Daulo grinned tightly. "Besides our trouble with the Yithtra family, you mean?"
"What can he say about that that he hasn't already said?"
"Not much," Daulo admitted. There were times he wished the competition between his family and the Yithtra family didn't exist; but it was a fact of life, and disliking it didn't change that. "Anything else?"
"Your brother Perto brought in that shipment of spare motor parts from Azras,"
Walare said, his voice abruptly taking on a grim tone. "Along with a passenger: an injured woman they found on the road."
Daulo sat up a bit straighter. "A woman? Who?"
"No one at the house recognized her."
"Identification?"
"None." Walare hesitated. "Perhaps it was lost in... the trouble she had."
Daulo frowned. "What sort of trouble?"
Walare took a deep breath. "According to the driver who helped bring her in, she'd been clawed at least once by a krisjaw... as well as clawed by a baelcra and bitten by one or more monota."
Daulo felt his stomach tighten. "God above," he muttered. "And she was still alive?"
"She was when they brought her to the house," Walare said. "Though who knows how long she'll stay that way?"
"God alone," Daulo sighed.
Chapter 14
They reached the house a few minutes later, Walare guiding the car expertly through the filigreed doors and over to the wide garage nestled behind a pair of fruit trees in one corner of the large central courtyard. Stomach tightening against what he knew would be a horrible sight, Daulo headed for the women's section of the house.
Only to discover that his worst fears had been for nothing.
"Is that the worst of it?" he asked, frowning across the room at the woman on the bed. Surrounded by three other women and a doctor, with a blanket pulled up to her neck, it was nevertheless clear that the injured woman wasn't the horribly mauled victim he'd expected to find. There was a bad set of scratches on her cheek, visible beneath the healing salve that had been applied, and a rather worse set on her arm that was still being treated. But aside from that...
From her seat across the bed Daulo's mother glanced up at him. "Please stay back," Ivria Sammon said softly. "The dust on your clothing-"
"I understand," Daulo nodded. His eyes searched the visible wounds again, then settled for the first time on her face. About his age, he judged, with the soft-looking skin of someone who had spent little time out in the sun and wind.
His eyes drifted down her left arm, past the wounds, to her hand.
No ring of marriage.
He frowned, looking at her face again. No mistake-she was at least as old as he was. And still unmarried-?
"She must have come from a far way," Ivria said quietly, almost as if to herself. "See her face, the way her features are formed."
Daulo glanced at his mother, then back at the mysterious woman again. Yes; now that he was looking for it he could see it, too. There was a strangeness in the face, a trace of the exotic that he'd never seen before. "Perhaps she's from one of the cities to the north," he suggested. "Or even from somewhere in the
Eastern Arm."
"Perhaps," the doctor grunted. "She certainly hasn't built up much resistance to monote bites."
"Is that what the problem is?" Daulo asked.
The doctor nodded. "On the arms and hands-here, and here," he added, pointing them out. "It looks like she had to fend them off with her bare hands."
"After her ammunition ran out?" Daulo suggested. She surely hadn't fended off that krisjaw with her bare hands, after all.
"Perhaps," the doctor said. "Though if she had a gun it was gone by the time she was found. As was the holster."
Daulo gnawed at his inner cheek, glancing around the room. A pile of clothing had been tossed into the corner; keeping well back from the bed, he stepped over to it. The injured woman's clothes, of course-the bloodstains alone would have attested to that, even without the odd feel of the cloth that branded it as from someplace far away. And the doctor was right: there was no holster with the ensemble. Nor any markings on the belt where one might once have hung.
"Maybe she had some companions," he suggested, dropping the clothing back on the floor. That would certainly make more sense than a single woman wandering alone out in the forest. "Was any effort made to see if there were others in the area where she was found?"
It was Ivria who answered. "Not at the time, but I believe Perto has now gone back to continue the search."
Stepping to the room's intercom, Daulo keyed the private family circuit. "This is Daulo Sammon," he identified himself to the servant who answered. "Has Perto returned from the forest?"
"One moment, Master Sammon," the voice answered. "...He is not answering."
Daulo nodded. Out of the house, away from all the Sammon family holdings in
Milika, Perto would be out of touch with the buried fiber-optic communications network which was the only safe way to send messages in Milika. "Leave a message for him to contact me as soon as possible," he instructed the other.
"Yes, Master Sammon."
Daulo keyed the intercom off and turned back for one last look at the woman.
Where could she be from? he wondered. And why is she here? There were no answers as yet... but that lack would eventually be corrected. For the moment the important fact was that the Sammon family had matters under control. Whether this mysterious woman represented a totally neutral happenstance, or a chance opportunity granted them by God, or part of some strange plot by one of their rivals, the Sammons were now in position to use her presence to their own advantage.
Which reminded him, he still had to clean up before his meeting with his father.
Opening the door quietly, he slipped out of the room.
"Come in," the familiar grating voice came from the opposite side of the carved door; and, steeling himself, Daulo opened the door and went in.
He could still remember a time, not all that long ago, when he'd been absolutely terrified of his father. Terrified not so much by Kruin Sammon's strength and stature, nor even by the man's cold voice and piercing black eyes; but by the fact that Kruin Sammon was, to all intents and purposes, the Sammon family. His was the power that ran this immense house and the mine and nearly a third of the village; his the influence that stretched beyond Milika to touch the nearby villages and logging camps and even the city of Azras, whose people normally treated villagers like themselves with barely concealed contempt. Kruin Sammon was power... and even after the fear of that power had abated somewhat, Daulo had never forgotten the emotions it had aroused in him.
It was only much later that he had realized it was probably a lesson his father had deliberately set for him to learn.
"Ah; Daulo," the older man nodded from his cushion-like throne in solemn greeting to his eldest son. "I trust your trip down the mine went well?"
"Yes, my father," Daulo said, making the sign of respect as he stepped to the cushion before Kruin's low work table and seated himself before it. "The necessity for extra shoring is keeping progress slow in the new tunnel, but not as slow as we feared it would."
"And the job is being done properly?"
"It appeared to be, yes, at least to the best of my knowledge."
"The job is being done properly?" Kruin repeated.
Daulo fought to keep his emotions from his face and voice. That had been a thoughtless qualification-if there was one thing his father hated, it was equivocation. "Yes, my father. The shoring was being done properly."
"Good," Kruin nodded, picking up a stylus from the table and making note on a pad. "And the workers?"
"Content. In my presence, at any rate."
"The mine chief?"
Daulo thought back to the other's face as he'd left the elevator. "Impressed by his own importance," he said. "Eager that others know of it, as well."
That brought a faint smile to Kruin's lips. "He is all of that," he agreed. "But he's also capable and conscientious, and the combination is one that can be put up with." Tossing the stylus back on the table, he leaned back against the cushions and gazed at his son. "And now: what is your impression of our visitor?"