“North of us, then. How far? ”
“Maybe ten, fifteen miles? There was a strong west wind . . . whenever. That nightmare that carried me off rode the updraft along this side. It kept trying to cross the ridge like the rest, but couldn’t stay up over there, so it was forced along farther and farther south. Lower and lower. It finally got so exhausted, it just . . . let me go.” A shaken breath.
“For an instant, I thought I was going to get lucky, but I slammed off that rock face and landed wrong, way too hard.”
“Can you feel anything below your waist? ”
“Weird spurts of pain sometimes, but mostly not.”
“Did any of your patrol get away to warn your camp? ”
“Gods, I hope so.”
Then Laurel Gap should be alerted by now, if anyone had escaped and followed the blighted patrol procedure, as Dag so often hadn’t. He felt a sudden new warmth toward the rules. “It sounds like your mud-bat was trying to carry you back to the malice’s lair, same as us.” Which suggested the malice was still in its lair, hopeful thought. “It’s a ways east of here, I reckon. Did it capture anyone else? ”
If this malice had succeeded in ground-ripping a Lakewalker, it was primed to grow immeasurably more dangerous, but the mud-bats plainly had trouble transporting prey as large as a full-size patroller.
“Not sure. That thing took me off early in the fight. I didn’t see much except . . . gods. I used to like high views.”
Dag grimaced in sympathy.
“You haven’t . . . run across any of the rest of my patrol yet? ”
“No, sorry. You’re the first.”
“If I’d had a primed knife”—the man’s voice dropped low—“that thing could have carried me to the malice with my goodwill. If I hadn’t left my own bonded knife in my fool saddlebags, wherever they are, I’d have shared by now. It’d have to hurt less than this. With this back, I’m a dead man sooner or later. You’ll never get me down off this ridge alive.”
“Maybe your luck just got better,” said Tavia. “Dag here’s a medicine maker.”
The man’s eyes widened. “With one hand? ”
“I’m just an apprentice. My wife partners me when I need two hands, but she’s”—Dag lifted his head to peer out through the trees, but couldn’t see much—“back with the others.” He added, “What’s your name, patroller?
“Pakko. Pakko Sunfish Laurel Gap.”
“Right.” Dag opened himself, dropped down and in.
The break was every bit as ugly as his first impression had suggested, two vertebrae cracked and pushed out of alignment. The spinal cord was twisted, with bleeding and swelling pressing upon the nerves and creating excruciating pain. One wrong move with enough force, and the nerves could be sheared through or torn outright. Pakko’s foresight was shrewd.
Likely the very best they could do was to get the man home to die there. Dag wasn’t sure that was a kindness. His own father had shared while taken sick on patrol, and been buried where he’d died, sending nothing home to his family but a clean bone blade. Would his return have merely plunged his tent into strain and grief and helpless anger, to the same end? No mercy there. No mercy anywhere, at the last. But Pakko didn’t have his knife, and Dag was almost glad of it. Though not for Pakko’s sake.
Dag came up and out again from his exploration to find the patroller staring at him with wider eyes. Groundsense. What you see, sees you.
“There’s a better medicine maker with our party, a groundsetter. If we can get him up here, I expect we can get you down.” Dag did not promise, Save your life. But what Arkady might do with this mess he scarcely dared guess.
Dag was not above plunging in and trying single-handed, if things were dire enough—he’d once done crude groundsetting on a man with a spurting cut throat, knowing much less than he knew now—but with water and someone to care for his immediate needs, Pakko didn’t look to be dying just yet. Dag was sure he could preserve the man long enough to give him the chance to share. Arkady might be able to get him back to his camp and walking well enough to live and work, if not patrol, for many more years. Forty or fifty years of a man’s life were too much to hazard on Dag’s own impatience.
Dag glanced aside at the sleeping heap of Owlet. These are not the responsibilities I want right now. But they were the ones he’d been handed.
He sighed.
“Tavia. I need you to refill the water bottle, then help me slide Pakko here further under this overhang, without putting strain or pressure on his back. I’ll stay here with him and the tad. You try to find Arkady and the others, and bring us help.”
