The branches of a beech tree came up around them with a whoosh and crackle. The mud-bat’s twisting wings caught, jerked loose, caught, jerked; together, mud-bat and prey descended in a neck-wrenching stutter and a shower of leaf bits and twigs. Just when Dag was figuring that his next greatest danger would be the mud-bat falling atop him, his sweaty grip was yanked loose from the bloody ankle, and he plummeted.
He tried to take the impact on bending knees, rolling, but lost everything on the steep slope; a looping root, strong as a hawser, caught his right ankle and wrenched it violently. But it stopped him tumbling tail over teakettle down the mountainside.
Then the mud-bat landed on him. Snarling.
In a world beyond pain, Dag fought his way out from under the choking black envelope of those wings. His hand closed on the first stout weapon he could find, a broken branch. He swung it high and began beating in the creature’s thin skull with frantic strokes.
On the third swing, he caught his first close look at its big brown eyes, blinking up at him. “Ow,” it said, in a miserable voice. “Hurts.” A human voice, an animal’s eyes, a child’s bewilderment as to why these terrible things should be happening to it.
The mud-bat shuddered, choked, and died.
Dag, chest heaving for air, bent over and heaved in truth. There wasn’t much in his belly. Small favors.
Oh, absent, absent gods. He folded in a boneless heap. He supposed, from the wet and slime on his face, that he was crying, although some of it might be blood. He didn’t care. He put his arms over his head and bawled.
–-
His regained control of his breath and wits in a few minutes. Overwrought didn’t begin to describe his state of mind. And body, which shuddered like Grouse in the throes of his ague. He lifted his right hand and found the wedding cord wrapping his left arm, and gripped it through the torn fabric of his shirt. Alive, Spark’s alive. She needs you. Start with that. Upon that foundation, he could stand.
Or at least… sit up. His wrenched ankle was throbbing under his boot. He eyed it with disfavor, turning his groundsense upon himself, although it sent another wave of nausea through him. He was fairly sure no ankle was ever supposed to fold as far sideways as that one just had.
He unlaced his boot and, with difficulty, extracted the bent steel knife, staring at it in wonder. There’s why my anklebone’s not busted clean through.
Not exactly the way he’d pictured that knife saving him, but it would do. He re-laced the boot for support before the joint could swell further.
Ripping the mud-bats had left a greasy stain in his ground-Arkady would doubtless disapprove-but hadn’t larded him with poisonous black blight like the time he’d ground-ripped a malice. The contamination would render him unfit for gifting ground reinforcements for weeks, which was likely all right, as he was more wishful just now to receive some. At least he hadn’t traded a swift death for a slow one. Yet.
In the distance, somewhere down the hill, a child began crying.
Weak, muffled. Dag went still. Opened his groundsense, reached out.
Alive. The tad had survived his fall!
Dag felt around himself, found a long, stout stick, and stripped side branches from it with his bent knife. With it, he levered himself onto his feet and began to make his way down the hillside. As swiftly as he might with due care, because he didn’t think another tumble would help much. The shadowless light was graying, concealing detail, although the sky above the leaf canopy was still luminous, shot with pink streaks of high cloud. The crying grew louder as he skidded from tree to tree.
There.
The black shape of a fallen mud-bat lay like a discarded cloak, half wrapped around a hickory trunk. The weeping was coming from underneath the folds. Dag leaned his stick on the bole, reached down, and heaved the carcass aside to reveal Owlet, curled up and shaking. The little boy looked up at Dag and burst into howls.
Dag’s groundsense flicked out anxiously. No broken arm, leg, head, neck, or spine. Both eyes still blinking. Lungs clearly in working order.
Scratches and gouges in plenty, though, a torn ear, and tumbled bruising.
Dag lowered himself with a pained grunt. The child flinched away.
A memory flashed in Dag’s mind of the second time he’d met Spark, in a rough rescue from a violent assault; too dizzied to tell friend from foe when she’d been flung at him, she’d tried her level best to scratch his eyes out. “I guess I’m not a very reassuring sight,” he said ruefully to Owlet. “But I do mean well.”
