It was very, very quiet in the area—which wasn’t unusual in areas of the deep woods. But it wasn’t an ordinary area, in which a nighthorse had met with something it couldn’t deal with. He could wish it was the rogue and that whatever injuries it had had just caught up with it—but he didn’t bet their lives on it.
Burn didn’t take great upset at the sight at all. <Bones> were <bones > and the woods were full of them, few hanging together for any length of time—that a few did argued that the horse hadn’t died too long ago; and that made Burn prick up his ears and sharpen his other senses into the ambient, not recklessly: Burn listened, and Burn’s rider sat astride and listened, in as close a borrowing of nighthorse senses as a human being could use.
All around, just a sense of life, little life, distant life, a whisper in the ambient, the awareness he’d dropped out of only in the desolation as Anveney.
That hush, everywhere about the mountainside. The rogue, if it was within reach, was quiescent for some reason.
Sleeping, maybe.
Or involved with something near and preoccupying to it, if it shared any traits of sane horses.
<Shelter, > Guil imaged, thinking of riders potentially in trouble. Burn made no objections to that idea. <Shelter> was a very good idea with <danger> in the area, but the danger was all <Guil danger.> Burn didn’t find a source of it in the ambient.
Burn picked up his pace, hit his meaning-business gait and kept at it, whuffs of breath and hoof-falls in the snow assuming one quick rhythm. Over close to an hour, the road led down across a rough spot in the mountain flank and around into a climb to a place protected by trees and the angle of the mountain.
It was a place a rider would look to find a shelter built, if he knew one was due; and Guil had no trouble spotting it among the evergreens a little above them on the mountain.
But there was a darkness about the door. It was standing wide; and when he and Burn turned off the road and went higher on the slope to investigate the place, vermin scurried madly and darted from the open doorway.
<Rider opening door,> Guil thought uncomfortably, and sat astride Burn and called aloud, “Is anyone here?”
There was no answer. Not a one. A last willy-wisp racketed about the interior and ran out in desperation past Burn’s feet.
<Horse bones,> Guil thought, and Burn snorted the scent of the place out of his nostrils and turned his head without Guil asking, going <downslope> and <toward the road> and <toward den and females.>
A restocking of the supplies in a shelter didn’t accidentally leave a door unlatched. A rider wasn’t that careless or he was dead in his first year.
<Horse bones,> Guil thought, and probably <human bones> not far from the others. Opening a door under attack was the last thing a rider would do, except maybe to save a partner, maybe to get off a shot at the attacker—but, first off, there was a gun-port; and second, if you did go out, you latched that door. Leaving that door open behind one’s back was a mistake only a fatally confused rider might make, under circumstances when places of safety and places of threat might trade places—when even a rider used to sendings might not be sure what he’d done and not done, or where the enemy was.
They turned back down to the road and found, as they went, supplies strewn along the ground, a blanket hanging in a bush, a big tin of what had probably been flour, very clean, shiny, dented and scratched, and missing both flour and lid, lying in the roadway. It had snow inside the open end and a deep blanket of snow lying undisturbed on the upper surface.
That also said something about when the occupants had died.
It wasn’t the last of the debris. Rags turned up here and there, a few bones hanging together that didn’t look to be horse bones. The scavengers were quick and thorough. There’d been one at the bones only a moment ago, but it fled into the bushes.
Burn maintained a very close, very soft contact with the ambient, listening, lowering his head and smelling the bones and the vermin-tracked snow—but only briefly, obtaining nothing definite, from what Guil could detect, besides the expected blood and animal smells. There were many more ways to reach that cabin than from the road, given the surefootedness of a horse.
There were more ways to die in the Wild. But none more sure than what those riders had done—under what pressure he didn’t hope to guess. He’d never met a spook he couldn’t resist. He was still alive. And he didn’t call them fools for having died. Fools didn’t get past their first season up here.
The deep snow in the tin said the deaths had happened before the snowfall quit—last night or before; and he hadn’t heard a thing in the ambient. Nothing.
Possibly it just hadn’t had the range a rogue was credited to have. Possibly that was exaggerated—he didn’t take everything he’d heard as truth. He’dnever dealt with one. But granted the range of its sending wasn’texaggerated—then it might have been as much as two days ago, before he’d arrived on the Height.
Grim as it was, his mind was working on details like that while he went, and confusing Burn, who was thinking <bones> and trying to figure the smells that came to him. Burn didn’t understand past things as relevant; Burn wanted <travel fast,> with a vague notion of <eaten horses,> and hit a gait not kind to a sore leg and an aching head.
Guil made no complaint.
The sun had passed overhead and westward, behind the mountain wall, putting the snowy woods in the blued shadow which was the story half the day in the mountains, in any season; afternoon clouds formed above the peak—formed and drifted on with a little spit of snow, to drop rain on the lowlands.
Demi-shadows lengthened with afternoon, evergreens grown near-black against the snow. Thunder rumbled and echoed among the peaks.
That was a serious, imminent warning, not of the afternoon snow-flurries that were a daily event once autumn began, but of the truly dangerous storms that swept winter in their wake, that dumped snow nearly waist-deep to a man in a single night. The wild nighthorses fled the mountains with the coming of the first winter fronts. The spook-bears took to digging, and with their long, long claws made tunnels out again after such storms ended, retreating more and more until, when hunting grew sparse, they slept the deep sleep and waked again with spring.
There was that feeling in the air, worse than Jackson Peak, which he’d served out of Malvey—six days south and a thousand meters lower made a great deal of difference in the weather. Rogers Peak was that much farther north, Tarmin Ridge was higher than the villages on Jackson, Konig, or Darwin, and a man or a horse who disregarded that difference was in for trouble. Not a night on which he’d sit out and wait—not if a major storm was moving in.
<Burn walking,> he thought, and when Burn slowed, coughing in the bitter, thin air, he slid down and carried the packs himself. <Guil walking side by side with Burn, Guil riding, Guil walking, Guil riding—>
It had taken him years and argument to get that simple sequence of events notion through Burn’s present-time attention—now, soon. But Burn understood him now: Burn walked along with him, head lowered, coughing, as Burn’s rider struck the fastest walk a two-legged creature could sustain on other than level ground. Legs burned, lungs burned, sore leg hurt like hell, but it gave Burn the interval to catch his breath.
Then it was Guil up to Burn’s back again, another stint as fast as Burn could take it; and walk again. <Village gate at sunset,> Guil kept thinking, and <us walking, us riding, going fast.>
Burn understood. It wasn’t the worst or the first time they’d made time like this: it was <go fast,> that was all, and Burn was completely in agreement, feeling a storm wind and smelling <snow.> The tops of the evergreens sighed with a breath of wind and with successive gusts—then whipped over and tossed in a sudden knife-edged gale that dropped the temperature by tens before they’d passed the next winding of the trail.