by D. J. Butler
The trees on this side of the river ended in a split rail fence that ran right to the edge of the Snaik, enclosing a large pasture of dozing cattle. They had reached the edge of Marsick, Dyan realized. They weren’t safe, they weren’t home free, but they were alive. And it felt like she was winning.
“There’ll be a road up here to our right,” she said.
“Don’t we want to go through the pasture?” Jak’s words were definitely a question this time, and a deferential one.
Dyan felt pleased. “We do,” she agreed.
She took the reins as Eirig dismounted. The one-armed boy pulled two parallel rails out of their sockets to open a gap in the fence. When Dyan and Jak had ridden through, he mounted up again, this time behind Dyan.
They rode slowly through the cattle, and hunched low over their mounts. From far away, Dyan hoped, they wouldn’t look like riders at all, but like grazing animals awake in the middle of the night.
Her heart began to feel lighter. She even sang a little, though the only song that would come to her was the one to which she didn’t really know the words. “Sally, she married a soldier, a Captain named William Lee … hmmm, hmmm, hmmmm-mmmm, Sally always loved me.”
At the top of the pasture were a barn, a cattle shed, and the farmhouse. Eirig dismounted again to open the gate.
A light snapped on in the darkness and Dyan started, almost falling off her horse. Had Shad and Cheela seen them and circled around by the ford? She struggled to pull the goggles off her eyes, seeing flashing spots.
“What in Mother’s name are you doing in my field?” barked a rough, scratchy man’s voice. “You touch my cattle?”
Then Dyan realized that the light wasn’t the bright white of a light stick, but the yellow of a petrofuel lamp. She could even smell the burning petrofuel. The light shot out in a beam so she couldn’t see the holder, but that just meant it had shutters around the sides.
“We’re no rustlers,” Jak said. “Just passing through.”
“Passing through the wrong blasted property!” the rancher snarled. “I’m armed.” A long, slightly hooked knife blade flashed in the lamp’s yellowish beam. “And my hired men are on their way. Get off your horses. We’re going to go have a little talk with the Sheriff.”
Jak hesitated.
Dyan had an idea. “We’re Outriders,” she said in the sternest voice she could muster. “On Buza System business. Is this really a fight you want to pick, Landsy?” She flashed Outrider Lorne’s five-branched tree badge in the lamplight.
The rancher guffawed. “Or you could be a thief. Either way, the Sheriff’ll sort it out.”
Dyan held up Lorne’s whip in her other hand. “I think I’d rather sort it out right here,” she said.
“Mother’s teats you do!” The cattleman laughed. “What you’d rather do is get away to Silvertoon so you can sell your loot!”
Dyan struck with the whip.
She didn’t have Cheela’s skill with any of the Outrider’s weapons, but that didn’t mean she wasn’t good. She was trained, like any System Crecheling was, to be completely at ease with the monofilament whip, capable of defending herself with it. That meant, first and foremost, the skill to use it without cutting herself in half, but it also meant accuracy. It also meant knowing how to strike with the filament only partially extended, so as to strike a near target without automatically slicing through whatever lay behind it.
She cut right through the lamp and the tip of the farmer’s knife, the whip’s counterweight snicking neatly back into its home at the end of her blow.
Lantern wreckage, knife blade and petrofuel hit the ground in a sound that was part clunk and part splash.
There was a moment of stunned silence.
“Mother!” the rancher hissed. His feet crunched on the earth as he backed away several steps from the fuel burning on the ground.
“So we’ll be moving along now,” Eirig said. He opened the gate. “You go ahead and tell the Sheriff you saw us. Maybe he can get you a new knife.”
They rode past the farmhouse and found themselves on a dirt track, wide and gravelled flat. Other farmhouses dotted the road on both sides and in both directions. Dyan helped Eirig up onto the horse’s back behind her and turned towards Orvyl Rich’s store and the other buildings at the center of Marsick.
She managed to keep from laughing out loud until the farmhouse was well behind them, and then she restrained the laugh into a choked giggle. The few passersby in the darkness, mounted or on foot, ignored her slight outburst. Eirig patted her on the back.
The realization that they were almost the only people on the streets of Marsick sobered her quickly.
