Fawn stretched and clenched her fingers. “My left hand, mostly. Up the arm it fades. Except I feel a little shivery all over.”
Fairbolt muttered, “But Dag hasn’t got a…” His face screwed up, and he scowled in a confusion briefly greater than Fawn’s.
“It’s…how shall I put this,” said Hoharie in some reluctance. “If the rest of his ground is as stressed as the bit I feel, his body must be in a pretty bad way.”
“How bad, how?” snapped Fairbolt. Which made Fawn rather glad, because she was much too frightened to yell at the medicine maker herself.
Hoharie opened her hands in a wide, frustrated shrug. “Well, not quite enough to kill him, evidently.”
Fairbolt bared his teeth at her, but then sat back in a glum slump. “If I get any sleep at all tonight, Hoharie, it won’t be your doing.”
Fawn leaned forward and stared at her hand. “I was kind of hoping you would tell me I was a stupid little farmer girl imagining things. Everybody else used to, but now that I want it…” She looked up, and added uneasily, “Dag’s not going to get in some kind of trouble for this making, is he?”
“Well, if—when he gets back I guarantee I’ll be asking him a few questions,” said Hoharie fervently. “But they won’t have anything to do with this argument before the camp council.”
“It was all my fault, truly,” said Fawn. “Dar made me afraid to tell. But I thought—I thought Fairbolt had a need and a right to know, on account of the company.”
Fairbolt pulled himself together, and said gravely, “Thank you, Fawn. You did the right thing. If you feel any changes in this, please tell me or Hoharie, will you?”
Fawn nodded earnestly. “So what do we do now?”
“What we generally have to do, farmer girl,” Fairbolt sighed. “We wait.”
13
D ag woke well after dark, to roll his aching body up, pull on his boots without lacing them, and stagger to the slit trench. The night air was chill and dank, but the two patrollers on duty had kept the campfire burning with a cheery orange glow. One waved to Dag as he wandered past, and Dag returned the silent salute. The scene looked deceptively peaceful, as though they watched over comrades merely sleeping.
After relieving himself, Dag considered more sleep. His bone-deep grinding fatigue of earlier seemed scarcely improved. The marsh remained silent—this hour should have been raucous with frogs, insects, and night birds—and eerily odorless. Either the reek of its normal life or the stench of death should have saturated this foggy air. Well, the rot would come in time, a week or a month or six or next spring. Which, while it would doubtless smell repulsive enough to gag anyone for a mile downwind, would be a first sign of life beginning its repair of the blight—rot had a lively ground of its own.
Dag stared at the grove, the campfire seeming like a lantern among the trees, remembering his patrol’s first approach…only yesterday? If this was after midnight—he glanced at the wheel of the stars—he could call it two days ago, though that seemed scarcely more reasonable. Frowning thoughtfully, he counted a careful two hundred paces away from the grove and found a stump to sit upon. He stretched out his aching legs. If he had opened his groundsense at this distance before without triggering the trap, presumably he might do it again.
He hissed in surprise as he eased his veil apart for the first time in days. Cramping, Mari had described his closure, and that seemed barely adequate to describe this shaking agony. Normally, he paid as little attention to his own ground as he did to his body, the two conflating seamlessly. Meaning to examine the groundlocked makers, Dag instead found his inner senses wrenched onto himself.
In the ground of his right arm a faint heat lingered, last vestiges of the healing reinforcement snatched from, or gifted by, Hoharie’s apprentice. Over time such a reinforcement was slowly absorbed, converted from the donor’s ground into that of the recipient’s, not unlike the way his food became Dag. Even this trace would be gone altogether in a few more weeks. In the ground of his left arm…
His ghost hand was not there at the moment. The ground of his arm was spattered with a dozen dark spots, black craters seeming like holes burned in a cloth from scattered sparks. A few more throbbed on his neck and down his left side. Surrounding them in gray rings were minute patches of blight. This wasn’t just fading reverberation from a malice-handling like Utau’s, though that echoed in him too. The spots were the residue, he realized, of the ground he’d ripped from the malice in that desperate night-fight. It was like nothing he’d ever seen before, yet immediately recognizable. Strangely familiar seemed the perfect summation, actually.
