Cloud's Rider

Cloud's Rider Page 36

by C. J. Cherryh

  This had direction. And it didn’t have to do with ,not now. Spook remembered , but he didn’t carry that image continually—and wouldn’t stop, just wouldn’t stop, though by now Spook was breathing hard and his jogging pace was jarring his rider’s teeth loose as he wove back and forth down the centerline of a depression in that white gash the sides of which Carlo feared might conceal stumps or brush. The center might be a road—he didn’t know. He had no sense of what Spook was doing or how Spook avoided obstacles under the snow—just—sometimes—Spook didn’t avoid them until the last second, and threw him violently off balance.

  Carlo didn’t want to fall off and find himself on the ground with that feeling of that was continually riding the edges of Spook’s awareness. He knew very well he didn’t have a rider’s skills or a rider’s knowledge of the dangers out here even on an ordinary day; and he didn’t have a rider’s sense of how to help his horse—he’d seen Danny take precautions and perform certain things with Cloud that he figured he ought to do for Spook if there was a problem.

  But that would have to wait for shelter—if they could find one. He’d known a moment of hope when they’d seen the one—but Spook seemed to be rejecting any thought of it—maybe of all shelters, not knowing his rider didn’t have the skill to make a camp.

  Maybe Spook had feared that could trap them there. He didn’t know.

  But all of a sudden he perceived , and Spook lurched downslope in a reckless run.

  He stuck tighter if he clung lower, and he made himself as flat as he could on Spook’s back—Spook wasn’t a young horse, Danny had said so. Spook had been a ridden horse, a horse that could keep him safe only if he didn’t fall off in front of whatever nameless terror was above him.

  Something broke through the brush. Sound added itself to impressions piling up in the ambient of something horrific after them. , he thought. He’d never seen one. But it might be. Or a They went in trees.

  Then an impression of was back there. And

  He didn’t know whether it was Danny. He couldn’t turn to see without risking their collective balance as Spook took a sudden series of zigzags down the road, not all-out, now, but scarily fast for so many turns.

  flashed to mind.

  Or the ambient was changing on him. was thick as the snow-fall that veiled the evergreens, as urgent on his heels as the image that chased him down through the woods.

  Spook stumbled on something and his hindquarters dropped as he swung sideways, slid, clawed for balance and went down. He didn’t know for a moment that Spook had fallen, but he was off to the side with his feet on the ground, and he hadn’t anything left but a double-handed grip on Spook’s mane as Spook gained his feet.

  was coming. It was And he couldn’t get up—Spook was trying to move, he couldn’t get footing to spring upward for Spook’s back, and Spook wouldn’t stand still as bore down on them.

  rang out and washed through him. He couldn’t see anything but Spook’s neck as Spook struggled to turn, dragging him around as Spook went on guard against

  His feet found a rock, then, beneath the snow, and Spook’s sweating body walled him off from whatever was coming down on them. Spook wanted He jumped for Spook’s back and Spook took off with him lying crosswise and barely aboard, struggling to right himself on the downhill.

  was in the ambient.

  “Carlo!” he heard behind him. “Carlo!”

  Spook tried to dodge opposite what he expected just as he almost righted himself, and Spooks back slid right under his leg as he went flying sideways again, still with a grip on Spook’s mane, jerked along with Spook’s sideways try at escape.

  It ended with Spook down again against a snow-covered wall of brush, and him still clinging to Spook’s mane, which he began to understand in his panic was impeding Spook’s try at gaining his feet.

  Two riders had come up the road on them, cutting off the downhill direction. He didn’t know them, but were still behind him, and Spook was of Danny, more afraid of and terrified of

  He couldn’t get back on. He was scared to let go, scared of losing Spook or leaving Spook a target; meanwhile Spook, stumbling on objects under the snow, kept backing up, hemmed in by snow-covered brush, by and

  But suddenly he knew these riders, and knew he’d met them. He tried simultaneously to hang on to Spook’s mane and still put himself between the riders and Spook,

  It was a rider’s calm-sending. It was an urge to , he knew that much, and desperately wanted to believe in it.

  “Don’t shoot,” he said, finding his voice. “Don’t shoot. He’s not crazy. I’m not. I didn’t kill anybody!”