About time, Dag thought he saw her breathe. Tavia had been wild to do just that, earlier, but had been stuck with Dag’s limping pace. That he might now be sending her alone into a death trap . . . there are no good choices here. But there were less stupid ones.
She nodded and scrambled up. Glumly, Dag resigned himself to getting no further tonight.
———
Sumac was right about the rocks. There was no way to haul a horse over this terrain, and Fawn wasn’t too sure about a gaggle of frightened farmers, either. Or frightened Lakewalkers. Their air of patroller grimness might conceal their anxiety from the others, but she’d been around Dag too long to be fooled by it.
Getting them all in motion in the same direction—disorganized for retreat as Sumac tartly put it—took an agonizing amount of time, by Lakewalker standards that Fawn found herself sharing. Sumac was rendered speechless when she found Sage at work fastening a chain around a tree and fixing it to his wagon axle, to daunt possible theft. But since half the others weren’t ready yet either, she let it pass. Indigo wept to let loose the mule team and his riding horse.
“If we make it back alive,” Remo said, “I’ll help you find them again.”
“What if those mud-bats eat them? ”
“Better them than us.”
Indigo didn’t looked convinced.
They tramped five miles north through the woods to come up even with a saddle on the ridgeline that Sumac figured they might get over.
Plum stumbled along for the first mile till she started to cry, was carried by her papa, still weak from bog ague, for the next two, then was passed off to Vio, and finally, as the family fell behind, was handed on to big Ash. Fawn figured the relay: between Ash, Sage, Finch, and Whit, they could likely pack the poor slip of a child over this barrier.
The young men could spare the gift of energy, now. But later? Let’s hope there’s a later.
The moon rode high, lighting their way. Such as it was. Their line of seventeen people began to snake up the steepening slope. Neeta and Remo, ahead, scouted paths by eye and groundsense, breaking the trail and dodging dead ends and drop-offs. Sumac, tense and wary, brought up the rear. Fawn trudged just ahead of her.
As Fawn bent and climbed, the sharing knife swung and bounced on the end of its cord, and she tucked it inside her shirt, below the walnut pendant. That didn’t stop the distraction. The sweat between her breasts made the cord slippery, and the sheath rubbed against her belly, bringing to mind her other burden. So welcome—till now, when all her fears seemed doubled. Her pregnancy had drained away a freedom to take risks that she’d scarcely been conscious of before. Lakewalker customs of knife sacrifice were so careful about binding and assent.
Her own state seemed a strange inversion, binding her not to death but to life. When she’d lain with her husband she’d made an irrevocable choice, and she could not now go back on it.
She rubbed her marriage cord. Where is Dag? Prisoner, injured, escaped?
Was he struggling to get back to her, just as she was going away from him? The thought hurt her heart, thumping hard and fast in her chest.
Fawn spared a glance upward to find the company strung in a zigzag across an exposed patch—whether burned over in the recent fire or always barren, she could not tell in this milky light. Across the weedy slope, a shadow rippled, like a wavelet on water. Then a
nother. Fawn blinked rapidly, wondering if she was passing out from the breathless climb. Then she realized what she was seeing, and spun around, looking up toward the high blue face of the moon. Across it, another shadow fluttered, and stars winked in and out.
“They’re back!” she gasped. Mud-bats, a dozen of them. Of course they could fly at night.
Sumac followed her gaze. Rasped, “Blight.” Raised her face and bellowed up the incline, “Archers, alert! Everyone, close up under that outcrop! Grouse, give that blighted boar spear to someone who can swing it”—Grouse had mainly been using it for a walking stick, poling his shaking legs up the hill—“trade with Ash, take back your youngster!”
At the shouting and scrambling, Plum began to cry again.
People abandoned the path and started to climb for the twenty-fivefoot- high face of stone, silver gray in the pale light, that promised some protection. Hod and Hawthorn shouldered under Bo and boosted him upward. Sage grabbed Calla, who grabbed Indigo, and they chained over the rugged rises. Remo, Neeta, and Whit slid down toward Sumac, bows brandished.
Out of the sky, disturbingly quiet, a vast shape descended and settled upon the outcrop overlooking them. It had twice the wingspan of the other mud-bats. It stretched out its arms to the sides like black sails, and folded them in again. A whiff of its unmistakable scent, a dry cellar smell, rocked Fawn back in realization.
