A long silence. Evidently they had closed a door across the grille, for she heard nothing. The lantern had gone with the voices. She pulled the cloak around her and slumped against the grille, head on bent knees, simply waiting. At least nothing from outside could get at her here. When the voice came again, it actually wakened her from a doze.
“We’ll open the door. There’s a small room here, where you can be comfortable for a while. You’ll stay here while we check what you’ve told us.”
“What about my other clothes?”
“We’d like to know what they gave you in that tea, so we’ll keep that robe for a time. Here’s your bodysuit, and we’ll find you some other clothing. We’re keeping the sandals. Someone will carry them away from here, a good distance away from here. The soles have tracking devices in them.”
“Tracking devices?”
“Scent emitters. Sometimes women escape, but their shoes are made to lead hunters directly to them. You’re lucky. The devices were blocked with mud . . .”
“The well,” she cried. “When I filled my bottle at the well. It was muddy.”
“Was your ship here, on Mahahm?”
“Outside the city. As I went out, I yelled at the communications man to tell them what was happening.” Or had she? She remembered doing it. But then, she might have imagined doing it.
“The people of Mahahm-qum would expect you to go toward your ship. They would not expect you to have listened to a malghaste woman’s tales. So, because they are creatures of their preconceptions, it is unlikely they have any idea where you are. If we are lucky, they will assume you are dead. One of us may backtrack to the place you left the bottle, however, as we would prefer that it and the sandals be found somewhere else, a long way from here. On the way to some oasis.”
A breath of air came from her left as the grille slipped into a wall pocket and a door opened upon a white plastered room where the day’s last light pooled around the high, barred window and seeped a melancholy dimness onto the narrow bed and stone floor below. Beside the bed a small table held a glass carafe of water topped with an inverted cup. She almost fell over herself in her scramble toward it.
“Slowly,” said the voice from somewhere across the room. “Take it slowly. A few sips, then a few more. Otherwise you may vomit it up, and that would be a waste. Don’t eat anything until you’ve bathed and settled down and are no longer thirsty. Bring your staff, and also the lantern. It will soon be dark.”
The lantern stood in its own circle of light on the floor by the grille. She fetched it and set it upon the table where a bowl covered a plate of fruit, sliced meat and a loaf of brown, crusty bread. Though she ached with hunger, she obeyed the voice. She sat on the bed with the cup in her hand, drinking little by little, refilling the cup twice. The dryness of her throat and nose slowly eased. For the first time she noticed the little jars near the plate, one of them half-filled with something waxy, herbal, perhaps an unguent.
“Can I use this on my lips?” she asked the walls, turning the jar in her hands, seeing the label too late to forestall the question. “For desert-burned skin.”
“Never mind,” she said, swallowing hysterical laughter that caught in her throat when she read the label on the other jar. “To dry your milk. Take one with each meal.”
To dry her milk. She choked on tears, swallowed them. Well then. Whatever help they might offer, it wouldn’t run to getting Dovidi back, not soon. She had best plan on staying here for some time and be thankful for what it offered: drink, food, and a place to wash herself. Someone had definitely mentioned bathing.
She picked up the lantern and walked the perimeter of the room, three meters by five, the entry door now closed off by a sliding panel. Through a pointed arch opposite the entry she found a boxlike hall with three more of the sliding panel doors: left, right, and straight ahead. Two of the panels were immovable, but the one to her right slid easily, opening on a stone-floored alcove furnished with a large, shallow copper pan, an ewer of tepid water, cloths, a low stool, and in the corner, a privy hole like those in the house they had used in Mahahm-qum.