  “Just calm down.”

  It was Guil Stuart and Tara Chang. Tara was the rider Spook was afraid of. And Guil Stuart only slightly less so.

  But , was insistent, washing over his vision, alternate with the white of real snow and those snow-obscured figures that had him pinned against the wall of brush.

  “Carlo,” came Danny’s voice from behind him and uphill. “It’s me. Calm down. It’s all right. Quiet him down. Calm the horse down. Nobody’s going to shoot.”

  He wanted things quiet. He wanted , so he dared let go, because he had Spook’s mane twisted in both his hands and he thought it might be hurting Spook and compounding the problem. “Settle down,” he said, scared to let go as Spook stood shivering. “It’s all right.” was in his head. He didn’t know whether it was his idea or not. was in his head, too, and he didn’t know how, but he thought it came from Danny, by the direction-sense that quivered along his nerves, like awareness of the faintest breeze.

  “Carlo,” Danny said, “I got it, I shot it. —Guil, I—don’t know what the hell it is. Lorrie-lie, maybe.”

  “Back there?” Stuart asked, and he and Chang at least made a move or the intent of a move in that direction, which gave Spook a notion of , but Carlo didn’t want that now. He tried to calm Spook down, and fortunately or because the others realized Spook’s inclination, they kept Burn and Flicker in the way on one side and Cloud on the other.

  Carlo freed one hand and used it to pat Spook on the shoulder— heart pounding, took the risk of freeing the other, awkwardly patted Spook’s resisting neck and secured of Spook at least a trembling quiet.

  Then Spook turned his head, butted it against him, was the sending, until, his doing or Spook’s or the others’, he gained awareness of the other riders, other horses, distances, minds, intentions,

  “I’m here,” Danny said quietly, aloud and in the ambient. “I’m just behind you.”

  “I know,” he said. “Danny, I didn’t do it. I didn’t kill anybody!”

  “I can hear it. I believe you.” There was a lot of and a lot of and a lot of in the air, with not quite an easy feeling to it—rather a skittish wariness that calm-sendings didn’t stop.

  “Devil meeting you here,” Stuart said. “Did you kill it?”

  He was talking to Danny, Carlo thought, and what hit the ambient wasn’t comfortable—it was that sending that upset Spook. It was It was

  “How did you get here?” Danny asked Guil, visualizing , and from Guil and Tara, Carlo guessed, came different images,

  That and something he couldn’t get, but didn’t think he wanted to, either. For a moment there were images pouring every which way, and , and , all, he realized suddenly, provoking memories and images from him, and and with what he knew now was a desperate and and a sense of

  He tried not to contribute to the confusion. Danny had gotten mad when he’d poured too much in on Cloud, in the days when they’d climbed the mountain. But he didn’t think Danny was angry now. Danny and Cloud became

  Then Danny left Cloud to come over to him, And he did reach. He kept one hand on Spook, and he felt as his gloved fingers met Danny’s.

  They stood like that a moment, with and running through them like electricity through a wire. Carlo felt Danny’s awareness and calm good sense go along his nerves. He believed Danny was different from anybody he’d ever met. And if he’d damned himself in the eyes of preachers, if riding a horse would do it when his other faults had missed, he made a conscious
choice now to be where he was standing, in rider company, a killer with a horse riders called crazed and a would-be killer itself—but he wanted their company, he wanted their acceptance among them.

  He didn’t know why Danny radiated and he didn’t know how to understand the impulse in Spook until the second Spook tried to break away into the clear in complete panic; but he wouldn’t let Spook run from help, not except , and he wouldn’t have it, wouldn’t allow it, had himself in the way and his hands on Spook without even knowing which one of them had moved first. He just stood there and holding his whole weight against Spook’s shoulder. was in the ambient and he had the presence of mind finally to join into it, as hard as he could think it. while he pressed with all his strength against Spook’s trembling shoulder.

  “Kid’s new?” Stuart’s voice asked.

  “Today,” Danny said. “Hours. Just barely hours.”

