So he figured he’d say nothing; but instead, when he took the rest of that breath, and even with his head empty, words came out all by themselves.
They were: “How come you don’t?”
He shouted it. It surprised them both. Steffie never shouted at her.
Gwen was pulled back against the branches, with the blanket hugged against her, and all her hair a-tangle. He couldn’t see her eyes, just shadows with flicks of light in. She looked like a stranger; she looked stranger than a stranger, because he couldn’t guess what she was thinking— and then he could. She was thinking that it was his question that made no sense at all.
They both crouched there, under the leaves, in the dim, looking at each other’s shadows; and it was just like they were a couple of animals with no words between them at all, because nothing either one of them said could make any sense to the other.
The dog stopped moaning. Steffie heard something like bad music in the distance, all different notes, all at once.
The demons were closer.
“Stay, then,” he said to Gwen; and then he was down the little leafy tunnel, out, and standing up.
He could get to Corey’s faster if he cut up the hill through the brush. He could get to Janus faster going straight down.
Then he was moving fast, not running so much as stopping himself from falling down, just. So fast that when he got to the bottom of the hill, he had to grab hold of a tree trunk so he could spin onto the road or he would have gone straight into the water. Then down the road, pounding, past the good end of the harbor, toward the shabby end, right at the cooper’s, into the backyard, up the steps.
Then he was slamming his fist on Janus’s door and trying the latch, which wouldn’t open, and he was yelling, “Wake up, you bloody stupid bastard, get yourself ready to do whatever it was you did the last time, because they’re back again, except there’s more of them, so you’ve got to do it again, so get up!”
He heard a voice inside, and someone moving; but Steffie didn’t wait. “Get up to Corey’s place!” he yelled, and then he was back down the stairs, back down the road, and up New High Street. Behind him more voices were calling: the people who’d heard him, yelling it all to the people who hadn’t.
By the time he got up to Corey’s door, the word wasn’t far behind him. He could hear it moving up the street, door to door, and he knew it was going out to other streets, too, people waking their neighbors to tell, all down the line.
Corey didn’t have a house, just a room at the side of Karin’s, with its own door. Steffie banged it, and then tried it. It wasn’t locked, but Corey was there already when Steffie opened it.
“More,” Steffie got out, between two gasps.
“Them demons?”
“Right,” between two more gasps.
“Where?”
“South. Not up to old Galer’s yet. Heard ’em. Didn’t see ’em. A bunch. All together.” Steffie put his back against the doorway, and coughed and gasped.
“Right.” The dark room swallowed Corey, then spit him up again with a bucket in his hand. “Take this.” He pointed up across the street. “Hit that.” Corey went back in the dark, and Steffie could hear him grabbing things.
The bucket had rocks in it. Steffie took a good-sized one and hurled it at the shutters of the upstairs window across the street. Then another, two good bangs. He was already flinging the third when the street door opened, and Nola came out. She was pulling on a heavy leather vest over her shirt, and she had her spear in one hand and a short sword he’d never seen her with before strapped on. She bolted off, already knowing what to do and where to go.
Corey came out again. He had a lamp in one hand, not lit, and an old bow in the other. Steffie had never seen Corey use a bow. “We’ve got to fetch more than Nola, don’t we?” Steffie said.
“No. She tells two, then those two tell two, and it goes out to the militia like that. They’ll all come here.”
Steffie looked down the street. “Well, there’s more people coming than that,” he said. Because there were: a straggle of people coming up Karin’s road from New High. And one coming down Hill Path, as well; the news had run itself past Karin’s house already and was probably still going strong.
They gathered at Karin’s cutting shed. Big, empty space— but they all stood close at the front end. There was the green smell of new-cut leaves on the tables all around and the dusty smell of dead leaves on the floor, like spring and autumn jammed both together by someone mean, who wanted to hurry things.
“We need someone to go out and see where they are now, and how many, and then come back and tell us,” Corey said.
“That’d be me,” Steffie said; but Belinda said it, too, and faster, so she got it. Good enough. She ran better. She could run all night and not notice.
“What I want,” Corey went on— he was standing up on a table so people could see, “what I want is to get at them with nothing behind them, so we can shoot them. I want them where if we miss no one gets hurt, because the way I see it, whoever can hold a bow gets to use it. You don’t need to be good, you just need to keep shooting in the right direction.”
Someone bumped Steffie’s shoulder, and he turned. Arvin was there, with his own good bow and another one, older and smaller. He handed it to Steffie— but Steffie gave it right back. “Got to be someone here can use it better than me,” Steffie said. Arvin nodded, and sidled off through the crowd.
“If we can’t get the monsters while they’ve got nothing behind them,” Corey went on, “the thing to do is let them come into the streets. If we can get them into the smaller streets, we can stand off down the street from them and try to pick them off. It depends on how many they are, and if they split up, which way each one goes.”
One of the militia spoke up. “Then we need more runners, to spot ’em and come tell. So they can split, too.”
