Dag hitched his shoulder forward. “Does your groundsense say these are valid cords? ” he asked. Growled, more like.
“Yes,” said Arkady cautiously. Fawn sighed with relief.
“Thank you for your honesty, sir.” Dag sat back with a satisfied nod.
“We had some blighted stupid argumentation about that at Hickory Lake, later.”
Arkady cleared his throat. “Your tent-kin did not welcome your new bride, I take it? ” Your very young bride, Fawn fancied his glance at her added, but he had the prudence not to say it aloud.
“Your aunt Mari and uncle Cattagus were pretty nice to me, I thought,” said Fawn, in what defense she could muster of Dag’s home.
“Wait, Dag, you left out the glass bowl. That has to be important. It was the first time your ghost hand came out.” She turned to Arkady. “That’s what Dag called it at first, because it spooked him something awful, but Hoharie said it was a ground projection. You’d better tell that part, Dag, because to me it just looked like magic.”
“There was this glass bowl.” Dag waved his hand. “Back at West Blue, just before we were wed. It meant a lot to Fawn-she’d brought it back from Glassforge as a gift for her mama. My tent-mother, now. It fell and broke.”
“Three big pieces and about a hundred shards,” Fawn added in support. “All over the parlor floor.” She was grateful that he left out the surrounding family uproar. Angry as she sometimes was with her kin, she would not have wanted to see them held up as fools before this Arkady.
“I…” Dag made a gesture with his hook. “This came out, and I sort of swirled the glass all back together through its ground. I’d seen bowls like it being made back in Glassforge, you see. Its ground had a hum to it…” His lips shaped, but did not blow, a note.
Arkady, Barr, and Remo were all staring at his hook-no, not the hook, Fawn realized. At the invisible, elusive ground projection that took the place of his lost left hand. Which she would never see, but could sometimes-she suppressed a smile-feel. Dag eased back, as did the other three Lakewalkers, and she guessed he’d let the projection go in again.
“First I heard about that bowl,” muttered Barr to Remo. “Ye gods. Did you know about it?” Remo shook his head and motioned his partner to shush.
“Before things came to the point at Hickory Lake,” Dag went on, “there was that big malice outbreak over in Raintree. Did you hear much about it, way down here? ”
“A little,” said Arkady. “I confess, the patrollers here follow the news from the north more closely than I do. There always seems to be some excitement going on, up your way.”
“Raintree malice was more than that. It promised to be every bit as bad as the Wolf War in Luthlia twenty years back. Worse, because it was fixing to tear across thickly settled farmer country. Malice food on a platter.”
Arkady shrugged. “But you were from Oleana-you said? ”
Dag’s lips thinned. Fawn put in quickly, “Raintree sent out riders for help. Hickory Lake’s sort of next door, being in the far northwest of the hinterland. Fairbolt Crow-camp captain at Hickory Lake-chose Dag to be company captain of the force they sent out. Explain about groundripping the malice, Dag.”
Dag drew breath and twisted his left arm, turning his hook. Ghost hand displayed again, or just referred to? “That thing I did to you at the gate, sir. For which I apologize, but I had to… anyway. What did you make it out to be? ”
Arkady, reminded, touched the back of his hand, now scabbed, and frowned at Dag. “A projection for groundsetting, applied too powerfully and damaging the overlying tissue. Deliberately, I take it. Although there are occasions when such tearing is a valuable tool-used rather more precisely, I must say.”
“Used vastly more powerfully and not at all precisely, it’s the same as the ground-ripping a malice does,” said Dag.
Arkady’s brows flew up. “Surely not.” His eyes flicked toward Fawn’s throat.
“Surely is,” said Dag. “I’ve seen it coming and going, and there’s no mistake-I can show you the old malice scars on my legs, later. Like that glass bowl, the first time I did it I was pretty upset-we had closed on the malice, and it was trying to ground-rip one of my patrollers. I just reached out…” Dag drew breath. “Free advice, boys, bought at the usual cost. Don’t ever try to ground-rip a malice. Its ground sticks to yours, and is deadly poisonous. That’s how I got these scars…” He gestured to his left side generally. He wasn’t pointing to his body, Fawn realized, but to its ground.
“Oh,” said Arkady, in an odd voice. “I couldn’t imagine what had caused those dark ripples.”
Dag hesitated. “You’ve never seen a malice, have you, sir? ”
Arkady shook his head.
“Ever patrolled at all? ”
“When I was a boy, they had me out a few times with the others my age. But I showed for a maker very young.”
“Ah, the camping trips with the kiddies,” muttered Barr. “I hate those.” The riveted Remo poked him to silence.
“So you’ve never seen a live mud-man,” sighed Dag.
“Ah… no.” Arkady added after a moment, “The medicine maker who trained me at Moss River Camp had a dead one that he kept on display. Dried, though, which made it hard to make out any distinguishing details. It fell apart after a short while. Pity, I thought.”
“And you’ve never seen a mud-man nursery, either. That’s going to make what came next hard to explain.”
Arkady paused for a long moment with a peculiar look on his face, swallowed some first response, and said instead, “Try.”
“All right. We found all this out bit by bit, mind. The malice, before we did for it, had taken a place called Bonemarsh Camp. Most of the Lakewalkers got away”-Dag’s swift glance around Arkady’s house whispered sessile again to Fawn-“but it captured half a dozen makers. It ground-locked them together-”
Arkady gave a little flinching hiss.
“Oh, there’s worse to come. It anchored this huge, complicated involution in their grounds to slave them to make up a batch of about fifty mud-men, which the malice had growing from local animals. A half-formed mud-man is about the most gut-wrenching thing you’ve ever seen, by the way. You want to kill it quick just for the pity of it. When my company got back to Bonemarsh, we found the groundlock still holding, the makers seeming unconscious. I’d thought the lock would break when the malice died, y’see, but I was wrong. Worse, when anyone opened their grounds to try to reach in and break the lock, they were sucked into the array as well. Lost three patrollers finding that out.”
“That’s… astonishing,” said Arkady. Fawn’s first fear, that Arkady would toss them out before they got their tale half told, eased. Beneath his quelling reserve, she thought he was growing quite engrossed. He likes the parts about groundwork.
Dag nodded shortly. “This was a very advanced malice, the most fully developed I’ve ever seen.”
“And ah… how many have you seen? ”
Dag shrugged. “I lost count years back. That I’ve slain with a knife in my own hand, twenty-six or so. That’s counting the sessiles, which I do. Anyway, back at Bonemarsh-I stupidly tried to match grounds to steady the heartbeat of a dying maker in the array. And I got sucked in, too. Which is how I found out about the involution-I saw it from the inside. And after that the story has to go to Fawn, because the next few days were all a gray fog for me.”
Fawn decided on a simplified version. “I came to Bonemarsh with Hoharie, because Dag had sent back for her help with this horrible groundlock thing. None of the Lakewalkers seemed to know what to do about it, which made me about half crazy, watching and waiting. Then Hoharie tried some experiment-I never did find out what, though I think she suspected about the involution.”