Rider at the Gate

by C. J. Cherryh

and took a skip and a bounce for a junior’s belly-down mount onto Burn’s weary back.

  Burn was thinking and Burn moved the moment he felt his rider’s weight, and struck a desperate pace through the gathering chill.

  There wasn’t a phone working. No way to warn the other villages. “Lines must be down,” Carlo had said, when Danny reported back; but Luke had had to try it, saying he must not be doing it right; and Luke had had no luck.

  Luke had also seen enough by daylight to convince even a senior rider he didn’t want to go into the other buildings. Luke came back and had a beer and stayed quiet for a time. Jonas thought he might go try the phone, and asked if they’d cranked it—“Yes,” Luke said testily. “I’m not a fool, brother.”

  It seemed to Danny it was time to keep his head down and argue nothing at all—argue when it mattered, yes, but if the Westmans wanted to accuse each other he had ample patience to wait in a corner of the store beside Carlo while the Westmans sorted it out.

  The horses had wanted out, weary of the inside, accustomed to freedom to go where they liked as they liked, but not leaving their riders, either, in a place that smelled of and Cloud snapped at Shadow, Shadow snapped at Cloud, but all of it was horses insisting they were staying close to the store— all of it horses worried with and

  Danny just sat on a heap of flour sacks and listened to the ambient through the walls.

  And more than the ambient. A wind rose. Something loose was banging repeatedly, somewhere down the street—but weather be damned, the horses didn’t ask to be in again, not minding the wind—he heard Cloud’s in the ambient, and the spookiness that was Shadow. Ice and Froth were there, too, skittish, smelling and

  “It’s going to storm.” Randy came and sat down with them, huddled up close against his brother’s side. There was a little silence. The weather was worsening—the night was coming. It was one more night in this place, waiting.

  “She’s coming back, isn’t she?” Randy asked finally, sum of his dreads.

  “We don’t need to be afraid,” Carlo said. “There’s a lot of us now.” Carlo put his arm around Randy’s shoulders. “Don’t think about it. All right?”

  came from outside.

  One of the horses had found a curious object. Thought it might have something edible about it. came a severe order—specific to the horse, and Danny thought it was Jonas ordering Shadow to leave it alone. The boys were upset, and there were faces and people in the ambient, village folk Danny didn’t know.

  Danny sent, occupying the ambient with a rude, strong effort that seniors might have slapped down, but he had help then, Ice’s rider, Hawley, thinking so that the very air seemed colder, right next to the stove.

  “Stuart better make it fast,” Luke said, dealing cards to Hawley. “That’s getting mean out there.”

  “Can’t have gone past,” Hawley said. “He’d at least check it over.”

  Danny didn’t want to think about the wreck, but suddenly it was there, and Hawley’s glum mood: he didn’t want to think about the wreck, but it nagged the ambient, a before-snow impression of rocks and empty space under the riders’ right hand—Jonas had gotten testy with Hawley’s brooding and told him have a drink, so Hawley had had several.

  Hawley and Luke resumed play with Hawley’s frayed pack of cards.

  They were safe enough. Jonas had taken exactly the position that Danny hoped he would, that they shouldn’t have to move again, that Guil Stuart would come to them, because from the direction Stuart should be coming he had to pass by Tarmin gates.

  So they’d get Stuart to join them, and shelter here until they’d rested up—

  And wait until the rogue came to them, he supposed. That made sense. It made a vast amount of sense if you didn’t think about the other villages up on the road, higher on the mountain, or if you just took for granted the rogue would stay around the area—

  He didn’t understand what Jonas planned to do besides wait for Stuart—he wasn’t altogether easy with the notion of them being fast friends. But he didn’t think they had any mischief in mind. He wished Jonas would hint what they were going to do about the coming night. Or what precautions they were going to take.

  And maybe Jonas was just a son of a bitch who didn’t explain his plans, ever; and maybe Jonas had the notion he’d had—that if there was connection between the rogue and the boys, there was every chance it would come back to Tarmin rather than go to the villages up the mountain. Bait.

  That kind of thing, he understood with no trouble: hard choices, greater and lesser risk, foolhardiness and courage—there was a dividing line. Papa had always said so. In that sense they were protecting the villages on the High Loop just by sitting here and protecting themselves, and he supposed that was good and he was on the right side.

  But he didn’t understand the dying. Didn’t understand the bodies out there—nor why a reasonable God let it happen to people who’d, in the preachers’ economy, had no defense but not to listen, to shut their ears, inside and out. These were people who’d paid their tithes and gone to church and not been riotous and drunk too much and danced. And they were dead.

  His own mother and father and Sam had bought that life for themselves. They believed in it. They believed righteousness made you safe.

  But, God, it was all so fragile. It was all so terribly fragile. Five riders hadn’t been enough—the way he understood the boys’ image of the situation: five in town, two out on road repair—and none of them had stopped it.

  In that thought, too, Jonas was doing absolutely right, holding them here. But the man was so damned cold. As if—

  The ambient changed. Something more was out there than had been—he couldn’t define the change, he didn’t know why he was suddenly feeling the mountain more strongly, just that background noise that was always there—that now was more to the fore of his mind.

