“My name’s Ilna,” Ilna said. She tossed the straw back into the stable behind her; it had served its purpose, now that she’d read its message. “My kinswoman here is Alecto. We’re from Barca’s Hamlet.”
The soldiers watched Alecto with more than causal interest. One of them shifted his left arm slightly, as if ready to throw his small, round shield in the way of any attack the wild girl made.
“Barca’s Hamlet?” the clerk repeated. “I never heard of the place.”
Ilna shrugged. The only thing she’d feared was that the fellow somehow had heard of Barca’s Hamlet—and therefore knew it was on Haft.
“It’s north and west of here,” she said. “We came to Donelle at the Mistress’ summons.”
“North and…” the stablemaster said. A deep frown furrowed his forehead. He glared at Alecto. “You come from the hills? You didn’t tell me that!”
“You might’ve known by looking at her,” the clerk said, his nose wrinkling. “They’re mostly animals up there. And not”—he turned his attention from Alecto back to Ilna—“many worship the Mistress.”
“There’s some of us,” Ilna said, making sure that her tone carried the cold contempt she really felt for this functionary. The Mistress’s service had no monopoly on his sort, jumped-up little worms who felt their slight authority made them important people. “Do you object?”
The clerk must have heard a threat in the words—and felt it might be justified. “What?” he said. “Of course not. Well, you’ll report to…”
He paused, flipping back to the outer leaf of his notebook, then realizing there wasn’t enough light to read it by without a lantern. “Well, I know there isn’t a gathering place for people from the hills. You’ll have to go the temple and ask them there. I’ll give you an escort.”
Ilna sniffed. “We can find the temple,” she said curtly. “We have on past nights, after all.”
Before the clerk could object, she added, “Come along, Alecto,” and started for the gate across the inn yard. She nodded respectfully to the soldiers as she passed. One of them nodded back, but the men kept their eyes primarily on Alecto.
Someone had lit a stick of lightwood from the oven and stuck its base through the iron harness loop of an upturned wagon tongue. The flame threw a flaring, yellowish light across the inn yard.
A line had formed in the yard’s forecourt. Clerks jotted information onto wax or wooden tablets, then divided the people into two groups. Those whose identity wasn’t sufficiently guaranteed went out into the street, sometimes pausing first to don clothing for public wear. The others joined a separate group in front of the priestess herself in the gateway.
Ilna didn’t want to call attention to herself by making eye contact, but as she neared the gate she saw the priestess touch a stamp to the cook’s forehead, then press it into a pot of ochre again. The red pigment outlined a fat-bodied web spider whose forelegs spread in an encompassing arc.
Ilna started, then lowered her eyes and sidled past. She expected the cook to snarl something at her, but the woman wore a nervous expression and didn’t seem to have noticed Ilna’s presence. She looked as tense as if the mark on her forehead was a real spider.
The waiting soldiers didn’t block the gateway, but they narrowed it considerably. Ilna waited for a pair of teamsters to go through ahead of her so that she didn’t brush the cuirass of the man to the left. He gave her a speculative look, to which she responded coldly.
The disciples of Moon Wisdom seemed a straitlaced lot; in that at least Ilna felt kinship with them. The soldiers, however, weren’t locals and apparently weren’t followers of the faith either. They reacted to Ilna in the fashion she’d come to expect from young men with weapons or some other reason to feel full of themselves.
The lantern and burning pine knot hadn’t made the inn yard very bright, but the street was darker still, especially where overhanging eaves shadowed the cobblestones. The teamsters turned to the right, the direction that Ilna wanted to go. She stepped away from the gate and paused, letting the others get farther ahead for privacy.
“Did you see that spider?” Alecto said. “Though I suppose it’s what you’d expect from people who call out the Pack.”
“I saw it,” Ilna said without emphasis. She was interested to realize that the spider symbol had affected her companion as well. There was more to it than a smudge of ochre, though she couldn’t have said what the added difference was.
In a less distant tone she went on, “I don’t think we dare stay in Donelle if they’re searching for us this way. We’ll get out through the north gate and go on, the way the pattern indicated.”
“I still don’t know how you did that,” Alecto muttered grudgingly. “All it was was a few wisps of straw, but when I looked at it I saw the road through the gates we left by last night.”
“You don’t need to know,” Ilna said. The teamsters had disappeared beyond the jutting corner of the second building down the street. She set off after them.
“Faugh!” Alecto said, glaring at the pavement as she strode along beside Ilna. “The only thing worse would be crossing the lava barrens sunwise of Hartrag’s village. The rock here doesn’t cut like lava, I’ll give it that, but half of it’s covered with slime so slick we might as well be walking on ice.”
Ilna sniffed. She almost asked what “lava barrens” were, but she decided that she didn’t want to give Alecto the satisfaction of knowing something Ilna herself didn’t. Instead she said, “If the people in the hills don’t worship this Mistress, then we can hope that they’ll hide us if the disciples come searching. Though I don’t think they’ll bother looking for us if we’re no longer in Donelle and a direct danger to them.”
That left the problem of Ilna getting her information back to Carus and the others in Valles, but she’d learned long ago to take matters one at a time. First she had to avoid being caught and disemboweled by the disciples of Moon Wisdom.
Alecto muttered, out of sorts and perhaps frightened by the twisting streets and stone buildings. In a louder voice she said, “I’ve hunted in canebrakes where the paths were straighter! How can people live like this?”
Ilna, who hated stone so much that she’d almost have preferred to walk on knives than on these streets, smiled coldly. “We’ll be outside soon,” she said.
“They closed the gates,” Alecto said, her voice sharpened by the undertone of condescension she’d heard in Ilna’s words. “We won’t be able to walk straight out like we did last night.”
“We’ll manage,” Ilna said. Her fingers were plaiting cords as she walked along. She wished she had some long straws snatched from the stable instead, because for this purpose she was working in a larger scale than she usually did. Her cords were short, no more than two fingers’ lengths apiece, so she had to weave several to manage the effect she wanted.
She smiled harshly again. As she’d said to the wild girclass="underline" they’d manage.
A family—father, mother, three children, and at the end of the line a servant—passed them going in the opposite direction. At their head was a minor temple official whose lantern lighted his own way, not that of those he was guiding. He looked irritated; they were nervous and uncertain.
Ilna glared at the guide, then found her gaze softening as she met the eyes of the woman carrying her youngest in a sling of coarse cloth. They didn’t know anyone in Donelle but one another, so they’d been roused from sleep and led off to a collection center for strangers from their district with no idea of when they’d be released. The children, already tired and whining, would be a shrieking burden long before then.
The Mistress and Her Children didn’t care. Ilna supposed she needn’t care either, since these people were part of the reason the Pack were loose to hunt in Carus’ dreams.
She and Alecto came around a bend in the street which brought them into sight of the wall. The city gate had been closed, apparently with some difficulty. A freshly attached length of hawser ran diagonally from the upper hinge of one of the leaves, lifting the opposite corner so that it didn’t sag into the ground and lock the panel open.