Текст книги "Cloud's Rider "

Автор книги: C. J. Cherryh

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Текущая страница: 25 (всего у книги 26 страниц)

“Didn’t work.” Peterson said the obvious.

“It’s tricking us,” Ridley said. “It’s diverting us in what it sends.”

“Then move the horses back from us!” Peterson’s wife said.

“That won’t work,” Callie said. “This thing sends. Thisthing sends. You don’t need a horse near you to hear it—but it’s going to lie to you most when it isn’t sending at all. Hope it sends and we pass it to you, or you won’t know where it is.”

“That girltalks to it,” Jennie said, completely out of turn, but Jennie was as hell. So was the horse. “She wantsit. I hear her.”

“It’s the truth,” Ridley said, and an uncomfortable silence followed—broken by another young voice.

“She rode the rogue, down in Tarmin.”

“No,” someone began to say, but Randy’s voice overrode it.

“She’s my sister! She killed the whole village—but she couldn’t get the door open to get us!”

Shock followed. Deep, unsettling shock. And the thingseemed to ricochet around the street, here, here, here, with no settling point.

“Lord save us.” That from the preacher. “The child’s only thirteen.”

“So I’m fourteen!” Randy cried indignantly. “She blames us! She wants Carlo dead!”

“It is the truth,” Ridley said. “I think it isthe truth, preacher, as true as I can tell.”

There was, surprisingly, no panic about the matter, just a settling of a very uneasy regard toward that house with the large wraparound porch, with its shutters thrown, with, in the ambient– which he wasn’t sure anyone but Callie understood—a ravening hunger for presence, a hunger for the ambient it– she—couldn’t ever satisfy, because no sane horse would have her.

Dammit, he thought—it took a fourteen-year-old and an eight-year-old to understand the reasons behind what it did: it wasn’t adult desires they were fighting. It wasn’t a hunter after food or a beast after a lair. It was a thirteen-year-old kid supplying its ideas and playing damnable, bloody pranks down at the tavern and through the passages while it mapped the place, damned well mappedthe village the girl had never seen with her own eyes.

Thataccounted for the occasionally true and occasionally skewed direction-sense: it was frolicking around, exploring the village and getting the upper hand over everyone trying to stop it.

Never ask how Earnest Riggs had crossed the girl’s notice.

“Wait for daylight,” the marshal said into the silence. “Just let it settle down. We’ve got about—what time is it?—it’s got to be toward dawn.”

“I can go look,” his daughter offered.

“No!” Peterson said sharply. And more quietly, “No. Not a good idea.” Peterson didn’t want his family scattering out, and neither did Ridley.

“That thing is running us wherever it likes,” Jeff Burani said. “We’ve got people down there at the bottom end of the street. Miners in barracks. Loggers in the hostel. The riders don’t want to split up, but we can’t be everywhere and we can’t move fast enough. We can’t protect just our houses and our families, the miners’ll lynch us!”

All those things were true. But those things were only half their danger. The marshal was advising they wait for daylight—but Ridley didn’t think it was going to hole up, if he had his guess. It might go right over the wall again and come back for more mischief tomorrow night.

Which might give them time to do something about Brionne Goss—but they hadas close to agreement in present company as they were going to get on that issue, tonight: the key people knewnow—and the panic he had feared if they knew the danger in Brionne Goss wasn’t, thank God, happening. The event was with them, and this one select group of villagers were at least willing to use their heads and try to out-think the beast that had come in on them—

Which wasn’t a horse, wasn’t Carlo Goss, and wasn’t a rogue cat. This thingwas a better climber. It was smarter around structures, very fast—which might be human intelligence feeding images into it—but it also figured out the tunnels as a means to play a hideous game of hide-and-seek so that they hadn’t gotten a clear shot at it. That was smart. And a rogue of whatever species didn’t by all he knew acquireabilities, it just lost all sane braking on the abilities it had until it killed itself. So this thing wasn’t a rogue. It wasn’t any threat Rogers Peak had ever seen, and the only reasonable conclusion was that a stray from the outback, maybe attracted by the crisis in the ambient, had come into the area like a willy-wisp to the smell of blood.

