• While Preu Flan dry and his fellow conspirators had agreed to fulfill the desire of the prophets by luring Maire Manone back to Voorstod and possibly back to her husband and house, they had not yet agreed on the best way to accomplish this end. They believed it best not to mention the matter to Phaed Girat, not yet. Phaed might be dedicated to the Cause, but he had a streak of contrariness in him likewise. Better wait until Maire was back before telling old Phaed.
Openly forcing the woman to return would be counterproductive. A forced return would be worse than no return at all. She must seem to return of her own free will, without any Voorstoders along, coming out of longing for her homeland and its people. “Have you heard?” they would ask in the taverns. “Maire Manone has returned to Scaery. She sang there just the other night.”
To guarantee her cooperation, they could come up with no better plan than the abduction of one of Maire’s children or grandchildren as a hostage against her return and good behavior. They had not, however, decided yet which hostage would work best.
“By now her son Sam’s a grown man,” said Mugal Pye in a judicious tone. “He’d be forty lifeyears if he’s a day. If he takes after Phaed, he could be hard to handle.” He sipped his ale and waited for comment. “Also, maybe he and his mam don’t get on all that well.”
“Maire’s daughter Sal’s younger by some,” said Epheron Floom. “She’s what? Five years younger?” Epheron had lately become active in the Cause after some years spent out in the fatlands among the Ahabarians as a reporter for the Voorstod news, which was to say, as a spy for the prophets. He was youngish yet, smooth-faced, plump, and quiet looking, with dead-calm eyes and a naturally cruel nature.
“Maire’s kept in touch with her mother’s sister here,” said Mugal Pye. “She’s sent messages from time to time. She’s mentioned that Sal has young kiddies. Two or three.”
“Young ones and their mams are a problem,” Epheron opined. “Separate them, and you have trouble with them. Babies need a woman to keep them in good condition. That means we’d need to bring Sal as well, or come up with some woman here to keep the kids, and every extra mouth is a mouth that might talk. Besides, if anything happened to one of ’em, the word might get around. Dead babies aren’t what’ll bring the women back.”
“We know Sam has a son,” said Preu Flandry. Preu was the oldest of them, his white hair and slightly lame right leg speaking of long years at risk. “A boy called Jep. Maire mentioned him thirteen or fourteen years ago, in messages to her aunt. There’s been no mention since, but likely she would have said something if he’d died. Likely if you brought him, Maire would behave herself.”
“The boy’d be old enough to get along without his mam, but still young enough to be manageable,” agreed Mugal Pye.
They went on arguing, with this one opting for Sam, and that one for Sal, and then changing their minds and settling on one or more of the children.
“Whoever we take, we can keep them at Elsperh’s farm above Sarby,” said Mugal. “It’s well hidden in the hills; even if Ahabar sent troopers in from the sea, they wouldn’t look for a hostage there. And Maire never knew Elsperh, so she’ll have no thought where her offspring might be.”
They thought about this for a time, exchanging specifics. How old was each of the children? Their plan might involve some mutilations before they were done, were the children strong enough to survive such treatment for however long it took?
“Whoever we take, he or she or they’ll have to be carried or forced off Hobbs Land, either by subterfuge or by threat of harm,” said Mugal Pye. “Which means we’ll need a party of at least three or four to handle the matter. Why don’t we wait until we get there to decide who we take? There’s nothing like seeing the ground before we decide on tactics.”
“Who will it be going from here, then? Who goes?”
“There’s you two, and me,” said Epheron, “and I think some relative of Maire’s, just to make our inquiries seem natural.”
“We’ll find someone, no fear,” said Preu. “Someone Maire knew, or at least knew of.”
“Not Phaed?”
“No, I think not.”
They drank to the project, and laughed about it, and so set in motion the chain of events that would end with the taking, and possible killing, of someone’s child far from love and home and hope.
Or perhaps they started the sequence that would only begin there.
• Shallow under the soil, near the temple at Settlement One, straight fibers ramified into feathers and the feathers into lace, which reached beneath the houses and the storage yards, beneath the settlement buildings, beneath the old temples, out toward open country in a tenuous, cottony web which enclosed in its fibrous reticulation all the land from the temples north of the community to the fields in the south. Under roads and paths, where people walked and machines rolled, the web grew thick, almost feltlike, able to absorb the repeated pressure of men and their tools. Under the fields, it spread itself in random polygons, leaving and finding itself, again and again.
As it spread, it encountered the gullies and channels of former, similar networks. Tiny canals led through clayey soil. Grooves had been cut along subterranean strata. The rock-hard roots of stone-oaks had been bored through long ago by a million thread-thin fingers. The evidence was everywhere that other webs had gone this way before, but the new net did not care. It took the easy way, the path of least resistance, the way of former times. The net that had run in these channels before had been old and
