really well.'
'Another letter,' Enda said, sounding rather resigned. 'But you never send any of these. You are terrible with letters.'
The lift came down to the bottom and locked in place. Its door opened. Gabriel stepped out-and stopped. Standing all around them was a crowd of extremely annoyed sesheyans, cowled and goggled, many of them staring and pointing at the ship, and all of them glowering at it.
Gabriel looked around at them for a long moment, then said rather hopefully, 'I don't suppose anyone here is from the Red-knife Tourist Bureau?'
At this a profound silence fell that seemed to indicate that the probability was slight. 'We were told to ask for someone named Maikaf,' Gabriel added. The silence got worse. Finally one sesheyan came stalking up to the door where Gabriel was standing. He was an imposing gentleman, his wings wrapped around him like a cloak. He wore very high-quality gailghe against what for sesheyans was considerable glare, even in the swiftly falling twilight. He pointed forcefully at the ground and said, 'Though the Hunter comes from nowhere, the guest requires invitation: to invade the hosts' hospitality, few things are worse in the world: and those who come uninvited, they must earn their fruit by the sword:'
His expression did not look promising.
'At best, we have intruded,' Enda said softly. 'At worst, I fear they must think we are spies, and spies are not terribly welcome here. There is usually only one assumption about where they come from and what should be done with them.' The crowd closed in around them.
Most people who have not been to the single moon of Hydrocus think of Grith in terms of sweeping generalizations: half rain forest inhabited by gargoyle like noble savages, half windswept polar plain inhabited by religious fundamentalists, and very little else in between. Others think of it from points of view influenced by sensationalized exposes of the local 'pirate trade' along the lines of Corsair Planet, full of corrupt and ruthless tribal leaders, illicit markets and shipyards, criminal warlords and sleazy traders on the take. Still others have formed their opinions from material appearing in over-romanticized documentaries like Song of the Gandercat, filled with not very informed speculation about the 'cats'' mysterious abandoned cities, and alternating haunting recordings of what might be ritual songs with images of creatures that looked like gigantic moss-covered furballs or (just after their molt) rubbery- skinned sloths not much smaller than a rhinoceros. Gabriel had seen all those images at one time or another, and all of them had seemed interesting, even amusing, at a safe distance. Now, though, Gabriel found himself wondering whether he, Enda, and Sunshine were all on the point of being sold to some corsair lord at a discount-or, equally, wondering what he would do if a gandercat wound up in the tent with them.
The local environment was much on Gabriel's mind. After he and Enda were removed from Sunshine, they were taken rather hurriedly and roughly out of the relative brightness of the clearing into the astonishingly sudden and complete gloom of the surrounding forest. The only sight Gabriel saw that gave him any reassurance was a final glimpse of Sunshine being covered up with great speed and skill, mostly with chopped-down or uprooted giant ferns. Within minutes, no amount of 'overhead' surveillance from satellites would be able to see anything on the spot but a lump of artfully arranged greenery, as natural looking as any other small hillock on the planet.
About an hour later they were somewhere else in the rain forest. By Gabriel's reckoning they still could not be much more than ten kilometers from Redknife, but there was no other indication whatever of where in the world they might be. Night fell quickly, and gloomy forest corridors and paths were quickly exchanged for pitch-black forest corridors and paths. The twenty or so sesheyans who were conveying them suddenly stopped, and Gabriel stood there blinking, aware of Enda beside him but still completely unable to see anything but shadows against shadow. High above, the uppermost tree-canopy was faintly colored with the light of what might have been, shining above it, the light of Hydrocus at first quarter, or gibbous-an indefinite ruddy glow such as humans see when they close their eyelids in normal light. Their hosts or jailers took Gabriel and Enda into one of a number of simple dome like constructions of woven ferns and branches, the sesheyan version of a tent. The sesheyans posted a guard outside it and left them there in a darkness broken only by Gabriel's luckstone. There they spent the night, rather wet (for the shelter leaked), but not cold. It is almost impossible to be cold in a rain forest on Grith in the summertime. Even the most unseasonable weather for that time of year would not have taken the temperature below 20°C. Sesheyans, being fairly inured to the wet as a normal part of their environment, were somewhat blind to the human or fraal attitude toward rain inside a tent. However, sable-snakes inside a tent were something Gabriel was not prepared to take with equanimity. After his robust reaction to the first one, a sesheyan came inside to sit with them, concerned that the prisoners should not die untimely. I bet they're not so sure we're spies any more either, Gabriel thought, just a little glumly. Any spy who would be sent here wouldn't react like that. Pity I couldn't find some less humiliating way to convince them.
