Cloud's Rider

by C. J. Cherryh

  The snow beyond, the forest, the road that had brought him—all of that was at his left and in front of him, deep in night and falling snow. He could see the deep snow disturbed on an approach and retreat that the horse had used. It went off into the trees and it wasn’t a place to go afoot. He had to trust the guard for his back and proceed with no time to attend to self-defense, aware of Cloud’s loud sending now, aware of Cloud’s outrage at the camp wall separating two who weren’t made to be separated.

  But Cloud’s sending was what he relied on for safety as he took a stance facing the woods and called out in his mind, letting Cloud carry it—

  “Spook!” he yelled aloud, hoping it was still in range. He never had known its real name. Harper had never said.

  It was a lonely voice, going out over all of a mountainside on the very edge of human habitation, and searching into a deep evergreen woods.

  “Spook!” he called—telling himself if a sane horse did answer him Cloud would know where it was with a nighthorse sense that wasn’t as easily confused as a human mind.

  And he wanted it to come to him. He had the rifle against everything else that might answer a hail into the snowy dark, but he wanted that lost, lonely horse to know he was a rider from the low plains, that it was Danny Fisher, Cloud’s rider—calling him, another rider, who wasn’t the enemy. He wouldn’t harm Spook. Spook-horse might remember they’d traveled together, might come to him quietly, peaceably, for food, for human help. He’d escort it to the next village or wherever someone might want it as much, as desperately, as this horse wanted human help.

  He’d see it fed, warmed, treated if it was hurt—he’d make a place for it outside the camp, and bring hay and biscuits—

  was Cloud’s indignant sending.

  That aspect of his plan wouldn’t help attract a stray male, and if he went further away from the wall to entice it to trust him, Cloud would go absolutely frantic to reach him—with good cause. Wade around out here with no protection but a rifle and put a foot down into some burrow, and a nest of willy-wisps would eat his foot off to the knee before Ridley’s help could reach him.

  Bang! Cloud hit the gate, wanting out.

  “Get back in here!” That was a human voice. Ridley’s. Urgent and angry. “You’ve done enough! It’s not going to listen to you! Get in here!”

  “Fisher!” Another one, higher-pitched, which could only be Callie. “Dammit! You don’t have to prove anything! Get back inside!”

  “It’s no problem,” he began to say—and stepped into a hole.

  Damn near jumped out of it, scrambled on hands and knees—the gate-guard was witness, and Callie and Ridley and Jennie were, because of Cloud, who hit the wall again in outright panic.

  “I’m all right,” he yelled back. “I’m all right—it’s only a hole! Don’t open the gate! I’m all right.”

  He turned toward the track he’d floundered and waded across, finding it the course of least resistance back to the village gate, and not at all wanting Ridley to open the camp gate, for fear Cloud would be out it in an instant.

  Then anything could happen if that horse was here, lurking, and cannily quiet.

  He reached the gates, out of breath and having worked up a sweat despite the cold, and in the little time it took the guard inside to get down the steps from his rifle-slot and to open the gate—for that moment he could feel how all the snowbound wilderness and darkness at his back waited for an outcome.

  The latch didn’t open fast enough. He really, badly wanted in.

  Now.

  There were hunters in the Wild that could image not being there. Or make a foolish human think that safety was right toward its jaws.

  The gate opened.

  “Figure it’s long gone,” the gate-guard said.

  “Figure so, too,” he said, trying to be calm—the guard likely couldn’t figure all that was in the sendings. But he was embarrassed to be shaking as he was. “Thanks,” he managed to say and, after his moment of panic, set out down the street, slowly, feeling the long run he’d made getting over here in sore feet, aching joints.

  He passed the smith’s place, the tavern, the miners’ barracks. Everything there was dark and still. It was possible no one had noticed—but down the street he saw some few lights.

  The doctor’s house wasn’t one.

  Horses were disturbed. Burn sent a feeling of and Flicker got on her feet with a sudden thump of hooves on boards that would have wakened the sleeping dead.

