Relief was like a jolt of strong liquor that went to his head. He even laughed aloud — four short, sharp barks that made Mudfoot stare. “So, do I owe you my life? Did you dash back to the Glade, yapping for help?” he crooned.

For once, Mudfoot seemed set aback, as if the noor knew it was being mocked.

Aw, cut it out, Dwer told himself. For all you know, it might even be true.

Most of his other hurts were the sort he had survived many times before. Several were sewn shut with needle and thread, cross-stitched by a fine, meticulous hand. Dwer stared at the seam-work, abruptly recognizing it from past experience. He laughed again, knowing his rescuer from tracks laid across his own body.

Lark. How in the world did he know?

Clearly, his brother had managed to find the shivering group amid the snowdrifts, dragging him all the way to one of the qheuen freeholds of the upper hills. And if I made it, Rety surely did. She’s young and would chew off Death’s arm, if He ever came for her.

Dwer puzzled for a while over blotchy, pale stains on his arms and hands. Then he recalled. The mulc-spider’s golden fluid — someone must have peeled it off, where it stuck.

Those places still felt strange. Not exactly numb so much as preserved — somehow offset in time. Dwer had a bizarre inkling that bits of his flesh were younger now than they had been before. Perhaps those patches would even outlive his body for a while, after the rest of him died.

But not yet, One-of-a-Kind, he mused.

It’s the mulc-spider who’s gone. Never got to finish her collection.

He recalled flames, explosions. I better make sure Rety and the glaver are all right.

“I don’t guess you’d run and fetch my brother for me, would you?” he asked the noor, who just stared back at him.

With a sigh, Dwer draped a fur over his shoulders, then gingerly pushed up to his knees, overruling waves of agony. Lark would resent him popping any of those fine stitches, so he took it easy, standing with one hand pressed against the nearest wall. When the dizziness passed, he shuffled on his heels to the ornate table, retrieving the candle in its clay holder. The doorway came next, a low, broad opening covered by a curtain of hanging wooden slats. He had to stoop, pushing through the qheuen-shaped portal.

A pitch-black tunnel slanted left and right. He chose the leftward shaft, since it angled upward a bit. Of course, blue qheuens built their submerged homes to a logic all their own. Dwer used to get lost even in familiar Dolo Dam, playing hide-and-seek with Blade’s creche-mates.

It was painful and awkward keeping most of his weight gingerly on the heels. Soon he regretted the stubborn impulse that sent him wandering like this, away from his convalescent bed. But a few duras later, his stubbornness was rewarded by sounds of anxious conversation, echoing from somewhere ahead. Two speakers were clearly human — male and female — while a third was qheuen. None were Lark or Rety, though mumbled snatches rang familiar. And tense. Dwer’s hunter-sensitivity to strong feelings tingled like his frostbitten fingers and toes.

“…our peoples are natural allies. Always have been. Recall how our ancestors helped yours throw off the tyranny of the grays?”

“As my folk succored yours when urrish packs stalked humans everywhere outside Biblos Fortress? Back when our burrows sheltered your harried farmers and their families, till your numbers grew large enough to let you fight back?”

The second voice, aspirated from two or more leg-vents, came from a qheuen matron, Dwer could tell. Probably lord of this snug mountain dam. He didn’t like the snatches of conversation he had heard so far. He blew out the candle, shuffling toward the soft glow of a doorway up ahead.

“Is that what you are asking of me now?” the matriarch went on, speaking with a different set of vents. The timbre of her Anglic accent changed. “If refuge is your need against this frightful storm, then I and my sisters offer it. Five fives of human settlers, our neighbors and friends, may bring their babes and chimps and smaller beasts. I am sure other lake-mothers in these hills will do the same. We’ll protect them here until your criminal cousins depart, or till they blast this house to splinters with their almighty power, setting the lake waters boiling to steam.”

The words were so unexpected, so free of any context in Dwer’s foggy brain, that he could not compass them.

The male human grunted. “And if we ask for more?”

“For our sons, you mean? For their rash courage and spiky claws? For their armored shells, so tough and yet so like soft cheese when sliced by Buyur steel?” The qheuen mother’s hiss was like that of a bubbling kettle. Dwer counted five overlapping notes, all vents working at once.

“That is more,” she commented after a pause. “That is very much more indeed. And knives of Buyur steel are like whips of soft boo, compared to the new things we all fear.”

Dwer stepped around the corner, where several lanterns bathed the faces of those he had been listening to. He shielded his eyes as two humans stood — a dark stern-looking man in his mid-forties and a stocky woman ten years younger, with light-colored hair severely tied back from a broad forehead. The qheuen matron rocked briefly, lifting two legs to expose flashes of claw.

“What new things do you fear, revered mother?” Dwer asked hoarsely. Turning to the humans, he went on. “Where are Lark and Rety?” He blinked. “And there… was a glaver, too.”

“All are well. All have departed for the Glade, bearing vital information,” the qheuen whistle-spoke. “Meanwhile, until you recover, you honor this lake as our guest. I am known as Tooth Slice Shavings.” She lowered her carapace to scrape the floor.

“Dwer Koolhan,” he answered, trying awkwardly to bow with arms crossed over his chest.

“Are you all right, Dwer?” the man asked, reaching toward him. “You shouldn’t be up and about.”

“I’d say that’s up to Captain Koolhan himself,” the woman commented. “There’s much to discuss, if he’s ready.”

Dwer peered at them.

Danel Ozawa and… Lena Strong.

He knew her. They had been scheduled to meet at Gathering, in fact. Something having to do with that stupid tourism idea.

Dwer shook his head. She had used a word, strange and dire-sounding.

Captain.

“The militia’s been called up,” he reasoned, angry with his mind for moving so slowly.

Danel Ozawa nodded. As chief forester for the Central Range, he was nominally Dwer’s boss, though Dwer hardly saw him except at Gatherings. Ozawa was a man of imposing intellect, a deputy sage, sanctioned to make rulings on matters of law and tradition. As for Lena Strong, the blond woman was aptly named. She had been a crofter’s wife until a tree fell — accidentally, she claimed — on her shiftless husband, whereupon she left her home village to become one of the top lumberjack-sawyers on the river.

“Highest-level alert,” Ozawa confirmed. “All companies activated.”

“What… all? Just to collect a little band of sooners?”

Lena shook her head. “The girl’s family beyond the Rimmers? This goes far beyond that.”

“Then—”

Memory assailed Dwer. The blurry image of a hovering monster, firing bolts of flame. He croaked, “The flying machine.”

“That’s right.” Danel nodded. “The one you encountered—”

“Lemme guess. Some hotheads dug up a cache.”

Dreamers and ne’er-do-wells were always chasing rumors of a fabled hoard. Not rubble but a sealed trove buried on purpose by departing Buyur. Dwer often had to round up searchers who strayed too far. What if some angry young urs actually found an ancient god-weapon? Might they test it first on two isolated humans, trapped in a mulc-spider maze, before going on to settle larger grudges?