  He didn’t know what else had come in, but he wasn’t alone in perceiving that something had—every rider in the room had gone still. The card game had stopped—Luke and Hawley looked toward the wall, toward the outside and the east. Jonas, who’d been cleaning and oiling his pistol, hesitated just ever so slightly, then snapped the cylinder into lock, a sound that made the boys jump, the general spookiness in the air surely having its effect on them as well.

  “What is it?” Randy asked. came flooding through from both the boys. They had guns. They’d at least had Luke’s short version of how to aim and hope to hit something, and how not to empty the gun, ever, until you were down to the thing coming dead at you with no way to miss: they’d found the boys simple revolvers, single action, no rounds to lurk in the chamber and no safety to remember to take off. Pull the trigger and they went off— a danger to themselves and everything around them if they spooked.

  “Could be Stuart,” Danny said. He couldn’t tell even yet what it was. It was far or it was quiet, and he suddenly suspected that if it was in fact Stuart, it could sound like that. Stuart and Burn wouldn’t necessarily be a noisy presence.

  A horse had come up onto the walk outside. Cloud wanted and Cloud wasn’t alone in signaling human attention to the sudden change in the air.

  Jonas went and opened the door—Jonas didn’t tell anybody what he thought and you didn’t get it even now through the ambient, not past Shadow’s blurred images—but Cloud came in, snow-blanketed, with thunderous steps on the boards.

  Knocked into a stack of pails as he dodged past Jonas. They fell and rattled. Cloud spooked another couple of feet and stopped, shedding snow with a whip of his tail.

  Danny found himself on his feet, not alone from the snow-shower: Carlo and Randy were beside him. Hawley’s cards had scattered on the floor. Horses outside and inside we
re feeling an undefined presence in the ambient, the echo of living creatures out in the woods, all reflecting what the creature in the next territory over had heard in its range.

  Something large was definitely out there in the woods. Maybe more than one.

  “Is it the rogue?” Randy wanted to know, picking it up himself, or reading the distress in the room.

  “Hush,” Carlo said. “They know. Let them alone.”

  Carlo had the right of it: they didn’t want distraction—but they didn’t know, that was the trouble. It might be any large creature— several of which had gone over the wall last night, and might have grown braver during the day: autumn brought voracious hunger, hunger that outweighed fears and better sense. The little slinks were back in the upper end of the village, around the marshal’s office, Danny was sure of it—fast-moving scavengers that would be over the wall or into the cracks before a horse got up the street. There was no good chasing them and they did no harm with the horses here.

  They might well be the source of some of the alarm, although he had a strange conviction it was generally eastward—like waves rolling on the sea, one to the next, to the next hearer.

  “If it’s Stuart he’s on his way here,” Jonas said. “He’ll hear us in good time.”

  “Weather’s one hell of a mess out there,” Hawley said.

  “Doesn’t keep this from being the safest place in the district,” Luke said. “Just sit still. He’ll hear us. He’ll want shelter tonight. You hear that out there?”

  Cloud was dripping puddles onto the board floor, snow melting off his back. The view outside, beyond the porch, had been snow-veiled, enough to haze the buildings across the street. Danny wanted and Luke agreed with him. That was two.

  “But we don’t know it’s Stuart,” Jonas said.

  “I’m going,” Danny said. “You can do what you like. He’s close. Whatever it is—he’s close—” Because that was suddenly the feeling he had. It was Stuart.

  But he got a from Jonas, so strong he did stop and look back.

  “I came here by myself,” Danny said. “I make my own choices.”

  “That’s fine. Use your head.”

  “I am using it. He might need some help out there.”

  “He could,” Luke said, redeeming himself in Danny’s sight, right there, clean and clear.

  Jonas wasn’t happy. dominated the images. But Jonas thought about too, or somebody did. Jonas, still frowning, picked up his jacket. “Fisher,” Jonas said, “you stay with the village kids. It might not be him.”

  “Then you need—”

  “I said—stay with them. Do I need to explain? You’ve been wanting Stuart into the ambient for an hour, Fisher. Use your head.”

  It wasn’t a slur, he heard that. It was even good sense, keeping the boys out of the range of trouble—he understood it; and Jonas was right; he might have given the rogue an image to use on them. He’d been stupid. He just didn’t want to be the one staying in the store.

  But there wasn’t another likely choice to guard the boys. And ‘Fisher’ wasn’t ‘boy.’ He didn’t protest when the Westmans and Hawley picked up their winter gear and their guns and went out to the porch.

  He went outside himself, just far enough to see it was a real blizzard developing, worse than any storm he’d ever seen come down in Shamesey district. You couldn’t see across the street in the blued twilight.

  If it was Stuart out there in that whiteout, they might have to guide him in. And that was dangerous, because they didn’t know what they might be calling to in the ambient, or what might come back at them out of it.

