“Is there a phone?” Jonas asked. And it was like the business with the gate: he just hadn’t thought—they were still in the process of getting a camp in order. But he hadn’t thought.
He said, calmly, “Carlo, where’s a phone?”
“Mayor’s office,” Carlo said.
“Do what we can,” Jonas said. “We’re all right. But villages up on the High Loop need to know.”
“Yeah,” Danny said. He was embarrassed about the phone. But he didn’t know how to use one, anyway. It wasn’t quite as bad a mistake as he’d made with the gate. “I’ll go see about it. What building and what do you do with it?”
The morning came crisp and clear, sunlight striking the tops of the evergreens—Guil put his head out of the shelter, shut the door and took his time in the warmth. He had two dry blankets, dry fire-warmed boots, everything warm from the fireside, and Burn and he had breakfast on the bacon they’d brought and on the dry supplies the villages supplied the riders that served them: biscuits and sugar syrup, firewood already cut, an assortment of small blades and cords and such that riders might need—you took out, sometimes you put in, if you had a surplus; it was just an oddments box, always on the fireside. They made the shelters so much alike on purpose—so you didn’t have to wonder. There were bandages. There were matches. You left them alone if you didn’t need them.
He sterilized his own needle in the lamp-flame and got a nasty splinter out of the heel of his hand, a few minor ones out of his fingers. He’d lantern light and firelight this morning, the room was warm—he’d had time to warm himself and his dry blanket last night and even wash off before he went to bed on a decent supper. Then he’d gone out, just out, until he waked with the fire gone to coals and staggered out to put a couple of more small logs on.
Quiet, quiet morning. He was tempted to hunker down and stay another day, at least: he had aches and pains enough to justify it— he’d do it if there weren’t so urgent a reason to move on, at least as far as Tarmin, where he could find out from the local riders what the situation was and pass the warning of the situation. Tarmin could advise the High Loop villages of the danger if the phones were working—or if very brave riders wanted to try to get through.
There was one more shelter between here and Tarmin if he needed it: he knew it from Aby, and the map painted on a board nailed over the hearth advised the same, in a system he couldn’t doubt. There were the sideways crosses for the shelters; there were the dashes for the phone lines, with a circle for where you were, at this cross, and the triangles for the villages. Reading might tell you more, he guessed, because there were some letters on the board; but you didn’t need to know so much which village was which, if you were on this road. All you needed to know was that there was a village ahead and not just a mining camp. The marks always told you that, triangles for a village, stars for towns (there weren’t any on Tarmin Height) and squares for the camps. Trails were dot and dash, roads were wide solid lines. It always made sense.
Not to Burn. Burn believed that it was
“No,” Guil said reluctantly.
Burn was not happy. Burn sulked.
“Come on, Burn. Cut it.” Guil gave a slap on Burn’s shoulder and got snapped at by strong nighthorse teeth.
But he packed up.
He kept packing. He put out the fire, put on his coat and hat and scarf and gloves. The shelter was fast to chill with the fire out. Much less comfortable. Much less inviting. He gathered up the two-pack and his rifle, and opened the door. Cold air wafted in.
Burn shook himself, imaging
Burn was sulking as he came outside. Guil latched the door.
Guil started walking. Burn followed, still sulking.
But after a little Burn’s gait grew more cheerful, Burn’s nostrils worked on the cold mountain air. Breaths frosted. The snow made that sound underfoot that came of profound cold. The light sifted through the middle branches now, shafts of light on the snow-frosted boughs and spots of light on the snow.
Burn grew bored with slow moving on a cold morning. Burn was sore, but Burn wanted
Burn ran for silly long bursts and circled with a spray of snow and came back again. And started to cough from the dry air and the altitude.
Guil didn’t ask to ride. Burn’s back was probably sore: Burn had put some few knots in it carrying him up the mountain. He still had a headache, but not so bad this morning. His legs were sore— too much sitting about camp, he said to himself; about time he stretched the kinks out.
