“What?”

  “Bury that when you’re finished with it.”

  “Sure.”

  “I mean it, imp.”

  “I hear you.”

  “Hunh.” She tied the case onto the backpack, slid her arms into the straps of the packframe and rocked onto her feet. “We don’t want anyone knowing where and when we came ashore.”

  He whistled a short sassy trill, modulated it into a breathy, cheery tune, kicked a groove in the sand, set the pack in it with exaggerated deliberation. In an almost dance, he used his feet to scrape sand over the pack, listening to the sounds the grains made so he’d know when the job was finished, squatted and patted the loose soil down with finicky little touches, smoothing it and smoothing it, passing his fingertips over the patch, smoothing it again.

  She watched a minute, shook her head. “Stop fooling, imp. You’ve made your point. Here. Take this.” She tapped the blanket roll against his arm. “I’m set. Let’s go.”

  After she scrambled over the edge of the earth wall and pushed onto her feet, she eyed the great trees uneasily. Not so long ago a carnivorous collection of monsters very much like these had come close to sucking her dry. She moved cautiously after Linfyar, relieved when she passed through the margin of brush and fern to find no skirts of blood-drinking air roots on the trunks. She stayed wary. You never knew what trees could get up to, no matter how safe and rooted they looked.

  The presence was suddenly there, laughing.

  “It’s all right for you,” she said aloud, indignation quivering in her voice. “You know this place.”

  “What?” Linfyar turned his head, one ear quivering at her.

  “Never mind.” She caught up with him, glared at the trees around them, walked close beside him. Soft amused laughter sounded in her head. She ignored it, but after a tense sweaty kilometer or so, she saw the humor in the situation and grinned into the dappled shadow as she walked beneath the trees. After all those years as a voice in someone else’s head, who was she to object to a voice walking through her own?

  * * * *

  They walked north, keeping to the fringes of the forest. Now and then Linfyar would stumble, turn his head side to side, his pointed fawn’s ears twitching. For the first time she thought to wonder what hallucination was like for someone born without eyes. Imagined sound? What kind? Memories from his old home? She started to ask, but changed her mind; she didn’t want to be a part of the illusions, didn’t know whether he would hear what she said or distort it into something else, perhaps something frightening. After several of these episodes, she saw him shake his head and then his whole body, grin and begin a lilting whistle, a raunchy trader’s song she’d taught him on Ibex when Aleytys was off somewhere. She smiled. Aleytys fussed too much. Worried over things. In a way Ibex was good for her, all those dreary little enclaves obsessed with killing off everyone who was different and unless she wanted to spend a Vryhh lifetime there she couldn’t change any of it; with all her power she couldn’t boot them into righteousness. Still, just as well she grew up with that uncomfortable conscience firmly installed—what would she be like without it? Shadith shivered. I should be glad she worries—I wouldn’t be taking this walk otherwise.

  Halfway through the morning the presence came tickling back, didn’t say anything, just hung around watching. She glanced at Linfyar to see if he felt anything. Neither she nor Aleytys knew much about the limits of his perceptions; he kept surprising them. He showed no signs of noticing anything strange floating about. He was whistling, more softly now, spaced bursts of sound, as if he were trying out his hallucinations, working on them, playing with the tricks his mind was throwing him. She laughed. He swung around and began to walk backward, grinning at her, his ears shivering and shifting about. “I think you like this crazy world,” she said.

  “Ay-yeh, Shadow.” He waited for her, turned around and jigged along beside her. “Crazy-crazy.” He liked the sound of the doubled word, said it again, “Crazy-crazy,” began chanting it over and over under his breath. She worried for a moment about how he was going to find his way without his locator pulses, but his proximity sense and whatever else he

  had was working well enough, because he negotiated the tangle of roots more nimbly than she, avoided patches of brush and low-hanging tree limbs, all the while continuing the sotto-voce chant, changing words to try out different combinations of sounds.

