Horizon

by Lois McMaster Bujold

  “I…” Dag made a gesture with his hook. “This came out, and I sort of swirled the glass all back together through its ground. I’d seen bowls like it being made back in Glassforge, you see. Its ground had a hum to it…” His lips shaped, but did not blow, a note.

  Arkady, Barr, and Remo were all staring at his hook—no, not the hook, Fawn realized. At the invisible, elusive ground projection that took the place of his lost left hand. Which she would never see, but could sometimes—she suppressed a smile—feel. Dag eased back, as did the other three Lakewalkers, and she guessed he’d let the projection go in again.

  “First I heard about that bowl,” muttered Barr to Remo. “Ye gods. Did you know about it?” Remo shook his head and motioned his partner to shush.

  “Before things came to the point at Hickory Lake,” Dag went on, “there was that big malice outbreak over in Raintree. Did you hear much about it, way down here?”

  “A little,” said Arkady. “I confess, the patrollers here follow the news from the north more closely than I do. There always seems to be some excitement going on, up your way.”

  “Raintree malice was more than that. It promised to be every bit as bad as the Wolf War in Luthlia twenty years back. Worse, because it was fixing to tear across thickly settled farmer country. Malice food on a platter.”

  Arkady shrugged. “But you were from Oleana—you said?”

  Dag’s lips thinned. Fawn put in quickly, “Raintree sent out riders for help. Hickory Lake’s sort of next door, being in the far northwest of the hinterland. Fairbolt Crow—camp captain at Hickory Lake—chose Dag to be company captain of the force they sent out. Explain about ground-ripping the malice, Dag.”

  Dag drew breath and twisted his left arm, turning his hook. Ghost hand displayed again, or just referred to? “That thing I did to you at the gate, sir. For which I apologize, but I had to…anyway. What did you make it out to be?”

  Arkady, reminded, touched the back of his hand, now scabbed, and frowned at Dag. “A projection for groundsetting, applied too powerfully and damaging the overlying tissue. Deliberately, I take it. Although there are occasions when such tearing is a valuable tool—used rather more precisely, I must say.”

  “Used vastly more powerfully and not at all precisely, it’s the same as the ground-ripping a malice does,” said Dag.

  Arkady’s brows flew up. “Surely not.” His eyes flicked toward Fawn’s throat.

  “Surely is,” said Dag. “I’ve seen it coming and going, and there’s no mistake—I can show you the old malice scars on my legs, later. Like that glass bowl, the first time I did it I was pretty upset—we had closed on the malice, and it was trying to ground-rip one of my patrollers. I just reached out…” Dag drew breath. “Free advice, boys, bought at the usual cost. Don’t ever try to ground-rip a malice. Its ground sticks to yours, and is deadly poisonous. That’s how I got these scars…” He gestured to his left side generally. He wasn’t pointing to his body, Fawn realized, but to its ground.

  “Oh,” said Arkady, in an odd voice. “I couldn’t imagine what had caused those dark ripples.”

  Dag hesitated. “You’ve never seen a malice, have you, sir?”

  Arkady shook his head.

  “Ever patrolled at all?”

  “When I was a boy, they had me out a few times with the others my age. But I showed for a maker very young.”

  “Ah, the camping trips with the kiddies,” muttered Barr. “I hate those.” The riveted Remo poked him to silence.

  “So you’ve never seen a live mud-man,” sighed Dag.

  “Ah…no.” Arkady added after a moment, “The medicine maker who trained me at Moss River Camp had a dead one that he kept on display. Dried, though, which made it hard to make out any distinguishing details. It fell apart after a short while. Pity, I thought.”

  “And you’ve never seen a mud-man nursery, either. That’s going to make what came next hard to explain.”

  Arkady paused for a long moment with a peculiar look on his face, swallowed some first response, and said instead, “Try.”

  “All right. We found all this out bit by bit, mind. The malice, before we did for it, had taken a place called Bonemarsh Camp. Most of the Lakewalkers got away”—Dag’s swift glance around Arkady’s house whispered sessile again to Fawn—“but it captured half a dozen makers. It ground-locked them together—”

  Arkady gave a little flinching hiss.

