by Kyra Halland
She nodded, relieved though she hated to admit it. She hated leaving it to him, but she just couldn’t face that again.
Silas laid his palms on the ground and closed his eyes. His face tightened in concentration. A faint blue glow, feathered through with amber, flickered from his mage ring. He remained still for several minutes as Lainie waited, wondering if his newly-repaired magic would allow him to do this.
Anger darkened his face. “Found it,” he said. “Gods-damned sheepknocking sons of bitches…” He felt along the ground, moving down the path a measure or so. “That’s the trail that leads to town, that the wiseman found.” The glow from his mage ring brightened a bit, then sputtered out. He stood up. “That’s all I can do for now. Come on. Let’s follow it down and see if another trail splits off anywhere.”
Walking the horses, they descended back down out of the gully, stopping every few arm-lengths so Lainie could check the fading trail the murderers had left behind. After the gully opened up and the ground leveled out, Lainie crouched down and placed her hands on the ground. Bracing herself against the foulness the murderers had left behind, she reached deeper into the ground with her mage senses, past the trail that had led the A’ayimat to the town, and found a fainter, more shadowy trail, an echo of bloodlust, cruelty, and driving purpose, that split off, heading south instead of west towards the town.
“I think there’s another trail here, that splits off from the first one,” she said. “It’s like they moved their trail over to lead towards the town, but it left an impression behind. Like if you pick up a rope on the ground and move it, it leaves a mark to show where it was. Tell me what you think.”
Silas put his hands on the ground next to hers. A look of concentration come over his face again, and his mage ring glowed faintly. “I think you’re right,” he said after a moment. “And the A’ayimat didn’t even see it because they weren’t expecting to see another trail.”
They stood up and looked towards the south. In the fading, cloudy daylight, Lainie’s gaze fixed on a wash, lined by a thicket of trees, that ran down from the hills a couple of leagues south of the town. “There,” she said. “That looks like a good hiding place.”
Chapter 14
THE FAINT TRAIL indeed led to the wash Lainie had spotted. The creek looked to have been dry for some time now, with the summer rains long past. Grim though the circumstances were, Silas couldn’t help feeling a sense of satisfaction at being able to detect the trail left by the killers’ emotions in the magic beneath the earth. Sensing the power in the earth here in the Wildings, so far from his birthplace, should have been impossible. But he never minded being able to do something he’d been told he couldn’t do, and he always welcomed another useful skill for tracking down bounties and troublemakers.
At the place where the fading magical trail ended, Silas uncovered the charred remnants of a small fire from beneath a thin layer of snow and dirt. “If anyone from the town did see smoke, they probably would have assumed it was just hands out on the range or travelers,” he told Lainie.
Pointing out the signs he found as he searched, he brushed away more snow to reveal the compressed dirt where the men, three of them, had sat, and located the pit where they had buried the remnants of their meals and their own wastes. The cold had done nothing to kill the smell. Their horses had been tethered a couple of measures away. Going by the condition of the horse droppings and the remnants of the camp, he guessed the men had been there for no more than two nights about a nineday and a half ago, which fit with the timing of the massacre.
No other magical trail led away from the camp to show where the killers had come from or where they had gone. Lainie guessed, and Silas agreed, that the men’s emotions on leaving might not have been as strong as when they committed their crimes, and the incoming trail could have just faded away with time. Silas explored up and down the wash, looking for physical tracks, and found a place several measures down from the camp where the growth of low, thorny trees on the bank had been disturbed. Lainie walked over to join him as he examined it. A number of branches had been broken and bent, making a path wide enough for a single-file line of horses to pass between the trees.
“That’s too easy,” he told Lainie. “I doubt they were really that careless.”
“And we already know they have a habit of laying false trails,” she said.
