“No,” Ashes snorted. “They pushed us in one side, and we swam out the other.”
“Was it deep? Did they try to drown you?”
“Wasn’t deep and they didn’t try to drown us.”
“So what did they take you there for?”
Long, dreamy silence, unbroken until Dyre asked the question again.
Ashes snorted. “Boy, if I knew that, I’d know a lot more than anybody else!”
Since Ashes immediately drifted into a reverie again, and since he seemed to have trouble dealing with the questions, Dyre gave up asking for a time.
They had gone a good bit farther on when Bane, who happened to be looking up to judge the position of the sun in the sky, saw Webwings approaching. “See there,” he cried, pointing.
They pulled up the horses and waited. Webwings was searching the ground beneath him, possibly looking for them. Ashes took off his hat and waved it. The flying figure folded its wings and dropped, coming to rest on a large rock near the trail.
“I’ve got to go get the others,” said Webwings. “Crawly and Strike and all the rest of us.”
“Crawly and Strike should be coming,” said Ashes, again in that dreamy voice. “They said so.”
Webwings jittered, peering closely at Ashes’s face. “Some of ‘em went north to intercept the road. Movin’s easier there. We’ve all got to get there in time. Time’s running out. Got to get there.” Web-wings’s voice had the same dreamy quality as Ashes’s.
“We told our brothers we’d come get “em,” Ashes asserted. “Before we did anything about women or taking over. They’ll all want to be there. Hughy Huge. Old Pete.”
Webwings stared at the sky. “I saw Pete. In the mouth of that cave where we left him. He’s still there. Grown to fit. Can’t get out, I shouldn’t think, at least not far.”
“Good old Pete. We’ll get him out. Crawly’ll get him out. How ‘bout Gorge George? An’ Titanic Tom?”
“I caught sight of most of ‘em.”
“How are they all? Good to see them again.”
“They’re moving.” He snorted and flapped his wings, sending the spiders fleeing to his armpits as he said distractedly, “Eager Eyes, you remember Eag, he can look down into the place, and he saw a whole bunch of Timmys and Joggiwagga and Tunnelers bringing some strange people there, just the way they did us. And one of the people is a blue person. You know what that’s about?”
“That’s got to be that Questioner’s people,” muttered Bane. “I heard all about them at Mantelby’s.”
Ashes stared at the sky, smiling slightly.
“What’s a Questioner?” demanded Webwings.
Bane slid off his horse to shake his shirt and trousers loose from his sweaty body. “Seven or eight days ago, maybe more, this Questioner thing came down in a shuttle, and they brought it to Mantelby Mansion to stay. And the servants said that’s why all the Timmys had to go, and why we ended up there, doing what Timmys had been doing, because this Questioner was there and she shouldn’t catch on we even had Timmys. And she—they all called it she—had this one blue-skin with her, along with a bunch of other kinds.”
“Oh,” said Webwings dreamily, as though he had lost interest.
Ashes switched his attention from the sky to his fellow Wilderneer. “What do you think it means, Web?”
Webwings shook his head. “Don’t ask me. I’m just telling you what Eager saw … down at the pond.”
“What would they want with a blue person?” Ashes muttered.
“What did they want with us?” Webwings responded.
“Things keep changing around,” Ashes complained. “I wish everthing would settle for a few years, let us make some plans.”
The flyer shifted from foot to foot. “You know, Ash, seeing that pond, I got to thinking, you remember Foot … before?”
“Before when?”
“Before that pond. You ever know about his shoe collection?”
“Shoe collection?”
“We could never figure him getting that way, you know. Or me, but him especially. But lately, I’ve been remembering. Back on Thor, after he’d done it to some bitch, you know, he’d take her shoes … “
“A fetishist?” asked Bane. “We learned about fetishists at House Genevois.”