The howls stopped, perhaps in surprise. Then started up again, though not as loudly.
“Absent gods,” hissed Tavia’s voice. “Can’t you shut that child up? It’ll have every mud-man for a mile down on us. Up on us. Whatever.”
Tavia descended the slope, lurching from sapling to sapling, and fell to her knees beside Dag, winded. No broken bones there, either, clearly; but bruises, cuts, branch-whipped wheals, red-brown braid undone, a hank of hair torn out and her scalp oozing blood. Copper-brown eyes wide and wild and pulsing. Dag suspected his were, too.
“Welcome back down,” he murmured. “Glad you made it in one piece.”
“Absent gods,” she said. “Nobody ever said the north was full of giant bats.” She glared at Dag as if this were somehow his fault.
Dag stifled the impulse to apologize. “Surprise to me, too. What happened to your mud-bat? ”
“When it couldn’t clear the ridge, it scraped me off in a mess of dogwood scrub and got away.” Her jaw set in frustration. But she seemed to have made a softer landing than his, fortunately.
“And, um… how are you with tads? ”
“I was the youngest in my family,” she returned at once, eyeing the crying toddler with alarm. “I don’t know anything about little children. Farmer or otherwise.”
“Ah.” Dag sighed and extended his hand. “Here, Owlet.” The child recoiled farther. “Eh.” Tavia was right about the noise. Reluctantly, Dag opened himself and shaped a persuasion for the shocked boy. It’s all right now. I won’t hurt you. You want to come to Dag and let him make it better. He left the beguilement in, too, for good measure.
“Mamamama,” Owlet blubbered.
“Sorry, the only mama-shaped person here doesn’t want to play. She’s just a youngin’, too, you know. I’m afraid you’re stuck with me.”
Come here.
“Mamama…” But Owlet stopped inching away.
Dag reached over and pulled the child into his lap. Owlet abruptly reversed his opinions, hiccupped, and buried his slimy face in Dag’s shirt, gripping like a baby ba-possum. Dag didn’t think it would do what was left of the garment a mite of harm.
“How did you do that? ” asked Tavia. Whispered, actually, perhaps influenced by the sudden end of the clamor.
“Cheated,” said Dag.
“Ah.” Tavia glanced fearfully upward, seeking black motion overhead.
“Don’t open your ground,” Dag warned.
“No, no. But can they see us in the dark? ”
“Not through trees. Rocks would be better. You and I can veil, but the tad here can’t. He’ll be a beacon.”
“Do those bat things have groundsense, do you think? ”
“Might.” A grim thought. Their maker malice must have taken a human or humans, or it wouldn’t have been able to gift its creations with speech. Had it yet taken a Lakewalker, stealing deeper powers?
“We’ll have moonrise in a while. While we can still see, better find us a ledge or cranny to hole up in. With water near.” The grown-ups could go without their dinners, but Dag was parched with his late panic, and Owlet likely was, too.
She looked at his ankle. “How is that? ”
“Not good.”
“I’ll scout, then.”
“Aye.”
Tavia slipped off in best patroller fashion; Dag waited, contemplating his new burden. Owlet now lay on his side, head pillowed on Dag’s knee, in a false calm. Hysteria still lurked benea
th, like fish circling under a frozen lake.
Tavia returned fairly soon, thankfully, and they set off through the dusk along the steep hillside. Ledges and crevices there were in plenty.
Water was harder to come by at this height, but Tavia had found a mossy trickle that would doubtless become a stream farther down. It more seeped than flowed, but it did collect in a natural stone bowl before slipping away. They took turns putting their heads down and sucking it up.
Owlet was harder to persuade into this novel form of drinking, but he got the idea at last, then was inclined to play in the puddle, and then objected to being dragged away and tucked in the far back of the crevice.
Dag would have taken the outside position, but Tavia clearly wanted a spacer between her and the unhappy farmer child.
