Cloud's Rider

Cloud's Rider Page 39

by C. J. Cherryh

  What—met him—wasn’t a body. It might have been one before something ripped it to shreds and draped it on the rail.

  He spun about and took the stairs at a skid. Slip was at the bottom of the steps and he didn’t even think clearly about launching himself for Slip’s back, he just landed there.

  He didn’t need to explain to Callie or Jennie. What he’d seen, they’d seen, and Jennie had never imagined the like. She was and Rain was with her.

  <“Easy,”> he said. <“Easy.> Keep Rain calm.”

  “Was Faint voice. Tremulous voice.

  “Most likely,” Callie said firmly. “Look for tracks going away, Jennie-cub!”

  “Is them?”

  In fact it was: Ridley got off again to take a close look at on the other side of the stairs, where something had—not vaulted the rail: the snow was still intact there—jumped from higher up, was what the intruder had done. He found the depression that indicated a jump clear from the next-to-last tier of the steps, He let Slip smell the trail.

  Slip snorted and brought his head up, dancing about nervously as Ridley swung up. Slip had smelled it twice, now, and still didn’t have a clear image of it. Shimmer walked back around and smelled the stairs and the railing, and didn’t have an image, either.

  “Where did it go?” Jennie asked—justified question.

  “Houses. It jumps and climbs.” , was what he was thinking. There was a snow ridge across the tracks and he rode Slip through it—picked up the trail of footprints on the other side, both scent and tracks, until it reached the Lasierres’ porch.

  The Lasierres seemed He didn’t want to disturb them or have them unbolting doors to the night—and possibly they’d caught the disturbance and warning from their horses out on the street and were staying close by their fireside.

  They made a circuit of the house. He rode in front. Callie and Jennie rode at a little distance back so they could get a vantage for firing at anything

  The tracks that had disappeared at the porch didn’t show up on any side. He considered the gap between the Lasierres’ roof and the Santezes’ roof, and it was wider than the gaps between most. But if whatever it was wasn’t lurking up there—it had jumped it and headed further up the street.

  Silent in the ambient.

  Slip sucked in a breath and blew it out again. There was that to track it by, a muskiness Slip amplified for his senses.

  Jennie was aching with And

  “Horses don’t know what it is,” Callie said to her. “They’ve no clear image. We’ve never seen those tracks before, and they’ve never smelled it.”

  “Let’s go back up the street,” Ridley said. “Get away from the overhangs.”

  They did that, and rode up again past The Evergreen. “Fool-time,” Ridley said. He slid down, his dismount bringing Slip to a halt, and with Callie and Jennie to watch the roof edges, he went up the steps to try the door.

  Locked, at least. Light came brightly through the frosted glass. He could see patrons inside through the clear lines in the etching. He could hear the talking stop as he knocked.

  “It’s Ridley Vincint!” he called out to the occupants. “You don’t have to open the door—just take your drinks and get away from the glass! Get into the back room and lock the doors! Don’t come out! Something’s inside the walls and it’s traveling on the roofs! It’s killed Serge Lasierre! We don’t know what it is!”

  A buzz of dismay broke out inside. They’d heard him. He didn’t wait for anyone to acknowledge the warning and he didn’t wait to argue or provide details. He went quickly down the steps and vaulted onto Slip’s back.

  Telling the marshal had to be the next step.

  Then all of them had to patrol the street until they had daylight to help them find a target.

  And they could only hope daylight didn’t signal it to hole up somewhere in the village.

  It was twenty-one and a stack of counters. Poker and twenty-one was what Darcy had played with Mark when they’d courted. She played twenty-one with Brionne between occasional moments that the storm-feeling grew terrible.

  At such moments Brionne would rise from the table and pace the floor in an angry frenzy.

  “Go away!” Brionne shouted now, and leapt to her feet, and looked up toward street level, which was well above the floor of the house’s sunken kitchen. “Go away!” It was a scream, a shriek against which Darcy steeled her nerves, having determined that ignoring the behavior was the best course.

