By morning's light, Paddy's feet looked worse than I'd expected. He didn't have stockings of course, a farmer boy like that, and he'd gotten river sand in his clodhoppers, so they'd rubbed his feet raw.
There was a brook in the draw below, and he wanted to go down and soak them. I told him he could go wash them but not soak them, that soaking would make them softer. Wash them, wipe them with his hands, and let the air dry them. Then I gave him a pair of thick stockings to put on when his feet were dry and he'd washed all the sand out of his shoes.
I don't normally wear stockings on a trek. They wear out too fast and they cost to replace. But I carry them. They're good to have in case you pull up lame.
After Paddy'd limped off toward the brook, I sat down on a log to see how my map had come through the night. Jamila had listened to Paddy and me talking. Now she came over and sat down beside me.
"Hi, daddy," she said. "I heard you taking care of your boy. Givin' up your socks like that!" Her voice was amused, but warm, too. It embarrassed me a little, but mostly it made me feel good. I didn't know what to say back, so I just held the map so she could see it better. Until I forced myself to, it was a little hard to study it with her sitting so close and our arms touching.
The original map lines hadn't run at all. But what had been added later—a thin route line plus additional places and their names, all in red—those had run, leaving a wash of pink.
"What's the pink?" she asked, and I told her.
"You goin' to be able to find your way to Adirondack with that? To the right place in Adirondack?" She sounded dubious.
You could pretty much tell by where the pink was that I was heading for somewhere up there. I realized then that I shouldn't have shown her the map; most of our missions were secret, and Soong had especially stressed secrecy for this one. With my mind stuck on that, I didn't answer her right away.
"Maybe we'd better use mine," she said at last.
"Yours?"
"My map." She grinned, then got up and fetched it from her pack, which hadn't gotten soaked like mine. Wading, she'd carried her pack on her head till she'd gotten to the creek with its shallow water. Now she sat down by me again and unfolded a big linen rectangle. Her map.
The base map part looked the same as mine, which by itself would have been surprising. So far as I knew, or even suspected, no one outside the Order had maps anything like that. But what actually caught my eye, at once, was the route marked on it! From Ohio to Adirondack, the inked-on route looked the same as mine had. I quit staring at the map and stared at her.
"Who sent you?" I asked.
Her grin widened. "The Order. My masters, actually: Fedor and Freddy."
The Order! My eyes must have been out on stalks. She laughed, touching my arm with long fingers to take away any sting. "I should have told you sooner," she said. "As soon as I knew you were a Brother. But it was just too much fun keeping you in the dark." She leaned sideways then and kissed my cheek, just a peck. "I suspected when I first saw you: When you know what to look for, you can pretty much recognize someone that's done spiritual exercises. And when I saw you fight, I was ninety-five percent sure."
She paused, cocking an eyebrow. "I'd have been ninety-nine percent sure if you'd killed him right away instead of fooling around with him like you did. That was dangerous!
"But you didn't suspect me because the Order's not known to accept women. I'm an experiment, Fedor told me. To see if a woman can operate as a Brother in a world like this one. So far my grades have been excellent, on mission as well as in training."
My attention was partly stuck on what she'd said and implied, about my foolishness in not disposing of the soldier quickly, back at the inn. She peered into my face and misinterpreted what was bothering me. "It was a dirty trick," she said, "and I apologize. Are we still friends?"
I smiled ruefully, and nodded.
"Your muse knew, all along," she said. "Otherwise you wouldn't have let me see your map. Your muse knew, but it seemed so unlikely, you couldn't have it up front."
It was thoughtful of her to say that. It made me feel more comfortable. And besides, I told myself, she was right. We compared information then. Each of us had been told there'd be others sent from other places, not more than one from a place. And she hadn't gotten any more briefing than I had.
Then she told me a little about herself. She'd been a member of the Order for more than ten years, starting when she was eleven. I'd been one for just less than four; hadn't started till I was almost seventeen. When I told her that, she looked really interested.
"Not to put you down," she said, "but how come they picked you to send? With only four years training and experience?"
I grinned at her, feeling proud and sheepish both. "That's what I asked. There are Brothers in our fellowship at Aarschot as good or better than me with just about any weapon you'd want to name, including hands and feet. And more experienced as missioners. And more advanced in knowledge of self; that's been my biggest weakness." I shrugged. "But Soong and Bhatti told me they both agreed: I was the one with the greatest survival power."