But then, he’d never before met up with anyone crazed enough to try to ground-rip a malice. Maybe he was seeing why it was not a recommended technique? Injury or healing to a living body injured or healed its ground in turn; ground-ripping or prolonged exposure to blight killed a body through its ravaged ground. What was this peculiar infestation doing to his body now? Nothing good, he suspected. With this map to guide him, he could trace deep aches in his flesh that centered over the splotches, if barely distinguishable from his present general malaise. Pain marked damage, normally. What kind of damage?
So…was the pulsating grayness slowly being absorbed by Dag’s ground, or…or was the blight spreading? He swallowed and stared, but could sense no discernible change.
Stands to reason, he could almost hear Spark say. How would a smart little farmer girl analyze this? What were the possibilities?
Well, his ground could be slowly repairing itself, as in any other wound. Or his ground might be unable to repair itself until the sources of injury were removed, the way an arrow had to be extracted before the flesh around it could start to knit. Sometimes, if more rarely, flesh knitted around a fragment that could not be removed. Sometimes it closed but festered. Or…was the blight spreading out faster than his ground could repair it? In which case…
In which case, I’m looking at my death wound. A mortality flowing as slowly as honey in winter, as inexorably as time.
Spark, no, how long do we—?
In a spasm of inspiration, he tried to call up his ghost hand to grip a splotch, tear it out, dump it in the soil, anywhere—was it possible to ground-rip yourself?—but his odd power remained elusive. He then massaged around a spot on his left ribs with his right hand, willing its ground to reach in, but found it as impossible as to will flesh to penetrate flesh. The effort made his side twinge, however.
An even more horrific possibility occurred to him then. The fragments of the first great malice-king, it was said, grew into the plague of the world. What if each of these fragments had the same potential? Could I turn into a malice? Or malice food?
Dag bent his head and huffed through his open mouth, his hand clutching his hair. Oh, absent gods, do you hate me that much? Or he might split into a dozen malices—or—no, a dominant one would no doubt conquer and subsume the others, then emerge the lone victor of…what? Once the miniature malice had consumed all the ground and the life of the body it lived in, it, too, presumably must die. Unless it could escape…
Dag panted for breath in his panic, then swallowed and sat up. Let’s go back to the death-wound idea, please? What if this was not a spew of malice seed, but more like a spatter of malice blood, carrying the toxic ground but not capable of independent life for long. Indeed—gingerly, he turned his senses inward again—there was not that sense of nascent personality that even the lowliest sessile malice exuded. Poison, yes. He could live with—well, be happy with—well…
He sat for several shaken minutes in the silent dark, then peeked again. No change. It seemed he was not dissolving into gray dust on the spot. Which meant he was doomed to wake up to his responsibilities in the morning all the same. So. He’d had a reason for coming out here. What was it…?
He inhaled and, very cautiously, extended his groundsense outward once more. The lingering blight all around nibbled at him, but it was ignorable. He found the dead trees in the grove, th
e trapped mud-men beyond, the live patrollers on night watch. He steered away from the groundlocked makers, barely letting his senses graze them. Before, he had found a gradient of ground moving through the soil, sucked into the making of the mud-man nursery. Did such a draw sustain it still?
No. The death of the malice had done that much good, at least.
Or…maybe not. The mud-men were still alive, even if they’d stopped growing. Therefore, they must still be drawing ground, if slowly. The only source of ground in the system was the locked makers and, now, the three fresh patrollers. And he did not think their depleted bodies could produce new ground fast enough to keep up. What must be the end of it, if this accursed lock could not be broken?
The weakest makers would likely die first. With them gone, increased stress would be thrown onto the survivors, who would not last long, Dag suspected. Death would cascade; the remainder must die very quickly. At which point the mud-men would also die. Would that be the end of it, the problem collapsing into itself and gone? Or were there other elements, hidden elements at work inside the lock?
