a red tally, which is a war party, to find where they lived and burn them out once for all.
So it was a wrong thing I was doing, climbing the grass-grail with light still in the sky and nothing threatening. I guess I done it with somewhat of bitterness and defiance in my heart.
Then dropping down on the inside of the fence I found myself almost face-to-face with Ursala. I had forgot that this was where she put up her tent when she was with us. She done her doctoring in the gather-ground, but she retired to this much quieter place to sleep.
Right now, she was sitting out in front of her tent, which was all different greens and browns so you thought you was looking at part of a forest. She was boiling a stew over a little fire. It was just starting to steam, and it had a good, spicy smell to it. She didn’t lift up her head to look at me as I jumped down, and I had hope for a second she never seen or heard me, though my feet hit the earth with a loud thump and raised up some dust.
I was making up my mind to walk right by her, pretending I was just taking myself for a stroll around the inside of the fence, when she spoke up.
“Well now,” she said, still stirring the pot. “That’s a strange thing to see. When a man comes into his own house he usually chooses to enter by the door. It’s thieves and cut-throats, by and large, who climb over the wall.”
I didn’t know what to say. I hadn’t done nothing that was so wrong, really – except to use the grass-grail in front of someone that was not one of ours, which was meant to be forbid. Being out alone, like I said, would not be favourably looked on but it wasn’t any crime.
I opened my mouth at last to say some of these things, though I didn’t know for sure what words would come out. But before I said anything at all, the tocsin bell over on the gather-ground gun to sound. It wasn’t the slow peal that meant a death, but the quick, shapeless jangle of an alarum.
And just as soon as it sounded, I seen what it was sounded for. A dark shape shot over us, high up in the sky but very clear to see with the brightness of sunset behind it. Then it come back on a big, wide loop, and swung right down towards the part of the fence where we was. As it dropped, it stopped being one thing and broke up into three. It was three things all moving tight together at first but now spreading out wide. They was drones. And they was lit up underneath with red light, which meant they was armed and ready to kill.
One of the three shot away towards the gather-ground and Rampart Hold. The second done much the same, except it stayed closer to the line of the fence so it would pass by the well-head.
The third come down right between me and Ursala, floating about ten feet above us.
“Disperse,” it said. It sounded like someone had nailed together a voice out of the sounds a bunch of stones made when they fell into a bucket.
“Disperse, or you will be fired upon. You have thirty seconds to comply.”
15
Maybe I should of told you more about the drones when I was numbering the things that hated us. I mentioned them in some kind, when I said there was weapons left over from the Unfinished War that was still dangerous, but I didn’t take it any further than that saying.
The drones was a fear that was ever on our minds when we walked abroad, though they come but seldom and they give us warning before they attacked. It’s hard to describe what they was like. When they was in the air they looked like insects, almost, if you can imagine an insect that’s as big as a man’s head and shoulders. They was dark and quick and dreadful, with an angry buzz like a hornet whether they moved or was still. And a tail like a hornet too, which was what they killed you with. But I seen a few of them after they fell to the ground, and on the ground they looked like nothing much at all. Some wires, metal rods, a sprinkle of broken glass.
The way you knowed