Rider at the Gate

by C. J. Cherryh

  In the same moment he felt Cloud’s attention skitter over him— Cloud just brushing by his thoughts—and he thought of the fire and of and He liked the biscuits. They weren’t as good as mama’s. But they were going to taste good on a cold night. Cloud was going to like the biscuits. He ought to tell them use less soda. That was the taste they could use less of. He’d asked his mama, on one of his visits home, and she’d been making biscuits at the stove and he’d stood right there and paid real careful attention to the measures and everything she did, because he really missed those biscuits.

  He stuck a little wood in the fire, not too much. They wanted less flame than coals in this wind. Nothing to carry into the trees. Hope they had a decent meal tonight. Watt scorched everything.

  Always on the edge of catching the pan afire. He was better.

  Close, close, close, he mustn’t look up. Little nervousness among the horses—they could solve it. He didn’t need to look up.

 

 
  Mama said they’d have to. So they got better at it. Even Sam.

  Mama would buy some scuffed up table or chair from a shop or another household and do a little sanding and fixing and painting.

  Then she’d trade it to a store or direct to an individual for more than she paid for it.

  Or sometimes she just did refurbishings for the same owner— any of which paid money that came in handy before he started bringing in money and fixed the place up.

  Mama would be sitting there with the bread baking, all the while she’d be painting flowers on a chair—she liked that part—or sanding and swearing—she always swore when she sanded—

  There was always some piece of furniture in the apartment that you weren’t supposed to touch or sit on, and it always made his nose run when she’d been painting.

  But the bread-smell was over all of it,

  Harper never stopped watching him. Just watching.

  They’d warned the village. They’d advised everybody lock the doors and the shutters and stay inside no matter what. People had guns. They had their storm-shutters locked.

  The rogue-feeling went away and it came back, maybe two, maybe three hours into the night, as if it was feeling them over, and it wasn’t a thing anybody could catch with human senses. You didn’t know when you’d started being afraid. You just knew by the prickling terror behind you that it was there again. A shutter banging in the wind. Rattle of sleet against the roof. A sense of presence…

  Something was near the walls.

  “It’s Vadim,” Mina murmured as the three of them, sitting by their fireside in the shelter, listened. “God, it’s Vadim.”

  “No!” Tara said sharply, because it was coming by way of their own horses now, she could hear them, could hear Flicker take up that refrain. Mina shoved her chair back and Luisa grabbed her arm, arguing with her not to go outside, to stay with them.

  “That thing could be anywhere on the mountain. It’s no good going out there. God, it’s echoing in every creature in the woods, can’t you hear it? That’s what it’s doing—that’s why it’s so damn loud—”

  The whole mountain seemed to echo it, loneliness, mourning over something lost. It echoed failures, or things undone, a terrible melancholy. It gnawed, it burrowed, it ran, it flew, it crawled—it slavered with winter-hunter and ached in rut and leapt along the ground, aching with loneliness and fear—

  Then it dissolved, flew apart in screaming rage.

  Flicker was still there. Skip and Green were, Tara could feel them through Flicker’s noisy presence and, Luisa’s advice to the contrary, she went and snatched up her coat.

  “Tara,” Luisa protested.

  “I’m fine, dammit, Flicker’s not. I’m going out there.”

  “We’ll all go,” Mina said.

  So that was the way it was—they went out to the porch and down into the nightbound yard. Snow was gusting on a fierce and biting wind.

  Then a presence came to them,

  Tara thought.

  She lost her balance—slipped and skidded on the ice. Mina had her arm.

  A presence so… lost… so idly strayed from reality… came flitting through her senses.

  it imaged.
  Brionne with the horses. All the horses loving her. Brionne in the moonlight, in the snow… the numbing, gentle snow… >

  “Get away from us!” Tara shouted into the dark.

 

  <“Tara!”>

  Luisa hurt her arm, she grabbed it so hard. She slid on the ice and Mina grabbed both of them.

  went out across the ridge.

  “It’s her,” Tara said. “It’s the Goss kid—God, stay here. Keep the gates shut.”

  “Where are you going?”

  The ambient was so live it didn’t need a horse near.

  the voice cried on insubstantial winds.

  Tara ran, sleet stinging her face—she ducked through the village gate and let it slam behind her; she ran not for where instinct or whatever drove her told her to go: instinct was screaming at her to go the other way. She ran against it—ran for reason, ran down the center of a deserted, sleet-hammered street, all the way to the end of the street, her throat hurting with the cold air. She ran up the wooden, icy steps to the marshal’s office and pounded her fist on the door.

  She heard someone coming, footsteps inside. The feeling of presence behind her all around her—was overwhelming, a wave of living anger rolling toward them, from all around the walls.

