None of them knew what she meant by scourges, but they did not interrupt her as she went on:
“I’d had a few years of running before I was rescued. Makes you quick. Makes you—what you say—crude. Guess I didn’t adapt real well to civilization.”
This time Mitigan grinned admiringly at her. Snark returned the grin, a quick feral flash, no more used to humor than to approbation.
Lutha watched the two closely, thinking them a good pair. She, brown and lean, with muscular shoulders and calves, high, strong cheekbones, and a rounded but stubborn jaw; he wide as a door, his almost white hair drawn up into a tall plume atop his head, wearing a hide vest, a beaded crotch piece, and not much else besides a bandage and his many scars. If he’d ever worn Dinadhi dress, he’d dropped it before attacking at the omphalos.
Leelson peered down his nose at both of them, the aristocratic Fastigat sneer Lutha found so infuriating. Snark didn’t bother to notice. She had seen so much of Fastigat superiority at Alliance Prime that it ceased to impress.
“What’s happening back on Dinadh, do you suppose?” Lutha asked Leelson. “They must have seen what happened to us. Are you sure Trompe’s … dead?”
Leelson looked at his boots. “I’m sure. The other … assassin was aiming at you or Leely, and Trompe jumped in front of him.” He glared at Mitigan. “You had no reason to kill Trompe!”
“We weren’t aiming at Trompe,” said Mitigan, unmoved by Leelson’s anger. “As for what’s happening back there, your Procurator will be stirring dust. As will Chur Durwen. We are sworn to cover one another.”
Leelson nodded. “The Procurator will mount a search immediately. He’ll send probes through the vortex.”
Lutha wondered, briefly, why Leelson hadn’t noticed that the vortex was no more. She started to say so, but was cut off by the ex-king:
“Poracious Luv is on Dinadh. She will also put her considerable talents to the problem. And perhaps the songfathers of Dinadh as well. Though they won’t want to admit they were wrong about the …Kachis.”
His words made the hair rise on the back of Lutha’s neck. She could infer from various things Saluez had told her that the songfathers wouldn’t want to admit they were wrong. In fact, if what had happened at this Tahs-uppi was what usually happened at the ceremony, they would not admit they’d been wrong. Every hundred years they would be disillusioned, and each time they would swear to hide their disillusionment in order to retain their power. “We won’t tell anyone,” they’d say. “We won’t let anyone know. We’ll deny it. We’ll defend the traditional teachings!”
Such things had happened before! Men in power had made mistakes or foolish claims and spent the rest of their lives and their successors’ lives defending the indefensible, or hiding it. And arrayed against the impenetrable wall of the songfathers was only one big woman, one old man, and one warrior who might or might not take sides.
“Whatever they do,” Snark remarked, “they’re not going to do it tonight. Those little shaggies, they came out all along this cliff.”
“Not just one place?” Leelson demanded.
“Hell, no. They spurted out from where you were, and from south of me a dozen places. Some of ’em even came out of that island out there.” She pointed westward, where a stone point jabbed the glowing sky. “Doesn’t matter where they came out, you still got the same problem. You need cover. You need food. You have to put that pregnant woman somewhere safe if you’re going to try to keep her. Right after dark still seems to be a good time to move around. The Rottens haven’t ever come over the camp right after sundown. I keep a kind of chart. When they come, how many, where. Then I try to stay away from the worst places, the worst times.”
All of them were exhausted, but they could not argue with the local expert. They got wearily to their feet; Mitigan put Saluez over his shoulder with surprising gentleness; Lutha was less gentle with Leely; and they went in a weary straggle through the dusk. Before it was completely dark, they arrived at a shallow swale halfway up the slope north of the camp.
Mitigan rolled Saluez under a windrow of dried brush, and Lutha was appointed to keep watch over her and Leely while Snark took the three men down among the buildings. Leelson left her with a lingering stroke along her cheek and the remark that it might take them a while to find everything that was needed.
Lutha didn’t care. She could have slept atop a volcano, so she thought, struggling to stay alert until they returned. The last of the dim purple along the sea horizon was being sucked into a black throat of night. Stars blazed on the moonless sky, like paper lanterns, their light diffused. Strange. Down in the camp small lights moved about, not radiating as one would expect, not making star shapes in her vision, but softened, dampened. She blinked, assumed the air was foggy, or that perhaps her sight was affected by fatigue. Then she realized it was not only sight that was affected but also sound. She shook her head, swallowed, twisted her head from side to side, trying to unplug ears that suddenly weren’t working properly. All sounds were flat, with no resonance. Damped. Someone had lowered a curtain over the world.
Which trembled. Beneath her. Only a little, as though some large creature had taken a step near me. And another. And another yet. Three steps. Something. Something huge enough to make the stone backbone of the ridge tremble like a leaf.
She swiveled her head, silently, scanning the darkness, trying to see something, anything against the sprinkled star field. There … across the camp. To the southeast. On the horizon, the stars winking out, and those above them, and those above them, and those above … By the Great Gauphin, halfway to the zenith, the stars winking