  “Come back to the table, dear.”

  “They’re hunting, is what they’re doing! The horses are hunting. But it’s too clever for them!”

  “Dear—”

  “I hope my brother dies!” Brionne cried. “You hear me? I hope he dies!”

  “Dear—”

  “Get away from me!”

  Possibly hysterics had worked in a family that didn’t have normal mechanisms for a young girl getting attention. Perhaps that had been the mother’s tactic. Or perhaps shattering the other party’s nerves had been the way to win acquiescence or attention in that family. She refused to react at all. “Pick up your hand, honey. This could go on a long time. Sit down and concentrate.”

  “My brother’s out there. My little brother. I can hear him.”

  “If the horses have come over, I do imagine they’ve brought him, too. I don’t need to hear the horses to understand that.”

  “I hear them! I hear everything they’re thinking. They’re thinking, Let’s not let Brionne associate with us! We’re too good for Brionne. We’re too important! They hate me! They’re too stupid to know I hear everything they’re thinking! Shut up, do you hear me?”

  Pans littered the kitchen. This time Brionne picked up an iron skillet, whirled it around and let fly.

  It hit the bottom cupboards and dented the door.

  “Your deal,” Darcy said calmly. “Don’t pay attention to disagreeable people, dear. That’s the way to handle such things.”

  “Do you hear them?”

  “No, dear, I’m sure I don’t. I don’t hear horses.”

  “I do. I hear them perfectly clearly. You hear me, Randy? You’re a brat! You’re an unspeakable little brat!”

  “Do sit down. I’d rather play cards than listen to them. Hadn’t you? They’re not important people.”

  “They’re hateful.”

  “I know, dear, but it’s just no good worrying about other people. No one else in town can hear them. Whatever they think. So just tell them they’re hateful and sit down and let’s play cards.”

  “I don’t like cards.”

  “Well, what would you like to do?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Why don’t we go into the sitting room and I’ll read to you.”

  “Because I don’t want to!”

  “You’d rather sit here and mope.”

  “Yes!”

  “What would make you happy? —Would you like to go to the store tomorrow? I’ll bet some of Faye’s things would fit you. And then you and I can go to the store and buy anything you like.”

  Brionne drifted back to the table. “Anything?”

  “The finest things in Evergreen. You and I will go to the tavern Saturday night and we’ll get a table. That’s where everyone comes. And we’ll have the nicest clothes and all the young people will think you’re the prettiest girl on the mountain.”

  Brionne sat down. “Do they have nice things in the store?”

  “Oh, very nice. And if you don’t see what you like, we’ll go to the tailor and pick out patterns.”

  “I want a fringed jacket. Just like the riders.”

  “Well, I’m sure no village girl ever had a fringed jacket.”

  “I want one.”

  A social disaster, Darcy thought. A religious calamity. Or a fashion. “We can have one made. Of red suede. Would you like that?”

  There were gunshots. She knew gunshots. She flinched in spite of herself, and dealt out cards, not asking a girl who didn’t know her own mind whether or not she would play.

  “Someone’s shooting,” Brionne said.

  “I’m sure it’s the riders after vermin. It’s perfectly fine.” She
arranged her cards. “Oh, I think I can beat you with this.”

  Brionne picked up hers and began to arrange her own hand. Brionne’s frown grew. Darcy wished she knew how to cheat at cards. Brionne was far happier when she was winning, and she wished she could arrange that a certain amount of the time.

  Brionne simply could not add worth a damn.

  Gunshots again. A lot of them. Brionne hadn’t wanted to go to bed. She’d wanted to sleep on the couch in the front room, but Darcy didn’t want that, thinking of the windows there.

  And very quietly she went and got the gun from Mark’s office, and put it in the pocket of her robe, and came back to find Brionne sleeping, or seeming to, with her head down on her folded arms.

  At least the bells had stopped, one by one. She hoped it meant all clear.

