forgotten. That, my friends, is the true definition of revolution.”

  — Anna, the first Mother

  excerpts from The Quiet Revolution,

  The Forbidden Books

  Chapter One

  Cheobawn woke with a start, her heart pounding in her chest, her mind already piercing the ambient, searching for the threat that had broken into her dreams and disturbed her peace.

  Dark and silent, her room was not the source of her unease. She pushed her awareness out further, into the home she shared with her Mothers and their Husbands. The household slept. She could feel their restless dreams whispering softly to her out of the still pool that was the Coven’s communal heart.

  Letting her Ear expand out beyond the walls of the house and the walls of Mora’s will revealed nothing of note. The village dreamed on. All was as it ought to be.

  Had the turmoil in her heart been nothing but a nightmare? She tried to put the wisps of that dream into some coherent order but it was like trying to catch clouds. An image lingered in the back of her mind. An image of herself standing on the edge of the Escarpment with her toes curled over the rocky lip of the tall precipice. The rest of the dream remained formless and unfocused, hidden under the same blanket of clouds that had covered the earth beyond the edge of the dream’s cliffs.

  An ominous foreboding tainted everything about that image, leaving a sour aftertaste in her thoughts. But it was just a dream.

  Cheobawn rolled over and tried to go back to sleep.

  She tossed and turned for a bit and when it became apparent that the time for sleep had come to an end, she sighed and sat up. Leaning over, she pressed her palm against the surface of the bedside table.

  “Five thirteen,” the table said softly, its voice serene and motherly, the program intentionally designed to comfort wee things who were afraid of the dark. In her own voice it added, “What are you doing up so early, you dufus? Go back to sleep.” Cheobawn smiled. Last Restday she had opened up the table’s guts and replaced its crystalline brain with one Alain had helped her program. She touched the night stand again.

  “I’m sleeping. Go bother someone else,” her own voice groused at her in annoyance. Despite its protest, the intractable tabletop activated. A menu glowed softly under her fingertips.

  Cheobawn laughed. She now had the most irreverent night table under the dome. She keyed in a code in the inquiry menu. The string of numbers initiated her own programing. The display rebuilt itself revealing a more complex menu.

  She touched a blinking icon. Halfway across the dome compound the little brain inside her personal study terminal flared into life.

  “Uh oh, someone is being naughty. Better not let the Mothers catch you,” her own voice crowed in delight.

  It was early, too early for study time. Her study station was now operating outside of the set time limits for underage use, an infraction that risked privilege restrictions and extra duty.

  Extra duty always seemed to be smelly, dirty, or disgusting, such as scraping hardened snail slime off the intake filters in the dome’s water works or mucking out the fermented straw in the bottom of the root cellars. This was awful in and of itself but it was made all the more horrible when you added the preamble of endless scolding from her nest-mothers, the Coven.

  Cheobawn grimaced at the thought but did not stop. She was fairly certain this small transgression would go undetected. Alain had assured her that you had to be standing directly in front of the terminal inside her cubical in the Learning Center to see the telltale lights. As long as she used her program after hours when the building was empty, she would be fine.

  Studying after hours was a minor infraction. She was not sure what the elders would say if they found out she had altered the original format of the night table, turning the glorified alarm clock into a full access data terminal.

  Establishing a link between the two brains had been fairly simple. She had cold soldered a pair of synced bloodstones to the two brain units, the one inside this table and the one inside her study station in the Learning Center. Alain had helped her with that as well, showing her the where and the how of it on his own study terminal in the Pack’s dormitory room in Pack Hall. He had even insisted she practice on a few dummy crystals before attempting the real thing. The hardest part had been sneaking him into her room and the Learning Center and dismantling the consoles without any of the Elders noticing.

  Finding a pair of synced bloodstones had been the easiest part of the whole escapade. She had merely taken a pair from the remains of the bag of marbles she’d found hidden in the detritus at the bottom of her old toy box. Her family of marbles were small and pink, their psionic field weak, good only for kid’s games
like hide and seek, a psi-skill game she had not played since Megan had declared Pack status and gone off to live with the boys. Pale as they were, they were clear as fine glass and the harmonics of the stones still managed to stay tuned to each other across the dome. Now the two crystal brains were linked as surely as if she had run a hardwire between them.