Survival power didn't mean muscle, although muscle was useful and I had a lot of it. In a situation—and they put us in plently of them in training—in a situation, I was the one who most often did the right thing. One thing Soong and Bhatti would do was have all the other students attack one of us with hickory-stick swords, hands and feet, whatever. But only one was assigned to make what would be the killing stroke if a real sword was used, or if the punch or kick wasn't controlled.
And of course, they never told you who the one was. That's what the test was about. But I never failed to go for the right one—the one most dangerous to me.
Another test was, Soong or Bhatti would try to take one of us by surprise, from ambush or when we were busy with something. It almost never worked on me.
Jamila knew exactly what I meant by survivability; her masters did the same things.
We agreed to use her map, at least till I had a chance to copy the route on mine. By that time I was over the worst of my self-consciousness with her. We knew more about each other, and we'd laughed together.
Paddy came back still limping pretty badly, but as ready as he'd get, barring a few days of barefooted rest. We ate a skimpy breakfast—johnnycake, cheese, a few berries left over that I'd picked one sunny noontime, a chew each of some jerky Jamila carried—then started out, taking it slow. Every little while, in a sunny spot, we'd stop to let Paddy take off his clodhoppers and socks, so the sun and air could get at his feet. I figured the sun would help them more than anything else we had available.
As sore as they looked, I wished I could carry him.
Obviously we didn't make very good time, but I didn't mind and neither did Jamila. The two of us walked together and talked about whatever struck us, anything except the mission we were on. Beyond remembering to take rest breaks, I mostly forgot about Paddy. And he was alert enough, and thoughtful enough, to leave Jamila and me to ourselves.
The day was the most beautiful I'd ever seen, the sky bluer than I ever remembered it, with absolutely pure white clouds that got more numerous as the morning went on. The temperature was just right, with a breeze that rustled the leaves, and made waves in the grass and flowers in an occasional meadow.
You don't run into many wild meadows in Allegheny, and seeing them made me wonder if maybe they were just there for that day—that maybe we'd made them by being there and feeling the way we felt, Jamila and me, and tomorrow they'd be gone. I never have known the names of many flowers, but there were lots of them there, lots of different kinds. I thought about picking some to give Jamila, but at first I couldn't quite bring myself to. She might think I was being foolish, because she could see them just like I did, live and moving. Then she picked some and gave them to me, and it was all I could do not to kiss her.
After a skimpy noon meal, we napped awhile in the sun, then trekked again. By early evening, the only sun came through gaps in the clouds. They were reddening above the hills to the west when we came out into a broad open valley. Up the valley to our left was Kings Town. The main part of town looked about two kilometers long and maybe one and a half wide, with a stone wall around it. Pretty impressive. The town had grown some since the wall had been built, the newer parts being outside it, with a field of fire kept clear between the wall and the buildings outside. A ways to our right, quite a bit south of the suburb, we could see an army camped. I supposed it was getting ready to go fight the invaders from Lankster.
In the suburb, on the main road, was a good-sized inn, and we stopped there. By that time it was starting to get dark, and they didn't have any rooms left. We settled for buying supper, which cost more than we were used to paying.
While we waited for our food, a man came over to us, wearing a military uniform. He'd been eating with three other guys in uniform, and they watched as he stopped at our table.
"Can I sit down with you?"
"Sure," I told him.
He pulled up a stool from the next table. "You people look as if you've been on the road awhile."
"Awhile."
"You hungry?"
"We're taking care of that now. What is it you want?"
"I'm recruiting for the King's army. You look like officer material. And your friend here"—he motioned at Paddy—"looks like he'd make a fine soldier. The pay's six bits a day for lieutenants, four for sergeants, and two for common soldiers. Plus all you can eat and two stoups of beer at the end of the day."
"I don't think so," I said. "Sounds good but..."
"You won't have to leave your lady, either. An officer's allowed to keep one with him." He looked her over and smirked. I had this impulse to punch him right on the nose. "If she wants," he added, "she can turn a nice profit on the side."
I glanced at Jamila. Her smile looked a little thin, and her eyes glinted.
