“Let me take her.”
“When we get halfway, you can have her.”
We went on trudging toward the steam plume above the oasthouse, sun breaking through the clouds above us in momentary encouragement. At the halfway mark, we traded burdens, arriving finally at the oasthouse under B’Oag’s accusatory frown.
“We committed no violence on her,” I snapped from behind my colleague. “The thing was killing her. It already took the woman. Was that her mother?”
He looked down guiltily. “Her ma, yes.”
“Well, she didn’t get to Joy, Oastkeeper. She’s simply gone, erased from existence. That’s what the creatures do. You should talk to your neighbors and let them know the facts.”
“What about her?” he grumped, pointing at the girl.
“I’m taking her to your baths, where I’ll search her skin, to be sure there are no more.” I would do it, though I was positive there were no more. My “finder” should have reached for her if there had been. However, I remembered too well finding a bead of a thing on my clothing one time when I undressed for bed, and I’d been positive that time, too.
“What about her ma’s body?” B’Oag asked Ferni.
“We left it in the house, and we had to burn the house behind us, for there were more of the creatures inside.”
The oastkeeper grumped, “Thought what you were for was to catch ’em, take ’em away. That all was a good house.”
“You can’t catch the tiny ones,” Ferni told him sternly. “Some are too small to see. And, since you knew about all this, now we’ll need to know who may have brought it here and who else knew about it besides you.”
B’Oag scowled. Ferni scowled back at him, a look that transformed his normally genial face into one of threatening ferocity, threatening enough, at any rate, to result in a less overtly hostile conversation.
I left it to Ferni and lugged the girl off to the baths, where I stripped off even the silky shirt and trousers that served as a warm bodysuit by day and decent sleepwear at night. During a northern winter on Fajnard, one got bare only in the tight oasthouse baths with their deep tubs of steaming water, constantly draining back into the stone basin they came from, constantly renewed and reheated. I took the girl into the tub with me, held her nose, and submerged her for a long count of thirty. No ghyrmlets surfaced, gasping for air. I dragged, her out, wrapped her warmly, got myself dressed, and took her to a warmed bed. Her body was alive, but only time would tell if her mind still was.
It was some time before I returned to the oasthall to find B’Oag looking haggard and ill-used, ostentatiously avoiding my eyes as he attended to business. Ferni sat waiting by the copper, a steaming cup in his hand. Seeing me approach, he set out another and poured from the pot. “Well?” with raised eyebrows.
“She’s clean.” I took a grateful sip of the hot tea. It had honey in it. “The basket?”
“Back in the lockroom. B’Oag says the girl, G’lil, and her mother worked with the weavers’ guild in the nearest town south, place called Vaccy. Summers, after shearing season, the local women weave at the mill; winters they weave with small looms at home, piecework, special commissions, fancy stuff they’ve no time for in summer. When the weather permits, they pick up supplies at the mill. Not long ago, the girl came in here, wanting to talk to B’Oag about Joy, how people got taken there when they died, what could be done to assure it happened.
“Finally, she admitted it was her mother who was dying. The doctors in Vaccy said there was nothing more they could do. B’Oag says he told her to take the doctors’ word for it, just keep her mother warm and well fed. The girl asked him if that was true even if someone had found a Taker. That’s what they call them around here. Takers. He told her all that was foolishness. This is what he tells me now, which may well be a lie. His excuse was that he didn’t think she’d actually found one. Then you arrive, making him believe she might actually have done so. We discussed where she might have found it, and he said the only place the girl ever went was to the mills and provender stores in Vaccy.”
“The mills import raw material and export fabric?”
“They do, yes.” He turned back to his tea. “They buy wool and hair from the farms around here that were started when the colony was founded: sheep, camel, goat. The mills import down from Chou-birds raised somewhere in Omniont space, and umox wool from Fajnard. The fiber for ultrasilk and vivilon comes in as cocoons, great sacks of them.” He laughed. “According to B’Oag, the mills label the fine fabrics as coming from the Isles of Delight.” He laughed. “Seemingly the K’Famir merchants don’t want it known their underwear is woven by dirty humans.”
I shook my head. “This girl didn’t weave vivilon, her hands are hard as rocks. Nonetheless, she was there, at the mill. Your mentioning cocoons makes me wonder…”
He nodded. “When B’Oag mentioned it, it struck me that cocoons with something live inside could make an excellent hiding place for vast numbers of infant ghyrm.”
I thought about this for a while. “It doesn’t answer the question of how she knew what she’d found, or thought she knew. The things are repulsive in their own shape, but they usually pretend to be something else.”
“I’ve heard that.”
“This search-and-destroy business we accomplished today is new to you, isn’t it.”
He nodded again. “So?”
“So what have you been doing during your years with the Siblings? I thought all of us were out seeking ghyrm.”
He shook