  Someday, when she was older, Menolly would take her into the Temple to teach her the Mysteries. Cheobawn would learn the art of Tuning. Then she would be able to take a family of raw bloodstones, indelibly bonded during their creation and turn them into something really useful such as warding stones, sentinel units, or com spheres.

  Once, when she was little, she had tried to tune a pink orphan bloodstone all by herself. She had become convinced there were things living in the darkness under her bed, inside the toy chest, and behind the cupboard doors. Mora had not listened and Brigit had laughed, so she had taken the matter into her own hands, playing with the internal harmonics of the stone, intent on turning it into a ward.

  Cheobawn grimaced at the embarrassing memory. Little kid’s brains came up with the strangest ideas.

  Needless to say, the results had not been pleasant. Instead of creating a warding stone, she had scrambled the stone’s harmonics so badly that its psi emanations had drawn Mora out of her study, a furrow of pain between her brows. Hayrald had been delegated to take the offending stone outside, beyond the Dome’s warding limits, to be buried as far away from sensitive minds as possible. Afterward, the scolding had been endless. Mora kept going on and on about eating your vegetables before eating your dessert, an argument that had gone over her young head since dessert and bloodstones seemed two totally different things.

  In retrospect the logic became painfully clear. One did not attempt a Master level skill with Apprentice level training. The lesson having been well learned, she had set out to learn as much about bloodstones as possible. Syncing a pair to work together had been dead easy.

  Cheobawn studied her enhanced table top. Running her finger across the new menu array, she pulled out a submenu and touched another icon. A weather report replaced the menu display.

  “Today’s weather will be sunny and hot. Expect highs…“ the machine voice murmured. The weather report droned on. It was not that she needed the table to tell her something she could have just as easily found out by searching the ambient above the Dragons Spine. It was just that she did not feel like getting tangled up in Bear Under the Mountain’s mind just yet. Bear, who danced the world about on his back, was a bloodthirsty creature. It was too early in the morning for such

  nonsense.

  The noise from her table filled the empty silence. An animated cloud map scrolled across its display underneath the scattering of cups, toys, sheet music, and colored styluses.

  She stabbed a finger into the power icon, cutting off the machine in mid-sentence. The mindless voice annoyed her more than usual today. Cheobawn’s eyes wandered around her room, looking for something else to distract her mind.

  “You must be at North Gate in 72 minutes,” her table reminded her softly.

  “Yeah, yeah,” Cheobawn said as she rolled out of bed, goaded into motion by a formless feeling of unease. She glanced up as she crossed the room and caught sight of herself in the mirror over her dressing table. The strange girl behind the wall of glass wrinkled her nose at Cheobawn.

  She had once harbored a vague hope that turning seven would fix everything that was wrong with her looks. It was not to be. Her short, pale hair grew in swirls at the corners of her forehead, defying all attempts to comb it flat. She ran her fingers impatiently through the curls that wanted to cover her ears and dangle down between her eyes. The same sun that had bleached her hair had also burnt her skin a golden brown everywhere except her face. There, a liberal dusting of dark freckles marred the pale skin of her nose and cheeks. Her smoky gray eyes only added insult to injury. She thought she looked less like a little girl and more like a hunting cat. The girl in the mirror raised her upper lip in a snarl. The transformation to cat was complete.

  Cheobawn turned away, snorting in amusement. She would never be in love with her mirror like a lot of the older girls, that was certain.

  She crossed to her window, threw open the shutters, and leaned out over the wide sill, letting her eyes wander over the sleeping village. The tall whitewashed houses with their rooftop gardens stood like shaggy-haired stone sentinels amidst the lush greenery of the commons, their window eyes closed with shuttered lids as their inhabitants slept peacefully inside them. Nothing stirred there, nor on the paths that snaked around them through the gardens and landscaping.

  A flash of light made her look up. High overhead, the transparent membranes of the dome’s apex panels opalesced under the first rays of the sun. A moment later, triggered by the warmth, a handful of panels popped open and pivoted out, the enviromatics turning the light-sensitive surfaces towards the rising sun while the venting fans whirled into motion. Cheobawn closed her eyes, imagining she could feel the first hint of a breeze.

  A frown settled between her brows. The dream nagged at her, wanting her attention. More curious than worried, she checked the ambient around it but could not make sense of what she found. Something strange, a thing with an odd alien feel to it, hung just off the edge of knowing. Distance, time, and a chasm of understanding separated her from it.