  “Who’s there?” the marshal called out. “Who’s out there?”

  “Tara Chang!” she shouted back, holding to the rail—resisting the impulse to look back and see if anything was in the street. “It’s here—” she said, and got a chill breath as the marshal opened the door. The marshal’s wife was holding a pistol aimed at her: she paid it only passing attention. “It’s the rogue. It’s the kid. Brionne. She’s with it. She’s wanting her mama and her papa. You’ve got to send word down to Tuck—keep those gates shut. No matter what!”

  “It’s a kid out there,” the marshal began. “We’ve got to shoot that horse.”

  “It’s hell out there.” She found herself shaking. “It’s my partners out there. It’s our men. It’s that kid. We can’t help them. We can’t do anything but hold that damned gate, do you hear me? Get out there! Keep that gate shut, I don’t care who wants in! That horse comes with her and everything in the woods comes next! Keep it out!”

  The marshal went for his coat and his scarf and his shotgun. “Watch the boys!” the marshal said to his wife. “If it’s the Goss kid—she might try to get to the boys! Keep that door locked!”

  Tara stood there shivering in the wind, trying to keep her hand from freezing to the icy porch rail—trying to be deaf and blind and numb to the ambient. Mina and Luisa were with the horses. She knew.

  She knew that the Goss boys were still in lockup.

  She knew that Brionne was with the rogue.

  She knew that Brionne was calling to all that was hers—her mother, her father, her brothers, her friends and acquaintances… every one.

  Brionne had never gotten on Flicker’s good side. But she was calling to and > in the lame way she’d always imaged their names.

  She called to But not to her. Not to Tara Chang. Brionne hated her. She felt the lost presence flit past her in anger, and she ran for the camp, assaulted by the ambient.

  <“Papa!”> it wailed.

  Shutters were opening. Lights from those windows flared out onto the snow, here and there down the village street. A door opened, a larger spill of light.

  Answering that voice.

  That was the way they heard it. The town was ready and armed for a rogue.

  They heard a lost kid. They heard Brionne Goss wanting in, wanting rescue.

  “Stay inside!” Tara screamed at the tanner, who came out on his porch. “That’s it, damn it! Get that door shut!”

  She didn’t know whether he listened. She ran for the only source of help, half-blinded by the sleet, through the narrow gap of the Little Gate, into the rider camp—and had a clear sense of Flicker’s sending, that shutting out the world.

  But Skip and Green were absent from the noise. There was only a darkness wanting wanting

  “Mina? Luisa?” She ran for the den, skidding on the uneven ice—caught herself on the corner post as she came inside, unprepared for the darkness that rushed at her— was all she knew.

  It flared past like a black rage and she pasted herself to the wall, blind and deaf to everything but and and as it passed—

  she realized then, and and she heard so intense and so close a sending that she couldn’t see where she was.

  Gunfire, then. In the village, outside, she wasn’t sure. Shots were going off, echoing off the walls.

  <“Luisa!”> she yelled, trying to get through the ambient, but came down like blizzard. She wasn’t sure of Luisa’s whereabouts. She wasn’t sure of Green’s. She only knew Flicker’s, and she didn’t want to lead Flicker to disaster.

  she sent and felt rather than saw her way—as if the whole world had gone to snow.

  She reached the open air and the blast of the wind, she wanted and she went the way she’d sensed Mina go.

  But she heard someone screaming then, into an ambient gone red and black amid the white, a voice beyond the village wall, a voice near the village gate.

  <“That’s my daughter! ”> it cried—and she saw

  An image of as and and came flying together in the air, assembled itself in a rush that reached the heart, the mind, the gut, one creature, one self, one mind—anything else was and Tara was

  She thought she saw—sight came fleetingly through the —the outer gate of the rider camp standing wide against the dark.

  She thought she saw snow whirling about her—white, thick snowfall, and wind so loud she couldn’t hear the screaming or the howling it made. It just was, and the snow was, and the cold was.

  came up beside her, it brushed against her, it called to her, and her hands knew its shape, found its mane to clench onto, and her body knew where, as she launched herself, she would find and and

  Then—then she was and and, blind and deaf as she was, she became the whiteout, she became the blizzard— blind and deaf and

  Nothing could touch her. If she’d had another purpose she’d lost it. If she’d had another destination she didn’t know.

  She was in the woods again, sweeping through the trees, and nothing more.

  Harper hadn’t moved. Quig had come back with another load of firewood and dumped it.

