She never answered, for they would not understand what she would say. She would say that she heard cold, she heard ice, she heard the whisper of the great dark. She would say that she heard the whisper of tomorrow.
Chapter Eleven
I
Gorry failed in her effort to rid Akard of its most bizarre tenant. Marika did not go to the Maksche cloister with the coming of spring. The senior was not yet sufficiently exercised with her most intractable student silth to accept the loss of face passing the problem would bring.
Hopeless as their hopes were, the exiles of Akard tried making themselves look good in the eyes of their distant seniors. Sometimes the winds of silth politics shifted at the senior cloisters and old exiles were derusticated. Not often, but often enough to serve as an incentive. A whip, Marika thought. A fraud.
Whatever, the senior did not wish to lose face by passing along such a recalcitrant student.
She was not shy, though, about getting her least favorite pupil out of Akard for the summer.
The orders had come not from Maksche but from beyond, from the most senior cloister of the Reugge sisterhood. The nomads were to be cleared from the upper Ponath. No excuses would be accepted. Dread filled Akard. To Marika that dread seemed unfocused, as much caused by the sisterhood's far, mysterious rulers as by the more concrete threat of the hordes close by.
Marika went out with the first party to leave. It consisted of forty meth, only three of whom were silth. One young far-toucher. One older silth to command. Thirty-seven huntresses, all drawn from among the refugees. And one dark-sider. Marika.
Maybe they hoped she would be inadequate to the task. Maybe they hoped her will would fail when it came time to reach down and grasp the deadly ghosts and fling them against the killers of the upper Ponath. Or maybe they had not had the webs drawn over their eyes the way she thought. Maybe they knew her true strength.
She did not worry it long. The hunt demanded too much concentration.
They went out by day, in immediate pursuit of nomads seen watching the fortress. The nomads saw them coming and fled. The huntresses slogged across the newly thawed fields. Within minutes Marika's fine boots were caked with mud to her knees. She muttered curses and tried to keep track of the prey. The nomads could be caught up when night fell.
Barlog marched to her left. Grauel marched to her right. The two huntresses watched their own party more closely than they watched the inimical forest.
"You look smug," Marika told Grauel.
"We are." Both huntresses were in a high good humor Marika initially assessed as due to the fact that they were outside Akard for the first time in six months. "We tricked them. They thought they would be able to send you out without us along to look out for you."
Maybe that explained the scowls from Arhdwehr, the silth in charge. Marika peered at the older silth's back and expressed her own amusement.
The hunt was supposed to follow the north bank of the east fork of the Hainlin as far as the nether edge of country formerly occupied by settled meth. Then it was to swing through the hills to the south, loop again north almost to the Rift, drift down to the east fork again, then head home. That meant five hundred miles of travel minimum, in no real set pattern after leaving the Hainlin in the east. Basically, they were to wander the eastern half of the upper Ponath all summer, living off the land and slaughtering invaders. Marika's would be but one of a score of similar parties.
For a long time very little happened. Once again, as in the summer of the journey to the Rift, the nomads seemed capable of staying out of their path. When the hunt passed below the site of the Degnan packstead, Marika, Barlog, and Grauel gazed up at the decaying stockade and refused to take a closer look. The Laspe packstead they did visit, but nothing remained there save vaguely regular lines on the earth and cellar infalls where loghouses had stood.
Stirring a midden heap, Marika uncovered a scorched and broken chakota doll-and nearly lost her composure.
"What troubles you, pup?" Barlog asked.
Throat too tight for speech, she merely held out the broken doll. Barlog was puzzled.
Marika found her voice. "My earliest memory is of a squabble with Kublin. I broke his chakota. He got so mad he threw mine into the fire." She had not thought of, or dreamed of, her littermate for a long time. Recalling him now, with a chakota in her paw, brought back all the pain redoubled. "The Mourning. We still owe them their Mourning."
"Someday, pup. Someday. It will come." Barlog scratched her behind the ears, gently, and she did not shy away, though she was too old for that.
Approaching the Plenthzo Valley, they happened upon a packstead that had been occupied till only a few hours before. "Some of them have changed their ways," Grauel observed.
It was obvious the place had been abandoned hurriedly. "They do know where we are and what we are doing," Marika said. She frowned at the sky for no reason she understood. And without consulting Arhdwehr-who was plundering deserted food stores-she ordered a half dozen huntresses into the surrounding woods to look for signs of watchers.
Arhdwehr was very angry when she learned what Marika had done. But she restrained her temper. Though just a week into the venture, she realized already that the savages with whom she traveled responded far better to the savage silth pup than they did to her. Too strong a confrontation might not be wise.
Marika had sent those huntresses that Grauel felt were the best. So she believed them when they returned and reported that the party was not being stalked by nomad scouts.
"They must have their own silth with them," she told Grauel and Barlog. "So they sense us coming in time to scatter."
"That many silth?" Barlog countered. "If there were that many, they would fight us. Anyway, sheer chance ought to put more of them into our path." The only encounters thus far had been two with lone huntresses out seeking game. Those the Akard huntresses had destroyed without difficulty or requiring help from the silth.
While searching for the best food stores, Arhdwehr made a discovery. She told the others, "I know how they are doing it. Staying out of our way." But she would not explain.
Marika poked around. She found nothing. But intuition and Arhdwehr's behavior made her suspect it came down to something like the devices Braydic used to communicate with Maksche.
Which might explain how the packstead had been warned. But how had the reporter known where the hunting party was?
Ever so gently, so it would seem to be Arhdwehr's idea, Marika suggested that the party might spend a day or two inside that packstead, resting. It had been a hard trail up from Akard. Arhdwehr adopted the idea. Her point won, Marika collected Grauel and Barlog. "Did you find any of the herbs and roots I told you to watch for?"
"Everything but the grubs," Grauel replied. She was baffled. Almost from her first contact with them after their arrival at Akard, Marika had had them gathering odds and ends from the woods whenever they left the fortress.
She replied, "I did not think we would find any of those. It is far too early yet. And too cold. Even the summers have become so cool that they have become rare. However ... " With a gesture of triumph she produced a small sealed earthenware jar she had brought from the fortress. "I brought some along. I found them the summer we went to the Rift. Find me a pot. And something I can use as a cutting board."