There was a muffled blast of shotgun fire below.
And for a moment the presence in the passages seemed to have split in four, behind them, ahead of them, under the church, under the row of houses—
Rain jumped sideways in startlement and Jennie was <down, with the wind knocked out of her, head hurt.> But Rain took up guard right over her, and Ridley, ignoring the temptation to look to his injured daughter, was trying to keep a view simultaneously of all the perimeter, no longer sure where it was and fearful of losing track of the thing.
Playing games with them, dammit. And he daren’t leave his view of the edges to help Jennie, who was <picking herself up out of the snow, trying to get back on Rain,> which she couldn’t manage without something to stand on. Without leaving his scanning of the perimeters, he slid off Slip’s back, gave Jennie the boost she needed and delayed only a heartbeat to pat her arm.
“All right?”
“Yeah,” she said. The lamplight showed tears smeared on one cheek. Jennie was <mad> as well as <scared,> and thinking about <girl in house> although she knew she wasn’t supposed to and they’d kept her away from that house. Rain was frothing at the mouth he was so mad, <wanting fight,> wanting his teeth into anything he could identify as the <enemy.>
And <enemy> was there, here, all over the place, and Jennie and Rain alike were looking this way and that trying to find it.
“It lies,” Ridley said with a sense of desperation. Their trap hadn’t worked. They knew that by the simple fact that the thing hadn’t been sending for a moment, having conscious control of whether it did or didn’t: that was a larger brain at work, larger and cannier; he’d become increasingly sure how the creature imaged where it wasn’t, catching pictures from minds around it and just throwing those moments back at the hearer—a little different from a horse, that tended to displace terrain sideways to your vision—this thing imaged a scene without itself in it. What they hunted was dangerously intelligent in that regard—if he understood what it was doing—replacing land-now with land-as-it-was. It could go silent at times, and rarely got so confused it began to locate itself. There and then not there—and he didn’t know how long or with how much complexity coming at it in the ambient it could shut down like that. There were thirteen dead down at The Evergreen. There was Serge—dead. There was Earnest Riggs— dead; because he hadn’t any doubt now that the same creature had gotten in that night, too, with its uncanny gift for stalking absolutely silently. Carlo Goss had been innocent, and there couldn’t be any doubt of it, now, in anyone who’d seen both the Schaffer porch and the tavern a moment ago.
He wanted Jennie to come with him, and collected Callie to go up to the church and regroup, taking a course as far as possible across the broad uptown street from the Schaffer house, which all along they had avoided—the horses actively hated it, and Rain wanted to go over there and pick a fight, to harass Brionne Goss, out of reach mentally as well as physically. He’d never seen a horse that determined on giving a potential rider grief, and he was anxious all the time he had Jennie in any wise near that place, for fear she might not hold him.
He was relieved when Callie was by him again, the other side of their defense of Jennie and Rain; and the three of them went up toward the porch of the village hall, next to the church where the hunters, having failed to hit the beast, were coming up from the small enclosed access to the passages.
The ambient prickled then with <Randy Goss> coming outside the village hall in Peterson’s wife’s company, Randy and the wife and then the daughter all armed with shotguns, as the defense of the administrative buildings. Reverend Quarles came behind them, not so evidently a preacher in his snow-gear and carrying a rifle.
“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. This thing 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 girl talks to it,” Jennie said, completely out of turn, but Jennie was <upset> as hell. So was the horse. “She wants it. 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 thing seemed 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 is the 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 mapped the village the girl had never seen with her own eyes.
That accounted 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 had as 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—