"Interesting," murmured Onsofruct. "Our Haggers tell us the man who made the terrible machines also lives near Nehbe."

Madame set down her gla.s.s. "The thing I can't figure out is that Thor Ashburn seems unconnected to any known family. Also, he and his sons share a family stink."

"Skunk-lung?"

"That's what it's called," Madame confirmed. "Though it doesn't come from the lung."

"But none of the settlers could have had it," D'Jevier remarked. "It would have been a disqualifying attribute for a colonial."

"I have a suspicion," murmured Madame, "that those who had it weren't settlers. At least, not from the second settlement."

"First settlement survivors?" breathed D'Jevier. "There were no survivors!"

"How do we know, for sure?" Madame raised her eyebrows as she refilled their gla.s.ses. "I've been puzzling over this a good deal since meeting Thor Ashburn. I hated the man instinctively, the way we hate snakes, without thinking about it, knowing they have not enough brain to be swayed by pity or reason. And yet, he is mankindly looking, not unhandsome, not badly built. He had to come from somewhere. So, I asked myself, how do we know there were no survivors? Our ancestors didn't see any, quite true, but then, our ancestors arrived over a period of twelve years, in ten large shiploads, a thousand to the ship. None of them knew all the others, not even the ones on their own ship.

"If someone from the first settlement had shown up in a bustling neighborhood and said he was from upriver or downriver, who would have known?"

Onsofruct mused, "According to the servants at Mantelby Mansion, the boys claimed to be sons of thunder."

"Thor was a G.o.d of thunder back on Old Earth," said Madame. "That's what Thor means, thunder. Thor is also the supremacist planet from which the schismatic group departed to become the first settlers here."

"You're forgetting something," said D'Jevier. "The first settlement had no women, and the second settlement was almost a hundred years later! They couldn't have lived that long."

Madame nodded. "They weren't supposed to have had women, no. But perhaps they did. Stolen women. Enslaved women. They simply didn't want it known."

Onsofruct cried, "So why haven't we ever seen them? Why didn't they make themselves known?"

"We haven't seen them because they didn't wish to be seen," said Madame. "They know what the Hags would do about enslaved women, and they do not want us to know they are here. They must have maintained a hidden community, somewhere. This planet is certainly rife with enough wilderness to hide a whole population if it wanted to stay hidden!"

After a long pause, Onsofruct said, "In addition to the two sons of thunder, there's a sailor lad missing, who seemingly went off with the Questioner herself, plus another of your young men. His name was Mouche."

Madame cried, "Mouche?" She looked quickly at D'Jevier, then back at Onsofruct. "Is he all right?"

"We a.s.sume so. You seem to care a good deal. Who is he?"

"He's ... just Mouche. Well, I confess, a favorite of mine. We have favorites, though we shouldn't."

"What can you tell us about him?" asked Onsofruct.

Madame poured a splash more brandy and sat back in her chair, surprised to find that her hand trembled slightly. "Nothing evil at all. I bought Mouche when he was twelve, and I made the first overture, having seen the boy in the marketplace. The father came to the House first, talked to some of the students and to Simon, who's one of my old boys. Only when he was convinced the boy would be well treated did he consent, even though his need was great."

"And his mother?" Onsofruct set down her gla.s.s.

"I didn't meet the mother. She must be a good-looking woman to produce such a son."

Onsofruct remarked, "He's handsome, then?"

"Oh, remarkably, yes. Many of my students are extremely good looking, and none are plain. Appearance is what sells! But it isn't his appearance that made me like him so. Most young men, well, you can imagine, learning to be a Consort is for most of them an occasion for a good deal of lewdness and that excretory jocularity that men seem to find funny. It's something we work hard to control, since by and large women are offended by it. With Mouche it wasn't necessary. Mouche was never lewd. He went through a stage when he was about sixteen when he seemed distracted, which isn't uncommon, but then lately, it seemed that he was above his work, very sure and capable but able to do it without thinking about it. No, it was more than that! He was able to embue a relationship with romance without personalizing it. He was able to do what we try to get all the young men to do; focus on the ideal, treat the real as though it were the ideal. Mouche could do that."

