“The mud-men can move faster.” Dag jerked his thumb over his shoulder. “As we saw by their scout, I reckon.”
Sumac said, “The malice looks like a sessile about to molt, except for its being out on the road. I’ve never seen one that close to splitting, if so.”
“Good for us if it’s awkward, but its menace is in its ground powers, not its pseudo-body.” Dag chewed his lip. Very few decisions left, here, till he committed them all irrevocably to action. “Rase, are you up for facing your first malice?”
“Yes, sir!”
Dag nodded, grinning darkly, the old excitement running molten through his veins. I thought you were tired of this game, old patroller? A live malice was never just a training exercise, but absent gods, this sounded close to it. So, let’s teach these youngsters a few tricks. The better to keep them alive on the day when Dag would not be there, and the malice would not be so soft.
Whit, flanked by Fawn, had come up to the edge of the crowd when Sumac had arrived. Now he shouldered forward to say, “Dag, can I ride with you?” He touched the walnut at his throat.
Dag said automatically, “No. I need you to lead the farmers.”
“Berry and Fawn can do that! What’s the point of making this ground shield if we can’t try it out?”
Indeed, that was going to be a problem, if he kept making shields for people he loved…“Blight, Whit. If I ever make shields for Reed and Rush, I’ll happily stake them out as bait. Not you.”
Fawn said, “If your shields are ever to make us farmers be partners to Lakewalkers, and not just backward children in your eyes, it has to start somewhere. Seems to me you’ve said a word or two about a man starting where he is. Well, here we are.”
She would quote Dag back to himself…He weakened. “I suppose,” he said, “someone has to hold the horses.”
“Thanks, sir!”
“You be careful, Whit,” said Fawn sternly. “Don’t go turning that into the stupidest thing I ever said. I shouldn’t like to explain it to Berry. Or Mama.”
“Right, Sis!” Whit gave Fawn a hug and dashed off to collect his horse.
“Arkady goes with the farmer party, of course.” Dag narrowed his eyes at the maker, who, praise be, didn’t protest. “So do you, Sumac.”
Sumac opened her mouth, hesitated.
“You’re still dizzy from that knock on your head, your horse is spent, and if it all goes sour, someone needs to know how to get these farmers to Laurel Gap. Which reminds me, Barr, go swap out your mount for a fresher one.”
Barr scurried. Miraculously, Sumac didn’t argue, but allowed the concerned Arkady to lead her off. She was blinking rather hard, as if her vision wasn’t quite meshing.
In minutes more, Dag was leading five patrollers and one West Blue boy at a canter up the road, while Berry and Fawn rousted the rest to ride south. Dag wanted to put as much distance between the attack and Fawn as he could, to give the farmers their best chance if they needed it; and if they didn’t, well, one of the young patrollers could play courier and close the gap quickly enough. A mud-man troop, horsed, could do the same, but these all seemed to be afoot, so far. And let’s keep it that way.
Dag’s safe scheme to leave his tent-brother with the horses foundered at once on Whit’s crossbow. His little patrol was too short on archers to forgo the weapon or its most experienced wielder. He reordered his plan of attack in his head yet again, in time with Copperhead’s swift stride.
“Barr!” he called over the hoofbeats. “Where’s our last good cover before we come up on ’em?” Which would be soon; already, and despite his closed ground, Dag could feel the dry shock in his midsection that told him a live malice was nearby.
“Depends on how much they’ve moved since we hit them,” Barr called back. “Right up there, I think.” He pointed to a rocky outcrop almost overhanging the road, the tail of a spur from the western ridge, sheltering a seeping rivulet. “Not many trees beyond, all fire scrub and brambles. We’ll be able to see trouble coming.”
So will the malice, Dag thought, but waved his hook in acknowledgment. They swung into the sheltered space, to find signs of its having been used as a campsite by many prior travelers. The patrollers dismounted and began arming themselves.
Dag flung himself off Copperhead and scrambled up the steep slope to the ridgelet, flanked by Barr. On his knees, he parted the blackberry canes and poison ivy with his hook arm and peered out into the hot green afternoon.
