Every few feet along he found a shallow pit in the wet soil, looking like a mud pot dug by playing children. At the center of each, a snout broke the surface, usually flexing frantically to draw air. He identified muskrat, raccoon, possum, beaver, even squirrel and slow, cold turtle. All were starting to lose their former shapes, like caterpillars in a chrysalis, but none had yet grown to human size. He counted perhaps fifty.
“Well, that’s handy,” said Codo, looking over his shoulder with fascinated revulsion. “We can kill them in their holes. Save a lot of grief.”
“These aren’t going to be ready to come out for days, yet,” said Dag. “Maybe weeks. We take the malice down first, they’ll die in place.”
“What are you thinking, Dag?” said Mari.
I’m thinking of how much I didn’t want to be in command of this jaunt. Because of decisions like this. He sighed. “I’m thinking that the rest of the company is half a day behind us. I’m thinking that if we can get some drinking water down those poor folks, they’ll last till nightfall, and Obio can cut them loose, instead. And we won’t have given away our position to the malice. In fact, the reverse—it’ll think any pursuit is still back here.”
“How far ahead of us do you think this malice is by now?” said Codo.
Dag shook his head. “We’ll scout around for clues, but not more than a day, wouldn’t you guess? It’s plain the malice has gathered up everything it’s got and pressed south. Which says to me it’s on the attack. Which also says to me it won’t be looking behind it much.”
“You mean to follow. Fast as we can,” said Mari.
“Anyone here got a better idea?”
They both shook their heads, if not happily.
They returned to the patrol, now gathered warily in the village. Dag dispatched a pair to go get Saun and bring up the horses, sending the rest to scout around the desolation the malice had left. About the time Saun arrived with their mounts, Varleen found the butchering place back in the scrub where the malice’s forces had eaten their last meal, bones animal and human mixed, some burned, some gnawed raw. Dag counted perhaps a dozen human individuals in the remains for sure, but not more. He tried hard to hang on to that not more as a heartening thought, but failed. Fortunately, there was no way for the three patrollers most recently familiar with Bonemarsh Camp to recognize anyone among the disjointed carcasses. The burying, too, Dag left for Obio and the company following.
His veiled patrol had been keyed up for a desperate attack. Gearing back down for a quiet, hasty lunch instead, especially for the ones who’d seen the butchery, went ill, and Dag had no desire to linger, if only for the certainty that the fierce argument over whether to attempt to release the groundlocked makers would start up again. Saun was particularly unhappy about that one, as he recognized some of them from the two years he’d patrolled out of Bonemarsh before he’d exchanged to Hickory Lake.
“What if Obio chooses another route?” Saun protested. “You left him free to.”
“Soon as we take the malice down, tonight or tomorrow, we’ll send someone back,” said Dag wearily. “Soon as we take the malice down, they may well be able to free themselves.”
This argument was, in Dag’s view, even more dodgy, but Saun accepted it, or at least shut up, which was all Dag wanted at this point. His own greatest regret was for the time they’d lost in their stealthy on-foot approach; they might have ridden into the village at a canter for all the difference it would have made. Dag suspected they were now going to come up on the malice well after dark, exhausted, at the end of a much too long and disturbing day. Part of a commander’s task was to bring his people to the test at the peak of their condition and will. He’d fumbled both time and timing, here.
Tracking the malice south presented no difficulty, at least. Starting just beyond the marsh, it had left a trail of blight a hundred paces wide that a farmer could not have missed, let alone anyone with the least tinge of groundsense. At the end of this, one malice, guaranteed. Finding it would be dead easy now.
The malice not finding us first will be the hard part. Dag grimaced and kicked Copperhead forward at a trot, his troubled patrol strung out in his wake.
11
A nother night attack—without the aid of groundsense this time. Gods, I’m as blind in the dark as any farmer. Dag had feared the flare of their grounds would alert the malice’s outlying pickets to his patrol, but blundering bodily into sentries in the murk now seemed as likely a risk. A misshapen moon was well up. When they cleared these trees, he might get a better look at what lay ahead. He glanced right and left at the shadows that were his flankers, Mari and Dirla, and Codo and Hann, and was reassured; if his dark-adapted eyes could scarcely make them out, neither could an enemy’s.
