Away from Opal Hill, toward the swamp forest, straight as an arrow, a trail trampled into the grasses as though ten thousand Hippae had marched there in files. The two looked at one another in horrified surmise.
“Do you suppose she’s down there?” Sebastian whispered.
Persun nodded. “Yes. She is. Was. Somewhere.”
“Shall we—“
“No. See there, in the flames. Hippae. There must be hundreds of them. Some dancing near the flames. Some going down that great trail. How many of them did it take to make that trail? And hounds, too. Every hound on Grass must be down there, all moving toward Commons. No. No, we can’t go down. We’ll come back tomorrow. When the fire burns out, we’ll look. Maybe she got into the winter quarters. I hope she doesn’t burn.”
Eugenie didn’t burn. The hounds that had swept through the place ahead of the flames had seen to that.
Commons was in a considerable uproar, busy with speculation and rumor. The housing of a hundred or so people was no great thing. The winter quarters were large enough to hold the entire population of Commons plus those of the villages, and only the very young among them found these underground halls and rooms at all new and frightening. The caverns had been here when men first came, but they had been enlarged and fitted out for human occupancy, and everyone over one Grassian year of age knew them well. The evacuated animals went into the winter barns. Though this year’s cutting of hay had not begun, there was enough of last year’s hay and grain to keep them. Feeding the people was no great thing either. They began using the winter kitchens with the ease of long practice.
Despite this ease, this familiarity, there was disquiet and anxiety both among those who had arrived and those who had welcomed them. The burning of an estancia was not a familiar occurrence. It had happened before, but that had been long ago, in their great-grandparents’ time It was not something easy to comprehend or accept. When Persun Pollut brought news of the great trail toward the swamp-forest, anxiety deepened. Everyone knew the Hippae couldn’t get through the forest, and yet … and yet, people wondered. They were uneasy, wondering if this event betokened mysterious dangers.
The unease spread even to Portside, where those occupied in serving and housing strangers became jittery. Saint Teresa and Ducky Johns were not immune to the common case of nerves. They met at the end of Pleasure Street and walked along Portside Road, Ducky bobbling and jiggling inside her great golden tent of a dress, Saint Teresa stalking beside her like a heron, long-legged and long-nosed to the point of caricature. He wore his usual garments: purple trousers tight at the knee but baggy elsewhere, and a swallow-tailed coat cut of jermot hide, a scaly leather imported through Semling from some desert planet at the end of nowhere. His bare cranium gleamed like steel in the blue lights of the port, and his great hands gestured as he spoke, never still for an instant.
“So … so what does it mean?” he asked. “Burning Opal Hill that way. There was no one there….” His hands circled, illustrating a search from the air, then swooped away, conveying frustration.
“One person,” Ducky Johns corrected him. “That fancy woman of the ambassador’s is missing.”
“One person, then. But the Hippae dragged fire through the gardens and burned it. all of it. It’s burning now.” His fingers flickered like flames, drawing the scene on the air.
Ducky Johns nodded, the nod setting up wavelike motion which traveled down from her ears through all the waiting flesh below, a tidal jiggle, ending only at her ankles, where her tiny feet served as a check valve. “It’s why I wanted to talk with you, Teresa. The things are obviously raging. Furious. Out of all control. You knew the ambassador killed some of them.”
“I heard. First time that’s ever happened, from what I hear.”
“So far as I know, yes. Darenfeld wounded one, years and years ago, before the Darenfeld estancia burned.”
“I thought that was a summer fire. Lightning.”
“So the bons say, but others say no. The bons pretended it was lightning and began to build grass gardens around themselves, but Roald Few says the CommonsChroniclecalled it what it was. Hippae, going rampageous.”