Cloud's Rider

Cloud's Rider Page 38

by C. J. Cherryh

  “No—” Ma’am was his mother’s manners. “No,” he said, unadorned.

  “Get some rest. We’ll fix things tomorrow.”

  “Right,” he said, having presumed as far as he wanted to on senior riders’ patience, and he leaned back against Cloud’s side.

  Tara settled down against Flicker. Carlo was out cold, in the ambient just barely, in that very faint way you could pick up someone sound asleep, at very close range.

  Carlo and Spook were out, Danny judged, Carlo exhausted from nights of worry, and Spook from nights of exhausting Carlo and the rest of Evergreen village.

  Fighting a solitary war with whatever-it-was. Keeping it penned up here, near the lake, because it wasn’t going to drive him off the mountain and away from the rider he’d gone through frozen hell and climbed a mountain to choose.

  Stubborn horse. Very stubborn, canny horse.

  So was the horse he was leaning against, the one keeping him warm in the icy cold air. He pillowed his head against Cloud and, patting a muscled shoulder, received a rumbling contentment-sound in return.

  Jennie had a very scary kind of nightmare. There was a girl, a very angry girl, who wanted a horse to come to her. And she, Jennie, was in the camp on the other side of the wall when a sending came wanting Rain, but she wouldn’t let this girl have Rain. Papa said—papa said you didn’t own horses. Horses just were. You got along with horses.

  She was in this girl’s house and she told her that. She told her so very firmly, and told her she couldn’t have Rain and she was sorry, but that was the way it was. And the girl was very angry and told her to get out.

  So she flew back over the camp wall and told Rain he shouldn’t listen to this girl.

  But something listened. Something came close, and it might be a horse. But she didn’t think so. And she flew back to that girl in the doctor’s house and stood in the middle of the room and wanted to warn her this wasn’t a good idea, and she shouldn’t call out beyond the wall like that.

  Then something waked her up and she was in her own bed and mama was in the doorway and so was papa.

  “Jennie,” mama said. “Jennie, —what’s going on?”

  “I don’t know,” she said, and papa said, “It’s that damned girl. The horse must be back.”

  “Is Dan back?”

  “No,” mama said, and sat down on the side of her bed and set a hand on the other side of her. “You stay out of the ambient, Jennie. Something’s going on out there.”

  “It’s really real?”

  “It’s real. You don’t go out there.”

  “But she wants Rain!”

  “Rain won’t go to her,” papa said. “The ambient’s just really loud tonight. The horses are upset. I’ll go out and calm things down.”

  “Probably both of us should,” mama said. And Randy had shown up in her bedroom doorway, dressed, but with his shirt half on. “You stay inside and see Jennie stays inside,” mama told Randy.

  “It’s my sister,” Randy said. He sounded scared. “It’s my sister. I know what she sounds like.”

  Then the bell was ringing again. Jennie thought confusedly, Serge didn’t tie the bell again. Then another bell was going. And another. The ambient went terribly , then, her mama and papa and Randy all scared at once.

  “That’s the breakthrough alarm,” papa said, and she remembered papa and mama had always told her if she ever heard all the bells, the gate’s big and little ones and the church tower and the fire bell all at once, then she should lock everything down tight and get the box of shells and set them on the table.

  And never, never, never go out to the horses.

  But Rain was out there.

  Rain needed her.

  “You stay put!” papa said in his harshest tone. “Randy, can you do anything with your sister?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Yellowflower,” mama said. And papa:

  “Jennie, put your clothes on. Get dressed. Right now.”

  “Everybody’s in my room!”

  “We’re going over to the village.”

  “What about the horses?” She wasn’t leaving Rain. She’d never been so scared in her life.

  Then half the bells that had been ringing so frantically stopped— leaving just the church bells and one other.

  “Is it done?” she asked.

  “No,” papa said. “Get dressed!”

