

Chapter 4
Shuli was inside a chimney when she saw the returning stonemen.
It was the chimney of the bakery near the Northgate and only half of it still stood. But in the half that remained, the pigeons liked to sit. In the absence of any net or snare, Shuli had decided that the best way to catch a sitting pigeon was from below. So she was waiting for a pigeon and was peering through a gap between the stones when she saw the movement on the north road.
Only four of them. Red tunics. But this time they were riding horses. There was no small concentrated thing of darkness. She climbed down swiftly from the chimney and stood on a wall behind it to give the signal. Week, week, four times, as loudly as she could. An answering week, week came from the east side; that was a small reassurance that she had been heard. She just hoped the stonemen hadn’t been paying attention.
But the stonemen were making plenty of noises of their own as they rode up to the Northgate. They weren’t trying to be stealthy; so they must be confident that nobody was here.
If they were sure that nobody was here, then what had they come back for? A day out, Shuli thought. A holiday from killing.
She crept round the back of the bakery and padded as silently as a cat – she was good at being a cat – through the blackened rubble to the market hall. Its small bell-tower made an excellent lookout in three directions. The bell had fallen but she scrambled over it and climbed up the inside of the tower to where it had once hung. There she was hidden as long as nobody looked too hard. She trusted that the horsemen would not be interested in the bell-tower.
By now they had split up. Two were riding south through the middle of the town, still making plenty of noise, and looking up and down the silent ruins of the streets they passed.
The other pair rode into the market place below her and dismounted. They went up to one of the Guardians and kicked at her and laughed. Shuli was coldly angry. She always thought of that Guardian as female and did not like to see her kicked. They kicked a couple of others too, before stooping to examine them. They seemed to be looking for something that they did not find, until they came to the corner where the dead stoneman lay.
One of the horsemen exclaimed on seeing the body; and the other one came over pulling what appeared to be some pliers from his pocket. Shuli couldn’t see what he did as he bent over the corpse, but after a couple of minutes they both moved off, talking to each other. They seemed to talk a form of Standard but with a strange abruptness. She thought one of them said,
“There were only two left here, weren’t there?” Two what, she wondered? They mounted their horses and rode off casually down the west street. In her opinion they were not very good riders: they kicked and slapped their horses more than should be necessary. The horses were not as large or grand as Poda but looked agile and tough.
Shuli stayed where she was while the stonemen moved around the town. She trusted that the others all had the sense to stay where they were too. She hoped the last person out of the cellar had swept the entrance to the inn. Yaret had been strict about that. It was one of the few things she was strict about.
The other things were performing Haedath every morning, and holding evening council. They had not missed a single council in the last two weeks, since Yaret had arrived. Shuli put up with evening council, although she didn’t care for it because everyone just stated the obvious. Or what was obvious to her, at any rate.
The stories and songs that followed in the evenings were better. They sang Madeo’s songs: Yaret was teaching them unfamiliar ones and encouraging them to write their own. That was fun although Shuli couldn’t sing. She was better at dancing and practised the Rannikan diligently in private. That was something Yaret couldn’t do, with her wooden leg.
However, she had found that she respected Yaret, and day by day had seen no reason for her respect to be withdrawn. She was glad that Yaret had ridden out to the town of Byant three days ago and not today, or she might have met the stonemen on the road. Yaret had come back looking grave and said that Byant was the same as here, only worse because there appeared to be nobody left at all. There might have been some survivors in the outlying hamlets – just a feeling she had, she said, although they were burnt out too and the streets appeared empty. But she had run out of time to look more thoroughly.
“I expect there are people who got away, and then came back like us, but they were hiding,” Dil had said, and everyone agreed – even Shuli – because keeping Dil happy seemed to be important for all of them. That was because he was the youngest. Although Shuli was the second youngest she sometimes felt like the oldest. She knew she was cleverer and less afraid than either Elket or Charo. She had done more exploring than either of them and had learnt the Ulthared Oveyn on the second time of its saying. She would have memorised it on the first if she hadn’t been so surprised.
By now she could not see any of the stonemen although she could still hear faint voices and hoof-treads in the deep silence of the town. They sounded unexcited: so the Guardians were doing their work. Thank you, Guardians. That was something Yaret said.
Yaret had brought bad news from Byant, but also good. On her way back she had found a survivor – a shepherd on the hills – although he had refused to leave his lonely hut five miles away, or his flock, saying he had to stay to look after them. The stonemen had taken many of the sheep but he had been gathering up any strays. A strange gaunt man, said Yaret, whose words were halting as if he seldom spoke to anyone. But as Yaret pointed out, he now knew where to find other people; and they in turn knew where the sheep were to be found.
Better even than that, Yaret had brought home more chickens. Live ones, from a Byant garden. The hen coop was burnt out but the chickens had been clucking nearby.
“It was Shuli that made me think of it,” she said, as she carefully unwrapped one from the sack she’d carried it home in. It was quiet while held fast in the sacking but began to fluff and squawk indignantly as soon as it was released. They had to catch it again and take the sacks over to the east side where Shuli’s chickens often roosted.
