He compressed thin lips into a tight line, more disturbed than he cared to admit. “Well, so! The bons are no concern of ours. If all of them got crisped tomorrow, it wouldn’t make a whit of difference to custom, Ducky. They may think they’re the pinnacle of creation, but we know different.”
“Oh, it’s not just them. It’s this plague, too. We’re hearing more and more of that.”
“There’s none here.”
“So there isn’t, which is strange on the face of it. I hear things. Asmir Tanlig has been around, asking this, asking that. Sebastian Mechanic has been around, digging here, digging there. Questions. Who’s been sick. Who’s died. Both of them work for the ambassador. So he’s trying to find out something. I talked to Roald about it. He talked to some others, including some of us here in Portside who’ve heard what foreigners have to say. Seems there’s plague everywhere but here. Hidden, though. Sanctity trying to keep the lid on it, but the word getting out, getting around.”
“So? What are you saying, Ducky?”
“I’m saying if everybody dies out there, there’ll be no custom here, old crane, old stork. That’s what I’m saying. Then how will we live, you and me? To say nothing of it being damned lonely, us here with all the rest of the human population gone and those Hippae out there, being rampageous.”
“They can’t get in through the forest.”
“So we’re told. So we’re told. And even if that’s true, think of all humanity closed in in a space no bigger than Commons. It makes me claustrophobic, Teresa, indeed it does.”
They had reached the end of Portside Road, where it ran off into ruts southward across the grazing land, and they turned as if by mutual consent to retrace their steps—more slowly on the return, for Ducky seldom walked such a distance.
Blue lamps cast runnels of luminescence on the ash-glass surface of the port. There were only two ships in, a sleek yacht in the dark shadow of a bulky warehouse and theStar-Lily,a fat Semling freighter squatting in a puddle of sapphire lume, its cargo bay gaping like a snoring mouth. In the puddle of light something moved, and Ducky put her hand on her companion’s arm. “There,” she said. “Teresa, did you see that?”
He had seen that. “No one working there this time of night.”
“See to it, Teresa. Do. I can’t move fast enough.”
She spoke unnecessarily, for the heronlike legs of Saint Teresa had already taken him off in long, ground-eating strides across the cinereous surface of the port, moving like some tall hunting bird toward that flicker of movement. Ducky struggled after him, panting, her flesh bobbling and jiggling as though a thousand small springs inside were heterodyning against one another. Her companion had moved into shadow. She didn’t see him, and then she did, one hand striking, head moving like a spearlike beak, the hand coming back with something pale and fishy wriggling in it. He turned and carried the thing toward her.
When he came close enough for her to see, she cried out in surprise. There it was, just like the last one. Another naked girl with no expression in her face, wriggling like a fish on a spear, not saying anything at all.
“Well,” he said. “What do you think of that?”
“What’s that in her hand?” Ducky asked. “What’s she carrying, and what was she doing there?”
“Trying to get aboard,” Saint Teresa said, holding the girl tight under one arm as he pried the thing from her tight fingers. He held it out, and Ducky leaned forward to look at it.
“It’s a dead bat,” she said. “All dried up. What was she carrying that for?”
They looked at the girl, at one another, full of questions and surmise. “You know who it is,” Ducky said. “It’s Diamante bon Damfels is who it is. The one they called Dimity. The one that vanished first thing this spring. It has to be.”
He didn’t contradict her. “Now what?” he asked at last.
“Now we’ll take her to Roald Few,” Ducky said. “As I should have taken the last one. Take her, and it, and ask Jelly to come along, and Jandra, and anybody else with any sense in their heads. I don’t know what’s happening here, old crane, but I don’t like it, whatever it is.”