Passage

by Lois McMaster Bujold

  The camp that Chato’s patrol had hailed from was closer, she was fairly sure, but she didn’t even know how to find that. That at least had a cure; she asked Dag that night where it was to be found, and he described it to her. For the first time, she began to see the point of their little patrol of three: not only because it would take two Bluefields to even lift Dag, but because one of them could stay with him while the other rode for help.

  If strange Lakewalkers would even give help to Dag, half-exiled as he was. Which was a new and ugly thought.

  But by the next day, Dag seemed much recovered. At noon they stopped at the roadside farm with the public well where they had first encountered each other, and reminisced happily over small details of shared memory while stocking up on the farmwife’s good provender. That evening found them quite near to Glassforge. Dag opined they could detour off the straight road tomorrow to show Whit the blight and still make town before dark.

  They could not have chanced on a prettier day for a ride up into the unpeopled hills east of the old straight road. The sky was the dry deep blue that only the northwest winds brought to Oleana, the air as cool and tangy as apple cider. The trees here were mostly holding their leaves, and the brilliant sun turned their colors blinding: bright crimson edged with blood maroon, yellow gold, a startling flash of nightshade-purple here and there in the drying weeds. Dag’s eyes grew coin-gold in this light, like autumn distilled. Fawn was glad it was Dag leading them up into these game-tracked humps and hollows, because she’d have lost her way as soon as their turn-off was out of sight. If not really been lost; she’d only to strike west to find the road again. But the blight was a smaller target—thankfully—some ten or twelve miles in.

  The sun was climbing toward noon when Dag halted Copperhead on the beaten trail they’d been following. A frown tensed his mouth. Fawn kicked her mount Weft alongside, though Copperhead laid his ears back for show.

  “Are we close?”

  “Yes.”

  Her own recall of the place was too dizzied to permit recognition. She’d been carried in head-down and ears ringing, a prisoner, retching from blows and terror. And carried out…her memory shied from that.

  Dag pointed up the trail. “This path goes to the ravine on the same side I came down. The visible blight should start about two hundred paces along.”

  “And the blight you can’t see?”

  He shrugged, though his face stayed strained. “I’ve been feeling the outer shadow for the past half-mile.”

  “Healing as you still are, should you go any closer?”

  He grimaced. “Likely not.”

  “Suppose you wait here, then. Or better, back down the trail a ways. And I’ll just take Whit in for a quick peek.”

  He couldn’t argue with the logic of that. A hesitation, a short nod. “Don’t linger, Spark.”

  She nodded and waved Whit on in her wake. He looked a trifle confused as he pressed his sturdy horse up next to hers. As Warp and Weft fell into a well-matched pace, he asked, “What was that all about?”

  “Being on blight makes Lakewalkers sick. Well, it makes anybody sick, but I was afraid it would send Dag into an awful relapse like after Greenspring. Glory be that he saw the sense of waiting for us.”

  Whit glanced around. “But everything is drying up and dying back right now. How do you spot blight in winter? How is it that you’re supposed to tell this here blight from…oh.”

  They reined in at the lip of the ravine. They must be very near to what had been Dag’s vantage, that day. The cave was a deep hollow halfway up the ravine’s far side, with a long outcrop of rock shielding the opening almost like a wall. The ravine itself was a dusty gray, devoid of vegetation but for a few skeletal tree trunks. The glimmering creek flowing through in an S-curve was the only movement, the only source of sound. No birds, no insects, no small rustles in the dead weeds. Even the breeze seemed stilled. The peculiar dry cellar-odor of malice habitation wafted faintly up to Fawn, and she swallowed, feeling sickened despite the sun on her back.

  “That is the weirdest color I ever did see,” Whit allowed slowly. “It’s not hardly a color at all. Dag was right. It doesn’t look like…anything.”

