Skink and Alder, blight them, had both claimed Crane was at the cave, and Dag would have sworn neither had been lying by that time. But they had been camped on their lookout for more than a day. Dag had seen good-once-but-too-old-now information devastate plans before this. Blight.
The little hole in Chicory’s skull was clotting off. With his ground projection, Dag teased the clot out, letting the blood keep trickling. Was this right? When would it stop? He wanted to go back in to find the source of the flow and pinch it off, but didn’t dare yet. One more of these deep ground-explorations, and he wasn’t sure he’d be able to get up and walk, after. Let alone fight. This fight did not seem finished.
Whit had been drawn off to help the Raintree men secure prisoners. He returned to Dag’s side and draped a blanket around his shoulders. Dag smiled up gratefully. Whit stared wide-eyed at the gray-faced Chicory. “Is he going to die?”
“Can’t say yet. Can you find me Remo or Barr? Where the blight have those two gone off to?”
“Back of the cave, I think. I’ll go check.”
“Thanks.”
Whit nodded and picked his way through the rubble. Dag thought his young tent-brother was holding up well, thrust into scenes of such lethal brutality for the first time in his life. He wouldn’t have sent Whit to assist Wain, though. Dag grimaced at the ugly thumps and yells from the interrogation going on over at the far side of the cave, cutting through the moans and groans.
Whit brought Barr and Remo back in a few minutes. The pair looked black indeed, and not only from their first experience with putting down farmer bandits.
Remo held up a sharing knife. “Look what we found back there.”
“Yeah, there’s a cache piled to the ceiling,” Whit put in, sounding amazed. “All the most valuable stuff, I guess.”
Dag squinted. The knife was unprimed. “Could it be Crane’s?”
“I found it in amongst what has to be a whole narrow-boatload of furs,” Remo said. “Looks like Crane’s crew didn’t always avoid Lakewalkers.”
Dag carefully set Chicory’s head between his knees and raised his blood-soaked hand to take the knife. Remo recoiled to see Dag’s sleeve wet with darkening red, but he reluctantly released the knife to the gory grip. Dag held it to his lips. Unprimed, yes. And with a peculiar stillness in its embedded involution.
“Whoever this knife was bonded to is dead now.” So, probably not Crane’s, though Dag supposed he could hope.
Barr, startled, said, “You can tell that?”
“My brother is a knife maker,” Dag said vaguely; the two patrollers’ brows rose in respect. “Keep this aside.” He handed it back.
Remo slipped the bone blade back into its sheath and hung the thong around his neck. As he hid it all inside his shirt, his voice hushed in outrage. “They must’ve murdered a Lakewalker without even letting him share!”
Or her. Dag didn’t want to think on that. There would have been women amongst the boat victims from time to time, but there weren’t any around now. Can’t let any run off to tell, Skink had claimed. Should Dag hope that they’d died quickly, and were his hopes worth spit?
Chicory’s drainage was clotting off again, blight it, the pressure in the blood pocket growing once more. “Did you find any sign at all of Crane?” Or of those mad Drum brothers who seemed to have become his principal lieutenants; Dag definitely wanted to locate them—dead, alive, or prisoners.
Barr shook his head. “Not within half a mile of here, anyway.”
“We have to find him. Take him.” And not only for his monstrous crimes. If the Lakewalker leader was not tried with the rest, perfunctory as Dag suspected the trial was going to be, the boatmen would always suspect the patrollers had colluded in his escape. “Blight it, what’s taking Wain so long…?”
As if in answer, Saddler crunched across the cave to stare down at Dag, shake his head in worry at Chicory, and report that all the bandits were accounted for but five. Two, it seemed, had left the night before last, cashing out their stakes and quitting the gang permanently, unable to stomach the Drum brothers’ grotesque cruelties any longer. Crane and his two lieutenants had left separately early the next morning, some hours before Alder had flagged down the Fetch. It had been a chance to the boatmen’s benefit, it seemed, because the bandit crew, bereft of their leader’s supervision, had broached some kegs Crane had been saving, and had been a lot drunker than usual this night.
So, up to five bandits still loose out there, including the worst of the bunch. Have we left enough men to guard the boats? Dag suddenly didn’t think so. But he dared not move his two charges yet, and besides, there would be no point jostling them up over the hill in litters when the boats had to come downriver anyway. The convoy could float around the Elbow in the morning and tie up below the cave, carrying them smoothly. But I can’t wait that long.
Dag wet his lips. “Anyone on our side killed?”
Saddler looked dubiously at Dag’s two patients. “Not yet, seems. Nine of the bandits are goners. Twenty-one here left to hang, though there’s one that might not live for it.”
Dag stared in frustration at Chicory’s drained face. He must bring the Raintree man to a point where he could be left for a while, because Dag had to start moving after Crane. But in what direction? Haring off the wrong way would be worse than useless. He did know he wanted Copperhead under him to speed the search. Barr and Remo might be mounted on a couple of the bandits’ horses—they’d found a dozen or so hobbled not far from the cave.
“Saddler, go back and see if you can find out anything at all about which way those five fellows might have gone. Barr, take a turn around the perimeter again—they might be coming back, and we want to spot them before they spot us. Remo…stay with me. I need you.”
Whit, unassigned, tagged off after Saddler. Remo knelt beside Dag.
“What do you want me to do?” he asked quietly.
“Break me out if I appear to groundlock myself. I need to do some deeper groundwork inside Chicory’s poor bashed head, here.”
Remo nodded gravely. Trustingly. Absent gods, did Dag look like he knew what he was doing? Surely Remo should know better by now. Dag sighed and dropped down into that increasingly easy, ever more familiar level of ground-awareness.
The inner world expanded to fill his horizon, as vast and complex a landscape as the Luthlian woods. No wonder that, once a fellow had done this, any other sort of making seemed trivial and dull. A calling, indeed. But his elation was short-lived. These injuries were subtler by far than Hod’s knee, the groundscape deeper and much stranger. Far beyond Dag’s understanding.
I don’t have to understand everything. The body is wiser than I’ll ever be, and will heal itself if it can. Let him just start with the obvious, mend the biggest broken vessels. He’d done that before. Maybe that would be enough. It had better be enough.
He continued the inner exploration. This end went with that one, ah. A little shaped reinforcement would hold them together. For a time. Another, another, another. Ah! That torn artery was the main source of the trouble, yes! Dag brought it back into alignment, reinforced it doubly. And then blood was leaking into the pocket more slowly than it was leaking out, and then it was hardly refilling at all. This time, when the bulge deflated, it stayed shrunken. Another push to position the shell-cracked bone. The squashed brain tissue expanded back into its proper place, still throbbing. Another ground reinforcement quelled its distress…
In his exacerbated sensitivity, Remo’s little ground-bump felt like a blow to the side of Dag’s head. He gasped and fell, disoriented, upward into the light.
“Are you all right?” asked Remo.
Dag gulped and nodded, blinking and squinting. “Thanks. That was timely.”
“Seemed to me you’d been in that trance for an awful long stretch.”
Had he? It had seemed like mere minutes to Dag. Whit appeared at his side; he handed Dag a cup of something, and Dag, unsuspecting, drank and nearly choked. It was nasty, sickly sweet, but it burned down his throat in a heartening way. Some sort of horrible fruit brandy, he decided, from the bandits’ stores. His stomach, after a doubtful moment, elected not to heave.