He said nothing, but smiled and waited. He was a wordy fellow, but a good listener—a rare combination.

She found herself saying, “I walked past Naevros just now. I think he saw me—he must have seen me. But he didn’t say anything to me.” She halted then, afraid that what she had said might sound disloyal somehow.

He put his hand on her arm and said, “It has been a hard time for everyone. I assure you, Naevros was as worried about you as any of us. But relief from one pain can make us newly conscious of another.”

“I suppose.” She gripped his arm with her free hand and he released her. “And what have you been keeping busy with?” she asked. That he was busy was a given: she had known Deor almost as long as she had Morlock, and she had rarely seen the dwarf at rest.

“We’ve got to herd the surviving Khnauronts down to A Thousand Towers where the Graith can have a look at them and decide whether to expel them or kill them.”

“No doubt.”

“Well, Lernaion and Earno are sitting with their legs crossed, weaving a little version of the Wards for each of the prisoners. Then they are going to stitch them together into a kind of ghostly honeycomb. Then they’ll be more herdable, you see.”

Aloê thought about this plan for a moment, then said, “It must be an enormous undertaking. Surely there are hundreds of survivors from the battle.”

“No longer.”

“Oh.”

“I guess you mean, ‘Why not?’”

“I guess I do.”

“The Khnauronts without their lifetakers are a fragile bunch; there isn’t much that keeps them alive. All the wounded died. We had binders from the Skein of Healing working night and day to no avail.”

“Odd.”

“It’s odder than that, harven. Many of the unwounded folded their hands and died. They looked—that is—”

“Yes?”

“They looked like you looked, until today. Empty. They’d given up. I’m sorry—”

“No, I understand. But some survive.”

“Yes! We made them soup, you see. Some ate it when it was set before them, some didn’t. The ones who ate lived.”

“Perhaps you should have offered the others pie. Not everyone likes soup.”

“Eh! I wasn’t born to run a refectory for ghouls. They can eat soup or starve, as far as I’m concerned. But that’s not the funny thing, Harven Aloê.”

“There’s a funny thing?”

“Well, more of an oddly disgusting thing.”

“That is a little different.”

“Shut up, can’t you? I’m trying to talk here!”

She bowed low, waving her arms in a parody of a courteous flourish.

“I like how you put that,” Deor said. “Anyway, you know how Southers cut up someone to find out how they died?”

Aloê smiled. She had been born on an island off the southern coast of Laent—about as far south as you could go and still be in the Wardlands. “I’ve never actually done it myself, but—”

“God Avenger!” whispered Deor, genuinely dismayed. He put a hand over his mouth, as if to prevent more offensive words from pouring out.

“Harven Deor!” she said patiently. She grabbed his free hand and held it in both of hers.

He slowly lowered his hand from his mouth. “It’s just that I forget sometimes—no, never mind!”

“Never mind it, Deor, truly.”

“What I really meant was, it’s those strange women from New Moorhope who do it, the yellow-robed healers.”

Some of those women were men, but Aloê wasn’t surprised that the difference wasn’t clear to a dwarf. It wasn’t always clear to her, even back when she was studying the arts at New Moorhope. She nodded.

“They opened up some of these dead Khnauronts, you see. Actually, I think they opened them all up. And the ones who died from not eating, well, they couldn’t have gotten any good from food anyway. Their innards or vittles, the parts that are used for nourishment—I don’t know what the Wardic word is—”

“Use the Dwarvish one.”

“Their shykkump.”

Aloê thought she recognized the word—it represented the tract from the gullet to the anus, if she wasn’t mistaken. She nodded.

“All that,” the dwarf continued, “was useless, and much of it was gone, absorbed back into the walls of the body.”

“All right. That is oddly disgusting.”

“Yes. They were dead from the moment they lost their lifetakers. Lernaion thinks that the ones who could still eat were just recent recruits—their shykkumpen would have dried up over time, too. But Earno thinks that it might have been a rank-marker, with the inferior Khnauronts slurping down soup, and the superior ones feeding off their tal.”

“They seem to be much at odds lately.” (She remembered: They will make that crooked man king someday. And: Shut your lying mouth.)

“The summoners? Indeed. I could almost wish that Bleys were here to step in between them. But the downside would be. . . .”

“That Bleys would be here, yes.” The oldest summoner was loved by few, if any, of his fellow Guardians.

Deor took her to see the captive Khnauronts, in an open field on the far side of the camp. They lay or sat each one alone, and Aloê thought she could see the faint imprint of something unseen in the pale, dry grass around them. Some were sitting upright with folded hands. Others held bowls of soup in their hands, lowering their faces to the liquid and slurping it up like animals. Yet others lay staring at the sky or sleeping.

The field was ringed with spear-armed, gray-caped thains. At a near corner, she saw the Summoner Earno, his legs crossed, his eyes glowing with rapture. Far off, across the field, she could barely descry another white-mantled figure: Lernaion, she supposed.

The wet succulent sounds of slurping were the only ones in the moonlit field.

“Do any of them talk?” she asked Deor.

“They can’t!” Deor pointed to his throat. “No, um, vyrrmidhen.”

“No larynxes.” How did they communicate with each other? Did they not communicate at all? It was strange indeed. “They will have to be examined on the Witness Stone.”

“So the summoners say.”

Aloê’s stomach moved audibly within her.

Deor glanced at her with a raised eyebrow. “Queasy?”

“Hungry,” she admitted. The sounds of the soup-sucking ghouls were indeed disgusting, but the smell of the broth drifting through the cold air was like a breath of meaty heaven.

“God Avenger strike me dead.”

“Avert!” she said automatically. “But do you suppose . . . ?”

“Of course! The Guardians, the Gray Folk, the Silent Folk all have refectories set up. Or we could go under Thrymhaiam.”

“No . . . I should return up the hill to—” Morlock “—the sleephouse.”

“Come in here. We’ll get you something better than soup.”

She found herself sitting on a long bench, eating some sort of roasted bird and the most delicious bread since bread was invented. The rest of the hall was dark, and Deor sat beside her, talking cheerily of this and that, eating roasted mushrooms and drinking wine. He persuaded her to drink some of the wine, and the drink might have been a mistake on her part. She was already weary, and the wine sent her right to the edge of sleep. She had little flashes of awareness as Deor half led, half carried her up the long slope to the sleephouse. Then he was tucking her into bed beside the still-snoring Morlock.

“I’m off in the morning with Earno,” he whispered. “If I don’t see you then, I’ll see you in A Thousand Towers. Be well, and good fortune to you, harven.”

“Harven,” she muttered, and then he was gone. She wished she had sent a word of goodbye to Earno. She regretted it when she awoke alone, long after noon, and knew they must be gone. She regretted it still more when she realized later that she would never speak to Earno again.

CHAPTER THREE

Death of a Summoner

Ten days before he was murdered, Summoner Earno woke with a dry throat and a guilty conscience. The sun was rising over the high Hrithaens to the west. He had told Deor to wake him when the stars spun around to midnight so that he could watch over their charges through part of the darkness. But here it was, deep into day, and he was just waking up.