It occurred to me that it might be best not to turn this guy down flat. String him along and then slip away.
"Tell you what," I said. "Let me think about that and talk it over with my friends. I presume the King's officers play cards; I just might be able to turn six bits a day into something better."
He nodded, got up, shook my hand, and went back to his table. "How did you get so good with cards?" Jamila asked.
"I'm not. But I lie pretty good when trouble's on the line."
About that time our food arrived, and while we ate, I noticed the recruiter and his friends looking over at us a couple of times. I decided they weren't done with us yet. When we'd mostly finished our meal, the serving girl came over with three stoups of beer.
"From the gentleman over there," she said. I looked. The recruiter smiled and raised his mug. I waved acknowledgement to him as the serving girl walked away.
"Don't drink," I said quietly. "Unless you want to wake up in the King's army with a headache you'll remember forever."
We finished our stew, then pretended to drink. If it was what I thought, it would be plain soon enough that we'd faked it. So as soon as we'd set our mugs down, we shouldered our packs, then started for the door and whatever security we might find in the thickening twilight outside. We got all the way out, too, but the recruiter and his three buddies were only a few steps behind. They wore swords, but their hands were on their pistols.
"Fellow," the recruiter said, "you insulted me."
"How so?"
"I bought you drinks and you didn't drink them."
His friends had spread out enough that, between the four of them, they had us hemmed in. "What makes you think we didn't..." I began. My words were a feint, a cover. By the time I got the didn't out, my sword was free. It darted up under his ribs and out again before he had time to fall, then I slashed at his nearest buddy, taking his upper arm to the bone as he drew his gun. He screamed and fainted. Jamila had another down and dead by that time. The fourth turned and ran without drawing either sword or pistol, yelling for help.
We ran the other way.
Paddy surprised me in two ways. He got away a few steps behind us, but even on raw feet he kept pace, which took a toughness to pain that not many could match. And besides that, in the brief moment of fighting he'd had the presence of mind not only to grab the recruiter's sword, but his belt with its scabbard!
There was more to Paddy Glynn than muscles.
We slowed a step to let him catch up, and scuttled into a lane that ran between houses—frame cottages with thatched roofs, a strange combination. Glancing back, I saw someone on horseback turn in behind us, trotting his horse easily, not trying to close the gap. I turned down the next lane, ran a dozen meters, and stopped.
Jamila had her sling out of her belt pouch by then, with a two-ounce slug in place and ready. The horse and rider made the turn and halted. "Peace," he called quietly. He wore a wrapper wound round his head, like the people in a district I'd passed through in Hoozh. But he wasn't a Seek. The Seeks have big beards, and this guy didn't have any at all.
"What do you want?" I asked him.
He nudged his horse a few meters closer while raising his hands to the side, palms showing empty. "I saw what fighters you are, back there. I am traveling northeast to Adirondack, and from all reports, I would do well to have bodyguards. I would like to hire you."
I let my body relax. "What's the pay?"
"Six bits a day each. I will provide food, horses, and lodging for you. Upon our arrival at my destination, I will have my associates pay each of you an additional ten dollars in silver. And you may keep the horses."
"Adirondack? Hmh! That's a long way out of our way."
He shrugged, his eyes never leaving my face.
"When would we leave?" I asked.
"Considering what you did outside the inn, it will be best to leave tonight. We will go up the valley a few kilometers and pay some farmer to let us sleep in his barn. The constabulary may sweep the immediate vicinity here, but they will not mount a broad search for you. Since the army has been here, murders are common."
He sounded straight, though he talked funny—more high-class than even my mother—and his offer sounded good. But ... It wasn't that I didn't trust him. I trusted him absolutely—to kill us or have us killed, if we let him. "Where'll we meet you?" I asked.
He seemed to think for a moment. Some of the yards there had low stone fences like those in Galway Town. "Take cover somewhere along the lane," he said. "Behind a fence. I will obtain horses and return as quickly as I can."
"Right," I said. "We'll be here."
He turned his horse and trotted off.
Poor Paddy. His face had turned absolutely joyous, listening to the hooded man and his offer. Now, when I said, "Let's get out of here," it fell like a puffball.
"But..."he objected.
