Rider at the Gate

by C. J. Cherryh

  But it was prickling at the edges of her attention.

  Flicker jolted forward into a sudden, neck-snapping run. Tara imaged in alarm. She had a fistful of mane, and took a second one, closer to Flicker’s head, jerking on it. But in the next instant her own panic overwhelmed her. She believed something was behind them—she threw a look over her shoulder, as Flicker hadn’t, and saw nothing but white light and the ghostly trees jolting and blurring past with Flicker’s reckless strides. she thought in fright, looked back, looked to the sides and forward, and again she looked back, and then she thought, an instant’s amazed chagrin—and absolute conviction: it’s not there. It’s not there now.

  Flicker slowed, breathing through her mouth in great, cold gasps—and kept making a little forward progress, just a little, a walk on a wider-open stretch of road. There was still one more shelter ahead, the last between them and the village, but Flicker’s reaction to that image, too, was a spooky, wordless no, Flicker wouldn’t stay there. Flicker kept walking, picked up speed on the downhills and trudged up the climbs, an ox-road and as level as the road-builders could make it. The place felt safer now, and if Flicker wanted to rest, Tara was for it.

  But she didn’t get off, because if that sending came down again, she didn’t rely on Flicker staying sane or remembering that she was leaving her rider stranded. There was a limit, even to their long partnership, and a goblin-cat confused even a nighthorse, if that was what it was.

  Hours on, well into afternoon, they came to that second shelter. Flicker’s legs and chest were spattered with ice now. Flicker’s breath huffed in great heavy pulses. Tara wanted, afraid Flicker would run herself into a heart attack.

  Flicker imaged only and and retook her beat, pace, pace, pace, pace, steady and scared.

  The falling snow slowly took on a kind of dim gold haze that passed to a hint of blue, heralding night, one of those snowy, moon-up nights that might have no boundary from the day. The second shelter was no-return now. It was farther back than it was on to Tarmin, and the night was blued and pale.

  Tara imaged, and swore that if they just made it to Tarmin camp there’d be warm blankets and whatever Flicker wanted. Ham. Eggs. A rub-down as long as Flicker wanted.

  Flicker wasn’t taking bribes. Flicker wasn’t listening at all. Flicker just kept going, in a fear that wasn’t at all panic, a fear that just didn’t let go, didn’t allow rest.

  Until between one stride and the next… the fear dropped away from them, different than its prior comings and goings—it just all of a sudden didn’t exist, might never have existed, leaving a nighthorse running and forgetting why and a rider who never had clearly known the cause.

  Flicker slowed to a shuddery walk, snorting and blowing and slavering onto a chest spattered with ice—walked, with wobbly steps, and Tara slid down, her fears of phantoms in the dark replaced by a real and present fear of Flicker collapsing under her rider’s weight.

  she imaged.

  Flicker wasn’t sure. Flicker was confused where she was, but in that confusion she kept listening to her rider, and Tara kept walking, holding a fistful of Flicker’s mane to be sure they stayed together. She cast through the haze of snow and blued night, picking out what the markers told her was the trail, despite the trackless blanketing of snow.

  She smelled the smoke of cookfires, then. She imaged and and shoved at Flicker’s shoulder, terrified of the ordinary dark for the first time in her adult life. She imaged it without intending to, and that got Flicker moving, a last shaky effort uphill and onto the flat road outside the gates.

  she imaged, before she reached the bell. But it was a snowy, sleepy night, and she had to grasp the rope with a numb, gloved hand, rouse the sleeping horses inside, and ring fit to wake the whole town, telling them there was a rider in from a dark that seemed deeper and more threatening at their backs now that they had the gate in front of them than it had a moment ago out in the midst of the storm.

  “Come on,” she muttered to the insensate wood, and hammered on it with her fist.

  The spyhole opened. They were being careful tonight. An eye regarded her before someone lifted the bar.

  “Need help,” she said. It was Vadim who had answered the gate-bell, and Vadim who shut the gate behind her as she led Flicker in, heading for the nighthorse den where warm bodies kept the air a constant temperature—where other horses, other minds, were solid, friendly, ordinary.

