by Kyra Halland
“West by south, about seventy or eighty leagues.”
“Thanks, friend,” Silas said. The man headed for the bar and Silas left the saloon. Instead of asking any more questions here, it would be better to get to Stone Creek as fast as possible. He and Lainie were several days closer behind the killers this time, and if they started out right now they could cover eight or ten leagues before it got too dark to go any farther. He hurried up to the hotel room to tell Lainie they were riding out again.
He found her sound asleep on the bed. She had taken a packet of flatbread out from their provisions, and half a piece and some crumbs lay on the table. Even asleep, she looked tired and drawn. Silas reached down to touch her shoulder to wake her up, then hesitated. She’d been so sick and so tired, he hated to wake her and drag her out of that comfortable bed back onto the trail.
On the other hand, even a quarter of a day’s riding could make a difference in catching up with the culprits and preventing more deaths. The fellow who had brought the news had ridden hard to get the word here as fast as he could; Silas couldn’t let his valiant effort be for nothing.
If he had learned one thing in their time together, he had learned that instead of deciding for her, he should let Lainie make her own decisions. He sat down on the bed and shook her shoulder gently. “Darlin’?”
“Hm?” She stirred and opened her eyes. “What –?” Whatever she saw in his face made her expression go deadly serious. “What is it?”
“It happened again. Stone Creek, seventy or eighty leagues southwest of here.”
“Damn.” She sighed, then sat up and shifted her legs over the edge of the bed. “Well, what are we waiting for, Vendine? We still got some daylight left.”
“You sure you feel up to it?”
She gave him a wan but hard-edged smile. “If that woman’s going to kill any more people, it ain’t going to be because I’m laying around in bed. Let’s go.”
Chapter 15
THE SCENE AT Stone Creek, when Silas and Lainie arrived late in the morning of the third day, was much the same as at Thornwood. Burned-out buildings, blackened corpses, the smell of burned wood and flesh – stronger since this attack was more recent; the sense of horror, suffering, and grief from the lingering spirits. As before, Silas left Lainie and the horses outside the town while he went in to see to the dead.
He started digging a mass grave, using a small amount of power to help soften and break up the ground. The links between him and his power had strengthened with time and use, and he was finding it easier to draw on larger amounts of his own magic and to control the Wildings earth-power. But even with the help of magic, it still took from midday to the middle of the afternoon to dig a grave big enough for all the bodies. How many more times he was going to have to do this? he wondered as he dug and recited the prayers for the murdered dead. Had A’ayimat children been killed to provoke this attack too? How many more people would die, how many more towns would be destroyed, before he and Lainie caught up to the Hidden Council and stopped them?
By the time he was finished digging, he was worn out and had worked up a sweat in spite of the cold day. As he leaned on his shovel to rest for a moment, a slight unease that had been nagging at him grew into a prickly feeling on the back of his neck.
He was being watched.
When he was ready to get back to work, he started carrying the bodies, wrapped in his old coat and the worn-out blanket, to the grave while he recited more prayers. The feeling of being watched grew stronger. Was it a survivor? An A’ayimat? Or one of the Hidden Council’s people? He continued his grim task, carefully giving no indication that he knew he was being watched, while waiting to see if the person watching him would make a move.
He laid yet another body in the grave. When he rose to fetch the next one, a man stepped out from behind the ruins of a collapsed building on the other side of the grave. He was short but solidly built, clad in deerskin and wool, his eyes gold in his dark blue-toned face, his long white hair bound in multiple braids. He walked slowly over to the grave, carrying a short, curved sword in one hand and an arm-length spear in the other. Both weapons were in resting positions; still, Silas’s hand went to his holstered gun, though he didn’t draw yet.
“You pray for the dead,” the A’ayimat man said, standing at the edge of the grave and looking at Silas.
Silas nodded warily, wondering what the warrior’s intentions were.