"A treasure," murmured D'Jevier.

After a rather long pause, Madame said, "Yes. A treasure. When that woman took him from here, I wanted to kill her. If I'd had a proper weapon in my hand, I might have done so. I managed to warn him, before he left, to be as inconspicuous as possible. Now, hearing that she's dead but that he is, so far as anyone knows, unscathed, I breathe again in hope. I have not had many like Mouche."

Onsofruct asked, "Why did the Questioner take him? Or the sailor boy?"

"Most likely she needed strong young hands to fetch and carry. Do you know where they went?"

D'Jevier explained about the sneakway in the wall.

"We must go after her, of course," said Madame. "Until my students are back, I have little purpose to my life, and my students won't be back unless we find this Questioner, get her or it off planet, and return to our own lives. a.s.suming the volcanoes leave us any life."

"I suppose we must go in search of her," said D'Jevier, almost unwillingly. "Otherwise ... well, we'll have the Council of Worlds on our doorstep. If by some chance our world survives all this rumbling and rattling, I'd prefer that the Council of Worlds not involve themselves in our lives."

"We should go as soon as possible," said Madame. "I'll need a couple of days to take care of immediate business, but then I can leave the House to my a.s.sistant. It's threeday morning. I can be ready early fiveday. Say at dawn."

"Let us use the time to prepare well," Onsofruct suggested. "We will want provisions, and some strong Haggers, and such things as lights and ropes. We can get that together by early fiveday morning."

"Very well," said Madame, already a.s.sembling her kit in her mind. "I will meet you then, at Mantelby's."

45.

The Camp of The Wilderneers.

The light carriage that Ashes had used to pick up his sons was abandoned at the edge of the wild, not far from the place Marool's parents and sister had died. The horse behind the carriage was already saddled and there were two more light saddles in the boot. Shortly the three were riding through the forest, along the level top of one of the great lava tubes to the north of the Combers. It was not the first time they had ridden together, though it was the first time they had ridden here, and only Ashes knew the way to their destination.

The horses' shod feet struck the top of the buried lava tube like drumsticks striking a gong. Most often the sound was muted, but occasionally, as they crossed a particularly reverberant s.p.a.ce, the earth shivered around them with deep bell sounds, an enormous tolling, as though for some creature long dying or just dead. Bane was not normally fanciful, but even he was struck with the similarity of the sound to that of the bells of the Panhagion, which tolled away the old year at the festival of the Tipping.

None of them were sorry when the stony way ended. They turned to the side for a brief time and picked up another stone-floored path, almost like a road, this one completely m.u.f.fled so that the hooves made no more sound than on any paved surface. Bane, staring at his surroundings, such of them as he could see in the moonlight, thought the lava trail was extremely roadlike. The dirt at either side of it was pushed up, like a curb, as though something huge and wide had moved this way, displacing the earth as it went. Several places along this track Bane found large, oval pieces of something, like enormous fingernails.

They rode for some hours, dismounting as needed to relieve themselves and once to eat food from the saddlebags and drink from the flasks. When dawn came, Ashes turned aside from the trail he'd been following, hobbled the horses and let them browse while he slept, leaving it to Bane and Dyre whether they followed his example or not.

The boys were unusually quiet, somewhat awed by the silence of the forest. House Genevois had always been clattery with boys, and they had spent their childhood on the farm where there was constant cackling of poultry, the low or bleat of livestock, the chatter of people. Here was no sound at all. The night had been windless. They had crossed no streams. No bird had cried, no small beast called, no large beast threatened. Sleep eluded them, and they dropped into uncomfortable slumber only moments, so it seemed, before Ashes roused them again.

When they remounted, the silence was still unbroken, and even Ashes looked around himself with a certain wariness.

"Is it always this still?" asked Bane, in a throaty whisper.

Ashes shook his head, his eyes swiveling from point to point. "No. Usually there's animals making noises. I don't like this quiet. It could mean Joggiwagga about."

"What?" grunted Dyre. "What's Joggi whatsit?"

"Very big and nervous and dangerous," murmured Ashes.

