“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.