He dared another deerlike step forward, and another, trying not to think, Blight it, we’ve done this once today already. His patrol had come up on signs of the malice’s massed forces soon after midnight, and again left their horses in favor of this stealthy approach. Through terrain for which, unlike Bonemarsh, they had no maps or plan or prior knowledge. If his own exhaustion was a measure of everyone else’s, Dag distrusted his decision to strike at once, without allowing a breather; but it was impossible to rest here, and every delay risked discovery. They had come into a level country, with little farms carved out of the woods becoming more and more common, not unlike the region above West Blue. Little abandoned farms. Dag hoped all the people hereabouts had been warned by the refugees from Bonemarsh and fled to Farmer’s Flats.
The open fields allowed a glimpse ahead but equally denied cover. As they reached the scrubby edge of what had been a broad stand of wheat, now flattened and dying, Dirla stole over to him. “See that?” she breathed, pointing.
“Aye.”
On the field’s other side, wooded land rose—as much as any land rose in these parts—angling up to a low ridge. The red glimmer of a few bobbing torches shone through the trees, then vanished again. Silvered by the sickly moon, a narrow triangular structure crowned the crest. A crude timber tower perhaps twenty feet high, built of logs hastily felled and notched to lock across one another, was briefly silhouetted against a distant milky cloud. Whatever shapes crouched on the plank platform at its top were too far away for Dag to make out with his eyes; but despite his tight closure, the threat of the malice beat in his belly with his every pulse.
“Lookout post?” Dirla whispered.
Dag shook his head. “Worse.” Absent gods help us. This malice was advanced enough to start building towers. Even the Wolf Ridge malice had not developed enough for that compulsion. “Can you see how many on the platform…?” Dirla’s younger eyes might be sharper than his own.
“Just one, I think.”
“It’s up there, then. That’s where we’re headed. Pass the word.”
She nodded and silently withdrew.
Now they had to get next to that tower without being spotted. So near—across a trampled field and up a wooded hillside—so far. Dag guessed that the bulk of the malice’s mud-men and mind-slaves were camped on the ridge’s far side, probably along a stream. Smoke from hidden campfires rose in thin gray wisps into a high haze, confirming his speculation. There was almost no wind, and he regretted the absence of covering rustles from the branches overhead, but what faint breeze there was moved the haze toward him. He hardly needed his eyes now; he could smell the enemy: smoke, manure, piss, the cooking of he-dared-not-guess-what meats.
Dag pushed through clutching blackberry brambles, setting his teeth against the gouge and scrape of sturdy thorns, and crouched by a fieldstone wall lining the high side of the wheatfield. He half crawled forward along its shadowed western side until he reached brambles again, then risked a look back. The moon emerged from a cloud, but the tight shapes of the patrollers following him did not once edge into the thin light. Good, you folks are so good. Half the distance down. He slid through more dying brambles into the black shade of the woods at the base of the ridge, the patrol too
spreading out to ease from shadow to shadow.
To his horror, a muffled grunt and some thumps sounded from his left. He made his way hastily toward the sound. Codo and Hann were crouching over something half-concealed in a crackling deadfall. Hann had drawn his war knife, but glanced up and froze when Dag’s hand fell on his arm.
Codo squatted across the chest of a grizzled man—farmer-slave, guard?—both his hands tight around the struggling fellow’s throat. “Hann, hurry!” Codo hissed.
Dag touched Codo’s shoulder, eased in, and studied their threat-and-victim. Farmer-slave, yes, clothes ragged, eyes wild and mad. Maybe from this farm, or else picked up along the way to add to the malice’s straggling, growing army. He wasn’t a big man, or young; he reminded Dag uncomfortably of Sorrel Bluefield. Dag took aim and landed several hard blows to the man’s head, until his eyes rolled back and he stopped bucking. The meaty thumps sounded as loud as drumbeats in Dag’s ears.
“Blight it, throat slitting’s quieter,” muttered Codo, cautiously rising. “Surer.”