  But suddenly something was wrong—Danny felt it, just as the firewood struck the ground and scattered, like something witnessed at that half-aware substitute for sleep, a thing of strange importance and insignificant aspect. He felt a jolt, just the faint brush of something like horses, running horses—and acute fear—like Shamesey streets, when the horses imaged together—

  The horses were in it—they snorted and milled about. But that wasn’t the only source. It was coming from somewhere completely opposite. It was huge, and full of anger, and it had a thousand feet. It moved—

  Danny sent. “What in hell is it?” Quig asked the air in general. “Could be a cat,” Harper said.

  “Cat, hell!” Quig reached for Danny’s arm. Danny hadn’t expected it, and scrambled backward from Quig’s hand, hit on his rump as Quig scrambled after him—and he scrambled away, scrambled up, turned and ran.

  A weight hit from his back—he fell, skidded on the snow with that weight on his back trying to pin his arms. He spat snow from his mouth, dug with his knees, to get to

  “Back that horse off!” Harper yelled from somewhere, and he panicked, wanted wanted

  He felt the jolt of nighthorse feet on the ground, sharp pivot, and

  But none fired, or he’d gone deaf. He was still spitting snow when whoever had fallen on him hauled him up by the scruff and shook him, and somebody else grabbed his arm and cuffed him on the ear.

  He could see Harper then. He knew where he was, in camp with the Hallanslakers, in the dark, in front of Harper, and Cloud was

  Cloud had left him. He didn’t know what could make Cloud leave him—Cloud never had, never would, but he felt something so scary, so dark, so threatening in the ambient—

  Then he felt as if the mountain were flying apart, as if the ground were dropping out from under all of them, as if the trees were about to fall on them.

  “It’s the damn kid!” somebody yelled.

  somebody was sending. He thought it was the man who was holding him, but he didn’t feel calm—he felt as if he were drowning in ice water, sinking and sinking in it, the whole world gone from flying apart to folding in on him, pieces coming together, heavier and heavier, the red-haired rider, and Stuart—

  “Kid!” Someone cuffed him hard, across the face, and in that moment’s shock he tasted blood.

  Blood was part of the ambient.

  Blood was the smell, was the wind, was the air, was the taste on the tongue—blood was the anger and the envy and the hate and people were shooting—

  “Get that horse back,” Harper said to him, holding his face in a hurtful grip. “You hear me, kid. Get that horse back!”

  He tried.

  “It’s his horse,” Watt said out of the dark behind him, and Harper hissed:

  “It’s the rogue, fool. That’s what it is—watch the dark! Watch the dark, dammit, and hold on to the horses! Keep them here!”

  But more real than Harper’s voice came something moving and dark—an ambient full of screams, cold of snow under Danny’s hands—he tasted blood and sprang up and ran, with

  “That’s Tarmin,” Quig said. “That’s Tarmin gates, damn, that’s Tarmin, do you see it? They’re shooting each other!”

  “You got to catch him, you got to, you fool! Stop him! He’s doing it!”

  <—fire blazing up, firelight on snow. Gunshots. People yelling—people falling under him—>

  He couldn’t hear. Somebody hit him across the face. His head snapped back and then he was in the woods again. His right ankle had folded, but the hands that held his arms had held him up, dizzied as he was, and cut the blood off from his lower arms.

  He felt the entire side of his face hot and numb, and he was he was he was the silence—>

  He wanted his family. His. Now. And they were

  A second time a blow landed across his face. Second time someone shook him.

  “God, shut him up!” someone yelled, and he saw “He’s spooked the horses, shit! Stop!”

  but he was

  He had no other chance. He got his knee under him, he lurched to his feet, branches breaking—immediately recoiled from a sheer drop, and ran along the edge.

  <(Voices—screams in the houses. Fire reflecting on window-glass. Embers glowing on the wind.)>

  He ran and ran, breaking through branches, plowing through thickets, blind, desperate. His side caught an agonizing stitch and the world was still churning with images,

  But snow began to muffle the shouts and the screams, as if the wind-driven white that skirled through the dark had deadened the pain and smothered the fear.

  He walked, breathing through his mouth, holding his side, knowing he was free of Harper, but equally well aware he had no gun, no supplies, no idea where he was going.

  <(Log walls and fire. Gates open. Going through streets, on horseback.

  <(Looking. Searching.

  <(Days-old ice crunching under three-toed nighthorse feet.

  <(Everything the same as she remembers, all the street the same, but windows reflect orange with fire. Fire through veils of sleet, sleet flying out of the dark, touching face, making stars in nighthorse mane—

  <(Gunshot. Horse jumping forward, horse wanting fight, wanting her, wanting—what horse can’t find.

  <(Red-haired woman.

  <(But she can have red hair like that. She can be grown like that. No one can ever stop her again, no one can tell her no.

  <(Wanting what horse wants. Wanting what she can’t find, a mind she doesn’t hear, but listening, listening, all up and down the streets she knows, because it might be here.