The road drew a groove through the recovering scrub, winding down to the next stream crossing and up again, an open space of a good mile. A quarter of the way across it, the malice’s band trudged toward them. Dag could see the creature clearly, head and shoulders above its mud-men. Its body was indeed massive, its gut enormous, its gait clumsy and bizarre.
“Still on the Trace,” murmured Dag. “I’d have thought you and Sumac would have driven them to cover. By the way, five down or no, I don’t thank you two for teaching them to fear Lakewalkers, or how to fight us. Sumac should have known scout doesn’t mean alarm.”
“We were flying around a bend and ran into them quicker than we expected. Just beyond that next rise. They were more spread out, then,” Barr whispered back. “They’ve only moved on about a mile since.”
Dag squinted into the shimmer trying to number mud-man heads, gave up, and said to Barr, “Count ’em. Has it changed?”
Barr’s younger eyes narrowed intently; his lips moved. “Twenty-six now. Hey! That can’t be right.”
Dag didn’t think Sumac had miscounted. “It must have drawn in its scouts, for defense, and to replace the fallen. Which is no bad result.” This close to the malice, Dag didn’t dare open his groundsense to check, but he saw no sign of flanking mud-men moving through the nearby scrub. Any more distant mud-men were not a tactical consideration.
The enemy was closing the gap, if at a shambling pace. Let them do most of the walking, good. Dag slid back down to the clearing. The horses had been tied patroller style, that is, reins wrapped up so as not to trail, and heavily persuaded to stay together. Because you wouldn’t want to physically tether a horse you might need to summon, nor risk leaving the poor beasts helpless if no one returned to release them. He rechecked Copperhead, then turned to order his patrol, keeping his voice low.
“All right. We have the advantage of this rise here, which I mean to keep. As soon as the malice and its mud-men are in bow shot, if they haven’t spotted us and turned tail first, I, Whit, Tavia, and Barr will try to take down as many as we can till we run out of arrows. After that it’s a wild pig hunt with spears and knives, except pigs aren’t smart enough to gang up on you and mud-men are. Try not to get separated and become a target, and keep an eye out for anyone who does. Don’t stop to finish off your mud-man if it’s too disabled to move, but be aware they’ll keep coming at you even when hurt as long as their malice is alive. And remember the mud-men are just a noisy diversion; the only target that counts is the malice, and getting Rase and his knife up to it. Try to circle behind it, Rase.”
The patroller swallowed, set his shoulders, nodded. Forced his hand, clutching the knife slung around his neck, back to his side.
Dag drew breath and went on swiftly, “I’m shifting your usual partnerships around. Neeta and Remo both will partner with Rase, flanking him like linkers, because they have the best ground veiling to be that close to the malice, and Neeta has some experience.”
Neeta flashed a nervous but pleased smile, and ducked her chin.
“That leaves Barr with Tavia, and Whit with me.”
That pleased Barr, certainly. Whit blinked in shy pride.
Without Whit along, Dag would have partnered Rase, guiding him in to his first kill. Whit had slain bandits; mud-men wouldn’t shake him unduly. But if the ground shield failed, the boy risked ground-ripping or—almost worse—mind slaving. If the latter happened, Dag hoped he wouldn’t have to do more than clout his tent-brother on the head to put him out of the way till the malice went
down, but that wasn’t a task he dared leave to anyone else. He did not voice the risk, not wanting to put Whit off his stride.
“We don’t have to worry about surrounding the malice once it’s close to our position. It’s moving so slow that when the mud-men are out of the way we’ll almost be able to overtake it walking. But—listen close, Whit, because this is where it gets different than a pig hunt—taking on the malice is more like attacking a big bear, and not one of the cute black bears you find around here, but a big northern grizzly. It’s strong, it swings around fast, and it can knock a man thirty feet if it connects with you. Only the sharing knife will kill it. So you concentrate on the mud-men, and leave the malice to Rase and his partners. Got it?”
“Yessir,” said Whit, eyes wide.
“All right. Get a drink or a piss now if you need to, keep your grounds shut tight, no talking from here on. Tavia and Barr, find your best shooting positions. Whit, stay by me.”
Dag went to Copperhead and collected his adapted bow and arrows. He hitched his quiver over his shoulder, unbolted his hook from its wooden wrist cuff and dropped it in the leather pouch at his waist, seated the bow in its place, and locked it down. He tested the draw: strings dry and sound. Whit came bounding up swinging his crossbow, and Dag thought to whisper, “Don’t cock that thing till I fire my first shot. Noisy ratchet.”
