“What do you mean, boy!”
“There won’t be any people left. The plague will have killed us all. Will the machines do all the resurrecting?”
“That’ll be ten stripes for impertinence,” Elder Brother Jhamlees said. “And another ten for uttering falsehood. There is no plague, Brother Lourai. None.”
“I saw my mother die of it,” said Rillibee Chime. “And my father and my sister had it. I may have it. They say sometimes it doesn’t come out for years…”
“Out,” the Elder Brother had blustered. “Out. Out.” His face had turned pale as he bellowed, so pale that Brother Lourai wondered if the Elder Brother had ever met anyone who had actually seen the plague.
Brother Lourai had gone out. Ever since then, he’d been expecting someone to summon him to receive the twenty stripes Elder Brother Jhamlees had assigned him. No one had. The only summons had been the summons in refectory, the one he didn’t want to answer. The one he was delaying now, pumping water while the dishes got washed.
Still, inevitably, the task was finished at last. The kettles were emptied into a ditch that led to the cesspool, the rinsing troughs emptied into a ditch leading to the gardens, the soapy steam vanished out the open door as Brothers scattered wordlessly. Rillibee’s counterpart at the other end of the pump handle hitched up his robes and went out. After a long, silent moment, Rillibee did likewise.
He thought he might stay in the washing house and hide. He considered this for a time, quite seriously, knowing it for nonsense but unwilling to let the idea go entirely. Where would they be waiting for him? Outside the courtyard somewhere, perhaps in the alley which led to his dormitory?
“Come on,” said an impatient voice. “Get it over.” It was too much trouble to answer the voice. It would be even more trouble to avoid it. Unwillingly, he shambled toward the summoner, through the gateway from the yard, into the alley, where three of them grabbed him and forced him through a door and down a hallway into an unfamiliar room. They wore only their tights and undershirts. Their faces were lit in the lantern light with shiny and unholy glee. There was no doubt at all that these were the climbers Mainoa had told him about. Not warned him. What good was it to warn someone about the inevitable? But one could be told. One could be given time to consider. Not that it had done Rillibee any good.
They pushed him toward a bench and he sat on it to hide the trembling of his legs. It wasn’t fear. It was something else, something some of those confronting him might have understood if there had been time to talk. There was no time.
The foremost among those standing there—the group had grown to a dozen or so—struck a posture and announced, “Call me Highbones!” He was a lean, long-armed man with a taut-skinned boyish face, though the wrinkles around his eyes said he was no boy. A hank of dun hair fell over his forehead and was pushed back with a studied gesture. The color of the hair was ageless. His brows grew together over his nose. His eyes were so pale a blue as to be almost white. Everything about him was studied, his stance, his gesture, his manner, his voice. Created, made up, out of what?
Rillibee saw all this as he nodded an acknowledgment just to let them know he had heard. No point in saying anything. Least said, the easiest denied, as the master of acolytes at Sanctity had been fond of telling them.
“As for you, having observed you carefully for several days, we can say without fear of contradiction that you’re a root peeper.” That snigger again, as though the insult meant something.
Rillibee nodded again.
“You’re required to acknowledge, peeper. Say you’re a peeper.” The voice was like a chant, empty of any feeling. Like the mosquito voices at Sanctity.
“I’m a peeper,” said Rillibee, without embarrassment or emotion. “The point of all this is,” Highbones went on, striking another pose, “that we climbers consider peepers to be the lowest possible form of life. Brother Shoethai, he’s a peeper. Isn’t that true, boys?”