“Shad will track us in the daytime,” she said. “We have to make more distance, and we have to stay out of sight.” She pulled her goggles onto her face and looked back across the river. Her vision was obscured by distance and by intervening farm buildings and trees, but she didn’t see any heat-giving presence on the other side of the river that didn’t seem to be a sheep.
Did that mean that Shad and Cheela had crossed the river already and were close behind them? Were they hidden in the trees because they were maneuvering to sneak up to Dyan’s false ambush site, weapons in hand? Or were they following a sheep’s trail up some box canyon, cursing her name?
She almost laughed again at the thought.
“The river,” Jak suggested.
Dyan nodded in agreement. “But we can’t just ride out into the ford now. We’ll be visible for miles.”
They rode up the hill and out of Marsick. This far, Dyan felt reasonably safe. They should only be visible as heat signatures, and there were fires all around them, buildings and farm animals that would show through heatvision goggles as warm red blobs.
Once over the hill, she breathed even easier. They cut off the road through more pastures, riding faster and down towards the river. When they reached the Snaik again, they were around the bend from Marsick and definitely out of sight of Narl’s canyon or the false ambush. They rode into the shallows and turned downstream, towards Nemap on the Lull Sea.
The night became colder, but their continued movement kept Dyan warm. She hummed to herself and looked over her shoulder a lot. She saw deer in the valley, and smaller animals, but no pursuit. She wanted to talk with Jak, but once the excitement of the chase was over he slumped into himself, riding with that sunken-chested, evasive body posture he had had when she had first seen him. She whispered short questions to him about how he was managing without an actual saddle, but his answers were grunts.
She didn’t dare mention Aleena.
She asked Eirig to sing the song to her, the one about Sally and William Lee and the unnamed singer who loved a woman he couldn’t have. Eirig sang it once, and while she was trying to sing it back to him, he fell asleep on her shoulder.
Dyan contented herself with humming softly, checking to see that they weren’t being pursued, and following the river. Their heat signatures behind them wisped immediately off the cold river and disappeared.
It seemed like they had been riding all night, but eventually the valley widened and the Snaik flowed into the wide, flat pan of the Lull Sea. The fires and bodies of Nemap on the shore burned bright through Dyan’s goggles, and she hesitated.
“We could camp here,” she suggested, looking at the long grass and scrubby desert trees around them.
“I don’t know about Nemap,” Jak said, “but Ratsnay Station kept its gates shut at night. Shut and guarded.”
Dyan pondered that question. “Would the guards at Ratsnay Station open the gates for an Outrider?”
Jak nodded, his head a bobbing light.
Eirig didn’t wake up when Dyan dismounted, but just slumped forward over the saddle. The night air was chilly on Dyan’s skin as she stripped down to her underthings for the second time in front of Jak. This time he didn’t look away.
“You’re beautiful,” he said. He sounded sad.
She laughed, trying to lighten
the moment. “You can’t even see me. I have the nightvision goggles.”
His laugh was harder-edged, and he pointed at the sky. “You’ve stared so long through those things you’ve forgotten the moon and stars,” he said. “I have more than enough light to see you by.”
Dyan put her System clothing back on, shirt, trousers, and coat, and she pinned Outrider Lorne’s badge to her chest. She left the goggles on, because she still wanted to check for pursuit and because they helped disguise her face. Not that she thought anyone in Nemap could possibly recognize her, but she felt more comfortable with her eyes hidden.
Nemap’s gates were shut and barred from the inside. A heavy woman on the stockade wall leaned on her spear and squinted down at Dyan in the light of long torches punched upright into the earth at intervals around the gate. Dyan shut off the heatvision to avoid burning her eyes from the glare.
“You from the System?” the woman called.
“Outrider!” Dyan snapped back.
It was enough. The guardswoman and her colleagues opened the gate and let Dyan and her friends in. Dyan paid for two stalls in a stable with Scrip rectangles she found in Outrider Lorne’s saddlebags, and rather than spend more and risk contact with more people, they shoved a yawning gray dog out of its place and bunked beside the horses.
Eirig curled up into a ball in the hay and continued sleeping.
