“If I knew, I wouldn’t have to go look.” More hair-twisting. “I don’t think I’m even looking for answers. I’m think I’m looking for new questions.” He gave Fawn a slow nod.
The next morning dawned bright blue, and everyone spent it getting their gear spread out in the sun or up on branches to dry out. By noon, Dag judged this task well along, and floated the notion of starting out today—in gentle, easy stages, to counter Mari’s exasperated look and mutter of Told you so. But since Mari was as sick of this place as everyone else, Dag soon had his way.
With the promise of home dangling in the distance, however round-aboutly, the youngsters had the camp broken down and bundled up in an hour, and Saun led their six mounts and the packhorse northwest. They skirted wide around the dead marsh, flat and dun in a crystalline light that still could not make it sparkle, for all that a shortcut across the blight would have saved several miles.
Halfway around, Mari drew her horse to a halt and turned her face to a vagrant moist breeze.
“What?” Saun called back, alert.
“Smell that?” said Mari.
“Right whiffy,” said Varleen, wrinkling her nose.
“Something’s starting to rot,” Dag explained to Fawn, who rode up beside him and looked anxiously inquiring. “That’s good.”
She shook her head. “You people.”
“Hope is where you find it.” He smiled down at her, then pushed Copperhead along. He could feel his weary patrol’s mood lighten just a shade.
As he’d promised Mari, they weaved through the woodlands of Raintree at a sedate walk. They rode with groundsenses open, like people trailing their hands through the weeds as they strolled, not formally patrolling, but as routine precaution. You never knew. Dag himself had once found and done for a very early sessile that way, when he was riding courier all alone in the far northeast hinterland of Seagate. Still, their amble put a good twelve miles between them and the Bonemarsh blight by the time they stopped in the early evening. Dag thought everyone slept a bit better that night; even he did, despite the throbbing ache in his healing thigh.
They started off the next day earlier, but no faster. Varleen spotted two mud-man corpses off the trail that appeared to have died naturally, running down at the end of the stolen strength the malice had given them, suggesting the hazard from the rest of their cohort was now much reduced. Even at this slow pace, the little patrol came up on the first noxious pinching of the blight around Greenspring by midafternoon.
In the shade of the last live trees before the trail opened out into cleared fields, Dag held up his hook, and everyone pulled their mounts to a halt.
“We don’t all have to go in. We could set up a camp here. You could stay with Varleen and Griff, Fawn. Blight this deep will be draining, even if you can’t feel it. Bad for you. And…it could be ugly.” Will be ugly.
Fawn leaned on her pommel and gave him a sharp look. “If it’s bad for me, won’t it be worse for you? Convalescing as you aren’t—at least not any too fast, that I can see.”
Mari vented a sour chuckle. “She’s got you there.”
Fawn took a breath and sat up. “This place—it’s something like West Blue, right?”
“Maybe,” Dag allowed.
“Then—I need to see it, too.” She gave a firm little nod.
They exchanged a long look; her resolve rang true. Should I be surprised? “Soonest begun, soonest done, then. We won’t linger long.” Dag braced himself and waved Saun onward.
They rode first past deserted farms: sickly, then dying, then dead, then dead with a peculiar gray tinge that was quite distinctive. Dag knew it well and furled his groundsense in tight around him, as did the other patrollers. It didn’t help quite enough.
“What are we looking for?” asked Griff, as the first buildings of a little town hove into view past a screen of bare and broken buckthorn bushes, someone’s scraggly attempt at a hedge.
“I’d like to find the lair, to start,” said Dag. “See where the malice started out, try to figure why it wasn’t spotted.”
It wasn’t that hard; they just followed the gradient of blight deeper and deeper. It felt like riding into a dark hollow, for all that the land here was as level as the rest of Raintree. The flattened vegetation grew grayer, and even the clapboard houses, with their fences leaning drunkenly, seemed drained of all color. It all smelled as dry and odorless as cave dust. The town was maybe twice the size of West Blue, Dag gauged. It had three or four streets. A sturdy wharf jutted into a river worthy of the name and not just a jumped-up creek, which seemed to flow deeply enough to float small keelboats up from the Grace, and certainly rafts and flatboats down. A square for a day market; alehouse and smithy and forge; perhaps two hundred houses. A thousand people, formerly. None now.
The pit of the blight seemed to lie in a woodlot at the edge of the town. The horses snorted uneasily as their riders forced them forward. A shallow, shale-lined ravine with a small creek running through it shadowed a near cave partway up one side, not unlike the one they’d seen near Glassforge, if much smaller. It was quite empty now, the shale slumping in a slide to half block the water. Alongside the creek the earth was pocked with man-wide, man-deep pits, so thickly clustered in places as to seem like a wasp nest broken open. The malice’s first mud-man nursery, likely.
“With all these people around,” said Griff, “it’s hard to believe that no one spotted any of the early malice signs.”
“Maybe someone did,” said Fawn, “and no one paid them any mind. Being too young and short. The woodlot is common for the whole town. You bet the youngsters here played in that creek all the time, and in these woods.”
Dag hunched over his saddlebow and inhaled carefully, steadying his shuddering stomach. Yes. Malice food indeed, of the richest sort. Delivered up. This was how the malice had started so fast. He remembered its beauty in the silver light. How many molts…? As many as it liked.
“Did no one know to run?” asked Varleen. “Or did it just come up too quick?”
“It came up fast, sure, but not that fast,” opined Mari. She frowned at Dag’s huddle. “Some were killed by ill luck, but I expect more were killed by ignorance.”
“Why were—” Fawn began, and stopped.
Dag turned his head and raised his brows at her.
“I was going to say, why were they so ignorant,” she said in a lower voice. “But I was just as ignorant myself, not long back. So I guess I know why.”
Dag, still wordless with the nightmare images running through his mind, just shook his head and turned Copperhead around. They rode up from the ravine on the widest beaten path.
As they returned down the main street near the wharf, Saun’s head suddenly came up. “I swear I hear voices.”
Dag eased his groundsense open slightly, snapping it back again almost at once, cringing at the searing sensation. But he’d caught the life-sparks. “Over that way.”
They rode on, turning down a side street lined with bare trees and empty houses, some new clapboard, the older ones log-sided. A few had broken glass windows; most still made do with old-fashioned parchment and summer netting, though also split or ripped. The street became a rutted lane, beyond which lay a broad field, its trampled grass and weeds gray-dun. A score or so of human figures milled about on its far end along what used to be a tree line. A few carts with dispirited horses hitched to them stood by.
“They can’t be back trying to farm this!” said Saun in dismay.
“No,” said Dag, rising in his stirrups and squinting, “it’s no crop they’re planting today.”
“They’re digging graves,” said Mari quietly. “Must be some refugees who’ve come back to try and find their kin, same as at Bonemarsh.”
Griff shook his head in regret.
Dag hitched his reins into his hook, for all that his left arm was still very weak, to free his hand. He waved the patrol forward, but with a cautioning gesture brought them to a halt again at a little distance from the Greenspring survivors.