“Take it,” whispered Cat.
I picked it up, feeling it slip into my fingers like a knife into a sheath, a flat, triangular piece of something with one curved edge, about as long as my middle finger. Then we all stood up and proceeded out of the place in absolute silence. The whole ceremony had taken only a little time. When we got back to our rooms, Murzy gave me a kind of locket to put the fragment in so it would hang safely around my neck. “Or you can carry it wrapped in a cloth in your boot, or sewn into your garment,” she said. “Just so it is always by you and you never lose it.”
“What is it?” I demanded. “What’s it for?”
“It’s a symbol. It shows you have been initiated. It puts some of the life of the pool in a form you can carry always, to remind yourself who you are.”
“But what is it? What is the pool?”
“Nothing we’ve made,” said Cat. “The pools were here before men came, you may be sure of that. Large ones and tiny ones. The large ones are rare, and hidden. Some say they are eyes which look into the heart of the world. Some say they are eyes which look out. And we say as long as the light moves in the star-eye, the shadow has not conquered.”
“Religion?” I asked doubtfully.
“One might say,” said Cat.
We stayed two days more while all of us went to “lectures”, which were actually kind of story-telling sessions given by people who thought they might have learned something new. The procedure is to tell an Auditor first (someone like the Dervish who heard me) and then, if the Auditor agrees, tell all the Wize-ards who are interested. Since I was new, they did not ask me to tell about Chimmerdong and the flitchhawk, but Murzy said the Dervish had done so. It was all so new to me, I didn’t remember very much of what I heard, and note taking was not allowed as it was in Xammer. One listened and one remembered. I listened as best I could, but there were no hooks in my head to hang much of it on.
Then we were leaving, taking off the robes and hanging them up, going silently away down the canyon until we came to the plains once more. Sarah was waiting with the wagon. She and Bets had been trading days to come wait for us, and we all got aboard. Only when I was settled into the wagon did I realize how exhausted I was. I felt beaten, and old, and as though I had run thousands of miles.
“Well,” said Murzy when we were all settled, “it’s time to tell you what happened with the Basilisk, Jinian. Now don’t interrupt me with questions until I’m finished. I know you, and you can’t keep your mouth shut for anything.”
So challenged, of course I had to be absolutely still, even though it griped me immensely.
“We had some men from one of the farms dig us a pit, right in the curve of the Old Road,” she began. When you ran, you swerved, but the Basilisk didn’t. It was a deep, straight-sided pit, the Basilisk fell directly into it, and we backed a wagon over it at once, so it couldn’t get out or be seen.
“Then we began asking the Basilisk certain questions. It hissed and snarled and didn’t answer, of course, but our Demon could Read the answers ...”
“Demon!” I couldn’t stop myself. “Where did you get a Demon?”
Murzy just looked at me, pressing her lips together until I subsided, then she turned and nodded at Cat. “That’s our Demon, fool-girl ... Always has been.”
Cat! A Demon! I thought suddenly of the times I had congratulated myself that I was Gamecaste and they were merely pawns and was suddenly hideously embarrassed. Were the rest of them ... ?
“We’ve all got Talents of one kind or another,” said Cat. “We don’t play with them, that’s all. We don’t Game. So far as the world knows, we six are pawns only. We say so for our own protection. Some of the Wize-ards choose to call themselves Wizards, some call themselves other things, and some call themselves nothing at all. It’s all in what one is trying to accomplish. And we couldn’t tell you until you were one of us. Listen now, and don’t interrupt.”
“Our Demon,” Murzy went on unperturbed, “learned that the Daggerhawk Demesne has a very ancient rule of enmity against Chimmerdong Forest.” She let me think about that for a moment, seeing I was about to explode. “They call themselves the Keepers of Chimmerdong. Since the giant flitchhawk is a ... What would you say, Cat? Resident? Numen?”
“Perhaps numen,” said Cat. “Friend. Guardian. My own guess is, it’s one of the old gods. It is certainly a being which is interested in the forest, which cares about it. You hinted at that, Jinian, when you said the voice of the flitchhawk sounded rather like the voice of the forest. The Dervishes agreed that it was an interesting possibility for investigation.”
“Yes. It was that which got you initiated, Jinian. They didn’t know either of those things, not about Chimmerdong and the flitchhawk or about Daggerhawk Demesne.
“Well, we asked our questions, received no answers, but got our answers anyhow. The creature was down below the wagon in the dark, so it couldn’t Beguile us with its eyes. It tried with its voice, but we’re old birds, well schooled against Beguilement.”
“I wasn’t,” I said, annoyed. “If it hadn’t been for Surefoot rearing, I might not have run in time.”
“Well, chile,” she said, “if you hadn’t run in time, you wouldn’t have been one we wanted for a seventh, would you?”
That shut me up, in several ways.
“We found, also, that those at Daggerhawk have bonded themselves in service to some northern power. Dedrina-Lucir did not know much about this;