  The just plain sleeping were an easier scare, and Guil reached instinctively for the gun he always kept to his right.

  Right now there was Tara, who was suddenly up on one elbow, a feat of flexibility Guil didn’t quite manage. He lay still to do his listening. So did Burn, for some few moments, while Flicker was up on her feet, a living shadow against the wall.

  “Damn!”

  For himself, Guil couldn’t swear to what was ordinary or not in a given area. The lay of the land and the mix of creatures that lived there made a lot of differences from one mountain to the next and down to various zones of the plains. He’d been in a lot of them, at one time and another.

  He’d never heard this particular flux of panic—except when a piece of a mountain snowbank dissolved and creatures died in a boil of snow and air, giving off their I’m-not-here and I’m-over-there that was their ordinary defense of their burrows.

  There was death up there.

  “You have a slide zone up there?”

  “No,” Tara said. “Feels like it, doesn’t it?”

  She got down in the blankets, cold from the air, and he put his arms around her. She shivered, then.

  “Second thoughts,” she said.

  She might well have them. But he thought about , and , that being all the image that would come to his mind for what they’d felt.

  “You’re crazy,” Tara said. But she was thinking something far worse. She was thinking about her , in total white, with the whole world in flux.

  That was the closest to what they’d felt. And from Flicker came an answering that was Flicker’s camouflage in direst straits. She’d spooked her horse—he hoped that was all it was.

  “I wish you’d stay here,” she said. “Something’s real wrong up there.”

  He hadn’t looked for that, for her to be thinking in the midst of this to be going alone.

  So did he, except for knowing he’d be a total fool. Tara didn’t have a hole in her side. Tara didn’t have any debt to the kids.

  Or maybe she did. She thought of And right along with it was

  She was thinking about She was thinking about He didn’t know what that was. He thought it might be something to do with the church, but had gone with it.

  “You don’t know, do you,” Tara asked him, “what I’m remembering.”

  “No.”

  “Don’t recognize it?”

  He didn’t. But for some reason that was an impetus to hold him close and kiss him on the cheek. It wasn’t sex she meant. Just— friendliness. Just—something kind. He wasn’t sure. He held her, she held him, Burn got up in a fair racket, and Flicker lay down again with a noisy exhalation.

  Burn lay down.

  The place was quiet, then.

  “Wind’s fallen,” he said finally. “Snow might stop soon.”

  “Good traction,” she said. “Anything but ice.”

  At which point she burrowed close, and he shut his eyes, never having figured what she was talking about, but he knew she was bent on going up there, and that somewhere in her battered sense of loyalties and obligations, she’d remembered her village and a couple of boys she’d known for years before the disaster.

  She’d remembered a closeness with the village he’d never felt for anything made of boards and nails and involving roofs over his head.

  But then—the things she remembered weren’t just buildings, either.

  * * *

  Chapter 13

  Ť ^ ť

  There was a presence in the passage, early in the morning, and Cloud knew it—Cloud was aware of and disturbed about it, following along the ridge as the walked
under the wall, and picking up all the way.

  Danny wanted and decided it was time to get up, urgently so. He flung clothes on, hearing a stir in the barracks from and and lastly and not least from and from , who instantly rolled out of bed and tumbled onto the floor.

  Danny was no slower into his clothes than Ridley and Callie, and into the hall at the same time.

  Ridley knew the and wanted , too. Callie was and Danny sent out a strong to Cloud, who was

  A knock came at the passage door about then, and Ridley opened it without hesitation, letting in three men, one with a shotgun, all with a weathered, outsider look about them, leather breeches, leather coats with the fur turned in—no fringes such as a rider wore, but never having seen high-country hunters as a group, Danny still had an idea what they were, and by that, guessed what they wanted—and also that they weren’t used to being harassed by a rider’s horse.

  “Sorry,” Danny felt obliged to say, even before introductions, as the men wiped their feet on the mat and Ridley and Callie offered tea. He had an and had to duck outside, coatless, onto the porch, about the time young Jennie was arriving in the barracks’ main room behind him.