  Fawn nodded, glad Whit seemed to have his wits with him today, because she didn’t think she could have borne stupid jokes right now. “Dag thinks that malice came up from the ground and hatched out right here. Malices all seem to start out pretty much the same, but then they change depending on what they eat. Ground-snatch, that is. If they catch a lot of people, they get to looking more human, but there was one up in Luthlia that mostly ate wolves, that they say grew pretty strange. Dag thinks the first human this one caught must have been a road bandit, hiding out up here, because after it grew its mud-men and caught more folks, it made them all be its bandit gang, at first.” Though some of the men might not have been as mind-slaved as all that, which was in its way an even more disturbing notion. “The bandits who kidnapped me off the road brought me here. Dag was tracking them, and saw.” From here, Dag would certainly have had a clear view of the mud-men carting her in like a sack of stolen grain. “He went in after them—after me—all by himself. No time to wait for his patrol. It wasn’t good odds. But he tossed me his sharing knife, and I managed to get it in the malice. And the malice…” She swallowed again. “Melted. I guess you could say. Malices are immortal, the Lakewalkers claim, but the sharing knives kill them. Kill them in their ground.”

  “What are sharing knives, anyhow? Dag keeps mentioning them and then stopping.”

  “Yes, well. There are reasons. Lakewalkers make them. Out of Lakewalker bones.”

  “So it’s true they rob graves!”

  “No! They’re not stolen. Dag—any Lakewalker would get mighty offended to hear you say that. People will their thighbones to their kin to be, be, like, harvested after they die. It’s part of the funeral. Then a Lakewalker knife maker—Dag’s brother Dar is one—cleans and carves and shapes the bone into a knife. They don’t use sharing knives for any other purpose than killing malices.”

  “So that’s what you stuck in the malice? Whose thighbone was it, d’you know? Does Dag?”

  Fawn supposed gruesome interest was better than none. “Yes, but it’s more complicated than that. Carving the bone itself is only the first step. Then the knife has to be primed. With…with a heart’s death.” She took a breath, not looking at Whit. “That’s the hardest part. Each knife, when it’s made, is bonded to its Lakewalker owner. Someone who has volunteered to share—to donate his or her own death to the knife. When such Lakewalkers think they’re dying, either old and sick or hurt mortal bad, they, they put the knife through their own hearts and capture their deaths. Which are trapped in the knives. So every primed knife costs two Lakewalker lives, one for the bone and the other for the heart’s priming. Ownership is…you can’t buy such a knife. It can only be given to you.”

  She glanced up to see Whit squinting and frowning. He said slowly, “So, it’s sort of like…a human sacrifice stuck in a canning jar and preserved, to take out and use later?”

  Fawn thought of the long rows of wax-sealed glass jars she and Mama had filled and sealed and set in the pantry only last week. The domestic comparison was apt, but, oh dear. “Pretty much. But I’m not sure you should say that to Dag. Lakewalkers keep their knives private and treat ’em as sacred. It’s their kin, you see. And their grief. But that’s what sharing knives share. Deaths.”

  Whit blinked some more, then frowned across the ravine and said, “How far back does that cave go?”

  “It’s not deep.”

  “Can we go in?”

  Fawn wrinkled her nose. “I guess so, if we don’t stay long.”

  Whit glanced down the steep drop, nodded, and slid off and tied his horse to a tree. Fawn did the same and followed him in a scramble down the slope. Black shale cracked and slid under her feet. Even the clay dirt in the gully-washes, which should have been dull brown, had that same drained gray tinge. Whit
picked his way across the stream on stones, not looking back till he reached the cave mouth, when he turned around to watch her puffing and lagging after him. “Keep up, Runt.”

  She was shivering inside too much to growl at the old taunt. She labored up beside him, and the dry, sour malice-smell of the cave hit her full-face. How long till the rains and snows wash this clean? Horridly blithe, he strolled into the shadow of the overhang.

  “What a great place to camp this would be! It really looks like it should be a bandit hideout.” He kicked at a broken old keg, part of a scattering of trash no one had bothered to cart away. “So where were you two, exactly? Where was this malice? How far did Dag have to throw his knife? He must not have known you then. It was a wonder you caught it.”

