The Sharing Knife Book Four: Horizon

by Lois McMaster Bujold

  The malice had actually knelt down, its vast gut resting on the road between its spread knees, but it wallowed upright again as its dozen remaining guards drew back around it. Dag let his bow arm swing down out of the way and drew his war knife. “All right. It won’t get any better.”

  Out of bolts, Whit started to let his crossbow fall, but Dag said, “Hang it on your back. You might get the chance to collect a few of your misses. Or hits.” Whit shrugged the carrying strap across his chest and took up the ash spear he had borrowed from Sage. The boy yelled once in excitement as they began to run, noticed that everyone else was advancing in dead silence, and clamped his mouth shut. Dag let him plunge ahead and spend his eagerness threshing a path through the thorny scrub, for which the waving spear proved unexpectedly useful.

  Barr and Tavia wove down the slope to his right, with the sharing-knife threesome close behind them.

  They spread out around the malice; its mud-men responded by throwing rocks, with which this country was only too well supplied.

  Their whistling power was nasty, but fortunately the aim was mostly bad, though Remo yelped as one bounced off his shoulder. The malice turned around and around, roaring horribly, but did not retreat. Closing and careful, Dag expended two of his last four steel-tipped arrows putting mud-men down to stay. Another pair lurched toward them; one ran up on Whit’s spear, ripping it from his hands but then falling over its impalement in a tangle. Dag’s war knife opened his mud-man from groin to breastbone. Whit paused to yank back one of his bolts from the fallen creature’s leg, shaking it free of gore.

  A cudgel-waving mud-man charged toward Rase, bowling Barr over; swiftly, Dag sent an arrow after it as his threesome kept trying to circle behind the malice, who kept rotating to face them. Inspired, Whit raised his bow and shot his retrieved bolt at the malice. It thwacked hard into the creature’s left shoulder. And vanished.

  The malice screamed and heaved its awkward body around. On its left breast, its gray skin parted; from that mouth, the bolt spat into the malice’s up-reaching hand. The skin rippled closed again while the malice was winding its arm back to throw the bolt like a dart. It would not miss; Dag stepped in front of Whit, who was gibbering, “Did you see that? Come flyin’ out just like a watermelon seed! Should’ve gone through its heart . . . !”

  Even through his tight veiling Dag could feel the malice reaching out to ground-rip his tent-brother. The power of it would pry open Whit’s shield like a mussel shell, given enough time. Which of course was also true of ground veiling. The huge arm bunched . . .

  Whit’s shot had been futile as a blow but perfect as a distraction.

  In the malice’s momentary and terrible shift of focus, Rase, face gone white, darted up behind it, shut his eyes, and thrust out the pale blade of his sharing knife.

  The faint crack as the bone split and released its hoarded death into the malice was the sweetest sound Dag could imagine.

  The malice’s scream shot upward in pitch till it felt like hot needles thrust into Dag’s eardrums. Whit clamped his hands over his own ears and bent, mouth opening and closing on words Dag could not make out.

  Rase, Neeta, and Remo all stumbled backward; Rase, grazed by the malice’s deathly aura, was curling in on himself and starting to vomit already. Slowly, starting at the top of its ridged skull, the malice began to fall apart, pieces flaking off and spinning away in a stinking cloud.

  Destruction spiraled downward, faster and faster, yet slowed when it reached the out-thrust torso. The remains of the creature—god, man, monster, or some clot of all three—slumped in a pile in the middle of the road, several hundred pounds of slimy rubble. The sudden silence was a blessing beyond imagining.

  Dag eyed the great formless lump, drew Crane’s primed knife from the leather sheath hung at his throat, and advanced cautiously. He was going to have to open his ground just a hair to check this, and then he was going to regret it. The smell was bad enough. The lingering wrongness blasted through Dag with the force of a bitter wind in a Luthlian winter; his belly knotted and his mouth watered uncontrollably. But the new malice body forming inside the old one was dead, too, or never alive. Dag clamped his ground and his jaw shut again, put the knife away, and swallowed hard against his late lunch demanding instant escape.

