Rider at the Gate

by C. J. Cherryh

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  A 3S digital back-up edition 1.0

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  Contents

  |1|2|3|4|5|6|7|8|9|10|11|12|13|14|15|16|17|18|19|20|21|22

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  ALSO BY C J CHERRYH

  CYTEEN:(Winner of the Hugo Award for Best Novel)

  The Betrayal

  The Rebirth

  The Vindication

  RIMRUNNERS

  HEAVY TIME

  HELLBURNER

  TRIPOINT

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  WARNER BOOKS

  A Time Warner Company

  Copyright © 1995 by C J Cherryh All rights reserved

  Warner Books, Inc ,1271 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020

  A Time Warner Company

  Aspect is a trademark of Warner Books, Inc

  Printed in the United States of America

  ISBN 0-446-51781-X

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  FOR JANE

  SINE QUA NON

  Especially the beginning—

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  Chapter i

  ^ »

  THE FIRST OF THE TRUCK CONVOY HAD SCARCELY TOPPED THE RISE that would lead them down to Shamesey town when three riders broke free of its line and raced up on a gust of autumn wind, past the bell-arch of Shamesey camp and through the open gates behind which over a thousand riders and nighthorses were encamped.

  These three, strangers all to Shamesey, swept into the camp commons without any more warning than that, borderers by their dress and manner, atop nighthorses out of the High Wild. Two of them stopped just inside the gate while the third rode down the main street of the camp, searching.

  They were a grayness to nighthorse minds, these three from the convoy, two out of range, the third a shifting flutter of images passed to nearby horses and from them to the Shamesey riders’ minds, an uneasy sending that masked that pair’s intent from the nighthorses, who held no secrets one from the other.

  But it required no nighthorse sense to know that these three wanted something; more specifically, they wanted someone.

  A scattered few Shamesey riders, camp-boss Lyle Wesson among them, hearing the disturbance among the horses, deserted their tables in the Gate Tavern and gathered on the encircling porch. Lyle Wesson walked alone down the wooden steps and stood in the dusty tavern yard to meet that third rider, this guide and guard (he perceived so on the whisper of information coming to him from the horses) to a line of trucks now rolling unescorted toward Shamesey.

  Unwise to leave a convoy unattended even within sight of Shamesey, largest and most secure of all the Finisterre towns; if they had done that, it was a breach of procedures for which these three might pay dearly in subsequent hires.

  But as the rider from the convoy drew up near them in the tavern yard, Lyle Wesson and all the nearby riders saw—imaged in their own minds through the stranger’s horse—the blond young man the convoy’s guide had come looking for.

  More, the Shamesey riders felt a terror closely held under the stranger’s facade of calm: terror and a gnawing insanity under which these three riders had labored for days.

  “Stuart is the name you want,” the camp-boss said aloud, more than uneasy at the prospect of that unsettled sending set loose through his camp. “He’s somewhere about. Get down. We’ll stand you and your mates a drink. Someone will find him.”

  The stranger shook his head. “Not here,” he said, scantly controlled, and leaned heavily on his horse’s withers. “Tell him. Outside.” The nighthorse under him threw its head, shook out its black, cloudy mane, and with no more decision of the rider (those around him were in a position to know) it spun and fled back toward the two riders who waited at the gate. Those two turned beforehand and dashed beneath the bell-arch and out onto the road.

  The third followed them at no less speed.

  The riders and the camp-boss, who had most immediately felt the fear unraveling the peace, breathed a collective sigh of relief at having that much space between Shamesey and the madness those stranger-riders carried with them.

  “Find Guil Stuart,” the word went out: the boss spoke aloud to the riders he sent on that job, a message without nighthorse image: it was a human attempt to contain that madness.

  But a solitary nighthorse, in the hostile, curious way of its kind, had come near enough to skim the image-rich surface of human thoughts, and gone off, unknown to the camp-boss, to carry what it learned to its den-mates.

  So the contagion spread, inevitably, through the encampment.

  It took a man a considerable walk to accomplish the circuit of Shamesey camp, that protective circle of riders and horses who lived between the double palisade walls of Shamesey town’s perimeter, riders who slept in hostels near the horse dens, met in taverns similar to the Gate Tavern, and lived in their separate settlements within that ring. But that image had made the rounds of the bell-gate section of the rider camp and was traveling down the ringroad to the next station before the camp-boss had even climbed the steps to the Gate Tavern.

  The image had reached the fourth tavern and cluster of hostels long before the bell rang that signaled the arrival of the convoy at Shamesey town gates. It was a smallish, blond man the stranger wanted, a young man, a borderer, the rider of the horse that imaged himself as fire, pain and dark: those who knew Stuart called the creature Burn.

  The image mutated and acquired opinion as it sped further: a solitary young man, a sullen, prankish horse, both prone to fights; a pair that roused dislike in some quarters of the camp, respect in others—disdain among the Shamesey riders, which image held more of Shamesey opinion of borderers in general than of Stuart in particular.