  “Here…” Simplify. “The malice picked me up by my neck.” She fingered the dented scars. Here. Here, right here, the malice ripped the ground from my unborn child, poor half-wanted waif, here she died, here Dag was nearly torn apart by howling man-beasts, here I struck, right here the malice screamed and stank and shattered, here sacrifice tangled with sacrifice, here I miscarried, here I hurt, here I started bleeding… “I have to get out of here,” Fawn said aloud. She could not see clearly. She was shaking so badly she could scarcely breathe. There is no simple to be had, here.

  “Hey, are you all right?” Whit called as she stumbled out into the air again. There wasn’t enough light in the wide green world to make that cave anything but a pit of darkness, to make her anything but stupid, stupid, stupid… She became aware she was weeping, not sobs, but weird dry gulps.

  Whit, trotting after her, said, “Is the blight making you sick? Here, maybe I…I better take you back to Dag, all right?”

  She nodded, trying and failing to steady her breathing, which seemed to stagger and stick. She tried to swallow between gulps of air, but her throat was too tight. Whit put a tentative, anxious arm around her waist and half-supported, half-hustled her back down and across the creek. She slipped and put one foot ankle-deep in the stream, gasping at the chill wet, which at least got some more air into her. By the time they reached the ravine’s top and Whit boosted her back up into her saddle, she was only wheezing. Her cheeks were wet, her nose beslimed; she dragged an arm fiercely across her face, and coughed.

  When they reached the place where they’d sent Dag back, she looked up through the silver blur to see Copperhead cantering up the trail toward them. Dag pulled up with a jerk that made the gelding shake his head and snort. A black scowl, a brutal voice the like of which she’d never heard before from Dag’s mouth, demanded of Whit, “What did you do to her?”

  “Nothing!” said Whit, alarmed. “I didn’t do nothing! She was nattering on about, about this and that, and then all of a sudden she took a fit o’ the vapors! I thought it might be the blight, though I didn’t feel anything like. Here, you take her!”

  Dag discarded his menace as he turned a keen look on Fawn; searching her body and her ground both, she thought. He dropped his reins on Copperhead’s neck and leaned over to pull her from her saddle into his lap. She clutched him hard around the chest, burying her face in his shirt, inhaling the scents of linen and warm Dag-sweat to drive the deathly cellar-smell away. Arm and strong spread hand, his beautiful hand, clutched her in return.

  “I’m sorry,” she mumbled into his shirt. “I didn’t think it would all pile back into my head like that. It was the smell of the cave. All of a sudden I couldn’t breathe. Stupid…”

  “Shh, no,” he said into her hair. His understanding seemed to wrap her more warmly than his arms. He raised his chin, jerked it at Whit.

  “Bring her horse. We need to get away from this bad ground. Maybe get everyone something to eat.”

  Copperhead turned obediently at the pressure of Dag’s leg, or perhaps ground; in any case, the gelding seemed to grasp that this was no time for tricks. They all rode a good two miles back down the trail before Dag turned off. He led down over a bank and up to a little clearing with a spring seeping out of a rock overhang. A pretty picnic spot. Patroller groundsense at work? In any case, Dag said merely, “This’ll do.” He murmured in her ear, “Can you get down all right?”

  “Yes. I’m better now.” Not all better, no, but at least she’d stopped sniveling.

  He let her slide off Copperhead’s shoulder, and he and Whit bustled about pulling food packets from the saddlebags, finding the tin cups, loosening girths, and permitting the horses to browse. Dag kept a close eye on Fawn till she’d settled on a rock, drunk spring water, and taken a few bites of the rather dry cheese wrapped in bread left from yesterday’s supply. He finally sat down cross-legged beside her. Whit perched on a nearby fallen log that was not too damp with moss and rot.

  “Sorry,” Fawn repeated, swallowing and straightening up. “Stupid.”

  “Shh,” Dag repeated, gripping her calf in a reproving, heartening little shake. “None o’ that.”

  Whit cleared his throat. “I guess that malice was pretty scary.”