No one could find out without opening their ground to the lock. No one could open their ground to the lock without being sucked into it, it seemed. Impasse.
My head hurts. My ground hurts. But no such collapse was happening now. Dag clutched the thought to himself as if it were hope. Perhaps the morning would bring better counsel, or even better counselors than one battered old patroller so frighteningly out of his depth. Dag sighed, levered himself up, and stumbled back to his bedroll.
What the morning brought was distractions, mainly. A pair of scouts returned from the south to report much the sort of chaos Dag expected—farmer and Lakewalker refugees scattered all over, improvised defenses in disarray—but also encouraging signs of people beginning to sort themselves out with the news of the death of the malice. About midday, some two dozen Bonemarsh exiles cautiously approached. Dag assigned his patrol of cleanup volunteers the initial task of helping them to identify and bury their dead, including the woman maker, and scavenge the village for still-usable supplies that might be carried off to the other north Raintree camps that would be taking in the nearly two thousand homeless. The Raintree Lakewalkers were likely in for a straitened winter, coming up. Bonemarsh casualties, he was glad to learn, had been relatively low. No one seemed to know yet if the same had been the case for that farmer town the malice had taken first.
Three of the Bonemarsh folks agreed to stay and help nurse their groundlocked makers and the hapless would-be rescuers. The makers all had names, now, and life stories that the returned refugees had determinedly pressed on Dag. He wasn’t sure if that helped. In any case, he sent the first batch of locals off with a patroller escort and an earnest request to send him back any spare medicine makers or other experts who might be able to get a grip on his lethal puzzle. But he didn’t expect much help from that quarter, as every medicine maker in Raintree had to be up to the ears in nearer troubles right now.
He had slightly more hope of the full patrol of twenty-five he sent home that afternoon, carrying both a warning to Hickory Lake of their neighbor’s impending winter shortages, and a much more urgently worded plea for Hoharie or some equally adept maker to come to his aid. To stay at Bonemarsh, Dag selected the best medicine makers—for patrollers—his company had, including several veteran mothers or grandmothers, whom he figured for already knowing how to keep alive people who couldn’t talk or walk or feed themselves. Small ones, anyway. They can work up.
He hadn’t expected them to work up to him, however. “Dag,” said Mari, with her usual directness, “the bags under your eyes are so black you look like a blighted raccoon. Have you had anybody look you over yet?”
He’d been thinking of quietly hauling one of the better field medicine fellows out of range of the grove to examine him. Mari, he realized glumly, was not only at the top of that list by experience and ground-sense skill, but would corner any substitute and have the story ripped out of him in minutes anyway. Might as well save steps.
“Come on,” he sighed. She nodded in stern satisfaction.
He led off to his stump of last night, or one like it, sat, and cautiously opened himself. It took a couple of minutes, and he ended with his head bent nearly to his knees. Still hurts.
He heard a long, slow hiss through her teeth that for Mari was as scary as swearing. In a tone of cool understatement, she observed, “Well, that don’t look so good. What is that black crap?”
“Some sort of ground contamination. It happened when I…” he started to say, ground-ripped the malice, but changed it to, “when I tried to draw the malice off from Utau, and it turned on me. It was like bits of it stuck to me, and burned. I couldn’t get rid of it. Then I closed up and passed out.”
“You sure did. I thought you were just ground-ripped—hah, listen to me, just ground-ripped—like Utau. Does that, um…hurt? Looks like it ought to.”
“Yeah.” Dag turned his groundsense on himself, closing his eyes for an instant to feel more clearly. Two of the gray patches on his left arm, separate last night, seemed to have grown together since like two water droplets joining. I’m losing ground.
Mari said hesitantly, “You want me to try anything? Think a bit of ground reinforcement might help, or a match?”
“Not sure. I wouldn’t want to get this crud stuck to you. I suspect it’s”—lethal—“not good. Better wait. It’s not like I’m falling over.”
