Hook touched the cheek of the birch beside him. “It’s real!” he said. “It’s not wood, it’s a real girl!”
The face shifted slightly, and the lips pursed. They kissed Hook’s fingertip.
“Of course we’re real,” the face said. “Real in every way, for a handsome man like you.”
“Cashel, I think we ought to go,” Tilphosa said in a small voice. “Sometimes nymphs can be…”
Cashel glanced at her. Her left hand gripped the crystal lens on her necklace, trying to find comfort in the God she’d been raised to worship. She’d stopped speaking, but her lips continued to move in silent prayer.
Mounix caressed a tree with an expression of wonder and delight. Not only were the faces growing clearer, hinted torsos were beginning to appear on the trunks. Ousseau stood openmouthed, listening to what a nymph whispered into his right ear.
“Come on!” Cashel said in sudden decision. “Drink as much as you can and I’ll fill my bottle. Then we’ll go on back to sleep where the maples were.”
“Leave?” Captain Mounix said. He was fondling the trunk as the face above moaned softly with pleasure. “Not just yet. Look at this!”
Cashel grabbed Mounix by the arm and turned him about. “Now,” he said. “Now.”
Hook looked over his shoulder as if to protest. Cashel said nothing, but Tilphosa made a curt gesture. “Bring him too,” she said, nodding to the wounded sailor.
The carpenter gave her a stricken look but touched Ousseau’s elbow. Ousseau ignored him until Hook seized his bandaged upper arm.
“Hey!” Ousseau screamed. He slapped Hook away with his good hand, then glared at Tilphosa with the expression of a child about to cry. “What’s it to you?” he demanded.
“Come on,” Cashel said bruskly. He shifted Mounix in the direction he wanted him to go and gave him a shove; not hard, but hard enough to get him moving. “We’ll go to where the water comes out downstream and get our drink.”
Cashel and Tilphosa followed the sailors out of the grove stone-faced. Behind them laughed the bright, cruel chorus of the birches.
12
“We could go off there somewhere,” Alecto said, gesturing toward the relatively open country to the west. “I don’t see why we have to hang around this, this—”
Her voice sank to a murmur.
“—city, you call it.”
“You don’t have to hang around,” Ilna said coldly as she surveyed the people entering through the gate near which she and the wild girl waited. “Go about your business, and I’ll take care of mine by myself.”
She didn’t—quite—say, “As I’d prefer,” because Ilna didn’t—quite—want Alecto to leave her. Alecto wasn’t the ally Ilna would have chosen, but she was the only ally Ilna had at present. But if the wild girl thought her whim could have the slightest effect on Ilna doing her duty, then she was a fool as well as several sorts of moral failure.
Alecto scuffed the dust with her big toe while muttering something that Ilna chose to ignore. Ilna was looking for a pattern in the traffic. The sun had been up for an hour, and the flow into the city was growing heavy. They didn’t close the gates at sunset here, but few chose to travel during the watches of the night.
“Why are there so many people?” Ilna mused aloud. “There wouldn’t be as many coming into Valles at this time in the morning.”
Well, the numbers coming though any one gate would have been less; but Valles was entered by three major highways plus a network of minor roads linked to the western suburbs across the River Beltis. Valles was many times the size of this place, however.
The track was bare dirt. The meandering ruts had been made by animals driven to the city, not wheels.
“I never knew there were this many people,” Alecto said, so morosely that Ilna glanced at her again.
She’s afraid, Ilna thought. Alecto was responsible for both of them being here, but she was far more out of place than Ilna was.
Even in the days Ilna expected to spend her whole life within a mile of Barca’s Hamlet, she’d been in some way a part of the wider world. Priests and merchants came into the borough, and Ilna sold her textiles for use in the great cities of distant islands. She couldn’t have described those cities, not ruined Carcosa and certainly not flourishing Valles, until she saw them; but she’d known they existed.
Alecto had never heard of a city. Ilna frowned in thought. Perhaps even if Alecto had travelled the length of the world of her time, she wouldn’t have found a city. A wild girl from a wild time; and for all her powers and ruthlessness, she was frightened of the place to which she had come.
“Look here,” said Ilna sharply. “Can you send me back into this dreamworld the way Tenoctris did? You’re obviously a powerful wizard, which Tenoctris claims she’s not.”
Alecto shook her head with a sour expression. “I don’t know how she did that,” she said. Her expression grew guarded. “Are you lying to me? Did you make the sacrifice yourself and draw the entrance in blood around you?”
“I did not,” Ilna said, momentarily so angry that she had the first knot in her cords before she caught herself. “Nor does anyone I’d associate with use blood sacrifice.”
She turned to the gate again. She’d hoped to learn something by watching the traffic, but all she’d seen was that it was surprisingly heavy. Well, back into the city, then, as a newly arrived visitor rather than the person who’d knifed the temple watchman in the night.
“If you like…” Alecto said. She sounded diffident, a little nervous. She was so afraid that Ilna would abandon her…. “I could get one of them to talk to you.”
Ilna looked sharply at the other girl. Alecto laughed, cheerful again. “No, not that way. Or that way too, if you like.”
“I don’t want that,” Ilna said primly. She felt the blush move into her cheeks and scowled with fury. “Go ahead, if you can do it without causing trouble for us.”
Ilna could weave a pattern that forced whoever saw it to answer her questions, but she’d intended to wait for greater privacy than this busy road provided. Besides, she was interested to see what Alecto would do—and only slightly concerned that it would end in another swipe of the bronze dagger, bringing this time a more difficult flight.
The soil where they stood was loose and barren, cropped and trampled by traffic which had spilled from the roadway proper. Alecto squatted and drew a five-sided pattern on the ground, using one of the twin horns of her dagger’s pommel for her scriber.
She drew other symbols around the pentacle’s edges. Though Ilna couldn’t read, her eye for patterns was unrivaled. These additions weren’t in the curving Old Script that Tenoctris used for her art. She suspected they were tiny pictures rather than writing, and that if Ilna tried, she could probably understand them.
She turned her head. It wasn’t something she wanted to understand.
“There!” Alecto said. “Stand in front of it so that they can’t see it from the path. It’ll take me a moment to set the charm. Then you just step out of the way when you see the fellow you want.”
She frowned. “It has to be a man,” she added. “You can manage that, can’t you?”
“Yes,” said Ilna, too icy cold to be angry. She turned her back on the other girl and watched the traffic again. Her inner tunic was ankle length, an adequate curtain for the symbols behind her.
Alecto began chanting. Her voice was ordinarily harsh, but when she worked her art it dropped an octave and gained a resonance that Ilna might have found pleasant if it had come from a different source.
Ilna and her companion had attracted less attention waiting by the roadside than she’d expected. For the most part the travellers walked in an aura of joyless purpose, glancing at Ilna as they might have done a milepost and then looking again toward the gate. None of them greeted Ilna or even offered a proposition.