  As a result of those acquired opinions, it might have been four and five different men the message sought before the image was halfway through the fifth cluster of brown plank buildings. Nighthorse sendings were like that when they flew through a camp: they were images and emotions, no words. Sometimes a rider or a horse mistook the individual in the message and shaped the image to something more like someone he did know—an image that also passed on, confounding the search: sometimes it found no names in human minds, and sometimes it acquired other, mistaken names as it met the leading edge of the spoken rumor.

  But the main thread, camp-boss Lyle Wesson’s order, running by human word of mouth at various distances behind the nighthorse sendings, held no doubt at all: Guil Stuart and the nighthorse Burn were the rider and the horse the strangers wanted at the bell-gate. They were present in camp; there was danger in the high hills; and, arriving with a truck convoy, some business had come to the gate that strangers who knew Stuart had feared to bring inside the walls—only prudent hesitation, where so many nighthorses were gathered.

  Bad business. Bad news. A contagion that no one in his right mind would want to receive.

  In the better part of Shamesey town, the very core of Shamesey— where wealthy wooden houses were bright with painted flowers and red and blue eaves, where gaslights glowed wanton waste on the street corners even at early twilight—no one even noticed the event, except that the bell had rung which signaled a convoy coming in.

  Merchants left their dinner tables and headed out for the marketplace, as late as it was, to spy out what goods had come in and with what prices. Well-dressed children ran out to see the trucks and annoy the drivers. Others in the town center turned out for curiosity, if nothing else.

  The better part of Shamesey town would never feel the fear and the distress that ran the circuit of the rider camp, but that was, after all, why the rich built their houses so far from the palisade walls, so that the riders and the world over the hills would never intrude into their pea
ceful lives. That insulation was the privilege of their wealth, which they gathered from their labor and their trade, and which they planned to enjoy forever, nothing changing, preferring to build atop each other rather than crowd closer to the camp.

  But in Shamesey slums, the insulating ring of human squalor lying between Shamesey town and Shamesey camp—where the bell meant little but rich merchants getting richer—the residents sensed that nighthorse rumor like a presentiment of storm. It was a sensation so convincing that some stopped their business on the streets and others flung up their windows to search the skies in the west, the ordinary direction of bad weather.

  But when the western heavens showed clear in the final glow of sunset, the slum-folk directed their anxiousness instead down their streets of ramshackle, unpainted board buildings toward the encircling walls of the rider camp; and, with the helplessness of the poor who had to live nearest the camp and the images that seeped through those wooden walls, they cursed and spat for fear of nightmares.

  The Fisher household felt that storm-feeling in their drafty third-floor flat, a flat which lately had new stoppage for those drafts and smelled of fresh paint and plaster. The Fishers paused in their supper and looked toward the window—as Danny Fisher’s fork hit the plate and flung beans in an arc across the table.

  “Hell!” Danny cried, which one didn’t ever say under his parents’ roof. He wasn’t thinking clearly as he began to get up. He only realized his intention as he cleared his chair and it scraped on the floor.

  “Where do you think you’re going?” his father demanded.

  His mother said, “Danny, sit down, finish your supper. The bell’s none of your concern.”

  But he couldn’t sit down. The feeling was dreadful, as if his mind were going every direction at once, and he had to wonder, didn’t his family feel anything?

  His youngest brother, Denis, shook at his arm, saying, “Danny, Danny, sit down, what’s the matter with you?”

  His mother was upset now, and his father was angry, ordering him to take his seat with the rest of the family and act like a sane human being.

  But he had to get to the camp. He had to find Cloud. He headed for the door.

  His father shoved his chair back, too, yelling at him to come back and do as he was told. His father crossed the room in two strides and grabbed his arm hard enough to bruise it. Then his mother was on her feet, and grabbed his father’s arm.

  “Let him alone!” his mother yelled.

  “The boy can act like he’s sane! The boy can sit down and finish his supper!”

  “We have neighbors!”

  “Fine, we have neighbors! They all know our son’s crazy! It’s no news to them!”

  “Don’t you yell at me! Sit down! Everybody sit down and eat your dinner! I’ll throw it out if nobody’s going to eat it!”

  Danny didn’t feel anything but that dissociation, that terrible coming-apart. He jerked at his father’s arm. “Let me go, dammit, I’ve got to go!”

  His father’s hand cracked across his face. His father started yelling at him, something about God and religion, devils and hell.

  But devils and hell weren’t here. Something else was, something as frightening and far more imminent.

  Danny freed himself, not because his father couldn’t have held him, even lately, but because his father had let go in seeming shock—while his mother pounded on his father’s arm with her fist, screaming about ‘that creature’ and how it would come into town and they’d all die if he didn’t let Danny go to it. Denis was bawling, screaming at them to stop fighting. His older brother, Sam, stared at all of them from the table—Sam didn’t argue with their father, Sam wanted the machine shop when their father was gone, nothing more, nothing less, so Sam just shoveled down another spoonful of beans.

  Danny grabbed his coat, his scarf, his hat from the pegs beside the door.

  “You don’t have to come back, you!” his father yelled. “You’re damned to hell, dealing with that beast, you know that? You’re going straight to hell!”

