"Very good—it is understood, then. Now you may go."
Piers Minor had not a word to say. He had been meditating upon a thousand possible explanations, excuses, apologies, and his tongue would not utter one of them. He accepted his orders meekly, but as he turned to go he managed to stammer out, "Of course—to meet again."
Nanna, to her own infinite amazement, answered with a look that meant yes, and knew that he had not failed to so understand it. As she walked over to the Citadel Square she could feel that he was standing where she had left him and looking after her. She would have turned to fittingly rebuke behavior so indecorous, but something told her that her insulted dignity would be better saved by removing it to a greater distance.
Nanna entered the Citadel Square after some parley with the sentinels on the walls, who grumbled at the trouble to which they were put to let down a rope-ladder; but, being a daughter of the Doomsmen, she could not be denied.
A little crowd of women and elderly men gathered about an ox-cart in the centre of the square attracted her attention. They were listening to a speaker who, standing upright in the wagon-body, was haranguing them earnestly. Nanna recognized him—Prosper, the priest.
It was the old story—repentance, the wrath of the Shining One, and the imminence of the judgment. The men of the garrison, absorbed in their preparations for defence, paid no heed; only this handful of old men and fearful women, who crept a little closer together as they listened and sought one another's hands. "To-day, to-day, even to-day, and Doom is fallen, is fallen!"
A disquieting thought flashed into Nanna's mind, the remembrance of those carefully arranged broken wires in the empty house not more than a block away from the Citadel Square. Then of those other wires in the temple of the Shining One, spluttering their wicked-looking sparks. She strained her ears to catch the humming drone of the engines in the House of Power, but there was no sound to be heard—they could not be running.
"Yet there will be mischief worked to-night if the priest has his way," said Nanna to herself, and shook her black-polled head safely. "I almost wish that I had told him of that, too." And then, unaccountably, she blushed again, for all that it was dark and no one was looking at her.