“Right. So I want about five people, willing to follow that noise the monsters make, and just sight them, and then come running to tell me.” And it was about five voices answering, but they were all the wrong ones. “No. You two girls, and you, boy, you go running ’round to all the streets now, and tell everyone who’s awake and wants to help that they should come here fast. Right? You, go north; you, northwest; you, southeast. If you hear any demons, just run the other way, as fast as you can. And, you two others, you go home now and hide under the beds— you’re too little.”
“I’ll be a runner, and that’s two when Belinda gets back.”
“Steffie, good. Who else?” No one spoke up. “I don’t want to use my fighters for this; my fighters will need to fight, and some of the rest of you will, too.” A couple more voices, not sounding happy about it.
Someone came up and stood just next to Steffie. He thought at first it was Gwen, but when he turned and looked it was Zenna.
“You can’t fight,” he told her.
“I know.”
“Right.” He turned back to watch Corey.
Karin had got one of those extra bows, and was looking pretty mean, holding it. She was standing beside the table, not watching Corey, but watching the other people. She was still a boss— but she wasn’t Corey’s boss, not for tonight.
Corey went on. “When Belinda gets back, we’ll have a better idea of where to set up. If the demons haven’t reached Harbor Road, I’m thinking we should swing ’round on them from the north, and there’ll be just marsh behind them …”
Steffie listened close, lining up all the bits in his head, trying to figure where he’d fit in. Plans were good, but you never knew when they’d fall apart …
Funny, he thought after a while. Seems he had a clearer view of Corey than before. A clearer view all around the room.
It was because some people had left. He hadn’t seen them going, but he saw them gone.
Some people who could help a lot were off and gone; while some people who couldn’t help at all, like Zenna, they’d come up here all the same.
All the people
like Gwen were gone, or going; all the people like him were here and still coming.
Good. Good both ways.
Across the room, he saw that little boy from down the harbor— Ivy’s little boy, Tarlie. He hadn’t gone to bed like Corey told him; he was sitting in a corner, looking at the world through people’s legs. Couldn’t do a thing to help, but there he was.
Ivy’s boat was at the bad end of the harbor. Way past the cooper’s.
If a little boy from there could make it here by now, so could Janus.
Steffie looked all around. What he saw was no Janus anywhere.
Must’ve decided to be one of those other people. The ones who don’t do things. The ones like Gwen.
But someone who did what Janus did last time wouldn’t be like Gwen this time.
And where was Belinda?
“Something’s gone wrong. Because Belinda’s not back, and she should be.” He talked loud, right over Corey, and everyone turned around to look.
Corey didn’t like it. “Maybe she’s warning more people on the way back,” he said, and tried to go on.
“But she wouldn’t do that, because you said come right back here. And what about Janus, with him so eager last time? I told him already myself, but he’s not here yet.”
And all of a sudden it was everyone paying attention to Steffie— him in the middle of all these faces— and it didn’t feel natural to him at all. But he pushed on anyway. “So, it looks to me like any plans you’re thinking are already gone out the window. Maybe we should just get down there, all of us, and figure what to do, when we see.”
“No, I want to have some idea first— ”
“But something’s up, something’s up right now, and we don’t know a thing about it, so everything you’re figuring will be no good, because you don’t know.”
Corey thought a bit. It looked like it was just for show, but he made sense when he talked again. “Then I want you other runners out right now. Just listen for where the demons are, see ’em if you can, but back off. One runner— you, Kenno— you go down New High as far as Jilly’s. Wait by the corner there. You others report to him, and he’ll come tell me, if we’re not already there by then. We’ll regroup there as soon as I’m finished here.”
“I’ll take Harbor Road going east,” Steffie said straight off. He didn’t wait to hear about the other runners.
He was all the way down Karin’s road and at the corner of New High, running steady but not so hard he’d get winded, when he got a picture in his head, and it was of the room full of people just before he’d run out.
Zenna wasn’t in that picture.
At the healer’s house there were lights in the downstairs windows. Someone had told Jilly, maybe one of the children. She was ready.
He was up to the second baker’s house, halfway down the hill in New High, when he passed Zenna. She must have used that three-point run of hers to get there so fast, but she couldn’t now, because it was too steep. “Go back!” he shouted as he went by, running fast enough that he said the first word before he reached her and the second when he was past.
She yelled back at him, her words getting littler as he left her behind. “No! You go forward!”
And he did.
Back at the bottom of New High, he started listening hard for the demon hum. He stopped and took off his shoes, and stuck them in the back of his belt with the heels against his back; then he was off at a jog trot again. He didn’t know why he’d done that until he wondered; and then he saw that it was because his shoes made noise on the stones and demons came after noise.
Good thinking, Steffie. Now, listen.
He slowed. He stopped. He listened, hard.
Demon-voice, east.
There were paths down there through the sea grass, and they all came up to Harbor Road. The demons were down there, but how far down?
Funny how sounds sounded different, depending what they were and where you were. If the noise was a person talking, he’d know straight off how far away he was. But that hum, all those hums together, like all the strings on Belinda’s fiddle all at once, only deeper …
Then he did hear voices, two of them.
One was that dog, barking instead of moaning, then just growling mean, like: Burglars, stay back!
