The child pointed with a shaking hand.
“Do we dare call?” murmured Danivon, listening with all his attention for the sound to be repeated.
“Do we dare not,” she replied, standing tall to shout into the silence:
“We are Enforcers from Council Supervisory, here to take you back to Choire. Come out. You’ll be safe with us.”
“She says,” muttered Curvis, loosening the weapon at his hip and looking alertly around him.
The swallowing sound came again, more remote, but with something in it of … amusement? Could that be?
Dirty faces peered from among the reeds. Children emerged, eleven years old, twelve, some a little older.
Danivon wiped the face of one youngster with the hem of his shirt. “How long has this been going on?” he asked.
The boy turned frightened eyes on the three of them. “Every night it gets some of us.”
“Have you heard anything? Seen anything?”
The boy shivered. “Nothing, sir Enforcer. We say … we say the ghosts are eating us.”
“When did it first happen?” Curvis demanded of the youth.
He conferred with some of the others. They thought twenty days perhaps, more or less.
Danivon shook his head angrily. “Is this all of you?”
They counted themselves, taking a tally, one or two going away into the reeds to emerge with others who had been afraid to come out.
“How many were there supposed to be?” asked Fringe.
“About a hundred,” said Danivon.
“There aren’t more than fifty here.”
“I know,” he grunted, turning to lead the remnant along the winding trail out of the reed beds.
“The body you saw. How had it been killed?” Curvis whispered to Danivon, not so softly that Fringe didn’t overhear.
“It had been dissected,” Danivon said flatly. “The organs laid out to one side, this one and that one. From the amount of blood splashed around, I’d say it had been done rather slowly while the kid was alive.”
“Boy? Girl?” asked Fringe, wondering why she cared.
Danivon shook his head, saying between his teeth, “An anatomist might be able to tell. I couldn’t.”
Fringe fought the sickness in her belly, thinking that lately all she’d done was feel sick about this thing, sick about that thing. Maybe Zasper had been right! Maybe she shouldn’t have become an Enforcer. Certainly she wasn’t doing very well at keeping her stomach or her emotions in line, not as well as the two men. Of course, they’d had more practice….
They came out onto the shore where several of the Head Fishers stood, heads cocked as though listening.
“Why did you bother to make a complaint,” snarled Danivon. “A few more days, you’d have had no children to complain of!”
“I told you,” said one Fisher to another. “I told you something was killing them!”
The one addressed turned away, making a dismissive gesture. “Not our problem.”
“Aaah,” snarled Danivon. “Not your problem. What makes you think whatever-it-is is going to stay out there in the reeds? Now we’ve taken the children, what’s it going to do? Hah? What are you going to do when it comes into the village? You’ll scream for Enforcers then, sure enough, and maybe they’ll just sit tight at the post near Shallow and tell you it isn’t their problem.” He angrily beckoned to the others, leading them toward the trail that led up the precipitous cliffs to Choire.
So, thought Fringe, with a glow of warmth toward Danivon, he does have some feelings. He is not totally uncaring. She soothed herself with this sentiment for a few moments, until it occurred to her Danivon might simply have been expressing annoyance at an unreported predator of unknown type. She fretted over this thought until the climb became so steep she had energy for nothing but putting one foot in front of the other.
Even though they stopped several times to allow the children to rest (“They’re half-starved,” muttered Fringe, to Danivon’s grunted agreement), the journey to the heights did not take long. They were three quarters of the way up the precipice when they rounded a corner in the trail and were met by music.
Fringe forgot her anxieties, her doubts, the sickness in her belly. There was no room inside her for anything but what she heard. Music pulled them along the way. Even the children’s heads came up as they ascended the final slope onto the stony ramparts, though most of them fell limply onto the stones at the top. Fringe sagged with them, leaning against a nearby wall with her mouth open, feeling nothing but the wonderful sound. She was caught in a joyous whirlwind! She simply stood, unconscious of anything but the music, lost in harmony.
“They’re bred for it,” Curvis barked as he passed, slapping her heartily on her bottom to bring her to herself. “Which seems to have caused the trouble. Suppose we earn our pay, Enforcer!”
Recalled to her duty, though still bemused, she followed him to the nearby portico where a group of Choire directors waited, their faces expressing less welcome than annoyance at this interruption of their daily rehearsals. They wore embroidered surplices and carried ritual batons, flourishing these to direct the Enforcers into the vacant hall behind them, all with such an air of tried patience and temperamental disdain that it gave Fringe an appetite for the role she had been assigned should the directors prove intransigent. For the moment she merely sat by, a supernumerary, while Curvis and Danivon began the negotiations.
The complaint and disposition were quoted and explained at length. The directors were not responsive. There was no help for it, they said. The children, and more later, would have to be accommodated in the Maresh.
Fringe took her dagger from her belt and began cleaning her fingernails with it. “The accommodation your children are offered is perhaps not what you planned. They are being sent alone into the reed beds to live as they may. They are not housed, they are not fed. And something is killing them, painfully and bloodily.” Her words summoned up the memory of those reed beds, the sounds,
