Shadowkill

##

The door opened. Aghilo took her wrist and tugged her inside, an urgent, fearful pull on her arm.

Matja Allina looked up, nodded, then let her head fall back, her eyelids droop closed again. She said nothing. Her daughters were crouched at her feet. They didn’t know what was happening, but they’d sensed danger and were pale and tense. Ingva was looking fierce again.

She extended her reach, sweeping through wide arcs, finally touched a big-eyed moth hunting gnats along the dark stream.

She went swooping through the night with the prowling moth, in and out among the trees, soaring on muffled wings that read the air currents so exquisitely they beat just once or twice a minute, only speeding up when she rushed down on a swarm of prey insects.

A sudden burst of heat drew her, heat radiating away from the cooling engines of a grounded flit, an open flier capable of lifting a score of passengers. The moth played in the thermals like a child dancing in wave-froth, forgetting her hunger in the exuberance of her tiny joy.

Candles were burning in here also; the current that fed the bedroom lamps had been diverted into the Honor Suite.

Hot wax and fear. The stink of both filled the room.

Aghilo dropped her arm and went back to the chair where she’d been sitting.

Tinoopa was already here, sitting cross-legged on the floor in the lefthand corner of the room where she had a view of the door but was inconspicuous behind the chair where Polyapo sat.

The titular Housekeeper looked older by half a century than she’d been at the start of the meal. Though Polyapo was Irrkuyon by birth, she was also female and a poor relation without any protection but her relatives’ good will. And when relatives fought, if she guessed wrong about who’d win, if she went too far with the wrong loyalties, she’d be one of the first to perish. She wasn’t an intelligent woman, but instinct told her that this situation could go in any of half a dozen directions, most of them deadly, that she could do nothing to influence the outcome. Nothing but sit here and pray to whatever gods a preybeast had that the powerful and the angry wouldn’t notice her.

The Jili Arluja was in more or less the same situation, but she was in less danger, being without ambition. She was content to be here and teach the girls as long as they needed her, what happened after that she was also content to leave to the good will of the Matja. Any dreams she had, time had leached out of her. She was sitting quietly beside the girls, touching them now and then, a gentle encouragement and comforting. Especially Yla. As Kizra crossed to Tinoopa, Yla gasped suddenly, turned and pressed her face against Arluja’s knees. The tutor sighed, stroked the girl’s hair.