  “Easy,” Chang said, and with every word the ambient grew calmer. “Easy, kid. You’re all right. You’re doing damn fine. He’s just on edge. It’s not your fault. Calm. Calm down.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” he said. His voice was shaking. “He’s scared of you. Spook’s especially scared of you.”

  The ambient sank further toward quiet. Tara Chang was quieting things, he thought, and the world unfolded further—wider and wider so that, with his hands on Spook’s side, he was aware of Guil Stuart’s physical pain, Chang’s grief, Danny’s anxiousness—aware of two horses, Burn and Spook, that had known each other in the past, and that were and weren’t enemies; and two horses, Spook and Flicker, that had encountered each other at a point of death and change, far, far down the mountain.

  Aware, then, of the mountain far and wide—and a breathless silence fallen around them.

  Danny didn’t know what he would have done without Stuart. He didn’t think he could have quieted Spook or Carlo. Cloud was all right with Spook now that Spook had a rider and there wasn’t a threat to his own. Burn was protective of Flicker, that was clear to him and to Cloud, but that was the way things had been, and Spook, with a junior and uncertain rider, was at the bottom of the status list, Cloud just behind the pair Burn and Flicker made.

  That meant peace, and peace came as a shakiness of the knees and a thorough relief. Danny still didn’t figure why Guil and Tara had come up the mountain when they’d said otherwise, but the first-stage shelter was among the images he’d gotten. He guessed that Guil and Tara had ridden over to check on them and then—then they’d have found his warning about Spook.

  And he was very glad they had.

  “Where did you drop the thing?” Guil asked with a fleeting image of what had been Tara had gotten down, but Guil hadn’t, hurting too much, Danny had no need to ask. It had been a risky and probably a painful ride for Guil—straight up the mountain, by trails and logging roads, he guessed that by the images floating past him.

  “Back in those trees,” he said to Guil’s question, and supplied the only image he had, “I don’t know what it was, but it dropped at me and I shot.”

  Burn took his rider slowly and warily in that direction. He and Tara went along with Cloud and Flicker in close company, and Carlo and Spook followed uncertainly hindmost—scared, still flighty, and with Spook—he was almost certain the source was Spook—giving off images of and and

  But it found echoes.

  So did

  Which was all they found when they rode up on the area where the thing had fallen.

  “I left it there.” Lame excuse. Danny knew he should have put another bullet into it. But Carlo had already been running. He didn’t know how he’d have caught Carlo if he’d taken to firing: he’d have scared Spook and Carlo could have broken his neck, a new rider, a tired, scared horse on that slope—

  “Best I could have done,” Guil said generously, and did slide down off Burn for a closer look. Light was getting dimmer and the snow was coming down thick and fast with little wind.

  Such traces as remained, a large depression in the snow, would go away very quickly. The blood was mostly obscured already. But there wasn’t, after all, that much of it.

  “There’s over toward the pond,” Danny said.

  It found an echo. For a moment the whole mountainside vanished in a strong sending of and and that stirred memories from another source of

  It took a moment to get the ambient calmed down again.

  “The horse hunted it,” Guil said, with that economy of words Danny had found among borderers. “The horse came up here tagging you, and you went into walls. The tree-climber was here first. But this horse was hunting it to get its territory, until he got what he wanted. Then he was going right down the mountain, fastest way he could.” It was true, too, that senior riders could sift a lot more out of a single image than juniors could do. And older horses both packed more information and traded it with more dispatch. There’d been just too much flying past him a moment ago for him to catch all of it—without resurrecting the fear that had gone with it. And he didn’t want to do that.

  Guil walked over where Carlo was and patted Spook on the neck. “Better have a look at his feet. Been running wild till today, was it?”

  Carlo didn’t seem to find it easy to talk to Guil. Not at all. “Yes,” Danny said in Carlo’s stead. “He was.”

  Guil walked around Spook, hand on Spook’s back, looked at him, looked at his legs, just a fast pass around, while Carlo uneasily dodged around Spook’s neck and stayed out of the way. “Needs some seeing-to,” was Guil’s pronouncement. “Had you staked out for his for a while, did he?”

  “I—don’t know. I guess. Yes, sir.” Carlo wasn’t doing well with words—not easy to talk when images were warring for your attention. And he was scared of Guil in a way Danny hadn’t seen in him, down in the cabin near Tarmin.