  “Shut up!” his mother yelled. “You don’t mean that! —Danny, he doesn’t mean that!”

  “Yes, I mean it!” his father shouted, and the fight was in full cry when Danny shot the bolt back, banged the door open and raced down the rickety stairs.

  He was halfway to the bottom, two steps at a time, before Denis overtook him. Denis got a grip on his coat, screaming at him to stop, he didn’t want him to go, papa didn’t mean it, he couldn’t go out there, the devil would get him and drag him and that horse down to hell if he went back there.

  Danny wasn’t even aware of shaking Denis off. “You just go!” he heard Denis screaming after him. “You just go ahead! God’s going to send you to hell! Papa says God’s going to send you to hell and I don’t care!”

  It was meaningless noise to him. He ran the stairs, rushed out the door and down the street, breathless.

  People everywhere were stopped, gathered along the walks, looking toward the wooden walls of the camp. He’d never felt anything the like: it was bad, it promised the town worse dreams, and people shied away from him in the streets, seeing not a kid who’d grown up in their neighborhood, but a rider’s fringed leather, a rider’s clear purpose in the midst of the stifling storm-feeling.

  Trucks jammed Gate Street, which led down to the bell-arch, trucks crowding one another, engines growling in their uphill climb toward the market and the warehouses buried deep beneath the town center: protection for the material wealth—and the vital food supplies that were life to everyone, merchant and slum dweller alike.

  Only the riders could survive without. Riders could survive without the town; the town could never survive without the riders.

  Tanker trucks lumbered in the midst of the canvas-covered cargo trucks, huge, long rigs the drivers ordinarily chose to park outside the walls. Tonight they were in the line, seeking shelter from the coming dark.

  Danny wove past the gawkers at the corner. It was a big convoy, maybe the last before the winter closed the passes.

  “Don’t listen!” a street preacher was shouting. “Heed not the beasts! Death and damnation to the followers of the beasts! Pray! Shut your hearts against the creatures of this world and pray to God for deliverance!”

  The feeling on Gate Street was overwhelming. Maybe part of it was the exhaust from the trucks: fumes welled up in the narrow street, under a dilapidated overhang of buildings so old and so close that at the gentle imprecisions of the uphill road the tankers ran their tires up over the low curbs and threatened the eaves and people on the sidewalks.

  Danny wanted to run. He felt as if he couldn’t get enough breath. Diesel stung his eyes and his throat as he walked double-time.

  Terrible thump. Some driver rear-ended the truck in front. Second collision, then, as somebody else stopped too short. Panic was contagious. The truckers felt it.

  “Pray for your children, that they follow not the beasts!”

  He was strangling in it.

  Fear raced through the camp, provoking a general surveillance over the main street from the doors of rider hostels and nighthorse dens alike. The camp-boss and the several riders who had first come out to meet the arrivals had set up their own watch over the situation from the vantage of the Gate Tavern porch. Nighthorses who had drifted into their vicinity had shied off into the twilight, spreading the message that the camp-boss was not pleased.

  The tide of disturbance had rolled all the way through the camp and back again. Consistently now it imaged a thin, smallish man with fair hair, recognizable to some, not to others; it imaged strangers at the gate, and horror in their company.

  That image stirred hate in some quarters, and that hate roused other angers waiting to explode, tempers set off by nothing more than the darkness of the feeling. Fights broke out that had nothing remotely to do with Guil Stuart.

  But it was hate for Guil Stuart that had sent Ancel Harper in particular searching after his cousins; and anger and fear flo
wed through their meeting at Hami’s Tavern, a bar mostly claimed by the riders of Hallanslake district. Nighthorses wandered through the open portico of the tavern, and the feeling in that precinct was not good.

  Hallanslakers, Harper included, knew Stuart.

  And unlike most of the riders in Shamesey camp, Ancel Harper recognized the threat lurking about the edges of the message. He, unlike most riders, had felt it before and never wanted to feel it again.

  He knew, and controlled that knowledge: a man who dealt with nighthorses learned to keep his past from infecting the present. Nighthorses didn’t think easily in terms of past or future: a careless rider’s own imagination could all too easily become real for his horse, and come from the horse back to him.

  Stuart hadn’t caused what had happened—not directly—as Stuart hadn’t caused this newest disaster—directly. But that hardly mattered: Guil Stuart was the kind of man trouble always happened next to, and there wasn’t a friend Stuart had in this Hallanslaker tavern… not now and not before some poor sod out there had died with the horror this death had about it.

  Because that was what lurked at the core and around the edges of the stranger’s message: death come singing to as many as wanted to listen. Harper and his associates knocked back two rounds of drinks in quick succession, not the only patrons trying to drown the feeling that pulled at old feuds and seethed up through old matters long settled, even among themselves.

  “Damned fool,” Harper said, as the horse-borne image made yet one more round of the camp, but what he imaged in his own mind was, in particular, a young fool, quick to offense, too quick to pull a knife. Drunk at the time, as Harper himself had been, night camp on the road, hard decisions to be made; and Stuart in no good mood. But neither had Harper or his brother been in a charitable mind toward a sullen outsider.