  Images flashed back and forth as she met that warmth, Flicker’s , the other horses’ queasy, unsettling fright at the dark outside.

  She couldn’t stop it—she couldn’t get Flicker to stop—couldn’t come out—couldn’t escape—couldn’t stop the light—

  “God,” Vadim said quietly, coming into that flood of panic.

  She was lost in it, trying to shut it down. She felt smothered when Vadim put his arms around her, hugged her against him— Vadim was sending and but it was remote from her, lost as she was in cold, lost as she was in her desperation to get air, to breathe, to move. She writhed free without meaning rejection. She felt Vadim’s consternation at that fleeting contact, felt it in the ambient, the horses all waked to fear and malady… they didn’t know, at first, what had come among them: Flicker sent. And no ordinary calm-sending. Flicker was lost, too. White was a veil of snow and light behind which they’d both taken refuge, and now in its shifting substance, Flicker couldn’t find the exit.

  “Tara!” Vadim shook her till her head snapped back. Till she could see the dark around them. He hugged her till her joints cracked, kissed her, breathed warmth on her.

  “Get help.” She’d been too cold to shiver. In the still warmth of the den, in Vadim’s attempts to warm her, his sending that she couldn’t take in—she found the ability. “Water. Cold water. Need more hands.”

  When you were this cold you started with cold water compresses, and you kept increasing the heat in the water little by little. If she and Flicker were alone she’d do it herself, but there was help. Chad and Luisa and Mina were in the barracks, and with a Vadim went running out into the snow, running, scared for her, when nothing she’d ever met could scare Vadim.

  Vadim hadn’t been where the danger was. He hadn’t felt it stalking behind him. He only had the echoes. And by that shapeless, dark fear of his, she knew how desperate it had been—still was, in her mind.

  “We’re all right,” she said to Flicker, pressing close against Flicker’s shoulder, thinking

  In not very long at all, her partners came running, Mina and young Luisa, all appalled, saying there was a rogue, they’d had a phone call clear from Shamesey, they’d wanted to come after her, but Vadim and Chad had held out against their going outside the walls— (young fools that they were)

  Tara kept saying, half-aware of them, shuddering at the thought of them going out into the woods unprotected. But it was constantly Flicker uppermost in her thoughts, it was Flicker she desperately tried to make aware of the camp, the den—the horses Flicker knew as her den-mates, as close to her as her human partners were to her rider.

  Flicker just kept imaging only as if, even in safety, she still couldn’t come back from that place.

  * * *

  Chapter viii

  « ^ »

  MAN’S A DAMN GHOST,” HAWLEY SAID, AT THEIR WIND-BLOWN campfire that night, high on the road, in a clump of evergreens that gave them a little shelter. There was no sign of passage but
the ruts the trucks had made in the road. The prints of horses on the dust were old, hardened mud; the tracks of game were newer. They hadn’t turned up tracks or sight or scent of Guil Stuart or, for that matter, any sight at all of whoever they’d sensed following them.

  Maybe we imagined it, Danny thought against his day-long inclination. He was, by now, willing to doubt his perceptions and Cloud’s.

  Maybe I misled everybody.

  “It’s sure a steep climb if he’s gone straight up the ridge,” Luke said, meaning “Question is, how bad was he hit? He could have gone to ground somewhere, if he was bleeding heavy.”

  The question turned unexpectedly to Danny then, when his mind was half-elsewhere; but Jonas was next to him, looking at him, so that a crawling-feeling went up and down Danny’s skin.

  Jonas wanted, Jonas was impatient, that came through, and Danny’s wits went scattered. also came through to him, along with a feeling of irritation.

  “Boy,” Jonas said. “You’d tell us if you had a thought of Stuart’s whereabouts. That so?”

  “Yeah, but I don’t. Sorry.”

  Jonas kept pushing at him. Friendly in the morning. Jonas’ back to him all afternoon. Everybody talking. Except him.

