Marika reviewed the past few months. There had been nothing at all that was different from what had gone before. Except that she had reached the brink of physical maturation and been ordered to take a daily draft of a potion which would prevent the onset of her first estrus.
"I don't see it, Grauel. I don't feel like I'm carrying any doom around."
"Would you know if you did, pup? Did Jiana?"
Gorry's word. Jiana. In a moment of anger the old silth had called her Jiana one day recently. "That's a myth, Grauel. Anyway, Jiana wasn't even meth."
The demigoddess Jiana had been the offspring of a rheum-greater and the all-father avatar of the All, Gyerlin, who had descended from the great dark and had impregnated Jiana's dam in her sleep. It was not accepted doctrine. It was a story, like many other tales from the dawn of time. A prescientific attempt to explain away mysteries.
When Jiana had become an adult, she had carried curses around the world, and in her wake all the animals had lost their powers of speech and reason. All but the meth, who had been forewarned by Gyerlin and had hidden themselves away where Jiana could not find them.
It was an ancient tale, distorted by a thousand generations of retellings. Any truth it might have held once had to have been leached away by the efforts of storytellers to improve upon the original. Marika accepted it only as what it was upon its face, an explanation of why the meth were the only intelligent, talking animals. She did not see that the myth had any connection with her present situation.
She said as much to Grauel.
"Myth or not, Gorry is calling you her little Jiana. And some of the others are taking her seriously. They are certain you have been touched by the All." Which expression could have two meanings. In this case Marika knew she could interpret it as a polite way of saying she was insane.
"Someone has been touched by the All, Grauel. And I don't think it is me. These silth are not very down to earth when you look at them closely."
Marika had been very much surprised to discover that the silth, for all their education and knowledge resources, were far more mystically and ritualistically inclined than the most primitive of nomads. They honored a score of days of obligation of which she had never before heard. They offered daily propitiation to both the All and the lesser forces with which they dealt. They made sacrifices on a scale astonishing to one for whom sacrifice had meant a weekly bowl of gruel set outside the packstead gate, with a pot of ormon beer, and a small animal delivered to Machen Cave before the quarterly conjunction of the two biggest moons. The silth were devil-ridden. They still feared specters supposedly cast down when the All had supplanted earlier powers. They feared shadows that had come with the All but which were supposed to be enchained irrevocably in other worlds. They especially feared those-always wehrlen-who might be able to summon those shadows against them.
Marika had observed several of the higher ceremonies by sneaking through her loophole. Those rituals had almost no impact upon those-who-dwell, as the silth called the things Marika thought of as ghosts. And those things were the only supernatural forces Marika recognized. At the moment she seriously questioned the existence of the All itself, let alone those never-seen shadows that haunted her teachers.
The ghosts needed no propitiation that Marika could see. Insofar as she could tell, they remained indifferent to the mortal plane most all the time. They responded to it, apparently only in curiosity, at times of high stress. And acted upon it only when controlled by one with the talent.
Doomstalker. That was Jiana's mystic title. The huntress in search of something she could never find, something that was always behind her. Insofar as Marika could see, the doomstalker was little more than a metaphor for change.
The doomstalker was a powerful silth myth, though, and Marika suspected that Gorry, fearful of what her own future held, was playing upon it cynically in an effort to gain backing from the other older sisters. None of the Akard silth liked Gorry, but they grudgingly respected her for what she had been before being sent into exile.
Even so, she would have to do some tall convincing before being permitted more blatant excesses toward her pupil. Of that Marika was confident.
Caution. Caution. That was all it would take.
"I am no doomstalker, Grauel. And I have no ambitions. I'm just doing what I have to do so we can survive. They need not fear me."
She had slipped into a role she played for Grauel and Barlog both, in their rare meetings, for she feared that Grauel, at least, in her own effort to survive reported her every remark. "I sincerely believe that I will become the sort of sister who never leaves the cloister and seldom uses her talent for anything but teaching silth pups."
Were her suspicions insane? It seemed mad to suspect everyone of malice. One meth, certainly. In any packstead there were enmities as well as friendships. Every packstead had its old-against-young conflicts, its Gorry-against-Marika. Pohsit had been proof of that. But to suspect the entire packfast of being against her, subtly and increasingly-even though the suspicion was encouraged by Braydic, Grauel, and Barlog-particularly for reasons she herself found mystical and inaccessible, stank of the rankest madness.
So it might be mad. She was convinced, and being convinced she dared do nothing but act as if it were true. Any concession to reason would be folly.
Why did the silth play their games of sisterhood? Or did every silth sister come to stand to all others as Marika was coming to stand to hers? Was sisterhood just a mask shown the outside world? An image with which the rulers awed the ruled? Was the reality continual chaos within the cloister wall? The squabble of starving pups battling over scraps?
Grauel intruded upon her thoughts. "I can't make you believe me, Marika. But I am bound to warn you. We are still Degnan."
Marika had definite, powerful feelings about that, but she did not air them. Grauel and Barlog both became sullen and hurt if she even hinted that the Degnan pack was a thing of the past. They had taken the Chronicle from her when they had discovered she was no longer keeping it up. Barlog had gone so far as to learn a better style of calligraphy so she could keep the Chronicle.
They were good huntresses, those two. They had given the packfast no reason to regret taking them in. They served it well. But they were fools, racked by sentimentality. And they were traitors to their ideals. Were they not working against her, their own packmate?
"Thank you, Grauel. I appreciate your concern. Please excuse my manners. I had a difficult morning. One of Gorry's more difficult tests."
Grauel's lips pulled back in a fierce snarl. For a moment Marika was tempted to press, to test the genuineness of the show. To employ Grauel as a blade in her contest with Gorry. But no. That was what someone had tried against her on the Rift. And the effort had earned nothing but contempt for the unknown one who had manipulated another into acting in her stead. The reckoning with Gorry was something she would have to handle herself.
So, when Grauel showed no sign of departing, she continued, "Thank you, Grauel. Please let me be. I need the song of the wind."
"It is not a song, pup. It is a death wail. But as you will."
Give Grauel that much. She did not subscribe to the clutch of honorifics which Marika was due, even as a silth in training. Had there been witnesses ... But she knew Marika abhorred the whole artificial structure of honor in which the silth wrapped themselves.
As Grauel stalked away, cradling her spear-cum-badge of office, Marika reflected that she was becoming known for communing with the wind. No doubt Gorry and her cronies listed that as another fragment of evidence against her. Jiana had spoken with the wind, and the north wind had been her closest ally, sometimes carrying her around the world. More than one sister had asked-teasingly so far-what news she heard from the north.