The packfast was a tall edifice built upon limestone headland overlooking the confluence of the forks of the Hainlin. The bluffs fell sixty feet from the packstead's base. Its walls rose sixty feet above their foundations. They were sheer and smooth and in perfect repair, but did have a look of extreme age. There was a wide walkway around their top, screened by a stone curtain which looked like a lower jaw with every other tooth missing. The whole packfast was shaped like a big square box with an arrowhead appended, pointing downriver. There were huntresses upon the walls always, though when Marika asked them why, they did admit that Akard had seen no trouble within living memory.
"Still," one with more patience than most said, "it has been a hard winter, and the northerners are not known for their brains. They may yet come here."
"They are not completely stupid," Marika said. "They may come, indeed. They will look, and then they will go away. Packsteads are easier prey."
"No doubt. There have been rumors that nomads have been seen in the upper Ponath already."
Marika took a step back. She cocked her head in incredulity. "Rumors? Rumors? Do you not know why the huntresses and I came here?"
"You were brought because you have the silth talent."
"I came because I had nowhere else to go. The nomads destroyed all my pack but the two huntresses who came with me. As they destroyed several other packs and packsteads before ours. Within walking distance of ours. There are tens of hundreds of them in the upper Ponath. Ten tens of tens died at out packstead."
The huntress's disbelief was plain. "The sisters would not permit that."
"No? They did not do anything positive that I saw. Oh, they did finish the wehrlen leading the nomads, and they killed those who were plundering our packstead when they got there, but they did not go on to free the rest of the upper Ponath of invaders."
"Wehrlen," the huntress murmured. "You said wehrlen?"
"Yes. A very strong one. The silth said he was as powerful and well trained as they." Warmed to her story, Marika added, "And there were silth with the nomad horde. My dam slew one. The tall sister, that the other called Khles sometimes, brought back her robe and weapon."
Marika suddenly turned to stare up the valley of the east fork. She had been baffled as to why the nomads had pursued them toward the packfast when they carried so little that was worth taking. Unless ... The tall silth had acted as though that club and robe were great treasures.
Perhaps they were. For reasons she did not understand. The nomads had directed their attention toward the club and the taller silth's pack.
Already she knew life among the silth would be more complicated than it had been at the packstead. Here everyone seemed to be moved by motives as shadowed as Pohsit's.
The huntresses who patrolled the walls and watched the snows called themselves sentries. It was a word new to Marika.
She learned many new words, hearing them almost too fast to assimilate them. "Fortress" was another. Akard was what its meth called a fortress, a bastion which maintained the claim of a silth order called the Reugge, which had its heart in a far southern city called Maksche.
Marika was inundated with more new words when she discovered the communications center.
At the downstream tip of the fortress, at the point of the arrowhead, there was a great tall tree of metal. Marika discovered that her second day of roving. It looked like something drawn by a disastrously twisted artist trying to represent a dead tree. It had a dozen major branches. Upon those sat wire dishes with bowls facing south, each backed be a larger dish of solid metal. There were many smaller branches, seedling size, growing straight up from the main branches. Every inch of metal gleamed in the sunshine. Snow did not stick on the metal branches the way it did on the trees of the forest.
Below and in front of that mad tree there was one huge dish which faced the heavens above the southern horizon. Sometimes that dish moved the way a head did when the eye was following fast game.
What in the world? Very baffling for a pup from the upper Ponath, who found so much metal put to such inexplicable use criminal at the least. She wondered if Grauel or Barlog knew what was going on here. They had been to the packfast before. Surely they had unraveled some of its mysteries. She would have to become more insistent about being shown where they were recuperating.
Grauel and Barlog were sequestered apparently. She had not seen them since entering the packfast. No one would tell her where they were being treated. When she tried to use her own remarkable senses to locate them, something blocked her.
She did not think she was going to like the packfast Akard.
She knew she did not like the way the fortress's huntresses cringed and cowered around the silth. She knew there would be a confrontation of epic proportion the day the silth demanded that of her.
She went down to where the metal tree was and roamed around. But she could find nothing that explained what she saw. Or what she felt. While she was there she became dizzy and disoriented. It took all her concentration to overcome the giddiness and confusion long enough to find her way to a distance sufficient to reduce both.
Her secret senses seemed all scrambled. What had happened? Had she stumbled into some of the great magic for which the silth were so feared?
Chapter Eight
I
Marika could not stay away from that strange part of the packfast where her brain and talent scrambled. Three times that day of discovery she returned. Three times she reeled away, the third time so distressed her stomach nearly betrayed her.
There had been a true qualitative difference that last time, the strangeness being more intense.
She leaned against a wall and tried to hold her dinner down, panting, letting the chill north wind suck the sudden fever from her face. Finally, she pulled herself together enough to move on.
She ducked into the first doorway she encountered. The vertigo was less intense inside.
She halted. She heard odd voices ahead. Strange lights flickered around her. Lights without flame or much heat when she passed a finger near them. Quiet lights, constant in their burning, hard to the touch when she did rest a finger upon them. What witchery was this?
She became very nervous. She had been told she could go wherever she wanted and see anything she wanted. Yet the silth must have their ritual places, like the males and huntresses of the packstead, and those certainly would be off limits. Was this such a place? She dreaded the chance she would interrupt the silth at their black rites. They had begun to seem as dark as her packmates had feared.
Curiosity overcame fear. She moved forward a few steps, looked around in awe. The room was like nothing she had ever imagined. Some yards away a female in a blue smock moved among devices whose purposes Marika could not pretend to fathom. Some had windows that flickered with a ghostly gray light. The voices came from them. The female in the blue smock did not respond.
Devils. The windows must open on the underworld, or the afterworld, or ... She fought down the panic, moved forward a few more steps toward the nearest of those ghostly portals.
She frowned, more confused than ever. A voice came through the window, but there was no one on the other side. Instead, she saw squiggles arranged in neat columns, like a page from a book in reversed coloration.
Flicker. The page changed. A new set of squiggles appeared. Some of those altered while she watched. She gasped and stepped closer again, bent till her nose was almost against the window.
The meth finally noticed her presence. "Hello," she said. "You must be the new sister."
Marika wondered if she ought to flee. "I do not know," she replied, throat tight. She was confused about her status. Some of the meth of the packfast did call her sister. But she did not know why. No one had taken time to explain. She did know that the word "sister" did not mean what it might have at home: another pup born of the same dam. None of these meth seemed to be related by blood or pack.