Silas crouched in the bottom of the wash, studying the ground again, then he grinned up at Lainie. “A word of advice, darlin’. If you’re going to lay a false trail, don’t make it so easy to find. And take some trouble to hide your real trail; don’t figure the snow and the false trail will do the job for you.” He brushed away snow from the ground, showing her the jumble of foot and hoof prints coming up the wash from the south and west.
“Did they come in that way, or leave?” Lainie asked.
Silas studied the ground a little longer, moving a little farther down the wash. “Both.”
Leading the horses along the narrow wash bed, Silas and Lainie followed the trail a league or so further down. Recalling how a lurking Orl Fazar had followed them through that tangle of washes in the Bads, Silas kept his physical senses and his regrowing mage senses on the alert and told Lainie to be vigilant as well. The last thing they needed was to be ambushed by any killers who might still be skulking around.
A natural gap between the trees on a low place on the rocky bank caught Silas’s eye. He investigated, and found some scuff marks on the rocks, some broken leaves, and a single human hair tangled on a thorny branch. “Here’s where they came in and left,” he said, showing Lainie the signs.
They led the horses up the embankment, then stopped and looked around. Flat, grassy rangeland stretched out to the south and west. A spread-out herd of grazing cattle had trampled what there was of the physical trail, and neither Silas nor Lainie could find any trace of a magical trail.
“I’ll take a look for mages,” Lainie said. She knelt again and placed her hands flat on the ground. She held still for several minutes, her eyes closed, then stood up, brushing her damp, dirty hands on her pants. “No mages within range of my senses. Now where?”
Silas considered the map in his mind of this part of the Wildings. The killers had come and gone in this direction, from the south, on their excursion to Thornwood. They could have circled around and gone north to Bentwood Gulch, but Silas guessed that Elspetya Lorentius wouldn’t be interested in wiping out a town that prosperous. If her intent was to acquire power and wealth, she would have other plans for it. A couple of remote towns lay to the north beyond Bentwood Gulch, but if the Hidden Council was looking for targets to attack, there were more of them in the opposite direction.
“I’m betting south and west,” Silas answered Lainie. “Simm’s Rest is the next town that way. Let’s go there, and see if we can find out anything.”
* * *
THERE WASN’T ANYTHING especially restful about Simm’s Rest, unless you considered four saloons restful. The four saloons stood one on each corner of the main crossroads, and even at this hour, early in the afternoon, the sounds of laughter, fights, and jangling hammerboxes filled the air. After the deathly silence of Thornwood and the quiet of the last three days’ riding across the open range, the revelry seemed frantic to Silas, as though in frenzied denial that things like the massacre at Thornwood could happen. The smells of alcohol, greasy cooking, vomit, and horse droppings hung heavily in the street, and Lainie looked decidedly green around the edges. The morning sickness had settled in with a vengeance, turning into nausea that lasted all day, and though she never complained of being tired, her face was thin, pale, and haggard, and dark circles ringed her eyes.
Fortunately, besides the saloons, there was also a real hotel in town, a block away from the main crossroads. Silas and Lainie headed there and took a room. Up in the room, away from the noise and smells, Lainie collapsed onto the bed. “Oh, gods,” she groaned. “The smell out there. I thought I was gonna heave.”
The bed looked mighty inviting to Silas as well, but it was still early in the day and he had work to do. “I’m going out to see if I can hear anything that’s worth hearing,” he said. “I’ll come check on you in a while and bring you some dinner.”
“Urg,” was her only response.
Silas took a handful of drinas and gildings and went out to the Dragon’s Cup, the busiest-looking of the four saloons, hoping to finally get some new information. On the way here, he and Lainie had spoken to a handful of cowhands they met on the range and stopped at a couple of ranches to ask if any suspicious travelers had been seen in recent days. The hands knew who they were; a couple of them had been among the hostile gang that Silas and Lainie had faced down on the drive. Those men had been sullen and refused to talk to them, but the others were polite if not friendly, and the ranchers were grateful to Silas and Lainie for saving their herds and their earnings that year. All of them, friendly or not, listened with avid curiosity as Silas told them what he had found at Thornwood and what the A’ayimat sentry had said, but they had nothing to tell him in turn.
