“Hold it, hold it!” the other rider said. “No need.” But that rider had a pistol in hand, aimed generally toward him and Cloud. “Just come back here. Need a word with you.”
He wasn’t sure. Maybe the man had simply been trying to get his attention after he spooked—but shooting at people wasn’t how he wanted a word with them. The man wasn’t alone. Another rode up through the woods, weaving among the trees.
He was still on foot and downhill from Cloud, where he couldn’t mount up without maneuvering.
That man came up with the first. He’d thought he might have detected a south-hills, Hallanslake accent, and he saw now for certain it was Ancel Harper. Harper was holding a pistol aimed at him while one more rider was closing in.
He was scared half to death. He’d never in his life dealt with a gun aimed at him. He saw very clearly now that it wasn’t just a misunderstanding, and he didn’t want to face these three men trembling like a fool kid, but he didn’t know what to do about his situation, he didn’t know what he should have done to escape it, and Cloud didn’t know, either. Guns had shot at Cloud before, but
Cloud hadn’t had a rider who fell off, the last time guns had fired at him, and nobody had wanted Cloud to come toward them under that circumstance, either, the way these men wanted him to do. Cloud was mad, and confused, and the ambient was thick with nighthorse threats, the Hallanslake horses’ and Cloud’s.
“So what do you want?” Danny asked, trying to sound madder and more confident than he was scared—but it didn’t work at all. His voice wobbled.
“Sitting out here all alone,” Harper said, and the gun in Harper’s hand never wavered. “No place for a kid. Where are the Westmans?”
“I don’t know. Tell the truth, I don’t care. I’m tired of being bossed.”
“Are you?” Harper said flatly.
“I’m tired of people acting crazy. What’s the matter with everybody, anyway?” He managed high indignation, and told himself that Harper wasn’t ‘sir.’ Nobody who pointed guns at him was ever voluntarily ‘sir.’ He made up his mind to that right then, as scared as he was.
“Friend of Stuart’s, are you?”
“No.” He managed to be surprised and mad. “I know the man, that’s all. I never dealt with him.”
“Not what I picked up in Meeting. Not what anybody in Shamesey camp picked up. What’s your name, kid?”
“Dan—” He almost said Danny. “Dan Fisher. Yours is Harper.”
“We know each other?”
“Same place as you know me.” Thoroughly bad odds, Danny thought. He fell back on his bad-boy days, his town days, old friends and a habitual insolence to seniors—before papa had jerked him sideways. “I’ve got no personal stake in this. Jonas tried to hire me, but he didn’t pay me and I got tired of being told when to breathe. I’m going home.”
Harper slid his pistol back into the holster, threw a leg over and slipped easily down from his horse’s back. “So he hired you, did he? For what?”
You didn’t lie, near a horse. “I heard Stuart the night they were shooting. Jonas thought I could hear him loud enough on the trail to help out. I couldn’t. So I left.”
“Maybe you’d like to travel with us.”
“You paying?”
“Yeah,” Harper said. “Your neck, if you follow orders. And maybe a junior’s share of the bounty, if ever happens they put one on the rogue. Not unlikely they will. So you could go back with pocket money.”
What was smart to do? Say go to hell, to three borderers with guns? Danny shoved his hands in his belt. “I keep my gun, collect my gear back there… yeah, I’ll go for a junior’s share.”
“Gun’s not part of it,” Harper said. “Kid like you, a cannon like that? You ever fired that thing?”
“I’m not going up there with no gun!”
“Kid, you haven’t figured it yet. You’re going up there stark naked if you want to argue with us, but you are going. No gun. You want a strip search while we’re at it? Or you want to hand the gun over? You don’t need it. Blow you right off your horse, the kick it’s got. Guy like Watt, here, that’s his size gun.”
The man named Watt grinned. Big as a boulder and built like one. Horse as big as any Danny had ever seen.
And Cloud thought
Danny snatched a handful of Cloud’s mane, patted his shoulder, bodily pressing against him for a moment, imaging
Cloud’s ears were flat to his skull.
“Yeah,” Danny said quietly, quickly, and started unbuckling the gun before Cloud got himself killed. “I’ve got my gear and supplies back there.” He concentrated on the quiet. It kept his mind busy, kept his knees from shaking and wobbling. He imaged his camp downhill. Cloud nipped at his knee, caught a lipful of leather, still wanting
But he let the gun and holster fall to the ground.
Harper motioned back the way they’d come. “Quig, get his stuff.”
“Yeah,” the other man said, and turned his horse about on the hill and went after the stuff while the big guy, Watt, got off and collected the gun he’d dropped.
In the deepest well of his thoughts he was sorry now he hadn’t stuck tight to Jonas and said yes, sir, no matter what. Harper left no doubt who gave the orders with this bunch, and who was meaner, or smarter, or whatever it took to get that obedience out of men both bigger and stronger than Harper was.
