Passage

  So if smoothing and reinforcing disrupted ground caused flesh to heal, disrupting ground might…? The blighted thing was large compared to its constricted intestinal world, but in absolute terms, small. Just a tiny ground disruption. Squeeze it, roll it, twist it—turn it inside out—there. He felt the head of the creature pop, and a spurt of blood from its anchorage as it tore away. He pinched off the little vessels in Hod’s gut, aiding the wound to clot. Then recaptured the thin worm-body and went right down the line to destroy each segment. In a weird way, it felt a bit like spinning thread. With his ground-hand, inside someone else’s body…I don’t think I want to think about what I’m doing, here. But the worm was dying, and he managed to keep its roiling, writhing ground from sticking to his own.

  Hod made a wary noise, and his hands twitched; Fawn caught one, to keep it at his side, and gave him a big happy reassuring smile. Whit bit his lip, possibly on a bark of laughter, but Hod offered a confused half-smile to Fawn in return, as who could help doing so? And made no further move to fight off Dag.

  “Done,” Dag whispered at last, and sat up, folding his left arm inside his right. His exhausted ground projection petered out, as if his ghost hand were evaporating into mist, into nothing. Absent gods, I feel sick. His groundsense range seemed down to ten paces, or maybe ten inches. But at least he hadn’t groundlocked himself to the blighted worm. Count your blessings. One…

  Next time, he would hold out for a medicine shop and some simple dose of vermifuge, a course of treatment he suspected even a Lakewalker medicine maker would prefer. Dag had a vague notion that senior makers saved their costly groundsetting skills for serious dangers, like tumors. More than ever, he regretted turning down Hoharie’s offer of real maker’s training; then he’d know what to do, instead of having to blunder around by guess. But Hoharie’d had no use for his farmer bride. Blood over the dam.

  Tanner and Whit settled Hod for the night. Dag dragged his bedroll around to the other side of the fire, away from the sight of his unappetizing patient. Victim. Whatever. He would’ve liked to retreat farther than that, but hated to give up the heat. Hod, exhausted by the shock and limp from the passing of his pain, dropped to sleep fairly soon. Dag, equally exhausted, did not.

  While Fawn, Tanner, and Whit went off to see to the horses, Mape came and squatted on his haunches beside Dag’s bedroll. After a while, he said, “I never guessed he was sick. Just thought he was lazy.”

  “I didn’t catch on either, at first.” Dag had been led down a false trail by Tanner’s talk, yes, but he’d only to open his groundsense to learn better.

  “I beat him, couple o’ times, when I caught him sleeping on the job,” Mape added. His voice was low, flat, expressionless. Suited for things confided in the dark, where no one could see. “I’m just sayin’. Thankee, Lakewalker.”

  “The knee should be good with a couple of weeks of rest. The other, you’ll start to see a difference in a couple of days, I’m guessing.” Dag could leave it at that. It was tempting. Oh, blight it. “I was cleaning up my own mess. I saw him sneak out to my bags. Thought I’d just let Copperhead teach him a lesson. Instead, I got taught. Can’t say as I enjoyed it.”

  “No,” agreed Mape. “Me neither.” He nodded, rose. Not friendly, exactly, but…acknowledging. That at least. He trod away into the dark.

  When Fawn finally came to lie down, Dag tucked her into the curl of his body like one of the cloth-wrapped hot stones she sometimes used for pain. He held her hard. It helped.

  In the morning, Hod was laid in his bedroll in the back of Mape’s wagon, and Whit took Hod’s place as brakeman. Fawn sat up beside Tanner. Dag, too, moved his bedroll, saddle, and bags to the back of the second wagon and continued his lie-down. Copperhead, unnaturally subdued, clopped loose behind, but Fawn supposed Dag had the gelding back under his mysterious groundsense-tie. Dag appeared to doze in the sun, but he was not asleep. It reminded Fawn uncomfortably of that deep, drained fatigue that had overcome him after Greenspring. The Glassforge teamsters seemed to think little of it, but Whit, familiar with Dag’s usual restless energy, cast more than a few concerned looks over his shoulder as they rumbled down the road.

