"So," she said to Grauel and Barlog. "Here we go again. Into exile once more."
Barlog nodded. Grauel merely stared straight ahead, trying to keep her gaze from taking in the long fall to the silvered snows.
The Hainlin twisted away to the west and out of sight for a time, then swept back in beneath. It widened into a vast, slow stream, though mostly it remained concealed behind a mask of white. Time passed. Marika shook off repeated fits of bleak memory. She suspected her companions were doing the same.
Meth were not reflective by nature. They tended to live in the present, letting the past lie and allowing the future to care for itself. But the pasts of these meth were not the settled, bucolic pasts of their foredams. Their pasts reechoed with bloody hammer strokes. Their futures threatened more of the same.
"Lights," Grauel croaked. And in a moment, "By the All! Look at the lights!"
Ten thousand pinpricks in the night, like a nighttime sky descended to earth. Except that the sky of Marika's world held few stars, filled as it was with a dense, vast cloud of interstellar dust.
"Maksche," Senior Zertan said. "Home. We will reach the cloister in a few minutes."
The flying crosses pacing them suddenly swept ahead, vanished into the darkness. The lights ahead bobbed and rocked and swelled, and then the first passed below, maybe five hundred feet down. Marika felt no awe of the altitude. She exulted in the flying.
Soon the cross settled into a lighted courtyard, to a point between crosses already arrived. Scores of silth in Reugge black waited silently. The cross touched down. Zertan stepped off. Several silth approached her. She said something Marika did not catch, gestured, and stalked away. The other silth left their places at the tips of the cross.
A meth female in worker apparel approached Marika and the others. "Come with me. I have been instructed to show you quarters." She assessed them cautiously. "Not you," she told Bagnel, diffidently. "Someone from your Bond is coming for you."
Marika was amused, for she knew this meth saw only savages out of the Ponath. Even her, for all she was silth. And she knew this city meth was frightened, for savages from the Ponath had reputations for being unpredictable, irrational, and fierce.
Marika gestured. "We go. You, lead the way."
Bagnel stood aside, looking forlorn, one paw raised in a gesture of farewell.
Grauel followed the worker. Marika followed her. Barlog stayed close behind, weapon at port. Braydic and the pups tagged along at the end.
The Degnan refugees searched every shadow they passed. Marika listened with that talented silth ear that was inside her mind. She felt silth working their witcheries all around her. But the shadows were haunted by nothing more dangerous than projected fears of the unknown.
The servant led them through seemingly endless hallways, dropping first the pups, then Braydic. Marika sensed Grauel and Barlog becoming edgy. Their sense of location was confused. She grew uncomfortable herself. This place seemed too large to encompass. Akard was never so vast or tortuous that she had feared for her ability to get out.
Get out. Get out. That built within her, a smoldering panic, a dread of being unable to escape. She was of the upper Ponath, where pack meth ran free, at will.
The worker detected their mounting tension. She led them up stairs and outside, to the top of a wall at least vaguely reminiscent of the north wall at Akard, where Marika had made her away place, the place she went to be alone and think.
Each silth found such a place wherever she might be.
"It is huge," Barlog breathed from behind Marika. Marika agreed, though she knew not whether Barlog meant the cloister or city.
The Maksche cloister was a square compound a quarter mile to a side. Its outer wall stood thirty feet high. It was constructed of a buttery brown stone. The structures it enclosed were built of the same stone, all topped with steep roofs of red tile. The buildings were all very old, very weathered, and all very rectilinear. Some had corner towers rising like obelisks peaked by triangles of red.
The worker said, "A thousand meth live in the cloister, separate from the city. The wall is the edge of our world, a boundary that is not to be passed."
She meant what she said, no doubt, but the fierceness that rose in her charges made her drop the subject. Marika growled, "Take us where we are supposed to go. Now. I will hear rules from those who make them, and will decide if they are reasonable then."
Their guide looked stricken.
Grauel said, "Marika, I suggest you recall all that has been said about this place."
Marika stared at the huntress, but soon her gaze wandered. Grauel was right. At the beginning she had best submit to the local style.
"Stop," she said. "I want to look." She did not await approval.
The cloister stood at Maksche's heart, upon a contrived elevation. The surrounding land was flat all the way to the horizons. The Hainlin, three hundred yards wide, looped past the city in a broad brown band two miles west of Marika's vantage. Neat squares of cropland, bounded by hedgerows or lines of trees, showed through the snow covering the plain.
"Not a single hill. I think it will not be long before I become homesick for hills." Marika used the simple dialect of her puphood, and was surprised when the worker frowned puzzledly. Could the common speech be so different here?
"I think so. Yes," Grauel replied. "Even Akard was less foreign than this. It is like ten thousand little fortresses, this thing called a city."
The buildings were very strange. But for Akard and Critza, every meth-made structure Marika had ever seen had been built of logs and stood under twenty-five feet high.
"I am not allowed much time away from my regular duties here," the worker said, her tone whining. "Please come, young mistress."
Marika scowled. "All right. Lead on."
The quarters assigned had been untenanted for a long time. Dust lay thick upon what tattered furniture there was. Marika coughed, said, "We are being isolated in some remote corner."
Grauel nodded. "Only to be expected."
Barlog observed, "We can have this livable in a few hours. It is not as bad as it looks."
Feebly, the worker said, "I must take you two to ... to ... " She fumbled for a word. "I guess you would say, huntress's quarters."
"No," Marika told her. "We stay together."
Grauel and Barlog snarled and gestured toward the door with their weapons.
"Go," Marika snapped. "Or I will tie a savage's curse to your tail."
The female fled in terror. Grauel said, "Probably whelped and raised here. Scared of her own shadow."
"This is a place where shadows are terrors," Barlog countered. "We will hear from the shadow mistresses now."
But Barlog was wrong. A week passed without event. It was a week in which Marika seldom left her quarters and had no intercourse at all with the Reugge of Maksche. She let Grauel and Barlog do the physical exploration. No one came to her.
She began to wonder why she was being ignored.
The time free began as a boon. In her years at Akard she had spent most of every waking hour in study, learning to become silth. The only respite had come during summers when she had joined hunting parties stalking the nomadic invaders who brought Akard and the Ponath to ruin.
Once her quarters were clean and she had sneaked a few exploratory forays into nearby parts of the cloister, and had penetrated the rest of it riding ghosts, and had found herself an away place in a high tower overlooking the square where she had arrived, she grew bored. Even study became appealing.
She snarled her dissatisfaction at the worker who brought their meals. That was on her tenth day in Maksche.