Whit nodded understanding. Except for an occasional faint clink of gear or snort from a horse, Dag’s makeshift patrol was moving in proper uncanny silence. Now he had nothing to do but find a good line of sight from the cover of the rocky rise, hunker down, and wait for things to go wrong.
18
The malice stopped barely two hundred paces off, a little to their right where the road started to bend around the outcrop. It seemed to sniff the air, swinging its great hairless head back and forth. Seven feet tall at least, and Dag guessed from its livid, mottled skin that its initial lair must have lain among gray rocks, which didn’t narrow it much; thousands of dells, cracks, caves, and overhangs lined this valley. The malice looked quite odd, standing out naked in the sunlit green space. It belonged hidden in cold shadow, where spring didn’t reach and ice lingered and its monstrousness might be concealed.
Dag didn’t know how much those glittering too-human eyes, lurking under brows like their own little limestone overhangs, could see in this light. He prayed the other patrollers had their grounds furled as tightly as his own. Shielded Whit would be an ambiguous glow in its groundsense, a smudgy something, alive yet elusive. It could likely sense the horses by now, growing uneasy behind the rocks.
It certainly sensed something, because it snorted, and a dozen of its mud-men left the road and began to wade through the waist-high scrub toward the outcrop. Even the mud-men flinched from last year’s thorns on the dry blackberry canes, which crackled as they fought through them. The angle between Dag’s position and Barr and Tavia’s was not as wide for crossfire as he would have liked, but their elevation was excellent. Yes, that’s perfect. Come closer, you suffering brutes, yes.
Dag held his steel-headed arrow loosely nocked and waited some more. Whit was watching him, crossbow clenched and bolt at the ready, with his eyes going wider and wider, as if to cry, Now, now…now?
Dag knelt up leisurely, taking his first and last chance for a perfect shot. He would try for an eye on that approaching…possum-man? Or it might once have been a rabbit. The peculiar relaxation overcame him that occurred when all decision making was over, as when an arrow had been released but not yet found its target. Speaking of which…
He drew. Settled. Released. “Yes,” he hissed. Brain-shot; the possum-man squalled once, fell, thrashed, and went still. Dag nocked and drew again while the wild cranking of Whit’s crossbow mechanism stuttered beside him. His second arrow flew just before Whit’s first.
Dag’s brows twitched up at the thwack-crack of Whit’s heavy bolt striking a mud-man’s arm. A belly or brain shot would have been better, but he could swear that bone just broke. Within its short range, the weapon’s projectiles packed an impressive punch. From the corner of his eye he saw more arrows dart out. Two hits, followed by roaring and howling. The mud-men boiled forward, crunching madly up the slope, which was just fine as long as the arrows lasted.
Whit’s next ratchet-and-thrum resulted in a clear miss, but after that was a hard hit that knocked a looming tuft-eared fox-man backward down the slope. Dag was not yet out of arrows when the few mud-men remaining on their feet began to turn tail, or at least withdraw toward their master. Dag didn’t bother counting the ones down, just the ones still up. Some had arrows sticking out of them at odd angles, and shrieked in pain, but they weren’t stumbling nearly enough to suit Dag.
The malice had actually knelt down, its vast gut resting on the road between its spread knees, but it wallowed upright again as its dozen remaining guards drew back around it. Dag let his bow arm swing down out of the way and drew his war knife. “All right. It won’t get any better.”
Out of bolts, Whit started to let his crossbow fall, but Dag said, “Hang it on your back. You might get the chance to collect a few of your misses. Or hits.” Whit shrugged the carrying strap across his chest and took up the ash spear he had borrowed from Sage. The boy yelled once in excitement as they began to run, noticed that everyone else was advancing in dead silence, and clamped his mouth shut. Dag let him plunge ahead and spend his eagerness threshing a path through the thorny scrub, for which the waving spear proved unexpectedly useful. Barr and Tavia wove down the slope to his right, with the sharing-knife threesome close behind them.