Dag shook his head and pointed uphill. This was no place for an argument, and the pair did not give him one, but turned to continue the silent climb. Dag could roll the issues over in his head without need of words—Hann’s glare, burning through the dark, was enough to make the point. A throat-slit guard couldn’t claw his way back to consciousness in a few minutes and raise the alarm.
I hate fighting humans. Of all the vileness in this long struggle, the malices’ mind-theft of people who should be the Lakewalkers’ friends and allies was the worst. Even when the patrollers won, they lost, in clashes that left farmer corpses in their wake. We all lose. Dag shook out his throbbing hand. That might have been Sorrel. Somebody’s husband, father, father-in-law, friend.
I hate fighting. Oh, Fawn, I’m so tired of this.
The farmer’s mad eyes were sign enough of his enslaved state, with no need for Dag’s groundsense to trace the malice’s grip in his mind. Even though they hadn’t slit his throat, his brief alarm could have given little warning, surely? Indeed, Dag decided, the malice would be more likely to notice the shock of a death in its growing web of slaves than what might be mistaken for a sort of sleep. Much depended on how many individuals this malice controlled, at what distance, attempting what tasks. Please, let it be stretched to its limits. Whatever it was now doing at the top of that tower, ground was flowing toward it in a great sucking drain; Dag could feel the mortal throb of it passing under his boot soles. He had a wild vision of gripping the streaming power with his ghost hand and just letting it tow him right up the slope.
The patrol reached the edge of the clearing, bristling with stumps from the trees felled to build the tower—within the last day, Dag guessed from the still-pungent smell of the sap. In the faint moonlight he could make out the hulking shapes of at least four mud-man guards at the tower’s base. Maybe bear-men or even bull-men; big, lithe, stinking. Without need for orders, he could sense his pairs moving to the front. His stomach clenched, and he fought down a wave of nausea. Time to clear the path.
At some faint clink or whisper of a weapon drawn from a sheath, a guardian’s head turned toward them; it lifted its snout, sniffing suspiciously.
Now.
Dag did not cry his command, just yanked out his war knife and plunged forward, weaving around stumps. His thoughts narrowed to his task: slay the mud-men, get his knife-wielders past them and up the tower as fast as death. Faster. Dag took on the nearest mud-man to hand, ducking as it brought up a rusted sword stolen from who-knew-where and swung violently at his head. Dag’s return stroke tore out the creature’s throat, and he didn’t even bother dodging the spray of blood. Arrows from patrol’s archers whispered fiercely past his head to sink into the chest of a mud-man beyond, although the shafts didn’t drop it; the mud-man staggered forward, roaring. Mari, her sharing knife clenched between her teeth, reached the tower and began to climb. Codo darted past her around the tower’s corner and swung himself upward too. Another patroller reached the tower, and another, all in that same intent silence. The rest turned to protect their climbing comrades. Dag could hear them engaging new mud-men reaching the clearing, as yet more came crashing up the hill yowling in alarm.
The dark shape at the top of the tower moved, standing up against a cobalt sky scattered with stars and luminous with moon-washed cloud. The four climbers had almost reached the top. Suddenly the figure crouched, leaped—descended as if floating the full twenty feet to land upon its folding legs and spring again upright. As if it were light as a dancer, and not seven solid feet of corded muscle, sinew, and bone. It wheeled, coming face-to-face with Dag.
This malice was lean, almost graceful, and Dag was shocked by its beauty in the moonlight. Fair skin moved naturally over a face of sculpted bone; hair swept back from its high brow to flow like a river of night down its back. Its androgynous body was clothed in stolen oddments—trousers, a shirt, boots, a Lakewalker leather vest—which it somehow endowed with the air of some ancient high lord’s attire. How many molts must it have gone through, how quickly, to have achieved such a human—no, superhuman—form? Its glamour wrenched Dag’s gaze, and he could feel his ground ripple—he snapped himself closed, tight and hard.
