Darkness came. “I have to go back,” he cried to Sebastian, who had just returned from a final trip. “She has to be still out there.”
“I’ll go with you,” the other said. “I’ve got everyone unloaded. They’re all getting settled down in winter quarters.”
“Have you heard any news of His Excellency?”
Sebastian shook his head. “No one’s had time to ask. How was he hurt?”
“His legs were trampled. And he was struck on the head. He was breathing well, but he didn’t move his legs at all. I think he may be paralyzed.”
“They can fix that kind of injury.”
“Some kinds they can fix.” They lofted the car once more and headed it away from Commons toward Opal Hill. They had not gone far before they saw the fire, wings and curtains of fire, sweeping across the grasses and towering above the estancia.
“Ah, well then,” murmured Persun. “So I was not a hysteric after all. Father said I might be.”
“Are you glad of that?” Sebastian asked curiously, turning the car in a long curve so that he could look down on the blaze. “Or would you rather have been called a hysteric and Opal Hill still be whole? I saw the panels you carved in the lady’s study. They were the best things I have seen in a long time. No, the best I have ever seen.”
“I still have my hands,” Persun said, looking at them, turning them over, thinking what might have happened to them if he hadn’t been skittish as any old woman. “I can carve more.” If Marjorie was safe, he could carve more. If they were for her.
“I thought the gardens were supposed to stop the fires.”
“They do. Unless the fires are set and dragged through the gardens and carried into the buildings. As these were, Sebastian. As these were.” He peered down at the ruin, biting back an exclamation. “Look! Sebastian. Look at the trail!”
Away from Opal Hill, toward the swamp forest, straight as an arrow, a trail trampled into the grasses as though ten thousand Hippae had marched there in files. The two looked at one another in horrified surmise.
“Do you suppose she’s down there?” Sebastian whispered.
Persun nodded. “Yes. She is. Was. Somewhere.”
“Shall we—”
“No. See there, in the flames. Hippae. There must be hundreds of them. Some dancing near the flames. Some going down that great trail. How many of them did it take to make that trail? And hounds, too. Every hound on Grass must be down there, all moving toward Commons. No. No, we can’t go down. We’ll come back tomorrow. When the fire burns out, we’ll look. Maybe she got into the winter quarters. I hope she doesn’t burn.”
Eugenie didn’t burn. The hounds that had swept through the place ahead of the flames had seen to that.
Commons was in a considerable uproar, busy with speculation and rumor. The housing of a hundred or so people was no great thing. The winter quarters were large enough to hold the entire population of Commons plus those of the villages, and only the very young among them found these underground halls and rooms at all new and frightening. The caverns had been here when men first came, but they had been enlarged and fitted out for human occupancy, and everyone over one Grassian year of age knew them well. The evacuated animals went into the winter barns. Though this year’s cutting of hay had not begun, there was enough of last year’s hay and grain to keep them. Feeding the people was no great thing either. They began using the winter kitchens with the ease of long practice.
Despite this ease, this familiarity, there was disquiet and anxiety both among those who had arrived and those who had welcomed them. The burning of an estancia was not a familiar occurrence. It had happened before, but that had been long ago, in their great-grandparents’ time. It was not something easy to comprehend or accept. When Persun Pollut brought news of the great trail toward the swamp-forest, anxiety deepened. Everyone knew the Hippae couldn’t get through the forest, and yet… and yet, people wondered. They were uneasy, wondering if this event betokened mysterious dangers.
The unease spread even to Port side, where those occupied in serving and housing strangers became jittery. Saint Teresa and Ducky Johns were not immune to the common case of nerves. They met at the end of Pleasure Street and walked along Portside Road, Ducky hobbling and jiggling inside her great golden tent of a dress, Saint Teresa stalking beside her like a heron, long-legged and long-nosed to the point of caricature. He wore his usual garments: purple trousers tight at the knee but baggy elsewhere, and a swallow-tailed coat cut of jermot hide, a scaly leather imported through Semling from some desert planet at the end of nowhere. His bare cranium gleamed like steel in the blue lights of the port, and his great hands gestured as he spoke, never still for an instant.
“So … so what does it mean?” he asked. “Burning Opal Hill that way. There was no one there….” His hands circled, illustrating a search from the air, then swooped away, conveying frustration.
“One person,” Ducky Johns corrected him. “That fancy woman of the ambassador’s is missing.”
“One person, then. But the Hippae dragged fire through the gardens and burned it, all of it. It’s burning now.” His fingers flickered like flames, drawing the scene on the air.
Ducky Johns nodded, the nod setting up wavelike motion which traveled down from her ears through all the waiting flesh below, a tidal jiggle, ending only at her ankles, where her tiny feet served as a check valve. “It’s why I wanted to talk with you, Teresa. The things are obviously raging. Furious. Out of all control. You knew the ambassador killed some of them.”
“I heard.
