“Do you know where it is? Ever been there?”
“Yeah, couple of times. It’s about twenty-five miles northwest of Bonemarsh.” He sat back on his saddlecloth and gestured vaguely at the opposite shelter wall.
Dag pursed his lips. “That must be, what, pretty nearly fifty miles above the old cleared line?”
“Nearly.”
“How was it ever let get started, up so far? It wasn’t there in my day.”
Saun shrugged. “Some settlement’s been there for as long as I’ve been alive. Three roads meet, and a river. There were a couple of mills, if I remember rightly. Sawmill first. Later, when there got to be more farms around it, they built one for grain. Blacksmith, forge, more. We’d stopped in at the blacksmith a few times, though they weren’t too friendly to patrollers.”
“Why not?” asked Fawn, willing to be indignant on Saun’s behalf.
“Old history. First few times farmers tried to settle up there, the Raintree patrollers ran them off, but they snuck back. Worse than pulling stumps, to try and get farmers off cleared land. On account of all the stumps they had to pull to clear it, I guess. There finally got to be so many of them, and so stubborn, it would have taken bloodshed to shift ’em, and folks gave up and let ’em stay on.”
Dag frowned.
Saun pulled his knees up and wrapped his arms around them in the damp chill. “Fellow up there once told me Lakewalkers were just greedy, to keep such prime farming country for a hunting reserve. That his people could win more food from it with a plow than we ever could with bows and traps.”
“What we hunt, they could not eat,” growled Mari.
“That’s the same fellow who told me blight bogles were a fright story made up by Lakewalkers to keep farmers off,” Saun added a bit grimly. “You wonder where he is now.”
Griff and Varleen shook their heads. Fawn bit her lip.
Dag wound a finger in his hair, pulling gently on a strand. He was overdue for another cut, Fawn thought, unless he meant to grow it out like his comrades. “I want to look at the place before we head home.”
Griff’s brow furrowed. “That’d be a good three days out of our way, Dag.”
“Maybe only two, if we jog up and catch the northern road again.” He added after a moment, “We could leave here two days early and be home on schedule all the same.”
Mari gave him a fishy look. “Thought it was about time for you to start gettin’ resty. Hoharie said, seven days off it for that leg. We all heard her.”
“Come on, you know she padded that.”
Mari did not exactly deny this, but she did say, “And why would you want to, anyway? You know what blight looks like, without having to go look at more. It’s all the same. That’s what makes it blight.”
“Company captain’s duty. Fairbolt will want a report on how this all got started.”
“Not his territory, Dag. It’s some Raintree camp captain’s job to look into it.”
Dag’s eyelids lowered and rose, in that peculiar I-am-not-arguing-about-this look; his gaze met Fawn’s curious one. “Nonetheless, I need to see whatever can be seen. I’m not calling for a debate on this, in case any of you were confused.” A faint, rare tinge of iron entered his voice. Not arguing, apparently, but not giving way, either.
Mari’s face screwed up. “Why? I could likely give you a tolerably accurate description of it all from right where I sit, and so could you. Depressing, but accurate. What answers are you lookin’ for?”
“If I knew, I wouldn’t have to go look.” More hair-twisting. “I don’t think I’m even looking for answers. I’m think I’m looking for new questions.” He gave Fawn a slow nod.
The next morning dawned bright blue, and everyone spent it getting their gear spread out in the sun or up on branches to dry out. By noon, Dag judged this task well along, and floated the notion of starting out today—in gentle, easy stages, to counter Mari’s exasperated look and mutter of Told you so. But since Mari was as sick of this place as everyone else, Dag soon had his way.
With the promise of home dangling in the distance, however round-aboutly, the youngsters had the camp broken down and bundled up in an hour, and Saun led their six mounts and the packhorse northwest. They skirted wide around the dead marsh, flat and dun in a crystalline light that still could not make it sparkle, for all that a shortcut across the blight would have saved several miles.
Halfway around, Mari drew her horse to a halt and turned her face to a vagrant moist breeze.
“What?” Saun called back, alert.
