“Then you need—”
“I said—stay with them. Do I need to explain? You’ve been wanting Stuart 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 is it?” 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 was Stuart, 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.>
But Burn was as confused as he was by the silence, and thought instead, <dead things in village.>
And the ambient was cold. So cold and still.
Then—wasn’t, quite.
<Riders,> he said to himself, spirits lifting. Somebody else was out in the hills, on the trail—or maybe in Tarmin itself, where he’d promised Burn they’d come by nightfall.
But he still found himself shying off from the thought. He wasn’t sure. He couldn’t be sure. The ambient, vague and strange and silent as it generally was, began to conjure thoughts of a warm fire already made, and a company of riders. Too good to be true.
It didn’t make sense with what he’d seen, evidence of dead riders—at least of a dead horse.
But riders might well be out hunting the rogue. Riders out of Tarmin village might be looking for it—and a bunch of them, in this storm, might be sitting safe behind Tarmin walls, trying to beacon him in through the whiteout of the blizzard, sensing a sane rider and a sane horse, and not the threat the rogue posed.
Maybe Cassivey had even done what he promised and called up to Tarmin to warn the villages. Even Shamesey might have. One lowland agency surely could have had the basic common sense to phone a warning of what the villages up here faced; and if that was the case, even if there’d been trouble here, then he could hope he came welcome, at a fire he didn’t have to build, and a sane barrier between him and the dark.
He wanted that. He was in one hell of a fix if Tarmin was shut to him — or lost.
He was spooked, was all. He’d spooked badly at Shamesey gates, and he hadn’t any patience at all with himself — he couldn’t afford it in the Wild, with the snow coming down in what was unquestionably now a full-scale, high-country blizzard — and a rogue somewhere in the question. Damned sure that there was trouble on the mountain, but he’d better sound sane to Tarmin riders, or they wouldn’t let him in. They’d leave him outside till they could get sober sense out of him, and that risked Burn. Calm down, he said to himself. Calm way down.
A couple more rises and falls of the road, a bending against the flank of the mountain ridge — and he could smell wood smoke in good earnest. It wasn’t at all as noisy as he thought a village Tarmin’s size should be — but it was all right, he said to himself: the heavy fall of snow and maybe a bad night last night could have sent a lot of the village to bed early, and left the rider camp on watch.
Burn saw <horses.> Burn was picking up something that came through to him as a liveliness in the otherwise silent ambient.
Burn called out suddenly, that sharp, high challenge to another horse that shook Burn’s sides, and there was a <darkness, instantly turning toward them,> instantly in the ambient as Burn imaged <Burn and Guil.>
Something came back to him — a familiar echo, he wasn’t sure from where or when, but he’d known that feeling. Burn said <shifty-image horse> and answered it <fire, dark, and pain.>
A shot came off the rocks near him, ricocheted and whined. Burn jumped in utter startlement and a second shot splintered bark off an evergreen.
Instant, too, the image that came back, <shifting shadows, changing shapes, > <foam on water> and <ice-glisten.>
Damn, he knew those horses.
Jonas. Luke.
Hawley.
He didn’t consciously think. It hit his gut and it hit Burn’s simultaneously, and Burn slid immediately into fighting mode, ready to settle accounts.
“<No!>” Guil sent, and Burn shied away from the challenge— imaged <gun!> and jumped into a run as a gunshot echoed off the mountain and shattered bark right next to them. They were at the village gates—snow-hazed, shadows of men and horses were there. It was <Jonas and Shadow.>