People of the Silence Read Online Free PDF Page A

themselves for morning prayers on this critical day of the sun cycle. The fires cast a wavering yellow gleam over the massive sandstone bluff on the opposite side of the canyon. It looked dark and brooding this early, but when Father Sun rose, the sandstone would turn so golden it would appear molten.
    Young Fawn sighed. The tang of sage scented the wind, but the fragrance did little to soothe her fears. Sternlight spoke softly to someone, and apparently received an answer he did not wish to hear.
    “But why must I do it?” he wept. He lifted his head and looked to his right. As he shook his head, his long black hair flashed silver. “Why me?”
    At the age of twenty-seven, Sternlight had been Talon Town’s Sunwatcher for nine winters, and his reputation had grown with each one. Chiefs as far away as three moons’ walk relied upon his advice. Young Fawn had seen their messengers arrive, packs filled with extraordinary gifts. Over the cycles, stories about Sternlight’s wealth had become legend. It was said that twenty rooms at Talon Town brimmed with his fortune—and some dared to whisper that only witchery paid so well.
    Young Fawn nervously smoothed her palms over her turkey-feather cape. The brown-and-white feathers glistened in the light. Witches—her own people called them sleep-makers—had great Power. By jumping through a hoop of twisted yucca fibers, they could change themselves into animals, and they used rawhide shields to fly about, spying on people. The most terrifying sleep-makers raided burials to gather putrefying corpse flesh, which they dried and ground into a fine powder. Once the soul had left the body, only corruption and wickedness remained. Corpse powder concentrated that evil, and when sprinkled on someone, could cause death or madness.
    Young Fawn had been captured in a raid ten summers ago, but she remembered the sleep-makers among her own people, the Mogollon, who lived far to the south. The Straight Path people called them Fire Dogs, for the Mogollon believed that they had originally come to earth in the form of wolves made from gouts of Father Sun’s fire. The Mogollon and the Straight Path people raided each other constantly, taking slaves, stealing food. Her father, Jay Bird, was the greatest and most powerful Mogollon chief. Sleep-makers had continually tried to kill him.
    … And the earth had quaked each time, as if the ancestor spirits who lived in the underworlds were enraged by the foolishness of the witches.
    Young Fawn reached up to touch the small bags of sacred cornmeal she wore around her throat. On occasion, when she missed her family, she thought about those sleep-makers and wondered if their Power had grown over the long summers. Was her father still alive? The earth continued to quake, more often of late, and she took each tremor as a great omen that he had survived yet another attempt on his life.
    The Straight Path people, however, took the recent rash of quakes to mean that their ancestors were growing more and more angry with the greed and malice that filled the hearts of their descendants.
    Young Fawn glanced at Sternlight. Could he be a sleep-maker? She had to admit that strange things did happen around him. His older sisters had vanished before they’d turned fifteen summers, and no traces had ever been found. Though rumors persisted that they had been taken slave by the Mogollon, Sternlight’s cousin, the great warrior, Webworm, had suggested a dire possibility. Sleep-makers lived very long lives—at the expense of their families. When a sleep-maker grew ill, or wanted to extend his life, he used a spindle to extract his relative’s heart and put it in his own chest.
    After Sternlight’s second sister disappeared, Webworm spent days going from family member to family member, begging them to help him kill Sternlight. Both had been very young at the time, Webworm thirteen, and Sternlight fourteen. Webworm’s accusation had been taken very seriously. Sternlight,