Fall of Angels (The Saga of Recluce #6)(49)

The wind continued to howl, and Nylan wished that he'd insisted that the big front door be finished and hung. He still hadn't done much more on the waste-disposal problem than rework the two casements.

The water had formed a large puddle, almost a small pond in the lowest part of the tower basement, that grew as Nylan watched.

Almost as suddenly as the storm had begun, the clacking of the hailstones died away, and the wind's whistling dropped off.

Nylan stood and eased his way up the steps and onto the water-soaked timbers and stone subflooring of the tower's entry level. From the doorless front portal, he looked out across the Roof of the World. The lower corners of the larger field were little more than knee-deep gullies, leading into a man-deep canyon that ran right off the edge of the plateau. Even in the middle of the northernmost fields, some of the small potato nodules were half-exposed, hanging out over ditches. Only the stone cairns-one large and eight smaller ones-looked untouched. That figured.

Nylan shrugged and walked out into the drizzle, then looked back at the tower. The walls seemed solid, and the foundations untouched, although the open casements on the upper levels were dark with moisture. His eyes went higher. From what he could tell, only the lower line of slate tiles on the east side had been damaged, and about half, a good twenty, were either askew or missing.

Nylan hoped the laser lasted longer, because trying to hand bore or punch those slates would create a lot of broken tiles-and more than a little wasted effort for Weblya, Huldran, and Cessya.

"Shit!" Huldran's voice was bitter.

"That's only a handful of roof tiles," Nylan pointed out, turning back toward the landers and trying to ignore a sense of loss as he plodded through ankle-deep water and mud. He didn't know what he should-or could-do, but he needed to find out the rest of the damage.

"Yes, ser, but we didn't need any of this." Huldran walked at his elbow..

"Probably not. We should have expected it, though. I imagine fall, winter, and spring are all this violent, if not worse."

"Hate this place."

"You'd rather be down on the plains, melting into a pile of goo?"

"The whole friggin' planet, ser."

"None of us planned this. We do what we can." And hope that it's enough and that we didn't do anything too stupid, he added to himself. "We'll need to run wider diversion ditches around the field to stop this sort of thing."

Heaps of hail lay strewn everywhere across the meadow, and the drizzle that kept falling was tinged with ice flakes. Ryba looked up from a prone figure where she and Jaseen, the combat medtech, struggled. "We need dressings, Nylan. Gerlich's out hunting, and he knew the storage plan by heart. Try lander three. Huldran, can you take charge of the diversion in the fields so that we don't lose any more crops?"

"Yes, ser." The blond marine was moving as she spoke. "Will do." As Nylan turned to go for the medsupplies, he asked, "What happened?"

"One of those skinny little trees with the gray leaves- the storm ripped off a top branch. Kadran didn't even see it coming in the wind and rain. Went through her shoulder like a set of barbed arrows."

Nylan winced, but stepped up his pace. He was halfway through the second bin in lander three when Ayrlyn joined him and started at the other end of the bins.

Nylan ran through an emergency medical kit. "There are a couple of modules missing here."

"Don't bother with that, Nylan." Ayrlyn frowned. "Great help here. This one says it's the emergency surgery section, and here's the section for emergency childbirth. Someone's been into it, but it's been resealed."

"Be a while before we need that." Nylan glanced through the lander door, but did not see the all-too-visibly-pregnant Ellysia. "How Gerlich . . ." He turned back and discarded the single remaining bone-splint kit.

"There are some stupid ones left. Every generation there always are. Not many, but she'd never considered birth control. Now, what about this-standard first aid-"

"That's it. We need to run that over to Jaseen."

"I'll do that. See if you can find any more. We might need them. Who knows what happened to those who were caught out in the open?" Ayrlyn grasped the sealed package and left while Nylan carefully worked through the dwindling medical supplies, before finding another sealed package of surgical dressings. He decided against taking them, but set the package in the now-empty first bin before leaving the lander.

In the short time he'd been in the lander, Ryba had managed to start the process of restoring order. Kyseen was rebuilding the cook fire, and straightening up that area, while Huldran had managed to divert the main flow of water from the bean field and had a crew working on the potatoes.

Ryba was checking over the mounts, and Istril headed off with two others to see about rounding up two mounts that had left the makeshift corral.

Everything, except the tower, it seemed, was makeshift, and he still didn't have the demon-damned thing finished- or even the plans worked out for the bathhouse and laundry addition and the jakes in the tower.

Slowly he walked back to the tower, where the lower level lay filled with puddles, one of them almost a half cubit deep. Drains. He had forgotten drains-another mistake to be rectified.

When he reached the tower yard, and the slowly vanishing puddles, he turned and looked up, studying the rain, now only falling steadily in a form somewhere between a fine mist and a heavy drizzle. The piles of white hailstones, like bleached bones, stood out on the green of the meadow.