“It’s not like you’re dancing a jig, either. This isn’t like…Utau’s ground, it’s like it’s scraped raw, shivering and won’t stop, but you can see it’ll come right in its own time. This…yeah, this is outside my ken. You need a real medicine maker.”
“That’s what I figured. Hope one shows up soon. Meantime, well, I can still walk, it seems. If not jig.” Dag hesitated. “If you can refrain from gossiping about this all over camp, I’d take it kindly.”
Mari snorted. “So if this had happened to any other patroller, how fast would you have slapped him onto the sick list?”
“Privileges of captaincy,” Dag said vaguely. “You know that road, patrol leader.”
“Yeah? Would that be the privilege to be stupid? Funny, I don’t seem to recall that one.”
“Look, if anybody with more skill shows up here to hand this mess on to, you bet I’ll be on my horse headed east in an hour.” Except that he could not ride away from what he carried inside, now, could he? “I have no idea who the Raintree folks can spare or when, but I figure the soonest we could get help from home is six days.” He stared around; the afternoon was growing hazy, with a brassy heat in the air that foreboded evening thundershowers.
Mari glanced toward the grove, and said quietly, “Think those folks will last six more days?”
Dag let out a long breath and heaved himself to his feet. “I don’t know, Mari. Does look like we need to rustle up some kind of tent covering to gather them under, though. Rain tonight, you think?”
“Looks like,” she agreed.
They strolled silently back to the dead grove.
He wasn’t sure how much Mari talked, or didn’t, but a lot of people in the grove camp that evening seemed to take it as their mission to tell him to go lie down. He was persuadable, except that with nothing to do but sit cross-legged on his bedroll and stare at the groundlocked makers, he found himself drifting into hating them. Without this tangle, he could have gone home with today’s patrol. In three days’ time, held Spark hard and not let go even for breathing. His earlier weariness of this long war was as nothing to his present choked surfeit. He slept poorly.
By late the following afternoon, two of the older makers had lost the ability to swallow, and one was having trouble breathing. As Carro, one of Mari’s cronies from Obio’s patrol, held the man up in her lap in an effort to ease him, Dag knelt beside the bedroll and studied his labored gasps. Breathing this bad in a dying man was normally a signal to share, and soon. But was this fellow dying? Need he be? His thi
nning hair was streaked with gray, but he was hardly elderly; before this horror had fallen on him, Dag judged him to have been hale, lean and wiry. Artin was his name, Dag didn’t want to know, an excellent smith and something of a weapons-master. Under his own tracing fingers, Dag could read a lifetime of accumulated knowledge in the subtle calluses of Artin’s hands.
Mari blotted the face and hair of the nearby woman she had just spent several fruitless minutes trying to get water down, while the woman had writhed and choked. “If we can’t get more drink into them in this heat, they aren’t going to last anything like five more days, Dag.”
Carro nodded to the man in her lap. “This one, less.”
“I see that,” murmured Dag.
Saun paced about. Dag had guessed he would volunteer for the patrol lingering in Raintree to assist the refugees, and indeed he’d scorned an offer to ride back to Hickory Lake yesterday; but, taking his partnership with Dag seriously, he’d instead requested assignment to this duty. He slept in the now-reduced camp to the east off the blight, but lived at Dag’s left elbow in the daytime. Which would be a fine thing if only Saun acted less like a flea on a griddle in the face of these frustrations.
Now he declared, “We have to try something. Dag, you say you think these makers are still supporting the mud-men. If that’s so, doesn’t it make sense to cut off the load?”
“Obio and Griff said they tried that,” said Dag patiently. “The results were pretty alarming, I gathered.”
“But no one died. It could be like one of Hoharie’s cuttings, hurting to heal.”
It was a shrewd argument, and it attracted Dag more than the prospect of just sitting here watching while these people suffered and failed. My company. He wasn’t quite sure how these Raintree makers had become honorary members of it in his mind, but they had. His three unconscious patrollers were the least depleted, so far, but Dag could see that wasn’t going to last.
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