Jak lay flat on his back staring at the ceiling. When Dyan reached out and touched him softly, and sang to him all that she knew of the Gallows Song, he crawled over next to her and pressed himself against her body.
He fell asleep instantly, and in his sleep, he wept.
***
Chapter Nineteen
In the morning, when Dyan opened her eyes, Jak lay on her breast. His breathing was regular and his eyes, though red and puffy, were relaxed in sleep. She ran her fingers through his hair and wondered what was next.
“Sausages,” Eirig said.
“What?” Dyan snapped her head around, startled by the intrusion into her solitude, and found Eirig climbing over the wooden gate into the stable. Over the earthy, pungent smells of horse and hay, Dyan’s nose detected juicy, hot sausage, and her mouth began to water.
Jak sat up, rubbing his face. Eirig dropped into the stall with three wooden skewers in his hands, and on each skewer, a taut, sizzling piece of meat.
“How did you pay for those?” Dyan wondered.
“Who did you steal these from?” Jak asked at the same moment, grinning his approval.
“Ah, now you shame me,” Eirig objected. He handed them each a skewer and took a careful bite of his own sausage. “I worked for these. You two were still asleep when it got light, so I walked around and found an innkeeper. She had three sausages she didn’t want, and a pile of wood she needed chopped.”
Dyan tasted her sausage. She burnt her tongue but it was sweet and savory at the same time, pork with some sort of spice she thought might be fennel. “Is this Basku?” she asked.
“How did you chop wood with just one arm?” Jak wanted to know.
“Just like I did with two arms,” Eirig explained. “Only slower.”
“It’s not Basku,” Jak answered her question. “Basku sausage is red, and really spicy.”
Dyan didn’t care. She had eaten a full dinner at Aleena’s cabin, but the night of riding had left her ravenous. She wolfed the meat down, ignoring the scorching twinges in her lips and tongue as she ate it. She finished before either of the boys did and immediately wiped her hands on the straw and stood, to avoid staring at their food and giving them the idea that they should share.
“We need to get out of here,” she announced. “We need to get more distance between us and the Outriders, and get somewhere we can disappear and be safe.”
“The Wahai,” Jak said. “Across the water.”
Dyan nodded. “Let’s pack up and go find a boat.”
The morning was already warm and they led their horses down the dirt streets of Nemap to its wharf. Chickens scattered out of their path as they went, and mangy dogs on the run from boys with sticks. Dyan picked straws from her coat and tugged her clothing into position. She couldn’t very well wear her goggles in the daytime and she wished she had an Outrider’s bandanna, but she tried to make herself look as orderly as possible by the time they reached the shore of the Lull Sea.
Jak and Eirig seemed to be accepting her lead without question, but Dyan questioned herself. She wanted to get across the Lull and into the Wahai, and she thought they’d need the horses there. But she wanted to get there quickly, and disrupt the physical trail, if possible. She didn’t think Shad could track her through Nemap, but she wanted to be sure.
So she needed a large boat, large enough to carry horses. She found one.
It was a wide, flat-bottomed craft, with outrigged pontoons and piles of tradings goods. Dyan saw sacks of grain and stacked hides, but manufactured goods predominated: boots and shoes, saddles, horseshoes, coats, shovels, hammers, axes, sawn boards, and so forth.
Three brown-skinned, wiry men wearing cotton trousers and nothing else finished loading goods into the boat and checked its lines and sail. A heavier man with a prominent Adam’s apple in a sag-fleshed neck checked over a list of his cargo, making adjustments with a bit of charcoal. He squinted at Dyan when she cleared her throat.
“Outrider Zarah,” she said. She tried to speak with authority, but felt a twinge of embarrassment at using Zarah’s name. She hadn’t meant to do so, it had just come out when she realized she had to introduce herself.
“My cargo’s clean,” he snapped back.
“I need passage to the other side of the Sea,” she said. “I don’t care about your cargo.”
He relaxed visibly. “What do you mean?” he asked, looking over her shoulder. “Do you mean just for you?”
“Me, those two, and the horses,” Dyan said. “I can pay.”
The merchant’s eyes narrowed. “That’s refreshing.”
“Not much,” Dyan hastened to add.