“It’s attracted to the girl in Darcy’s house,” he said. “It’s concentrating its mischief up at this end. But never there—because it’s being elusive and that would give it away. That’s what I’m thinking. The girl’s attracted it and the girl’s guiding it, consciously or unconsciously. She’s got to be silenced. Stopped. Put out cold.”

“That’s pretty hard-minded,” John Quarles said. “That poor child, rider-boss, —”

“I don’t say do her any lasting harm, but if we quiet Brionne Goss it mightforget why it was here. At least it won’t have a human mind steering it. Slip her something. Darcy’s a doctor, for God’s sake. She’s got to have somethingin the office that won’t hurt her. This thing’s mapping the village for that girl. It’s going all around the village, but not there. It will. And thenwhat happens?”

“You can’t even tell us what it is,” the marshal’s wife said.

“I can tell you it’s not from this side of the mountains. I can tell you it’s damn smart. I can tell you while we’re arguing, it’s picking up our intentions in the ambient and telling a thirteen-year-old girl what we’re apt to do, and it’s only begun to do its work on this mountain if we don’t stop it here, Lucy. I’ll swearthat to you.”

“I’ll go put it to Darcy,” John Quarles said. “She’ll listen to me.”

“Not alone,” Ridley said. “Line of sight. Rifles lined up and us watching.”

“I’m aware the beast is dangerous,” the preacher said. “But if your theory is right, diminishing the threat to the girl andthe beast might actually lessen the danger.”

“I’ll have that porch in my rifle sights. —Listen to me, preacher. I’m asking you, don’t endanger anybody including that girl. Trust mygood wishes and if you hear anything untoward on that porch, drop flat instantly and I’ll shoot right over you. Don’t confuse our aim. Trustus. All right?“

“I’ve every confidence,” Quarles said, and handed his shotgun to the marshal. “But most of all, I’ll trust in the Lord.”

Quarles walked out through the falling snow, then.

Brave, Ridley gave him that, as he slid down from Slip’s back and lifted his rifle—not the only one drawing a bead on that area.

“Stay still,” Callie was saying to Jennie, and to all the people around them.

“She’s just real mad,” Jennie said quietly, her thoughts rising very softly to the top of the ambient. “She knows we’re here. She knows Randy’s here. She knows about the preacher coming to the door. She’s not happy at all. She wants it to come and drive us away.”

Jennie was sending too much, Ridley realized that too late. Jennie and Brionne were trading fartoo much, and what had been a quiet struggle between two kids was suddenly reaching after all of them. The rifle wanted to shake in his hands as he stared down the sight and widened his focus to the whole porch, any movement in the snow-obscured night.

Then he knew something else—a wider ambient than had existed. It had direction. Distance. Outside the wall.

Horses. On the road.

it was. More than one rider. But that was definitely And Jennie and Callie knew it from him.

hit the ambient and shivered in the air, force added to their force.

He thought then of calling out to the preacher to come back. But he thought if a preacher could ever bein the ambient, John Quarles was there right now, and if ever they had the chance to reach Darcy, they had it now. Quarles knew something had changed just now, surely. He hadto be aware of the arrival.

and had run riot and crazed the ambient.

They wanted, too. They wanted to be there, and around the next turning of the road, obscured in a thin veil of snow, Danny saw the village wall. He knew then they’d arrived and he pushed himself despite the ache in his side to keep running and not even to waste time getting up on Cloud. A jarred and frantic portion of the working brain said that in a crisis no one might be able to reach the gate to open it for them, and he might need to be on the ground to try to open it from outside. If the village had left the rope outside that made that possible.

He ran, he told the ambient as he stumbled down the last of the road. Cloud wanted Cloud wanted

They reached the lesser gate through a trampled space that said that this gate at least had opened—but not in hours, Danny judged by the rounded edges of the prints. Horses were at the other end of the street, no one was near the wall, and neither village gate had budged since yesterday.

Bad business. And the pull-cord wasn’tout.

“Damn it!” Tara said, and with her knife through a gap in the timbers tried to raise the heavy bar inside. Danny lent his hands to the effort, both of them pushing and struggling until finally it waslifted as high as they could hold it, and it wouldn’t clear the trip-latch.