“Smell that?” said Mari.
“Right whiffy,” said Varleen, wrinkling her nose.
“Something’s starting to rot,” Dag explained to Fawn, who rode up beside him and looked anxiously inquiring. “That’s good.”
She shook her head. “You people.”
“Hope is where you find it.” He smiled down at her, then pushed Copperhead along. He could feel his weary patrol’s mood lighten just a shade.
As he’d promised Mari, they weaved through the woodlands of Raintree at a sedate walk. They rode with groundsenses open, like people trailing their hands through the weeds as they strolled, not formally patrolling, but as routine precaution. You never knew. Dag himself had once found and done for a very early sessile that way, when he was riding courier all alone in the far northeast hinterland of Seagate. Still, their amble put a good twelve miles between them and the Bonemarsh blight by the time they stopped in the early evening. Dag thought everyone slept a bit better that night; even he did, despite the throbbing ache in his healing thigh.
They started off the next day earlier, but no faster. Varleen spotted two mud-man corpses off the trail that appeared to have died naturally, running down at the end of the stolen strength the malice had given them, suggesting the hazard from the rest of their cohort was now much reduced. Even at this slow pace, the little patrol came up on the first noxious pinching of the blight around Greenspring by midafternoon.
In the shade of the last live trees before the trail opened out into cleared fields, Dag held up his hook, and everyone pulled their mounts to a halt.
“We don’t all have to go in. We could set up a camp here. You could stay with Varleen and Griff, Fawn. Blight this deep will be draining, even if you can’t feel it. Bad for you. And…it could be ugly.” Will be ugly.
Fawn leaned on her pommel and gave him a sharp look. “If it’s bad for me, won’t it be worse for you? Convalescing as you aren’t—at least not any too fast, that I can see.”
Mari vented a sour chuckle. “She’s got you there.”
Fawn took a breath and sat up. “This place—it’s something like West Blue, right?”
“Maybe,” Dag allowed.
“Then—I need to see it, too.” She gave a firm little nod.
They exchanged a long look; her resolve rang true. Should I be surprised? “Soonest begun, soonest done, then. We won’t linger long.” Dag braced himself and waved Saun onward.
They rode first past deserted farms: sickly, then dying, then dead, then dead with a peculiar gray tinge that was quite distinctive. Dag knew it well and furled his groundsense in tight around him, as did the other patrollers. It didn’t help quite enough.
“What are we looking for?” asked Griff, as the first buildings of a little town hove into view past a screen of bare and broken buckthorn bushes, someone’s scraggly attempt at a hedge.
“I’d like to find the lair, to start,” said Dag. “See where the malice started out, try to figure why it wasn’t spotted.”
It wasn’t that hard; they just followed the gradient of blight deeper and deeper. It felt like riding into a dark hollow, for all that the land here was as level as the rest of Raintree. The flattened vegetation grew grayer, and even the clapboard houses, with their fences leaning drunkenly, seemed drained of all color. It all smelled as dry and odorless as cave dust. The town was maybe twice the size of West Blue, Dag gauged. It had three or four streets. A sturdy wharf jutted i
nto a river worthy of the name and not just a jumped-up creek, which seemed to flow deeply enough to float small keelboats up from the Grace, and certainly rafts and flatboats down. A square for a day market; alehouse and smithy and forge; perhaps two hundred houses. A thousand people, formerly. None now.
The pit of the blight seemed to lie in a woodlot at the edge of the town. The horses snorted uneasily as their riders forced them forward. A shallow, shale-lined ravine with a small creek running through it shadowed a near cave partway up one side, not unlike the one they’d seen near Glassforge, if much smaller. It was quite empty now, the shale slumping in a slide to half block the water. Alongside the creek the earth was pocked with man-wide, man-deep pits, so thickly clustered in places as to seem like a wasp nest broken open. The malice’s first mud-man nursery, likely.
“With all these people around,” said Griff, “it’s hard to believe that no one spotted any of the early malice signs.”