  “Damned well playing tag with the tree-sitter,” Tara said, and was in the ambient as Guil stared off into the woods and Tara walked up beside him.

  “What are they saying?” Carlo asked quietly, his arm under Spook’s neck, as Spook.

  “They think whatever I shot, whatever has the , is something—I don’t know—some of it’s hazy to me. But they think Spook and this thing have been fighting each other up here. Spook had you pegged for his. So he wasn’t leaving. The thing in the nest, it wanted this whole ridge for its territory. And Spook was hellbent he was going to get you out of the village if he couldn’t get that thing out of this territory.”

  “One argumentative horse,” Guil said, paying attention when Danny thought he hadn’t been. He walked back and laid a hand on Carlo’s shoulder. “Hell to manage. Got to warn you. He’s used to a rider that picked fights.”

  Tara walked back over with a tuft of fur in her gloved fingers. Falling snow lit on it and stuck; horses laid their ears back as they smelled it, but there wasn’t a thing from Burn or Flicker, just from Spook and, to Danny’s surprise, Cloud, who laid his ears flat and did that sending but nothing clearer.

  Took a second for the implication to get through. And then a very anxious feeling hit the stomach.

  “Never met anything Burn didn’t recognize the smell of,” Guil said.

  Neither Burn, who was far-traveled, nor Flicker nor Cloud recognized it, and Spook, who’d been playing tag with it for days along the road, didn’t have a clear image of it.

  “There’s a lot of unknown territory,” Tara said, “on this mountain’s backside. And beyond here—there’s just unexplored outback. With the rogue-sending taking Tarmin down, the whole mountain upset—that sending would have carried clear around the mountain flanks, clear to God knows where, so long as there were creatures to carry it. —Danny, you got anything better on it?”

  He tried to image it. Wasn’t sure he succeeded.

  “I’m from Shamesey,” he said by way of explaining his limitations. “From in town. I never even saw a lorrie-lie real clear. Just what Cloud knows.”

  “This is nothing anybody knows,” Tara said. “It could be like a lorrie-lie, but it seems bigger. What would you say, seventy, eighty kilos?”

  “I couldn’t judge,” Danny said. “I really couldn’t judge.”
/>   “Sometimes in autumn, when things get restless, something does stray across the Divide. Never anything this big, that I’ve heard of.”

  “More than that,” Guil said, staring off into the woods, and that image was steadier and longer than Danny personally had held it. That was Guil and Burn, Danny thought, with real appreciation for seniors. “Predator. Strong one. Smart. Not enough blood. Didn’t hit it solid enough.”

  “There’s the villages up here,” Tara said, and with the hair prickling on his arms Danny was entertaining the same thought. Cloud didn’t like it, and he moved to the side to lay a hand on Cloud’s neck.

  “Shelter near here,” Guil said.

  “So’s its nest,” Danny said. “It could be its nest, at least—near the shelter.”

  “Bad business to leave anything wounded,” Tara said. “Snow’s already taking the trail, and it’s likely gone up in the trees anyway. Check the nest is my recommendation.”

  “Sounds good to me,” Guil said.

  It sounded good to Danny, too. And there’d be cramped quarters for four riders and horses in the shelter, but there’d be safety, too.

  They’d run a hard course, as Guil and Tara were at the end of a day’s travel from somewhere below. Tara set out walking beside her horse, Guil did the same, Danny followed with Cloud, and Carlo trailed an uncertain last.

  But feeling that uncertainty, Danny lagged back at Cloud’s tail and put himself near Carlo.

  “Sorry about the scare,” he said. “Wasn’t your fault we ran to hell and gone. I should have been more careful coming up on you.”

  “I’m all right,” Carlo said. “But what about Randy?”

  “Rider camp.”

  “He made it.”

  “He’s fine, last I saw.”

  “Danny, I didn’t kill that man.”

  “I know.”

  “How? Did they find who did it?”

  “No. But I hear you clear. Horses carry it. Took me two years to learn to lie. And you’re under camp rules, now. Village law can’t take you without Ridley’s say-so.”

 

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