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the wounds? Her throat seemed untouched. Left arm thrown wide, wrist unmarred; right arm across her body, no blood on the rucked-up tunic ... Vala stepped forward and lifted her right hand.
    Her armpit was torn and bloody. A Grass Giant man turned and wobbled back toward the wall, retching.
    Big woman, small vampire. Couldn’t reach her neck. Spash is right, we have to learn.
    Farther along, bright cloth lay near the grass border. Vala began to run, then stopped as suddenly. That was Taratarafasht’s work suit.
    Vala picked it up. It was clean. No blood, no ground-in dirt. Why had Tarfa been brought so far? Where was she?
    The Thurl had outrun his party by a good distance. He’d almost reached uncut grass. How much did that armor weigh? He scrambled up a ten-pace-high knoll, then paused at the top, waiting while the rest straggled up.
    “No sign of vampires,” he said. “They’ve gone to cover somewhere. Travelers say they can’t stand sunlight ...?”
    Kay said, “That tale’s true.”
    The Thurl continued, “Then I’d say they’re gone.”
    Nobody spoke.
    The Thurl boomed, “Beedj!”
    “Thurl!” A male trotted up: mature, bigger than most, eager, indecently energetic.
    “With me, Beedj. Tarun, you’ll circle and meet us on the other side. If you’re not there I’ll assume you found a fight.”
    “Yes.”
    Beedj and the Thurl went one way, the rest of the Giants went the other. Vala dithered, then followed the Thurl.
    The Thurl noticed her. He slowed and let her catch up. Beedj would have waited, too, but the Thurl’s gesture sent him on.
    The Thurl said, “We won’t find live vampires hiding in the grass. Grass grows straight up. Night slides across the sun, but the sun never moves, not anymore. Where can a vampire hide from sunlight?”
    Vala asked, “Do you remember when the sun moved?”
    “I was a child. A frightening time.” He didn’t seem frightened enough, Vala thought. Louis Wu had been among these people; but what Louis had told Valavirgillin, he didn’t seem to have told them.
    It’s a ring, he said. The Arch is the part of the ring you’re not standing on. The sun has started to wobble because the ring is off center. In several falans the ring will brush the sun. But I swear I will stop it, or die trying.
    Later the sun had stopped wobbling.
    Beedj was still jogging, stopping here and there to examine bodies; swinging his sword to cut a swath of grass to see what it hid; eating what he cut as he resumed his patrol. He was burning more energy than the Thurl. Vala had seen no challenge between them—easy command and easy submission—but she became sure that she was watching the next Thurl.
    She nerved herself to ask, “Thurl, did an unknown hominid come among you claiming to be from a place in the sky?”
    The Thurl stared. “In the sky ?”
    He could hardly have forgotten, but he might hide secrets. “A male wizard. Bald narrow face, bronze skin, straight black scalp hair, taller than my kind and narrow in the shoulders and hip.” Fingertips lifted and stretched the corners of her eyes. “Eyes like this . He boiled a sea hereabouts, to end a plague of mirror-flowers.”
    The Thurl was nodding. “It was done by the old Thurl, with this Louis Wu’s help. But how do you come to know about that?”
    “Louis Wu and I traveled together, far to port of here. Without sunlight the mirror-flowers couldn’t defend themselves, he said. The clouds, though, they never went away?”
    “They never did. We seeded our grass, just as the wizard told us. Smeerps and other burrowers moved in well ahead of us. Wherever we went, we found mirror-flowers eaten at the roots. Grass doesn’t grow well in this murk,   so at first we had to eat mirror-flowers.
    “The Reds who fed their herds from our grass in my father’s time, and fought us when we objected, they followed us into new grassland. Gleaners hunted the burrowers. Water People moved back up the rivers that the mirror-flowers had