  Burn got up all of a sudden—which left his sleeping rider scrambling awake, sore side and all, and reaching after his rifle and struggling, with it for a prop, toward his feet, as the rest of the horses surged to their feet and the ambient that had been very quiet suddenly got louder by reason of one young horse that was overwhelming it with question and fright. There was the sound of bells, was what it sounded like, echoing from somewhere distant. Or maybe it was coming through the ambient, which was , and more lively about them than it had been. was contagious.

  “Danny, get him quiet,” Guil said, catching his breath, and still leaning on the gun instead of relying on it for protection, because it seemed to him that the danger, like those bells, was very far off.

  And it seemed to him that it came from the direction of Evergreen.

  Evergreen—where Brionne Goss was resident.

  Not a good thing. Not at all a good thing.

  “That’s Evergreen,” Tara said. “What did the ride take you, Danny?”

  “Half a day. Six hours at least. I stopped some.”

  Six hours’ ride from here, if Danny’s account was straight, and neither Danny nor Carlo had been lazing along when they’d covered that distance.

  “We’ve got to move,” Guil said, in the full knowledge there was no way he could last on that kind of ride. Bells in the night were a cry for help, from anyone in range. It seemed to him he did hear them with his own ears—and it was possible, given the folds of the mountain that made it that long a run for a horse.

  It wasn’t saying the beast used the roads. It was past midnight. Since dark—it had had time to move, and it might well have had a place it wanted to go.

  The same place Spook, until tonight, had been discouraging it from going.

  Half the bells that had been ringing were quiet now, a sudden, frightening kind of quiet, but the bells of the church and the mayoralty were still ringing. In want of other remedies Darcy Schaffer went about brewing tea. Brionne had come downstairs in the dark, distraught and unhappy, as small wonder the girl would be, with alarms in the night. It felt to be blowing up a storm—which didn’t entirely account for the breakthrough alarm, but it could well be the cause of such an event—creatures getting desperate as they did before one of winter’s truly deadly storms, and all it took was someone near the walls on the forest side not watching their cellars or some warehouse foundation eroding. Creatures didn’t dig well in the rubble fill under the dirt, but now and again water made an incursion.

  It was amazingly quiet, yet, but she supposed the barometer at the mayoralty might have dropped and advised the night guards. The air had that feeling about it, and with murder on her doorstep this morning and Brionne’s brothers running, one to his death outside (or to a horse: that was the whisper in town) and the other to the rider camp to stay—small wonder Brionne had complained of bad dreams.

  Occasion of her own uneasy rest—the Mackeys had come to call in the afternoon. They disavowed all knowledge of their son’s accusations, and wanted to assure Brionne that they were still taking care of Randy.

  “He’s in the rider camp,” Brionne had said in icy tones, with an aplomb which she had inwardly applauded. “The riders have him. You don’t.”

  Even that rebuff hadn’t set Mary Hardesty back. “But he’ll have a place with us when they straighten this ridiculous mess out. Our son thinks now he was mistaken. He thinks it could have been another miner he saw quarreling with that Riggs person.”

  A wonder Rick Mackey hadn’t come in for stitches after some fall down the stairs today. She’d put various stitches in him during his growing up, usually for falls on the Mackey stairs. So Mary Hardesty had always claimed, and she’d bet any amount that Rick and
his father had gone at it.

  She hated that woman.

  And of course Brionne’s coolness to their well-wishes didn’t dissuade Van Mackey from offering to see that the Tarmin properties were taken care of and that the forge was working.

  “You think Rick can do that?” she’d been cold-blooded enough to ask. Rick’s lack of meaningful competence was well known even outside of Evergreen, by what she knew, but Mary Hardesty never flinched.

  “Well, until we can hire help. In the girl’s name, of course.”

  She’d gotten them out the door shortly after that, smiling all the while she was wondering whether the Mackeys had heard about Ernest Riggs’ proposal to her and whether that had been the reason for Riggs’ violent demise.

  They never had found the body.

  She poured the tea. She added spirits to her own. She set a cup in front of Brionne, who sat in Faye’s nightgown and Faye’s lace-collared robe. Brionne’s golden curls were tousled from the pillow—Brionne had banged her shin and overset a chair in the dark in the lower hall, scaring the wits out of her.

