“Or bees, without the dancing.”
“Yeah.” It was funny that Ronan should mention bees just now, as Kit had been registering a faint humming at the edge of hearing. As they walked, though, Kit realized that what he was hearing had nothing to do with insect life. He was hearing, at a distance, the sound of movement and voices from the transients’ encampment ahead of them; and it made the hair stand up on the back of his neck.
It’s not like we haven’t been within visual distance of them for a couple of days, Kit thought. But the motion at that distance had been indistinct, sort of an average of many movements seen together; and sometimes, even under Thesba’s light when darkness fell, difficult to see at all. Now he could see people, or the individual shapes of people anyway, moving around, moving among one another, clothed or not-so-clothed over their feathers; sitting outside the small tentlike structures scattered throughout the encampment, standing and talking, and sometimes pausing to look up at Thesba as it slid across the sky.
Kit and Ronan followed the sibik’s track past another tangle of knotted light in the grass, while the hum became louder and started turning into a huge low murmur of voices in many Tevaralti languages. The path began to angle to their right, somewhat toward the encampment’s western edge, now just a couple hundred meters ahead of them. That was when the wind that had been blowing at their backs dropped off for a few moments, and then changed, swinging around to gust toward them from the encampment.
Two things happened. The grip of the sibik’s tentacles around Kit’s shoulders and head immediately tightened, and it made another of those little moans; of excitement this time, but strangely mixed with dread. And as it did, Kit got a strong whiff of something he hadn’t smelled since he came, or had mistaken it for part of this world’s larger, natural scent. It was a metallic aroma, or at least that was the way it read to him. But it wasn’t until he saw the small, cubelike sanitary arrangements that were set outside the edges of the encampment that he realized his error. The biology of human beings from Earth naturally arose from and was geared to a very specific biosphere, meaning that human bodies and senses were wired to read certain scents as unwholesome or noxious. Aromas from other planets would naturally mean nothing to them. If I’d smelled something recognizable as piss or crap, Kit thought, or both of those mixed up with chemicals meant to hide the odor—if it’d smelled like people crowded together in really basic conditions—
He wasn’t sure what was supposed to come after the ‘if.’ But it was funny, the way a smell could concentrate your mind when sound or sight hadn’t done so before.
“Kit,” Ronan said. “Stay focused.”
Kit looked at Ronan out of the corner of his eye. It was unusual enough for him to call Kit by his name instead of one of the endless series of rude nicknames he’d evolved over time. Ronan’s face looked unusually tight, the wide mobile mouth set thinner and harder than Kit was used to seeing it. It was unnerving.
“You okay?” Kit said.
Ronan nodded just once. “Trail’s swinging again,” he said.
So it was, further to their right, right off toward the encampment’s westward side, to a point where it amgled southward and dove straight into it. Kit and Ronan worked around the edge of the encampment’s boundary, more or less defined by a line of long low tents and the cubical structures that Kit’s nose now identified as the Tevaralti version of portable toilets—extremely advanced, yes, but not quite perfect at disguising their purpose or their contents. And then the wind shifted again, and the sibik grabbed Kit even tighter, almost throttling him with a tentacle that had been left around his neck, and shouted “Yes!”
Kit tried to ease the tentacle’s grip slightly as they followed the sibik’s trail into the encampment. All around them, Tevaralti in their many kinds of dress, from harnesses to kilts to robes and everything in between, in small groups or larger ones, were staring at him and Ronan as they made their way between the temporary buildings and among the lookers-on. Kit tried to smile at the ones who stared at him, but he wasn’t at all sure that they were prepared or even able to understand the expression as a gesture of friendliness.
And the way the Tevaralti around them were regarding him was peculiar. They didn’t seem hostile, but they did seem sad and afraid, afraid of them—as if Kit and Ronan somehow were symptoms of everything that was going wrong with the world right now. The people they passed most closely drew back from them, still staring; and as this happened again and again, even though he was perfectly safe, a wizard in company and in his power, out and about on the Powers’ business, Kit started feeling small and unsettled and strangely alone.
Fortunately he had something to distract him—the sibik, which was now yelling “Yes yes! Yes yes!” over and over again in response to something it was smelling. The rhythm was strangely like that of a dog barking. And as that thought crossed Kit’s mind, suddenly a peculiar unexpected wave of sensation washed over him, one that meant something: or rather, someone. Someone for whom the sibik didn’t have a name, nothing so advanced. It was a scent, or actually a whole bundle of scents bound up together, clothes and food and possessions and a personal aroma laden with meaning and safety and warmth and the reality of a place to be and someone to belong to, and oh, it missed them, it missed them—
The pang of its emotion pierced so profoundly through Kit that he actually staggered, and stumbled and might have gone down on his face if Ronan hadn’t caught him by one arm. “Are you okay, what the f—”
“No, it’s OK, I’m OK,” Kit said, “we’re here, he’s here, he’s home—”
Right in front of them, someone was crying in one of the Tevaralti languages something like, “Weegie? Weegie!” And the sibik undid all its tentacles from around Kit and more or less launched itself off him at the small feather-crested figure that was running toward them, and the next moment or so was taken up with Kit stumbling back into Ronan (who was still bracing him, and sharing Kit’s surprise at how much force a sibik that size could impart to you when using you as a launch platform).
The little one meanwhile caught the sibik in mid-leap and clutched it to him as if it was the only stable thing in a world gone mad. “Weegie, oh Weegie, I felt you! I felt you and you were sad and you couldn’t come back and now you’re here—!”
Moments later Kit and Ronan were surrounded by a crowd of Tevaralti all of whom seemed to be talking at the two of them in different languages (understandable via the Speech, but still aurally confusing in such numbers), and Kit was being hugged around his waist by the little boy, who was wearing a kilt and very raggedy feathers, mostly brown ones. The sibik meanwhile concentrated on wrapping itself more and more tightly around the little boy’s shoulders as if intent on melting into his body.
Kit was still trying to get control of his breathing, and also trying to recover from his perception of the sibik’s ecstatic certainty that here, in the middle of a refugee camp, with the world about to be destroyed, it was finally home and safe and everything was all right, in fact absolutely perfect. Kit was shaking with the echoes of the feeling, rocked to his core. He was also determined not to have to start wiping his eyes, especially with all these people looking at him. Though would they even know what that meant? Maybe wiping your eyes for no reason is perfectly normal behavior for some weird featherless humanoid species from Powers only know where.
He pulled away from Ronan, enough to let him know that he was okay, and Ronan let him go, patting him on the back. To the Tevaralti around them—especially the three who’d come up behind the young boy, who were apparently his parents or at least his guardians—Ronan simply said, “We’re on errantry, and we greet you.”