And open again as Utau, sharing knife out, staggered with a sudden cry. Dag could sense the strain in Utau’s ground as the malice turned and gripped it, starting to rip it away. Frantic, Dag extended his left arm and stretched out his ghost hand to snatch at the malice’s ground in turn. Out of the corner of his eye, Dag saw Mari, clinging to the tower side, drop her sharing knife down in a pale spinning arc to Dirla, who had temporarily broken free of mud-men.
As a fragment of its ground came away in Dag’s ghost hand, the malice turned back to him with an astonished scream. Dag recalled that moment in the medicine tent when he’d snatched ground from Hoharie’s apprentice, but this time it felt like clutching a live coal. Pain and terror reverberated up his left arm. He tried to cast the fragment into the earth, but it clung to his ground like burning honey. The malice reached two-handed toward Dag, its dark eyes wide and furious. Dag tried again to close himself against it, and failed. He could feel the malice’s grip upon his ground tighten, and his breath locked at the surge of astounding pain that seemed to start from his marrow and strike outward to his skin, as if all his bones were being shattered in place simultaneously.
And Dirla lunged forward onto a stump and plunged Mari’s sharing knife into the malice’s back.
Dag felt the dying enter his own shredding ground, cloudy and turbulent as blood poured into roiling water. For a moment, he shared the malice’s full awareness. The world’s ground stretched away from their center for miles, glowing like fire, with slaves and mud-men moving across it in scattered, blazing ranks. The confusing din of their several hundred, no, thousand anguished minds battered his failing consciousness. The malice’s vast will seemed to drain from them as Dag watched, leaving blackness and dismay. The irrational intelligence of the great being snatched at his own mind, hungry above all for understanding of its plight, and Dag knew that if this malice took him in, it would have nearly all it needed, and yet still not be saved from its own cravings and desires. It is quite mad. And the more intelligent it grows, the more agonizing its own madness becomes to it. It seemed a curious but useless insight to gain, here at the end of breath and light.
The malice screamed again, its voice rising strangely like a song, wavering upward into unexpected purity. Its beautiful body ruptured, caught by its clothing, and it fell in a welter of blood and fluid.
The earth rose up and struck Dag cruelly in the back. Stars spun overhead, and went out.
Fawn shot awake in the dark and sat up in her lonely bedroll with a gasp. Shock shuddered through her body, then a wash of fear. A noise, a nightmare? No echoes pulsed in her ears, no visions faded in her mind. Her heart pounding unaccountably, she slapped her right hand over her left wrist. This panic was surely the opposite of relaxed persuasi
on and openness, but beneath her marriage cord her whole arm was throbbing.
Something’s happened to Dag. Hurt? Hurt bad…?
She scrambled up and pushed through her tent flap into the milky light of a partial moon, seeming bright compared to the inky shadows inside. Not stopping to throw anything over her sleeping shift, she picked her way across the clearing, wincing at the twigs and stones that bit her bare feet. It was all that kept her from breaking into a run.
She hesitated outside Cattagus and Mari’s tent. The night was cool after the recent rains, and Cattagus had dropped the porch flap down. She slapped it as Utau had theirs on the dark morning he’d come to wake Dag. She tried to guess the time from the moon passing over the lake—two hours after midnight, maybe? There was no sound from within, and she pounded the leather again, then shifted from foot to foot, trying to gather the nerve to go inside and shake the old man by the shoulder.
Before she did, the flap moved on Sarri’s tent, and the dark-haired woman emerged. She had paused for sandals, but no robe either, and her feet slapped quickly across the stretch between the two tent-cabins.
“Did you feel that?” Fawn asked her anxiously, keeping her voice low for fear of waking the children. And then felt utterly stupid, for of course Sarri would not feel anything from a marriage cord wrapped around someone else’s wrist. “Did you feel anything just now?”
Sarri shook her head. “Something woke me. Whatever it was, was gone by the time I’d gathered my wits.” Her right hand too gripped her left wrist, kneading.
“Razi and Utau…?”
“Alive. Alive. At least that.” She shot Fawn a curious look. “Did you feel something? Surely you couldn’t have…”
She was interrupted by a grunt from the tent. Cattagus shouldered through the flap, tying up his shorts around his stout middle and scowling. “What’s all this too-roo in the moonlight, girlies?”