  But Brionne didn’t ask about the goings-on, or the bell, probably because it was perfectly clear that there was an alarm, as there would have been in Tarmin, Darcy was sure. Brionne didn’t seem to want to acknowledge the crisis, after embarrassing herself in the lower hall, and Darcy didn’t mention her own apprehensions of a breakthrough and reasons the marshal and the village guards might be abroad tonight. It wasn’t their business, after all. They had their latches tight, and her house was near the rider wall, not the outside, so there was no need to check the foundations for burrows from beyond the village confines. They’d done their part.

  She sat down at the table with Brionne. “It feels like blowing up a storm, doesn’t it?” she asked, to fill the silence. “It’s been snowing all day.”

  “I don’t care,” Brionne said. And apropos of no remark of hers: “He had no right to go out there! He hates me.”

  He was very clearly the brother. And that was at least a clue to Brionne’s state of mind. She didn’t know whether it was the truth, what Brionne had said this morning about her elder brother shooting their father. But she had no reason to doubt it, either. “Honey,” she said gently, “don’t think about it. You’re safe here. And you don’t ever have to go with him. We’ll go to the judge. We’ll be sure he hasn’t any rights over you.”

  Brionne wiped her eyes.

  “I hate him.”

  “Don’t hate people, honey. It’s not good for you. —You know what we should do? We should both go to the store tomorrow. You’re strong enough, aren’t you? And we’ll get you a new coat, and some yarn for sweaters if we can’t find one we like. What color would you want?”

  “I want a leather coat. Like riders have.”

  “What about for church?”

  “A red one.”

  “And for Saturday nights? We used to have supper at the tavern on Saturdays. And everybody shows off their nice clothes. What would you like to wear?”

  Brionne seemed to be thinking. She stared off into nowhere.

  “He hears me,” she said. “He hears me. I can still talk to him. He won’t go with my brother.”

  “Brionne. Honey.”

  “He’ll come for me. He will!”

  Horses. Adolescent fancies. Children pressed to the limit by a violence within the family that had finally found a way to attract outside attention. There was nothing, on the surface, amiss with Carlo Goss. But there’d been something deadly wrong in that household. Maybe it was Carlo. Maybe it had been the parents. But Brionne sat talking about going off with horses when this morning she’d accused her brother of murder. There was a certain tendency toward denial in the Goss children, which she could plainly see. But knowing that, she could afford her dear Brionne a little extra understanding and bring the girl to love her.

  The thing was to humor the swings from fact to fancy and provide the girl a clear baseline of reality.

  There was a battered pack of cards in the kitchen cabinet—hours and hours of solitaire had worn them smooth-edged. But she took them out and began to deal them.

  “Do you play cards, dear?”

  Peterson said they couldn’t open the gate, that they daren’t open the outside gates and he wouldn’t allow it: even relying on the lesser gate, the rider-gate swung too wide and they wouldn’t risk a swarm such as happened at Tarmin.

  So they had brought a logging saw, one logger on the village side of the camp wall and Ridley on his with the other grip, ripping through the substantial vertical post that, buried deep in ice and earth, barriering the camp and the village apart from each other, so that no horse could pass it. It had taken too damned long, first arguing with the marshal about going around to the gates and then getting the saw from the supply store, because nobody wanted to go about the street to open the store, but now that they had it, the teeth made fast progress. The log went down in short order and Ridley and the logger, a man named Jackson, grabbed it up and carried it through to the village side, where they tossed it to the side of the gate.

  Slip followed through that gate no horse had ever been able to use, not from the village founding.

  Callie and the Goss boy, Jennie and Rain and Shimmer came across, too, the horses in a rush as if they expected the gate to shut or the pole to reappear.

  It was scary in this dark and strange business. Jennie was scared. Rain was scared. Ridley had no trouble admitting the same to his daughter and anyone else who might ask. With a breakthrough warning gone silent like that—with the unprecedented measure of taking down the barrier between camp and village to get the horses through without using the outside gates—even a child could understand that this had never happened before, and a rider child a lot faster than that.