They spread out around the malice; its mud-men responded by throwing rocks, with which this country was only too well supplied. Their whistling power was nasty, but fortunately the aim was mostly bad, though Remo yelped as one bounced off his shoulder. The malice turned around and around, roaring horribly, but did not retreat. Closing and careful, Dag expended two of his last four steel-tipped arrows putting mud-men down to stay. Another pair lurched toward them; one ran up on Whit’s spear, ripping it from his hands but then falling over its impalement in a tangle. Dag’s war knife opened his mud-man from groin to breastbone. Whit paused to yank back one of his bolts from the fallen creature’s leg, shaking it free of gore.
A cudgel-waving mud-man charged toward Rase, bowling Barr over; swiftly, Dag sent an arrow after it as his threesome kept trying to circle behind the malice, who kept rotating to face them. Inspired, Whit raised his bow and shot his retrieved bolt at the malice. It thwacked hard into the creature’s left shoulder. And vanished.
The malice screamed and heaved its awkward body around. On its left breast, its gray skin parted; from that mouth, the bolt spat into the malice’s up-reaching hand. The skin rippled closed again while the malice was winding its arm back to throw the bolt like a dart. It would not miss; Dag stepped in front of Whit, who was gibbering, “Did you see that? Come flyin’ out just like a watermelon seed! Should’ve gone through its heart…!”
Even through his tight veiling Dag could feel the malice reaching out to ground-rip his tent-brother. The power of it would pry open Whit’s shield like a mussel shell, given enough time. Which of course was also true of ground veiling. The huge arm bunched…
Whit’s shot had been futile as a blow but perfect as a distraction. In the malice’s momentary and terrible shift of focus, Rase, face gone white, darted up behind it, shut his eyes, and thrust out the pale blade of his sharing knife.
The faint crack as the bone split and released its hoarded death into the malice was the sweetest sound Dag could imagine.
The malice’s scream shot upward in pitch till it felt like hot needles thrust into Dag’s eardrums. Whit clamped his hands over his own ears and bent, mouth opening and closing on words Dag could not make out. Rase, Neeta, and Remo all stumbled backward; Rase, grazed by the malice’s deathly aura, was curling in on himself and starting to vomit already. Slowly, starting at the top of its ridged skull, the malice began to fall apart,
pieces flaking off and spinning away in a stinking cloud. Destruction spiraled downward, faster and faster, yet slowed when it reached the out-thrust torso. The remains of the creature—god, man, monster, or some clot of all three—slumped in a pile in the middle of the road, several hundred pounds of slimy rubble. The sudden silence was a blessing beyond imagining.
Dag eyed the great formless lump, drew Crane’s primed knife from the leather sheath hung at his throat, and advanced cautiously. He was going to have to open his ground just a hair to check this, and then he was going to regret it. The smell was bad enough. The lingering wrongness blasted through Dag with the force of a bitter wind in a Luthlian winter; his belly knotted and his mouth watered uncontrollably. But the new malice body forming inside the old one was dead, too, or never alive. Dag clamped his ground and his jaw shut again, put the knife away, and swallowed hard against his late lunch demanding instant escape.
Whit was shaken but standing. Barr was sitting on the ground holding his bleeding head; Tavia, with a bright red mark on her face that was going to be a dark blue bruise soon, knelt beside him trying to pull his hands away to check the damage. Rase was now on all fours, emptying his guts, with Remo bent beside him in concern and Neeta watching warily.
“Whit, Neeta,” Dag called. “We’re not done yet. Got to clean up all the mud-men within reach.”
Easy reach, at least. Only a couple of the creatures had escaped across the road, trying to find concealment in the riverbanks or in the scrub up toward the far ridge. They were mindless now—or rather, and more dreadfully, returned to their animal minds trapped in their humanlike bodies. They would die on their own, but only after lingering agonies. The ones still alive in the broken brambles were making the most vile noises, animal screams mixed with almost human-sounding weeping. Dag paused to swap out his bow for his hook again, and drew his knife once more. The downed mud-men were still dangerous in their thrashings, so the three of them worked together, two to hold them down and one to slice through those pitiable throats, ending what should never have begun. It was rightful mercy and Dag hated every wretched minute of it. But the youngsters didn’t need to see that, so he set a methodical and thorough example, for the thousandth time. They collected as many of everyone’s spent arrows as they could find.