Vio gave her husband a hard look. “I don’t see anybody else volunteering, now, do I?”
Fawn put in more quietly, “We all lost folks. Neeta her partner, Sumac her uncle, me, well. And if Barr gets to keep his leg it’ll be a miracle.”
A disagreeing grunt from Arkady. All in a day’s work for him, was this?
“If this is a contest, I don’t think much of the prizes,” Fawn finished, ignoring that last. “What we need is to work together.”
Vio stared venomously at her. “You can’t know what it’s like to lose a child.”
On the list of pointless things to say to the woman, Yes, I do seemed pretty high up. So Fawn said nothing, and was shortly glad of it when Vio’s hard voice broke. “Owlet’s so little.”
Sumac started to rub, then winced and dabbed, at her scratched face. “There’s not a lot of question in my mind Dag would have wanted me to turn back and look after you all.” Her glance at Fawn added, Especially you.
In an effort to be practical, because someone needed to, Fawn put in, “We found another dead mule along the road. I don’t know if you had time to notice, but didn’t neither of those mules have their harness taken off. If they’d died natural, those tea caravan boys wouldn’t have left their loads on ’em, nor the hides either, likely. That says to me they must have been attacked and forced away or run off. But we haven’t spotted any human bodies yet.”
Sumac’s brow furrowed. “Sounds like trouble to the north, all right. Besides no traffic coming down, I ’specially don’t like that we haven’t even met anyone running away our way.”
“Except for that first malice,” Fawn pointed out.
“There was that.” Sumac grimaced. “Going forward seems a bad idea. Going back is no better. We’d be open targets in that burned-over country. Staying here’s no good, either. We hit that mud-bat pack hard. No question they’ll be back looking for more. But I know the worst would be to scatter into the woods with no blighted plan!”
The others had trickled up around the firelit debate, looking more mulish than their mules.
“We should round up our weapons,” said Ash.
“We should,” agreed Sumac, “but we’re too many to hide and too few to make a stand.”
“I’m thinking,” said Fawn, “that those muleteers could have been mind-slaved.” She looked around at the array of faces, some blank, and explained, “That scares me way more than mud-men. I talked to folks at Glassforge and in Raintree who went through it. It’s like you still have your wits, you keep all your know-how, but suddenly you want to do whatever the malice wants of you. If it wants you to attack your friends, or eat your own children, it seems like a fine idea at the time. And you remember, after. The most important thing, whatever else we do, is to keep everyone out of range of that malice.”
Sumac bit her knuckles, seemed to gather herself, and spoke in the most no-nonsense voice Fawn had yet heard from her. A patrol leader’s voice, for sure. “All right. This is what we’re doing. The wounded can’t run or be carried. They’ll have to be hid in the rocks on the valley side no matter what. Lie up till rescue can get to them. That’ll be Barr, Arkady, and Rase.”
“I can fight,” Rase quavered. To Fawn, he looked as if he could barely stand.
“Good,” said Sumac heartlessly, “because if you get found, you’ll have to. My best guess is that the malice lair lies to our east. So that leaves west. Happens there’s a Lakewalker camp almost due west of here at Laurel Gap. So we set the animals loose, pull together what food and weapons we can carry—and ropes, we’ll want ropes—and skedaddle west over the ridges on foot. Tonight.” Her voice slowed. “It might be best to leave Plum with Arkady.”
“No!” Vio wailed.
“Your decision,” said Sumac. “You have one hour to think about what this retreat’ll put her through. And who’s going to carry her fifty, sixty miles over mountains at a run.” She turned on her heel, taking in the rest of the stunned company. “We want to make sure we have all the bows and arrows into the hands of folks who can use them.”
“Tavia’s bow was broken when her horse fell on it,” Fawn said. “Neeta got back her quiver.”
Sumac nodded. “Remo can take Barr’s bow. Neeta can have mine. Whit, you have yours.”
Putting the distance weapons, Fawn noticed, solely into the hands of people who could ground-veil or were shielded, and did not risk mind slaving.
“We can fight those things!” said Finch. “We drove them off once!”
“Speak for yourself, boy,” growled Bo. “Looked to me like they just left ’cause they got bored.”
“But we can’t fight their master,” said Sumac. “This wants the Laurel Gap patrol. Blight, this wants every Lakewalker camp in the hinterland!”
“I have Dag’s primed knife,” said Fawn quietly. “He dropped it to me. Last thing.”
Sumac’s eyebrows rose. “Well,” she said. “That gives you two good reasons to stick tight to me.”
Fawn swallowed. “Dag might come back. Looking for us. Or maybe Tavia.”
“Then they’ll be able to join up with Arkady’s group,” suggested Sumac. “Hide out till we can send help.” Fawn thought Sumac drew more consolation from this notion than she did.
Arkady looked up, squinting, and said in an underwater groan, “Needle. Dressings. Splints.”
Calla and Fawn hurried back to his side, Fawn rooting in the medicine pack.
“You all right?” said Sumac, in what was for Sumac an amazingly diffident voice.
“I’ll do. Just don’t bring me another like this for the next three days, eh?” He grimaced at her.
“In case you didn’t hear, we’re going to tuck up your medicine tent back in the rocks. Your job will be to all stay alive till we send a patrol to dig you out of your burrow again.”