  Didn’t need a junior to go calling out into the storm wide-open, he said to himself. Jonas had been polite when he’d suggested that village kids were a liability and hadn’t included him in that number. It wasn’t safe to go bunch down there by the gate and listen into the storm for whatever happened to image back at you. Jonas had a reason to be hesitant just to go out there, that close to the wall.

  A lot of reason. He went back inside, shut the door before they lost all the warm air—stamped off the snow.

  “What is it?” Randy asked, and his older brother elbowed him with,

  “Shut up, for God’s sake, they don’t know.”

  “It’s all right,” Danny found himself saying. “These guys—if you had to be in this situation, they’re as good as you could hire anywhere. They won’t open that gate until they’re sure.”

  was in the ambient. And, with an edge of anguish that turned to a darker, more desperate feeling, from at least one of the boys:

 

  He couldn’t answer that hard problem for them—not with anything they wanted to hear. he thought before he could stop it. Because they would—without a question their survival was at stake.

  Because by now if their younger sister wasn’t bones in the forest out there—she was half of the rogue. If she wasn’t dead—and the boys thought not—she rode it; she made at least half of any decision to run, to fight, to kill the village, to kill even their mother.

  With her brothers in the ambient they’d have her attention, that was what he guessed. They were all the reference points the girl had now. The rogue was going to come back sooner or later. He had no question of it.

  Just—if it was Stuart, if they could get Stuart in with them, along with Jonas, then the odds began to shift the other way.

  The snow came down so thick there was no telling they were on the road, except the lack of trees in front of them, and that could almost as well mean a drop off the mountain if they missed a winding of the road.

  It wasn’t a time to hurry, no matter how cold. It was a time to have made camp, if they’d planned to spend the night in the open.

  There couldn’t be that much farther to go to Tarmin. He wasn’t completely sure of his distances, but they ought to be there by now. They hadn’t seen further signs of destruction. The snow was too thick and coming down too hard, now—but the ambient had been damned quiet. Damned quiet.

  he insisted to Burn.

  Burn thought, he would have expected Burn would think,

  But Burn was as confused as he was by the silence, and thought instead,

  And the ambient was cold. So cold and still.

  Then—wasn’t, quite.

  he said to himself, spirits lifting. Somebody else was out in the hills, on the trail—or maybe in Tarmin itself, where he’d promised Burn they’d come by nightfall.

  But he still found himself shying off from the thought. He wasn’t sure. He couldn’t be sure. The ambient, vague and strange and silent as it generally was, began to conjure thoughts of a warm fire already made, and a company of riders. Too good to be true.

  It didn’t make sense with what he’d seen, evidence of dead riders—at least of a dead horse.

  But riders might well be out hunting the rogue. Riders out of Tarmin village might be looking for it—and a bunch of them, in this storm, might be sitting safe behind Tarmin walls, trying to beacon him in through the whiteout of the blizzard, sensing a sane rider and a sane horse, and not the threat the rogue posed.

  Maybe Cassivey had even done what he promised and called up to Tarmin to warn the villages. Even Shamesey might have. One lowland agency surely could have had the basic common sense to phone a warning of what the villages up here faced; and if that was the case, even if there’d been trouble here, then he could hope he came welcome, at a fire he didn’t have to build, and a sane barrier between him and the dark.

  He wanted that. He was in one hell of a fix if Tarmin was shut to him — or lost.

  He was spooked, was all. He’d spooked badly at Shamesey gates, and he hadn’t any patience at all with himself — he couldn’t afford it in the Wild, with the snow co
ming down in what was unquestionably now a full-scale, high-country blizzard — and a rogue somewhere in the question. Damned sure that there was trouble on the mountain, but he’d better sound sane to Tarmin riders, or they wouldn’t let him in. They’d leave him outside till they could get sober sense out of him, and that risked Burn. Calm down, he said to himself. Calm way down.

  A couple more rises and falls of the road, a bending against the flank of the mountain ridge — and he could smell wood smoke in good earnest. It wasn’t at all as noisy as he thought a village Tarmin’s size should be — but it was all right, he said to himself: the heavy fall of snow and maybe a bad night last night could have sent a lot of the village to bed early, and left the rider camp on watch.

  Burn saw Burn was picking up something that came through to him as a liveliness in the otherwise silent ambient.

  Burn called out suddenly, that sharp, high challenge to another horse that shook Burn’s sides, and there was a instantly in the ambient as Burn imaged

  Something came back to him — a familiar echo, he wasn’t sure from where or when, but he’d known that feeling. Burn said and answered it

  A shot came off the rocks near him, ricocheted and whined. Burn jumped in utter startlement and a second shot splintered bark off an evergreen.

  Instant, too, the image that came back, and

  Damn, he knew those horses.

  Jonas. Luke.

  Hawley.

  He didn’t consciously think. It hit his gut and it hit Burn’s simultaneously, and Burn slid immediately into fighting mode, ready to settle accounts.

  “” Guil sent, and Burn shied away from the challenge— imaged and jumped into a run as a gunshot echoed off the mountain and shattered bark right next to them. They were at the village gates—snow-hazed, shadows of men and horses were there. It was