They were atEvergreen, there was all hell broken loose inside as they listened to it, and nobody could let them in the gate.

He let off a rifle shot. It echoed off the mountain and into the ambient in a massive wash of and as everyone in Evergreen, deaf to the ambient or not, realized there was someone outside.

came, too. Someone else—was fiercely

They were shooting again, and Darcy flinched, though this shot was far away. “Listen to me,” John Quarles was saying through the closed front door. “Darcy? Darcy, —just for safety, I want you to find a sedative. I want you to find a strong sedative and get the girl calm. I know you want to protect her. You have a sedative, don’t you, Darcy?”

“Yes,” she admitted. But she didn’t want to do that. She didn’t want to lose the girl’s trust. Brionne was suspicious and afraid. Brionne suspected everyone out on the street, and John said terrible, incredible things, how something was prowling the village passages and it had killed people down at The Evergreen and it had killed Earnest Riggs.

She knew it was true, though. She knew the way she knew that people were outside and that they had designs on Brionne. It was as if pictures of everything were pouring in on her, John coming with the marshal, bringing her Faye’s body. She’d heard gunshots going off and it conjured that single shot that had echoed through the house, that moment she had known it came from downstairs, from Mark’s office. There were memories of blood, so much blood. Mark was a doctor. And he’d chosen that way, when there were easier ways in the locked cabinet. Mark had wantedviolence in the leaving of his life. He’d been so quiet. And he’d chosen violence for herto deal with.

He– dared—leave her—that unspeakable sight to remember. It was his anger. It was his spite. It was his blame. It was Mark saying again as he’d shouted at her the day before he died, Damn you, Darcy, shed a tear! Yell! Blame me out loud, don’t just look at me like that!

She wasn’t sitting on the couch, with John talking about God’s mercy, she wasn’t rocking back and forth like a fool, and still not able to cry, and John talking inanely about what colors to use at Mark’s funeral, as if anyone gave a damn. She was standing at the front door, and John was on the other side, begging her to drug the child senseless, when Brionne knew, she was sure Brionne knew people were betraying her. Pans were flying about the kitchen, crockery was breaking.

“I’ve got to go,” Darcy said.

“ Will you do it?” John shouted through the door.

“I don’t know,” she said. And then thought—if she did that—if she did that, John would be on her side. John was her arbiter of what the village thought. What John said was what they thought was good.

And if she quieted Brionne down, then everything would be quiet and John would help her.

So she went to the cabinet, and turned the key and shook powder into a prescription vial. Her hands were shaking, but she got it in, knowing fairly accurately the girl’s weight. She thought she’d make another pot of tea and put it in that. She stopped the vial and tucked it in her waistband, under her sweater.

Then she went to the kitchen, where Brionne was having a tantrum.

The crockery was all broken in pieces all over the floor. The teakettle was lying against the wall. Brionne was crying and had a metal plate in her hands.

“Honey. Put it down. It’s all right. I told him go away.”

“You’re lying!” Brionne clanged the plate down against a chair, and bent it, and flung it away against the wall. “I hate you! I hate allof you! They’re all talking about me! My brother’sout there, and he’s telling lies about me and everyone believes them!”

“I’m sure I don’t believe them. I think it’s all rather silly.” The playing cards were all over the floor. She crossed the kitchen and picked up the teakettle. She wasn’t sure there was a whole cup in the kitchen.

“My friend will come for me,” Brionne said. “You just watch! He’ll come.”

“Not a horse?”

“I’ll have a horse. I’ll have a horse when I want one! And everybodywill be sorry.”

Darcy felt such an angerfrom the girl, from somewhere, so much angerand confusion…

Brionne headed down the three steps to the passageway door.

“No!” Darcy said sharply, expecting obedience, but Brionne didn’t stop. Brionne flung up the bar, and Darcy crossed the kitchen in four fast strides, reached to stop Brionne and slam the door shut.

The door banged wide. A black shape was there, yellow-eyed, yellow-fanged. It reached a shaggy arm—an arm!—around Brionne, snatching her away, and the other arm swept with a force that flung Darcy back against the wall. It hit her again, and again. She was numb, and astonished—totally astonished—to see the blood spatter wide across the wall. Like Mark’s, that day…

Very much like that day.