That’s not a mud-bat. Oh gods, oh gods . . .
The malice turned its dark, chiseled, elegant face upon them. Great eyes glimmered in the moonlight, and pointed ears twitched against its faintly ridged skull. Soft, batlike fur covered its body; its legs, anchored by clawed feet, were longer and more manlike than those of the mudbats.
The weight of its gaze fell like a war hammer.
Fawn had seen the Glassforge malice face-to-face, an early molt, ugly as mud. The Wolf War malice was said to have acquired a strange man wolf form before its end. The Raintree malice had been breathtakingly beautiful, Dag had told her, a tall warrior shape of surpassing glamour.
This malice, too, had its own appalling beauty. Fawn stared upward, entranced with terror.
Sumac, frozen beside her, made a weird little noise that might have wanted to be swearing, but was squeezed thin by awe. She found her voice only to whimper, “It flies . . .”
But her words broke both of them out of their shock. Fawn was already scrambling in her shirt as Sumac hissed, “The knife, give me the knife!” As Fawn fumbled it into her hands, Sumac’s legs bunched to launch her up the slope, angling around the rock face.
Three bows lifted, aimed uselessly at the commanding figure staring down over them in cool curiosity. Remo was so shaken that he almost tried to shoot it anyway, but at the last moment turned and found a circling mud-bat instead. His arrow tore through a wing; the creature shrieked and fluttered sideways. A few more mud-bats darted near and banked away, not so much seeking to grab prey off the hillside, Fawn thought, as to drive it before them toward their master. The spread-out company’s dash in all directions changed to a drawing-in.
Fawn saw it coming before Neeta and Remo did. Ash, upslope, turned and raised the boar spear. Took aim, but not at the malice or the mud-bats.
“Remo, duck!” Fawn screamed.
The heavy, steel-tipped pole hissed downslope. Remo dodged barely in time; the point grazed his shoulder instead of lodging in his throat.
The spear clattered to a stop against some rocks below. At least Ash had thrown away his weapon, temporarily. He looked confused, blinking and shaking his head. Finch, Sage, and Indigo drew up beside him. Only Calla tried to back off, jerking like a balking horse, but ended up falling to her knees.
Above, Sumac burst onto the outcrop. The malice merely spread its wings and fell forward, sliding away as she swung wildly. Two buffeting flaps and it rose, wheeling upward once more. Sumac pitched over the edge, breaking her own plummet with skin-tearing grabs at bushes clinging to cracks in the rock face. The bone knife spun from her hand, rising futilely after the malice and arcing outward. Fawn gasped and tried to move beneath it—if that bone breaks on the stones—with a crackle of twigs, the knife came down in a buckthorn bush. Fawn raced to retrieve it. Whit, after a moment’s hesitation, followed after her, crossbow swinging in his grip as he ran.
Sumac landed in a shower of leaves, rolled downward past the farmer boys, found her feet, and kept on going, braking from handhold to scrubby handhold. Sage, looking puzzled, knelt and picked up a rock, and threw it after her. Finch and Indigo, after a moment, followed in clumsy imitation. Hod and Hawthorn turned back to join them.
“Hawthorn, no!” screamed Berry in dismay as he, too, scooped up a missile, launching it with rather better aim. It clipped Remo’s ear.
Neeta’s bow wavered around to point at the farmers.
“No!” yelled Sumac, breathless, still scrambling wildly downward.
“We can’t fight them! Cut and run!” Remo had half fallen; Sumac pulled him up, stared around, spotted Fawn scrabbling through the buckthorn after the knife. Tried to make for her.
A line of mud-bats went for Sumac, one after another, and she broke the other way, ducking through the scant shelter of the scrub. All the mud-bats circled to concentrate upon the three Lakewalkers, who retreated southward.
“Berry, over here!” yelled Whit. Berry’s white face turned, saw him; she gave up yanking at Hawthorn’s arm just barely in time to evade Ash and Sage closing in on her, and bounded down the hillside toward them. Whit caught her as she almost plunged past, the walnut pendant bouncing on her collarbone.