The warrior looked down at the grave for a long moment, then sank to his knees and placed his weapons in it. “Pray for me and my kin as well.” His voice was heavy with sorrow. “Ask your gods to forgive us. Then bury my weapons so I can’t take any more innocent lives.”
The request left Silas dumbfounded for a moment. Then he realized that this man must have taken part in the attack. “What happened?”
“Two children of my clan, a young boy and girl, were raped and murdered,” the warrior said.
Silas’s stomach clenched at the news. It was exactly as he had feared.
“We found their ravaged bodies just inside the boundary of our territory,” the warrior went on. “A trail of footprints and a hidden trail of hatred and bloodlust in the earth led into the town. So, of course, we knew it was settlers who had abused and killed them, and we decided to take revenge. While we were preparing to attack, I felt a darkness come over us. Not the grief and anger we already felt, but a lust for destruction. We thought nothing of it; why shouldn’t we want to destroy the town? Our desire was completely justified. So we attacked without mercy, killing everyone we could reach –” His face crumpled and his voice grew ragged. “Then we set the town on fire and left the wounded to die screaming in the flames.”
A chill went up Silas’s spine as he listened. The warrior’s description of the darkness reminded him of the Sh’kimech and the Old Ones and their own hunger for destruction. And indeed, one of the mages who had caused the storm that nearly destroyed the northern herd last summer had drawn on the Old Ones. Madam Lorentius and her mages were dangerous enough; if they were still making use of those ancient powers from under the earth, that made the situation even worse. They were fools to tamper with such powers, thinking they could control them; worse, they had no idea how foolish they were being.
“When it was over,” the warrior continued, “we started back home. I was at the rear of the band. From the corner of my eye, I saw two Grana men hiding in the rocks over yonder, watching. At that distance, I couldn’t see them very well, but they were there, they had seen what we had done, and they had done nothing to help the townsfolk, their own people. Cowards, I thought, then it came to me that maybe they weren’t just cowards. Maybe they wanted this to happen and were watching to make sure it did.
“When I thought that, the darkness fled from my mind and I realized that my clan had been used to carry out someone else’s evil intentions. I caught up with the other warriors and told them, but the darkness was still over their minds and they tried to kill me. So I returned here, to find a way to atone for what my clan had done.” He looked up at Silas from where he knelt beside the grave. “I don’t understand it. Why would those men want us to attack their own people?”
“Those men weren’t settlers,” Silas said. “My wife and I think they belong to a group of outlaw wizards from Granadaia who want to take control of the Wildings.”
The warrior drew in a sharp breath, then spat a word that sounded like a curse. “They mean to start a war and force the settlers and my people to destroy each other.”
Silas nodded. “Leaving only a few people alive to be their slaves. They did the same thing at another town.”
“We heard. We couldn’t understand why, after all these years, the settlers would break the Compact in such a terrible way, knowing how such acts would be answered.” He gave Silas a long, thoughtful look. “Tell me, what do you have to do with these outlaws? And why are you here, burying the people they wanted us to kill?”
“They’re our enemies. My wife an
d I, we’re wizards, too, sworn to protect the freedom of the Wildings from people like this group. And – there’s a lot more to it, there’s personal business between us and them, even from before all this started. It’s a long story. But we mean to stop them, and we’ll do whatever it takes.”
The warrior stared down into the grave where he had placed his weapons. “Just you and your wife? And no one else?”
“The two of us, and another wizard who gave up magic fifteen years ago, who promised to fight if they attack his town. And that’s it. We don’t dare seek out other wizards because we’re also outlaws, as far as the wizard council in Granadaia is concerned.”
“I see.” The warrior was silent for a moment. Then he reached into the grave and took his weapons back out. “You have my help, as well,” he said, getting to his feet. “I’m Jasik, of the Ko’ayamat clan. To atone for what my people have done, I’ll help you stop the evil that caused it.”
“Silas Vendine,” Silas said. “And we’ll be right glad of your help.”
