This time Dyre spoke before Bane could stop him. “What did Pete grow into?”
“Pete? Old Petey. He came out of that pond considerably enlarged, and last time I saw him, sitting in the mouth of that cave, he had a piggy as long as old Crawly. He just sat there, looking at it, keeping it from getting sunburned. If it’s grown into the mountain, it must be sizeable by now.” Abruptly, he kneed his horse onto the trail, riding in the direction Webwings had come. “Be good to see old Pete again!”
Behind him, Bane looked at his brother in terrible surmise, fighting down the urge to feel himself to make sure he was still the same size he had been that morning.
“I know one thing,” mumbled Dyre. “I know I don’t want to go near that pond.”
With some difficulty, Bane summoned up his usual jeering manner. “Don’t want a big piggy, huh?”
Dyre moved onto the path, following his father, head hanging. Bane rode up beside him, reaching out to touch him, only to have his hand shaken off.
“Look, we need to decide something,” Bane whispered, reaching across to rein Dyre’s horse, letting some distance grow between them and Ashes’s receding figure. “I don’t like all this much. He’s talking funny. He’s riding west for no reason at all, so far as I can see. And another thing, Webwings … “
“He flew back to camp.”
“Well, he said he was going to, but not long ago, I looked up, and there he was, headed west again. And he said the others were headed this way, too. Like all of them headed off like this, no reason, just going. Like … well, like some of those Old Earth creatures we learned about, going off on migrations, no reason, just going because their insides told them to, maybe right over the cliff into the ocean! I’m getting the idea all this sons of thunder business may not be what we’re really after, you know?”
“How you gonna get away from him?” asked Dyre, nodding at the figure ahead of them. “Him and his whip.”
Bane shrugged. “He keeps drifting off. Maybe we can get him to get shut of us. Just let us go. That Questioner thing came down in a shuttle, and the shuttle’s still there, outside Sendoph. If this world is going to fall apart, like everybody says, I’d just as soon get a ride to someplace else.”
“You can’t fly a shuttle.” Dyre laughed derisively. “You can’t even fly a kite.”
“The shuttle’s got a crew, crotchbrain. Maybe we could get a few of the … the people at the camp to help us. If any of them stayed there. Maybe Mooly. Some of the halfway normal-looking ones. We take the shuttle, and we fly it to the ship, then we take the ship.”
“Yeah, but the way he talks, the way we smell, I mean, what’s the point? If we can’t get any women?”
“We had women,” Bane declared. “Stupid! At House Genevois, we had women. Not as many as pretty boy Mouche, but some. And they didn’t die, either. So Madame knows how to handle the smell bit. All we have to do is grab her and take her somewhere and make her tell us. We can do that before we leave.”
They heard a call, looked up to see that Ashes had stopped and was glaring back at them, beckoning.
“Later,” said Bane, spurring his horse. “You keep your mouth shut. But later … we’ll talk about it some more.”
49—Sailing the Pillared Sea
On the ship, the Timmys retreated to an open-sided cabin at the rear of the deck while the Corojum explained the skills of the underground sailor. There were neither compass nor stars. Everything was either black or luminescent, and the only landmarks were the great pillars that loomed, dark and featureless, from the wavering yellow-green sea into the vaulted blue-green sky.
“Except,” said the Corojum, pointing with a huge bony finger, “for the luminous lichen that grows on each face in signs that Kaorugi has set there.”
“It’s like blazing a trail,” Ornery whispered to Mouche. “I read about that, something people used to do in forests, before they had locators. You’d chop a chip out of the tree, leaving a white blaze that you could see on your way back.”