  Whit took over helping with Hod during their stops, at least. Hod still didn’t say much, but his gaze followed Dag around in something between worry and fascination. Tanner and Mape were kinder to him, which served only to confuse him, as though kindness were a baited trap into which he feared to fall.

  Dag was quiet all day. They put up for the night in a barn let by a roadside farm to travelers and their beasts—no hotel, but warmer and more sheltered than last night’s uncomfortable sleep on the ground. The next morning, Fawn was relieved when Dag seemed enough himself to climb back up on Copperhead for the last leg of the journey.

  Noon found the teams plodding up a long slope along a wooded ridge. Dag edged Copperhead alongside the wagon, and said to Fawn, “Climb on.” He had that elusive smile he wore when he looked forward to surprising her, so she stood up, balanced herself, and swung her leg over behind Dag. When she’d adjusted to a secure perch, he let Copperhead roll out in his long patrol walk, and they pulled ahead as though the wagons had parked. At the top of the ridge, he let her slide down, and swung after her. Walking backward, he took her by the hand and brought her to the lip of the road.

  The valley of the Grace spread out below them in the gold-blue autumn light. The river seemed to have put on her party dress, her banks and bending hillsides a swirl of color: scarlet and purple-red, glowing yellow, bright brown. The water reflected the azure of the sky, save where it broke into a sparkling shoal, necklace to the dress. Brooches of boats slid upon the water—a distant keel, a broad, blunt ferry—with a girdle of flatboats pulled up along the farther shore. Fawn was dimly aware of Whit, trotting up panting to see whatever there was to see. She was more aware of Dag, watching her face. She wasn’t sure if he was seeing just the river valley reflected there, or something more, but his mouth softened in an ease that handed her joy back to her, to be passed back to him again, redoubled.

  “Oh,” said Whit, in a voice the like of which she’d never heard come out of him before. She glanced up, startled, to watch his lips part, his mouth grow round. Wonder, she thought, though you could well mistake it for a man punched in the stomach.

  “Lookit those boats. Lookit…” he went on, though she was fairly sure he’d forgotten there was anyone listening. “That’s one big river. Even half dry, it’s bigger than any river I ever seen. It’s like a road. A great grand road, running from mystery above”—he turned with the river’s curve, like a man dancing, twirling with his lady—“into mystery below. It’s like, it’s like…it’s like the best road ever.” He blinked rapidly. His eyes were shining.

  No, not shining. Wet.

  5

  Back aboard Copperhead, Dag rode close to the second wagon as they made the turn at the top of the ridge and started down the road into the valley. Fawn, beside Tanner, sat bolt upright and earnestly alert, ready to work the wheel-brake at the teamster’s word. In the front wagon, Whit had his head cranked sideways, goggling at the river. Dag’s eye followed his gaze.

  Half a mile upstream on this side, Pearl Riffle Camp was just visible amongst the thinning leaves, a scattering of tent-roofs—Fawn would have called them cabins, Dag supposed—along the wooded hillside. Opposite the Lakewalker camp, below the mouth of a creek, lay Possum Landing, the level stretch of shore where the ferry put in and where cargoes were traditionally transferred from the old straight road to the river, or vice versa. There were more farmer houses clustered upslope from the landing than the last time Dag had ridden through here, and more sheds for storing goods.

  Eight flatboats and a keel were presently tied to the trees along the muddy bank on that side, waiting for a rise in the water level to dare the shoals below; a good selection, though if the water rose suddenly from some big storm upriver, they could all be underway in an hour. But the water was still falling, judging from
both the width of the mud margin and the fact that a couple of the flatboats, tied imprudently too close to the bank, now had their bows stuck in the drying mire. Even the wharf boat was half-grounded.

  Dag turned in his saddle to look over his shoulder. Half a mile below the glittering shoals on this side, where the river again curved out of sight, was the farmer hamlet of Pearl Bend, which also boasted a wharf boat serving the crossing, as it made sense to offload heavy cargo before hauling a boat up over the Riffle, or wait to load on till after successfully negotiating the hazard coming down. The Glassforge men would take the bulk of their goods there. Pearl Bend, too, boasted more roofs than Dag remembered; practically a village, now.