  “Oh, there’s worse to come. It anchored this huge, complicated involution in their grounds to slave them to make up a batch of about fifty mud-men, which the malice had growing from local animals. A half-formed mud-man is about the most gut-wrenching thing you’ve ever seen, by the way. You want to kill it quick just for the pity of it. When my company got back to Bonemarsh, we found the groundlock still holding, the makers seeming unconscious. I’d thought the lock would break when the malice died, y’see, but I was wrong. Worse, when anyone opened their grounds to try to reach in and break the lock, they were sucked into the array as well. Lost three patrollers finding that out.”

  “That’s…astonishing,” said Arkady. Fawn’s first fear, that Arkady would toss them out before they got their tale half told, eased. Beneath his quelling reserve, she thought he was growing quite engrossed. He likes the parts about groundwork.

  Dag nodded shortly. “This was a very advanced malice, the most fully developed I’ve ever seen.”

  “And ah…how many have you seen?”

  Dag shrugged. “I lost count years back. That I’ve slain with a knife in my own hand, twenty-six or so. That’s counting the sessiles, which I do. Anyway, back at Bonemarsh—I stupidly tried to match grounds to steady the heartbeat of a dying maker in the array. And I got sucked in, too. Which is how I found out about the involution—I saw it from the inside. And after that the story has to go to Fawn, because the next few days were all a gray fog for me.”

  Fawn decided on a simplified version. “I came to Bonemarsh with Hoharie, because Dag had sent back for her help with this horrible groundlock thing. None of the Lakewalkers seemed to know what to do about it, which made me about half crazy, watching and waiting. Then Hoharie tried some experiment—I never did find out what, though I think she suspected about the involution.”

  “She did.” Dag nodded.

  “Anyhow, then she was drawn in, and Mari, who was in charge by then, said, no more experiments. But that night, I thought of one more. If an involution is a cut-off piece of a maker or a malice, which it seems to be, maybe this leftover piece of malice just needed a separate dose of mortality in order to destroy it. So I took my sharing knife”—she gulped in memory—“and stuck it in Dag’s leg. Because when I slew the malice back in Glassforge, he’d said I could stick it in anywhere.”

  Dag smiled, and murmured, “Sharp end first.” Fawn smiled back.

  “I think it worked to give it into Dag’s ghost hand, the way his arm jerked up, but he’ll have to tell that part,” Fawn concluded.

  Dag frowned and scratched his head. “Strangest experience I ever did have. We all know what it feels like to have a body and no ground, from being youngsters before our groundsense comes in, or in veiling. While I was slaved in the malice’s groundlock, it seemed like I was my ground—but not my body. I felt the knife come into me, and I knew it at once—it had been bonded to me, and still had affinity with my blood. But Fawn’s child’s ground lacked affinity with the malice—very strange and pure, it was—so there was no resonance, no, no…calling, to break open the knife’s involution and release the dying ground. So I broke open the involution myself, and added some affinity from my ghost hand. It was like unmaking a knife, all backward. It tore up my ghost hand something fierce, but it destroyed the malice’s groundwork, and cleaned out those poison spatters as well. Fawn’s sacrifice—well, with that little extra groundwork from me—got all ten of us out of the lock alive.” He blinked at Arkady, who was staring with his hand before his parted lips as if to stifle an exclamation, and added apo
logetically, “It wasn’t like I saw it, and figured it out, and did it. It was more like I saw it, and did it, and figured it all out much later.”

  Remo said, in downright peeved tones, “You never told me about all that, Dag! You only told me about Greenspring!”

  “Greenspring was the important part, seemed to me.”

  Fawn shivered in memory; Dag, grimacing, reached across the table to briefly grip her shoulder as he might console a young patroller.

  Arkady took his hand from his mouth and said, “So what was Greenspring?”

  Dag sighed. “When I’d recovered enough to ride, we all went home by way of the blighted farmer village that malice had emerged under. When we arrived, we found some folks had come back and were having a mass burial of those who hadn’t got out. Which was about half, of a thousand people. That first feast was the secret of how that malice had grown so quick, so strong.”