  Cloud was out there in the dim first light of dawn, perplexed about the and not sure what he should do about it, but Danny came down off the porch under a still black-as-pitch morning sky, hugged Cloud about the neck and reassured him with pats and his presence and showing him the men in his mind, perfectly ordinary men,

  Cloud was only mildly reassured, but he’d at least settled on the image of and had the notion of

  But on the steps dissuaded that with a strong argument, leaving a mildly behind, with Slip and Shimmer, who didn’t find anything unusual in the

  Danny went back into the barracks, shivering and very glad to go to the fireside and meet the three men. Harris was the senior of them, with gray in an impressive beard. And there was Golden, younger but not much, and Brunnart, who might be related to Golden, but Danny wasn’t sure. Tea water was on to heat, and the talk was, excluding the matter of anxious horses, about the horse in the neighborhood and the game moving off.

  They were the hunters Ridley had been going to take outside this morning—hunters responsible for seeing the village provisioned with meat that didn’t come up the mountain dried, canned, and expensive—their supplement to low-country beef and pork, as well as hides and furs other businesses depended on.

  And the hunters heard from Ridley and Callie what Danny also felt as the state of the mountain this morning, that there wasn’t anything stirring out there.

  “Spooky quiet,” Jennie put it, sitting on the stones and with her hair uncombed and her feet still bare and her shirttail out.

  “Quiet,” her mother said, meaning a too-talkative child, not the ambient.

  “This commotion last night,” Harris said. “This business down by the gate—didn’t see anything of the horse?”

  Harris was questioning him, and Ridley didn’t object. “No, sir,” Danny said. “It was pretty well out of the area before I got out there.”

  “The horse came up from Tarmin,” Ridley said, and went on to say what Ridley hadn’t said to the marshal: “Male, lost his rider, followed Fisher here up the mountain.”

  It wasn’t his place to talk to outsiders to the camp when the camp-boss was there to talk for him. That was the rule down in Shamesey, and it had never made so much sense—but it left him nothing to do but sit and feel guilty as hell that his—maybe manageable—problem down at first-stage had now become these men’s problem, and the village’s problem.

  “Got to be dealt with,” Harris concluded. Danny figured Harris must be senior among the hunters, and probably stating the position for a lot of unhappy people including the grocer and the ordinary village folk. “We’re offering help.”

  “It’s a dangerous kind of business,” Ridley said, and in the passage of a horse near the walls—probably Slip—there leaked a little bit of and worry into the ambient. “Jennie-cub, you have to understand, a bad horse is worse than a bear or anything. It’s dangerous. Nobody wants to shoot it. But sometimes that’s our business to do.”

  “I don’t want you to,” Jennie said.

  “You hush,” Callie said, “you sit still, and you learn. Questions later.”

  “Yes, ’m.” Jennie said faintly, and stared at her hands.

  “Fisher,” Ridley said, “you and I better go out today.”

  “Yes, sir,” Danny said. “No question.” They’d made their try at luring it in. They couldn’t let it start stalking the village. He didn’t like to think about shooting it. But he could think of worse things, including having that horse waylay a rider or a hunter.

  “We’re offering backup,” Harris said. “Three of us.”

  “I think,” Ridley said slowly, “that none of us have ever had to hunt a horse, and a man on foot is just too vulnerable. I’m not turning you down. I’m saying let us see whether there’s any chance at all of us getting it without taking that risk.”

  “You don’t—” Harris cleared his throat. “I don’t want to talk in front of the young miss, but—is there any chance—it’s here for somebody inside?”

  “Not for our daughter,” Callie said in no uncertain terms.

  “It’s possible,” Ridley said.

  Danny sat burning with what he ought to say, and with what he knew, and things he didn’t want to say. But the water was hot and tea-making and hospitality after a cold and spooky walk for these men was at the top of the agenda.

  He thought—I have to say something.

