The tentacle began to swerve slightly to the right of our line of travel. Shortly, we came to the narrower lane that went in that direction, a barely shadowed trail around the breast of the hill. The tendril quivered.
“When will you basket it?” asked Ferni, observing the questing tentacle with disgust.
“As soon as I’m sure we have the right place,” I replied.
The house lay just behind the hill, dug in for more than half its height, small, shuttered windows high upon its walls beneath the deep eaves of the high-pitched roof. The door was set at the inner end of a roofed tunnel that led through the hill to the house wall. The tentacle quivered its eagerness. Before we entered the tunnel, I took my tool kit from Ferni, opened it, and fastened it around my waist, where I could reach it easily. I slipped the killing knife from its sheath and put it near the tentacle, which shrieked as it lashed back into the basket. I shut the opening and set the basket on the snow.
“What makes them yell like that?” asked Ferni.
“I don’t know any more than you do,” I retorted. “The Siblinghood doesn’t tell us. I’ve always supposed the blades are poisoned because they make ulcers on our skins if we touch them.”
The latchstring was out. Ferni released the inside latch, letting us into a long, ice-cold room, ashes on the hearth, an inside door standing ajar. We peered through the crack: a bed, a body lying on it, another beside it, no movement in either. I stepped back.
“It’s loose in that room,” I said. “Probably on the girl.”
We pushed the door open and went to the side of the young woman lying beside the bed, pale as the snow. The woman on the bed was long dead. Ghyrm-kill were often virtually mummified, making it impossible to learn when they had died. We did not see the thing itself.
The girl’s chest moved in a shallow breath. I said, “She’s still alive, so it’s on her somewhere, under her clothes. They can sometimes move quickly. There are too many hiding places in here, including us. Take the girl’s feet, I’ll take the hands. We want her outside on a nice, empty, hard-packed snowbank.”
We carried her out through the doors and the tunnel to lay her on the snow some distance from the house. I returned to the basket and opened the porthole once more, carrying the basket near to the girl, watching the tentacle as it quivered, quivered, stretched itself to the maximum length near the girl’s breast. I set the basket a safe distance aside, took my killing knife in one hand and a cutting tool in the other, starting at the girl’s throat and slitting her clothing as far as her waist.
“There,” whispered Ferni, pointing with the tip of his knife at a pulsing red mole on the girl’s breast, a mole with legs that trembled as it sucked her life into itself.
“How long does one of them take to kill a person?” he asked.
“If there’s only one small one, half a day or more. Lend me your knife.”
He held out the sheath, and I drew forth a twin to my own, a broad, curved blade with a slightly hooked end. With a knife in each hand, I bent forward, catching the thing between them like grist between grindstones, mashing and twisting the flat sides of the blades to pulverize what lay between.
A scream came from between the blades, impossibly shrill, barely within the limit of hearing, and was echoed by a howl of fury from the basket as the tentacle turned toward the house, quivering, quivering.
“More of them in there?” asked Ferni.
“If the tentacle stays rigid, yes,” I said, scrubbing the blades in the snow to clean them. “When they kill someone, they sometimes split into buds. The buds don’t always grow, but sometimes they do.”
“The Order wants us to capture them…” he said doubtfully.
“I know,” I said, returning his knife carefully. “Several times I’ve tried, but it’s impossible to capture the tiny ones. There’s no way to hold them securely outside a laboratory. We have to put everything that may be contaminated in that building, then we have to burn it.”
“What about her?”
“We strip her bare, shave her head and body hair into her clothes, throw them into the house along with that spot on the snow, which could conceivably have buds in it, search her body, wrap her in one of our coats, and take her back to the oasthouse.”
“She’ll freeze!”
“It’s partly the cold that’s kept her alive so far. The things aren’t as active in the cold. She won’t freeze in the time it will take us to get her back. I’ve done this before, during even colder times. I’m quick at it.”
Under the clippers from my tool kit, the girl’s clothes and hair fell away like wool from a shorn sheep. I scanned every intimate part of her, an inspection that Ferni regarded with discomfiture.
“I violate her no more than needed,” I explained. “I look only in the creases. The creatures do not enter the body orifices. They have gills, and they need air. Here, wrap her in my coat, I have four or five layers on besides it. They’ll keep me warm enough until we get back.”
“How do we fire the house?” he asked.
“An incendiary in the pocket of the coat. Pull the lever and toss it inside.”
I checked to see that the tentacle still pointed rigidly at the house, forced the tentacle into the basket, and closed it, then put the bundled girl over my shoulder and started back
