Sorting out the Aftermath [Open]

Supposedly the assignment of work to the Candidates was random, so Qosis did not take second measure of the fact that since the first few days of Summer he had been sent repeatedly down into the stores. It surely had nothing to do with his long-cultivated instinct for tallying and quality control of raw goods. He certainly had no reason to complain: the manual labor was light enough not to trouble him, and the deep stretches of the Weyr were always maintained by mechanisms-- natural and not --at an agreeable temperature.

And he could wear proper clothes, not a drudge-worthy shirt and trousers colored so they could avoid looking dirty for long as possible. In his bright trader's tunic capped by a jacket of green wherhide that a full-fledged rider could proudly claim his own, the Candidate enjoyed a surge of respect from the workers he passed. Or maybe it was the usual intimidation hidden with a courtesy nod, but it stroked his hubris all the same. He maintained a good mood for most of the journey to his destination, and did not even mind that the other Candidate arrived some time later. He had a customary punctuality that always seemed to operate at an obsessive quarter-candlemark before everyone else's anyway.

Qosis had already noted her name on the assignment list in the barracks, and knew the basic form to watch for. He only did not notice her at first because, briefly, she appeared to be moving with drooped shoulders and disconcertion. He had been looking for someone a scant five inches beneath his own height, but the girl's method of entering the storeroom had made her look shorter. Or he was wishing her taller. After brief consideration of her unaccomplished femininity, he moved quickly to confront her.

He stuck out his right hand: large, callused, missing the end-joint of the pointer finger, and usually the far firmer grip in such a greeting.

"Qosis," he introduced himself on a sharp note, though the smile breaking out of his stubby beard was pressed with warmth. He relaxed his shoulders, looking down at Tasia with a certain fondness for the familiar. "You're a tall one." His olive-colored eyes flicked off her face and to the tunnels she had left in her wake for a moment. "I have seen you..." He gestured vaguely to the rest of Dalibor, then specified: "The barracks." The ex-trader applied generous, genuine congeniality to his words, like the Weyr had not just been doused in the blood of its youngest riders. Like he had not been right there at the unlucky moment, wrangling one assassin after the fact.

He turned to the storeroom and indicated the empty slabs at the eastern end. "There are oat sacks down the hall to stack on those. ...I will deal with that, and any other things that need moving." The Candidates' assignment board had not placed their duties so specifically. Qosis took stock of Tasia's gaunt silhouette again, this time with the more careful and unabashed eye of a man trying to determine her value as a worker over anything else. Thinness did not speak well to his notion of a well-fed and well-educated woman. "How long have you been here? Can you tally?"

Qosis made a quick study of her glasses when she moved to prop them, having not noticed them till then. His caravan had sometimes come into the possession of such devices, though no trader he knew wore them. Very often they were made at a commission and had specific persons they needed to be taken to. Luxury items. The surcharges that resulted were rarely worth the extra time it took to find the half-blind recipient.

He made no comment for his thoughts. But he wondered, additionally, if the Searchriders were really trying very hard; they both plucked masterful traders from their places of greatest experience and stole girls just hitting their child-bearing potential who could not see without augmentation-- all when there were not even eggs on the Sands.

Her later replies, despite their innate friction, prompted a grin.

"Ha," Qosis answered, as if in acknowledgment, though the baring of his white teeth fully suggested a laugh. "You do that. We are simply supposed to report the numbers and quality in at the end-- we have nothing to scratch it on. So do keep it all..." He tapped one side of his head, the bluntness of the self-poking interrupted by a leonine mane of brown hair. Then he departed out into the hall to retrieve his first bag of oats.

It was only that he had no means of checking Tasia's progress, but the trader did not linger at any point to see what she was doing. He counted supplies himself on his way in and out of the storeroom, so that he could examine her numbers at the end without appearing to cast ouright scrutiny. Some of the produce caught his eye as being noticeably wilted. If Tasia missed it, he could always check the signs for each batch before they turned in their report.

When he was finished with the oats, he approached her with one of the especially sad clumps of yellow-green vegetable in his palm. It was a tiny, wrinkled flag to gather her attention. "Isn't this pathetic?" he asserted amicably before tossing the vegetable into a nearby waste cart. They would have to wheel those out at the end, so the smell and rot did not infect the good stores. "It would not have been permitted in by any other Weyr." Especially not by the high-and-mighty northern dragonmen. "So what are your numbers so far?" he asked, eager to compare to his mental ledger.