  The world blurred suddenly, it warped and flowed into strange shapes about her, images dripping down, melting into each other, color melting into color, shapes ballooning, dissipating like smoke, shapes doubling and redoubling. She stumbled to a stop, lost in this chaos, flung her hands out groping for something solid. Anything. A small warm hand-closed on hers, held it with a strength, that vaguely surprised her; she heard a gush of words but understood none of them, their sounds as distorted as the colors and shapes, understood only that it was Linfyar who spoke. Trembling with relief, she clung to those anchor points, Linfy’s hand and Linfy’s voice, and let him lead her until the confusion faded.

  When the sun was close to directly overhead, they stopped to eat and rest awhile; in a thirty-two-hour day it was a long time between dawn and noon. As they ate they talked about things unconnected with this disconcerting world, things back on Wolff, horses and colts, the vagaries of the house cats, the song of birds that lived in the grove of trees behind the house, the necessity or not for Linfyar to spend some years in school; they tried out a few songs, blending their voices at times, at times Shadith singing to Linfy’s whistle, at times he singing while she beat the rhythm with her palms on the leather of her harp case. The listener in the forest drifted in closer sometimes, sometimes retreated until Shadith almost couldn’t feel him, but never quite went away.

  Shortly after they started on, Linfyar staggered, then began running. Shadith ran after him, caught him before he could hurt himself, hugged him tight against her, remembering how much comfort she’d found in his touch when she suffered chaos. Disoriented and frightened, he clung to her, whimpering and shuddering. She looked about, found a knot of roots high enough to make a seat, lifted him into her lap and rocked him like a baby, stifling her urge to sing to him; it might make his horrors worse. Finally she heard a long shuddering sigh and he relaxed against her. She risked a word. “Over?”

  “Uh-huh, Shadow.” For a moment longer he nestled against her, then he pushed away with nervous strength and stood on the bed of leaves with feet apart, his body a shout of defiance; whistling as loud as he could, he flung a scornful trill at the forest. “Hunh,” he said. “Stupid trees.”

  Shadith laughed and rocked back onto her feet, the pack a weight that grew heavier with each hour. A lot of hours ahead before they got to the end of Linfy’s stupid trees. She thought of making camp here and going on in the morning, then sighed and began walking. Might as well keep going. God knew what prowled here in the dark.

  Episodes of confusion came steadily after that, none of them quite as bad as the first. Linfyar and she helped each other and kept moving; their metabolisms differed enough for one to be clear-headed when the other was muzzy. Irritated and a little afraid, she was tempted to take more of the counteractant, but Head had warned her against that. “We’re running on guess and hope,” she’d said, “and the fact that this glop has never killed anyone, though a lot of different types have taken it. Both you and the boy are mutated stock, no knowing what it’ll do to you; the only reason for chancing it is that going in without it would probably be worse.” Shadith endured and Linfyar endured and both kept moving. The exercise seemed to help. By midafternoon the severity of the hallucinations had diminished so much that for Shadith it was like looking at the world about her though a distorting screen. Shapes and colors changed, sometimes did the melting trick, but she knew where she was and what was around her no matter how wild the contortions got. Her mind and body were adjusting to the world, a wrenching experience but one that seemed about over. Linfyar was experimenting with sound, playing with what had terrified him just a short while before, so she knew he’d passed his crisis and was enjoying himself again; she watched him strutting along and chuckled softly. I told Lee you were a tough little imp, she thought, and so you are, oh yes you are.

  When the sun was a hand’s breadth above the horizon and shadows were swallowing the expanse of three-lobed ground-cover plant thick and soft as moss that stretched from the forest to the outskirts of the city, Shadith and Linfyar walked from under the trees and stopped after a few steps onto the clovermoss, enjoying the sudden sweep of a brisk cool wind.

  Linfyar bounced on the springy growth, bent and broke off a stem, crushed the leaves and sniffed at them. “Walking on a mattress,” he said. “Smells good.” He rubbed the sap off his fingers, drooped all over, put on a pathetic little smile, turned himself into an image of extreme debility. “I’m tired, Shadow. I’m hungry. Let’s stop.”