"You can stay if you'd like," I told him, "but that was a Lizard. A devil."
It just blurted out, taking me by surprise. I don't lie just for the heck of it, and seldom to my friends. But unlikely as it sounded, even to me—especially to me—Paddy never questioned what I'd said. We started hiking, and turned east at the next lane as the first isolated raindrops fell. They took me by surprise. For the first time I noticed how low and heavy the clouds had gotten while we were eating.
We turned at a couple of cross-lanes, and in a few minutes were out of the suburb, south of it, headed east through farmland toward the hills. Scattered raindrops kept falling without increasing much, but the sky, from which nearly all daylight had faded, threatened more and heavier. And there were Paddy's feet to consider.
Here by the city, the farms were large, their steadings separate. A hundred meters farther was a solitary farmhouse, set back from the road, with a good-sized barn and attached cowshed. As we got closer, I could smell the cowshit.
A large dog charged barking, to threaten us from beyond sword-reach. He quieted when I spoke to him, though his hackles stayed half-up and he growled a little, deep in his throat. I've always gotten along with dogs. I told Jamila and Paddy to stay back enough that she wouldn't be recognized as a woman, then we went to the farmhouse and I knocked at the door. A middle-aged man answered, short and stocky, with slanty eyes. He had an accent that reminded me of Chickwan County, back in Mizzoo, and quite a few other places I'd been. For two bits he agreed we could sleep in his barn, then spoke sharply to the dog and closed the door.
The rain was picking up a little as the three of us went to the barn, groped and found the ladder in the dark, and climbed into the hayloft. Faint light came in through the large hay door. Paddy spread some hay and took off his shoes, then flopped down without a word, still wearing my socks.
I sat down cross-legged a little back from the hay door, where I could watch the lane without being seen. It seemed unreasonable that our would-be employer could follow us here, yet somehow I felt a need to keep watch. For a while anyway.
The rain began to fall steadily but still lightly, muttering faintly on the roof. I hoped it would quit by morning—wet shoes would be a real problem for Paddy. I took my own off and wiggled my toes. Jamila came over and sat down beside me.
"You're doing a good job, Luis," she said, and put a hand on my arm. "I'm proud of you."
"Thanks." It occurred to me that with all those years of training and experience, she'd probably have done better than I had. But then I realized she might not have: Most people wouldn't want to deal with a woman except as a woman. Which could cause problems. In fact, I might have resisted accepting her as equal to a man, if I hadn't gotten to know her in a jam—three jams now—and seen how she operated.
"Not as good as I should have," I answered. "I blew an opportunity. If we'd jumped the guy that wanted to hire us, Paddy could have ridden his horse."
"Don't second-guess yourself," she said quietly. "Figure that what you did was probably right, however it looks."
She said that like Bhatti would have, or Soong. It was all that training. Only, Soong and Bhatti wouldn't have said "probably right." Maybe she'd thought I couldn't accept it without the probably.
"And we don't know how tough a Lizard would be in a fight," she added.
"A Lizard?"
"Sure. You said it yourself: he's a Lizard."
Huh! Why not? Although my eyes hadn't seen it. We'd been fairly close but it had been three-fourths dark out.
"My muse said it," I told her. "I guess I wasn't paying attention." Bhatti and Soong had told me more than once not to argue with my warrior muse. Ride with it. And I guess I do, but sometimes I don't believe it afterwards.
Jamila chuckled, a nice throaty sound. "What does your muse think about me?" she asked.
"I don't know. He hasn't said yet."
We sat there saying nothing then for a couple of minutes. Paddy started to snore. Not loudly, though, and I hoped it stayed that way. I was strongly aware of Jamila now as a woman, and my muse, one of my muses, was sending me signals: my loins were stirring. I needed to squirm around a little and make adjustments, but I couldn't while she was there beside me.
So I got up, as if I could see out the door better on my feet. Nothing was moving in the lane. "Be nice to know," Jamila said, "if Lizards can see better in the dark than we can."
After I'd adjusted my breeches, I stayed on my feet, still watching, but back a little farther from the door. My warrior muse had nothing to tell me about how well Lizards saw at night, but it might pay to assume they saw pretty well.