So he walked a good distance, until he was limping and beginning to think about
Burn had worked off his little coughing fit. But it was too bright and clear a morning to laze along. Burn was in a good humor and wanted
There wasn’t an apparent threat in the morning—a dry powder snow scarcely supported the little spooks, making strange plowed tracks in the deep places. It flew in clouds from under nighthorse feet. The air was clean-washed and clear.
The eye that took in constant information from such tracks could say there were a lot of them, and they were all nuisance-spooks, nothing serious.
The mind—understood a threat in that pattern: there should be bigger hunters abroad, even with a local number of horses in the ambient. A horse wouldn’t drive the hunters out. Compete with them. Annoy them. Yes.
But not interfere with a hunter’s predations among so many, many small spooks—unless human riders wanted to clear the area. That would be the obvious conclusion—if this rider didn’t know there was another, more ominous possibility.
The predators gave each other as much room as they needed, unless hunger or human presence drove them into a fight that neither ordinarily would pursue: their sign and their sendings defined where that back-to-the-wall point was, so they passed with bluster and bluff; the life-and-death struggle was all with prey, and prey never lacked predators.
Never lacked predators.
It didn’t make either of them comfortable, the horse-image in his head when he thought that.
The ground showed occasional tracks, never enough of them. The ambient held the occasional spook-image from the bushes. They walked along together, or Guil rode, and walked again, as Burn pleased. They had the morning’s biscuits as bacon sandwiches, had a couple of targets if he’d wanted to hunt, but they had supplies enough and he could get a good meal at Tarmin this evening. He didn’t want to shoot off a gun and spook everything into behaviors that said everything about the gunfire and nothing at all about what he was hunting. And he might not stay in Tarmin after he got there. He might sit out and listen—if there was a place he could fortify and quiet enough near the village to sit out in the dark and listen.
Because he never forgot what the job was: he just broke it up into smaller pieces that never left him daydreaming his way across the mountain—quick way to disaster, that was; of all mistakes Aby had made, he knew it wasn’t that one—she’d been too long in too many bad places to get caught napping.
The phone lines and the clear-cut were a guide along the easy way—no n
eed to worry about pits, rocks, and hidden holes: Burn was willing to move—Burn had
Guil took a fistful of mane and was about to do that when he saw a strange growth on the mountainside above them, like slats or a curiously regular weed growing out of the rocks. That was the first blink.
Then he realized it was bone supporting a coating of snow. A rib cage, or a part of one, and large.
Guil swung up. Dead horse up there. Possibly a wild one. Hard to say how long dead, but the very fact the bones were hanging together—though they might have frozen in that state—made it worrisome.
A fall was always possible. A broken leg, a stone-edge gash, a death by freezing or blood loss or even old age. But that was the way you’d explain a horse death on mountains where you didn’t have other, worse, possibilities, and he listened into the ambient, in case there was a rider stranded and dug in somewhere.
It was very, very quiet in the area—which wasn’t unusual in areas of the deep woods. But it wasn’t an ordinary area, in which a nighthorse had met with something it couldn’t deal with. He could wish it was the rogue and that whatever injuries it had had just caught up with it—but he didn’t bet their lives on it.
Burn didn’t take great upset at the sight at all.
All around, just a sense of life, little life, distant life, a whisper in the ambient, the awareness he’d dropped out of only in the desolation as Anveney.
That hush, everywhere about the mountainside. The rogue, if it was within reach, was quiescent for some reason.
Sleeping, maybe.
Or involved with something near and preoccupying to it, if it shared any traits of sane horses.
Burn picked up his pace, hit his meaning-business gait and kept at it, whuffs of breath and hoof-falls in the snow assuming one quick rhythm. Over close to an hour, the road led down across a rough spot in the mountain flank and around into a climb to a place protected by trees and the angle of the mountain.
It was a place a rider would look to find a shelter built, if he knew one was due; and Guil had no trouble spotting it among the evergreens a little above them on the mountain.
But there was a darkness about the door. It was standing wide; and when he and Burn turned off the road and went higher on the slope to investigate the place, vermin scurried madly and darted from the open doorway.
There was no answer. Not a one. A last willy-wisp racketed about the interior and ran out in desperation past Burn’s feet.