  He shared a look of understanding with Fawn, who picked up the thread: “They’d finished planting the grown-ups, mostly women and old folks, and were just starting on the children.” She took a breath, measured Arkady, and dared to say, “I’m told New Moon Camp lost a youngster a couple of months back. There were—how many children, in the row in front of that trench, Dag?” Laid out all stiff and wan, there had seemed no end to them.

  “One hundred sixty-two,” Dag said flatly.

  “The ground-ripping had kept them from rotting in the heat,” explained Fawn, and swallowed hard. Pale ice-children. “It didn’t help as much as you’d think.”

  Arkady shut his ground just then, Fawn thought; he went something more than expressionless, at any rate.

  “It took me some thinking, after,” said Dag. “How Greenspring was let to happen, and what could keep it from happening again. It’s an Oleana problem; in the south there’s nearly no malices, and in the far north there’s nearly no farmers. Where there’s both…” He held up hand and hook, but was frustrated in a gesture of interlacing fingers; Fawn thought everyone could imagine it, though. “It was plain something needed done, and it was plainer no one was doing it. And that we were running out of time to wait for someone smarter than me to try to figure out what. That’s why I broke with my kin and camp and quit the patrol. They thought it was over Fawn, and it was, but it was Fawn led me to Greenspring. Roundaboutly.” Dag gave a sharp nod, and fell silent.

  “I…see,” said Arkady slowly.

  He glanced toward his front door; annoyance flashed across his face, but then shifted to a shrewder look. He rose and was halfway to it when a knock sounded. Sticking his head out, Arkady exchanged murmurs with his caller; Fawn caught a glimpse of a middle-aged woman, who craned her neck in turn, but did not enter. Arkady turned back holding a large basket covered with a cloth, which he thumped down upon the table. “Some lunch all around would be as well just now, I think.”

  Fawn, Remo, and Barr all jumped up to help Arkady set out tools and plates; Dag sat more wearily, and let them. The break from the tension was welcomed by everyone, Fawn suspected, even Arkady. The basket yielded a big lidded clay pot full of a thick stew, two kinds of bread wrapped in cloths, and, almost to Fawn’s greater astonishment than this farmer-style fare, what were identifiably a couple of plunkins, spheres half the size of her head with brown husks. Cut open, they revealed a solid fruit both redder in color and sweeter than the plunkin she’d encountered at Hickory Lake.

  “Why don’t you have this kind up north, Dag?” she asked around a mouthful.

  “Longer growing season, I think,” he answered, also around a mouthful. Judging from the munching, all the northern Lakewalkers at the table plainly thought it was a treat. Arkady explained that these were grown in the shallow ends of the crescent lake.

  Arkady did not pursue his interrogation while they ate—thinking, or did he just have medical notions about guarding digestion? Nor did Dag volunteer anything further. The boys, Fawn thought, wouldn’t have dared to say boo. But Arkady wouldn’t be feeding us this good if he wasn’t at least thinking of keeping us, would he? Or maybe he just reckoned wild patrollers, like wild animals, could be tamed with vittles.

  Finally growing replete, Fawn thought to ask Arkady, “Where did all this food come from? Who should we thank?”

  He looked a trifle surprised at the question. “My neighboring tents take it in turns to send over my lunches and suppers. Breakfasts I do for myself. Tea, usually.”

  “Are you sick?” she asked diffidently.

  His brows went up. “No.”

  He busied himself making another pot of tea while Fawn and Remo repacked the basket and set it outside the front door at Arkady’s direction. He washed his hands again, sat, poured, frowned at Dag. Dag frowned back.

  “Your wife,” said Arkady delicately, “does not appear to be beguiled.”

  “She never has been,” Dag said.

  “Have you not done any groundwork on her?”

  “Quite a bit, time to time,” said Dag, “but she never grew beguiled with me. That was half the key to unlocking unbeguilement. Hod was the other half.”

  A sweep of Arkady’s clean hand invited Dag to continue. Maybe this subject would be less fraught than Greenspring?

  “You know beguilement can be erratic,” said Dag.

  “Painfully aware.” Arkady grimaced. “Like most young and foolish medicine makers, I once tried to heal farmers. The results were disastrous. Lesson learned.”

