The reality generators, in a coincidence of factors, had brought forth against the Lok-Sanu Range a desert storm, a rain of rains to rend the night, drowning and nurturing, carving and smoothing. It boomed and banged, lightning pulsing, stabbing mountain ridges, punctuating a darkness otherwise absolute. Wind whoomed. Rain slashed in sheets against thick walls and stubby towers. Torrents, rock-laden, snarled and rumbled down deep ravines.
Inside his tower-top cell, Master Tso-Ban sat in trance, unaware of the misted spray, the ruptured rain which swirling gusts brought in beneath the eaves and through the open side to wet his skin with unaccustomed coolness.
His awareness was elsewhere—much farther even than Iryala. In fact, he lay as a sellsu, in a cool ocean current, on a world as wet as his own was (usually) dry. Rose and fell gently, slowly, on oil-smooth swells fathered by some distant storm, his flippers gently stroking to hold him in place. Floated among his pack listening to a poem, a favorite ode among the sullsi, told this night by a master bard who phrased the well-known tale in words and meter of his own. A human maiden, Juliassa, daughter of a chief, had found a sullsit chieftain, Sleekit, left by the tide sick and dying on a beach. She'd cared for him, brought fish to him, protected him from saarkas. Had even learned to speak the sullsit air speech, so they could share stories, until he was well and strong enough to fish and fight again and travel with his own.
And how, with the help of the far-listening serpents who call themselves Vrronnkiess, the sullsi, people of the waves, had gone to war to save Juliassa's people from the big-ship humans who'd come to enslave them. (Two verses were given to explain enslavement, and another for war.)
The bard was describing the gathering of the packs, when Tso-Ban felt himself drawing out of the sellsu he'd melded with, a sellsu who'd been aware of him as a psychic presence, a visitor silent and benign, and by now was used to him. For just a moment, Tso-Ban was aware of his tiny tower room. Then, unexpectedly, he was with—
Tarimenloku! Nearby! Quickly but gently he melded, and found himself looking at a screen, the bridge's version of a window, looking at a world, his own world, Tyss, a tan ball with a visible area of blue flecked with white. The Klestronu flotilla was parked 50,000 miles out, beyond the radiation belt.
Tso-Ban stayed unnoticed with Tarimenloku for hours—till after sunup. Because Tyss was technologically so backward, at 50,000 miles the ship's instruments failed to perceive that it held people. Instead, from those instruments he reluctantly decided that this planet was not habitable. Most of its surface he judged too hot for human life, while in the polar regions it was utter desert. Closer examination would not be worthwhile.
Although it was the most nearly habitable world that Tarimenloku had found in the systems he'd examined. In a sour mood he moved his two ships away from Tyss, accelerating in a warp field toward a point far enough from any gravitic nodus that he could generate hyperspace safely. Meanwhile his astrogator was taking data on the nearest other stars, deciding which to visit next.
Gently Master Tso-Ban disengaged, woke his body from its trance, then stood and stretched, and stepped outside. Desert rocks steamed beneath the newly risen sun. He would go and notify Master Deng before his exercises. This unexpected visit by the Klestroni was something the Confederatswa would want to know about.