A restocking of the supplies in a shelter didn’t accidentally leave a door unlatched. A rider wasn’t that careless or he was dead in his first year.
They turned back down to the road and found, as they went, supplies strewn along the ground, a blanket hanging in a bush, a big tin of what had probably been flour, very clean, shiny, dented and scratched, and missing both flour and lid, lying in the roadway. It had snow inside the open end and a deep blanket of snow lying undisturbed on the upper surface.
That also said something about when the occupants had died.
It wasn’t the last of the debris. Rags turned up here and there, a few bones hanging together that didn’t look to be horse bones. The scavengers were quick and thorough. There’d been one at the bones only a moment ago, but it fled into the bushes.
Burn maintained a very close, very soft contact with the ambient, listening, lowering his head and smelling the bones and the vermin-tracked snow—but only briefly, obtaining nothing definite, from what Guil could detect, besides the expected blood and ani-mal smells. There were many more ways to reach that cabin than from the road, given the surefootedness of a horse.
There were more ways to die in the Wild. But none more sure than what those riders had done—under what pressure he didn’t hope to guess. He’d never met a spook he couldn’t resist. He was still alive. And he didn’t call them fools for having died. Fools didn’t get past their first season up here.
The deep snow in the tin said the deaths had happened before the snowfall quit—last night or before; and he hadn’t heard a thing in the ambient. Nothing.
Possibly it just hadn’t had the range a rogue was credited to have. Possibly that was exaggerated—he didn’t take everything he’d heard as truth. He’d never dealt with one. But granted the range of its sending wasn’t exaggerated—then it might have been as much as two days ago, before he’d arrived on the Height.
Grim as it was, his mind was working on details like that while he went, and confusing Burn, who was thinking
Guil made no complaint.
The sun had passed overhead and westward, behind the mountain wall, putting the snowy woods in the blued shadow which was the story half the day in the mountains, in any season; afternoon clouds formed above the peak—formed and drifted on with a little spit of snow, to drop rain on the lowlands.
Demi-shadows lengthened with afternoon, evergreens grown near-black against the snow. Thunder rumbled and echoed among the peaks.
That was a serious, imminent warning, not of the afternoon snow-flurries that were a daily event once autumn began, but of the truly dangerous storms that swept winter in their wake, that dumped snow nearly waist-deep to a man in a single night. The wild nighthorses fled the mountains with the coming of the first winter fronts. The spook-bears took to digging, and with their long, long claws made tunnels out again after such storms ended, retreating more and more until, when hunting grew sparse, they slept the deep sleep and waked again with spring.
There was that feeling in the air, worse than Jackson Peak, which he’d served out of Malvey—six days south and a thousand meters lower made a great deal of difference in the weather. Rogers Peak was that much farther north, Tarmin Ridge was higher than the villages on Jackson, Konig, or Darwin, and a man or a horse who disregarded that difference was in for trouble. Not a night on which he’d sit out and wait—not if a major storm was moving i
n.
It had taken him years and argument to get that simple sequence of events notion through Burn’s present-time attention—now, soon. But Burn understood him now: Burn walked along with him, head lowered, coughing, as Burn’s rider struck the fastest walk a two-legged creature could sustain on other than level ground. Legs burned, lungs burned, sore leg hurt like hell, but it gave Burn the interval to catch his breath.
Then it was Guil up to Burn’s back again, another stint as fast as Burn could take it; and walk again.
Burn understood. It wasn’t the worst or the first time they’d made time like this: it was
A dry wind, at first, and they could be glad of that—but Guil swung up to Burn’s back and Burn struck his staying-pace again.
Hope, Guil thought, that the rogue found similar need of shelter—or, best for everyone, that in its demented state it just stood still and froze to death.
He walked again. And in that stint at walking he came on a strange thing—a child’s coat in the snow, and not just lost— gnawed by vermin teeth.
A short time after that he found rags of cloth and leather, stiffened with ice. And vermin that, despite the weather, scampered down the mountain face below the trail.
Bones, then. Small, unidentifiable bones, recent, half-lost in the snow and the rocks beside the clear-cut and fill.
Snow was starting to fall. He thought,
Rider at the Gate Page 36