Shuli knew there were no foxes to harass them. She presumed the foxes had all left the area when the fires took hold. She had lied about the dead chicken she had found: it had not been taken by a fox at all, but had been running round in frantic circles with its eyes pecked out. So that would have been crows. She’d wrung its neck.
When they had released the chickens from the sacks, to her delight she saw one was a cockerel. Yaret unwrapped it very carefully.
“It took some catching, believe me,” she said, and showed the peck marks on her arms. “And we might be fed up with it soon if starts doodle-doing all the time.”
However, the cockerel had kept its crowing for the dawn. It was at present lurking with the chickens somewhere on the east side. The stonemen had not gone that way, so they were safe, and Shuli hoped that everyone would keep still and hidden just a little longer because now she could see the stonemen emerging on the west-road, riding slowly.
They were leaving town. After a moment one of them kicked his horse quite viciously into a gallop and instantly the others did the same. They were racing each other. Another five minutes and they were out of sight.
All the same she waited; and when she did descend from her look-out post, it was very cautiously. She went straight to the inn.
Everyone else was there already. They looked relieved to see her although they should have known that she would be all right. Only Yaret and Elket had noticed her owl signal; but Charo and Dil had heard the noise of the approaching stonemen with just enough time to hide in the cellar. Dil looked quite shaken.
“I thought they’d given up searching for people here,” said Elket with an unnecessarily long face.
“They weren’t looking for us,” Shuli told her confidently.
“What makes you say so?” Yaret asked.
So Shuli explained what she had seen in the market place and what she deduced from the stonemen’s careless behaviour.
“Let’s go and hunt for what they found so interesting,” Yaret said. All five of them walked up to the market place and stepped courteously over the Guardians to look at the dead stoneman’s body.
There was a line of holes where the stones had been around the blackened head. It was satisfyingly gruesome. Shuli hoped the stones they drilled into their skulls hurt them. She did not care in the slightest what happened to any of the stonemen after what they’d done. She wished she had a bow or sword to fight them with, although she knew that jumping down from her tower today to attack them would have ended in her death. But all the same.
When she had gone to the forge last week to look for the old swords that used to hang on the walls she found that Charo had got there first. She wished she had remembered the swords earlier, because she knew Charo had taken them although he wouldn’t say. He didn’t trust her to be sensible with a sword. She wondered if Yaret knew about swordplay as well as archery.
“You’d think they would have taken the dead stoneman away,” said Charo now in some disgust, “to bury him.”
“That doesn’t seem important to them. But the stones in their heads evidently are,” Yaret replied. “Yet they’re not gemstones. The ones I’ve seen were more like flint.”
“Perhaps they’re rare,” said Charo. “Rare round here, I mean. So if the stonemen need more stones maybe they have to re-use the old ones.”
“Why would they need more? Why do they need them at all?” asked Yaret.
“The stones must have some special meaning,” suggested Elket. “They might give them…”
“Status,” said Charo.
“Yes.”
“Power,” said Shuli.
Yaret looked at her thoughtfully in that way she had. “What sort of power?”
“Power over the other stonemen.”
“Mmm. What puzzles me,” said Yaret, “is why they’ve waited so long to come back for the stones, if they’re that important. These bodies have been lying here for a month now.”
“Perhaps they didn’t have the right tools before,” said Shuli. “It looked quite difficult to get them out even with pliers.”
“Perhaps they were busy,” put in Dil, “and couldn’t come back until they had horses. You can do a lot more with horses.”
“And you can travel further,” Yaret said with a sudden smile. “You may be right about that, Dil. They may be travelling a long distance to reach us. Which makes it all the stranger about the stones. If we could find one of the stones we could check if there’s anything unusual about them.”
“What about the other dead stoneman, the one outside the forge?” asked Charo.
“They went there too,” said Shuli dampeningly.
“Let’s go and check.”
But sure enough, when they trooped over to the forge to look, the burnt corpse lay discarded without its coronet of stones. They had all been removed.
“That’s a shame,” said Charo.
“And there were only the two dead ones,” Elket added.
“That’s what the stonemen thought as well. I heard them say so. But they were wrong. There is a third dead stoneman,” Shuli said. “It’s underneath the Dondel bridge.” They all turned to stare at her. She shrugged. “It wasn’t important before.”
“It might be now,” said Yaret.
And off they trooped again, back across the ashen town to the north-west edge where the stoneman lay sprawled beneath the bridge, hidden in the reeds. He was not burnt like the others had been and had evidently drowned in the shallows of the Dondel brook. There was not much of him left and what remained was not very much like a human any more.
Yaret told them all to wait on the bank while she waded to the body and turned it over. Shuli saw Yaret take a knife from the man’s belt and was annoyed with herself for not searching him when she first saw him.
