“I’ve told you we don’t know,” said the barefaced servitor, an older woman whose voice verged upon annoyance. “We would have no reason to know. We do not discuss such things. Until you said the man’s name, I had never heard of him. We have our own pattern here on Dinadh. Why would we ignore our own pattern to enter that of some outlander ghost?”
Both men were Firsters of the more primitive sort, accustomed to treating every itch in the groin as though it were divine commandment, and after several days of utter boredom in the hive, Mitigan thought he’d try a bit with the veiled servitor. She had a seductive shape beneath her robes and a pleasant voice from behind her mask. He managed to twitch the veil a little bit to one side before she got away from him, but that little bit was enough to leave him sweating and cold, like a man who had just escaped dropping over a precipice.
“My god, man,” he whispered to Chur Durwen. “She looked chewed. Like a viper bat had been at her, or one of those hovolutes they have on Zeta Nine.”
“Hovolutes don’t leave anyone alive,” objected Chur Durwen.
“Well, imagine one of the victims surviving and you’ll have an idea what our waiting woman looks like.”
Chur Durwen was curious. He kept watch, and one day as the woman bent over to pick up something, the veil fell loosely at the side of her face. He, too, caught only a glimpse, but that was enough.
These happenings were small in themselves, but enough to set both men thinking. They had assumed there were no predators on Dinadh, but now they began assessing certain phrases and silences, certain movements of avoidance, certain rituals of aversion.
“It’s them,” Mitigan said to Chur Durwen one night as he looked through their barred windows at the pale forms assembled across the canyon. “Those flyin’ things that hang about after dark. They’re dangerous beasts.”
“Small ones,” murmured Chur Durwen, unimpressed.
“Chowbys aren’t big either,” said the other. “Or viper bats. But you get overrun by a dozen of either one and you’re dead meat. And ants, they’re tiny little old things, but people on Old-earth used to go in fear of their armies. Stingers, those were.”
“I’d forgotten about chowbys,” mused the man from Collis. “And you’re right. There’s a considerable mob of those night fliers about. I must’ve seen several hundred, just last evenin’.”
“So.”
“So?”
“Puts a bit a crimp in goin’ lookin’ for Fambers, dunnit? Stands to reason they’re not comin’ here, we got to go lookin’.”
“Must be a way.” Chur Durwen stared meditatively at his boots. “Always has to be a way.”
Mitigan grunted. What his friend said was true. There was always a way to kill a man or woman. No matter how he hid, how he ran, how he vanished into another identity; no matter how she pleaded, how she bribed, how she threatened. There was always a way. So Mitigan’s father’s brother had taught him when he was a boy.
“Always a way, boy. Study on the target, make him your book, make him your library, boy, and you’ll find the way.”
“They say killin’s wrong, Uncle Jo.”
“They! And who’s they? They put power in your pocket? They buy festives for your women? Food for your children? Ha? Who’s this they? Not Firsters, that’s sure! No Firster ever said such a damn fool thing!”
Which was true. A man who’d recently killed was considered blood guilty, but there was a ritual for erasing blood guilt. All Mitigan had had to do was pay a hefty price to the Firster godmonger in the district where the victim lived. Those who spoke against killing were only do-gooders, reformers, non-Firsters all. They were men who belonged to no tribe, swore allegiance to no hetman. Men who, it was said, would puke themselves inside out if told to go out and get an ear for the hetman, a hand for the hetman, or somebody’s head in particular.
Mitigan was born of the Dirt-hog tribe, and Uncle Jo sat on the hetman’s right hand. Not quite next to him, true, but no more than three or four men down. Mitigan’s pa, now, he’d sat right next to the Dirt-hog hetman, and when the hetman said go, Pa had gone. One time too many, as it turned out, but he died with his name bright, so Mitigan had no dishonor to live down.