He pinched the skin of his biceps with the opposite thumb and forefinger. “I’ve borrowed this from Garric,” Carus said softly. “I’ll give it back to him the first chance I have. It doesn’t matter whether I want to or not, girl. It’s my duty, and I’ll do it regardless.”
“I’m sorry,” Sharina whispered. “I shouldn’t have…”
Carus laughed cheerfully again. “Do you think you need to apologize for worrying about your brother?” he asked. “Not to me you don’t, Sharina!”
He sobered. “Because I’m worried about him too,” he added. “And even more worried about what Ilna may be facing.”
Ilna thought the rhythmic clacking from the darkness summoned worshippers to the temple, so she touched Alecto’s shoulder before sitting up in the straw. She frowned; the light slanting through the loading door at the end of the loft meant that the moon was still well short of zenith.
Alecto was on her feet with the dagger in her hand, as quickly and supplely as a cat waking. She didn’t try to slash Ilna in half-wakened stupor; her weapon was simply ready if needed, and sheathed again quickly when the wild girl saw that it wasn’t.
“What’s going on out there?” she said with an undertone of harshness. Ilna bristled, reading into the question an implication that the confusion was somehow her fault. Or not, of course—but everything Alecto did seemed to grate on her.
“I thought it was the call to the temple,” Ilna said, “but—”
“Hey!” bawled the stablemaster from the stalls below. “You girls up there! Don’t you hear the summons? Get out here now, or I’ll come up with a whip!”
“If he likes to hear his voice so much,” said Alecto in a deadly whisper as she started for the ladder, “then let’s see how he’ll sound as a soprano!”
Ilna caught the other woman’s knife wrist. Alecto turned, still catlike, and tried to jerk her hand free. Ilna held her, smiling faintly.
“Hey!” the stablemaster repeated.
“We’re coming!” Ilna said, her eyes holding Alecto’s. “And watch your tongue when you speak to us!”
Alecto tossed her head and relaxed. “All right,” she muttered. She gestured for Ilna to precede her down the ladder.
The stablemaster had already gone out into the night, leaving the door ajar behind him. The sharp rapping came again, closer. A horse whickered uncomfortably, as though awakened by the sound and nervous about it. With Alecto just behind her, Ilna stepped into the inn yard.
A priestess in a white-on-black robe stood beneath the archway to the street. Several lower-ranking functionaries accompanied her—clerks, a lantern-bearer, and a brawny man with a flat hardwood block slung from a pole. He’d been hitting the block with a mallet as an attention signal. Ilna hadn’t seen that method before, but the sound was distinctive and seemed to carry as far as the blat of the cow-horn trumpet her brother’d used while herding sheep in the borough.
There were half a dozen soldiers in the priestess’s entourage. They looked more bored than threatening, but they held their weapons with professional ease. Ilna had seen enough troops to know that these men weren’t a militia of shopkeepers and day laborers, armed for the emergency.
“Fellow disciples!” the priestess said. She was a hefty woman; judging by her voice, she might not be much older than Ilna herself. “Evildoers entered Donelle during the past night and have profaned the Temple of the Mistress with the blood of a believer. The Mistress says they’re still in the city. They must be caught and punished before they can do further harm.”
All the windows facing the inn yard were open. Faces, the staff and guests alike, leaned out to hear the announcement. The servants and hangers-on who’d been in the yard to begin with were quiet and alert as well. Ilna had the impression that the respect they showed was real, not something frightened out of them by the soldiers’ presence.
“In order to identify the evildoers,” the priestess continued, “the gates have been closed. Everyone in the city will join with at least three other people who have known them for a year or more. Each group will report to a Child of the Mistress, who will mark each person’s forehead.”
“But I’m from Brange!” called a man who’d been sleeping in the box of one of the coaches. “I don’t know ten people here in Donelle!”
“Those who’ve come as individuals into the city from other communities,” said the priestess, “will report to the clerks with me. The Mistress has set gathering places here in the city for each region. Eventually everyone will have others to vouch for them—everyone but the evildoers!”
Men—there were no women in the yard save for Ilna and her companion—shuffled and spoke to one another in low voices. The attendant with the wooden gong cried, “Come along, now! Do you think you’ve got all night? We have the whole Leatherworker’s District to enroll!”
“Yes, and you inside the building come out as well,” the priestess called, gesturing toward the faces watching from the windows. “Quickly. It won’t take long, but you must get moving!”
“What do we do?” Alecto whispered hoarsely.
“Stand watch while I choose a route,” Ilna replied. She eased back toward the stable door, then slipped inside. The bustle in the yard would keep her from being missed for a time, but she and Alecto couldn’t hide for long.
The warmth of animal bodies and animal breath enfolded Ilna and calmed her. She wasn’t in a panic, but these were dangerous straits. She squatted on the trampled floor, then pulled a handful of straw from a manger and began plaiting it. Ilna rarely used her skill to make decisions for her, but in this case she had no choice. She didn’t know how the Mistress had learned the interlopers were still in Donelle, but there was more to it than mere intuition.
Ilna’s fingers wove straws in and around their fellows with a swift competence that would have seemed magical to anyone watching. The darkness of the stable didn’t affect the work: this was a business for Ilna’s soul and hands, not her conscious mind.
Outside an attendant called, “Move along, now, do you hear me? Who’s next?” The buzz of voices was louder, some of them now female. Someone shouted back into the inn proper. The words were blurred, but Ilna could identify the cook from her angry tone.
She rose again to her feet, certain that the pattern was complete though she couldn’t see it. As she reached for the door, Alecto whispered hoarsely through the crack, “There’s a flunky coming this way. The fat pustule of a stablemaster was talking to him!”
Ilna stepped back into the yard. She glanced at the rough straw mat in her hand, then showed it to the wild girl.
“North and then northwest,” Alecto said. Her face wrinkled in a thunderous frown.
“How did you do this?” she demanded. “I can see the directions in it, but there’s nothing here really!”
“Hush,” said Ilna curtly.
The fat stablemaster had worked his way back through the crowd with a clerk and two soldiers in tow. “There’s the other one!” he said to the clerk. “She was trying to hide in the stables!”
Under the gate arch, the inn’s residents were giving their names to clerks while the priestess looked on. She pointed to the innkeeper, come from the main building in a nightshirt and cap. “I know Master Reddick by sight,” she said. “Stamp him and then the ones he can vouch for.”
“I went to get my outer tunic,” Ilna said coldly, her eyes on the clerk as if the stablemaster were beneath her notice. “We have nothing to hide.”
“Don’t you?” the clerk sneered. “That’s for me to decide, I think. Now, who are you?”
In his left hand was a notebook made of four thin leaves of birchwood bound with leather straps. The ink-filled tip of a cow horn dangled from a hook in his tunic collar, and he held a short quill between his right thumb and forefinger.