“What do we do about this . . . this . . . what did you call it, Rigg?” asked Param.
“Barbfeather. Just a descriptive name. And we’re not going to do anything about it.”
“What if it follows us to our camp?” she asked.
“If it lies down, don’t snuggle up to it,” said Rigg. “Those feathers really are barbed.”
“That’s it?”
“What do you want me to do, Param, kill it?”
“Isn’t that what you and your father—I mean Ram—isn’t that what you did with animals?”
“We killed the ones whose fur we could sell,” said Rigg. “Do you want a coat made out of that?”
“Gloves,” said Loaf. “I think Leaky could use gloves like that—for punching some of our customers who drink too much and won’t leave the roadhouse quietly.”
They left the barbfeather and set about making camp. But soon it joined them again. Their provisions were meager, but they had been on the road for a while and they were used to them. Rigg offered some of his food to the beast. It sniffed and then wandered away. “Must not smell like anything edible to him,” Rigg said.
“Doesn’t taste like anything edible to me,” said Olivenko.
“Wonder how that barbfeather would taste,” said Loaf, “if we could talk him into climbing into a stewpot for us.”
“I don’t think our bodies could make much use of his meat,” said Rigg, “even if we could keep it inside long enough to digest it.”
“Pretty image while I’m eating,” said Param.
“I had no idea you were so fussy,” said Rigg, with a grin. Param rolled her eyes.
“Why couldn’t we eat it?” asked Umbo.
“When they were testing me to see if I should get access to the library,” said Rigg, “I met a scientist in Aressa Sessamo who was separating out the plants and animals that came to this world with our ancestors—which is most of them—and the ones that evolved here, which is only a few. Every single one of them, Father and I had already identified as plants and animals that we can’t eat. Even dead, only certain carrion eaters will go after them. It’s as if we had two separate ecologies twined together. Father called them ‘mildly toxic’ and my guess is he knew.”
“So maybe that parasite can’t use our bodies either,” said Olivenko.
“But Vadesh says it can,” said Rigg.
“And yet you touched it,” said Param.
“Tomorrow let’s go back in time,” said Rigg. “When we’re rested and fresh. Come on, we passed through the Wall today. People tried to kill you and Umbo not that many hours ago, Param! Can’t we get some sleep?”
But when they finally cleaned up supper, laid out their dosses, and took up their sleeping positions, with Loaf on first watch, Rigg couldn’t sleep. Because as soon as he knew what the facemask’s path looked like, he began to find the same kind of path riding along with humans ten thousand years ago. Vadesh was telling the truth—humans had been infested with facemasks.
And the more of them Rigg followed, the more certain he became of a pattern. At first the facemasks had been rare and were never inside the city. Then they came along with humans when they approached the city in large groups. It looked to Rigg like war, or raiding parties.
But abruptly, about five hundred years before the city emptied out, all the facemasks were inside the city, and the only human paths without facemask paths traveling with them were outside the city—again in raiding parties.
The conclusion was obvious to Rigg. Halfway through the history of humans in this city, the ones infested with the facemask parasite became the possessors of the city, and the uninfected people were the ones who lived outside.
And the tallest buildings were not built until the city belonged to the infested ones. Rigg knew this because none of the human paths rose up into the sky inside those towers until the relatively newer ones, the ones with facemask companions.
This is a city whose greatest buildings were erected by people with parasites embedded in their brains.
Now that was something Vadesh might have told them, if he were actually obeying the command to tell them everything. Which meant that he was deceiving them. He must have found some logical loophole in the orders Rigg had given him. Or maybe there was no deep law that required him to obey the first humans to pass through a Wall.
Eventually, exhaustion won and Rigg slept.
CHAPTER 3