With an overhang at the back, the cleft was blocked from both vision and groundsense from five out of six directions. Dag was less certain that it would be blocked from invading mud-bats-they folded rather well when they weren’t tangled in trees. But the creatures’ clawed hands and feet, though dangerous in themselves, didn’t seem built to carry weapons-not that all of this malice’s scouts were necessarily of the same design.
Blocked perception unfortunately worked both ways. Dag wished they’d landed on the other side of this ridge, overlooking the Trace. If he were alone, he’d be up and over that ridgeline already, bad ankle or no.
“Where did those horrible bat-things come from? ” asked Tavia, peering nervously out past the narrow rock walls of their temporary refuge. In the slice of purple sky, Dag could see one lonely star.
“They were mud-men. A malice made them. Not the one we slew yesterday.”
“I could tell that.”
Dag squeezed his eyes shut and open a few times, trying for coherence.
“It’s been over thirty years since I exchanged in these parts, and that only for a season. But this whole region all the way north to the Grace River is limestone country in its bones, shot through with sinkholes and caves and caverns. And some of those caverns harbor bats.”
“Thousands of bats? ”
“Oh, no, not thousands.”
Her shoulders slumped in relief.
“Millions.”
Tavia’s mouth fell open. In a tone between hope and dismay, she said, “That’s a Bo story… isn’t it? ”
“No. The biggest bat caverns are amazingly dangerous. Besides the risk of rabies, which some bats seem to carry, when they gather in such numbers their droppings poison the air. People who’ve stumbled into one of the big caves have choked and died on the fumes. Though skunks and raccoons do go in to catch baby bats, in the dead dark-nobody quite knows how they do it.”
Tavia’s face screwed up in mounting horror.
“Now, the local patrols do search the caves, but only near the surface. It’s dangerous to go deeper, though they say there’s galleries and passageways running for miles underground. But no malices have ever emerged from the deep caves, either because they were never seeded down there, or because there’s no life for them to get started growing on. Except-I have a notion-that if a malice finally chanced to come up near or right in one of those big bat caves, it would have found a feast laid out for it from the get-go. Off to a very fast start, which could explain how it was missed between one patrol and the next. That’s my best guess, leastways.”
Tavia poked tentatively at her hurts. She could do with a stitch here or there-they all could, likely-but no one was doing more than oozing by now. Treatment would have to wait. She glanced up. “What has that child got in its mouth? ”
Dag looked around. Owlet was sitting up looking very scruffy and battered, with an appalled expression on his face, his jaw working and drool dribbling from his lips. “Peh,” he remarked. Dag went fishing with his little finger.
“Inchworm,” he remarked, holding up his green catch. “Actually, more of a two-inch worm.”
“Ugh!”
Dag smiled. It felt strange on his set face, like dry leather cracking.
But welcome for all of that. He dug down in his pocket and drew out a dark strip. “Here, tad. Chew on this.”
“What is that? ” asked Tavia, peering in the dimness.
“Dried plunkin. I always keep a few strips in my pockets. When they start to look good despite the lint and sand stuck to ’em, you know it’s time to eat ’em.”
Owlet regarded the plunkin with considerably more suspicion than he had the worm, but shortly broke down and began gnawing. His false calm was beginning to be replaced with real calm, Dag thought, for all that Dag had pulled the initial persuasion out of his own ear. When the child crawled back into Dag’s lap, it was as soothing as holding a purring cat. Moods were contagious in more than one direction, it seemed; which was why a leader should never break down in front of his patrollers.
He was grateful Tavia hadn’t found him any sooner.
His back to the warm stone, Dag felt strung tight between nerves and exhaustion. He decided to cultivate the nerves, because if the exhaustion overtook him he might not get up again for a week. And they had to move again soon. He felt his marriage cord for reassurance, still alive. But surely the malice would mount its forces for another attack- the Trace must seem a moving picnic to it. Unless the Laurel Gap patrollers were alerted and gathering, putting on pressure north of here.
There’s a hope. And not a fool’s hope, either, but-he contemplated the unsubtle difference between arrive eventually and arrive in time.
“We’ll have to work out some way to carry the tad,” he said to Tavia.
