A scream sounded from somewhere in the house; thin, cracked. The grandmother. She seized Kaiku and pulled her towards the doorway. A sawing scrape from outside cut through the house, the voice of the moonstorm. A moment later came the sound of a shin-shin, rattling across the roof slates. Something darted past the shutters, crawling down the outside wall of the building. Kaiku saw it and shuddered.
Asara took her hand and looked into her eyes. They were wild and panicked.
'Listen to me, Kaiku,' she said, her voice firm but calm. 'We must run. Do you understand? I will take you to safety.'
Trembling, she nodded. Asara was satisfied.
'Stay with me,' she said, and she slid aside the thin curtain in the doorway and stepped out on to the balcony beyond.
The country retreat of Ruito tu Makaima – Kaiku's father and a scholar of some renown – was built in a clearing in the midst of lush woodland, a hollow square enclosing a central garden. It was built with an eye for aesthetics, in the fashion of the Saramyr folk, ensuring ostentation was kept to a minimum while the spare beauty of its form was picked out and assembled in harmony with its surroundings. The austere simplicity of its pale walls was contrasted by ornate wooden shutters and curved stone lintels shaped into graceful horns at either end. It sat in eerie serenity even amid the howling storm. A ruthlessly tamed lawn surrounded it, with a simple bridge vaulting a stream and a path leading from the front door that was so immaculate it might have been laid only yesterday. Within the boundaries of the clearing, the more untidy edges of nature had been excised for the sake of perfection; it was only where the clearing ended that the forest regained dominance again, crowding around the territory jealously.