  Fawn wanted to hear more of this, but Arkady waved Dag on again.

  Dag sighed, as if steeling himself for this next confession. “Hod was a teamster’s helper out of Glassforge—we hitched a ride with his wagon down to Pearl Riffle. My horse kicked him in the knee, which made me feel sort of responsible. I remembered what I’d done with that glass bowl, and set myself to try a real healing. Which I did do—pulled his broken kneecap back together good. But it left him beguiled to the eyebrows, which we found out when he made to follow us on our flatboat. And Fawn said, Take him along and maybe you can figure out why, but if you leave him you never will. And she was right. Come to it, me, Fawn, Hod, and Remo all sat in a circle and traded around little ground reinforcements till we figured it out. I don’t think anyone who didn’t have both a beguiled and an unbeguiled farmer to compare at the same time could have seen it.”

  Remo said, “Even I could see it, once Dag showed me. I can’t quite do the unbeguiling trick yet, though.”

  Arkady’s glance went in surprise to Remo. “And what did you see?” he asked.

  “Don’t tell him, Dag,” said Fawn. “Show him.” She felt uncomfortable volunteering to be the Demonstration Farmer, but from his expression she suspected Arkady had some pretty stiff-set ideas on the subject that mere assertion would not shift.

  “Elbows again?” said Remo.

  “That’d do,” agreed Dag. “Watch close, Arkady, as the ground transfers.”

  Remo reached across the table and touched Fawn’s left elbow; she felt the spreading warmth of a tiny ground reinforcement. She tried to decide if it also made her feel any friendlier toward the boy, or made him look finer to her eyes; since she already liked him well, it was hard to tell.

  Arkady looked across at Dag in some puzzlement. “So?”

  “Now watch again. Watch for a little backflow of ground from Fawn to me, almost as it flows from me to her. It’s like it flows back through the reinforcement.”

  Dag smiled and reached his left arm toward her right elbow. As before, she saw nothing; but Arkady swore—the first she’d heard him do so, she realized.

  “Absent gods. That explains it!”

  “Yes. You just saw an unbeguilement. The farmer ground tries to rebalance itself through a ground exchange, the way it happens when two Lakewalkers trade ground, but if the Lakewalker is closed—rejects it—it bounces back and sets up this odd, um…imbalance in the farmer ground, which the farmer experiences as longing for another reinforcement. Obsession, if the imbalance is bad enough.”

  “No, yes…” A
rkady reached up and almost mussed his carefully tied hair. “Yes, I see, but not that alone. Is this why your ground is such a ghastly mess? How many of these have you been doing?” His voice wasn’t quite a shriek. Fawn stared at him with disappointment. She felt Dag’s discovery should be due much more applause.

  “I unbeguiled every farmer I did healing groundwork on, of course. Once I’d figured it out, that is,” Dag added a bit guiltily. Fawn wondered how Cress was getting along.

  “And then there were the oats,” Fawn put in. “And the pie. And the mosquito, don’t forget that, that started it all. Your poor arm swelled up so bad you couldn’t get your arm harness on after you ground-ripped that mosquito, remember?”

  “You took in ground from all those things?” said Arkady in horror. “It’s a miracle you’re still alive! Absent gods, man, you could have killed yourself!”

  “Aha!” said Fawn in triumph. “I told you ripping that thorny tree would be a bad idea, Dag!”

  Dag smiled wearily. “I sort of figured that out for myself, sir. Well…Fawn and I did. After a bit.”

  “A properly supervised apprentice,” said Arkady, somewhat through his teeth, “would never have been permitted to contaminate himself with such dreadful experiments!”

  “Groundsetter’s apprentice, you mean?”

  “Of course,” said Arkady impatiently. “No one else would be capable of the idiocy.”

  Dag scratched his stubbled chin, and said mildly, “Then he wouldn’t ever have been able to discover unbeguilement. Would he. Might be a good thing I started out unsupervised.”

  “Is it still?” asked Arkady.

  Dag lost his glint of humor. “No,” he admitted. “Because then came Crane.”

  Arkady, leaning forward to vent something irate, sat back more slowly. In a suddenly neutral voice, he said, “Tell me about Crane.”