Jamila got up too, and stood beside me. Tentatively I reached out and put an arm around her waist. We stood there like that for a minute or so, then she moved closer so we were touching hip and shoulder. It got a little hard to breathe. I had a big lump in my throat and another somewhere else. She was nothing at all like the occasional girl that'd come my way before. There'd only been two, actually, both before I'd joined the Order. Since then I'd avoided getting involved with women at all, on the theory that they'd distract me from training or missions. Besides, all the Orders have a low tolerance for womanizing, and unlike some Orders, the Order of Saint Higuchi forbids its members to marry.
So I removed my arm and took refuge in talk. "Tell me about yourself," I said, "and Shy Town. How did you get in the Order?"
"Well," she said, "Shy Town's on the Plains River, a few kilometers inland from the Sea of Mishgun. The townsite is sandy, and where it's not built on, it's old dunes partly overgrown with oaks. But there's a lot of wet prairie around, and people graze a lot of cattle. When I was ten, cattle raiders killed my daddy. And my mama, though not quickly enough. You know."
I did know. My Kansas mission had been to eliminate a gang something like that.
"Mama had hid me in the loft of the house, and while I couldn't see from up there, I could hear. So as soon as the raiders left, I came down.
"I wanted to kill them, so I got my dad's butchering knife and followed their trail." She paused, shaking her head and duckling ruefully like a guy might have. "Their herd dogs spotted me, and I climbed a bur oak tree to keep from getting torn up. The raiders thought that was pretty funny. They gathered round and told me to come down or they'd send someone up to drag me down. I wasn't about to, though. I knew what would happen. So their honcho sent one of them up after me.
"While they were watching him climb around trying to catch me, a Higuchi team, Alexei and Victorio, took them by surprise and killed them all. All but the one in the tree: I slashed his face and then his hand, and he fell out. After Vic and Alec had run the dogs off—they had to shoot two of them to do it—I jumped down and cut his throat. Then Vic and Alex took me with them to the Brother House—after they convinced me they weren't like the raiders. And Fedor and Freddy let me stay and help the cook for a while...."
The dog began to bark, alerting me. Someone was walking along the lane, leading a horse, moving something back and forth ahead of him, almost as if sweeping with it like a blind man with a stick.
The dog was going berserk now, three times as upset as he'd been with us. Lizard, I thought. A hound would know. He was right out by the edge of the lane, raging. Whoever it was took something out from under his cloak, something that might have been a short saddle musket, and pointed it one-handed at the dog. But there wasn't any bang, just a thin brief line of light that found the dog and silenced it instantly.
Then the horseman scanned around, taking in house, barn, fields. Finally he started on again, still sweeping the lane with whatever it was, and passed the barn. When he'd gone thirty meters past, I turned and headed for the ladder, Jamila half a step behind.
"Where are you going?" she whispered.
"To get Paddy a horse. And get my hands on whatever the Lizard used on the dog."
She didn't say anything, just followed me down the ladder. There was a worm fence on our side of the lane and a low stone fence on the other. She slipped across the lane, black in the night and with no more noise than a shadow, and went over the fence without dislodging a stone. I moved along after the Lizard, or whatever he was, crouching low behind the fence on my side, certain that Jamila was keeping pace. The ground was wet beneath my bare feet, the stones hard, the rain a soft murmur on the land.
About sixty or seventy meters down the lane, the Lizard stopped again, and I stopped too. He stood there for a moment, staring back at the barn, then swung up into the saddle and, turning the horse around, touched spurs to it. I could see his saddle gun in one hand, and I held very still. When he was about even with me, I made a grunting noise, a bit like an old sow, loud enough to hear easily. I did it just once, so it would be hard to locate, but he could tell which side of the road it came from.
He stopped. I heard a nasty thud, and with a cry he pitched foward off the horse. He wasn't dead or even unconscious, but scrambled to his feet, stumbling, and peered under the horse's neck, gun ready. There was another thud, and the horse reared, making the Lizard scrabble backward. I was over the fence then, sword in hand, and on the guy, striking. He never knew what hit him.
