“Sorry,” Danny said.
“It’s all right,” Guil said.
“It’s hard to get an image of.” <Sending in the woods. Land rippling in his perception. Carlo—>
He tried not to spill beyond his intention to inform them. But Guil <wanted.>
“Rest of it,” Guil said.
<Rippling sending. Carlo and Spook.>
“It blotted things out,” Tara said. “Damned strong.” Danny was <frustrated.> He didn’t understand what it had done. And he’d experienced it.
“It can blot out another sending,” Guil said. “Take another sending out of the ambient it passes on. A horse can do it.”
“But a horse has to learn,” Tara said. “This thing’s got tricks. Complicated tricks. Like Guil says, it’s smart, it’s a predator, and I hope to hell there’s just one of them. Last thing we need is a colony going.”
Thoughts hitting the ambient were stirring real apprehension now from Spook. <Shadow against the stars. Anger. Ripples and shadows in the ambient. Shadows moving. Running. Blood—and hunting, down a wooded road.>
“Get ourselves settled in tonight,” Tara said, and they left the place, through a snow-fall that stuck to eyelashes and piled up on clothing and horses’ backs. Tracks were filling in, even the ones they’d made. But there was a trace where something large had crossed the snow, a depression too snowed-over to read much of it.
But the horses didn’t like it, and there were unpleasant images, horses taking information from each other, Danny thought, fast and furious—he was learning, too, of a feud, horse and beast, that had gone on for days around Evergreen, out in the woods.
The seniors were learning from him and Carlo, the same fast, disjointed and sometimes exceedingly accurate way, about the village, the camp, the blacksmith shop—
<Brionne,> the image came, a command, a question, he thought from Tara; and it was Carlo’s image that came back, <house with fine furniture, Brionne in bed, awake and talking to him—>
The ambient wasn’t happy about that. Not at all.
“We’d better get over there,” Tara said. “Soon as we can.”
“The camp-boss told me to get Carlo on to Mornay,” Danny said. “I’m not so sure.”
“Not a good idea right now,” Guil said.
“More riders at Mornay than Evergreen,” Tara said. “Fewer further on.”
Danny wished to himself he’d aimed better. They weren’t good thoughts that were populating the ambient right now, <danger to the villages and to rider camps.> He’d had the chance to prevent it. He could have stopped and made sure of his target. If he’d known it wasn’t a lorrie-lie. If he’d known what to do first and what second in Carlo’s likelihood of rushing off a cliff or whatever other danger he could find out there.
“My fault,” Carlo said, “isn’t it?”
“The pair of us,” Danny said honestly. “You don’t rush around out here. You just don’t hurry.” He became excruciatingly conscious he was repeating Guil’s advice to him last summer, and thought Guil might remember it, as he hadn’t clearly remembered the green kid who’d asked him how to get good jobs.
The green kid who’d survived up here as far as he had, all on Guil’s advice.
The green kid who didn’t need a senior’s advice to feel the hazard as they came up that logging road and passed beside the shelter.
“Don’t like this,” Carlo said to him quietly. “I really don’t think Spook likes it.”
“They know,” Danny said, smelling something he’d never smelled, a scent heightened by the horse’s sense of it as they came up along the logging road.
“It’s gotten in,” Tara said, as they passed by the blind wall. “Too big for the chimney.”
“Seems so,” Guil said.
They rounded the corner toward the door itself. The horses weren’t advising them of any presence there. <Vacant shelter> was how it seemed. But the smell was there despite the snow, beyond human noses, maybe, to detect.
The shelter looked normal. The latch-string was out, which would pull the inner latch up and let a traveler inside.
“Guil,” Tara said, “you get out of the way. —Danny, you open it.”
He didn’t object, though Cloud wasn’t happy. It was just a case of taking no unnecessary chances, putting someone who could move fast in the right spot, and having Tara standing behind him with a rifle that packed a high-caliber punch—in case the beast had dug in under a wall and gained the place for a den, and in case it was capable of lying in wait. He stepped up to the door, wanting <Cloud beside him,> and pulled the latch-string and pulled the door open.
The place, he could see even in the gathering dusk, was a shambles.
“It’s gotten in,” he said. He had no trouble at all smelling the creature at this range. Bedding was all over the floor. He hoped that accounted for all the scraps and rags of cloth. “Shall I see if the supplies survived?”
“Got a match?” Guil asked him from the doorway.
He had. He went in as Tara took up a position to the inside of the doorway and Cloud came all the way in, smelling both <bad smell> and <dark in the trees> and on the defensive.
A fire ready to use, the ordinary and courteous condition in which one left a shelter’s fireplace, had been scattered around the hearth. A tin of cooking oil had popped its metal stopper and spilled, and in the expediency of getting a fire going, he opened the flue, stuffed a few pieces of oil-soaked wood and an oil-soaked blanket in and touched a match to it.
It lit the room. The damage was thorough, flour thrown about the walls and ceiling—cots broken, absolute wreckage.
“Hell of a mess.” That was from Tara. “This isn’t vermin damage. They’d have gotten the oil and the flour. Vermin have never been in here.”
Cloud sniffed a torn mattress and jerked his head up with a snort of disapproval. Guil and Carlo were both in the doorway against a backdrop of dusk near darkness.
“Vermin were supper for this thing,” Guil said. “Search the edges. Look for an entry hole. And be careful.”
Danny started looking along the edges of the fireplace. Tara made a faster circuit, kicking bedding aside, shoving the broken cots out of the way, making Cloud dodge her path. Flicker came in and helped <smelling for burrow> all around the edges of the cabin.
“No entryway,” Tara said. “That thing came in the way we did and left the same way; the flue was still shut, and something that size wouldn’t fit up there, anyway.”
“Damn, damn, damn,” Guil said. Carlo said nothing at all. And Danny was putting together a scene he didn’t at all like.
“You think it just pulled the latch-string to get in?”
“Curiosity might have pulled that string,” Tara said, and in the dying light of the blaze he’d made in the fireplace she ran a gloved hand over dents and scratches around the doorframe. There were others, Danny saw, by pulling the door back, on the inside of the door surface. “That door,” Tara said, “took some abuse. Must have been shut, at some point—can’t figure why else the dents inside. Maybe spooked it. Till it figured out to shove the latch up. By accident, maybe.”
Bad news, Danny was thinking. Cabins were safe with latch-strings out. No creature on the planet knew how to pull the cord and simultaneously handle the door while the latch was up. Complicated operation. A ridden nighthorse knew somewhat how to do it, but didn’t have the right equipment to make it work. Lorrie-lies had fingers, but didn’t have the brain.