Then Yaret used the stoneman’s knife to poke and prise at his head. It took quite a while. Eventually something fell with a small splash into the water. Yaret retrieved it and washed it before bringing it back to shore. When she held it out for them to inspect, it looked a little like a thin arrowhead, sharp at one end, but shaped into a rough dome at the other.
“It doesn’t look anything special,” said Charo.
“I think it’s horrible,” said Elket vehemently. “It’s been inside a man’s head. And it’s so sharp! How could they?”
“They take painkilling drugs for it, apparently,” said Yaret absently, to Shuli’s chagrin. She thought about the stonemen in Yaret’s long ongoing tale, which was continuing nightly. Currently several stonemen had just been killed at the entrance to a cave by the man Rothir, of whom Shuli approved. She approved of Tiburé as well. She had decided that she might quite like to be a Rider of the Vonn if such an option became open to her.
Meanwhile there was plenty to do here. It was decided to leave the stoneman hidden underneath the bridge in case they wanted any more of his stones. He didn’t smell much: the water seemed to have washed the smell away.
Then the others went back towards the inn to make the evening fire before it got dark. Shuli told them she would be working on a cellar she was hopeful of, on the north-side. In fact she had already dug out most of the entrance. It looked as if this cellar was going to be a good one. She could see at least one barrel inside.
But she did not return there now. Instead, once the others had departed, she hung around the Dondel bridge, poking about in the water for anything else that might have fallen in. It had occurred to her that the other two dead stonemen had had no weapons by their bodies, yet in the first attack when she looked back from her hiding-place across the fields she had seen all the stonemen carrying slightly curved swords.
She paused with that picture static in her mind for a few seconds: the upraised sword, the running woman silhouetted by the flames. It had happened. She would not forget. Meanwhile she did not let the image run on in her head but concentrated instead on the contents of the stream. Not to think about it unless you wanted to: that was the trick. She found it easy. She didn’t even think much about her aunt and uncle. They were gone. She thought about the present and the future and looked at the past only when it was necessary, for information.
The stonemen must have taken their dead companions’ swords. But they might well have missed this one. Downstream was the place to look. The banks were obscured by overhanging weeds, so she took off her shoes to wade in. The slow waters of the Dondel were not much more than knee deep. When she turned round to check how far she was from the bridge, she saw the lin.
As soon as she looked, it disappeared, of course, and became a stray bedraggled branch poking through the water. She bowed and said the rhyme:
“Woodwone, woodwone, hob or lin,
Grace to thee and all thy kin.”
She wondered if this was the same lin as she had seen last time. Or was it a lin at all? The Dondel lin was usually to be found on or underneath the bridge, not all this way downstream. It might even be a hob whose home had burnt and had to seek refuge here. There had been a hob in the school; all the children knew that, although they never mentioned it to Anneke the teacher. It had often lurked around the stove, and turned itself into a lump of wood whenever it was looked at. Perhaps this was the school hob. Shuli knew that some people were sceptical about the existence of hobs and lins, but she knew what she had seen and she trusted her own judgement.
When she looked back at the water she saw the sword. Her heart seemed to skip out of time for a second. Were the two connected? The sword and the lin? It was obviously the stoneman’s sword caught in the weeds against the bank, for it was long and slightly curved and starting to grow rust. It would need cleaning and oiling but then it could be very useful.
She pulled it out and tried to wield it. Too heavy. But she herself would grow – was growing fast at present. She wondered if Yaret could wield this sword, and if so, whether she would give Shuli lessons.
But no, she wouldn’t tell Yaret about the sword just yet.
“Thank you, lin,” she said, in case the sword was somehow the lin’s doing – although she didn’t see how it could be. This was probably not the school hob after all, but just the lin that had always lingered around the Dondel bridge.
It was strange that she had seen it so often recently, however. Even before the stonemen first arrived. It might have been several weeks before. She had been seeing the lin – or different lins or hobs – all over the place. After the fire happened, she had vaguely assumed it must be something to do with that; but now that she considered, she realised that such vague assumptions were a mistake. She needed to be precise. As sharp as this sword.
Climbing back onto the bridge with the sword, she felt quite proud but also unusually anxious. There were a number of things going on now that she didn’t understand, and she liked to understand things. The stones; the lins; and as she stared out down the east road, a new thing. Three of them.
“Week, week!”
She did the owl screech for the second time that day, knowing it might well terrify the others. But it might just be necessary.
As she watched, though, she soon realised it was not. The three people approaching were not stonemen after all. They were on foot and the middle one was supported by the other two. The tall one on the left carried a long, hooked stick: a shepherd’s crook. The two others wore long dresses, like Elket’s before she had cut it and stitched it into breeches, although on Elket it did not seem like proper male mode. She was the wrong shape. Male mode was sensible, in Shuli’s opinion. At least her aunt had never objected to that.
Two females in dresses, she thought in some disgust. We don’t need more girls unless they’re me, and they never are. We need more male mode, or more men.
Nevertheless she stowed the sword carefully beneath the bridge, intending to hide it later on in her new cellar; and then she ran across the fields to meet them.