Either no particularly lewd lyrics had been wafting through the storeroom when Qosis returned, or he had put them out of his ears as fast as they entered. All that he learned from the clip of melody was that the girl-- Tasia, he reminded himself --was probably from a place of fishercraft. Qosis knew at least one song from every major craft, and whether harper-planted or individually invented, they all had their own identifying cadence.

The request for clarification earned Tasia a blink. There was no way for Qosis to know how much she had removed. Tempted to ask her to let him count to be double-sure, he came around only to realize a few seconds had passed, and shook his head.

"After is fine. It doesn't matter, really, just make sure you have everything squared when we report." All of the eagerness had blown out of the trader like air from a popped balloon, though there was no corresponding comic effect on his stalwart figure. "There are still some others of those spuds that need hauling in," he muttered, gesturing to the potatoes before showing himself back out.

A few hundredweight of potatoes later, Qosis passed a drudge with a serving cart while on his way back to the storeroom. There were at least forty meatrolls on two trays in the drudge's care, and Qosis' nose twitched at the rich scent. So different from the dried and stored odors of the produce! He dropped off the next sack and then sidled out into the cavern hall.

He could not attempt to hide so large a figure, so he only walked at a nonchalant pace, turning toward the receiving room as if to take his next bundle of spuds but pausing as the drudge did at a cave entry a short ways down. His eyes widened as the drudge-- a limber, young lad who had not yet let his miserable lifelong duties somber his step --passed into the cave. Qosis took his full stride to the cart, swept two rolls from the top tray and one from the bottom, balancing the shares in either hand and moving off just as quickly. It would be hard for a drudge to count four, he wagered, nevermind the requisite forty he was bringing to whatever engagement he had gone to check on.

The grinning fiend interrupted Tasia a minute later, and this time the food he brought for inspection was not only fresh, but prepared. His hands were feeling red from the heat through each roll's flimsy holder, but Qosis' grasp of victory could withstand that much. He controlled his elation enough to eject a story at her: "They have brought us lunch, meager as it is." He stuck the one roll out toward her, intent on keeping the other two for himself.

But after a moment he noticed a quality Tasia might also appreciate. As a test, he withdrew the first offering and transferred one of the rolls from his other hand. It was of browner crust than the others, and differing scent. The meat poking from the vent-hole at the top was white instead of red. "This one is fish."

His eyes glimmered with recognition of her lacking gratitude. Maybe he only paid attention to it because he was the one that procured the rolls, and thus was due the thanks. But with that first subtle note, he began to identify a trail of malaise in her features, weeping through to her voice. Qosis tucked the hand holding the fishroll back and brought it to his own lips, chewing on the problem for a minute. He set himself on a storage box after testing its sturdiness with his boot. His distance from the ground was so reduced his legs had nowhere to go but into a languid splay.

Qosis ate with care; he was not fond of fish flecks in his beard. But his caution did not keep him from biting the meat roll in half when he got to it, voraciousness scoring brief victory till the still-bubbling center burnt his tongue. Swallowing hard, it took him a minute to resume eating. And then he was back to his precision nipping of the bread, shaving it down to nothing.

"Y-you have missed out," he declared, though his tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth at the first word and he gulped again before continuing. "The fish is better than the beast this time." His eyes, already tinged blue around the lower lids, watered minutely as he looked through the storeroom for water. There was none at hand, save for the smelly moisture at the bottoms of the waste carts. "But it seems you do not eat with vigor anyway. You are one of us lucky Candidates, are you not? I should think food of any kind would thrill you, nevermind that which is hot and fresh." His olive eyes lay wide with scrutiny, sculpted brow wrinkling. "You are not the first person I have seen this way during duties. What is wrong with you?"

Qosis weighed the notion of eating fish through all of his growing years, and immediately appreciated Tasia's rejection of the roll. He had enjoyed the bounties of many coastlines, but the fillets always had a taste-muffling sliminess whether it was redfin or yellowtail. Herdbeast had no such coating, and in the quality of the meat he could almost feel out the life of the beast it had come from. Fish were alien and inscrutable.

"Your mother sounds reasonable," he said anyway, not about to disparage the woman on her choice of staple meats. All the better that she pick something local and plentiful rather than increasing her losses for imported beast. He thought that even as a caravanner. "But she should have fed you more." And he motioned to Tasia's gaunt figure. "I had you pegged as orphaned for sure. Only the 'specs' are unexpected by that lineage." He tipped his chin toward Tasia's face, and the glasses keeping watch from the bridge of her nose. When her head made its fervent angle toward the floor, he watched a second longer to see if the glasses would not fall straight off.