  He rolled to his knees, intending to leave the fireside and go over to Cloud’s vicinity, where he was comfortable and welcome.

  “Kid,” Luke said, not half so harshly. Luke was the friendlier, youngest one, the one he didn’t want a fight with—Luke maybe knew it. He couldn’t tell what got through to other people. “Sit down. Sit down, all right? Just a question.”

  It wasn’t just a question, he thought, with upset still roiling in his stomach. The question he was asking himself was about his own competency, a question so wide and general through his life he didn’t want to consider it except piece at a time, and most of all he didn’t want to consider it with them.

  But he didn’t want a fight with Luke, so he sat back down, arm around one knee, and found a dead seedpod to break up into dry pieces.

  “Ought to have stayed with mama,” Jonas muttered.

  “Yeah, fine,” he said back. “You want an answer, Jonas, sir? I don’t know where he is. I’m not hiding him.”

  He was unhappy, Cloud was unhappy.

  “You’re being loud, kid,” Jonas said.

  “Yeah, well, get off me. Doing the best I can.” He didn’t look at Jonas or the rest of them. The seedpod was far more interesting. It had four inside chambers, with hard, round seeds, brown in the firelight. Crunch. Four, six, a handful. He tossed them at the fire, one, two, three, trying to land one where it would burn visibly. Two hit, off, the third landed under the glowing archway of branches at the edge. Achievement.

  “Kid.” That was Hawley. He didn’t dislike Hawley. He really, really wasn’t sure about Jonas.

  “Kid’s adjusting,” Jonas said. “And he doesn’t know.”

  Truth. Jonas always talked nicer about him than Jonas talked to him. He didn’t know why Jonas couldn’t do a little adjusting himself.

  Didn’t know why Jonas had wanted him if nobody was going to believe him, except that remark Jonas had made about him being bait, and he didn’t take that altogether as fluffery. They might have intentions like that, using him that way, to draw Stuart in; and no reason they shouldn’t tell him so.

  They probably thought he was lying about people following him, trying to make himself important, trying to cover his trailing in late the way he had, as if there was some big, awful danger out there and he’d escaped it on his own.

  Serve them right if somebody did come up on them. And he’d warn them, of course, but they wouldn’t listen. They were seniors, and knew everything.

  “Kid,” Jonas said. “Calm down for two minutes, have you got it? We can send the horses off a ways so you and I can have a discussion, if you want.”

  “No, sir,” he muttered. Nobody was sending Cloud anywhere he didn’t want Cloud to go. But it wasn’t smart to quarrel with men who carried knives for more than fire-making. It didn’t even take a junior’s intelligence to figure that out.

  “Guns are quicker,” Jonas remarked dryly.

  He was sending, again. Dammit.

  “The kid’s just upset,” Luke said. “Lay off, Jonas. You’re pushing him too hard.”

  “Damn right I’m pushing him. We leave him at Tarmin village first chance we get. The rogue’d have him for breakfast. Go right for him, it would. I don’t plan to get him killed.”

  Madder and madder. Insult and concern. He couldn’t read Jonas’ signals and he couldn’t say whether Jonas was right or wrong. He wanted to go to Cloud the way he’d started to and not have to listen to them. He’d no need of lectures. But he’d been told to sit down, by the only one of them who was civil to him, and if Luke got mad at him the trip was going to be hell.

  Cloud ambled up into the firelight, snuffing at the ground, insinuated his big head over Danny’s shoulder and rested it there, imaging

  Danny patted Cloud’s cheek, and Cloud’s soft nose investigated his pockets, wanting he was sure his rider ought to have.

  Cloud didn’t do things totally unselfishly.

  “What I still can’t figure,” Hawley said, “is what he’s doing.”

  He meant Stuart.

  “Maybe he thinks the camp’s sent out hunters,” Luke said.

  “They have, of course,” Jonas said, and it took Danny a second and more to realize Jonas meant themselves, that that was what they were. It didn’t even count whoever was following them. He told himself what he’d perceived was real, no matter what Jonas thought. It was a damned stupid mess, over a rider who hadn’t done anything—anything but go to the gate trying to get his belongings back.

