“What did it look like?” asked Ferni.
“Like a few beads on a little string of vivilon. One red one, one blue one, two yellow ones. He held it to my ear so I could hear it sing. He said put it around her neck…” The girl shuddered. “Oh, Ma, Ma, what did I do to you?”
I sat down on the bed, suddenly exhausted. “Do we have to burn the mill, Ferni?”
B’Oag began to rumble threateningly, like his own heating system readying an eruption.
Ignoring him, I continued “It’s within our authority, but I dread the upheaval that will cause. These people have little else to sustain them.”
“There may be an easier way,” Ferni replied. “Let the girl rest, and come with me. And you, Oastkeeper, don’t get in an uproar over something that may not happen.”
We went outside, some distance from the oasthouse, where I sat wearily on a wall.
“I’ve never seen that done before,” said Ferni.
“It seems to be a talent I have,” I said. “The ability to see other worlds, to take a spirit shape and go into other worlds. My shaman had it, too. It was she who taught me. Once I have seen something, I can show it to someone else…”
“How did you see that destruction?”
“I had seen a little of it before, on Earth. For the rest, I reached out to some creature that had seen it all: not with human eyes, but good enough for all that. It may have been a horse, or a dog, or even a goat. My shaman taught me to connect with the minds of animals. That’s why the chitterlain is content to stay with me. She knows I’m taking her south, where her kindred are.”
He muttered, “Since the mill is all that sustains these people, I believe we can ask our Siblings to exterminate any pests that may be sheltered there without harming the mill itself or the people thereabouts.”
“They can do that?”
“I’m told so, yes, on a small scale. There’s been some recent technological advance among my old academy friends that give them the capacity to disinfect one building, more or less, though not yet a city, and certainly not a planet. I can’t make contact from here, however.”
“How did you get here?” I asked, amazed that I hadn’t wondered this before.
“There’s a flier, hidden over behind one of those hills.”
“Well, go then. Find out about it.”
He gazed at me thoughtfully. “M’urgi. While I’m at headquarters, I’m going to arrange for some time off for both of us. Whether they approve the strike or not, I’ll be back here within the next few days to get you…”
“You’re taking a lot for granted,” I half snarled.
“No. I’m not taking anything for granted, and you know it! This is important, and I can’t even take time to explain it to you now. Just remember, I’ll be back within a few days. Stay here. If they approve the strike, it will happen during the next few days. Tell B’Oag he has to get everyone out of the mill who may be working there or maintaining the place. If anyone lives close, they should go away for a few days. May I rely on you for that?”
“Of course.”
“Then you may expect them to send the machine, unless I bring word they can’t when I return.”
“They, being who?”
“Dominion or the Siblinghood. One or both.”
“Ah yes.” I shrugged. “One or both. Or as we in the field say, one is both. Sometimes they seem joined at the heart.”
We returned to the oasthouse. Ferni packed up his belongings and departed. I explained in some detail to B’Oag that he had to see to emptying the mill.
“They won’t do as I say, Envoy!”
“Tell them they may do as you say in comfort, or I will come down there, and they will do as I say with pain. I will lay my hands on them and show them! You saw how that girl suffered. Do you want it for them as well?”
When he had grumbled his way onto the road, I returned to the girl, who grizzled at me lengthily about her bare skull before demanding sulkily to be taken to her home.
“No home there anymore, girl. The thing you brought into it multiplied like weeds in the spring. We had no way to get them out of your house, so your house had to be burned.”
The lamentations started afresh. I hadn’t time to wait them out, so I told her, “B’Oag will give you a job here for the rest of the winter. You will have company here, including B’Oag’s son, Ojlin, a marriageable young man. By spring, I have no doubt you will have a new home of your own to worry over.”
This seemed to be a new thought, and she perked up. “Ojlin, he wunt look at me, all bald like this.”
“Tie a scarf around your head until it grows out.”
The idea of having a future was interesting enough that she stopped crying. That evening B’Oag returned to report. “The envoy wanted the place empty, and I done that all, and what in billy-be-drat is that girl doin’ behine my counter with my son?”
“Helping you, Oastkeeper. She needs a job, you need the help. Your son needs a wife.”
“Now you just wait, woman…”
“Envoy,” I corrected him with a steely voice. “I will not wait, B’Oag. I have come, I have found what I was sent to find, killed what I was sent to kill, sorted out the results of both finding and killing, and the job seems well done to me. I have thus far made no fuss about your part in the matter. Do not cause me to choose otherwise.” I fastened my eyes on his, my hands slightly outstretched as though at any moment I might lay them on some
