Stuart hadn’t caused what had happened—not directly—as Stuart hadn’t caused this newest disaster—directly. But that hardly mattered: Guil Stuart was the kind of man trouble always happened next to, and there wasn’t a friend Stuart had in this Hallanslaker tavern… not now and not before some poor sod out there had died with the horror this death had about it.
Because that was what lurked at the core and around the edges of the stranger’s message: death come singing to as many as wanted to listen. Harper and his associates knocked back two rounds of drinks in quick succession, not the only patrons trying to drown the feeling that pulled at old feuds and seethed up through old matters long settled, even among themselves.
“Damned fool,” Harper said, as the horse-borne image made yet one more round of the camp, but what he imaged in his own mind was, in particular, a young fool, quick to offense, too quick to pull a knife. Drunk at the time, as Harper himself had been, night camp on the road, hard decisions to be made; and Stuart in no good mood. But neither had Harper or his brother been in a charitable mind toward a sullen outsider.
Gerry had died years later, of something Stuart hadn’t had a thing to do with, just the breaks as they happened in the High Wild. Gerry was dead and Stuart was alive… nothing to do with each other, those sets of facts, those events that left one man alive, one dead; but it wasn’t damned fair, in Harper’s thinking, and Harper didn’t want to see the face that kept intruding into his mind in constant image, preoccupying his attention like an unwelcome, waking dream.
Most of all, he didn’t want to feel what he was feeling in the air. He didn’t want that sending that was rubbing in the fact of Stuart’s presence in the camp like salt into a wound: Stuart, Stuart, Stuart.
Damn his trouble-prone, arrogant, son-of-a-bitch ways that plowed ahead into a situation when smarter men said stop, don’t go. Men and horses had breaking points, and the High Wild, when a man or a horse grew careless, always won. Minds snapped. Illusions became fact. A man wandered right into his death, blithe and believing, until madness sucked his companions down into that delusionary hell with him.
So somebody else had died. On Stuart’s side, this time. One of Stuart’s friends, most likely.
Good riddance.
Harper carried a scar across his ribs. Stuart had one to match. So had Gerry. Draw, it had been, then—thanks to a trucker’s interference. Hallanslakers had said no go, and maintained a convoy wasn’t safe on the mountain. Hallanslakers had had damned good reasons for saying so, including the higher fees they ought to have gotten for doing it; but Stuart, the only outside rider the convoy had hired on, he’d pushed, claimed of course they could make it, and he’d bring them through—for no extra charge, as if money didn’t matter.
And Stuart, of course, had gotten his way, his way being far more palatable to the trucker boss, so it was go on up the road at the same fee despite the risk or lose their reputation and look like cowards to the clients.
Two Hallanslakers had died on that haul, swept away down the mountain, thanks to a snapped cable and toppling truck that had nearly taken Gerry out as well. Knocked cold, he’d been, by that free-flying cable that had taken Gerry’s partner down.
Stuart in the number of the dead? The man whose stupid-stubborn fault it was they were there with that faulty cable? that unstable truck?
No such luck.
And Gerry hadn’t fought Stuart again. Gerry hadn’t fought much of anything after that trip, not even after his cracked head healed. Gerry was never the same after that. Gerry had taken hires he shouldn’t have taken, loned it across the mountains in a season he shouldn’t have. Gerry’s sense was gone, thanks to that cable, and Gerry’s heart had gone, swept down the mountainside with his partner, and that was that.
A brother couldn’t hold him. A brother couldn’t stop the change in him. Gerry’d been on his own when he died. He’d chosen that, as others who lost partners chose to die. He’d ridden out to his death. His horse… they’d had to shoot it when it came to camp without him. They’d had no choice. They’d been lucky: for a moment, it had been sane.
The feeling in the camp grew darker, and more angry: nighthorse politics, sexual politics, that shivered on the autumn wind.
Death. Sex and death and a rider Stuart knew and slept with.
Harper had his knife with him. He knew where Stuart was now, disquieting feeling. He knew that the ripple of query had just gotten to Stuart.
Stuart knew and the ripple came racing back again, through nighthorse minds and human, a feeling like the pause between the lightning and the thunder.
The camp-boss watched from the Gate Tavern porch as Guil Stuart came walking toward the camp gate, following that reverse tide of rumor. Slight, smallish, dressed in brown fringed leathers: the reality behind the image. Stuart’s long blond hair was loose, a borderer’s vanity—and he carried knives, one in the boot and one on the hip.
That was a manner, as the saying had it. A definite manner which gave not a damn about the rules of no-conflict that prevailed in a camp this size… a manner that flatly challenged the camp-boss to call him on it.
But say that Stuart wasn’t the only one, and that Stuart carried at least two of his in the open: a clear warning. Say that the camp couldn’t enforce the rule: there were riders—especially borderers like Stuart—who had specific reason to guard their backs, generally against other borderers.
Borderers, the rider-guides born to the High Wild, were the ones who knew the routes at the extreme points of settled land. They were a necessary fact of rider society—they stayed in Shamesey camp only during the winters, when the routes were closed to trucks and riders alike; and Shamesey locals, the guards over cattle and town edges, hadn’t the knowledge the borderers had of each other. No one local knew who was right and who was wrong in their quarrels, out in the far land where civilized law didn’t apply and where those knives settled grievances.
So Lyle Wesson, sipping a slow, speculative pint on the porch of the Gate Tavern, kept entirely out of it, not seeing anything in his venue in question.
Borderer business. Borderers looking for each other, carrying bad news, was what Wesson picked up. He couldn’t identify some of the other feelings he was getting on the backwash out of the farther camp—he didn’t like much of what he could identify, so he kept a purely human ear to the matter, awaiting human specifics.
More than an ear: Dart, old himself, limping a little (it was arthritis in the hindquarters, an affliction they shared, with the winter nip in the air) left the comfort of the nighthorse den nearest the tavern to stand watch over the commons, too.
And as Stuart approached, on foot, Dart imaged <dark,> —and something so unquiet it shivered along the nerves.
“Man’s walking,” Ndele said, moving out of the doorway to stand at Wesson’s elbow.
“He’s being followed.”
“A man can’t help that,” Ndele said.
Truth. That Stuart chose to walk and not ride gave Wesson, who disliked and distrusted borderers in general, a better opinion of him: Stuart, for his part, had meant to keep it a human matter.
But a living darkness trailed Stuart as he passed them without a word, headed for the three strangers waiting for him just outside the gate. It trailed Stuart through the gathering dusk, regardless of Stuart’s intentions, a head-down, angry darkness with which no rider would be willing to argue.