"There!" she heard Agat shout, above her on the slanting, stepped inner face of the wall, built of paving-stones and rocks from the seacliffs. He came down to her, his eyes blazing, and hurried her off to the League Hall. "Saw it just for a second as it crossed Otake Street. It was running, it swung its head towards us. Do the things hunt in packs?"

She did not know; she only knew Wold's story of having killed a snowhoul single-handed, among last Winter's mythic snows. They brought the news and the question into the crowded refectory.

Umaksuman said positively that snowghouls often ran in packs, but the farborns would not take a hilf's word, and had to go look in their books. The book they brought in said that snowghouls had been seen after the first storm of the Ninth Winter running in a pack of twelve to fifteen.

"How do the books say? They make no sound. It is like the mindspeech you speak to me?"

Agat looked at her. They were at one of the long tables in the Assembly Room, drinking the hot, thin grass-soup the farborns liked; ti, they called it.

"No—well, yes, a little. Listen, Rolery, I'll be going outside in a minute. You go back to the hospital. Don't mind Wattock's temper. He's an old man and he's tired. He knows a lot, though.

Don't cross the Square if you have to go to another building, use the tunnels. Between the Gall archers and those creatures ..." He gave a kind of laugh. "What next, I wonder?" he said.

"Jakob Agat, I wanted to ask you ..."

In the short time she had known him, she had never learned for certain how many pieces his name came into, and which pieces she should use.

"I listen," he said gravely.

"Why is it that you don't speak mindspeech to the Gaal? Tell them to—to go. As you told me on the beach to run to the Stack. As your herdsman told the hann ..."

"Men aren't hann," he said; and it occurred to her that he was the only one of them all that spoke of her people and his own and the Gaal all as men.

"The old one—Pasfal—she listened to the Gaal, when the big army was starting on south."

"Yes. People with the gift and the training can listen in, even at a distance, without the other mind's knowing it. That's a bit like what any person does in a crowd of people, he feels their fear or joy; there's more to mindhearing than that, but it's without words. But the mindspeech, and receiving mindspeech, is different. An untrained man, if you bespeak him, will shut his mind to it before he knows he's heard anything. Especially if what he hears isn't what he himself wants or believes. Non-Communicants have perrio feet defenses, usually. In fact to learn paraverbal communication is mainly to learn how to break down one's own defenses."

"But the animals hear?"

"To some extent. That's done without words again. Some people have that knack for projecting to animals. It's useful hi herding and hunting, all right. Did you never hear that farborns were lucky hunters?"

"Yes, it's why they're called witches. But am I like a hann, then? I heard you."

"Yes. And you bespoke me—once, in my house—It happens sometimes between two people: there are no barriers, no defenses." He drained his cup and looked up broodingly at the pattern of sun and jeweled circling worlds on the long wall across the room. "When that happens," he said, "it's necessary that they love each other. Necessary ... I can't send my fear or hate against the Gaal.

They wouldn't hear. But if I turned it on you, I could kill you. And you me, Rolery ..."

Then they came wanting him out in the square, and he must leave her. She went down to look after the Tevaran men in the hospital, which was her assigned job, and also to help the wounded farborn boy to die: a hard death that took all day. The old bonesetter let her take care of the boy.

Wattock was bitter and rageful, seeing all his skill useless. "We humans don't die your foul death!" he stormed once. "The boy was born with some blood defect!" She did not care what he said.

Neither did the boy, who died in pain, holding onto her hand.

New wounded were brought down into the big, quiet room, one or two at a time. Only by this did they know that there must be bitter fighting, up in the sunlight on the snow. Umaksuman was carried down, knocked unconscious by a Gaal slingshot. Great-limbed and stately he lay, and she looked at him with a dull pride: a warrior, a brother. She thought him near death, but after a while he sat up, shaking his head, and then stood up. "What place is this?" he demanded, and she almost laughed when she answered. Wold's kin were hard to kill off. He told her that the Gaal were running an attack against all the barricades at once, a ceaseless push, like the great attack on the Land Gate when the whole force of them had tried to scale the walls on one another's shoulders. "They are stupid warriors," he said, rubbing the great lump over his ear. "If they sat up on the roofs around this Square for a week and shot at us with arrows, we wouldn't have men enough left to hold the barricades. All they know is to come running all at once, yelling ..." He rubbed his head again, said, "What did they do with my spear?" and went back up to the fighting.

The dead were not brought down here, but laid in an open shed in the Square till they could be burned. If Agat had been killed, she would not know it. When bearers came with a new patient she looked up with a surge of hope: if it were Agat wounded, then he was not dead. But it was never him. She wondered if, when he was killed, he would cry out to her mind before he died; and if that cry would kiU her.

Late in the unending day the old woman Alia Pasfal was carried down. With certain other old men and women of the farborns, she had demanded the dangerous job of bringing arms to the defenders of the barricades, which meant running across the Square with no shelter from the enemy's fire. A

Gaal lance had pierced her throat from side to side. Wattock could do very little for her. A little, black, old woman, she lay dying among the young men. Caught by her gaze, Rolery went to her, a basin of bloody vomit in her hands. Hard, dark, and depthless as rock the old eyes gazed at her; and Rolery looked straight back, though it was not a thing her people did.

The bandaged throat rattled, the mouth twisted.

To break down one's own defenses ...

"I listen!" Rolery said aloud, in the formal phrase of her people, in a shaking voice. They will go, Alia Pasfal's voice, tired and faint, said in her mind: They'll try to follow the others south. They fear us, the snowghouls, the houses and streets. They are afraid, they will go after this attack. Tell Jakob I can hear, I can hear them. Tell Jakob they will go—tomorrow—

"I'll tell him," Rolery said, and broke into tears. Moveless, speechless, the dying woman stared at her with eyes like dark stones.

Rolery went back to her job, for the hurt men needed attention and Wattock had no other assistant.

And what good would it do to go seek out Agat up there in the bloody snow and the noise and haste, to tell him, before he was killed, that a mad old woman dying had said they would survive?

She went on about her work with tears still running down her face. One of the farborns, badly wounded but eased by the wonderful medicine Wattock used, a little ball that, swallowed, made pain lessen or cease, asked her, "Why are you crying?" He asked it drowsily, curiosly, as one child might ask another. "I don't know," Rolery told him. "Go to sleep." But she did know, though vaguely, that she was crying because hope was intolerably painful, breaking through into the resignation hi which she had lived for days; and pain, since she was only a woman, made her weep.

There was no way at all of knowing it down here, but the day must be ending, for Seiko Esmit came with hot food on a tray for her and Wattock and those of the wounded that could eat. She waited to take the bowls back, and Rolery said to her, "The old one, Pasfal Alterra, is dead."