“Could be Stuart,” Danny said. He couldn’t tell even yet what it was. It was far or it was quiet, and he suddenly suspected that if it was in fact Stuart, it could sound like that. Stuart and Burn wouldn’t necessarily be a noisy presence.
A horse had come up onto the walk outside. Cloud wanted <Danny, > and Cloud wasn’t alone in signaling human attention to the sudden change in the air.
Jonas went and opened the door—Jonas didn’t tell anybody what he thought and you didn’t get it even now through the ambient, not past Shadow’s blurred images—but Cloud came in, snow-blanketed, with thunderous steps on the boards.
Knocked into a stack of pails as he dodged past Jonas. They fell and rattled. Cloud spooked another couple of feet and stopped, shedding snow with a whip of his tail.
Danny found himself on his feet, not alone from the snow-shower: Carlo and Randy were beside him. Hawley’s cards had scattered on the floor. Horses outside and inside were feeling an undefined presence in the ambient, the echo of living creatures out in the woods, all reflecting what the creature in the next territory over had heard in its range.
Something large was definitely out there in the woods. Maybe morethan one.
“Is it the rogue?” Randy wanted to know, picking it up himself, or reading the distress in the room.
“Hush,” Carlo said. “They know. Let them alone.”
Carlo had the right of it: they didn’t want distraction—but they didn’tknow, that was the trouble. It might be any large creature— several of which had gone over the wall last night, and might have grown braver during the day: autumn brought voracious hunger, hunger that outweighed fears and better sense. The little slinks were back in the upper end of the village, around the marshal’s office, Danny was sure of it—fast-moving scavengers that would be over the wall or into the cracks before a horse got up the street. There was no good chasing them and they did no harm with the horses here.
They might well be the source of some of the alarm, although he had a strange conviction it was generally eastward—like waves rolling on the sea, one to the next, to the next hearer.
“If it’s Stuart he’s on his way here,” Jonas said. “He’ll hear us in good time.”
“Weather’s one hell of a mess out there,” Hawley said.
“Doesn’t keep this from being the safest place in the district,” Luke said. “Just sit still. He’ll hear us. He’ll want shelter tonight. You hearthat out there?”
Cloud was dripping puddles onto the board floor, snow melting off his back. The view outside, beyond the porch, had been snow-veiled, enough to haze the buildings across the street. Danny wanted <going to the gate,> and Luke agreed with him. That was two.
“But we don’t know it’s Stuart,” Jonas said.
“I’m going,” Danny said. “You can do what you like. He’s close. Whatever it is—he’s close—” Because that was suddenly the feeling he had. It wasStuart.
But he got a <Danny stopping> from Jonas, so strong he did stop and look back.
“I came here by myself,” Danny said. “I make my own choices.”
“That’s fine. Use your head.”
“I am using it. He might need some help out there.”
“He could,” Luke said, redeeming himself in Danny’s sight, right there, clean and clear.
Jonas wasn’t happy. <Cold, snow, and vermin> dominated the images. But Jonas thought about <Stuart,> too, or somebody did. Jonas, still frowning, picked up his jacket. “Fisher,” Jonas said, “you stay with the village kids. It might not be him.”
“Then you need—”
“I said—stay with them. Do I need to explain? You’ve been wantingStuart into the ambient for an hour, Fisher. Use your head.” <Rogue and panic, Carlo and Randy afoot among the horses, down at the gate. Guns and gunfire.>
It wasn’t a slur, he heard that. It was even good sense, keeping the boys out of the range of trouble—he understood it; and Jonas was right; he might have given the rogue an image to use on them. He’d been stupid. He just didn’t want to be the one staying in the store.
But there wasn’t another likely choice to guard the boys. And ‘Fisher’ wasn’t ‘boy.’ He didn’t protest when the Westmans and Hawley picked up their winter gear and their guns and went out to the porch.
He went outside himself, just far enough to see it was a real blizzard developing, worse than any storm he’d ever seen come down in Shamesey district. You couldn’t see across the street in the blued twilight.
If it was Stuart out there in that whiteout, they might have to guide him in. And that was dangerous, because they didn’t know what they might be calling to in the ambient, or what might come back at them out of it.
Didn’t need a junior to go calling out into the storm wide-open, he said to himself. Jonas had been polite when he’d suggested that village kids were a liability and hadn’t included him in that number. It wasn’t safe to go bunch down there by the gate and listen into the storm for whatever happened to image back at you. Jonas had a reason to be hesitant just to go out there, that close to the wall.
A lot of reason. He went back inside, shut the door before they lost all the warm air—stamped off the snow.
“What isit?” Randy asked, and his older brother elbowed him with,
“Shut up, for God’s sake, they don’t know.”
“It’s all right,” Danny found himself saying. “These guys—if you had to be in this situation, they’re as good as you could hire anywhere. They won’t open that gate until they’re sure.”
<Guns shooting> was in the ambient. And, with an edge of anguish that turned to a darker, more desperate feeling, from at least one of the boys:
<Brionne.>
He couldn’t answer that hard problem for them—not with anything they wanted to hear. <Men shooting,> he thought before he could stop it. Because they would—without a question their survival was at stake.
Because by now if their younger sister wasn’t bones in the forest out there—she was half of the rogue. If she wasn’t dead—and the boys thought not—she rode it; she made at least half of any decision to run, to fight, to kill the village, to kill even their mother.
With her brothers in the ambient they’d have her attention, that was what he guessed. They were all the reference points the girl had now. The rogue was going to come back sooner or later. He had no question of it.
Just—if it wasStuart, if they could get Stuart in with them, along with Jonas, then the odds began to shift the other way.
The snow came down so thick there was no telling they were on the road, except the lack of trees in front of them, and that could almost as well mean a drop off the mountain if they missed a winding of the road.
It wasn’t a time to hurry, no matter how cold. It was a time to have made camp, if they’d planned to spend the night in the open.
There couldn’t be that much farther to go to Tarmin. He wasn’t completely sure of his distances, but they ought to be there by now. They hadn’t seen further signs of destruction. The snow was too thick and coming down too hard, now—but the ambient had been damned quiet. Damned quiet.
<Village,> he insisted to Burn. <Warm den.>
Burn thought, he would have expected Burn would think, <females.>