Inside the Dragon’s Cup, someone was assaulting a hammerbox with murderous force. Silas supposed they meant to be playing it, but the effect was more tortured than musical, as was usually the case with hammerboxes. The air was thick with tobacco smoke and the house ladies’ perfumes, all merging together into one big stink.
He got a beer at the bar, then looked around. Several games of Dragon’s Threes were in progress. One game was winding down and it looked like there would be room for a new player in the next game. Lainie had banned him from playing for money, but card games were a good way to engage in conversation with the locals and find out the latest news and rumors. Besides, he hadn’t brought very much money with him, so he couldn’t lose much, and he had learned a lot from watching Lainie play. He put money for dinner in the inside pocket of his duster, resolving not to play with it, then carried his tankard over to the table.
The game had just finished and the players were gathering up their winnings. “Got room for another player?” Silas asked.
“Sit yourself down,” said the man who was acting as dealer as he shuffled the cards for the next game.
Silas took a seat. Immediately, a house lady in bright green satin perched herself on his knee. “Hey, handsome,” she said, “you’re new around here.”
She was pretty, in an overblown, over-dyed, over-painted kind of way, and her voluptuous curves felt cushy against him. There was a time when he would have been tempted, but that was before Lainie. He set his left hand on the table, displaying the ring on his wedding finger. “I’m also married.”
“I don’t mind. What’ll you buy me if you win?”
He tried to shift her off of his lap, but she remained firmly planted in place. “I never win, but if I do, I’m going to buy a decent meal to take back to the hotel for my pregnant wife.”
Pregnant wife. The words still sounded strange. Not that he had any regrets. Once he got over the initial shock of learning that Lainie had removed the fertility block and realized that he wasn’t breaking out in oozing boils or foaming-mouthed fits or embarrassing digestive upsets and he certainly hadn’t been rendered impotent, he had decided he was glad she had had the nerve to do it. Given a realistic assessment of his troubled relationship with the Mage Council, he never would have been able to get the block removed by them. In one bold move, though, Lainie had dispensed with that problem.
The house lady pouted. “You’re no fun.” She snuggled up closer against Silas, giving him an excellent view down her cleavage. He gave up on trying to dislodge her, at least for the moment. Being rude to one of the resident house ladies or, worse, manhandling her to get her off his lap would likely get him thrown out of this saloon and banned from the others, which would reduce his chances of being able to have some useful conversation in this town.
He turned his attention to his cards, peering over the house lady’s ample bosom to see what kind of hand he had been dealt. Not bad, he thought, rearranging them into the threes he figured Lainie would play, then separating them to confuse the other players.
“Ooh,” the house lady said, pointing to a couple of the cards. “Why don’t you play those together?”
“You know the rules, sweetheart,” Silas said. “No talking about the cards, or you’ll have to leave the table.”
She pouted some more, but fell silent. He had hoped that the reproof would get rid of her; no such luck. He jiggled his leg, trying again to shake her off, but she didn’t budge. Defeated, he resigned himself to the distracting presence of her cleavage and her stale perfume. At least if he lost he could use that as his excuse. He threw a couple of drinas onto the tray, an unimpressive opening bet.
The game started. Silas, as the newcomer, was the natural topic of conversation as the gameplay passed around the table. “So what brings you this way?” asked a man with an enormous red mustache.
Silas put down a Star Priest, a Moon Crone, and a Fire Farmer. Not bad, the highest-scoring combo so far in the first round, but not great. Lainie usually liked to start out with a modest play like this. “I’m looking into what happened in Thornwood.”
“Terrible thing, terrible,” a man in a fine black suit said.
“Some of us was talkin’ about hittin’ ’em back. Teach them blueskins a lesson,” Red Mustache said.
