often longed to see with his eyes instead of his mind. “No. He won’t hurt us.”
They saw an expanse of trembling skin over eyes they could not quite see. Fangs, or something like fangs, in a gleam of blued ivory. Flaring wings of hair, doubly flaring violet auroras, like spurts of cold lightning.
Brother Mainoa murmured, head down, as though he addressed a hierarch, “We are honored.”
The being crouched. It gave the impression of nodding. Paws curled — no — hands curled upon the braided walkway. Hands which seemed for an instant to have three fingers and opposed, furry thumbs. Behind maned shoulders lay an armored expanse of mottled hide and callused plates, seen only for an instant, or perhaps not seen at all. It was an impression only, gone too quickly to define. They could not describe it except to say it was not like anything else, not like any earth creature, not like any Grassian creature except itself. The proportions were wrong. The legs were not the usual thing one thought of as legs.
Brother Mainoa confronted this mirage with an expression of awed interest, blinking rapidly, as they all were, trying to clear their vision. “Perceiving you for the first time has made me wonder what evolutionary tangle led to the development of this ferocious aspect,” he murmured, eyes down.
Great orbs may have widened. Perhaps a long, curved talon extruded from a half-furred, half-scaled finger and pointed toward Brother Mainoa’s throat.
Brother smiled as though at a joke. “I cannot believe you mean that. You don’t need any of it against me. You don’t need much of it against mankind unless they choose to use heavy weaponry against you, and if they did, all your armor wouldn’t help much. Men are expert killers, if nothing else.”
Eyes narrowed, possibly, and Brother Mainoa seized his head in both hands. The others fell to their knees, holding their heads, except for Sylvan, who started forward, anger and fear combining to make him reckless.
“Whoa. Whoa.” Mainoa drew himself erect, gasping. “I wish they wouldn’t do that.” Now he knew what evolutionary tangle had led to this armour. There had been an enemy once, a huge, inexorable creature. Brother Mainoa had received an excellent picture of it rampaging about, devouring both Hippae and hounds. His head ached from the assault.
“Extinct?” he asked, receiving a feeling of agreement. “Did you kill them?”
They received an impression of perplexity, then sureness. No. The Arbai had killed them. The armored monsters had not been intelligent things. They had been only walking appetites. The Arbai had done away with them to protect the Hippae. Since that time, there had been many, many Hippae.
Brother Mainoa sat down on the walkway, suddenly lost in weariness. “This being is my friend,” he said to the other humans. “He and I have been talking for some time.” Now that he had almost seen the creature, he felt weak with anxiety over all the times he had talked with it, unseen. If he had seen, would he have said — ? No. If he had seen, he could not have said anything. One could talk to gods and angels only so long as they did not look like gods and angels, he thought. In order to approach them, we must think of them as like ourselves, and one could not think of the foxen as like oneself…
“Foxen,” Tony breathed. He was still on his knees with the others.
“Foxen,” Mainoa agreed. “He or they managed to keep the Hippae at bay long enough for us to get here. He and a few of his friends wanted us to come here, where they could get a good look at us.”
“Does he know where Stella…” Marjorie pleaded. She had the impression of a vast head turned in her direction. She shuddered as she said, “I see. Of course. Yes.” Sylvan said, “Marjorie?”
“I can hear him,” she cried. “Sylvan, I can hear him. Can’t you?” He shook his head, casting a suspicious glance at the place he thought the foxen was. “No. I hear nothing.”
“You have been a hunter too long,” Mainoa said. “You have been deafened by the Hippae.”
“Is he speaking?” asked Sylvan.
Rillibee nodded. “It’s somewhat like speech. Pictures. Some words.” He rose to his feet, utterly immune to further wonder. The trees were wonder enough for one man. He needed nothing else. He did not want to talk to foxen. He, like Marjorie, wanted to find Stella. “What does he say about your daughter?” Sylvan asked. “That others of his kind are looking for her,” Marjorie replied. “That they will tell us when they find her.”
“There are many things they want to tell us, to ask us,” Brother Mainoa said wearily, longing for and yet dreading that converse. “Many things.”
“I’ll go back down and unsaddle the horses,” said Rillibee. If they weren’t going to hunt for Stella, then he wanted to be by himself, to cling to the trunk of a huge tree and let the feel and smell of it sink into him. In the darkness, they had looked like the spirits of trees. In the light, they looked like themselves. Joshua would have given his soul for trees like these. On all of Terra there were no trees like these. Trees, all around him, like a blessing. He turned to go back the way they had come.
Sylvan followed him. “I’ll help you,” he said. “I’m no good here.” Ungraciously, Rillibee nodded. The others did not even see them go.
In his suite high in the bon Damfels estancia, Shevlok bon Damfels reclined on a window seat and sipped at a half-empty glass of wine. Dawn stood at the edge of the world. Through the open window he could see the huddled houses of the village, tied to the sky by the smoke rising from their chimneys. Dead calm. The morning had not yet been broken by sound. Even the peepers were silent at this hour.
A case of bottles stood open beside him, half of them empty. On the tumbled bed the Goosegirl slept. She had not left the bed for days. She had slept sometimes. Sometimes she had lain unmoving beneath him while he stroked her, whispered to her, made love to her. Her body had reacted to his manipulations. Her skin had flushed, her nipples had hardened, her crotch had grown moist and welcoming. Beyond that, she had given no evidence that she felt anything at all. Her eyes had stayed open, fixed somewhere in the middle distance, watching something Shevlok could not see.
Once, only once in the midst of his lovemaking, he thought he had seen a spark in her eye, the tiniest spark, as though some notion had fled across her mind too swiftly to be caught. Now she slept while Shevlok drank. He had been drinking since he had first brought her there.
She was to have been his Obermum. She was to have ruled the family with him, when Stavenger died. She was fitting. More than that, he had loved her passionately, Janetta had been everything he had wanted.
But the thing on the bed was not Janetta, not anymore.
He was trying to decide whether he should keep her or not.
Someone rapped at the door, and then, without waiting for an invitation, came in.
“You did do it!” It was Amethyste, peering across the dim room at the girl sprawled on the bed. “Shevlok, what were you thinking of?”
“Thought she’d know me,” Shevlok mumbled, the words sounding sticky and ill-defined coming from lips numbed by the wine. “She didn’t. Didn’t know me.”
“How long has she—”
He shook his head. “Awhile.”
“What are you going to do with her?”
“Dunno.”
“Everyone says someone took her. From her mother’s servant. You did that?”
Shevlok gestured, hand tipping one way then the other, conveying that yes, he had, probably.
“Then you’d better give her back. Take her back to bon Maukerden village. Send word so they’ll be looking for her.”
“Better dead,” Shevlok said with surprising clarity. “She’d be better dead.”
“No,” Amy cried. “No, Shevlok! Suppose it was Dimity. Pretend it’s Dimity.”
“Better dead,” Shevlok persisted. “If it was Dimity, she’d be better dead.”
“How can you say that!”
He rose, took his sister’s arm roughly, and dragged her to the bed. “Look at her, Amy! Look at her.” He stripped the blanket away to show the girl who lay there naked, face up. With a hard thumb he pulled back the girl’s eyelid, “Janetta’s eyes were like water over stones. They sparkled with sun. Look at this one! This one’s eyes are like the pools that collect in the cellars in spring when the snow melts. No sun in them. Nothing normal swims there. Nothing good lives there.”
Amy jerked her arm away. “I don’t understand what you’re saying.”
“When I look in these eyes, all I see is dark going down and down into bottomless muck where there’s something squirming that’s maimed and horrid. She’s been short-circuited. They’ve done something inside her She