  Whit was shaken but standing. Barr was sitting on the ground holding his bleeding head; Tavia, with a bright red mark on her face that was going to be a dark blue bruise soon, knelt beside him trying to pull his hands away to check the damage. Rase was now on all fours, emptying his guts, with Remo bent beside him in concern and Neeta watching warily.

  “Whit, Neeta,” Dag called. “We’re not done yet. Got to clean up all the mud-men within reach.”

  Easy reach, at least. Only a couple of the creatures had escaped across the road, trying to find concealment in the riverbanks or in the scrub up toward the far ridge. They were mindless now—or rather, and more dreadfully, returned to their animal minds trapped in their humanlike bodies. They would die on their own, but only after lingering agonies. The ones still alive in the broken brambles were making the most vile noises, animal screams mixed with almost human-sounding weeping. Dag paused to swap out his bow for his hook again, and drew his knife once more. The downed mud-men were still dangerous in their thrashings, so the three of them worked together, two to hold them down and one to slice through those pitiable throats, ending what should never have begun. It was rightful mercy and Dag hated every wretched minute of it. But the youngsters didn’t need to see that, so he set a methodical and thorough example, for the thousandth time. They collected as many of everyone’s spent arrows as they could find.

  Dag made sure Rase wasn’t vomiting blood, then set Remo to haul him back to the horses, away from the remains of the malice. Tavia supported Barr, who looked impressively gory—scalp wounds bled like wellsprings—but had suffered no skull cracks. Dag assigned Neeta to ride after the farmers and get them turned around once more. “Tell them we’ll meet by the wagons!”

  As the swift hoofbeats of her mount receded, Whit circled the smelly mound piled up in the middle of the road, shaking his head in new amazement. “That thing must have weighed six, eight hundred pounds. Did Fawn’s malice look like that one? ” he asked Dag.

  “Pretty much. Except the Glassforge malice was more dangerous, not being on the verge of a molt.” The Glassforge malice had also acquired language; this one seemed not to have, which suggested hopefully that it had not yet taken any human victims.

  “How do those molts work? You keep talking about them like they was a bad thing.”

  Dag shrugged. “You understand how mud-men are made, right? The malice places a live animal in the soil, and alters the creature’s ground to impel its body to grow into a human form.”

  “I heard Fawn describe the ones she saw in Raintree. I wouldn’t rightly claim to understand it, but I guess I get the picture.”

  “Ground is the underlying truth of the world. The malice turns it into a lie, or at least, into something else, and the matter labors to match it.”

  Whit looked much blanker; Dag swiftly gave up on maker theory.

  “It’s like the malice uses its own body as a mud-pot to grow its new one in. A newer, better, more advanced, usually more human-looking one. Depending on what people or animals the malice has found to consume. Ground-rip, that is. A malice uses those grounds to teach its new body how to grow.”

  Whit’s nose wrinkled. “You’re saying the malice gives birth to itself?”

  “There’s a reason we call it molting and not birth. When it reaches full size, the malice abandons its old body, which dies around the new one, and the new one, er . . . fights its way out of the old skin. The new body is usually near as big as the old, so a malice on the verge of a molt is sessile—immobile. It holes up for days or weeks and doesn’t move till the process is complete. They’re pretty helpless at that stage, and easy— well, easier—to slay.”

  “What about when it gets more
human, like the one you saw in Raintree? That you said was so beautiful? ”

  “Same process. Messier, I guess. They tend to molt less often as they advance.”

  Whit stared at the pile of rubble and scratched his head. “Huh. You wouldn’t want Fawn to see that just now, I reckon.”

  Trust Whit to blurt out what was better left unsaid. Dag didn’t know whether to laugh or sigh. “No,” he agreed. “I sure wouldn’t.”

  But Whit was already in pursuit of another thought. “So—back when you two met near Glassforge, Fawn did what Rase just did, more or less? ”

  “Yes. She slew a malice, with a primed sharing knife. Just like that.”

  Whit was silent for a very long time. “My little sister,” he finally said.

  His tone was not especially readable, but Dag thought it might be wonder.

  Or awe. “Huh.”