“Maybe someone did,” said Fawn, “and no one paid them any mind. Being too young and short. The woodlot is common for the whole town. You bet the youngsters here played in that creek all the time, and in these woods.”
Dag hunched over his saddlebow and inhaled carefully, steadying his shuddering stomach. Yes. Malice food indeed, of the richest sort. Delivered up. This was how the malice had started so fast. He remembered its beauty in the silver light. How many molts…? As many as it liked.
“Did no one know to run?” asked Varleen. “Or did it just come up too quick?”
“It came up fast, sure, but not that fast,” opined Mari. She frowned at Dag’s huddle. “Some were killed by ill luck, but I expect more were killed by ignorance.”
“Why were—” Fawn began, and stopped.
Dag turned his head and raised his brows at her.
“I was going to say, why were they so ignorant,” she said in a lower voice. “But I was just as ignorant myself, not long back. So I guess I know why.”
Dag, still wordless with the nightmare images running through his mind, just shook his head and turned Copperhead around. They rode up from the ravine on the widest beaten path.
As they returned down the main street near the wharf, Saun’s head suddenly came up. “I swear I hear voices.”
Dag eased his groundsense open slightly, snapping it back again almost at once, cringing at the searing sensation. But he’d caught the life-sparks. “Over that way.”
They rode on, turning down a side street lined with bare trees and empty houses, some new clapboard, the older ones log-sided. A few had broken glass windows; most still made do with old-fashioned parchment and summer netting, though also split or ripped. The street became a rutted lane, beyond which lay a broad field, its trampled grass and weeds gray-dun. A score or so of human figures milled about on its far end along what used to be a tree line. A few carts with dispirited horses hitched to them stood by.
“They can’t be back trying to farm this!” said Saun in dismay.
“No,” said Dag, rising in his stirrups and squinting, “it’s no crop they’re planting today.”
“They’re digging graves,” said Mari quietly. “Must be some refugees who’ve come back to try and find their kin, same as at Bonemarsh.”
Griff shook his head in regret.
Dag hitched his reins into his hook, for all that his left arm was still very weak, to free his hand. He waved the patrol forward, but with a cautioning gesture brought them to a halt again at a little distance from the Greenspring survivors.
The townsmen formed up in a ragged rank, clutching shovels and mattocks in a way that reminded Dag a lot of the Horsefords’ first fearful approach to him, sitting so meekly on their porch. If the Horsefords had suffered reason to be nervy, these folks had cause to be half-crazed. Or maybe all-the-way crazed.
After an exchange of looks and low mutters, a single spokesman stepped out of the pack and moved cautiously toward the patrol, stopping a few prudent paces off, but within reasonable hearing distance. Good. Reassurances might work better delivered in a soothing tone, rather than bellowed. Dag touched his temple. “How de’.”
The man returned a short, grudging nod. He was middle-aged, careworn, dressed in work clothes due for mending that hadn’t been washed for weeks, an almost welcome whiff of something human in this odorless place. His face was so gray with fatigue as to look blighted while alive. Dag thought, unwillingly, of Sorrel Bluefield again.
“You folks shouldn’t be on this sick ground,” Dag began.
“It’s our ground,” the man returned, his stare distant.
“It’s been poisoned by the blight bogle. It’ll go on poisoning you if you linger on it.”
The man snorted. “I don’t need some Lakewalker corpse-eater to tell me that.”
Dag tried a brief, acknowledging nod. “You can bury your dead here if you like, though I wouldn’t advise it, but you should not camp here at night, leastways.”
“There’s shelter still standing.” The townsman raised his chin and scowled, and added in a tone of warning, “We’ll be guarding this ground tonight. In case you all were thinking of sneaking back.”
What did the fellow imagine? That Dag’s patrol had come around to try to steal the bodies of their dead? Infuriated protests rose in his mind: We would not do such a foul thing. We have plenty of corpses of our own just now, thank you all the same. Farmer bones are of no use to us, ground-ripped bones are no use to us, and as for ground-ripped farmer bones…! Teeth tight, he let nothing escape but a flat, “You do that.”