  Dag turned back to find the cautious glass-men pulling their wagons to a halt at a wide space in the road, huddling toward the hillside. A troop of riders was coming up the slope, double file—a Lakewalker patrol, outbound from Pearl Riffle Camp, likely. A dozen and some men, maybe half that many women, a normal complement. Dag drew Copperhead in behind Tanner’s wagon and squinted down the track. He fought an impulse to open his crippled groundsense wide, closing it down instead. He could look with his eyes well enough.

  Outbound for certain, Dag decided, as first patrollers drew level with the wagons and fell into single file to pass. They appeared far too rested and tidy to be anything else. He suppressed a company captain’s inventory of the condition of every horse, rider, and weapon approaching. Not his job, anymore.

  The patrol leader, who had barely glanced at the wagons, looked up as he spotted Dag and urged his mount forward. Dag opened his groundsense just enough to keep Copperhead polite as the strange horse loomed near.

  “Courier?” demanded the patrol leader, a spare, middle-aged fellow with a shrewd eye.

  Because why else would a Lakewalker be riding alone, and if the news Dag bore was bad, perhaps this patrol was about to acquire a more urgent task than their routine search patterns. His mind would not connect Dag, in Lakewalker gear on what was obviously a patrol horse, with the party of farmers that his patrol was rounding.

  Dag touched his hand to his temple in a courteous salute, but said, “No, sir. Just travelin’ through.”

  The patrol leader’s shoulders eased in relief. “Any news from the north?”

  He meant patrol news, Lakewalker news. “All was quiet when I passed through Glassforge, three days back.”

  The leader nodded. He looked as if he’d like to pause for fuller gossip, but the last rider cleared the obstructing wagons and kicked her horse into a trot to take up her place in the re-forming double file. He contented himself with a return salute and a “Travel safely, then.”

  “You, too. Good hunting.”

  An acknowledging grimace, and he trotted after the others.

  Dag took back his place as Fawn’s outrider as the two wagons creaked into motion again. Fawn twisted around in her seat to watch the departing patrol, turned back, and glanced across at Dag. Concern shone in her big brown eyes, though for what cause Dag was uncertain.

  Tanner, too, cast a curious look over his shoulder. “So, all those Lakewalkers are going off to hunt for blight bogles, are they? With their, their ground-senses?”

  “Yes,” said Dag. “Pearl Riffle Camp doesn’t cover as big a territory as Hickory Lake—that’s my, was my, home camp. Hickory has eight, nine thousand folks, the biggest camp in Oleana. Doubt Pearl Riffle has eight or nine hundred. They can field maybe two or three patrols, barely a company. But their more important task is right here, keeping the ferry crossing open in case of need. If the Glassforge malice had gotten out of hand—more out of hand—we might have called on Lakewalker camps from south of the Grace to help out. Or the other way around, if they ran into trouble down there.”

  “The way Hickory Lake sent Dag’s company west to fight the malice that came up in Raintree, couple of months back,” put in Fawn, for Tanner’s sake. And, at Tanner’s next question, went on to give him an accurate summary of the summer’s campaign, if sketched in broad strokes, and all in terms a farmer might readily grasp, because, after all, Fawn was one. Which drew braver questions from the teamster in turn. Dag listened in grateful silence, backing her with an occasional nod. This fruitful exchange lasted till the wagons reached the bottom of the long slope and turned across the narrow floodplain toward the river.

  When they reached the crossroads, Dag said, “Fawn, do you think you’d be all right staying with Whit for a little? I’d like to pay a visit.” He jerked his head upstream.

  “Sure. This is the camp where Saun and Reela stayed, right?”

  The two were fellow patrollers injured in the Glassforge fight, sent down here as the closest place to convalesce. Saun had been Dag’s own partner; Fawn had made friends of a sort with Reela, laid up in the hotel afterwards with a broken leg. “Yes,” Dag answered.

  “Do you have friends here? Or k—” She cut short the last word: kin.

  “Well, I’m not sure,” he said, passing over her little stammer. “It’s been a while since I was down this way. Thought I’d go check.” Which was not exactly the reason for his detour, but he was reluctant to discuss the real one in front of Tanner. Especially as Dag himself was doubtful of the result. “I’ll find you two after my errand. Might be a while. Stay by Whit, right?”