The horse had started off up the road, but I didn't worry about that. I got the gun, which had a shoulder sling, and cross-slung it over my back. Then I examined the whatever-it-was; what I'd been thinking of as the Lizard. I'd just about cut its head off, but there hadn't been any great spray of blood. Now I cut it off the rest of the way. Something liquid was oozing out of the neck, but not in any big quantity. It wasn't dark, either, and it didn't feel or smell like blood. I picked the head up and pulled the wrapping off it. I couldn't see any hair, only a crest kind of like a chicken's comb, but stiffer and maybe six or seven centimeters tall.
Jamila had caught and mounted the horse, and it was circling in the road, kind of half bucking, while she talked to it, calming it. I walked toward them, then waited a little ways off till it was standing quietly.
"Sorry," she said to me. "I was too far back when you made your noise, and I seem to have missed his head. That stone fence is so low, I needed to go on all fours to keep under cover."
"It's all right," I said. "That way you were back where you could catch the horse." I held the head up by the crest. "Let's go knock on the farmer's door again. I want to see what this looks like in the light."
When we got to the farmhouse, I gave Jamila the Lizard gun. Taking it, she led the horse toward the barn. I knocked at the door. The farmer opened it enough to peer out at me.
"Did you hear your dog a few minutes ago?" I asked.
He nodded.
"Somebody was snooping around. I saw him do something and your dog fell dead. So I snuck out and killed whoever it was; I think it was a Lizard."
The farmer hissed, a sharp intake of breath.
"But it's too dark out here to see what he looks like. Can I bring the head in by the fire?"
He didn't say anything for a minute, then nodded and stepped back from the door. I went in. There was a kid inside, a boy maybe fifteen years old, with a musket in his hands, watching with scared eyes. I went over by the fireplace and kneeling, laid the head on the hearth.
The crest was blue, and not only was there no scalp, there was no hair at all—no whiskers, no eyebrows, not even lashes. But the strangest thing was the eyes. A little bigger than a normal person's, the white of the one was purest white, while the other was amber red! Not bloodshot—red was its color! There was something obscene about it, the two being so much different.
The nose, though, wasn't really different from ours. And the face was tan and pink; the skin could have passed for human. Except—it didn't quite look natural. When I rubbed it with a firm finger, the tan and pink came off, leaving a streak of golden yellow and showing smooth dry scales, finer than any fish I knew about, or any grass snake's. Even so, if it hadn't been for the eyes it wouldn't have been bad looking, alive.
The blood from the neck was nearly colorless.
The farmer was kneeling beside me, staring harder than I was. When we got up, he started talking in whatever his lingo was to his wife and son, talking fast but not loud. The kid swung the muzzle of his musket toward me and I grabbed the farmer around the neck for a shield, drawing my knife.
"Boy," I said, "point that musket at the roof, or your father dies."
He raised it a little, enough that I wasn't looking down the barrel. "At the roof!" I snarled, and the barrel tilted upward.
"Why'd he point that thing at me?" I asked.
"If you have killed a Lizard," the farmer said, "surely the devils will come out of Hell to get you. I do not want them to think we had anything to do with it."
"I see." And I did. "What's your son's name?"
"Ezekial."
Ezekial. At least they were Christians. "Ezekial," I said, "lower that hammer very carefully, or I'll run this knife into your daddy's heart."
Very soberly he lowered the hammer. From the corner of my eye I saw movement at the open door; Jamila was there with her sword in her hand.
"Now," I continued, "put the gun on the floor where you are and go stand with your face to the wall."
I watched him do it. The farmer's wife had a meat knife in her hand. I met her eyes and she laid it aside, putting it down as if the handle were hot. Jamila came in then, picked the musket up, and recocked it.
"Okay, farmer," I said, "you don't need to worry. We'll leave before daylight. And the Lizard—you can bury it in the morning or stuff it down the privy. Or bury it in the manure pile; that's a good place for it. Nobody'll ever know. It ought to cook down pretty good in sour cowshit."
He nodded.
"We could easily kill all three of you," I added, "but we won't. We are good people, not bad. But we are very, very deadly, so deadly we can kill Lizards. We'll take your musket now, so you won't do anything foolish with it, but we'll leave it in your barn when we go, because we are not thieves."
I let the man loose then, turned my back on them, and walked to the door, carrying the head. Jamila covered me with the musket. Outside, the light rain had just about quit. I took the Lizard head down the backyard path and dropped it on the ground outside the privy. Then I trotted down the road to the body, hoisted it over my shoulder, and carried it to the privy too, flopping it down beside the head. Going through its pockets and belt pouch, I found a little bag full of coins, and took them.