Perhaps uneasily realizing he’d given offense, the townsman did not apologize, but at least slid sideways: “And how else will we find each other, if any more come back? The bogle cursed us and marched us off all over the place…”
Had he been one of the bewildered mind-slaves? It seemed so. “Did no one know to run for help, when the bogle first came up? To spread a warning?”
“What help?” The man huffed again. “You Lakewalkers on your high horses rode us down. I was there.” His voice fell. “We were all mad with the bogle spells, yes, but…”
“They had to defend—” Dag began, and stopped. The cluster of nervous townsmen had not put down their tool-weapons, nor dispersed back to their forlorn task. He glanced aside at Fawn, watching in concern from atop Grace, and rubbed his aching forehead. He said instead, abruptly, “How about if I get down from this high horse? Will you step away and talk with me?”
A pause, a stare. A nod.
Dag steeled himself to dismount. Varleen, watching closely, slid down and went to Copperhead’s bridle, and Saun dropped from his own mount, unshipped the hickory staff that he’d carted along slotted under his saddle flap, and stepped to Dag’s stirrup. Dag’s leg did not quite turn under him as he landed on it, and he exchanged an almost-smile with Saun as the youth carefully unhanded his arm, both, he thought, thrown back in memory to their night attack on the bandit camp, ages ago. He gripped the staff and turned to the townsman, who was blinking as if he was just now taking in the details of his interrogator’s ragged condition.
Dag pointed to a lone dead tree, blown or fallen down in the field, and the townsman nodded again. As Dag swung the staff and limped toward it, he found Fawn at his left side. Her hand slipped around his arm, not yet in support, but ready if his leg folded again. He wondered if he should chase her back to Grace, spare her what promised to be some grim details. He dismissed his doubts—too late anyway—as they arrived at the thick trunk. She speaks farmer. With that thought, Dag guided Fawn around to sit between them. Both men could see over her head better than she could see around Dag, and…if this fellow’s most recent view of a Lakewalker patroller had been looking up the wrong end of a spear, he could likely use a spacer. We both could.
Dag breathed a little easier as the mob of townsmen went back to their digging. Now it was the Lakewalkers’ turn to stand in a tight cluster, holding their horses and watching Dag uneasily.
“This bogle was bad for everyone,” D
ag began again. “Raintree Lakewalkers lost folks, too, and homes. Bonemarsh Camp’s been blighted—it’ll have to be abandoned for the next thirty or more years, I reckon. This place, longer.”
The man grunted, whether in agreement or disagreement was hard to tell. Maybe just in pain.
“Have very many people come back? To find each other?” Fawn put in.
The man shrugged. “Some. Most of us here knew we’d be coming as a burial party, but…some. I found my wife,” he added after a moment.
“That’s good, then,” said Fawn in a tone of encouragement.
“She’s buried over there,” the townsman added, pointing to a long mound of turned earth along the tree line. Mass grave, Dag thought.
“Oh,” said Fawn, more quietly.
“They waited for us to come back,” the man continued. “All the wives and daughters. All the boys. The old folks. It was like there was something strange and holy happened to their bodies, because they didn’t rot, not even in the heat. It’s like they were waiting for us to come back and find them.”
Dag swallowed, and decided this was not the moment to explain the more arcane features of deep blight.
“I’m so sorry,” said Fawn softly.
The man shrugged. “Could have been worse. Daisy and Cooper over there, they found each other alive just an hour ago.” He nodded toward a man and one of the few women, who were both sitting on the tail of a wagon. Staring blankly, with their backs to each other.
Fawn’s little hand touched the man’s knee; he flinched. “And…why worse?” Fawn could ask such things; Dag would not have dared. He was glad she was here.
“Daisy, she’d thought Coop had their youngsters with him. Coop, he thought she’d had them with her. They’d had four.” He added after a moment, “We’re saving the children for last, see, in case more folks show up. To look.” Dag followed his glance to a line of stiff forms lying half-hidden in the distant weeds. Behind it, the men were starting to dig a trench. It was longer than the finished mound.
The Sharing Knife 2 - Legacy Page 28
