announced himself as a secret agent of the Long Lakes Republic. Now what real spy would do that? Every pack on the council had eyes on the alien, some fearful, some—like Scrupilo—crazily curious. Woodcarver watched with only a couple of heads. The rest might have been asleep. She looked as tired as Peregrine felt. He rested his own heads on his paws. The pain in Scar was a pulsing beat; it would be easy enough to set the member asleep, but then he’d understand very little of what was being said. Hey! maybe that wasn’t such a bad idea. Scar drifted off and the pain receded.
The talk went on for some minutes more, not making a whole lot of sense to the threesome that was Wickwrack. He understood the tones of voice though. Scrupilo—the pack on the floor—complained several times, impatiently. Vendacious said something, agreeing with him. The doctor retreated, and Scrupilo advanced on Wickwrack’s alien.
Peregrine pulled himself to full wakefulness. “Be careful. The creature is not friendly.”
Scrupilo snapped back, “Your friend has already warned me once.” He circled the litter, staring at the alien’s brown, furless face. The alien stared back, impassive. Scrupilo reached forward cautiously and drew back the alien’s quilt. Still no response. “See?” said Scrupilo. “It knows I mean no harm.” Peregrine said nothing to correct him.
“It really walks on those rear paws alone?” said one of the other advisors. “Can you imagine it, towering over us? One little bump would knock it down.” Laughter. Peregrine remembered how mantis-like the alien had seemed when upright. These fellows hadn’t seen it move.
Scrupilo wrinkled a nose. “The thing is filthy.” He was all around her, a posture that Peregrine knew upset the Two-Legs. “That arrow shaft must be removed, you know. Most of the bleeding has stopped, but if we expect the creature to live for long, it needs medical attention.” He looked disdainfully at Scriber and Peregrine, as if they were to blame for not performing surgery aboard the twinhull. Something caught his eye and his tone abruptly changed: “By the Pack of Packs! Look at its forepaws.” He loosened the ropes about the creature’s front legs. “Two paws like that would be as good as five pairs of lips. Think what a pack of these creatures could do!” He moved close to the five-tentacled paw.
“Be—” careful, Peregrine started to say. The alien abruptly bunched its tentacles into a club. Its foreleg flicked out at an impossible angle, ramming its paw into Scrupilo’s head. The blow couldn’t have been too strong, but it was precisely placed on the tympanum.
“Ow! Yow! Wow. Wow.” Scrupilo danced back.
The alien was shouting, too. It was all mouth noise, thin and low-pitched. The eldritch sound brought up every head, even Woodcarver’s. Peregrine had heard it many times by now. There was no doubt in his mind -this was the aliens’ interpack speech. After a few seconds, the sound changed to a regular hacking that gradually faded.
For a long moment no one spoke. Then part of Woodcarver got to her feet. She looked at Scrupilo. “Are you all right?” It was the first time she had spoken since the beginning of the meeting.
Scrupilo was licking his forehead. “Yes. It smarts is all.”
“Your curiosity will kill you some day.”
The other huffed indignantly, but also seemed flattered by the prediction.
Queen Woodcarver looked at her councillors. “I see an important question here. Scrupilo thinks one alien member would be as agile as an entire pack of us. Is that so?” She pointed the question at Peregrine rather than Scriber.
“Yes, Your Majesty. If those ropes had been tied within its reach, it could easily have unknotted them.” He knew where this was going; he’d had three days to get there himself. “And the noises it makes sound like coordinated speech to me.”
There was a swell of talk as the others caught on. An articulate member can often make semi-sensible speech, but usually at the expense of dexterity.
“Yes… A creature like nothing on our world, whose boat flew down from the top of heaven. I wonder at the mind of such a pack, if a single member is almost as smart as all of one of us?” Her blind one looked around as it made the words, almost as if it could see. Two others wiped at her drooler’s muzzle. She was not an inspiring sight.
Scrupilo poked a head up. “I hear not a hint of thought sound from this one. There is no fore-tympanum.” He pointed at the torn clothing around the creature’s wound. “And I see no sign of shoulder tympana. Perhaps it is pack smart even as a singleton… and perhaps that’s all the aliens ever are.” Peregrine smiled to himself; this Scrupilo was a prickly twit, but not one who held with tradition. For centuries, academics had debated the difference between people and animals. Some animals had larger brains; some had paws or lips more agile than a member’s. In the savannahs of Easterlee, there were creatures that even looked like people and ran in groups, but without much depth of thought. Leaving aside wolf nests and whales, only people were packs. It was the coordination of thought between members that made them superior. Scrupilo’s theory was a heresy.
Jaqueramaphan said, “But we did hear thought sounds, loud ones, during the ambush. Perhaps this one is like our unweaned, unable to think—”
“And yet still almost as smart as a pack,” Woodcarver finished somberly. “If these people are not smarter than we, then we might learn their devices. No matter how magnificent they are, we could eventually be their equals. But if this member is just one of a superpack…” For a moment there was no talk, just the muted underedge of her councillors’ thoughts. If the aliens were superpacks, and if their envoy had been murdered—then there might not be anything they could do to save themselves.
“So. Our first priority should be to save this creature, to befriend it and learn its true nature.” Her heads lowered, and she seemed lost within herself—or perhaps just tired. Abruptly, she turned several heads toward her chamberlain. “Move the creature to the lodge by mine.”
Vendacious started with surprise. “Surely not, Your Majesty! We’ve seen that it is hostile. And it needs medical attention.”
Woodcarver smiled and her voice turned silky. Peregrine remembered that tone from before. “Do you forget that I know surgery? Do you forget… that I am the Woodcarver?”
Vendacious licked his lips and looked at the other advisors. After a second he said, “No, Your Majesty. It will be as you wish.”
And Peregrine felt like cheering. Perhaps Woodcarver did still run things.
CHAPTER 12
Peregrine was sitting back to back on the steps of his quarters when Woodcarver came to see him next day. She came alone, and wearing the simple green jackets he remembered from his last visit.
He didn’t bow or go out to meet her. She looked at him coolly for a moment, and sat down just a few yards away.
“How is the Two-Legs?” he asked.
“I took out the arrow and sewed the wound shut. I think it will survive. My advisors were pleased: the creature didn’t act like a reasoning being. It fought even after it was tied down, as though it had no concept of surgery… How is your head?”
“All right, as long as I don’t move around.” The rest of him—Scar -lay behind the doorway in the dark interior of the lodge. “The tympanum is healing straight, I think. I’ll be fine in a few days.”
“Good.” A wrecked tympanum could mean continuing mental problems, or the need for a new member and the pain of finding a use for the singleton that was sent into silence. “I remember you, pilgrim. All the members are different, but you really are the Peregrine of before. You had some great stories. I enjoyed your visit.”
“And I enjoyed meeting the great Woodcarver. That is the reason I returned.”
She cocked a head wryly. “The great Woodcarver of before, not the wreck of now?”
He shrugged. “What happened?”
She didn’t answer immediately. For a moment, they sat and looked across the city. It was cloudy this afternoon, with rain coming. The breeze off the channel was a cool stinging on his lips and eyes. Woodcarver shivered, and puffed her fur out a bit. Finally she said, “I held my soul six hundred years—and that’s counting by foreclaws. I should think it’s obvious what has become of me.”
