She looked up at him mournfully-at that point Gabriel suddenly realized that she was one of the youngest of them-and said, "The Hunter may widely range, but sometimes the prey hunts him: and fear goes hunting the forests, and the dark between the stars:"
She choked her words off suddenly. It was an odd sound, for sesheyans normally always left you with the impression that the song of their conversation invariably had another verse that they might add at a moment's notice, or a year from now, but that they were never actually done. "But where did they all go?"
"Under the forest's shelter lie other places of landing:" she said. "News came from one of the nearer that one had returned untimely: he bore a-"
More broken staves, Gabriel thought. Those were evidence of a sesheyan about as upset as one could become. But what in the worlds could have-
He barely heard them coming. That he could hear them at all was evidence of several days in almost exclusively sesheyan company. Gabriel had a few seconds' warning anyway, before the clearing was full of sesheyans, many more than had routinely been using the encampment. Ondway was among them. His expression, as far as Gabriel could make it out, was very grim and dark. Behind him came several more sesheyans, silently carrying something on a plasteine sheet stretched between them. Gabriel went over to them, then saw what they carried on the sheet and stopped very still. He recognized certain things about the object immediately. The green-colored plastic e-suit, full, as he now knew, of that acidic gel, the dark armor in plates and patches over the suit, the terrible, blank protective helmet. The shape suggested strongly that there was no human inside. It was too broad in the shoulders and too thick in the leg.
Gabriel looked around at the sesheyans. "Let's get this open," he said. "Does someone have a hard/soft knife?"
Ondway shouldered forward and took Gabriel by the arm with one claw. It was not an entirely friendly gesture. "Do you know what you are doing?" he growled.
"I think I do," Gabriel said softly. "I think you do, to, but it might be less awful if I do it. Don't you think?"
He and Ondway took a couple of breaths, looking at each other. Then Ondway let go of him and turned away.
As they put the body down, Gabriel knelt down beside it. After a moment one of the sesheyans handed him one of the most beautiful hard/soft knives he had ever seen. "As the Hunter says, use it with care: for what the blade cuts, is severed ever:" said the sesheyan.
Gabriel held it up to stroke the blade out and nodded, agreeing. The blade was of so-called "hard monofilament," barely more than a hair thick, but it would pierce almost any substance and slice through nearly anything, slipping along the molecular interstices as if steel or stone was nothing more resistant than cheese. "Thank you," Gabriel said as he bent over his work, taking it slowly and trying not to breathe more than he had to.
He was not going to attempt what Doctor Delde Sola had done, but his dissembling of the armor slowly revealed the body to be that of a sesheyan, a very young one, just barely adult. There were some other disturbing developments though. The wings, every sesheyan's pride, were gone, amputated, their bony stubs all wound about with the biotendon material that had been present in the body that Delde Sola had autopsied. As this became evident, the sesheyans gathered around raised a low moan, and Enda shaded her eyes in a way that Gabriel suspected was ceremonial rather than having anything to do with the light. "Sacrilege," said the eldest of the sesheyans looking on. "His soul has been taken from him." Gabriel wondered what else might have been taken from him as he made the last cut, removing the headpiece and revealing the face. The expression of pain and fury it wore was terrible, the lips wrinkled back, snarling, the eyes pinched nearly oblong by the surrounding musculature. How did I ever think of these faces as expressionless, he thought sadly, just because they had an "unusual" number of eyes? Gabriel stood up after a few moments and turned to Ondway again. "Where was this found?" he said. Ondway did not speak for several moments. Finally, very reluctantly, he said, "Far out in this system. The starrise detection equipment says that they came in from somewhere in the neighborhood of-" He stopped.
"Thalaassa," Gabriel said, so that Ondway would not have to.
The other sesheyans suddenly appeared to be looking in every direction at once-not that this was difficult for people who had their optical arrangement. Taking a few extra moments to get control of himself, Gabriel thumbed the knife to "clean," then hit the "sheathe" control and handed it back with thanks to its owner. Then he turned to Ondway. "Son of the Hunter, now comes our time to track. Get the ship handled today. Get her to Redknife. Swift get her repaired and fueled, for I must go hunting. Well you know where and why-say no more about it!"
He headed back toward the leaf hut, slipped inside and then sat down in a hurry, for controlling his stomach had left him somewhat weak in the knees. In the dimness of the hut lit only by the luckstone that lay off to one side atop a cross section of tree trunk, Enda's blue eyes caught the light and glowed slightly as she leaned on one elbow, looking at Gabriel. "I smell something," she said.
"Fear," Gabriel said, without entirely thinking and then added, "A cousin to Doctor Delde Sola's autopsy subject, a sesheyan this time. Or rather, it was sesheyan once. What it is now, or was ..." "Are you sure you want to find out?" Enda said.
"I'm going to make it my business," Gabriel said. 'This is tangled up with Rhynchus, somehow, and Rhynchus is tangled up in the ambassador's death and with me. As soon as the ship is 'recovered' and ready to lift-" "I understand," Enda said.
"Do you?" Gabriel asked. "Enda," he paused, "you don't have to come." "Ridiculous!" she said, looking genuinely angry. "Why should I not?"
The image of Enda turning up dead or worse than dead in one of those suits occurred to Gabriel with sudden and stomach-turning force. He opened his mouth, but before he could say anything, Enda sat upright and said, "Now that even the most mind-deaf of fraal might have heard. I may be largely mind- blind, but not deaf. Gabriel, first of all, Sunshine is half mine. If you think I will allow you to endanger my investment by making any more such idiotic landings without me aboard to certify that they were made necessary by circumstances, you are greatly mistaken." Gabriel had to smile wanly at that.
"Additionally, there are forces moving here that I desire to monitor. Twice now, by your telling, you may have heard Ondway thinking. Once more and it ceases to be coincidence. This is a matter of concern to me, as much so as any crazy landing. Third-" She sighed. "Here again is that smell of evil that I mentioned. The scent spreads, it seems. Your people have been wise enough to know that one must act against evil before it becomes too strong, before it comes for those who were too lazy or too complacent to act. I will not wait to let it come for me. If you go to see what is to be done, I go also." "If only to protect your investment," Gabriel said, a little shaken. "If only," Enda agreed and got up. "Let us find Ondway and lay our plans."
Two days later they were in Redknife. Gabriel's reaction to the place astonished him. Not so long ago Diamond Point, the biggest settlement on the planet, had seemed like a nice little city, but nothing to get too excited about. Now, after a week of living in a hut with a dirt floor, Redknife seemed wildly cosmopolitan to Gabriel, for all that it was little more than fifty or so buildings-many of them mere uninspired prefab-and a landing flat that looked crowded with more than three ships on it. The effect would wear off, he knew, but for the time being Gabriel kept catching himself goggling like the merest hick.