I rehearsed the way as we children had learned it from songfather. “The Canyon of Cochim-Mahn to the Lost Things Canyon. This canyon to the Burning Springs. Burning Springs to the Nodders. Beyond the Nodders, the omphalos.”
He tracked my words on the map. “Burning Springs?” he asked me. “It’s printed here, but what is it?”
“Songfather told us it’s a flammable gas that comes up through fissures in the rock. There is water that comes also. The gas was ignited at some time or other, perhaps by lightning, and it burns in the water. Sometimes the place is called the Fountains of Fire or Canyon of Fire. There is a superstition that drinking the water from there will keep—”
I caught myself in time. I had not said it.
“Keep what?” Leelson asked.
“Keep one in good health,” I said. Masanees had mixed her medicine with water brought from the Canyon of Fire. So she said.
He gave me an odd look. I suppose he read my discomfort, but at least he did not ask me anything more.
“What are the Nodders?” Lutha asked.
“Tall thin pillars of rock. Many of them. With stone tops that move sometimes. Songfather says when the wind blows strongly, they nod.”
“If that is true,” remarked Trompe, “sometimes they no doubt come crashing down.”
“I don’t know,” I confessed. “Songfather never mentioned that.”
“No animals?” Leelson asked. “Nothing dangerous except the Kachis?”
“The beautiful people are as they are, which is as the Gracious One wills,” I replied. Who knew what the Gracious One willed?
“No known dangers, then?” Leelson smiled, reading my mind.
I flushed. “None.”
I was more worried about the known than the unknown. Known dangers were quite bad enough. These feelings were justified at about midmorning when we began to hear wings. At first it was just a barely heard flutter behind us. When we looked, we saw nothing. The noise grew more frequent the farther we went. I caught Lutha and Leelson exchanging long glances. I felt myself growing pale and sick. I knew the sound. Oh, yes, I knew the sound.
Then we heard the noise from before us as well. Both behind and before. Casting a quick look around, I surprised a pale shadowy movement on the canyon wall to our left. Then I saw them everywhere, pallid shapes slipping behind rocks. More than I had ever seen before.
“They’re all around us,” I said in a voice that I could not keep from sounding terrified. “They’re all around us.”
“I thought they didn’t,” said Trompe. “In daylight … ”
“But it isn’t daylight,” I cried.
It was daytime, but we were still in deepest shadow. The sun lay upon the wall to our right, perhaps a third of the way up, a long line of brilliance that inched downward slowly … so slowly.
“We could stop and set up the shelter,” said Lutha.
“I read that as a bad choice,” said Leelson, keeping his eyes on the trail. “The minute we try it, they’ll be on us.”
“You can feel them?”
“If it is them I’m feeling, yes.”
“Then what? What, Leelson!”
“Keep your eyes on the sun line, there on the right-hand wall. How long would you say until it hits us?”
“I have no idea! Saluez?”
“Not long,” I mumbled. “But maybe too long.”
“I think not,” said Leelson. “I’m getting feelings of slyness, of calculation. They want to be sure of us. They aren’t yet. They’re cunning.”
“You speak as though they were rational beings,” Lutha objected.
I pinched my lips shut and said nothing. Trompe looked at me curiously, his brows knit together. I concentrated on the lower pool at Cochim-Mahn, thinking deliberately of its coolness and the light-less depths within the stone. Leelson looked away, perhaps foiled, perhaps merely respecting my desire not to be thought at.
“We’ll talk of something else,” he said firmly. “Trompe, how were the league championships coming when you left Prime?”
Trompe responded, and the two of them talked in quite natural voices about interalliance sports of various kinds. Their voices seemed normal and casual, but their eyes were narrowed in concentration. I stayed frozen in place, gathered into myself, my face hidden in my hands. I could still hear the Kachis, even above the sound of the men’s voices. Lutha put her arm around me and squeezed. I scarcely felt it.