“Get on your horse,” Harper said, and Danny turned Cloud around on the hill to put his preferred side uphill.
Cloud moved as he was about to get up.
“Cloud!” he hissed, scared, because he wasn’t all that steady in his knees, and wasn’t sure his nerves weren’t most of the reason for the upset he felt in Cloud. “Stand still, all right? Just stand still.”
Cloud’s ears were still flat.
He made it onto Cloud’s back, and Harper and the others led the way to the site downhill, where the man called Quig was putting his blanket rolls together and gathering up his supplies.
They stopped there. Quig handed him up his packets and his blankets. He sat there between Watt and Harper until Quig had finished and gotten back on his horse.
Harper brushed close to him. “You ride alongside me, hear?”
Cloud didn’t want be close to Harper or his horse, Cloud was consistently thinking
Following Jonas and company.
Not on Stuart’s trail, he was relieved to think, Stuart having gone—
Shit! he thought, remembering the look of that town—heart sinking.
“… Anveney, is it?” Harper asked him.
“Yeah, well, that’s what Jonas Westman thinks. That’s all I know.”
“Why does Westman think that?”
Try not to think of something.
He truly didn’t know what more he could do to foul things up.
* * *
Chapter x
« ^ »
IN THE BUSY DAYS OF SUMMER, BEFORE HARVEST AND AFTER SPRING and open market, riders took hires as many as they could and went wherever along the roads their commissions took them, traveling with steady partners if they could, but i
f that wasn’t possible, and a convoy had only so many berths, you took the job, that was all— because you always had a winter to get through, three dead-white months when nothing moved, when only the juniors made any money at all, and that was paltry change. If you were a high country rider, you made very good money during the summer itself, often the highest paying convoy right at the risky edge of autumn, when some last moment situation or late-realized shortage mandated that goods move somewhere fast.
The reliable riders got those offers—the shippers gave priority to the riders who gave them priority over other shippers, and if you had such a regular hire, depend on it—rather than risk losing a customer, you arranged a place to meet your partner for wintering-over, and you satisfied that special customer. Aby and he had end-season requests enough, usually separately, and they’d always arranged a place…
The MacFarlane, most times. He wished to God Aby had agreed to the MacFarlane with him this year, which would have put Aby far to the south instead of on that road.
But one of those last-moment commissions had come through, and as he guessed it, the high-pay end of it had been from Anveney up to Tarmin and the mining and logging towns.
Which meant Aby must have gotten a call from her Anveney shipper.
He still wanted to talk to that man, once he’d settled his own essential business on the mountain.
Anveney was a town riders avoided if they could. The spur over to Anveney was not so well-maintained since the townsman ambient had gotten tense between Shamesey and Anveney districts. Cargo still went, but the two districts quarreled about everything including responsibility for road maintenance, and the area where each claimed it was the other’s responsibility held potholes big enough to take a truck tire.
Anveney was northernmost of the towns—and the branch road out of Anveney east could take you downland and east to Carlisle, on the Inland Sea, if you stayed with it long enough, a trek through tedious days of barren flat and sandy ground, fit to make you and your horse see mirages. And once he’d finished his business, the Anveney west road was a way up to Tarmin, at least for riders in a hurry—not the way Jonas had come down, he was sure: modern trucks couldn’t take the steep grade.
What had come into Shamesey in that convoy with Jonas had been mostly lumber, logical enough for a cargo coming down from Tarmin district on the main road. Then the Anveney-based trucks and (the riders being short-handed) probably the whole convoy would have detoured over to Anveney (you never, for any reason, left trucks sitting unprotected in the Wild) before taking the Anveney spur road home to Shamesey: fuel was expensive, but it cost less than trucks.
Anveney copper sheet and Shamesey flour and beans and canned goods had undoubtedly been the upbound load, a before-winter shipment of supplies or equipment, on which Tarmin had elected to defray cost by shipping lumber down to Anveney and Shamesey. He knew the reasons and the directions things moved at the edge of winter. His job was to know; and he reckoned possibilities now in scatter-witted preoccupation, reconstructing without overmuch difficulty the reason Aby had been with Hawley and Jonas. The Westmans came north only rarely, but not so improbably: jobs had been slow in the south hills, a lot of rain this summer, as he well knew, and Aby was a good bet to be in this district come fall; they’d have come to ask her to get them hire. Which she could do: better to convoy with riders you knew than ones the truckers picked, and Aby was an experienced senior guide whose recommendation counted.