The trader sat up with a little more interest as Tasia's voice soured. There were points to address, but first... "Wait a moment." Qosis got up and walked out of the room. It was more like two or three minutes, but eventually he came slithering back with a couple hip-flasks of wine. He glanced over his shoulder as he passed through the doorway, then bent low to deliver one flask to Tasia.

He took the second for himself, drinking greedily. The wine was propped with essences of various fruits, and was not thick enough to give a man spirits too fast. A good working wine. "Now..." he said with a proper clearing of his throat. "You speak of Weyrlings like you are their mother." Though Qosis' tone did not hold much ridicule of the idea. "Perhaps the worst of it," he began in a whisper of agreement. "Is that an entire Weyr of dragon-men cannot defend their own beasts. We will see in the coming season how the Weyr changes to accommodate the new threat. Or we will see that their leadership cannot handle a human enemy."

Another draught sipped and swallowed, and his voice eased almost to teasing: "You are still young. Why does that bother you? Do you not want to waste your Turns here? If so, you should go home. That could be better, even. There are many fine occupations for you during Threadfall that have no relation to dying in it."

"All were caught," Qosis clarified for her, then touched his thumb to his chest. "I took one of them. And I was there when they were brought to the Sands. Our Sands," he added, for it had been demonstrated that they held no special meaning for anyone else, least of all the queen dragon that had commanded the assassins there. When he returned with the wine, the broodier topic was sufficiently washed from thought. "Twins, is it? There was a friend of my mother's who had those. They killed her in the birthing, then one of them died a month after. Shamefully ungrateful of him." Qosis scratched his bearded jawline with the knuckle of his abbreviated finger. Humor did not hint itself anywhere around his creased lips or olivine stare. "If your brother is only a fool, and you have kept your mother, perhaps it is fair enough."

The trader rocked onto his feet, pocketing the unfinished flask. He gave a trailing look to Tasia as he approached the potato pile again, a command for her to also rise and resume the semblance of work. "I have heard Weyrfolk fuss about how bloodline links to potential. Did your brother get Searched too? Tell me his name. I want to know who the fools are that I will be working with these coming Turns." He took the potato sack he had thrown down hastily before and adjusted its place, fitting it into a structured pyramid that kept any bag from slipping out of line. "Or perhaps his foolishness prevented Searching? When the Search came to the caravan, they did not take any of my nieces or nephews, some of whom are of better age for this than I. I have never thought any of them deadglows, but one is feeble and another was bred from my foolish brother."

A smile struggled to Qosis' face. He grabbed one of the full waste bins and transferred it to a cart, which he shoved out into the hall with measured abandon. The cart rolled a few feet and stopped against a wall, out of the way for the moment. He returned to drag apart wooden stands that had been set together in one corner of the storeroom, granting Tasia space to examine their contents for her tallies. It was mostly pots of healer salves and herbs, a little incongruous in a larder. Probably all belonged across the Weyr, near the infirmary. "Perhaps the dragons thought you were prideful and needed humbling," he ventured. "Doesn't seem to have worked though."

He kept his back to her as he slid the stands across the floor. "They are fallible as anyone else," he considered aloud, for her benefit. "The killings prove it. They do not always choose wisely. If you remain dragonless, however, and good with tallies as you are now, you could angle for Headwoman in a few Turns. Then all dragons and riders would know your name. That is better than bitterness." The crack of a small pot off the floor broke the air just as he stopped speaking, and Qosis peered around the side of the stand he had been shifting to the left. There was a whole flock of dye pots on the shelf precipice, waiting to make trouble. The one on the floor had blotted the stone red. He walked around and began rearranging the supplies to prevent any more falls. "Find an old rag no one is going to miss," he instructed Tasia, stepping daintily around the vibrant mess as he worked.

The trader allowed himself one glance to the narrow back of the girl scouring the stained floor beside him, not one feature in his bearded face changing for the sight. Then his head turned back toward the shelves. His arm sought upward and he began transferring items from the top shelf to the roomy middle, where Tasia could actually see them for counting. Just as he turned the pots and other containers around so that he might see the labels better, he nudged the notion of fisherwives-sans-fishermen about in his head. In a caravan there was never any worry. There were extended families waiting to absorb the loss and resulting expense. There were new mates in every hold, even if taking one risked the widowing party debt and stagnation. The only restraint was grief, and that passed in time.

Qosis had never thought about how the holders dealt. But his first impression of Tasia's explanation was an agreeable one. He simply did not voice it to the girl.