  ———

  Fawn was relieved to camp that night back at the shallow ford where they’d left the wagons, despite the exhausting trek to regain it. Grouse wasn’t the only farmer to grumble about having ridden twelve miles down the road only to ride twelve miles back, just the loudest.

  “It was a long day’s work to end up right back where we started. What did we gain? ”

  “Practice,” said Sumac, without sympathy. “Practice is never wasted.”

  Once Fawn had convinced herself of Dag’s uninjured state, she viewed the victorious but battered patrol with what concern she had left over. Whit assured her that Barr yelped far more for Arkady stitching up his head than he had for the mud-man hitting him with the original rock. Remo moved stiffly, and couldn’t raise his right arm higher than his shoulder, but made no complaint. Everyone including Tavia seemed to think the bruise on Tavia’s face was more showy than serious.

  Rase, untouched by any blow, was by far the sickest. Fawn gladly shared her dwindling stock of anti-nausea medicine with him, but it was after sunset before he could keep so much as a sip of water down.

  Dag seemed unalarmed, but made sure the boy stayed in his bedroll.

  The Lakewalkers all agreed Rase deserved a proper bow-down, a party patroller-style to celebrate his first malice kill, but that it would have to be put off till he was in shape to enjoy it, which Dag said could be as much as a week.

  The patrollers collected around the fire after supper to piece together Rase’s spent knife and carefully wrap the shards in a makeshift cloth shroud until it could be returned to New Elm Camp for burial.

  They didn’t seem grave enough for Fawn to call it a ritual, nor cheery enough to call it a celebration, but Sumac led them in a song Fawn recognized from the bow-down she’d seen back in Glassforge—not with a bone flute this time, just with naked voices. The words turned out to be not about malices or death or sacrifice, but about a garden by a lakeside where two lovers met. It ought to have sounded lyrical, but somehow came out more like a hymn. Fawn could not have said why, but she felt the tune must be very old.

  Berry, listening as the verses found their culmination, drew her hickory-wood fiddle from its bag and, despite her healing fingers, took up the melody in winding variations each sweeter than the last. The flickering firelight gleamed off tracks of tears on Rase’s face as he listened from his bedroll, and when she finished, he murmured, “Thank you,” very sincerely. Fawn wondered how close to his great-grandfather the young patroller had been.

  Berry lightened the mood with a brisker reel, inspiring Plum to drag her little brother Owlet to the fireside in a valiant attempt to dance. The two held hands and swung arms with more enthusiasm than grace, and Owlet squealed his delight as Plum twirled her skirts.

  In this warm weather Owlet ran about dressed in a cast-off shirt, as good as a gown on him, and nothing else; below the hem his dimpled knees pumped and his little bare feet tromped the dirt, and even Bo and Dag smiled.

  After Berry shook out her hands and put the fiddle away, Bo offered a tale or two, both outrageously unlikely, which led to some reminiscing from the patrollers, the likelihood of which was harder to judge. A few hoarded bottles passed from hand to hand. Arkady’s contribution won the most respect; the one sip that Fawn dared went down like liquid fire. Even Grouse took a swallow of that one.

  When the moon rose, Fawn lay in their bedroll and listened to the munching and muffled snorting of the grazing animals, scattered up the creek side. From the way he’d picked at his dinner, she thought Dag shared some of Rase’s queasiness, but she wasn’t sure how it compared with how he’d felt after the Glassforge malice, as she’d been in no condition then to notice. So had Rase’s ground veiling just been unpracticed, or would he grow into a maker someday, too? Dag walked his perimeter patrol very wide; it was a long time before he joined her. They found their familiar positions, legs interlaced beneath the blankets, face-toface in the silvered dark.

  “Was it a hard fight today? ” she asked, stroking his furrowed forehead, winding her fingers in the unruly curls of his hair in which no gray strands yet gleamed.

  “No. As straightforward as any other sessile, truth to tell.”

  “Did Whit’s shield work right? ”

  “As far as I could tell. Well, I don’t know how long it would have stood up to a serious attempt at ground-ripping, but it resisted mind slaving. If only because it made Whit’s ground so blurry the malice couldn’t figure out what he was. We didn’t give it time to puzzle out the problem.”

  “Your patrollers were all right? ”

  “Oh, yes.”