  “We’re almost there, Linfy.”

  “You said that before.” He dropped into a squat, looked stubborn. “You’ve been saying that for the longest.”

  “Well, it’s really true now, we’ve got maybe half a kilometer to go. I can see it, Linfy, and if you listen, you can probably hear something. Besides, do you want to spend the night around the forest? Remember what we ran into on Ibex.”

  He crouched where he was without responding, his fingers wandering across the clovermoss, but his ears twitched, then swiveled in the direction of the city. A minute more and he got wearily to his feet, no play-acting this time. He really is tired, she thought. Poor baby. He sighed. “When can we stop?”

  “Soon as we find a place to stay.”

  The inner city, the center of government on Avosing with its tall sealed buildings and covered ways, where the homeworlders of the Colonial Authority lived and worked, that city sat inside a high wall that was as unnecessary as it was massive, serving as a visual symbol of the distrust all of those inside it had for the world they were supposed to govern. The wall had only two gates—airlocks fitted with baffles and filters and everything else Pajunggs could think of to keep out Avosing ,air and the confusion it carried. One gate led to the great cathedral casino, the other into the city proper. Avosingers seldom used that one, for the city made them uncomfortable; they went into it when they had unavoidable business with the Authority and otherwise stayed away. The rest of Keama Dusta, the greater part, was a vast sprawl of homes and businesses, huts and factories, taverns and warehouses, shops and showplaces, a clotted rambling conglomeration without apparent pattern to it.

  Shadith walked into the fringes of the city, past crude shacks that could have been eyesores but weren’t, structures thrown together from scrap wood, nothing painted, bits of this sort of wood and that fitted together into curving natural shapes, aged by time and weather into soft grays and umbers, vines of the blooming sort twisting about the timbers until the distinction between outside and in was lost. The strong slanting light from the setting sun intensified the textures, adding strong blacks and reddish highlights to the more muted colors. I think I’m going to like these people, anyone with such a feeling for beauty. She wrinkled her nose as the presence laughed in her head. Giggling fool, she thought at it. There were no streets, no straight lines anywhere, just the irregular spaces between the houses, some long and thin, some like roundish bulbs on a vine, all covered with the vigorous clovermoss. Spaces filled with a ferment of life, children running everywhere, food vendors with steaming everything on skewers over coals and under heat lights, taverns with clusters of tables out on the moss, with men and women sitting over beer and wine talking, laughing, men and women standing about talking with the air.

  A lean woman with gray-streaked hair sat on the clovermoss in one of the nodes, legs crossed, back straight, hands resting on her knees, a vague smile lifting thin lips, lost in some ancient memory, watching it move before her, something cherished by the look on her lined leathery face. Playing shouting wrestling slapping at each other, children ran and tumbled about her, giving her a polite space to herself. When one of them dropped out of the game to stare at a patch of air, the others left that same sort of space about him or her and went on their games and he or she rejoined the action a little later without comment on either side.

  All this was very interesting, but she was tired and Linfyar was stumbling along, clinging to her. She worked her way to one of the larger nodes, found an unoccupied patch of clovermoss, settled her pack beside her with Linfyar to guard it, unsnapped the harp case and sat tuning the harp until she had it right.

  She didn’t know what the local custom was for street performers—don’t even have streets here—or what bureaucratic rites she was skipping, though Head had said the Authority rarely stuck its collective nose outside the walls; it was the invisible government she’d have to placate. Setting up and performing should bring quick action on that; street people, even without streets, protected their privileges. She got interested looks as she finished the tuning and began a ramble across the strings searching for something that felt right for the people and the place. More Avosingers drifted up and settled onto the clovermoss waiting for her to begin.

