“What about our future?” she asked expressionlessly.
“Father Sandoval agrees with me that there will be a cure,” he announced in his laying-down-the-law voice, as though his saying it made it fact. Well, Rigo’s use of that voice had almost always produced the desired result. So he had spoken to his mother, his sisters, to Eugenie and the children, to Marjorie herself. If his voice hadn’t worked, Father Sandoval’s had, setting penances, invoking the power of the church. Now Rigo was going on, telling her what would happen.
“Someone will find it. Now that we know the answer lies here, someone will find it, and it won’t take long. The cure will be disseminated. We will stay here only until then. Then we must get back to our real lives, all four of us.”
“We must what?” she asked, thinking of the monsters in the town, in the port. How could he simply ignore them? But then, how could he have ignored the fact that they were monsters before? “What must we do?”
“All four of us.” he repeated. “Including Stella.” His eyes were angry. Evidently Stella’s going to the forest had rankled. “She’ll take a lot of attention, but you needn’t give up your charities or your riding. We can hire people to care for her.”
“To care for her.”
He made a grim line with his lips. “I know she’ll require a lot of attention, Marjorie. The point I wanted to make is that it needn’t be a burden on you. I know how much your work means to you, how important you think it is. Father Sandoval has pointed out that I shouldn’t have argued with you about that in the past. It was wrong of me. You’re entitled to have your own interests…”
She shook her head at him, slowly, disbelievingly. What was he saying? Did he think they could go back as they were before, as though nothing had happened? Would he find someone to replace Eugenie and then go on, as they had before? Would she go down to Breedertown, taking food, arranging transport? As it had been?
“Have you and Father Sandoval discussed how you will introduce Stella to your friends?” she asked. “Will you say, This is Stella, my idiot daughter. I allowed her to be mentally and sexually crippled on Grass in order to show off my manliness to people who meant nothing to me.’ Something like that?”
His face turned dark with fury. “You have no right—”
She put up a hand, forbidingly. “I have every right, Rigo. I’m her parent too. She’s not yours alone to dispose of. She belongs to me, as well, and to herself. If you want to take Stella back to Terra, I suppose you can try. Somehow, I don’t think you will easily remove her from where she is now. You would have great difficulty removing me. If you want to go back to the way things were, I can’t stop you. I won’t try. But you must not expect Stella or me to come along like dogs at your heels!”
“You’re not thinking of staying here! What would you do here? Your work is at home. Our lives are at home.”
“I would have agreed with you once. It’s not true now.”
“All those arguments you used to give me about your work at Breedertown? You’re saying that was so much fluff? Lies?”
“I thought it was important then.” Or made myself think so, she said to herself.
“And now you don’t?”
“What difference does it make what I think? I’m not even sure what I think! And despite your assumption that the plague will be ended, we may die of it yet! Or the Hippae may kill us. This is no time to discuss what we will do if, what we will do when. We have no choices right now except to try to stay alive as best we can.” She got up and went past him, laying a hand on his shoulder as she went, wanting to comfort him or herself. Now was not the time to have argued with him. If their lives were to end here, she would rather not have them end in rancor. What did it matter what he said now?
He went after her, finding her at the window with the trooper. Rigo, looking over her shoulder at scenes of fire and destruction, wondered why anyone would consider staying on Grass. The Hippae had found the scientists in the attached hospital and had dragged them out onto the weedy slope. Even when they were all dead, the Hippae rampaged among the bodies like bulls, trampling and bellowing.
Marjorie cursed in a quiet voice, tears running down her face. She had not known or remembered that there were other people in the port building. When she and the trooper had shut off the power, they could have-brought the others up to safety. The sight of the rampaging creatures made her think again of the horses. She would not leave them to face this horror alone.
The two men were frozen at the window. She turned quietly and went out without their noticing. It would be a long climb down to the winter quarters and the tunnels which connected everything, as Persun Pollut had said, like the holes in a sponge.
Most of Commons managed to get behind the stout doors of winter quarters before the Hippae arrived. Most, not all. Those who were left above ground fought their way to such safety as they could find. Though most buildings in town were low, there were upper floors for refuge, stairways that could be held at least for a time. They had no weapons to oppose the Hippae and the hounds. While a knife could cut a leg or a jaw, a hound could come up from behind and take the arm that held the knife before the man knew the beast was there. Hounds could come up stairs like great cats. Bodies and parts of bodies began to accumulate in Commons streets. In the order station the Seraph sweated and swore, wishing he had ways of communicating with the defenders of the town.
“An aircar,” James Jellico suggested. “You can fly overhead. Aircars have speakers.”
“You do it,” snapped the Seraph. “Tell them to get out of the streets onto roofs where we can pick them up. Tell them to stop dying uselessly until I can get my men down!”
So Jelly flew, and Asmir, and Alverd, and even old Roald, skimming the tops of the buildings as they bellowed at those below to get onto the rooftops.
“Climb,” they shouted. “We’ll pick you up.”
Those who heard them swore and screamed and tried to get onto roofs while beasts darted at them from every doorway, lunged up at them from seemingly empty streets, materialized out of nothing in corners of walls. Always before, the Hippae had chosen to be seen. Now, in battle, they chose not to be seen until their teeth were fastened in their prey. Like chameleons, they faded against their backgrounds, their skins mottled the colors of brick or cobbles or plaster, only their teeth and the gleam of eyes betraying them, too often too late.
Those with the arrogance to be ridden could not disguise their eldritch riders, however. The sight of a shuddering corpselike figure coming head high along a wall was enough to warn that there was a beast beneath it. Roald, peering down from the aircar at this display, wondered what arcane motives led the Hippae to this horrid mockery of a Hunt? Why did they burden themselves with these useless excrescences? When the Hippae died, their riders rolled off, some of them alive, some barely alive, some already truly dead. Roald had picked up a few that looked like they might make it. Even the most alive among them did not know why they were there. Why were they there?
“I see more dead ones,” Roald muttered to Alverd as they flew from rooftop to rooftop. “More dead Hippae.”
“I know,” Alverd marveled. “Who’s killing them? Not the troopers. They’re all tied up over at the order station.”
“Us, I guess.”
Alverd snorted. “Not likely, father-in-law. There’s another dead one, at the corner down there. All torn apart.”
“What’s killing them, if we’re not?”