  Cheobawn pushed it out of her mind. If her year of experience at being Tam’s Ear had taught her anything, it had taught her to deal with the most pressing problems first. Time would resolve her confusion. It always did.

  She turned her mind to other matters. Her Pack must surely be up by now. Even though they had the dawn shift of harvester duty, Tam would not neglect their practice sessions. Ever since Tam, Megan, Alain, and Connor had taken the name Blackwind and moved into Pack Hall, taking up residence in a single large dorm room alongside all the other Packs, Tam insisted on extra training outside the scheduled physical-arts lessons. Declaring Pack status seemed to have made Tam even more driven, if that were possible.

  Cheobawn checked the ambient of the house once more, wondering who else was up. The house was silent. A silent ambient could mean nothing. Awake, the entire Coven and all their husbands could be in the house and she would not know it until she turned a corner and met them face to face.

  She considered sneaking out of the house without checking with an adult but then she shook her head. Nothing good would come from it, that was for sure. It was so unfair that Mora insisted she wait until she turned eight before she could train with her Pack.

  She returned to her night table and palmed it again.

  “Five twenty-seven,” the table informed her. “Exactly twelve minutes since the last time you asked,” her own voice added in exasperation.

  She activated her study station again. “That’s two times. Don’t be stupid. Once is an anomaly, twice is a coincidence, three times is a pattern,” the other Cheobawn said. She was reminding herself that nothing went unnoticed for long inside the dome. Ignoring herself, Cheobawn scrolled down her study guide to ‘E’ and then touched the word ‘Escarpment’.

  “The Escarpment is the name given to the natural boundary created by the overthrust of the continental plates …” the lecture began, the voice a soft susurration that carried no further than the edges of the room. She watched the simple animation showing two continents coming together, one floating while the other sank beneath its leading edge. The video was from the pre-history archives, the time before the tribes had built domes, the animation primitive, the frames obviously hand tinted, the information more entertainment than science. She closed the video and scanned the text that replaced it. Cheobawn sighed in frustration. Like the simple cartoon maps hanging on the walls of the underager’s classrooms, the article was geared for a seven-year-old, the content stripped, the language simple. If one were to believe only in what was taught children, one might think the world ended at the lip of the Escarpment.

  She touched
an icon that connected her to the dome’s core database. Linked to every other dome by a family of powerful bloodstones, the central crystalline mind contained the totality of tribal knowledge. If the information existed, it existed here.

  A security warning appeared, requesting a passcode. Only people who had reached majority were given pass codes. Cheobawn entered Brigit’s number.

  Alain, a veritable fountain of odd facts, carried an endless list of adult passcodes in his head. It seemed that as they got older, adults had problems remembering things so they kept their passcodes written down on bits of paper for anyone to find. He told her where to look. Alain was very clever that way. Of all the codes she knew, Brigit’s seemed safest. Brigit had a very relaxed attitude towards rule breaking and would not report Cheobawn’s sins to her other wives unless she thought it necessary for Cheobawn’s well being.

  Cheobawn watched the menus on her table repopulate themselves, bringing up a much more extensive list. She found the subject she wanted, pulled out a cascade of menus, and then touched a title. An article about planetary geology appeared on her screen. Scrolling down to the end, she scanned the list of related articles. What she wanted was not there.

  Cheobawn growled in frustration. How were you supposed to ask questions about things you didn’t know if you did not know enough to ask the questions?

  She chewed on her lower lip, frowning. Time to rethink the problem, as Hayrald would say. Cheobawn found a pre-history file that contained images of the planet surface and expanded it.

  Studying the map, she ran her finger along the serpentine line that represented the vertical cliffs called The Escarpment, a line that divided the entire continent, running almost due east-west. North of this line lay the land occupied by the tribes and their dome covered villages. She flicked her fingers over the image. The image zoomed in. More current local maps replaced the antiquated overall map. She scrolled until she found the dome labeled Waterfall. This was home. With this point of reference, she zoomed out again. To the north of her dome lay the mountain range, neatly labeled Dragons Spine. Perpetually hidden under snow and ice, the peaks fed the countless little creeks that ran over the tribal lands, all of them flowing south until they fell off the Escarpment. She found Badnite Creek and ran her finger down its length from its birth on the spire labeled White Dragon Peak to where it ran around Waterfall Dome before continuing south to where it ended at the high cliffs.