Danny was trying to move Cloud into line with the gate to use Cloud for a ladder—but he people coming then, a that very soon he and Tara could hear aloud, swearing and encouraging each other.

“Open the gate!” Danny and Tara yelled, almost with one voice, and that reassured the people on the other side. Someone opened the gate, and Danny got through first, rifle in hand, the pain in his side grown acute, and his throat so raw he immediately went into a coughing fit. Cloud was behind him, and then Tara and Flicker, but the people in front of him, shadowed by the wall, were faceless to him, a mob, a mass—men from the barracks, villagers, he didn’t know.

He did know and he didn’t waste time trying to understand the shouts about and and he just got control of his coughing enough to swing up to Cloud’s back, feeling the wobble in himself and the wobble in Cloud’s legs as he landed. He started moving through the crowd, aware of and it was a measure how frightened the crowd was that people bunched around two riders on horseback and pressed up close to the horses as a point of safety.

Cloud wasn’t used to that kind of treatment. It was a question whether they were going to get through before or after Cloud bit somebody, but the instant there was an opening Cloud jumped forward, instinct-driven toward the of him, and Cloud’s rider was along for the ride for an instant, Cloud knowing beyond any doubt there was

Flicker was close behind them as Cloud ran, and Flicker might not know the horses ahead, but they were a band Cloud knew: was the presence at the mountain-end of the street. flung the ambient wider and louder than Danny intended, but it was five horses now, with one mare in foal and a boss horse aggressive as hell toward whatever threatened their vicinity.

They came in where Ridley, Callie and Jennie were holding the area across from the doctor’s house. Randy was there, with a couple of armed women Danny didn’t know, with the marshal’s deputy, some of the hunters, and a very shaken-looking preacher, whose total contribution to the ambient was a roiling chaos of and at them being there.

“Tara Chang,” Danny said to Ridley and the rest, by way of introduction. “Guil Stuart and Carlo are coming, but they’ll be longer. What’s happened?”

He got more than he wanted. Cloud shied back from a rush of and and Someone had died. He thought it was the doctor. He thoughtthe worst of the sending came from young Jennie, in the way of loud juniors and young horses, but he wasn’t sure, and rapidly there was more of it, the echo of confirmation sounding in his head to be the preacher, and was current and happening now—along with a presence he knew from brief encounters: Brionne Goss was the core of it, but it was and and again.

“Tarmin,” Tara said beside him. “That’s what it was like.”

Like and unlike, Danny was thinking. The Tarmin rogue wasn’t essentially a killer. It opened gates to those that were.

This thing—this confusion—had hands and walked upright, or it was Brionne herself.

“It’s in the upstairs of the house,” Ridley said, and how glad Ridley was to see the two of them was evident in the ambient. “It’s strong. God, it’s strong. We haven’t dared get close to it.”

“Five of us, now,” Tara said. “Let’s push it. Let’s get it out of here and hunt it later.”

Ridley was and thought of Danny understood the fear he had, bringing a kid’s mind close to that thing. But notdoing it guaranteed she’d be close for sure when the thing went further over the edge than it was.

“I don’t think it’s a rogue,” Danny ventured to say. “Part of it’s the same, but it’s not crazy. I don’t think it’s crazy.” A dreadful comparison occurred to him, and he unintentionally let it loose:

Tara, last person he’d have thought would agree, slid into that image with astonishing quickness and memories of and “Smart like a horse,” she said. “Damn sure.”

“Paired with that?” Callie said in disgust.

“Nothing I want to see leave here,” Tara said, and intended no question, while Randy Goss hovered in the low edges of the ambient, and and Danny knew that image of the way Tara had to recognize it.

But Tara was trying to pull them together in which with Flicker’s essential skittishness had its difficulties. So hewanted it, in support of Tara’s effort, and Callie wanted it; then Jennie was there, fiercely so, and thatspooked Ridley into a direct attack that wasn’t native to him: Danny suddenly felt what Ridley and Slip could be when Jennie was threatened, and all of a sudden the marshal and the preacher and the rest were clearing back from them.