He nodded. Not sorry, Fawn guessed, that it would be Sumac’s duty to run away from this place as fast as she could drive her farmer flock.
Sumac packed off the splinted Barr on a sapling-and-blanket stretcher carried by Remo and Whit, with Arkady leading his packhorse bearing the medicine-tent supplies and Rase staggering along after. Vio didn’t send Plum with them. Again, Fawn noticed, no one without either ground veiling or a shield would know just where they’d gone to earth, and so could not betray them even under a malice’s persuasion. The company scattered to gather its gear.
20
Two hours after sunset, the lopsided moon rose to bathe the eastern-facing ridge in milk and ink. Under normal conditions, Dag would have found it as good as daylight. Not tonight. Staggering along with his only hand full of walking stick, trying to peer over the squirming burden of Owlet tied to his chest, ankle screaming at every step, it took Dag twice as long to reach the crest as he’d planned. He could sense Tavia’s growing impatience.
“Maybe I should take the tad,” she said as they made the top and Dag stood gasping and bent.
He waved an acknowledging hand. “A minute.” He stared out over the valley, seeking, beyond the silver ribbon of river, the fainter line of the Trace. Nothing moved along the road. No curls of luminous smoke rose from the woods to the north, either. He dared to open his groundsense, reaching, but it was well over two miles to the valley floor, beyond his range even at his best. Fawn’s still alive, his marriage cord told him, but where?
The cool damp of this black-white-gray world, falsely serene, felt clammy on his sweating face. Something unexpected pricked his senses, not below, but north along the ridge. Faint, thready…
“Tavia, open and check along the ridge to our right. Maybe half a mile.”
“That’s right at the edge of my—wait. A patroller? Not one of ours…?”
“No ground I recognize. Hurt, I think.”
She nodded; they began to pick their way between scrubby bushes, around jutting rocks, through weeds. Plants bruised by their passage gave up a sharp green smell in the dark. The trees rose around them as they descended, making the shadows more treachero
us, though they did give Tavia handholds. Dag found that anchoring his hook on a passing sapling proved more pain than it was worth. His left arm was wrenched and sore, his stump swollen and uncomfortable in the wooden cuff, but he hardly dared remove his arm harness for fear he wouldn’t be able to get it back on.
Tavia forged ahead; he caught up to find her crouched and peering over a twenty-foot drop. A huddled man-shape lay at its foot.
A dry, hoarse voice rose from below. “Someone…up there? Help!”
“We see you,” Tavia called. “We’re coming down.”
“I think my back is broken,” the voice returned.
“Don’t try to move!”
“I can’t…blighted move!”
They crept along the outcrop till Tavia found a steep scramble down. Dag was forced to go a little farther and then work his way back.
A patroller, yes, Dag saw as he limped near. Spare of build, middle height; a few threads of silver gleamed in his dark hair, mostly undone from its braid and scrambled around his head. He lay faceup, legs limp, hands clenched. A marriage cord, frayed and faded, circled his left wrist. His lips were dry, cracked, and bleeding. His ripped shirt was stained with dark, dried blood; already Dag recognized the pattern of mud-bat clawings. And he was right about his back. At least two vertebrae fractured, about halfway down.
“Water,” he whispered to Tavia as she bent over him. “Oh, please…” The man’s patting hand found a leather water bottle at his side, empty and flaccid, and thrust it toward Tavia.
“Dag?” she said uncertainly.
“Yes. He’s dangerously parched. Careful getting it off.”
She unwound the strap from his neck, untangled it from his hair, and sped away. Dag lowered himself with a grunt. Sleepy Owlet whimpered protest; Dag off-loaded the child and rolled him to the side, where he curled up in the dry dirt, stubby hands relaxing again in sleep. How did youngins do that, go from squirming whirligigs to limp little rag dolls in a blink?
“Who’re you?” whispered the injured man. “Patrollers? Not ours. Help from outland…?” He squinted up at Dag in brief hope, took in his battered appearance, his arm harness, his stick, and answered his own question with a deflated, “Not…”
“Name’s Dag Bluefield N—” Dag swallowed the No-Camp. “Traveling north with a mixed party of farmers and Lakewalkers. We were attacked just before sunset by a flock of those flying…things. Mud-bats. They tried to carry me, Tavia, and the tad over there across the ridge, but we fought free of ’em. We’re trying to get back to our people, but I don’t see where they’ve gone.”
“Lucky. I…was dropped…” The man’s eyes rolled anxiously as Tavia reappeared out of the moon shadows. “Ah-please…”
“You can help him raise his head,” said Dag, “but don’t lift his shoulders or jostle his back.”
Tavia nodded, and spent the next few minutes getting the entire skin of water down the desperately thirsty man without choking him, much.
“Ah,” he said as she let his head down again. “So good. Gods. Hurts…”
“How long have you been up here?” asked Dag. The man’s bladder had given way in his paralysis long enough ago for his trousers to have pretty much all dried out again. That actually wasn’t a good sign, but the water should fix it.
“Not sure. I keep fading in and out, and waking up not dead. Surprises me. One day, two? It’s been dark and light and dark…”
“Where you from? Laurel Gap?”
“Aye. My patrol—we’d heard strange reports, just arrived at the head of the valley and started to sweep, when those mad things fell out of the sky on us.”
“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 re
fill 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.
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