Burn brought his head up, came over and nudged him hard. “What was that for?” he asked. The sound of his own voice startled him. He didn’t use it often—only as often as Burn’s behavior defied imaging.
Burn nudged him again, decided he was going to lick his sore leg—“Hell!” he said, fending off the help. Burn left wet, sticky grain on his trousers. And wasn’t helping.
<Guil and Aby,> Burn imaged to him, then. And as sloppily licked his cheek. So Burn thought he was crazy. He rested his head against Burn’s neck, arm on his shoulders, really, really wishing he could fall into the icy-blanketed cot over there and not move for two days.
But a man—or a woman—paid out promises, or lived a liar.
So supper and bacon it had to be.
The snow came down in puffs and stuck, thick on the tall trees, making precariously balanced loads on branches that dumped down on rider and horse when they brushed beneath.
Maybe they should camp for the night, Danny thought. They couldn’t see where they were going. He didn’t know what was behind Cloud’s insistence on moving. Trust your horse, he kept telling himself—and telling himself if there were anything out here in the dark he would know it through Cloud’s senses; but the tales he’d heard around the camp firesides said there were exceptions, that horses could be tricked, too, and walk right into traps, a sending so seamless and on so many levels that even a horse couldn’t see the lie in it.
<Cloud stopping,> he thought, but Cloud kept going.
<Cloud stopping. Danny getting off.> Cloud paid no attention.
He shifted his weight then, intending to make Cloud break stride, then to slide down. But Cloud gave a pitch of his hindquarters and imaged something so strange, so disquieting an impression of multiple minds that it sent chills down Danny’s back. He lost all inclination to get off.
<Cloud stopping,> he insisted, but that feeling only grew, more and more distinct, like a swarming of half-crazed animal minds, <food, fight, gnaw.> Cloud hadn’t been carrying it on a conscious leveclass="underline" it was out there, and Cloud had just sopped it up and not reacted to it, not passed it even to the rider on his back. Being transparent, that was what the seniors called it. The predators were good at it. And he’d startled Cloud into at least a quiet, body-touching-body sending.
“I don’t like this, Cloud. Wait. Stop.”
<Tumbling over one another. Logs. Jumble of logs. Big, little images, high and low. Smell of smoke. Logs. Gnawing at wall. Taste of flour. Taste of blood. Tugging at human hand.>
“Cloud, stop!” He grabbed at Cloud’s mane mid-neck and pulled up, signaled <back up> with his legs, but Cloud ducked his head, jerking the mane out of his hand, and plowed ahead.
<Rogue,> Danny thought, and helplessly remembered: <Fire on glass. Log buildings. Village gates. —Cloud stopping. Cloud stopping.>
But Cloud sent <blood > and <fight > and carried him willy-nilly toward the chaos in Cloud’s thoughts.
Maybe the rogue was calling to them. Maybe Cloud was going crazy himself. He didn’t know what to do. If he got off he couldn’t hold Cloud back at all. Cloud would be helpless, prey to whatever Cloud believed he was seeing.
<Men taking Danny’s gun,> he sent. <Harper taking gun. Cloud stopping.>
Suddenly walls appeared through the veil of falling snow, walls at the side of the road—<log walls, a bell-arch, standing hazed in falling snow. Gates wide open to the night—the main gate standing wide.>
And rising from inside those walls: <eat and gnaw. Blood and flesh. Sugar and salt.>
<Nighthorse,> Cloud sent of a sudden. <Angry nighthorse.> And charged the open gates so suddenly that Danny scarcely grabbed a handful of mane.
They burst through into a street still reeking of smoke, a street where vermin by the hundreds, black against the snow, swarmed from under Cloud’s charge, snarling and spitting and squalling as they fled the street for the porches, the porches for the shadows. Vermin poured over walls, ran down the street ahead of them, a hissing recalcitrance all up and down the street.
Something sizeable went over the porch of a house near them, a house with what looked bodies lying on the porch. Scavengers scurried across the unmoving shapes and into the dark between the houses.
<Nighthorse,> was all Cloud’s sending. <Angry horse. Dark and blood. Clouds and lightning.>
Danny sat paralyzed on Cloud’s back as Cloud paced down the street. There was no real defiance, no <fight> coming back at them—the scavengers rolled back like a black tide in the force of Cloud’s warning, willy-wisps running for cover, lorry-lies clambering up over the walls, flitting shadows diving off porches and under them and down the spaces between the houses.
There was no horse present. No answer to Cloud’s challenge. Charred, skeletal timbers that had been buildings. The stench of smoke. A burned building standing next to a stone one that wasn’t touched at all, its windows appearing intact.
Bodies—thick in some places, bodies and what was left of them, sometimes just gnawed pieces, animal or human, he wasn’t sure.
A backbone that small teeth hadn’t taken apart turned up in the snow where something had dragged it and left it. For a second he wasn’t sure what it was. He’d not thought before what pieces would resist the scavengers longest—if a human or a horse went down out here. He’d not seen anything to match this destruction, not even from the images seniors carried with their stories—nothing, nothing this complete.
“Anyone?” he called aloud, scared to make a noise. His voice sounded thin and strange in the snowy silence that had succeeded the hissing.
He sent <horse and rider> into the ambient, but he feared no villager holed up in any refuge would dare put their head up until they heard a human voice. “Hello! Anyone hear me? Call out! You don’t need to come outside—just yell! I’ll find you!”
There wasn’t any sound. Scared, he thought, if anybody was alive—he’d endured only a few minutes of the scavenger babble before Cloud had sent them running; and he’d had a horse under him.
Any survivor would have had to hold out sane—God, since he’d seen the images of the attack. The village had cried out into the ambient for help—with only the rogue to image for them. No one had come. No one had answered. There were supposed to be riders here. And they hadn’t saved the village.
“Anyone?” he called out, louder. “I’m a rider up from Shamesey! Do you need help?” Stupid, stupid question. “God, —can anybody hear me?”
He thought then that he did hear something, thin and far, he couldn’t be sure, except he thought he heard it through Cloud’s ears, too, and Cloud’s ears had pricked up.
Then Cloud quickened his pace, imaging <disease> and <fear> and <fire> as he went—Cloud went as far as a building at the end of the street, and stopped, a shiver going up his leg, his head up, his ears up—<disease,> Cloud maintained. <Blood. Vermin.>
But something else came through: <room with bars> and <dark> and <fear> and <cold,> all jumbled up together.
“Who’s in there?” Danny called out. “Come out! I’m right outside. It’s safe.”
“We can’t,” a voice cried from inside. “We’re locked in. God, oh, God, get us out of here.”
He wasn’t sure. He had no gun, he had no advice; he only had Cloud to keep vermin from going at his legs if there was anything lurking under that wooden porch, and if the rogue should come back—God knew what they could do, at this bottled-up end of the street and with the wide-open gate and escape far, far off at the other end.