Good dog. Do your job. You’re a dead dog, but you’re a good one.
Quarter of a mile away, just past the end of Harbor Road. Right.
The other voice was a man’s, and it was just one shout. Janus. Steffie could tell. From the same place.
Stupid, stupid bloody idiot Janus, off all by himself, going to get himself killed— and Steffie was supposed to run back now, pass the word up to Kenno and get the militia, and leave Janus, just leave him on his own—
Steffie, there’s not enough time to waste it standing and thinking. Either do what you want, or do what’s right, but do it now.
He was a third of the way back up the hill on New High when he came to Zenna again, still coming down, swinging herself slow so as not to fall. “Go back,” he told her, like before; but if she said anything, he outran it.
Kenno was at the crossroads by Jilly’s. Steffie told him where the demons were. “And that Janus, he’s doing something, he’s right with them, but I didn’t get close enough to see. Tell Corey. Don’t wait. Something’s happening now.”
And that was the best he could do— except he thought of one more thing. Kenno had a scythe; Steffie took it.
Like it was enough to help. Like if he got close enough to use it, he wouldn’t be already dead from that spray.
At the bottom of the hill, already going down Harbor Road, Zenna was swinging along hard, her shadowy shape making that shoulder twist that said she was about to start running, and she’d almost be as fast as Steffie that way.
And she had no weapon, and no hands free to use one, and she’d only got one leg. Nothing she could do, but she was still going.
So he got right in front of her, and let her crash against him; he dropped the scythe and grabbed at her shoulders to stop her falling. One of the crutches ended up swinging around and hitting the back of his legs, hanging loose from the strap around her left arm. He almost stumbled but got himself right before they both went down. “Stay out of it— you can’t help.”
“Are they coming?” She was clattering that crutch, trying to get it back right.
“The militia? Yes. The demons? Yes. There’ll be spray coming one way and arrows the other. You don’t want to be in the middle. What is it you think you’re doing?” And in his head, Gwen’s voice added: And how come you have to do it?
Then he didn’t need to wait to know that Zenna wouldn’t answer, because there was no answer, not to that question. And no words either one of them might say would change it.
So he did the only thing he could think of, which was to pull that crutch right off Zenna’s arm and swing it once over his head and let it go, out into the harbor. He heard it thump, then clatter, then splash. Then he swept up the scythe, and he left her behind.
It was a rotten, rotten thing to do to someone like her, and it hurt him like a knife to think he’d done it, and he swore to himself he’d find the crutch later, fish it out for her— but Zenna wouldn’t be going on now, and that was what mattered.
Up ahead, just past the end of Harbor Road, there was light, there was something burning. Someone was shouting, but it wasn’t Janus, and that dog was making noise again, but not Burglars, now; it was more wild, like Wolves! Evil! I will kill you!’
Of Janus he heard nothing, and Steffie ran silently himself, barefoot-sore on stones, then dirt, then grass.
24
Something crashed into him, something grabbing at him, and falling, almost pulling him down. Steffie tried to get the scythe where it would do good, but the thing was too close. Then he knew it was some person— except it didn’t sound like a person, making just noises, horrible noises, right in his face.
Steffie grabbed with one hand, and shook, and shou
ted, “Where? Janus and them monsters, where?”
It was a man, and the noises started being words, nearly. “Yes,” Steffie told him, “there’s help coming, yes, but I’m not help for you, I’m help for Janus.” He couldn’t see the man in the dark, and he was glad, because there was a lot of wet under his right hand, and shreds of cloth and bits of things shifting that shouldn’t ought to, not properly. Steffie tried to break free without hurting him more. He spun him around, and pushed. “That way, go that way, it’s Corey and the militia coming, soon— now go!”
He shoved him away, and the man stumbled half on the path, half in the bushes, and Steffie didn’t stay to watch him go.
The light was up ahead— something burning, something big. Galer’s old shed, maybe, Steffie thought, and that must have been Galer himself he was leaving behind.
Farther down the path he tripped over something, and he thought it was that dog— but then the dog set up again, yelping and whining, still ahead. There was the demon noise ahead, too; and Steffie tried to count the voices, but he couldn’t. A lot. Just a lot.
Then the thought what he’d tripped over might be Janus, so he put out his hand— and brought the hand back fast. It was demon skin he touched, all sticky with that stuff they used for blood.
Well, good then. That’s one down. Steffie wiped his hand on his shirt, and put his shoes back on.
Right then the shed fell in on itself. Steffie couldn’t see it, but he heard it: a big sudden noise, and a hot wind pushed at him, hard. A huge spout of sparks went straight up, with the tree branches and leaves all turning away from the wind. Then the gust stopped; and it was just heat and light that Steffie was walking toward. He could feel it right through the trees. He got off the path and sidled along from trunk to trunk, stepping careful, because Galer always threw his trash out into the woods.
When he got to the edge of the trees, the whole yard was lit by that fire. He didn’t have to worry about not seeing demons in the dark; and maybe that was what the fire was for, because what could a demon do to a shed that would make it catch fire? So it was Janus who set it.
The Lost Steersman (Steerswoman Series) Page 28