  “Shut that gate,” Peterson said. “Bolt it good.”

  “We’d better take a look down at the main gate,” Ridley said. To this hour they didn’t know why the bell had stopped. The only encouragement was the lack of specific alarm from the horses, who carried an ambient void of native presence around the village. But Serge Lasierre had undoubtedly rung the alarm for some reason. And stopped—for some reason.

  “I haven’t wanted to scatter people out and about,” Peterson said. “Could be Serge is locked in. Could be there’s been a tunneling down there—we don’t know what the hell.”

  “I want you and Jackson there both behind walls. Leave the streets entirely to us.”

  “We’ll be in the office.”

  “Good. —Randy, I want you to go with the marshal right now. Get behind solid doors.”

  “I’d rather—” Randy began.

  “Go with the marshal.”

  “Yes, sir,” Randy said, having believed him about obeying the camp-boss and maybe having caught the warning in the ambient. Jennie, meanwhile, was a worry he couldn’t dismiss: Jennie had the one horse that, if they could keep him from panic—and separating him from Jennie wouldn’t help—was the loudest, strongest-sending horse of their three.

  He swung up onto Slip’s back and rode to one side of Jennie as Callie rode to the other, down the middle of the village street, through a snow-fall that hazed the few lights left in a tightly shuttered village.

  “It’s Jennie said. “Everybody’s

  “Don’t babble,” Callie reminded her. “Talk when you need a word. The ambient’s enough, miss.”

  Frightened people were awake everywhere. The shutters were latched. People behind those shutters had guns, every one of them, as much a hazard to them as to any swarm of vermin that might have gotten in. The Schaffer house wasn’t in this end of the street, for which Ridley was entirely grateful. It was down where the marshal and Randy had taken refuge—and where he hoped there wasn’t any native creature the Goss girl could pick up. It had seemed quiet down there, and it still seemed quiet at their backs.

  But the warehouses and the granary that lay right along the rider camp gate and those running behind the houses and along the rider camp wall, and those behind the church and the public offices, were a warren they might have to go into. Those would
be the target of a breakthrough and a swarm of vermin, if it once sensed food stored there as well as the living food within the houses. The grain-eaters weren’t usually the vanguard of trouble; usually it was the meat-eaters that came through, and the others followed, but the grain-pests were equally as dangerous, partly because they were more numerous, and partly because some of them weren’t averse to a varied diet.

  They passed The Evergreen, which wasn’t shuttered, and which cast lamplight through its glass-windowed doors. Patrons were inside, huddling in a and that blazed as bright as the lamplight into the ambient. Jennie, who’d kept quiet after her mother’s reprimand, asked meekly,

  “They’re not doing right, are they?”

  “No,” Ridley said. “Those are fools. We look out for people doing necessary jobs, first, like us and the marshal and Serge. Second, people taking care of themselves, like in those houses, locked down tight. Fools come last on our list, always.”

  They passed the blacksmith shop and the Mackeys’ house, where God knew the state of affairs and he didn’t care to.

  Then the miner barracks, that was at least to outward appearances shuttered tight and proper.

  After that came one warehouse set back from Serge’s place and then the Santezes and the Lasierres, who were closest to the wall. Things felt all right there.

  They came all the way to the gate, where he saw nothing—nothing but the tracks one might expect about the elevated stairway to the gate-guard’s tower. Serge’s tracks. Maybe another man’s. They were just slightly rounded over by new snow. Serge had gone up there not a long time ago—maybe talked to some other man. Those tracks were trampled over. He’d need more light.

  But Slip didn’t like what he smelled here. Truly didn’t like it. Neither did Rain and Shimmer.

  “Serge?” he called out.

  There was no answer. There was nothing in the ambient to advise him Serge was there—but Serge might be unconscious. Might just have slipped on the icy steps and hit his head. He hoped that was the case.

  He slid down from Slip’s back at the foot of the tower steps. He had had a shell in the rifle chamber all the way down the street, and he carried the gun carefully and had it ready as he climbed the steps as far as the first turn.

 

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