"The queens like holders, don't they?" he suggested instead, extending cautious support for what he considered her other valid path. "I've not heard as much in lessons, only echoes from the dining hall," the Candidate admitted. "They said something about the last Hatching, but there's no queen in those Weyrlings, so. It was just murmurs of who, and when, and it always came back to liking hold girls." He shrugged at his own ignorance. His ears had put in a valiant effort, but still had not ensnared the entire conversation. And he could not pursue the comment further, not without rankling her on unhatched hopes that ran counter to his earlier sentiments. "More than Weyrbreds," was all he added, as if returning the implied jab against regular folk.

He stepped around her, backing off from the neatly arrayed line of shelves, green eyes surveying from one end to the other. "This time you will check your tally against mine," he warned. There was nothing to be thrown out among the non-food supplies, and thus he could quickly sum up what was present. "Six of each dye pot on each shelf, minus the one lost there, ten of those wooden tool kits..." He rattled off his own numbers even if she was still counting, unconcerned with the effects. When he was done he punctuated his indifference with a long draw on the hip-flask. "Let's take this information to whoever is minding the stores before we move to the next room. I expect we'll be loading the contents of those shelves and wheeling them across the Bowl as soon as we report it." Qosis canted his head thoughtfully. "Unless we leave it till last, and risk the dark in favor of cooler air."

An abrupt silence on Qosis' part lasted well into their journey to the stores minder. At last he looked over at Tasia, brows crunched in anger, but it was not for her.

"When a queen dies it is not just her that goes, but all the dragons that would have been of her. Hundreds of fighters for Thread. How could they have let one die? Wasn't the whole Weyr there? Wasn't the mother of the clutch?" His fervor abated only for a moment devoted to remembering whose clutch it had been. According to their lessons, the senior queen. Another Copper. "Do the new dragons lack the proper instincts? A Hatchling is large enough to kill a man, but they can do nothing to their adult kin. All it would have taken was one of them. Can't the riders tell their dragons what to do?" His throat was dry by the end of his initial outrage, but his thoughts rolled on in perturbed anger as they met with the woman in charge.

He gave stiff courtesies to the minder, who confirmed that yes, the healing supplies did in fact need to be transferred across the Bowl. It was just a minor mistake, but now compounded against killings-- of both foreign and self-induced origins --it smelled like a grievous error bound to bring death to Dalibor. A small muscle in his cheek twitching persistently, the Candidate loaded the shelf contents onto a cart. "Secure it," he snapped at Tasia, though again there was little blame to put at the girl.

Qosis resolved quietly: he could have done better. But he had not been there. And he was not-- not what? A rider? A Candidate on the Sands at the tragedy's peak? A queen dragon squatting on the Sands like an eggbound wherry while her children consumed each other? He pushed the cart out of the tunnel and onto the gentle stone of the Bowl, and blinked as sunlight filled his eyes. "I did not intend to lay all my sentiments on you," he noted in listless apology to Tasia, who he preferred to walk at the cart's side rather than assist him in rolling it along. "The wine, I think."

"Better a man than a queen!" Qosis snarled, before his recent retraction of anger recalled itself. Well now Tasia knew the pot was still stewing, and each new detail rubbed in another grain of salt. "I am sure she mourned. Then she forgot. That is why the responsibility is always on the one of the pair that can still recount the past the next day. ...this is just something I have to think on," he grumbled. "Even those dragons will need riders. I think we have already decided that Blood does not mean everything."

By the time they ducked out of the sunshine into the cramped glow-lit tunnels to the healer stores, Qosis had settled back to only mild irritation. At least, that was how much of his feelings rang through the crease of his lips and the hedging of his brow. Perhaps it was an issue with the new colors. His father had mentioned something about some of the Weyrfolk in the Northern Continent holding the mutations in great disdain. Why had he never taken the opportunity to examine the Weyrs before? Maybe he had assumed there was nothing new to learn from another rooted population. He knew dragonriders only from a distance, as customers and tithe-getters only. How wrong he had been.

The minder on this side of the Weyr was not very happy to receive them. She seemed convinced they had taken the supplies over to the wrong stores themselves, and on purpose! Qosis leapt into the opportunity for negotiations, his prize access to the healers' stores, and her price a constant verbal lashing that he weathered readily. "That deadglow," he clucked aside to Tasia as they were moving into the stores proper. He was sweating lightly, though the blood in his cheeks had gone with his faded outbursts. "No communications if you're not dragon-able, I think." The other possibility was that their shipment was not considered important enough to give the healers due notice of their arrival. "At least the rooms look better organized." They had to be, if healers were supposed to be plucking remedies from them on swift demand.