He chuckled sourly. “That’s more like it.” He sighed and scratched his head, staining the whitish thatch with black from the charcoal he still held in his hand. “Look,” he said, “I’m running short on time. If you can have your prisoners help with the loading, I’ll get one of my men to clear a space in the hold for the animals.”
Dyan tried to think like a hard-nosed Outrider. “You expect help loading and Scrip, too?” she pushed.
The heavy man bowed his head. “Whatever Buza System thinks my services are worth,” he said quickly, “I am happy to agree.” Then he turned and shouted harsh-sounding words to his crew in a language Dyan didn’t understand.
Prisoners? Jak mouthed to her, but he and Eirig piled timbers and hand tools, and a few minutes later one of the nut-brown crew opened a large hatch in the deck. Clucking and saying words Dyan didn’t understand, he took the two horses from her and led them up the gangplank and down into the hold.
When the last barrel of nails was roped into place, the crew untied the ship from the wharf and raised the yellow-white sail. A stiff breeze tugged the sail out and scooted the ship slowly out from the wharf and into deeper water. The Wahai Mountains, blue-brown and snow-hatted, seemed larger by the minute.
Jak and Eirig sat quietly by Dyan on crates in the aft of the ship’s deck, and she pretended to watch them closely. Once the ship was safely out of Nemap, its skipper joined her, offering her half of a round wheel of soft bread.
“Thank you,” she said. “They haven’t eaten for a couple of days.” She tore herself a piece of the bread and passed the rest to Jak and Eirig.
“Going the wrong way, aren’t you?” The trader chewed bread in his cheek as he talked and looked closely at Dyan’s face. “With prisoners, I mean? Usually, you Outriders kill them on the spot. And when you don’t, if you transport them anywhere, it’s back to Buza System, not out into the Wahai.”
“They’re not exactly prisoners,” she said. She tried to
be tough like Cheela, and quiet like Shad. She didn’t like the trader’s curiosity, but she thought that was okay, because a real Outrider wouldn’t like it, either.
“Oh yeah? What are they, then?”
She didn’t want to rebuke the man or give him any other reason to hate her, or even remember her. Instead, she changed the subject. On a whim, inspired by the fact that she was crossing the Lull Sea and entering the Wahai, she asked: “Why don’t you sail west?”
“Beg your pardon?” The merchant looked confused. “I assumed you were going to one of the trading posts. If you want to go to the Dam, I can take you, but I’d rather do it on my return trip.”
“I don’t mean the Dam,” she said. “I mean beyond the Dam. You’re a sailor. Don’t you ever get tired of sailing back on forth on this tiny sea? Don’t you ever want to sail west on the Snaik as far as it can go, until you come to the ocean?”
He squinted at her, eyes glittering and dark. “Are you asking me if I’m a smuggler, Outrider?”
Dyan forced a laugh. “I meant to ask if you were an explorer. Haven’t you ever wanted to sail west and see what you could see?”
The trader spat over the gunwale and into the water. “I’ve known men who’ve done that,” he said slowly. “Those who weren’t killed by the Shoshan, or bandits, or wild animals, came back with stories of nothing. Hundreds of miles of nothing at all.”
“Anything else?” Dyan asked.
He shrugged. “Wild stories of ruins, some of them. Ruins on the shores of the ocean. From the days of the Cataclysm, I guess, but I don’t know, and I don’t really care. Because here’s the thing, Outrider.” He stared at her with a sour eye. “I don’t care about exploring. I don’t care about any ocean, I don’t care about any ruins and I don’t care about the Cataclysm. What I care about is making a profit, and that’s why I sail the Lull Sea. The crazies out there herding sheep and mining and the crazies on this side farming and making furniture are all the same—a bad year will ruin them. Insects in the crop mean the farmer starves. Sickness in the hooves of the herd means a cull, and death comes even to healthy animals. Bad luck on your stream, or claim-jumpers, means a miner dies a solitary death. The only one who prospers in all this, the only person who always prospers, is the trader. Because no matter what, all the crazies need someone to run around between them, carrying their goods to each other and making a profit. That’s what I do because that’s what I care about.” Dyan felt his eye boring into her forehead. “Making a profit.”