But Randy stayed. was there with them, recalling all of it with an overlay of and Randy didn’t want the Randy wanted

Glass shattered at that house. Wood broke. A throat uttered a sound not human. came back at them.

“It’s going up!” Callie cried aloud. “ It’s Get a sight on it!”

Danny didn’t expect it to show on the street side of the building. But there, in the murky light that had been growing around them, he saw an upright darkness on the very crest of the roof, a darkness with something white hugged against it—with what a blink of snowflakes cleared into the sight of Brionne Goss in her nightgown standing on her own feet withthe creature, balanced on the snowy rooftree of the doctor’s house.

Hedidn’t trust he could hit it and not spook it out of the sights of those with a chance. Tara, beside him, and Ridley, had rifles.

More than those two guns went off. A ragged volley made Cloud jump and him blink, and in the stench of gunpowder and the smell of snow around him afterward—there wasn’t anything on that roof.

“Did we get it?” Ridley asked. Randy’s shock was racketing through an ambient that was just them, now, nothing in, on, or beyond that house.

“Don’t trust not hearing it,” Danny said. “Not till we find it dead.” He rode Cloud forward, and the rest of them were with him,

Randy attaching himself close to Cloud afoot, and Tara and Flicker going on his other side.

That silence persisted. The doctor’s house stood adjacent to outbuildings, small sheds behind; but a warehouse roof came close, and he and Tara went down the alley it made, rejoining the others along the wall.

The post was absent from the rider-gate. Danny knew that from Ridley and Jennie and Callie. The post was still in the tunnel access, but that wouldn’t have stopped a beast on two feet, either—if it had had the chance to get in there, but none of them believed it had.

The marshal and his group came now and joined them as, in the very early dawn and among the shadows that still were left, they looked for footprints.

They didn’t find them until they went through the rider-gate. The tracks of one set of long humanlike feet and sometimes two, the second clearly human, went toward the den.

Shimmer was and Slip pulled the rest of them in, as a band of five horses went toward the den intent on

But the tracks went around to the outside, to a rider-gate left standing open to the forest and the light coming through the trees.

Danny and Tara went out hunting straightway. But the trail, which showed blood now and again, went aside into the trees before it had gone a kilometer down the road, on a diagonal line down the mountain. The trail all along had been tending toward the south, toward the truck road, but now it left that. Cloud and Flicker were sure about it going into the trees, and downhill, after which, with the beast’s tree-climbing ability, it was capable of going cross-country and above brush and rock that would stop a horse.

So they both thought it more prudent to go back to the village and in a day or so, with full kit and enough gear to survive what began to feel like chancy weather, set out to warn other villages. There was nothing they could do chasing it now; and a great deal they could do by warning the other settlements.

Besides, with the beast’s talent for misdirection, and the possibility of a human mind helping it, they didn’t want to leave things in disorder in the village behind them—in case it didn’t find itself discouraged.

Guil and Carlo came in the early afternoon, with snow coming down heavily. Guil was decidedly hurting, Burn was exhausted, and Carlo had walked, so as not to overload Spook. Both of them had pushed things more than they ought.

They came in the village gates. In the middle of the street and in full view of the curious, Carlo slid down off Spook’s back and held out his arms for his brother, who until that time had held himself reserved and quiet. Things weren’t reserved or quiet for some time, then, in that quarter, among riders and villagers alike.

And introductions went quickly, rider-fashion, the ambient thick with self-protection and reserve for a moment, then warming up considerably. Yes, the Evergreen camp had known Guil’s lost partner, they’d liked Aby Dale, they trusted her lifelong partner; and they knew that the last Tarmin rider hadn’t survived by scanting duty, any more than Tara had done since her arrival at Evergreen.

They stayed villageside, all of them, including Guil and Carlo, with the horses, to survey the damage, to help the marshal sort out the dead and make sure the village felt safe. With the smell of blood on the wind it was certain in their minds and in the minds of very anxious villagers and winter residents that the wildlife wouldcome back to the area, and relatively quickly if the beast hadn’t hunted it to nonexistence: Guil said the ambient had formed at their backs on their ride along the road like water flowing into a gap, as if wild things knew that a horse’s presence in this instance was an assurance of a worse predator moving out of the territory.