  “Yeah,” said Fawn. The spring water was welcomingly cool; why did her throat feel so hot? She scrubbed at her scars.

  Whit added magnanimously, “Well, you’re just a girl, after all.”

  Fawn merely grimaced. In his own way, she supposed Whit was trying. Very trying.

  Dag’s brows drew in, as if he were struggling to parse what Whit meant; he clearly didn’t see the connection between the two statements. And then he did, and got a pretty odd look. He said, “I’ve seen the first encounter with a malice devastate fully trained patrollers. I was on sick leave for weeks after my first, though the thing never touched me.”

  Whit cleared his throat, made a wise decision not to try to retrieve his remark, and asked instead, “How many have you seen? Altogether?”

  “I’ve lost count,” said Dag. “That I’ve slain by my hand with a knife of my own, twenty-six.”

  “Twenty-seven,” Fawn corrected.

  He smiled at her. “Twenty-six and a half, then. My knife, your hand.”

  Fawn watched Whit’s lips move, counting up kills. No—knives. Lakewalker lives, and deaths. His brow wrinkled.

  Fawn put in hastily, “I told Whit about sharing knives. Tried to, anyhow. I’m not sure if he has it all straight.” Her anxious eyes quizzed Dag: Is that all right?

  He ducked his head, answering her look as well as her words. “Oh. Good. Thank you.”

  Whit scraped his boot toe across the moss. “Is that a lot of those knives to have had?”

  “Yes, actually.”

  “Did you…er…have a big family?”

  Fawn resisted the urge to knock her head—or maybe Whit’s—into a tree. He was trying.

  Dag was trying, too. He replied straightforwardly, “No. Folks—friends, kin of friends, other patrollers—gave them to me, because I seemed to have a knack for getting them used. A patroller can carry a primed knife for a long time and never encounter a malice, which makes the sacrifice seem—well, not vain. But folks like knowing when it all comes to something.”

  “That makes sense, I guess,” Whit allowed. He remembered to take a bite of bread and cheese. “You don’t have—do you have—one of those, um. Suicide knives?”

  “Unprimed knife, bonded to me?” Dag hazarded.

  Whit said, “Well, it would have to be unprimed, wouldn’t it? Stands to reason. Because if it was primed you’d be, um.”

  “I did have. Carried it with me for twenty years, in case. A lot of patrollers do.”

  “Can I see—no, um. Did, right. What happened to it?”

  Dag glanced at Fawn; she gave a small headshake, No, we didn’t get to that part. “It met with an accident.”

  “Oh.” Whit blinked—daunted, Fawn prayed. But not quite enough, for he added curiously, “Whose bone was it?”

  “Kauneo’s. She willed one bone to me and the other to one of her surviving brothers. My tent-brother up in Luthlia.”

  Whit gave Dag a look partway between earnestly inquiring and leery.
“Um?” He was already starting to learn caution about these sorts of questions, Fawn thought. And their answers.

  Dag took a drink of spring water and managed to reply with tolerable composure, “My first wife.”

  Fawn gave him a worried look, Are you all right with this? He returned her a fractional nod. Yes, he could talk about Kauneo now; they had come so far. Dag cleared his throat and added kindly, for even Whit’s feckless curiosity was faltering in the face of all this, “She was a patroller, too. She died in a malice war in Luthlia. She left me her own heart’s knife as well as a bone to make one for me. We think she rolled over on her knife in the field after she fell. Her brother said”—he drew air in through his nostrils—“she must have moved quick. Because she could not have been conscious for very long after…after she received her wounds.”

  “Is that where you—” Whit’s gaze moved to Dag’s left arm.

  Another short nod. “Same fight. I went down before she did, so I only have guesses. She was…just a girl, then. Five years younger than me.”

  Just a girl, thought Fawn, and Dag didn’t repeat those words by accident.

  “Oh,” said Whit. And, tentatively, “I’m, um, sorry.”

  Dag gave him another reassuring nod, and repeated his stock phrase, “It was a long time ago.”