Jasik help Silas finish burying the dead. Then he fetched his sturdy mountain horse, tethered at his camp outside the town, and they rode out to where Lainie was waiting. She had cleared away the thin layer of snow from a spot of ground and was sitting on a folded blanket, gnawing on a piece of flatbread, which was about all she could stand to eat these days. She looked up as Silas and Jasik approached. “Well?” Her eyes went to Jasik in wordless question.
“This is Jasik,” Silas said as he climbed down from Abenar. “He was part of the band that attacked the town, then he discovered they were being manipulated, and now he wants to help us. You need to hear what he has to say.”
Jasik dismounted as well and nodded to Lainie in greeting. Silas felt a shifting of magic beneath his feet and in the air. “You’re the wizard woman we’ve heard of,” Jasik said. “Grana, but with power that’s kin to ours. It was the two of you who stopped the Ta’ayatan from making war on their neighboring clans.”
“That’s us,” Lainie said. “I’m pleased to meet you. Won’t you sit down and have a bite to eat?”
Jasik and Silas sat down on the blanket, and Lainie offered them beef jerky, flatbread, and dried fruit. As Jasik ate, he told Lainie his story, beginning with the discovery of the violated and murdered children.
Lainie closed her eyes, clenching her fists. “Not again. The gods damn her to all the hells.”
“Perhaps she shouldn’t hear this,” Jasik said to Silas.
Silas looked at Lainie, letting her decide. “I’m okay,” she said. “Go on.”
The warrior described the darkness that had fallen over his clan, the attack, and how, when he had spotted the two men watching and realized the deception, the darkness had lifted from his mind. He finished by telling how the other warriors had refused to believe him and how he had returned to the town to find a way to repent for the killings.
“Those blasted fools,” Lainie said when he was done. “I can’t believe her people are meddling with the Old Ones again. Those are the same spirits that the Ta’ayatan tried to summon to help them fight the other clans,” she explained to Jasik. “That proves it; it’s Elspetya’s people, sure as a hand of Dragons.”
“What did the men you saw look like?” Silas asked.
“I can’t say. They were too far away. One was paler and the other was darker, I think. Like you two.”
“Can you show us where they were hiding?”
Jasik nodded. “It isn’t far from here.”
They packed and mounted up, and Jasik led them south of the town to a tumble of boulders along the rocky stream bed that had given Stone Creek its name. There, Silas and Jasik searched the area and found burned sticks from a fire, kicked apart in an attempt to hide the fact that there had been a campfire there, bones from a small animal that had been cooked and eaten, and scuff marks on the hard ground. Men had stayed there for a night, maybe longer. Four of them, by the looks of it, though apparently only two had stayed behind to watch the attack. Snags of horsehair on a nearby thornwood tree, signs of grazing on the dry, tough clumps of grass, and droppings that had been kicked apart, again in an attempt to conceal them, showed where the horses had been tethered.
Jasik and Silas poked at the droppings with sticks, testing how hard and dry they were, and Jasik sniffed at a piece of the burned firewood. “Six, seven days old, considering the cold weather?” Jasik said.
Silas nodded agreement. “When the murders and the attack happened, right?”
“That’s right.”
Lainie was kneeling by where the fire had been, her hands to the ground, her eyes closed. When she opened her eyes, Silas asked, “Find anything?”
“Yeah.” Her face was grim, and she shuddered as though trying to shake off the memory of what she had found. “A trail like at Thornwood, but stronger. Here, you try it.”
Silas crouched down, put his hands where hers had been, and closed his eyes. He reached into the ground with his mage senses and soon found a trail of corruption and evil – lust, hate, greed, contempt. Its touch made his stomach twist.
He fought back his revulsion and tried to examine the trail more closely, to see if he could learn more about the men who had left it. He picked up fragments of thoughts – any means to achieve the desired end, a chance to satisfy urges that usually had to be kept hidden, a display of power over the despised savages and Plains… As well, probably because the trail was newer, he also picked up an impression of their power. It wasn’t much, but he could tell that one of them definitely had Wildings-influenced power, and he was certain he would recognize the other powers if he encountered them again.