"Did Joggy whatsit clear the road along here?" Bane asked. "Something big came along these tops. The dirt's all pushed back. And there's funny pieces of stuff."

Ashes swallowed, his nostrils pushed together, then said, "No. That wasn't Joggiwagga. Those things are scales, and they came off another ... another thing entirely."

"Something big?"

"Big, yes."

"Never seen any really big wild thing," opined Dyre.

His father retorted, "You boys favored little things, didn't you? Well, the one that made this trail is a lot bigger than the little critters you hunted for fun while you were at Dutter's."

"How'd you know?" asked Bane, astonished. "Never told you!"

"You don't need to tell me anything, boy. I know everything there is to know about you from before you was planted to the breath you just took. I know all about your hunting trips."

"Ol' Dutter, he said even if we killed something, he wouldn't let us keep any hides."

"No. That furry thing you hunted-there was lots of them when we first landed, and we hunted 'em for fur, but the Timmys, they won't let you keep any part of an animal here. Well, except for the littlest ones, birds and fish and mousy things. The only way to keep hides from anything bigger than that is put 'em in a safe, put the safe in a metal-lined room, then send them off world as soon as may be, the way we used to. Dutter knew that. He wanted no trouble with Timmys."

"Like to see the Timmy could take something from me," muttered Bane. "Like to see 'em try."

Ashes didn't reply. They had come to the end of the network of level lava trails they'd been following for hours and were now climbing onto the flanks of the ancient calderas that stretched in an unbroken range stretching south from the sh.o.r.e of the Jellied Sea, and perhaps beneath it, for all anyone knew. The day wore itself out in ascents and descents, in long traverses across sliding scree, ending at evening on a shadowed ledge that darkened as the sun set.

"Can't go on until moonrise," said Ashes. "Can't see where to go. We'll build a little fire and have some food, catch some sleep."

Bane and Dyre were too tired to complain. They ate, dropped into sleep, only to be wakened again, this time for hours of careful, slow travel by landmarks only Ashes could see, until almost dawn.

"The way's tricky from here," Ashes remarked, dismounting and hobbling his horse once more. "We'll wait for full light."

Full light came. They rode. Darkness came. They stopped, until moonrise once more, then went on. Shortly before dawn, after a long climb, they drew up near the edge of a cliff that marked the rim of still another immense and ancient caldera. Early light bleached the eastern sky. Two moons threw silver reflections in a lake far below, and beyond the lake flickered the amber glows of a scatter of campfires.

"Our people," said Ashes. "Wilderneers." He moved restlessly on his saddle, then turned to the boys and told them to dismount.

When they were afoot, he brought them close, within arms' distance, and muttered, "Before we go down there, there's things you got to know."

"Yeah?" sneered Bane. "And what would that be?"

Ashes reached to his side, thrusting back his coat to let Bane get a good look at the whip coiled around his waist, the sharp end hanging at his side, then grasped him by the shoulder in a grip that made him cry out. "You want some more of what you had before, boy? I'm not one of your flowery fencing masters or your wet-eared boys or some woman you can smart-mouth to. I'm Ashes and Thunder, and you'll hark or you'll suffer." He gave Bane a shake and released him, glaring into his face. "Now the two of you. You listen.

"A long time ago, we came here, a bunch of us, from the planet Thor. We'd had a bit of a disagreement with our brethren there, and we decided to find ourselves a new place where we could do things right without having to explain every other move...."

"What was the disagreement about?" asked Bane, interested in all this.

For a moment Ashes looked angry, but then he breathed deeply and said, "Women. How we were going to handle women. We said women had no right to refuse any man anything. Whatever man she belonged to, he owned her just like he owned a horse, and you didn't let a horse say it wasn't going to be bred or saddled. We took a few women just to prove the point, and we killed some families that got in the way, and the whole thing blew up into a sort of war.