“The malice.” Fawn, scratched bloody, clutched the knife to her heaving chest. “The malice has taken everybody’s minds.” She stared at her brother and sister-in-law, gaping back in horror. “Except ours . . .” In the moon-washed dark the mud-bats whirled; their master soared above them, so close, so out of reach. “Sumac’s right. It’s time to run.”
“But—Hawthorn,” choked Berry, looking back as Fawn turned north toward the nearest trees. “Bo . . .”
“We can’t help them now,” Fawn gasped over her shoulder as Whit grabbed Berry and dragged her along. “They’d turn on us, too. Best hope is to all stay alive till the local Lakewalkers arrive and bring down the malice.” Would the local patrol be expecting this? Did they even know about the night-sky terror that had burst upon the Trace? What if the rest of the company was made to be soldiers against them? Unlike Sumac and their own Lakewalkers, the Laurel Gap patrollers wouldn’t see the farmers as captured friends, only as dangerous enemies. Tears tracked down Fawn’s face at the vision, but she bit her lip and dodged onward. The ground came up like blows under her fleeing feet, and whipping strands of her hair caught in her open mouth. Running beside her, Berry looked just as wind-wild.
They stumbled into the shelter of the trees and looked back. The Lakewakers had vanished on the south side of the clear space, a couple of hundred paces away, but Fawn thought she could mark them by the mud-bats dipping and swooping above the trees over there. The malice appeared to be following them. The rest of their company stood in a bewildered huddle, temporarily undirected by their new master.
“Keep running,” said Whit, shouldering his crossbow to free both hands for their next burst—or rather, one hand to fight through the undergrowth, the other to clutch Berry’s in a death grip that she returned.
Fawn longed for a hand to grip as well—just one’s all I need—but Dag seemed as beyond her reach right now as the moon overhead. She swallowed, nodded. The three of them toiled north along the mountainside.
———
Dag peered into the night. This rock ledge above their overhang offered a broad vantage, down over the tops of the trees. The angle gave him a dizzy shudder, and he ventured no closer to the edge. The moon was full enough to infuse the whole valley with a blue glow, but it wasn’t bright enough for him to see clearly at a distance, even without the rising mist.
The widest cast of Dag’s groundsense wouldn’t ma
ke out what was happening eight or ten miles off, nor did sound carry that far. But beneath that saddle in the far ridge, he thought evil specks whirled.
Unless his eyes were full of floaters, like that time Copperhead had thrown him . . . but by the ugly quaver in his belly, he thought not.
The mud-bats were abroad, and had found new prey. Fawn and the company? Some other hapless Trace travelers?
The faint hum of Spark’s live ground in his marriage cord was no reassurance. Because if it stopped, it would already be too late . . .
He clenched his teeth and hand and snarled helplessly. Even if he were to ruthlessly abandon Pakko and Owlet to each other—and he was feeling pretty ruthless right now—it would take him four, five, six hours to limp from here to there. Whatever was happening would be long over, or moved elsewhere, and he’d be wrecked, wholly crippled instead of just half. Was Tavia seeing any of this? She might have crossed the river by now, but if she was under the trees—and she should be— her view would be worse blocked than his.
His every heartstring twanged go. What was left of his wits said, stay.
I’m going to go mad before this night is done.
———
Fawn sat panting on the dirt floor of their crevice. A tiny patch of moonlight lay at her knees like a rivulet of spilled milk; she and Whit and Berry edged back from it, as if the moon were a malicious eye that might stare in and see them cowering.
“You think this is enough?” Whit wheezed, staring around; Fawn could just see the gleam of his eyes in the shadows.
They’d run maybe two miles north, angling downward mainly for speed’s sake, before Fawn realized they would run out of rocks if they descended farther, and started looking instead for a bolt hole. “Groundsense doesn’t go through thick stone,” she said. But malice groundsense was in every way stronger than Lakewalkers’ . . . Fawn tried for optimism, because the alternative was a panic they could ill afford. “I expect Sumac tucked Arkady and Barr and all up somewhere a lot like this. And I don’t think she’d take chances with Arkady.”
The Sharing Knife Book Four: Horizon Page 35
