Alive. So far, so far.
On the next whirl he glimpsed Sumac, face raised, whipping her horse in and out of the fringe of the woods. She fell behind. The mudbats lurched and swooped at a terrific pace, unimpeded by any barrier.
No, wrong. The mud-bats were laboring hard to clear the eastern ridge.
Dag abandoned thought of the knife in his boot in favor of getting his hand around the other ankle of the mud-bat that gripped his hook.
It would not be able to drop him wholly at its convenience . . . the mudbat shook its back foot and made an angry screeching noise, but in this position was almost as helpless to fight as Dag. The feeling that his skull was exploding in his panic eased slightly with this doubtless-false sense of control.
Fawn had seen the problem at once, while his head had still been swinging around. If he fought free at this height—the blurring fall, the hot crunch of impact—even Arkady wouldn’t be able to put the pieces together again. Blight, I only look like I know what I’m doing because so much of it is the same doings of the past forty years. The truly new uncovered his weaknesses. Such as now, when he wanted down with a desperate desire, but not that fast . . .
He stiffened his neck and tried to look in some other direction. Most of the surviving mud-bats had winged ahead, but the burdened ones lagged. The screaming toddler—oh, I hear you and agree, little brother— was not far in front of him, if higher up. At least Owlet’s mud-bat seemed to have its back claws locked around the child’s thin arms, not cruelly piercing them the way the other had caught Fawn’s shoulder.
Tavia was ahead and lower, struggling. She, too, had hit on the notion of wrapping her hands around her captor’s back ankles; she twisted and kicked air, dragging her mud-bat closer to the ridge, which seemed to rise below them. The gray rocks looked bony and lethal, the trees like pit-trap stakes. Could Dag force a similar descent without being dropped or falling? Once they wobbled across the high line, the ground would fall away again. Best chance.
If he could somehow get rid of the mud-bat holding up his right boot, the other would not be able to support his weight. He kicked, without effect but to elicit some nasty hissing and a tighter grip that hoisted his right leg higher at a more awkward angle.
How close was the malice? The mud-bats strung out ahead seemed to be aiming to clear the next ridge as well, a good four miles off. At least that far. Dag dared to ease open his groundsense, reaching upward into the mud-bat bodies as he would examine a distressed patient. Their thin-walled chests heaved, their big hearts pounded with their exertion.
Their grounds were a horror, but he ignored that. He focused on the second mud-bat, closer up and deeper in, deeper in . . . The ridge was coming up fast. There was no time for—there was no time.
He organized a projection, reached in, and ground-ripped a pinhole in the great artery exiting the mud-bat’s heart. Three straining flaps, three thumping heartbeats, and the vessel split asunder. The mud-bat’s mouth opened on a pained roar, its eyes rolled back, and it fell away, its clutching claws tearing loose from Dag’s boot. It tumbled into the trees. Dag’s remaining mud-bat lurched in surprise, redoubling its efforts.
Owlet’s mud-bat turned and swooped nearer, calling in confusion, “Come, come!”
It’s this or the poor tad is malice food. Dag had once been partly groundripped by a malice; as painful deaths went, there wasn’t much to choose between that and plummeting onto rocks. Dag reached again, at his fullest stretch. This time he went for the big vein entering the heart.
A touch slower to take effect, maybe . . . ? He felt the pop, withdrew at once. Owlet’s mud-bat shrieked, choked, flapped more slowly . . . began spiraling down . . . crashed into whipping branches. Owlet’s screams stopped too suddenly.
Dag’s mud-bat was falling, too. It released its grip on his hook, tried to shake him off. But the release gave Dag back a weapon. He clawed upwards, catching and ripping skin from the creature’s short rear legs, tearing tatters in the lower edges of the leathery wings. Blood spun out like a shower of raindrops, bright red.
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.
&
nbsp; 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 beneath, 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.”