Grauel glanced up. "It was not like this when I found it. I had to reconstruct it. I noticed some stones that looked smoked on one side scattered around. Then just a hint of a smell of smoke still in the ground here. Once I started looking around I found more stones. It all came together fairly easily."
Marika nodded. "What can you tell me about it?" Grauel was the huntress. This was her area of expertise.
"Very little, except that it's here. And it shouldn't be. But it did seem that this ledge would be a good place to ground a darkship."
"How far afield did you go?"
"Not far."
"Let's snoop around, see what we can find."
Careful visual search turned up nothing more.
"If they were here, they must have had a latrine and some place to dump their garbage," Grauel said.
"They may have had huntresses with them," Marika chided. Grauel and Barlog, treating the search as they would a hunt in their native Ponath, left every resting place pristine, naked of evidence that anyone had visited. Both huntresses believed the Serke were hunting for them in turn.
"One doubts it. No skilled huntress would have left a fire site so obvious to the eye. My thought was that you might use your talent to look where the eye cannot see."
"You are right, of course." Marika went down through her loophole and caught a suitable ghost, then searched the area again, using the altered perspective of the otherworld. She found what Grauel wanted in a crack to one side of the ledge. She returned to flesh. "You were right. Over here. Whoever they were, it looks like they used one natural hole for a garbage pit and a latrine both."
"Grab yourself a stick," Grauel said.
"A stick?"
"Do you want to stir through it with your paws?"
"Of course. All right." Marika collected pieces of dead wood. Grauel used one to dig at soil that had been used to cover the wastes.
"Been a while for sure," the huntress said. "It has all decayed away to nothing. It must not rain or snow much here, for the black on the rocks to have remained noticeable. But we're wasting our time. There's nothing ... Hello!" Grauel dropped onto her belly and reached into the hole. She wriggled forward, bent at the waist, got hold of something, wriggled back and sat up. She held a lump to the light. Marika saw nothing special till Grauel spat upon it and cleaned it on her sleeve.
"A button." It was a tarnished metal button with a few fibers of thread still attached. It was embossed. Grauel passed it to her. Marika studied it, then compared it to the five upon the left wrist of her jacket. "That is a Serke witch sign on it, Grauel. We're on the trail. They've been here. I have a premonition. We are within a few passages through the Up-and-Over of catching up with them."
"That's what you've been saying since we established our first base."
"This time I am right. I can feel it. I am convinced."
"I hope you are." Grauel sounded sour.
"Grauel?"
"I do not want to die out here, Marika. How would the All find me?"
"What?" This was a surprise.
"In fact, if I had my choice, I would spend my final days in the upper Ponath, at the packstead that gave me life."
Marika was baffled. What had brought this on?
"I am getting old, Marika. In the Ponath I might already be one of the Wise. Likewise Barlog. The witchery and medicine of the silth have kept us young beyond our time, but time never stops gnawing. Lately I find I cannot help remembering that we are the last of the Degnan pack, and that our pack lies beneath the northern ice still unMourned."
"Yes. I know all that. You are indeed old for the Ponath, but not old by standards of the silth. There will be time, Grauel. We will see to the Mourning. But we can't go now. We're finally making some headway out here. We've finally found something besides a place where they aren't and haven't ever been. Maybe this world is a regular stop. Maybe if we just sat here and waited ... I know what I'll do. I'll make this world our new base. We'll continue the hunt from here."
"Which means a whole new globe of space to search," Grauel countered, showing no excitement. "It will be like starting from the beginning."
"Think positively, Grauel. Think lucky. Let's go tell the others."
"What I think is I wish I had not called you down here."
That evening Marika climbed a peak while the others rested. She stood staring at the stars. There were few to be seen, for the dust cloud spanned the heavens of that world. She selected the next half dozen stars that should be investigated. Into the cloud itself this time? Yes. What better place to hide?
For the most part she had avoided going into the cloud during her search. She was much less comfortable operating there because there were so few landmark stars. She had reasoned that the Serke explorers would have suffered the same reluctance. But perhaps one of their more daring Mistresses of the Ship, possibly a Bestrei, might have dared the darkness and have found the aliens.
What lay beyond the cloud? No one knew. No one had tried to reach its nether side. Maybe no one but the Serke had had any contact with the aliens because they were over there and they too were reluctant to enter the dust.
The dust cloud it would be, for a time.
II Marika's bath had again been rotated. Grauel and Barlog had begun to show gray and even lose a little fur. Marika herself had begun to feel age in her bones when she rose some mornings. And there were moments when the homeworld called so strongly that her resolve almost broke. There were moments when she was tempted to go home just to discover what had happened in her absence. Sometimes, during the on-planet resting pauses, she lay awake when she was supposed to be sleeping, wondering about Bagnel, longing for his company, and wondering about the progress of the mirrors she had imagined into reality, and even about the warlock, her littermate, Kublin.
She knew very little about what had happened since her departure. But for the regular visit of High Night Rider, and the occasional appearance of a Mistress of the Ship with an adventurous spirit, a desire to visit the strange worlds Marika had reported, and a knack for assembling bath of like temperament, she had no ties with home.
Grauel and Barlog had recognized the process at work and had ceased their importunities for abandoning the quest, fearing their petitions would harden her resolve.
She was finding it increasingly difficult to convince herself that the hunt was worthwhile. There was no end to the universe, even within the dust cloud. There was always another star. And, inevitably, always another disappointment.
It was time for High Night Rider to come again. She felt she had reached a time of decision. If the news from home were bad, she would return.
The mirrors, insofar as she knew, were coming along well. A brief note half a year earlier, written by Bagnel, had told her the mirror in the leading trojan was well ahead of schedule. So much for his doubts about his management skills.
But he had mentioned trouble down on the homeworld's surface. The old rogue male trouble had begun to reassert itself. The Communities seemed unable to stem it. This time the outlaws seemed to be working independent of the brethren, under the dominance of their wehrlen, but there were those, according to Bagnel, who did not believe the warlock was the true source of their witchcraft. Silth did not want to believe a male could be so strong, so felt the rogues had to be getting aid and encouragement from silth smuggled in by the Serke.
On its last visit High Night Rider had brought word that the rogues were sabotaging the brethren as well as silth, that assassination had become their primary weapon. They were using their talent-suppressing device again, and the sisterhoods could not cope.
Marika suspected they could not cope because they did not feel motivated enough. Even now, after all the disaster they had wrought, it was difficult to get silth to take males seriously as a threat.