And in truth that night and the morning after there wasn’t a sign of it coming back—hard to imagine a creature you had to recognize in terms of the silence that went around it. Slinkwas the name some villager came up with for it, and it might stick, who knew? It was certain at least that the High Wild produced some odd creatures, some strange, some deadly, and that humans who’d come to the world had yet to see most of them.

As Tara said, they just hoped this one stayed wherever it had gone. Weather came howling down, and that, the village hoped, finished that. In all senses.

Even the Goss brothers’ mourning was short.

Chapter 23

Water dripped off the icicles that rimmed the barracks roof—which often happened on sunny days even in deep winter, but when it went on all day and, after a cold snap, started up again for several days running, then it was relatively certain the thaw had begun.

Likely there was already green in the fields around Shamesey. Danny began thinking of that, and thinking about going back again, maybe this year, maybe not, for a visit.

But with, as Guil put it, water beginning to run downhill again, the village was crazed with packing, the lure of mining and to some extent the solid pay of logging forgotten in a different kind of gold rush. The only way supplies were going to get downhill until trucks got up the mountain was in hand-carts, and while riders might help get fools down the mountain to Tarmin to stake claims, they weren’t going to risk their necks or their horses’ necks shepherding anybody who was overloaded.

So carts were being built and axles and wheels reinforced. Wood was at a premium. Van Mackey had had more work all winter than he wanted to get around to, and had to do it alone: Rick Mackey had been at The Evergreen that night, and Carlo never had gotten the chance to sort grievances out with him. There was a cave in the mountain that served to keep the dead, and Rick Mackey and twelve others were there, besides Serge Lasierre and Darcy Schaffer. Except Earnest Riggs, whose body they never had identified for certain.

The village was without a doctor, but the pharmacists, husband and wife, served as they’d begun to do during Darcy Schaffer’s year of retirement, and their daughter, Azlea Sumner, had settled down to the notion shemight apprentice to the doctor over in Mornay– the doctor there, in the second and third times the two villages had met for skating outings on the pond, had talked about resettling to Evergreen, as a far bigger establishment. The doctor had a son, and Azlea Sumner was very interested.

Van Mackey and Mary Hardesty had set their sights on hiring Randy Goss, Carlo having clearly left the trade, and the work and the potential prosperity piling up the way it was. But with carts wanting wheels and fittings and all of Tarmin and that shop lying down there unclaimed and apt to fall to the Mornay smith—Randy Goss had no interest these days in anything but Shimmer’s imminent foal, which had begun to image, and which was (Ridley and Callie had begun to call it fate) another colt.

In all of it, Randy just played games with Jennie, and Tara taught them the elements of marksmanship, while Guil Stuart told all the junior riders and the potential junior the kinds of things they might need in the open country.

Juniors who had their wits about them (and they all had) paid strictest attention. Jennie, for as young as she was, had acquired a certain sober knowledge that night, and so had Rain. She knew about the dangers on the mountain, and Jennie was in no rush to go out the gate quite yet, even with spring in the air and the wild things coming out of burrows and birthings and silliness imminent.

Wild things coming out of burrows was the part that made them all nervous. And on a certain day Danny, out hunting with Carlo, was troubled to see Carlo and Spook just standing still and staring off down the road to the south, all with a very strange feeling in the ambient.

“Sometimes I wonder if she’s dead,” Carlo said, when Danny rode up beside him. “Sometimes I hope she is. Sometimes I wonder—if that thing’s like Spook, if you could halfway talk to it—or if she could.”

Danny personally didn’t consider talking to it a good idea, inside the ambient or out loud. They still hadn’t heard a thing from it since that night, none of the shelters between there and the south road had been opened that they could detect, when he and Tara and Carlo and Ridley had gone out to check them and to hunt the thing.

So his own opinion was that it wasdead. He damned sure didn’t want to find thatbreed coming across the mountain ridge, laying siege to village walls, and calling village kids out for company. Horses had become addicted to human minds. Horses had never been predators on humans—just curious, just vastly and immediately curious when ships came to the worlds and landed in the horses’ range down near Shamesey. This thing was a far different matter. And he’d shoot one if he saw it, without a second thought about its intentions.