underside of a vaulted overhang. If one climbed up the closed side, one could cross to the hp that curved to slick knife edges hanging twenty or thirty meters above the razor-edged fragments below. One could walk along the inside of a comber or clamber about in the soil-filled area between combers, and while doing so, one could fall through into any number of pits and deadfalls. For these and other reasons, people rarely found cause to go to the Combers.
Marool Mantelby’s family had met their deaths among the Combers, and Marool decided to go see for herself. No matter what people said, Marool’s parents would not have gone on a picnic, they would not have gone anywhere together without some strong and so far unfathomable motivation.
The Man of Business who had attended to the affair at the time accompanied her in the light carriage that jolted along a woodcutters’ rutted road as it wound back and forth among the stinks and steams of hot springs toward the wilderland. In addition to the Man of Business, Marool had hired a bulky guard from the post in Sendoph, and a driver, a wiry individual who had agreed to use his carriage only after she signed a release that allowed him to unveil once they were in the hills.
“I don’t drive on those roads ‘less I can see,” he said, rather too truculently for Marool’s taste. “There’s things in those hills, and I sure can’t outrun ‘em if I don’t see ‘em coming.”
“Things?” Marool inquired, in the voice she had been cultivating since leaving the Wasters, one that disguised her malice with a gloss of amiability. “What things are those, driver?”
“Things,” he repeated, rather less belligerently, mistaking her nature as she had intended. “People go missing with no sign how or where, so it has to be things. Stands to reason!”
“Ah,” she murmured. “Well, then, I will give you permission to go unveiled. Once we are in the hills.”
The guard required no such variation from custom. Guards wore tinted visors that covered their faces, allowing them to see out but others not to see in, and this one perched beside the driver, head swiveling alertly from side to side while Marool, seated behind them, contented herself with a view of backs and heads between which scraps of scenery were sometimes discernable.
“I can see no reason whatsoever that my parents would have come here,” she muttered.
“Nor I,” replied Carpon, the Man of Business. “Your father ordered a team hitched to a carriage, then he took it from the carriage yard himself, collected your mother and sister at the front steps and went off. The only servants who knew anything were the stableman and the cook, for your father had asked him to prepare a basket luncheon.”
“And who was it found them?”
“When they did not return by evening, their majordomo reported their absence to the guard post, and at first light dogs were fetched and the carriage was tracked—or more properly, perhaps, the horses were tracked—to the place they were found unharmed and still hitched. The luncheon, though much disarrayed by small creatures during the intervening hours, had obviously been laid nearby, some way back from the comber edge. I was with the group who found the bodies of your family members in a sink at the bottom. We recovered them for burial only with great difficulty.”
They continued on their way for some time while Marool digested this. “The driver,” she murmured, “mentioned things. Could they have been driven over the edge by things?”‘
Carpon shifted uncomfortably on the seat. “One hears such stories, of course. One has never seen a thing, however, nor has one talked to anyone who has actually seen one. There are always subterranean noises in the mountains, and rumor makes more of them than is probably warranted.”
Marool was not inclined to believe in things, but as she and the Man of Business fell silent, they were uneasily aware that the only noises in these mountains were the ones made by themselves. Aside from the plopping hooves of the horse and the rattle of the wheels, the world was incredibly still. Even the steams that came from hidden vents to curtain the surrounding forest were silent.
“Just around the next bend,” said Carpon in too loud a voice.
They came around the bend into a clearing that spanned the tops of several of the great tubes running from southwest to northeast, the nearer ones to their left curling toward the southeast. To their