  Perhaps because of the long dreamvision the night before, what finally felt right was the music of her people. She slid into the croon, using the harp to amplify her range and provide the sounds her voice could not. Almost at once her sisters were dancing again, frail ghosts swaying through the sundown shadows and the gathering crowd.

  Beside her Linfyar straightened his narrow shoulders and began weaving his whistle into her wordless song, deepening and broadening the sound as if he tied into her memories as deeply as she did.

  The Avosingers listened like ancient clients, eyes wide and dreaming.

  And she was doing what she’d never thought to do, singing a dream for others. She was the link who learned and passed on but never performed except for her mother, her trainer, a link as she was. Before the Kanzedor raid that killed her mother and cast her aside, that took her sisters and her aunts, one of the many slave raids that stripped Shayalin of its weavers and destroyed a culture that had lasted for millennia, before she was wrenched from all she knew, sold as trash at the first bid, thrown on her own, her kin vanishing forever, her world irretrievably out of reach (by the time she worked herself loose, it had vanished as thoroughly as her family), before all that, her duty was to store in her brain what could not be recorded or written down, what her grandfather passed to her mother, her mother to her.

  And as she made her music, it came to her that the weavers of Shayalin might be reborn—not as they were, there were no more Shallal, but something … something might be done. Maybe there were people she could teach, maybe a piece of that long-forgotten culture could live again. Hope throbbed in her voice, and joy ….

  When the croon was finished, she settled the harp against her thigh and gave herself over to feeling good, smiling wearily as Linfyar jumped to his feet and began moving through the wakening crowd, shaking the collecting bowl, whistling a cheery coaxing tune, adding his charm to their appreciation to milk a handsome coinflow from the Avosingers.

  One of her listeners got to his feet, shook his head and scuffed over to her, hands in the pockets of his shorts, a boy who couldn’t be much older than Linfyar. “That’s Sojohl’s spot.”

  “Any objection to my using it when he’s not around?”

  The boy rubbed a bare foot over the clovermoss, wiggled his thick reddish brows, worked his mouth, stared vaguely over her head as he thought over his answer, scratched beside his nose, grinned suddenly, an electric beam as effective as any of Linfyar’s. “Nah,” he said. “But you got to move when he comes.”

  “How far?”

  “‘Nother k’shun over.”

  K’shun, she thought. Emptiness. Right. This node is Sojohl’s territory, whoever he is, and I move to the next empty node if he shows up. “Thanks,” she said aloud. “I’m new here.”

  “Yeah, I thought.”

  She looked around. Linfyar was about finished; most of the crowd was drifting off. She turned back to the boy. “You know a place I can stay cheap? My friend and me, we need a roof and supper, been a long day, we’re worn out.”

  He looked her over, turned to watch Linfyar. She didn’t try rushing him, feeling no urge to rush, though the sun was beginning to play color tricks on the clouds overhead and the drifts of pollen that caught the light and glittered through the thick air, making round rainbows that shifted with the slow shift of the light.

  “My mam,” the boy said, startling her out of her drift. “She got a vacancy. You want, I could take you there.”

  “Yeah, why not?” She clamped her teeth together to shut in a yawn, snapped the harp back in its case. With a sigh of weariness and a feeling she was bruised to the bone by them, she slid her arms into the packframe straps, smiled her pleasure as the boy pulled her to her feet. “Mind if we wait till Linfy’s finished? Your mother, however kind, will want to be paid.”

  “Yeah.” He turned to watch Linfyar. His face was a little weasel’s, all pointed, nose and mouth with almost no chin, close-clipped red hair like a weasel’s fur; though he was as grubby as any boy would be at the end of an active day, it was only a single day’s accumulation of dirt, no patina of neglect about him; she’d seen the signs often enough in her wanderings. He reached out, touched the harp case; pulled his hand back though she hadn’t said anything. “You sing good.”

  “Thanks.”

  “That hard to learn?”

  “Depends.” She untied her belt pouch and watched Linfyar drifting back. “I’m Shadith,” she said. “Friends call me Shadow. You can.”