  “Dag, I don’t need my brother to guard me every minute.”

  “Who said it was you I thought needs a keeper?”

  She dimpled, taking this in; he cast her a return wink, possibly more cheerful-looking than he felt. The wagons turned right onto the downstream road toward Pearl Bend. Dag wheeled Copperhead around and trotted in the opposite direction.

  Across a shallow run and over a rise, he came to the camp’s perimeter and let his groundsense ease open just a hair, to present himself to the gate guard, if any. He felt an inquiring double-flick in return, and raised his eyes to spot not one but a pair of Lakewalkers lingering on a couple of stumps flanking the road. An older man was whittling pegs; a morning’s worth lay piled haphazardly at his feet, and Dag’s nostrils flared with the pleasant tang of new shavings. A young woman worked on weaving willow-withy baskets, but a bow and quiver leaned against a rock within easy reach. Patrollers both, on light camp duty.

  Dag drew up Copperhead and nodded. “How de’.”

  The man stood. “Good day to you”—a slight hesitation, as he looked Dag up and down—“patroller.” An anxious look crossed his face. “Courier, are you?”

  “No, sir, just stopping by. I was hoping you could tell me where to find your camp captain, and who’s holding that post these days.”

  The young woman frowned at his hook, wrapped with Copperhead’s reins, and he lowered it a trifle. The man directed Dag to look for Amma Osprey in the third tent to the left past the split oak tree, and Dag, not lingering to get tangled in talk, pressed Copperhead on. A last curious ground-flick touched him. Pass, friend.

  Both ease and anxiety knotted in him as he rode by the familiar domestic sights of a Lakewalker camp. Tents peeked through trees, the traditional log structures with hide awnings rolled up on their fourth, open sides, mostly looking southwest to the river. Stands of fruit trees, beehives, homely washing on lines. Smoke rising from chimneys, the smells of cooking and preserving. From a distance, a less pleasant whiff of tanning hides. Half a dozen black-and-white speckled chickens squawked and fluttered across Copperhead’s path, and the horse tossed his head and snorted.

  Downslope near the shore, a couple of men were building a good-sized narrow boat on a rack, hammering in pegs. Twenty-five feet long, double-prowed, broad in the middle, clearly meant for the river trade—its boards looked mill-sawn. A few of the newer tent-cabins, too, were built of such planks; the farmers at Pearl Bend or Possum Landing must have put in a sawmill on one of the feeder creeks.

  Dag spotted patrol headquarters by the array of hitching posts in front, and the lack of washing and cook-smoke. The four-sided cabin had Glassforge glass windows, presently hooked open on wh
at had to be one of the last warm days of the season. Dag dismounted, tied Copperhead, and let his groundsense dart out once more. Two folks inside right now, both ground-closed; a woman’s voice, sharp, drifted out the open windows.

  “If we upped and moved the camp and the ferry a mile upriver—better, five miles—we wouldn’t have these blighted clashes.”

  “And lose the rest of the business from the straight road to the Bend’s new ferry? We’re hurting already,” returned another woman, with a rougher, warmer voice. Not young.

  “Let it go. We don’t need a wagon road for our patrols and pack trains.”

  “Amma, three-fourths of the camp’s coin comes from farmers using our ferry. And flows right back to them. Everything from flour to horseshoe nails comes from the Bend goods-sheds these days.”

  “As it should not. Proves my point, I’d say.”

  A glum silence fell. When it remained unbroken, Dag stepped up onto the wooden porch and knocked, furling his groundsense more tightly around him.

  “Is that you, Verel?” the first voice called. “Come on in. When are you going to let those two—ah.” A tough, tall, strongly built older woman, one haunch half-up on a plank table, wheeled as Dag ducked through the door and touched his hand to his temple in polite greeting. He had no trouble identifying her as the camp’s patrol captain, given her riding trousers, worn leather vest, long steel knife at her belt, and harassed look. The cabin held the usual headquarters clutter of strewn gear, with maps and record books stuffed on overflowing shelves. The other woman, of like age but rather plumper and wearing skirts, might be some clan head; she seemed to bear herself with scarcely less authority.

  “Now what?” said the camp captain, in a voice of accumulated exasperation. Her lips began to shape the next query.