  But what in hell could his information do? If the horse was trying to link up with Brionne—it was in serious trouble. A healthy horse wouldn’t do it. He was sure of that. And that chance was what made him sure they couldn’t take half measures in getting rid of it. Sometimes—sometimes you had to protect the non-riders who were relying on you, and sometimes you had to protect yourself and your horse, or the camp you were in. And if it meant doing something he’d ordinarily not choose—well, he saw less and less choice about it.

  Sleep didn’t cure the confusion or the anger. Carlo waked in the morning and lay in the blankets thinking that maybe, it being a new day, he would feel better and not lose his temper and maybe Randy would be his cheerful self.

  But the more he tested his feelings the more he raked over thoughts he didn’t want to lie in bed with, and didn’t want to be idle with.

  Fire on the glass. The rogue had sent that while it prowled Tarmin streets, while it drew people out their doors and the vermin had swarmed in.

  People hadn’t died quick deaths. Maybe there were some large predators like goblin-cats or lorrie-lies with jaws that could make a quick end of someone, but mostly—mostly the end wasn’t quick.

  Their mother had died that way.

  Their father—

  Explosion in his hands. A shock that shook the world.

  Papa stopping in midstep and mama—mama’s mouth open, and maybe a sound coming out—he didn’t know.

  Faces below the village hall porch. People with lamps and electric torches. Angry faces. Mouths open there, too, but he didn’t hear. He just kept hearing that sound. That explosion. Feeling that shock in his hand. Brionne was lost and their father was blaming them for every fault, every failure of ambition or expectations—

  It wasn’t his fault Brionne had gone outside the walls. Their father had believed they were murderers—that out of jealousy they’d shoved her outside and locked the gates.

  Give me back my girl! That was what he’d been yelling. You did it, you were the one!

  And he’d fired. He’d fired when their father headed at him with the intent to take the gun away from him, and after that to beat him and Randy for God knew what. He never knew why their father hated them, and why Brionne was perfect. All their lives, he never knew: that was the hell of it—until this time, their father—

  For the first time in his whole scared life, he’d held the threat, he’d told his father to stop. But his father wouldn’t—constitutionally couldn’t—hadn’t.

  He didn’t remember firing.
/>   There’d been the explosion.

  The faces below the porch, all looking at him. Tara Chang speaking up for him. His mother damning him for a liar and a murderer—I want my Brionne, his mother had yelled.

  And the jail. Himself and Randy—the bars.

  All of Tarmin had heard the rogue in their streets, had opened their doors and gone out to help their neighbors.

  But the marshal’s wife had taken up a shotgun and spattered herself all over the office so as not to open that door. He and Randy had sat blank with horror while the rogue and its rider had gone up and down the street, calling aloud and in the ambient—all Brionne’s anger, looking for mama, looking for papa, looking for them.

  They’d sat locked in—listening—and Brionne had found them. Had screamed at them to open the door—but they couldn’t.

  And she couldn’t. She’d tried. She’d tried and kicked and battered at the door in a tantrum. She’d called them names. And things had come through the ambient, things swarming over each other, snapping jaws, biting and feeding and tearing each other in their frenzy, and people screaming and people dying and screaming and screaming—

  And when Brionne gave up and went away, the swarm had come against that door and gnawed and scratched at the wood for hours after the light went out.

  They’d sat in the dark. He and Randy. For hours. Knowing that while their cell had bars to keep out the big predators it wouldn’t stop the little ones. The vermin had been working at that door just now and again, but they hadn’t been out of food yet and the jail hadn’t been the only source—yet.

  Then Danny had come.

  In the dark, after all those hours, they’d heard Danny calling for survivors. He’d led them out without a question of where he’d found them and guided them down a darkened street littered with the scraps of flesh that had been their mother, their neighbors, every living creature in Tarmin.

  He didn’t want to stay still with thoughts like that. He flung the blankets off, got up and got himself ready for the day before he went over to Randy, who was sleeping like a lump, and nudged him with his foot.

  “Time to get up,” he said, and Randy just snarled and hauled the covers over his head.