“Better than die at the hands of Aresian torturers!” said Aufors, tears streaming down his face.
“We are not torturers,” Terceth blustered, flushing as he confronted Aufors’s pain-racked face and the accusing stares of those around him.
“I was quite well until I met the Aresians,” Aufors murmured. “Call your treatment what you will.”
Terceth glared in frustration, grinding his teeth as though to gnaw the situation into something more malleable.
“If our world is dead, what do we do to resurrect it?” Dunnel pled.
“You can’t,” said Melanie.
Dunnel cried, “But we must. We’ve already brought in animals! We’ve imported trees!”
Joncaster shook his head. “There are too many vital pieces left out, hundreds of thousands of tiny living things you never knew were there. How can you restore what you never saw in the first place?”
Aufors bent forward with a moan, trembling, his hands clenched, his forehead beaded. “Jenny,” he whispered, as though to himself “Oh, Jenny . . .”
Awhero put her arms around him, murmuring, “You heard your Jenny, Aufors. She said to wait. Believe in her. She didn’t drown herself. And she didn’t drown Dovidi.”
Terceth was too frustrated to let this go unchallenged. “Oh, she most certainly did, old woman. She’s committed suicide!”
“No,” cried Aufors, his eyes wild and unfocused as he tried to stand on legs that would not hold him.
“She’ll be back,” whispered Awhero, dragging Aufors back onto the stone, holding him there.
Terceth ranted, “She won’t be back unless she’s part fish! And the child won’t be back unless he’s a fish’s whelp!” He spun around, gesturing. “Dunnel, go back to the ship and get it out into the sea. If that woman or creature or whatever she is comes up with or without the brat, I want her.”
“Fish’s child,” said Aufors, his face becoming even more pallid and clammy. Part fish, his mind blathered, running back into his childhood, full of jeering brother-noises and night terrors. Part fish. He was unable to escape the idea. Maybe it was true. Genevieve had encountered something in Merdune Lagoon. Something shapeless, she’d said, but what did shape matter? Had something happened to her she hadn’t wanted to tell him . . . ?
This led him into a thicket full of clammy monsters, bogeymen of grief and jealousy that he was not strong enough to recognize, much less analyze. He slumped, unable to hold up his head. Joncaster picked him up and strode up the hill with Awhero and the other malghaste following. Delganor and the Marshal followed Terceth and Dunnel, who went on down to the shore, Dunnel very pale and quiet while Terceth, who had been raging at the world of Haven and everyone on it, grew gradually quieter and more thoughtful and more anxious. In an impotent fury he admitted to himself that there might well be things going on he did not understand. It might well be that this expedition had not been a good idea. Perhaps, oh, perhaps all the Aresian forces now on Haven would be better off somewhere else.
* * *
On a hillside not far from Havenor, among an untidy litter of furnishings and materiel, two watchers sat comfortably in dusty chairs observing a procession of exotic and complicated robots emerging from a vertical cleft in the rock. Variously, the machines rolled or strode or bounced westward in eerie procession on a shadow carpet cast before them by a rising moon. They might almost have been spectral, they moved so silently. Even after centuries of storage, not one of them squeaked.
The watchers, Veswees and Jeorfy Bliggard nee Bottoms, had only recently discovered this deep fissure leading into the Lord Paramount’s caverns, one better suited to the emergence of bulky machinery than any of the eel-burrows or squirmy mazes they had explored theretofore. The departing procession was the final one for this evening, though on previous nights many waves of flying or fast-running machines had come out like monstrous hatchlings from a dragon’s nest. The earlier departures had allowed more travel time, but this group was destined for duty in the villages around Havenor itself.
“You know,” said Jeorfy in a disappointed voice, “I expected them to clank. When we unpacked and programmed them, down below, they looked like they’d clank. And make sparks.”