Ashes nodded again, distantly. “There’s time. World’s not going to blow up yet.”
“How do you know?”
Ashes shrugged again, yawning, staring sleepily at the fire.
Bane turned away, outwardly calm, inwardly seething. The Wilderneers had a plan, but nothing came of the plan. They found themselves a new planet, but they had done nothing with it. They planned to get themselves some women, but nothing happened. Hundreds of years and nothing had changed with them, except that they’d grown bigger and stranger. They—or more properly, Ashes—had succeeded only once at reproduction. Their town was a shabby collection of huts and hovels, not fit to live in. Their food was offal. Some of them had only one emotion, and that was a kind of unfocused belligerence. Ashes and Webwings had retained some quality of irritability, but aside from being irritated, what did either of them do?
Bane surprised himself at these thoughts, at the words he used to form them, words he had never had until he went to House Genevois, words he had learned from the conversation mistress but had rejected using in favor of the rude and impoverished blatting of his fosterage. He used them now, nonetheless. Well, Madame herself had said words were tools. A tool was a tool. A man didn’t need to carry a tool. He could pick it up when he liked and put it down when he liked.
Still seething, Bane curled into his blankets once more, peering through slitted lids at his father’s firelit face, brooding over the coals. What was he thinking? Was he thinking? He, Bane, wasn’t at all sure Ashes could think, not straight. So, maybe … maybe he’d better concentrate on this business of getting away.
He remembered something Madame had said: “There is a class of person who cannot lead and will not be led. Such persons go their own way, uncorrupted by insight, unmitigated by experience. They do what they do, and usually they die of it, but they would rather die than cooperate with anyone else.”
Bane had always made a point of ostentatiously not listening during Madame’s lectures, so it surprised him how much of what she said he remembered. He remembered that bit, because it had made him think of Ashes at the time, wondering if he was one who couldn’t lead and wouldn’t be led. Now he was sure: nobody could lead that batch of weirds, anyhow. And none of them would be led. So if all of them were getting together, now, it meant something big was happening, something maybe they had no control over at all!
Brooding on this, Bane fell asleep. Ashes, too, returned to his blankets. The fire burned down to dying embers once more. They were not wakened by the quakes that came in the early hours, snapping the ground beneath them, but gently, like a laundress shaking out sheets. They were not wakened by certain other things that came quietly and stood looking at them for a time before going forward on business of their own, though when Bane and Dyre and Ashes woke in the morning, they saw the sinuous tracks of those beings all around them.
“What?” Dyre asked, pointing to the deep depressions.
Ashes yawned, shook himself, and said in an uninterested voice, “Joggiwagga, maybe. Something like that. On their way to the chasm.”
“Why are we going there?” Bane demanded. “All kinds of things are going there, and they’re all bigger than us.”
“I guess that’s why,” said Ashes, moving about his morning tasks almost unconsciously. “Something going on. You can’t gain ground without knowing what’s going on, boys.”
“I thought you was gonna take the cities,” Dyre cried petulantly. “You can’t take the cities if you’re here and they’re there. What if they fall down while you’re gone? You can’t get anywhere doin’ that.”
The whip was out and moving before Bane could take a breath; it moved of itself, without Ashes using his hands, like a prehensile tail, an autonomous appendage, snaking out from the front of Ash-es’s jacket, cracking with that all too familiar electrical sound, leaving Dyre writhing on the ground, spittle running down his chin, eyes unfocused.
“You,” snarled Ashes. “You keep your mouth shut. I told you, and I won’t tell you again. You do what you’re told. And what you’re told is, we’re going to that chasm to see what’s going on. We’re gonna talk to old Pete. Talk to some of the others.”