“We must leave the horses,” she said. “We can’t fight horseback up this way, and we dare not be trapped where we can’t even turn—”
“They cleared a forecourt, like, below the fall,” one of her troop said. “There’s room to turn there.”
“Yes, but not in between.” She didn’t like this, any of it. Leave the horses and they might be stolen, or spooked. Take them, and they could be attacked easily from above, with bows or even rolled stones. And why hadn’t she thought to leave the horses with Tamin, back at the trail division? Now she would either have to leave someone else to guard them, which meant having only eight with her, or tie them and hope nothing happened. She had lost her wits, she thought angrily. It was hard to think, hard to make any decisions; she half wanted to turn around and ride back to the stronghold. She dismounted, ending both the internal and external discussion, and the others dismounted as well. “We’ll tie the horses,” she said. If something spooked them, sent them back down the canyon, it would at least warn Tamin.
Despite everything, that walk up the steep trail to the clearing below the falls reminded her again why she loved this country. All along the creek, more of the starry yellow flowers, more tiny ferns, more beds of fragrant mint. Tiny golden frogs splashed into the water, arrowing across pools not much larger than a kettle to flip themselves onto a sunny stone. The canyon walls closed around them, making each stretch of trail a private room, almost a secret.
She could well understand why someone might want to live here, even though in flood or in winter snow it would be impossible to get out, to join the others in the stronghold. If she had had no responsibilities, she might have wanted to live here herself.
They came around a last twist to the clearing, a grassy circle edged along one rock wall by the merest trickle of water. The Rosemage stared. The last time she had seen it, fruit trees and vines had been trained all around the margin in rock-walled terraces above the seasonal floods. Those trees had been hacked to the ground; their green wood, slow-burning, had fueled the smoke that rose as if in a chimney, straight up the cliffs past the dwelling. They had not smelled it before, but now acrid smoke stung her nostrils. Behind her, a mutter rose; a wave of her hand silenced it. She let her eyes rove up the cliff, ledge by ledge, looking for any movement, ignoring for the time a trickle of darker smoke from the dwelling entrance. Nothing . . . no movement, no sound, until her gaze flowed into the sky and found dark wings already circling.
She moved cautiously around the clearing, keeping close to the wall. The trees had been cut with axes, the marks clear on their short stumps. A few branches had escaped the fire, their blossoms and tender leaves already wilted from the day’s heat. Some of the carefully laid terraces had been broken apart, the stones flung several arm’s-lengths. It could not have been done by stealth; it would have made considerable racket, to echo off the cliffs on every hand. The mageborn must have heard it—why had they done nothing? Because they had been killed first? She did not look forward to what they might find in the dwelling itself.
The lower, obvious entrance led to a small stable, carved of the rock. Here the families had kept goats and a couple of sturdy ponies to pack their fruit down-canyon and other supplies back up. Normally it was closed by a heavy door of thick planks; these were shattered almost to splinters. The Rosemage knew before she entered that the animals were dead; she did not expect the savagery with which they’d been flayed and butchered. Most of the meat had been taken, and the innards strewn to smear every bit of wall and floor with stinking slime. Here, for the first time, she found a footprint in the bloody mess: it could have been human, by its size and shape, a foot cased in soft leather, not boots with heels.
From the stable, an inner stair led up into blackness. The Rosemage considered, decided to use the outside approach to the family’s own chambers. This, outside, meant climbing a series of ledges, zig-zagging up the curving cliff. When she had visited before, a notched log had served to cross one gap which now required a careful leap.
The main entrance had served as a front porch, a low stone wall protecting small children from the drop to the clearing below. No water trickled past it now, but she remembered how beautiful it had been when the falls ran. She glanced out, down-canyon, surprised as always at the way the land hid its real shape. From here, the side-canyons were invisible; she could not tell where the stronghold lay.
But she could not stand gazing at lost safety, not now. She waited until half her band had made it that far, then called her light. It flickered for a moment as shock blurred her mind. There they were, the two families, the bones unmistakable through charred flesh, square in the entrance to the rest of the dwelling. A few ends of wood indicated that the household furniture had fed that fire. Stinking smoke trailed along the cave floor and made her cough. She moved forward.
“We have to know,” she said. “Maybe someone escaped, maybe a child found a hiding place—” In her light, she could see walls smeared with blood and filth and smoke. As she edged past the smoldering pyre, she realized that the passage had been systematically dirtied with the corpses before they were burned—she hoped they had been corpses then, not still living. Nausea cramped her belly, her throat, and she fought it down. She had to remember how the cave dwelling had been laid out. She heard someone retching behind her, but the stench of death and burning was so bad nothing could make it worse.
Two families, both fairly young; they had shared this passage, a dining hall, a large kitchen with two hearths, and the wide space behind the waterfall. On either side of the passage had been each family’s sleeping rooms and private space. She could not remember all of it; she wasn’t sure she’d been shown all of it. She went into the first opening she found, on the left, and found the remains of a loom, smashed, and the cloth ripped away, hacked and smeared with blood. In the next, only the splinters of whatever furniture had been there, probably taken to fuel the fire. Someone had walked through the pool of blood on the floor before it dried, leaving footprints like those in the stable. Chamber after chamber, on one side the central passage or another, had only destruction, blood, the smell of horror.
Her mind could not take in the whole thing. It seemed to fragment, to split into five or six minds, each attending to only one part of what she saw and heard and felt. Had they been surprised? Had anyone fought? Where had the attackers come from, and who were they? Could she find more clues?
In the kitchen with its double hearth, its concession to the kitchen rights of two women of equal rank, she found the first sign of resistance. A pothook, marked as if by a sword-slash. A broken knife, stained with blood. The Rosemage sniffed it, trying out what her magery might tell her. A strange odor seared her nose, woke terrible fears. Not human, not this blood. But what? She called the most experienced of the huntsmen, who sniffed and then shook his head.
“Nasty, lady, you’re right about that. But it’s nothing I’ve smelled before, not here or anywhere. It has a . . . a tingle in it, a ringing, almost a sound.”
“It’s wicked,” the Rosemage said. She felt something in the atmosphere as a smothering wave of evil. “And it knows we’re here.”
But nothing more happened, as they searched each chamber carefully. They found no survivors, only the bloodstains where each had been killed and gutted. They found no clues but the odd-smelling blood on that one blade, and the evidence of the pothook, that the attackers had used swords. And the sense that some great evil, some cold and incalculable menace, lurked about them.