  There’d been nervous fingers on triggers toward the forest wall— that had proved nothing, after they’d ridden breakneck to the site: the Jorgensons, opening their front door and shouting at them there’d been something trying their downstairs back window, but whether they’d fired first in a set of three houses claiming disturbance, was impossible to say. No one was killed and, in Ridley’s earnest hopes, the nervous trigger fingers had scared the intruder back over the wall.

  But their initial search had turned up nothing, and they’d been all the way back up to the marshal’s office and, leaving Randy with the marshal’s wife, picked up the marshal, the deputy, and the hunters, all armed with shotguns and rifles, to go on a house-by-house patrol.

  In Ridley’s hopes, too, no one would mistake them for intruders as they made their slow pass down the street, knocking on doors and giving out verbal warnings building by building and house by house—at least Peterson and Burani did that duty, the hunters escorting them with rifles and watching the perimeters of the porches while the three of them stayed on horseback in the middle of the street and watched the roof edges. He was aware of in the houses. He knew the horses made themselves felt when they went near a building—and he was glad to have two of the town guards and the marshal’s wife and daughter, all with guns, to keep watch in the upper end of the village, near the Schaffer house, where he didn’t want to take the horses.

  kept entering the ambient. It kept Jennie spooked, though Jennie was doing amazingly well at holding herself calm and not talking. Rain, between Slip and Shimmer, was behaving with more sense than he’d have believed, part of that to Jennie’s credit, as he meant to tell her at some moment on the other side of this.

  But the snow-fall was the creature’s friend if it was still in the village. Now and again the horses caught a whisper of something in the ambient that made all three of them in direct contact with the horses entirely uneasy, it was impossible to see what might be more than three buildings away, and hard to focus up into falling snow to check the roofs.

  “Papa,” Jennie said once, in a very quiet voice—a kid asking for reassurance; but with good reason.

  “Hush,” Callie said. “We know. We—”

  Shots went off down the street. A flurry of them. Glass broke. He wanted—and Slip was off, Shimmer and Rain close behind, leaving the marshal and the hunters and the others to hold the middle of the street in mid-village as he and his went down the street, Jennie clinging like a burr to Rain’s mane and staying up with them all the way to the black clot of scared men grouped in front of The Evergreen.

  Those men, some with guns, were screaming in panic at others still inside to get down as sounds of breakage resounded in the building. The shattered glass still in the doors showed dark spatter against the light, more dark spatter showed on the walls and a chaotic wreckage of overturned tables lay inside— was in the ambient, and something else. Alive. Hurt.

  And

  “Stay he said to Callie and Jennie, and rode Slip for the side of the building, the and the

  He saw what looked and felt like , and in that split second too long knew it wasn’t a man as it swarmed up an evergreen in the back of the tavern and up to the roof in a cloud of dislodged snow.

  He let off a shot, and knew from that they were aware of him, and aware of danger, His own shot hadn’t hit anything—the ambient held nothing of the thing he’d seen, and that was something he’d never had happen to him or to Slip.

  He rode Slip breakneck back around the building, fearing that at any moment the thing might come or onto where the ambient from the miners was awash with and the air was confused with shouting voices.

  He reached Callie and Jennie, and shouted for order among the miners who, the worse for drink and the scare of their lives, were all trying to report and debate what had happened. Hell, he knew what had happened—broken glass and , was what had happened, with carnage left and right.

  Laughing at them. Eluding them.

  Slip wanted So did Shimmer, now. Shimmer’s peace had been challenged, the vicinity of her winter den disturbed.

  But something else had flared into the ambient: and and Jennie was outraged, for Rain, for the ambient and her own place in it. It was Jennie first and foremost that that sending challenged, not them. It was his daughter who flung that challenge back, and the threat of Brionne Goss calling out and welcoming that thing that had come into his village, the threat of Brionne Goss challenging his daughter for whatever was at issue between them diminished the miners and their bloody calamity to a distant concern in his world.

