The Cold Eye

by Laura Anne Gilman

  He hushed his own thoughts, blanking them under the quiet sound of water. Smell came last: First, the ever-present, soothingly familiar smell of horse and leather and human sweat. Then the tang of sagebrush and green pine, and the faint tickle of maidenflower. And under that, once his entire self lay open and waiting, came the scent of water, from the quicksilver lightness of the creeks to the slower, stone-wet deepness below. The ability to dowse: his medicine, his curse, the thing tying him to the Territory, marking him as one of its own, finding water as easily as he could find the Road.

  And then, going deeper still, finding the feel of specific water. The water warmed by familiar scent, the warmth of her body shaping it, the exhale of her breath scenting it.

  Years and lives ago, he had spent time with a band of Hochunk, regaining his health, regaining his strength, when all he could do was listen to stories. There had been an old man once among them, one story claimed, who could find a single person lost in the Underworlds by the scent of their spit. Gabriel, who mocked no story, did not believe such a thing was possible. But this . . . this he thought he could do, after months of sharing canteens and coffee and the dampness of morning air with her. Enough to ensure he could find her like a freshwater spring in a dry plain.

  “Hey, Iz,” he said, pitching his voice as though to carry just a little ways away, as though she were still riding next to him. “Whatever trouble you’ve found, just hold tight. We’re coming.”

  Isobel was flummoxed. Everything she had been taught, all the things she had learned, told her that it was not possible for the land to be barren of power. Water flowed, wind breathed, people moved, and therefore power was.

  Kneeling by the table without explanation, she placed her left palm down on the ground, sinking inside herself in that way she never could explain to Gabriel, opening herself to whatever the Territory wanted to tell her.

  Silence.

  It went beyond the cleansing she had felt: this little settlement had no connections to anything. There was no well-trod Road here, no familiar pull of the bone-deep ribbon that connected the Territory. Nothing.

  Three times she tried skin to dirt, sending herself as deep as she dared, opening as far as she dared without Gabriel to watch over her, among strangers, however kind.

  Nothing. Worse than silence: an emptiness where silence might be, a hollow unfilled, unfillable, driving her out and back into herself.

  Fingers clenched, jaw tight enough to ache, Isobel was uncertain how much time had gone, save they all still waited, the men looking away, the women staring, near rude but so hesitantly hopeful, she could not take offense. Not for the first time, she wondered why the boss had sent her out so woefully unprepared —and how she was supposed to function once her time with Gabriel was done and he moved on.

  “Something happened here,” she said. “Tell me.”

  They all looked at Duck, who merely shook her head and lowered her gaze to her hands twined together in her lap. Isobel felt a snap of impatience: how was she to help if they would not tell her? Was this yet another test? Was she supposed to know?

  The tension stretched, filling the air until it became hard to breathe, Isobel’s impatience becoming a thing she could feel, knocking at her bones. The older woman was their leader, they would not say anything if she would not. And Isobel could do nothing if they did not speak.

  “Jumping-Up Duck. Please.”

  “The ground rumbled,” the woman said finally, not looking up from her hands, rough-skinned knuckles clenched tight.

  “A quake?” They were not common in Flood, but they happened, and the boss had said that the ground had once rocked hard enough, farther west, that those who lived there told stories of it a hundred years later, of ground crumbling and waters rising, and those who could not run, died.

  “Jordskalv,” Karl said. “As though waves underfoot, on a ship, in solid ground. Three times yesterday, one after another.”

  Isobel, trying to read him, thought his expression was less worry and more irritation at the world not behaving itself.

  “The land shakes often to the west of here,” Four Wolves said. “Where the ground steams and ancient spirits rest. If the dwellers-below are restless enough to stretch their hands this far . . . they are best left alone. It is nothing we need worry about. We have done nothing to offend.”

  There was utter certainty in his body: whatever was happening, he did not think it a threat, and he was tired of repeating himself.

  Isobel remembered Ree, after the boss had told that story of the great quake, his fingers stroking the jagged ink that ran, blue against black, from wrist to elbow. “The deep bones ache,” he’d said then. “They stretch and wake, then go back to sleep. Best to let them be.”

  “This is not the rumble of birthing,” Jumping-Up Duck told Four Wolves, scowling. “It is a rumble of pain.”

  Four Wolves opened his mouth to argue with her, then closed his mouth and lowered his gaze, as though she had cowed him.

  “Margot? Elizabet?”

  The sisters glanced sideways at each other, then each shook their head.

  “The earth shook,” Elizabet said. “I was sleeping, the first time, but awake for the others. It was . . . disturbing. The children cried.”

  “They were the most upset,” Margot added. “But they could not tell us why.”

  Isobel thought that the ground shaking needed no more reason than that to upset them, but simply nodded. “Three quakes, one after another. How long apart?”