“He can’t climb these rocks, dark or moonlit. I’m thinking we could rig a sort of sling with my shirt and your vest, to tie over my shoulder.”
“What about your bad ankle? ”
“Well, I’m thinking… one of us needs both hands free in case of trouble, and that’s already not me.” He hesitated. “We’re not going to be hunting this malice, but there’s no doubt it’ll be hunting us. If it catches us”-he drew breath-“just so you know, I have my bonded knife around my neck.”
She stared at his throat, at her hands.
“If the job has to be done, it’ll be at the last moment, because, well, because. But that means you won’t be able to hesitate. Can you do the needful? ”
“I… don’t know,” she answered honestly.
He nodded. “You’ll find your way if you have to.” He made his voice confident, unwavering, bland. Such situations had come up before, of course, though more common in legend than fact. For the first time he wondered if any of those prior ill-fated heroes had been as desperately unwilling to share as he was right now. Likely. A year ago, this would have been easy, his barren future scant grief to give up. Things seemed to be coming at him out of their time.
Fatherhood, for one. He wanted to watch over his late-come little girl as a live papa, not as a dead legend. Not even as a living absence, as his own father had been. I want to see how her tale comes out… The sudden thought of her at the mercy of strangers, as Owlet now was at his, made his heart go hollow.
No need to burden Tavia with these reflections, no, nor any fraught last words, either. “The malice,” he said, “will give you all the gumption you need. Trust me on this.”
She nodded unhappily.
–-
It was upwards of an hour before Sumac dragged back. Whit almost shot her.
Fawn looked up from the far side of the little fire where she was attempting to help Calla attempt to help Arkady with Barr. As the ominous shape loomed out of the dark and the dual gleam could be made out as Sumac’s eyes, Whit lowered his quivering crossbow. “Give some warning, why don’t you? ” he gasped.
“I bumped grounds with Neeta,” Sumac said, voice flat. Neeta was off in the woods somewhere, trying to guard their whole perimeter by herself. Sumac’s hair was in disarray, her face branch-whipped and strained. She added tightly, “You can see that blighted fire for a hundred paces through the trees. And smell it. Put it out.�
��
“Not yet,” said Arkady in a blurry voice, from deep in his trance.
“Need the boiled water…” Sumac looked around, taking in the scene in some dismay, Fawn thought.
Barr lay on a blanket, right boot off and trouser leg cut away, his lower leg held across a towel on Arkady’s lap. Arkady’s hands hovered over the bloody mess. The hideous pink bone ends that had been sticking out through his burst skin earlier had been pushed beneath it once more, mating up under Arkady’s most powerful groundsetting. The maker had seemed unshaken by the bone break-the worst Fawn had ever seen or imagined-but had complained bitterly, back when he’d still been able to speak, about all the dirt he had to work in. Barr’s face was the color of suet, and he looked as if he wished he could pass out again, as he had a couple of times so far. Remo gripped his white-knuckled hand and wiped his sweating forehead with a wet cloth.
The rest of the group was scattered back under the trees, taking care of the animals and one another. When the last of the mud-bats had vanished over the eastern ridge, the shaken company had pushed forward a quarter mile into deeper woods, then turned off the road at a shallow stream and struggled up it as far as they could drag the wagons.
The boys had pushed the two wagons as deeply under the cover of some spreading oak trees as they could be squeezed; Fawn doubted it was enough.
Sumac ran an aggravated hand through her escaping hair. “If you… oh, blight. Keep the fire. With all these unveiled farmer grounds and this herd of animals, nothing with groundsense could miss you, dark, trees, or no. Blight, have a party and dance.”
“I’ll pass,” said Barr weakly from his blanket.
It might almost have been a joke; the wheezy bark it won from Sumac might almost have been a laugh. The laugh leached away as she met Fawn’s anxious eyes.
“I couldn’t catch them-couldn’t get near them,” she said. “Other side of the river, up the ridge, those rocks rise up in ten- and twentyfoot blocks. No way for miles either side to get a horse up. Fawn, I’m sorry.”
Sharing Knife 4 Horizon Page 33