  “Dammit,” he said to the clatter of miners shouting appeals and drunken orders at him, “get

  was the defiance at that instant blazing out into the snowy dark, a challenge to all comers, flung out with all the force a young fool horse could throw into a sending. Rain wanted Rain wanted Rain’s rider wanted from her village and knew no sensible fear of the threat: were in possession of the street and the village that was their world, and nothing could come into it and take it from them.

  “Stay with us!” he ordered Jennie, and fought Jennie and Rain for the lead as they bolted up the street. He was just barely able to cut Rain off short and prevent a charge right to the Schaffer house as they reached the marshal’s position. “Hold him, dammit, or get down!”

  He’d never sworn at Jennie. He’d told her from earliest time that the way to stop a horse that wouldn’t otherwise stop was to slide off, and she didn’t do that—she wanted and somehow made it stick, clinging to Rain and holding on, because she wouldn’t let him go across that street toward the

  Neither was Slip going to lose one of his own herd, young male or not: Slip was sending a strong , boss horse, and Shimmer came in with fit to chill the spine of an intruder.

  They’d stopped in the midst of the marshal’s group, guns all around them, guns aimed toward roof edges—when all of a sudden rushed right under them and up the street.

  “God!” Peterson cried.

  Callie said, “It’s found the passages.”

  * * *

  Chapter 22

  Ť ^ ť

  Run and run and run down the dark of the road, carrying only the rifle and a dozen shells—Danny ran by Cloud’s side as Tara ran by Flicker’s, the two of them, alone in the dark, ran and ran until the horses had caught their wind in this high altitude. It was swing up and ride until the horses were tiring under their weight, then run, then walk a distance, at last resort rest a moment, humans and horses alike, heads down, trying to warm the air they breathed. A rider knew the state of his horse’s body as a horse knew his rider’s. He knew what they could possibly do. He discovered reserves in both of them. And Guil had told them, go, run and ride, get there as fast as they could, stripped down to the absolute minimum they had to have in the Wild if something stranded one of them: a knife and a burning-glass, matches, Tara and him with rifles, the very least they could survive on and the lightest weight they could carry and make speed.

  Guil and Carlo were coming behind them with the rest of their belongings at the best rate they could, a man healing of a wound and a new rider whose chief use to them was outright strength—carrying three riders’ ordinary gear.

  It was up to them to get to the village
with horses that might make the difference—to prevent another Tarmin.

  The bells had gone silent an hour ago at least.

  Slip reared, then lunged at invisible threat under his feet as the creature raced right under them, and the went flaring off toward the church.

  At that place, by the light of lanterns hung on the village hall posts, two men stood on watch with shotguns.

  But more volunteers were actually heading down into the passages, by the church front access, to try to get a shot at it point-blank. Hunters had volunteered for that harrowing post, village-siders accustomed to standing their ground in dicey situations, and Ridley entirely gave them their due: he didn’t want to be in their position at this precise instant.

  Jennie was with him and Slip, ; and Callie and Shimmer were down almost at the church along the course of the tunnel. “Now!” he heard from Callie, signaling presence right under Shimmer’s feet, and “Now!” the shout came from the men on the porch, the signal for the hunters in the tunnel to open the door to the church access.

  There was a muffled blast of shotgun fire below.

  And for a moment the presence in the passages seemed to have split in four, behind them, ahead of them, under the church, under the row of houses—

  Rain jumped sideways in startlement and Jennie was But Rain took up guard right over her, and Ridley, ignoring the temptation to look to his injured daughter, was trying to keep a view simultaneously of all the perimeter, no longer sure where it was and fearful of losing track of the thing.

  Playing games with them, dammit. And he daren’t leave his view of the edges to help Jennie, who was , which she couldn’t manage without something to stand on. Without leaving his scanning of the perimeters, he slid off Slip’s back, gave Jennie the boost she needed and delayed only a heartbeat to pat her arm.

  “All right?”

  “Yeah,” she said. The lamplight showed tears smeared on one cheek. Jennie was as well as , and thinking about although she knew she wasn’t supposed to and they’d kept her away from that house. Rain was frothing at the mouth he was so mad, , wanting his teeth into anything he could identify as the

 

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