The hunters had decorated their vests by sewing on the scalps of Coerli they'd killed since joining Ilna, a double-handful each. Ilna didn't object, but of course she didn't take trophies herself. All that mattered to Ilna was the killing. When she'd killed all the catmen in this world, she didn't know what she'd do. Die, she hoped, because her life would no longer have purpose. Asion joined them, holding the staff of his sling in his right hand and cupping the pocket and bullet in his left. "Have you guys noticed the pond?" he said with a frown in his voice. "Why did they do that, d'ye think?

Throw the plants in?" The little temple was set up three steps from the ground. Forsythias grew around both it and the small, round pool in front of the building. Several bushes had been pulled up by the roots and thrown into the water. The men who'd done that had mortal wounds, clearly. One of them lay on the curb with a yellow-flowered branch clutched in a death grip. "What do they have a pond there anyway?" said Karpos. "Are they raising fish? It's too small." "I don't know," Ilna said. She didn't add to the statement, because there was nothingto add and she saw no point in wasting her breath. "Let's go on, then." The pool surprised her as well, though she didn't bother saying so. Ilna hadn't seen a temple till she left Barca's Hamlet some two years-or a lifetime-before, but there'd been plenty of them in the cities she'd passed through since then. Ilna didn't pay particular attention to buildings, but she had an eye for patterns. She'd certainly have made note of a temple facing a pool if she'd seen one.

This was the first. Karpos knelt and placed his right index and middle fingers to the throat of the first corpse, a man lying on his back.

The fellow's hair was white, as much of it as was left; his forehead rose to the peak of his scalp. His face was as calm as if he'd been praying, though the wounds that'd killed him-three deep stabs in the lower body and a slash that'd broken the bone of his upper right arm-must've been extremely painful. "Dead since daybreak," Karpos said, rising and touching the bowstring again. "Maybe a little longer, but not much." Ilna looked into the pool, her face frozen into a deliberate lack of expression in place of her usual guarded silence.