While I was doing all this, Jamila had gone into the barn. Now she came out with a rod-like thing, metallic-looking, with little things sticking out of it. It seemed to be what the Lizard had used to track us. She laid it down by the body.
"You throwing that away?" I asked.
She nodded. "I've got a feeling—" she began, then didn't finish.
I picked it up, hefting it. Surprisingly light. "Maybe we can learn how to use it," I told her. "I don't mind carrying it. For a while, anyway."
She shook her head. "Leave it," she said, and changed the subject. "We need to take care of the horse. Then we can go upstairs and sleep."
I tossed it down, shrugging—my warrior muse wasn't saying anything on the subject—and we started for the barn. "Suppose the farmer sneaks out tonight and goes to the constabulary," I said.
"He won't," she answered. I didn't ask why. We went in and walked over to where she'd tied the Lizard's horse; she unbuckled the bellyband and hoisted off the saddle. In the dark I didn't know where the farmer kept stuff, so after taking the bit out of his mouth, I used the bridle as a halter, tying it to a post by the reins. While we worked, she started to explain her muse. "I doubt these people trust the constabulary. And anyway they look at this as a matter of Lizards and Lizard magic. If they go to anyone about it, it'll be the priest."
I'd never thought much about magic. Never considered that I'd seen any. But now... Was the thin beam of light, the beam that had killed the watchdog, a magic of some kind? I remembered something Bhatti'd said once: that magic was just a word, a word for anything that was strange enough and you didn't understand.
"Do you think it's magic?" I asked her.
It was too dark down there to see a grin, but I was sure she wore one. "I believe in what I see. I saw the Lizard kill the dog with a gun that shoots light. The farmer would call it magic. I don't feel like I need to call it anything."
I went up in the loft, threw down some hay, and we used some of it to rub the horse down with. Most we put in front of him to eat, and on the floor as bedding for him. Then Jamila went back to the ladder and I followed her. The rain had taken on new strength while we'd worked, and the hayloft was filled with the soft drumming of it on the shingled roof. An easy sound to go to sleep by. But somehow we started kissing, then I started exploring Jamila's shirt. After that...
It wasn't like laying with the other girls I'd laid with. With Jamila there was a feeling that I don't know any other name for than love. It was an hour before we got dressed again and went to sleep.
I woke up to a deep humming outside that wasn't like anything I'd ever heard before. It was still night. Both of us went to the hay door to look out, but whatever it was, we couldn't see it from there, so we buckled on our swords and went back down the ladder to peer out the door.
Some fifty or sixty meters above the privy, a thing was floating, in the air, settling downward. "What the Hell!" I whispered, and hoped that wasn't where it came from. At a guess, it was eight or ten meters long, three or four wide, and—I don't know, maybe three high. I could see dim light coming out of it through windows. My hair stood up like the watchdog's hackles; there had to be Lizards inside.
As it lowered, a broad beam of light, pale violet, came out the bottom of it, and when it got down to a meter or so from the ground, the thing sprouted arms. We watched it lift the dead Lizard's body up into itself, then the head, and the tracking tool. Gooseflesh washed over me in waves. Now I'd seen magic!
Nothing more happened for a minute or so. Then the thing, the airboat, rose up to fifty or sixty meters again. Suddenly a different beam of light shot out of it, bright hard green, looking as if you couldn't cut it with an axe. It struck the farmhouse and played over it. The house burst into flame, almost as if the whole thing had caught at once—roof, timbers, floor, furniture .... people. It only burned for a few minutes, four or five maybe, before it was down to a heap of glowing rubbish smoking in the rain.
By the time I thought to look up at the airboat again, it was gone.
When we got back up in the loft, Paddy was still asleep. He'd missed the whole thing. We hardly talked at all about how the airboat, or the Lizards in it, could have known where the dead Lizard was. If they knew that, what else did they know? Apparently not that the Lizard's killers were in the barn, or they'd have roasted us instead of the farmer and his family.
Mostly we talked about what we'd do next, keeping it short and simple. We'd stay the night where we were, and leave at dawn.
Then we settled down and went back to sleep.