"Well, we had hostages, and we said we'd let the hostages go if they'd let us go, and they said so leave. They wouldn't let us bring any women, but we figured we could pirate some from somewhere, once we got settled. So, we scouted a few places and decided on this one, then we met up at a transfer point, and we captured a colony ship with almost a thousand men aboard, people we could use as slaves, and we came here. The place suited us. We settled in, we planted crops, we built a couple of fortresses, we started building towns, we did some hunting, some trapping, we sold furs off planet-after we learned how to get 'em off planet-we brought in some recruits, we sold biologicals, Dingle and Farfaran and other such stuff, and after a score or so years, after most of the towns were built and most of the slaves were dead, we decided it was time to bring in some women."

Dyre gaped. "Why'ja wait so long?"

"Too much trouble to get them earlier. Our system is, women are for breeding, and that's it. You gotta keep 'em locked, you gotta keep 'em private. Letting other men see your women, that'd be shameful. So, before we brought women in, we had to make places to keep 'em, places they could stay out of the way, do their own work without being seen. Courtyards, like. Like there in House Genevois. That wharf behind there, we shipped furs and stuff down river from there. When the courtyard was empty, the Timmys used to come out into it, and I used to sit up there under the tower watching them dance."

"Timmys? You saw Timmys? Our teacher said they didn't come till after the second settlement!"

"They were here almost as soon as we were, but I'm not talking about that...." He paused, as though he'd lost track of his tale.

"So?" muttered Bane. "So, you brought women."

"We were getting ready to, getting the ship ready, deciding who'd go and who'd stay, and then one night, the Timmys came out of the walls in packs, like ants. It wasn't just Timmys, either; they had other kinds of bigger critters with 'em, and there we were, all of us, wrapped up like so many packages, being hauled off into these woods here. They hauled us partway and they floated us partway, and they swallowed us partway, and we ended up down in caves, over there, some days west, beyond the far side of this valley! They took us out of the caves and down into a kind of pond. And they threw us in the pond. And after a while, we crawled out again."

"So," muttered Bane again, yawning.

Ashes said angrily, "So, some of us came out pretty much like we was before and some of us didn't."

The boys stared at him, waiting, but he seemed to find no words to go on with his story. Finally, Dyre ventured, "What do you mean, not like before?"

Ashes chewed at his lip, eventually saying, "Some of us was changed, that's what I mean. And some went on changing. When we go down there, where the camp is, you'll see some of us who don't look ... well, who don't look like we do, but you'll know they're Wilderneers by the smell. Since that pond, we all smell the same. But you won't know by the shape, so be careful who you smart off to."

Bane's forehead was creased. "So what did you do about the women?"

"We never got any women," said Ashes. "When we came out of that d.a.m.ned pond, there weren't enough of us left in shape to man the ship, and in the meantime a trader ship had set down and taken all the slaves away, not that there was many left. We came roarin' down on 'em, and when they saw us, they killed a good many of us, then they took off in both ships, theirs and ours! Left a notice on the door of the fortress saying they'd salvaged our ship, taken it as a prize!

"So, after that we had no way to get women. Not until the other settlers came. Then we took some women, but they weren't our women, so it wasn't any good."

"Settlers let you get away with that?"

"The settlers didn't know it was us. The settlers don't even know we're here. Some of us, we go to town when we like, we wander around, we know what's goin' on, they don't know who we are. The rest of us, well, the rest of us learned to stay hid. There's caves ... caves that go on forever. After they took our ship, we stayed in caves for a long, long time."

"So it was you, doing the women raids," said Bane.

"Well, it was us to start with. Some of us looked ... normal, so we dressed up like them, let them think it was one family going after women from another family. Before you knew it, it was one family going against another family, like we'd given 'em the idea. They never did know it was us started it."

"So, you took some women...."

"Just enough to find out it wouldn't work anyhow. We couldn't breed 'em."

"Whattaya mean, you couldn't breed 'em?"

"They died. We'd get close to 'em, and they'd die. Every time."

"But there's us," Bane complained. "We had a mother!"

"That was later, and I tricked her," Ashes said. "It was something we planned, to get some daughters born to us who could be our kind of women, women of our own. But ... she didn't have daughters. She had you two."

A long silence, during which Bane and Dyre thought their way through the implications of this.

"You mean we're the only ones?" Bane asked. "The only kids you've had in hundreds of years?"

"The only ones the Wilderneers ever had," said Ashes.