“Chphuris on sankiste…” said Alecto.
What if Chalcus were here with them? How would he get along with this wild girl?
Ilna snorted. Well enough, no doubt. Far too well for her own comfort, that she was sure of.
“Lampse seison souros!” Alecto cried. She made a final flourish with her knife, an intricate pattern in the air. There was a rustle from above.
The fire was a small one, built from the stems and branches of a wild olive which had sprung up at the base of the great cedar. The wood was green but oily; it caught quickly when Ilna struck sparks from the back of her knife into the wad of milkweed fluff Alecto provided.
The milkweed wasn’t ripe either here—wherever “here” was—or in Valles when Ilna went into her trance. Alecto came from a place distant in time; by a season at least, but very likely from farther than that. She eyed Ilna’s steel knife with as much fear as envy.
A dove toppled end over end to the ground. It hit with a thump, its beak opening and closing slowly. Alecto snatched the bird’s head and broke its neck with a quick jerk.
A second dove flopped down, like the first, stunned but not dead. Ilna killed it, then slipped her paring knife from its case of yellowed bone and began to skin the bird. If they’d had a pot to scald the doves, she’d have plucked them instead, but this would do. Alecto was proceeding in the same fashion, gripping her athame by the end of the blade with a careful gap between the edge and the heel of her hand.
“I was in Valles on Ornifal when I came here,” Ilna said, keeping her eyes on her work. “Where did you come from, mistress?”
Alecto shrugged. “I was at home, outside of Hartrag’s village,” she said. “I put myself into dreamworld to find a nightmare to send to Brasus.”
She chuckled. “He said he was leaving me to go back to his wife and sons,” she said. “So I thought fine, I’ll let him dream about the bitch and her whelps too—with their guts around their necks and their eyes gouged out. See how he likes that!”
Ilna spilled the offal on the bird’s skin, then threaded the giblets on a long splinter that she set over the flames. They’d grill more quickly than the rest of the bird, small though it was. Her empty stomach was already twitching in anticipation of the hot morsels.
Alecto shook her head in mingled disgust and disbelief. “I’d never’ve troubled the Pack,” she said. “Oh, sure, I knew I was going into territory close by theirs, but that didn’t matter unless they’d already been roused. Who’d’ve imagined that?”
Ilna thrust a peeled withe the thickness of her little finger through the squab and set it on the supports she’d prepared while Alecto called the birds down. She’d bound straight sticks in a pair of X-frames instead of bothering to find forked twigs of the proper size and angle.
“Yes, Hartrag’s village,” Ilna said, for the sake of information but also to get her mind off her companion’s casual boasts. “But what island are you from? And who’s the King of the Isles in your time?”
“Island?” Alecto repeated. “I don’t live on an island. I told you, I’m just a bowshot north of Saller’s hut, on the path to Queatwa’s village.”
Ilna’s lips tightened in anger. Then she looked at herself with her mind’s eye and snorted in disbelief at her foolishness.
A year ago she herself had been only vaguely aware that she lived on the island of Haft. She’d had no idea that there was a King of the Isles and had known little more of the Count of Haft in Carcosa. If Alecto now was as ignorant as Ilna had been so recently, that was no reason to scorn her.
Ilna had much better reason than that to scorn Alecto.
“Ah…” she said, thinking about the connections Barca’s Hamlet had with the greater world. She turned her spit a notch. She’d squared the withe where it rested on the supports, then beveled the corners to double the number of faces to give her precise control of the way the bird faced the fire. “Do priests come to your village in the spring to collect tithes for the temple in—”
Not in Carcosa, surely.
“—whatever place has the chief temples of the Lady and the Shepherd?”
“I’ve heard of priests,” Alecto said. “Somebody paid to pray for you, you mean? Not in Hartrag’s village! Sometimes a hermit comes through and some folks give him a meal. Mostly hermits had better be able to knock over a rabbit or a squirrel for themself, though.”
She’d butterflied her squab with twigs and was holding the skewer in her hand instead of using a frame as Ilna did. The firelight threw harsh shadows onto the planes of her face; despite that she looked tired and, to Ilna’s mind, perhaps a little less bestial. Calling doves down to the ground by art was work as surely as climbing the tree to fetch them would have been. Besides, the stress of hiding in the temple must be telling on her muscles as well as Ilna’s.
The reason Ilna so disdained Alecto…the real reason did Ilna no credit, and she was far too honest to hide the truth from herself.
“I was lucky to meet you, I don’t mind saying,” Alecto said, rubbing her eyes with the back of her free hand. She shifted her legs slightly, then reached under the front of her skirt to scratch herself. “I could run, but I couldn’t have run much farther. And the Pack never stop when they’ve taken up a trail.”
“Do you know anything about the people we watched there in the temple?” Ilna said. “If I’m correct, they may call themselves Moon Wisdom and this may be Tisamur. The island of Tisamur.”
“Never heard of them,” Alecto said. She yawned. “Either one.”
She glared at the fire. Ilna turned her squab again, then took the skewer of giblets from the fire and waved it to cool the meat.
“You know it wasn’t just the ones we saw in the room who raised the Pack, don’t you?” Alecto said unexpectedly, looking directly at Ilna. Her eyes winked like beads of polished chert. “They were just focusing it. There were people outside praying with them, too.”
In a softer voice, she added, “More people than I’d ever thought there were. All together.”
“I didn’t know there were other people,” Ilna said. She thought back on the day not so very long ago when she’d entered Carcosa. There were tenements in the city that held more people than lived in all of Barca’s Hamlet. “I’m not a wizard, you know.”
“Don’t give me that!” Alecto snapped. “You wouldn’t be here—you wouldn’t have been where I found you!—if you weren’t a wizard.”
“Believe what you please!” Ilna said. She bit the dove’s gizzard from the skewer and chewed it. The tough muscle, only half-cooked, gave her an outlet for her irritation.
Alecto lapsed back to staring at the fire. “I suppose they think they control the Pack because there’s so many of them,” she said morosely. “They’re wrong, though. If they keep doing it, eventually they’ll let something slip. And then…”
She shook her head. In Alecto’s voice Ilna heard the tone she herself would have used in describing the craftsmanship of another weaver, one who’d attempted more than her skill would permit her to succeed with. Ilna looked at her companion with new interest.
“The Pack doesn’t quit,” Alecto said to the fire. “The people we saw, they think they’re the Pack’s masters. The Pack doesn’t have a master. All it has is hunger. And if you let the Pack loose, before long it’ll come back to feed on you.”
Ilna chewed the dove’s liver. She said nothing.
She wasn’t thinking about the Pack or the nearer dangers of this place in which she found herself. She was thinking about another sort of pattern altogether, a pattern and perhaps a duty.
Chalcus has asked me in every fashion but words, Ilna thought, and I’ve pretended that I didn’t hear him. This girl, this woman, would’ve said yes to Chalcus before she was even asked.