The Dragon Man - Brian Stableford [75]
How does he know which window’s mine? Sara thought—and then she realized that he must have followed his shadowbats. They had probably evaded his attention on the first night they had made their way to the rose, but on the second occasion he must have kept track of them, reckless of all inconvenience, until the hedge had placed an insurmountable obstacle in his path. There really had been someone there when she had called out into the night—someone who hadn’t had the courage to answer her.
He wasn’t ignoring the notice I put on the public board because he didn’t know that it applied to him, Sara deduced. He ignored it because he was busy watching over the five that came out, not knowing whether they’d recover if he let them feed and gave them time.
Because the stone-thrower was standing outside the garden’s boundary, he hadn’t triggered the kind of trespass alert that might lead to criminal charges, but he was determined to attract her attention. Seen from the outside, awash with the reflected light of the security beams, the window hadn’t changed significantly when she’d switched it from picture mode to transparency, so he didn’t know that she was standing in the darkened room looking out at him. He continued throwing the little stones, and his aim was remarkably good. He was probably an accomplished sportsman of some kind, although Sara wasn’t sure which kind of game would most readily lend its expertise to this kind of expertise.
When Sara’s eyes had fully adapted to the light, she was better able to judge the kind of person the shadowbats’ owner was. His face and body were hidden, but his throwing arm wasn’t, and it was easy enough to judge his height by comparison with the hedge. She guessed that he was probably a couple of years older than she was.
He could have waited till tomorrow, Sara thought.
She opened the window slightly—not enough to risk being hit by a stone, although most of them seemed to be too small to do more than sting her—and called out: “Stop that! You’ll wake the whole house!”
“So what?” a barely-broken male voice replied. “You killed my shadowbats, Sara Lindley! Why did you do that? They couldn’t do you any harm.” He obviously didn’t want to wake the whole house, though, because he was speaking just loud enough to be heard—not so loud that the sound couldn’t be damped down by the walls protecting her parents’ sleep. There was a slight chance that one or two of them might wake up anyway, but the only ones who had windows facing the same direction as Sara’s were Father Lemuel and Mother Quilla. Father Lemuel was almost certainly in his cocoon, safe from disturbance by anything short of a clamorous alarm, and Mother Quilla was also a sound sleeper.
“I didn’t do anything to your shadowbats,” Sara told him. “They did it to themselves. It was an accident. Who are you, anyway?”
“Never mind that, Sara Lindley. I know who you are. How did you lure them into your room? What did you do to them once they were in there? They were only supposed to fly around me. I want to know what you did to them.”
“I didn’t do anything,” she repeated, irritably. She knew that there was something very odd about what was happening, but she wasn’t sufficiently alert as yet to figure out exactly what it was.
“You poisoned my shadowbats, Sara Lindley,” he said again. “I’m going to get you for this, Sara Lindley. You’d better watch out. I know who you are, but you don’t know who I am.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Sara said, trying to cover up her anxiety—although she was more worried about the possibility that the hometree’s AI would react to the threat than the much slighter one that he might actually mean it. “Mr. Warburton knows who you are. Mask or no mask, I can find out easily enough. And I didn’t poison your shadowbats. They did it themselves. It was Mr. Warburton who tweaked them, but he didn’t mean to let them be