  Fawn said carefully, “I’m not sure they know you think that. You’ve been sort of grim and glum tonight.”

  His brows lifted. “The youngsters did very well. Whit, too. He pulled his weight, and they all saw that he did. Won’t any of ’em look at farmers quite the same way again, I daresay.” He was silent a moment.

  “It’s the malice bothers me.”

  “Why? ”

  He drew breath, let it out slowly. “I don’t know. It just . . . niggles. Every malice is akin, yet every one is a little different. Why was it out on the road like that? ”

  “Maybe it was just changing its lair. Looking for a better place to molt.”

  “Possibly.” Dag didn’t sound convinced. “But this one seemed awfully aggressive for a pre-molt. Usually by the time they reach that stage they just lay up and let their mud-men bring them their prey.”

  “Maybe . . . I don’t know. Maybe it ground-ripped some rabid animals?”

  “I don’t think it would work like that.” He shook his head, hugging her in close as she turned to fit the curve of his body. “But I’ll say a few good words to the youngsters tomorrow. They earned it.”

  ———

  The next day dawned clear; the company made a creaky but willing enough start shortly thereafter. Rase had recovered enough to sit his horse, although he had to let Indigo saddle it and two of his comrades help boost him aboard. Four miles up the road came a delay when everyone who hadn’t been on the battlefield got dragged over it by everyone who had for a blow-by-blow description of the fight. Fawn watched from atop Magpie, a trifle worried about the effect any lingering blight might have on her child. She was waiting eagerly for the first flutter of quickening, down there deep in her belly. She had not confessed even to Dag her unfounded conviction that if only she could bring this pregnancy past the point where her first had failed, it would be a sign of hope, like breaking a curse. To encounter a malice just now, bringing back such evil memories, had shaken her more than she’d let on.

  But Whit and the patrollers finished babbling about their every bow shot at last, and they moved on.

  Late in the morning, they came upon the spot where Dag said the malice must have first turned onto the road, and Dag led a mixed party of patrollers and farmer boys up toward the eastern ridge to search for the lair. Sumac stayed with the wagons to watch over Rase, with Neeta, who had seen lairs in Luthlia, assigned as support. Bo also declined the treat, and Hod as usual stuck by him.

  Berry, gr
inning, leaned across her saddlebow to whisper to Fawn, “I expected Bo to have a worse head than this, come this morning. At midnight last night he was swearin’ to me he’d seen bats the size of turkey vultures flyin’ over the moon.”

  “Were they anything like the hoop snakes he told me southern folks used as wagon wheels? ” said Fawn. “Or the alligators hitched up in teams to draw racing boats in the swamps? Or the time it rained so hard that he saw catfish swimming up the road overhead, and fellows caught them in their hats? ”

  “I expect so. This fish wasn’t biting, though.”

  Fawn snickered, and kicked Magpie along. She wouldn’t be surprised if Bo had seen vultures; those unburied mud-men corpses stank, and would draw scavengers soon. Did vultures search for carrion by moonlight?

  The fire scrub ran on for miles, and Fawn tried to imagine the size of the blaze that had leveled these woods. How fast had the wind whipped the orange wall of death? She was reminded that malices were far from the only great uncaring hazard in the world. Between being burned to death or blighted, she could see little to choose. Yet the fire scars were recovering in years, not decades or centuries, and from the point of view of blackberry brambles and fireweed, might almost be considered a blessing.

  Her ruminations grew darker when they stopped for lunch at a stream crossing by what was plainly a burned-out village, destroyed by that same three-years-back fire. The lack of settlers in this valley seemed suddenly explained. She walked among the traces of houses and sheds, blackened char sticking out from the green weeds like bones through skin.

  “We could stop right here,” said Grouse, eyeing the bit of flat land along the feeder creek that had doubtless been what first attracted the burned-out folks.

  “I’m not stopping in this accursed country,” said Vio sharply. “Monsters and fires and bear-men and who knows what all . . .” She had to break off to run and rescue her toddler Owlet from a determined attempt to fall headfirst into an old well. As she was snatching him away from death, and he was thrashing mightily in protest, she glanced down and shrieked.