Free The Loranth (Star Sojourner Book 1) by Jean Kilczer Page A

silver spears of water and dug saplings from out their holdfasts. It sent mud slides down to rivers where dead animals floated. Lightning lashed the land and thunder shook it to its granite roots.
    Pru pa, the Cleoceans, who came from their homeworld's milky seas, would call this storm. Those water folk say that storms are God's reminder of our humble beginnings in the primordial ooze at the bottom of seas. His warning to shun pru zae paeii which best translates as the ancient Greek word hubris, that excessive pride which residents of Mount Olympus took great glee in kicking out of mortal man like stuffing.
    But these thoughts were not really thought so clearly on that day of the humbling storm. Sye Kor was still replacing my own mundane desires for survival and such with the grand cause of feeding Him.
    Rain crashed down in freezing waves against my ripped clothes, my body, as Christine and I hunted with our motley crew of reptiles and amphibians. Rain hissed past my ears and whispered of pru zae paeii with every clammy breath I drew. It drummed against the ground, drowning out all other sounds so that Christine and I had to shout to hear each other.
    “Water is life,” I murmured, but felt guilty as I drank from a hollow in a boulder. After all, the Master had ordained that we drink only from His Sacred Pond. Mud sucked between my bare toes as I knelt and tied a noose of slippery twine around the ripe carcass of a snuffler we'd killed for bait two days ago. Three days? Maybe four. I dunno.
    There was a strong stinging odor to its decaying flesh. But the family was hunting yellow fang, and fang was known to relish such rotted fare. Yellow fang is the Terran bastardization of Yeth F'Aron, stelspeak for “terrible fauna of alien planets.” Tartarus' fang is a cousin to grunithes, only bigger, much, and meaner, also much.
    “But not as crafty.” Something in my core rebelled at killing this animal just to use as bait, but Sye quickly covered that emotion with the need for nourishment. Relieved of guilt, I chuckled as I set a notched wooden branch under the snuffler's body and laid the noose around it. I squinted into rain, checking the strong twine tied to the bent narctressus trunk. It was held by a stake in the ground that kept the tree bowed tautly. With any luck, fang would blunder upon the tasty morsel along this game trail that led to yon water hole, dislodge a loosely tied crosspiece above the bait, spring the snare and neatly hang himself. If the noose didn't snap his powerful neck, I'd finish him with a harpoon thrust to the heart.
    I hefted the harpoon, felt its weight and balance. It was a good weapon, hardwood shank, stone tip. I'd worked on it for days and I think the Master was pleased. But I would've preferred my stingler. Sye Kor wouldn't let me have it, though.
Taboo
, He'd said in my mind when I looked for it.
    The game trail ran streams of mud. I don't think I once considered why fang should seek a water hole in this deluge. But the Master had said fang would come, and the Master was always right. About all things. My only anxiety was that fang might be diseased, like so much of the game we brought down, and unfit for the Master's plate.
    I listened for grunts and/or growls through the seething rain. Some of our swifter hunters would run ahead of fang in a bait game to lead him to his last supper.
    I brushed water from my eyes, smiled as I pictured the great reptile lumbering toward his doom, thinking he moved under free will, imagining himself the hunter. I felt a shiver of excitement at the prospect of presenting the Master with this flesh gift of our hunt, of our reverence for Him. It brought tears to my eyes, or was that rainwater?
    Soon now, Master!
    My hands felt numb as I checked knots in the snare. My fingers were stiff with cold, the knuckles red and raw. Water ran off them the way it did when Sye Kor surfaced.
    Soon! I would be with the family soon, huddled around the Master's Pond, His