“Lie down,” Thrasne whispered to her, pushing her below the line of the rail. She seemed hypnotized by that distant figure, leaning out across the rail as though asking to be noticed. He thrust her down into the piled nets with one hand, then set his foot upon her, holding her there as he tied off the lines to the boom, his stance betraying nothing except attention to the task at hand.
Across the stretch of water the striding figure stopped as though it had heard its name. Sound carried over the River. Perhaps her voice had been loud enough for the Laugher to hear, for he stared out over the long pier to the place the Gift rocked slowly on the tide, holding his right hand to shield his eyes from the brilliant glow in which the Gift was bathed. Thrasne watched him covertly, memorizing the face, the form, the strange helmet he wore. Thrasne had seen such helmets before. This hunter was not a new thing but an old one, at least as old as Blint’s youth, for Blint had told him of these men-always men, the Laughers. Beneath the contorted helmet the face was narrow, full of an unconscious ferocity, a violence barely withheld. It was a cruel face in repose, one that could lighten into sudden, dangerous charm when it was expedient to do so. Thrasne looked at his own hands, square upon the ropes, thinking of men he had known with faces like that. Often they died of violence. One time his own hands had pushed the knife home. Sometimes the knives were held by women. Such men were always feared. And hated. Had they not been Laughers, still they would have been hated.
When he looked up again, the Laugher was gone, perhaps into the town.
“You can get up now,” he told her. “The hunter has gone.” “It was Il/e. Come after me.”
Thrasne decided upon calm acceptance of this. There would be no point in lies between them. “Pamra, you knew that someone would come after you. It is time to talk of that now. Make plans. Decide how we will avoid them.”
The moment stretched between them. For a moment he thought she would answer him, for she was looking at him as though she actually saw him. Ilze had made her aware of her surroundings, of him no less than of all other things. He waited, breathless, hoping she would speak.
She, however, turned toward the sun glow again. From that glow came a voice, Neff s voice, speaking for her ears only, soft as the feathers of his breast had been. “Cruel, Pamra. Cruel to so raise up the dead, who should lie at peace.”
“Remember,” instructed her mother, also silently. “Remember.”
And from the wrapped darkness that was Delia came a sigh.
“Cruel,” Pamra said. “Cruel!” A flame-bird called as though in answer to this.
“Yes,” said Thrasne, thinking she meant the man she had just seen. “Very cruel. But we can deal with that.”
“It has to be stopped.”
He nodded. He had already decided to stop Ilze himself, in the only way possible, but Pamra took his agreement for more than he had intended. Her eyes clouded with mystery once more; her spirit disappeared along some road he could not follow.
“We must go to the Protector of Man. He must be told. He must be told to stop it.”
Her face was utterly calm. Behind her in the golden light Neff s voice seemed to breathe an assent.
And her mother’s voice. “Remember!”
And for the first and only time, Delia’s voice, breathing from the effulgent silence. “It is better when all the people know, Pamra. It is better not to be alone.”
Pamra turned to Thrasne, smiling. He had not seen her like this before, though the novices of Baris Tower would have recognized her radiant face, her eyes lighted as though from within by rapture. Her arms went out, out, as though she would encompass the world. “We will go, yes,” she breathed to him. “But we must take the people with us, all of them, to the Protector of Man.”
And he, lost in her eyes from which the dark shadows had suddenly gone, stared at her in terror, seeing her flee away from him down a long corridor toward a blinding glow into which he could not see and would not dare to go.