  Which they had brought with them. Supposedly to give Stuart’s belongings back to him when they found him.

  But he wasn’t so sure what Jonas’ personal motives were.

  He was probably sending again, but Jonas ignored it, just kicked the cook pan into the fire for the fire to clean. There wasn’t much grease. It made a flare, and the flare died quickly. He’d have to wipe it down in the morning, with a twist of grass, nasty job. But the youngest rider always got those jobs, it was a law of the universe.

  “Suppose he did get hit worse than we thought?” Luke asked.

  “I don’t think so,” Danny muttered without even thinking about it, and wished he hadn’t opened his mouth on any of their business, but Luke asking was different from Jonas asking, in his estimation, and by that comment, he’d committed himself. He found his hand resting on his leg above the knee, remembered the pain of the gunshot across the skin, the shock to the knee bones and tendons, vivid memory—he’d played it out a dozen times in his head and he did it for them, the whole image, to answer Luke’s question.

  “Didn’t go through,” Hawley judged with a grimace. “Went past. Burned him good, knocked him down, is all.”

  “Good,” Jonas said, not meaning about knocking Stuart down, meaning him: he suddenly figured he’d just done exactly what Jonas had been trying to get out of him, exactly the way that Jonas expected, and he hated Jonas for the satisfied look Jonas cast in his direction. But he held onto Cloud’s forelock long enough to distract Cloud when Cloud jerked his head up. Cloud’s hair burned through his hand. And Jonas won. Jonas was used to winning.

  “Kid’s damned good when he wants to be,” Hawley said, which doubly confused him, about whether Hawley was serious or sarcastic, as Hawley, immediately off on another tangent, imaged It looked like Guil.

  “Maybe not,” Luke said, not about him being good when he wanted to be: it was the rider-image Luke shook apart, in favor of < level trail >; a definite place, it seemed to be, but it could be any place. They knew what they were imaging. He didn’t. He sat there with places he’d never seen flying back and forth thro
ugh his vision and no knowledge what the question was.

  From out of nowhere Jonas put his hand on Danny’s knee— scared hell out of him, that too personal, powerful touch—shook him right out of his thoughts. “Gone across to Anveney?” Jonas asked without paying further attention to him, and the image of town and smokestacks Danny had never seen in person was certainly Anveney the way he’d seen it before, in his head. It was a place, he’d learned, that riders didn’t like, except Anveney paid well… and it was the only place of all the places in the world besides Shamesey he could have identified without their help.

  Jonas hit his knee, meaning Shut up, Danny thought; stop thinking into the ambient.

  “Man’s got no supplies,” Luke said.

  “Question is if he’s got money,” Jonas said.

  “I wouldn’t leave my stash under any hostel mattress,” Hawley said. “Not in Shamesey town.”

  Insult his town, while he was at it. There were limits.

  Another pat of Jonas’ unwelcome hand, and Jonas wasn’t even talking to him. Jonas was thinking about a building somewhere else, a place with bars on the windows, a jail, Danny thought at first, and then thought not, it was a business. “Has he,” Jonas asked, “got a draw on Aby’s account?”

  The question surprised Hawley, angered Hawley. Danny didn’t know why. Then it seemed to perplex Hawley, who scratched his stubbled chin. “Hell. She never said.”

  Jonas asked: “How much was in there?”

  “Healthy amount,” Hawley said sullenly. “It’s not his.”

  What did they do? Danny wondered. It sounded like an account at a bank, and money the dead rider had had there—that they thought Stuart might have gone to get.

  There was an uneasiness in the air, Hawley’s Ice, Cloud, Jonas’ Shadow all suddenly on edge. Jonas wasn’t at all happy.

  Hawley wasn’t.

  Hawley had gotten the money the dead rider owned, out of a bank, somewhere not in Shamesey—which was maybe Anveney. Danny didn’t know about banks or how you got money out of them. He’d never been inside one. Papa kept his money on him, or in the hiding-place under the floor, which he didn’t want to think about with these men seeing it…