“I found it,” he said. He stood and walked in the direction the faint magical trail had gone. “This way, I think.”
The physical traces of the men’s passage were harder to find in this rocky ground than they had been in the dirt in the wash outside Thornwood, but Silas and Jasik put their heads and their tracking skills together, and soon found the men’s trail. “What do you think?” he asked Lainie, to get confirmation of what they had found.
She put her hands to the ground. A moment later, she said, “Yeah. That way.” She pointed in the same direction, southwest – towards the great Gap River Valley, and hundreds more potential victims for the Hidden Council’s deadly scheme.
Chapter 16
SILAS, LAINIE, AND Jasik followed the killers’ trail south and west through the sparse, rocky rangeland along the base of the Greenstone Mountains. The main business in this area wasn’t ranching but mining for copper and other minerals, by special arrangements with the A’ayimat who controlled the ore-rich mountains.
Still, there were a few cowhands out on the range with their herds. The cowhands were wary and suspicious of the three of them, so Silas and Lainie approached with their hands empty and arms wide open while Jasik kept well behind them. Silas explained that they were after the troublemakers who had provoked the blueskin attacks and that the warrior with them also wanted to prevent any more bloodshed, and the hands agreed to answer their questions. A number of strangers had been seen in the last nineday or so, traveling in small groups, some heading east and others west, but they had kept to themselves and the hands hadn’t approached them. That wasn’t much to go on, but at least they knew people had passed by this way and there was no word of any more attacks.
On the fifth day out from Stone Creek, the town of Discovery came into view. The seat of the copper mining business, Discovery was a good-sized town, and rich, and had an unusually close relationship with the A’ayimat in the Greenstone Mountains due to the mining agreements. All of which, Silas figured, made it a likely target for Elspetya Lorentius’s attention.
Silas reined in Abenar, and Lainie came to a halt beside him. Jasik joined them, as well. “Let’s talk,” Silas said, and they all dismounted.
“That’s Discovery, up ahead,” Silas said. “I doubt the Hidden Council would provoke an A’ayimat attack there; it’s too big and too rich
. But they might well be interested in it for other reasons. Lainie, darlin’, would you check to see if there’s any mages around here?” Lainie’s method of detecting mages through the slight disturbances their power made in the flow of magic within the earth was more accurate at distance than Silas’s more usual way of detecting power and shields. She could also pick up on Wildings-born mages who were suppressing their power, and it was pretty certain that at least one of the mages they were after was Wildings-born.
Lainie knelt, pressed her palms flat against the ground, and closed her eyes. After a few moments, she stood up, brushing dirt from her hands. “Three, for sure. Maybe four or more. That way.” She pointed towards Discovery.
“All right,” Silas said. “Let’s go see what those sons of bitches are up to.”
As they approached the town from the east, Silas could see a gibbet just outside the south edge of town. Two bodies dangled from it, one in pants and one with skirts fluttering around its legs. Lainie drew in a sharp breath and stared at the gallows, eyes wide and face pale, a hand straying towards her neck.
“Don’t look at it,” Silas said. “There’s nothing you can do about it now.”
She closed her eyes and swallowed, and turned her face away from the sight. Even after a year and a half, the terror of that day when Lainie had nearly been strung up by a mage-hating mob in Bitterbush Springs was fresh in Silas’s mind, and the memory had to be much worse for her. Who were the unfortunate souls who’d been hanged here? The trouble-causing mages, caught and hanged by the townsfolk? Not unless they had been hanged in the last hour or so; no one, not even Lainie, could detect a dead mage’s power.
“Trouble. Stay here?” he said to Jasik, using words he had determined the A’ayimat warrior understood without having to draw their meaning through the magic in the earth.
Jasik shook his head, his multitude of white braids swinging with the motion. “No. I speak for A’ayimat.” Then he grinned. “No Grana touch me.”