The morning came after what seemed an interminable night of gandercats' cries through the darkness, and a great deal of itching, almost all of which was psychosomatic. Before they turned in, Gabriel spotted a particularly large bug walking with exaggerated care across the floor of their shelter. For the rest of the night, he'd had a hard time believing that there weren't lots more of them. There's never just one bug. But when the dim light came again, things looked less itchy, and their hosts looked marginally less unfriendly. Maybe it was just the change of lighting, which was now a pronounced, green-tinted twilight instead of dead blackness full of pelting rain and strange screeching noises. 'The water here is at least clean,' Enda said, coming back into the shelter after spending a few minutes outside with one of their guards.
She looked more radiant than usual, and her hair had been rinsed and wrung out and wound into a tight bun at the back of her head. Her smartsuit was as clean as one might expect it to be after being dragged through jungle slime and mud. It had managed to lose all of the mud and most of the embedded grime already.
Gabriel shook his head, thinking, If I can ever look that good at three hundred, after being chucked into a jungle, I'll count myself lucky.
There was some noise off to one side of the encampment. Gabriel looked over that way, then stopped, seeing a flash of color that surprised him. His eyes were definitely getting used to this lighting-yesterday he doubted he would even have been able to see it. Other thoughts were also on his mind though, for the beishen he saw coming toward them at ground level, its wearer making his way carefully around the boles of the biggest trees, had a red stripe.
Ondway came into the clearing with several others around him. More sesheyans came to meet them, and there was a lot of hurried talk in low voices. Gabriel stood watching by the door of the shelter, and Ondway looked up past his countrymen and saw Gabriel standing there.
He made a sound rather like a roar. Gabriel winced slightly, until he realized that what he was hearing was the true sesheyan laugh, the sound that was meant to ring out under the trees-not the tamed or subdued laugh of some VoidCorp employee within walls.
Ondway strode toward him. 'What are you doing here?' he roared.
'This is where you said we were supposed to come,' Gabriel said.
'Here? I think not! You were supposed to go to Redknife!'
'We did try,' Enda said, putting her head out of the shelter, 'but I fear Sunshine had other plans. She is not far from here, still largely functional, but she will need some repair before she sees space again.' 'You are going to make us haul a smallship from here to Red-knife?' Ondway roared again. 'Hunter of night in the forests: what manner of guest behaves so!'
'The same manner of guest that gets rained on all night,' Gabriel said, trying hard not to sound too aggrieved about it.
'Yes, as for that, it would not have happened had you waited as I told you! Why did you not wait for your guide?'
'We were being followed,' Gabriel said, starting to get angry now. 'I've been attacked too often lately to want much more of it. So has Enda-'
Ondway started to laugh. 'I thought you said you would hardly notice! But followed! Did you think we would offer you sanctuary without seeing that you came to it safely? The one who followed was your escort, your guide! He would have brought you safely here the next day, but instead you fled from him like ...' Ondway was now laughing so hard that he could barely speak. 'Wanderer, you are incorrigible! And I have had to pay your guide faceprice because you lost him and made off without his help!' 'Sorry,' Gabriel said, but he wasn't particularly, and he was feeling better already. Sesheyans were famous for their tracking abilities, and if he had managed to spot one and then lose one, even in the cluttered and uncomplicated environs of the Iphus Collective, that was not