She wouldn’t, he decided, have anticipated any danger yet in the weather: Aby was a good weather-doctor, rarely missed a prediction. She’d have held her favorite client up for a hefty fee, having a better knack than some for making a run sound risky (no lie, if your chief guide made mistakes with the weather) for making herself sound knowledgeable (she was) and for generally convincing the shipper that they’d lose the best rider in the region if they didn’t keep Aby Dale satisfied with her situation. In part what they paid for was the expertise Aby had to say no if she didn’t like the feel of it and the guts she had to go ahead if she knew she could make it.
You only needed to be wrong once. And nobody could have predicted what had happened.
But damn the discussion they’d had at mid-summer, a discussion that had drifted to the dancing and the music and the electric lights of Shamesey camp. She liked it. She’d gotten snowed in last winter and left him stranded in Shamesey. She’d wanted him to come back north two winters running to the damn town, which was smoky, overcrowded, with an ambient that never let you rest. She called it excitement. He called it enough to give you a headache. He’d been stuck there last lonely winter waiting for her while she was snowed in.
But she wanted it. Wanted—
His rebel mind suddenly, as it would, conjured corpses.
And worse, worse, the feeling, the going-apart, the lost, dreadful disintegration that occupied that place high on the road, where the evergreens came close to the unstable ground of that bad turn, and the outward view was empty air.
He shook. He pressed his hand against his eyes, blotting out the light around him. He remembered Aby living, Aby on Moon, blithe and beautiful, coming down the road in the safe lowlands.
Burn shivered under him, ripple of skin up his shoulders. Whuff of confusion.
He confused Burn, and Burn dragged him back to what was. Burn couldn’t help it—and he couldn’t. He’d dragged Burn into thinking Aby might be waiting there, when Burn knew Aby was dead, and what was Burn to think?
That was one difference between horse-mind and human: once Burn had realized death, regretted it, disposed of the matter, Burn wouldn’t go raking it over and over at the turn of a breeze. And where did what-wasn’t-real lead a horse or a rider, anyway?
He had to get the thing that had killed Aby. Had to get it. It didn’t know any better than it did, its story was probably as sad as Aby’s, but it had destroyed Aby’s life and gotten a piece of his he couldn’t get back from it until he settled the question. For hours at a time he’d be all right, and then for a few minutes confusion would close in on him so he couldn’t breathe, and he’d lose his thoughts between past and present in a way Burn couldn’t handle.
And, equally confused, once in an hour he might think, To hell with it, ride south and forget it. You can’t bring back the dead. Aby won most times; she didn’t, once; she lost, is all. Fall of the dice. The riders up at Tarmin can handle their own trouble.
Then something would nag him saying, But all those people up there—riders not necessarily aware what’s moved in, unless the thing’s gotten noisier in the ambient. More deaths, after it got away with Aby’s.
And the way he understood the affliction, rogues didn’t always make a lot of noise. Some were very quiet. Very canny. A mountain village, unlike a lowland town, had only a few riders, and they’d have to divide themselves between hunting the horse and defending the village.
But: Damn stupid villagers, he’d think then, and hate them all; and ask himself who cared, or why he should care if they couldn’t take care of themselves. If they couldn’t take care of themselves they had no business living where they did and least of all crossing his path. He wasn’t a town rider. He stayed generally to the High Wild, dealt with the convoys, got their precious lumber and fuel oil to them, and minded his own business otherwise. He’d had a bullet burn across his skin, thanks to townsmen.
And then, on a breath, the painful lump in his throat would come back, a stinging in his eyes, a desire, villagers or no villagers at stake, to blow that thing to bloody hell.
The average was anger, and hurt, which couldn’t lead him to sit safe and secure down in Malvey, ignoring the situation, even if at moments he
wanted to.
It didn’t lead him straight up to Tarmin bare-handed, mad, and stupid, either. It led him steadily toward Anveney, because he needed a gun. If he could reach their money at the bank in Anveney, he couldn’t think of a better use for what he and Aby had saved for the winter than to buy something to blow so many large-caliber holes in that thing daylight shone through.
Give it a chance at him, the best bait and somehow, in his mind, justice in the offering.
Give it the one chance that thing would have had at him if he’d been with Aby the time she most needed him—and give him the chance he would have had if he’d been there, kill or be killed. Jonas had been all prudence. Get the convoy down, leave the rider for the scavengers. No damn way he would have left Aby lying at the foot of that slide and not gone down after her, convoy or no convoy; and hell if he wouldn’t have gone into the woods after that thing. Hawley he’d have thought would have had the loyalty to her to leave a safe, well-armed, downward-bound convoy, solo, to track Aby’s killer down. He hadn’t done it. He’d run. Aby had died with nobody near her with the guts to have gone after her killer.
Nighthorses caught the contagion of anger very readily, and believed human images very easily. Sometimes Burn likewise wanted to go
But
Rider at the Gate Page 17
