"Yeah," said the red-haired girl, in the garden of the deserted o. "We seen her, me and Paolo both seen her. She e through here days ago."
Father Gomez said, "And do you remember what she looked like?"
"She look hot," said the little boy. "Sweaty in the face, all right."
"How old did she seem to be?"
"About..." said the girl, sidering, "I suppose maybe forty or fifty. We didnt see her close. She could be thirty, maybe. But she was hot, like Paolo said, and she was carrying a big rucksack, much bigger than yours, this big..."
Paolo whispered something to her, screwing up his eyes to look at the priest as he did so. The sun was bright in his face.
"Yeah," said the girl impatiently, "I know. The Specters," she said to Father Gomez, "she wasn afraid of the Specters at all. She just walked through the city and never worried a bit. I ain never seen a grownup do that before, all right. She looked like she didn know about them, even. Same as you," she added, looking at him with a challenge in her eyes.
"Theres a lot I dont know," said Father Gomez mildly.
The little boy plucked at her sleeve and whispered again.
"Paolo says," she told the priest, "he thinks yoing to get the knife back."
Father Gomez felt his skin bristle. He remembered the testimony of Fra Pavel in the inquiry at the sistorial Court: this must be the knife he meant.
"If I ," he said, "I shall. The knife es from here, does it?"
"From the Torre degli Angeli," said the girl, pointing at the square stoower over the red-brown rooftops. It shimmered in the midday glare. "And the boy who stole it, he kill our brother, Tullio. The Specters got him, all right. You want to kill that boy, thats okay. And the girl, she was a liar, she was as bad as him."
"There was a girl, too?" said the priest, trying not to seem too ied.
"Lying filth," spat the red-haired child. "We nearly killed them both, but then there came some women, flying women...」
"Witches," said Paolo.
"Witches, and we couldn fight them. They took them away, the girl and boy. We don know where they went. But the woman, she came later. We thought maybe she got some kind of ko keep the Specters away, all right. And maybe you have, too," she added, lifting her to stare at him boldly.
"I have no knife," said Father Gomez. "But I have a sacred task. Maybe that is proteg me against these, Specters."
"Yeah," said the girl, "maybe. Anyway, you want her, she went south, toward the mountains. We don know where. But you ask ahey know if she go past, because there ain no one like her in Cigazze, not before and not now. She be easy to find."
"Thank you, Angelica," said the priest. "Bless you, my children."
He shouldered his pack, left the garden, a off through the hot, silent streets, satisfied.
After three days in the pany of the wheeled creatures, Mary Malone knew rather more about them, and they knew a great deal about her.
That first m they carried her for an hour or so along the basalt highway to a settlement by a river, and the journey was unfortable; she had nothing to hold on to, and the creatures back was hard. They sped along at a pace that frightened her, but the thunder of their wheels on the hard road and the beat of their scuddi made her exhilarated enough to ighe disfort.
And in the course of the ride she became more aware of the creatures physiology. Like the grazers skeletons, theirs