Farris understood. “They left because we brought back a man who’s hunati?”
She nodded. “All the tribespeople fear the rite. It’s said there’s only a few who belong to it, but they’re dreaded.”
Farris spared a moment to curse softly the vanished Annamese. “Piang would bolt like a scared rabbit, from something like this. A sweet beginning for my job here.”
“Perhaps you had better leave,” Lys said uncertainly. Then she added contradictorily, “No, I can’t be heroic about it! Please stay!”
“That’s for sure,” he told her. “I can’t go back down river and report that I shirked my job because of—’’
He stopped, for she wasn’t listening to him. She was looking past him, toward the bed.
Farris swung around. While they two had been talking, Berreau had been moving. Infinitely slowly — but moving.
His feet were on the floor now. He was getting up. His body straightened with a painful, dragging slowness, for many minutes.
Then his right foot began to rise almost imperceptibly from the floor. He was starting to walk, only a hundred times slower than normal.
He was starting to walk toward the door.