“What’s your interest in it? You lose family?” Black Suit asked.
“Some kin of the victims hired me to find out who provoked the blueskins into attacking.” It was close enough to the truth.
“I had kin in Thornwood,” said a man with a fancy snakeskin band on his hat. “I’m no holy-pather like them, but they was good folks. They was always real careful about not goin’ near the blueskins’ territory or doin’ anything to provoke them.”
“Turns out the blueskins did have cause to attack, though,” Silas said.
“What?” The astonished demand, almost angry, went up around the table.
Silas laid down his next combo, then gave the men around the table a serious look. “Two little blueskin girls were raped and murdered just on the blueskin side of the boundary. The blueskins tracked the killers’ trail to Thornwood.”
The table fell silent. Silas found himself looking down the wrong end of a revolver aimed at him by Snakeskin Band. The house lady fled. Slowly, the rest of the noise in the saloon died as the other patrons noticed trouble brewing. Even the hammerbox went quiet.
“You sayin’ my folk did a deed like that?” Snakeskin Band demanded in a cold voice.
“An’ how do you know all this anyway?” Black Suit added.
“I’m not saying anyone in Thornwood did it,” Silas said, looking steadily past the gun at the man who was holding it. “In fact, I’m sure they didn’t. After my wife and I looked at the town, we went up into the hills to see what we could see. We’ve had dealings with the blueskins before, and they know us and have a tolerance for us. We met a sentry who told us what happened. He pointed out where they found the girls’ bodies and the trail into town. The trail was so obvious it struck me as false, so we did some tracking ourselves, and found an abandoned camp not far outside the town, back from about the same time as the attack.”
He shuffled his cards in his hand, trying to relieve some of the tension. “So, we figure some outlaws, rough types like that, maybe drunk, maybe just looking for trouble, passed close to the town, went up into the hills and did their deed, then laid a false trail so the townsfolk would be blamed instead of them. They looked to have come from down this way and returned the same way afterwards, so we wanted to find out if anyone remembers any suspicious types passing through in the days before or after it happened. We’re also trying to spread word that the blueskins were provoked, so folks shouldn’t go striking back and making things even worse, and warn everyone to keep an eye out for troublemakers.”
After a long silence, Snakeskin Band returned his revolver to his holster. “Damned mess this is
. Gods-damned murdering sheepknockers.”
The card game resumed, as did the rest of the activity in the saloon, though more subdued now. “Don’t know if anyone like the fellows you’re looking for would have come in here,” the dealer said. “This is a respectable establishment. You should ask across the street, over to the Bootlicker. That’s where the vagabonds and troublemakers hang out.”
“I’ll do that, then,” Silas said, “as soon as I finish winning all your money.”
In the end, he lost every copper bit he had set aside for playing. He had tried to play the way Lainie did, but she must have some trick that he just couldn’t grasp of carrying all the figures in her head as well as guessing who had what cards. At least he had only lost two gildings. There were times in the last year and a half when that would have been a fortune to them, but right now, still flush with money from their job for Coltor and the cattle drive, they could afford a friendly loss.
Silas handed his cards back to the dealer. “Thank you for the game, gentlemen, and the conversation. I’ll head on over –”
A man burst into the saloon, red-faced and sweating despite the cold. “It happened again!” he shouted over the noise of the saloon.
Dead silence fell over the room again. “What happened?” someone asked.
“The blueskins,” the man gasped. “They attacked Stone Creek.”
Shock and outrage exploded in the saloon. Silas walked over to the man. “When did this happen?” he asked.
“’Bout three days ago.”
“Any survivors?”
“Don’t think so. Bunch of us was heading to work at the Square Moon ranch over that way, and we came across it. The fires was still smoldering, but not a living body in sight. We scattered to warn everyone; I rode hard to get here fast as I could.”
Silas called his map to mind. “Stone Creek is south of here?”