Ingold was still motionless, listening intently in the zebra shadows of the blown-out colonnade as Gil crossed to the edge of the stuff.

"It isn't just me, is it?" Her soft voice fell harsh as a blacksmith's hammer in the unnatural hush.

"It's getting worse as we get farther south." As Gil knelt to study the tracks that quilted the clay soil all along the edges of the slunch, Ingold's instruction-and that of her friend the Icefalcon, rang half-conscious warning bells in her mind. What the hell had that wolverine been trying to do? Run sideways? Eat its own tail? And that rabbit-if those were rabbit tracks...? That had to be the mark of something caught in its fur, but...

"It couldn't have anything to do with what we're looking for, could it?" A stray breath lifted the long tendrils of her hair, escaping like dark smoke from the braid jammed under her close-fitting fur cap. "You said Maia didn't know what it was or what it did. Was there anything weird about the animals around Penambra before the Dark came?"

"Not that I ever heard." Ingold was turning his head as he spoke, listening as much as watching. He'd put back the hood of his heavy brown mantle, and his white hair, long and tatty from weeks of journeying, flickered in the gray air. He'd trimmed his beard with his knife a couple of nights ago, and resembled St. Anthony after ten rounds with demons in the wilderness.

Not, thought Gil, that anyone in this universe but herself and Ingold, because she'd told him- knew who St. Anthony was. Maia of Thran, Bishop of Renweth, erstwhile Bishop of Penambra and owner of the palace they sought, had told her tales of analogous holy hermits who'd had similar problems.

Unprepossessing, she thought, to anyone who hadn't seen him in action. Almost invisible, unless he wished to be seen. "And in any case we might as easily be dealing with a factor of time rather than distance." Ingold held up his six-foot walking staff in his blue- mittened left hand, but his right never strayed far from the hilt of the sword at his side. "It's been... Behind you!"