Behind her the others made their beds near the fire. Tony put his mother’s bed to one side, screened from the others by low brush, where she would have some privacy. When she returned, he pointed it out to her, and she went to it, grateful for his help. Silence came then, broken by Mainoa’s low, purring snores, the cries of peepers distant upon the prairie, and the cries of other less familiar things in the swamp around them.
Marjorie had thought she would lie sleepless. Instead, sleep came upon her like a black tide, inexorably. She went down into it, dreamless and quiet. Time passed, with her unconscious of it. The hand that was laid upon her arm did not wake her until it shook her slightly.
“Ma’am.” said Rillibee Chime. “I’m hearing something.
She sat up. “What time is it?”
“Midnight, more or less. Listen, Lady. It’s sounds that woke me. People, maybe?”
She held her breath. After a moment she heard it—them—the sounds of voices, wafted to them on a light wind which had come up while she slept. A conversation. No words she could understand, but unmistakably the sound of people talking.
“Where?” she breathed.
He put his hand on her cheek and pushed so that her head turned. As she faced in another direction, she heard them more clearly. “Light,” she whispered.
He already had it in his hand, a torch which shed a dim circle before their feet. He handed her another, and they walked among the trees, through the meadow where the horses grazed with a sound of steady munching, beyond the meadow into the trees once more. Rillibee pointed up. It was true. The sounds came from above them.
She was no longer sure they were people. The sound was too sibilant for human people. And yet …
“Like the sounds in the Arbai village,” she said.
He nodded, peering above him. “I’m going up,” he said.
She caught at him. “You won’t be able to see!”
He shook his head. “I’ll feel, then. Don’t wait for me. Go back to the others.”
“You’ll fall!”
He laughed. “Me? Oh, Lady, at the Friary they call me Willy Climb. I have the fingers of a tree frog and the toes of a lizard. I have stickum on my knees and the hooves of a mountain goat. I can no more fall than an ape can fall when it creeps among the vines. Go back to the others, Lady,” and he was away, his torch slung about his neck, the light dwindling up the great trunk of the tree as he swarmed up it like a monkey.
When the circle of light had dwindled to nothing, she went back the way she had come, certain now that she would not sleep again. Yet when she lay down upon her bed she found sleep waiting for her. She had time only to wonder briefly what Brother Lourai would find among the branches before she was deeply asleep once more.
At the Friary, Elder Brother Fuasoi was sitting late at his desk, angrily turning the pages of a book. Yavi Foosh sat disconsolately on a chair nearby, yawning, trying to keep from nodding off.
“No sign of Mainoa or Lourai, then?” Fuasoi asked for perhaps the tenth time.
“No, Elder Brother.”
“And they didn’t mention to anyone where they were going?” “There wasn’t anybody there to mention to, Elder Brother. Mainoa and Lourai were all alone at the ruins. The library crew had changed shifts three days ago. Shoethai and me didn’t take the replacement men back until this evening. When we got there, Shoethai and me went to tell Mainoa, but he was gone. Him and Lourai. We looked all through the ruins, Elder Brother.” He sighed, much put upon. He had told the story four times.
“And you found this book where?”
“Shoethai found it, Elder Brother. On Brother Mainoa’s worktable. He thought—since they were gone—there might be something written down somewhere. The book was the only writing Shoethai found. He brought it straight here to you.”
Fuasoi glared at the book, obviously a new one, with only a few pages written in. Oh, indeed there was something written down. All in Brother Mainoa’s own hand. Conjecture about the plague. Wonderment that it hadn’t infected Grass. Conjecture about the Moldies, and whether there might not be some on Grass. And if so, what they might be up to. Interest in the people at Opal Hill, and what they were doing, which was working to thwart the work of the Moldies. Working for Sanctity to stop the plague. To find whatever had kept Grass free of it up until now.