“Shall I kill it?” asked one of the dark-robed ones, pushing his veils aside to wipe the sweat from his face on his sleeve. In that instant, Genevieve knew where she was. She was in Mrs. Blessingham’s office, seeing a vision. There was the body she had seen, the blood, the knife in the hand of a man, and that man was Willum. What was he doing here, slitting the throats of Mahahmbi women? It had had nothing to do with Carlotta and Glorieta? Why had she thought it did! She shuddered and buried her face in the sand, trying desperately not to be sick.
“Leave it for the birds,” said the leader, wiping his knife upon the woman’s clothing then standing back to observe the flow of blood. “She made a good candidate for your father, Havenite.”
Joncaster put his arms across Genevieve’s back and held her firmly. The men climbed from the hollow, each picking up one of the abandoned robes before taking a position beneath the fins of the harpta and moving away, out of the hollow, back along the track they had made earlier.
Genevieve struggled against their arms, but they held her fast.
The men and the great lizard retreated, the lizard coughing in a dull, repeated complaint.
“Wait,” whispered Joncaster. “Sound travels on the wind, and they are downwind of us.”
Solemnly, slowly, the lizard moved away, grumbling, the silent men keeping pace beneath the shade of its fins until they vanished along the line of flags around a far dune.
“Now,” said Melanie, with distaste. “Come!” She rose to her feet and started down the slope of the dune.
“I don’t want to go down there,” cried Genevieve in a child’s voice. “I don’t . . .”
“You will,” said Melanie. “For your mother who could have died here, for all the women of Haven who have died here.”
“Of Haven!” she cried. “Women of Haven? These are Mahahmbi women.”
“You are of Haven,” Joncaster said in an angry voice. “And you were supposed to be here, among these. You were warned, you escaped, otherwise you would have been here to drink their potion and kneel before their knives. And I am told there was to have been at least one other on your ship, one who did not come . . .”
“Lyndafal.” She shuddered in disbelief. “The wife of the Earl of Ruckward.”
Joncaster’s iron hand pulled her erect and half carried her down the slope after him, she stumbling along in a mood of frantic denial. They went over the lip of the dune, into the cupped center, and stopped by the first body, white as a cloud, all its blood pumped away into the sand.
“Look,” said Melanie, pointing. “This is what you have to see.”
Where the blood had run, the sand had come alive! Questing scarlet tendrils writhed into the sunlight, tiny-toothed granules along their stems opening into flat, scalloped fronds that overlaid one another like feathers on a bird, rapidly covering the ground with winy scales. A high-pitched sound came from the sand, like the avid screaming of minuscule voices. Already, the patch of blood lichen that had been cut off at the ground had erupted into frantic regrowth wherever blood had flowed.
Joncaster knelt and turned the first body over. The face was peaceful, unafraid. “They give them a drug,” he said. “At least the bastards don’t terrorize them.”
“Only because fear changes the blood chemistry,” said Melanie. “If adrenaline helped the process, they’d terrorize them, believe me.”
Joncaster pulled Genevieve after him as he went on to the second body, and the third, turning up their faces and feeling among the voluminous veils they wore. He came up with a bundle, which he unwrapped carefully. A baby. “Dead,” he called to Melanie, “from the heat and dehydration.” He rewrapped the tiny bundle and replaced it by the mother’s body.
“A boy. They raise almost all the girl babies for their blood, but if the donor of the candidate already has an heir or two, they leave the boys for the carrion birds.”
Genevieve cried, “I should think they’d grow them bigger, too. They’d have more blood, wouldn’t they?”