  “The first when the quarter-moon was bright,” Catches in Teeth said. “The second soon after, and the third well after sunrise. We stayed in the lodge for the first. When we came out . . .” He looked distressed, his gaze flicking to the barn where Uvnee was stabled. “We had goats, not many, but enough to give milk, meat. They all fled. Only the dogs remained.”

  “The earth is in pain,” Duck said, as though Catches in Teeth’s words had opened something within her. “Pain that does not care the cause, only to find something within reach to hurt in turn.” She was looking at the children as she spoke, five of them, comfortable in bare skin and clouts, their hair reddish black in the sunlight as they played with the dogs in the grass.

  They should have been living with a tribe, or a village, or in a city back East, Isobel thought. Not here, isolated, alone, with parents who seemed as helpless as babes themselves. And yet there was something in her that envied them, born to nothing less than the plains and mountains, the four winds above and the bones below.

  She had been born on a farmstead somewhere. Luck and her parents’ foolishness brought her to Flood, to the devil’s house, to become his Hand. But for that . . . what would she have become?

  Isobel felt something stir at that thought, slow and deep. The sigil on her palm remained cool, but her fingers closed over it nonetheless, and her right hand crossed over to rub at the silver ring on her finger. Power, building somewhere, rising to that thought. This place might have been cleansed, but the Devil’s Hand carried power within too.

  Show me, she asked it, remembering the feel of the boss’s hand on her shoulder, his voice in her ears, the comforting smell of his cologne and the unlit cigars he carried but never smoked. She closed her eyes to chase them, suddenly dizzy with the sensation of layer after layer like an onion under her hands, forever unpeeling until there was nothing left but tears.

  Stone tears, white with heat, deep in the center of it all, and a molten whisper tracing burning scars along her skin, under her skin, searing her bones with words she could not understand. A story, and a warning, and something else beyond, below the silence, beyond the emptiness, seething like a pot overboiling, odorous as a blacksmith’s forge.

  This is not for you, it warned.

  She clung to it nonetheless, searing the skin of her nonexistent hands, charring her bones into dust, ignoring the pain that rattled her like venom surging in her veins, until it snapped sharply and thrust her through the cooling mantle of dirt, back to
the surface, into her own bones and skin.

  Forcing her eyes open, Isobel focused on the people in front of her, their faces anxious and drawn, the dirt-streaked children stilled in the games, watching their adults watching her.

  The boss had said the left hand was the quick knife, the cold eye. Gabriel had told her she was the devil’s silver, cast down on the road to find danger, find it and clear it.

  She only knew that if there was pain, if there was danger, she needed to find the cause and end it. But the source was not here.

  The boss hadn’t explained anything to her, hadn’t taught her how to do anything. She didn’t know what it was she did, only that she could do it. It wasn’t enough.

  It was all she had.

  Isobel stood from the table, circling around the children, and came to a patch of ground where the grass had worn thin, the dirt a dry red crumble underneath. She could feel the others watching her still, although they turned their faces away now, unwilling to be rude. It made something between her shoulder blades itch, not the way that told her a demon was watching but something else, more immediate, and more disturbing. She ignored it.

  If something was making the ground move, logic said it would be in the ground. Something that pushed her away. Ree and Molly had told stories of spirits who lived in the world below, but Isobel had only ever felt the bones, the deep-set stones the world rested upon.

  Isobel looked at the sigil in her palm, thick and fine lines twisted in the doubled circle within a circle. Burnt into her mare’s tack, drawn in her own skin. As Hand, she was nothing but an extension of the devil’s will, and the Territory did not answer to him.

  But she was also a rider, thanks to Gabriel’s mentorship, and the Road that looped through the Territory could not hide from a rider once they learned to find it.

  She reached, feeling the familiar rush, unlike a crossroads in that its power flowed rather than being trapped, diminishing and refilling rather than building until it burst. Southward, where she’d been, felt the strongest; the hills rising grey-brown to the east were fainter, but she could feel them, something pulsing at their heart, neither welcoming nor forbidding, simply there, healthy and full.

  West lay the northern edge of the Mother’s Knife, the farthest edge of the Territory. Northwest, Gabriel had told her, were hills and forests bordering the Wilds, trees as old as the devil, deep springs hotter than the mid-day sun.

  She felt nothing to the northwest.

  Isobel tilted her head, listening harder. I’m here, she thought, sending the thought as widely as she could, stretching herself out rather than deep, thought-fingers stroking the skin of the earth the way she would Uvnee’s hide, testing for uncertainty, sending reassurance and control. . . .

  Silence. No, not silence. Denial. A refusal.

  this is not for you.

  Isobel withdrew, found herself within her own body again, testing the limits of flesh. Her throat was sore, her back aching, and her lips were cracked and dry as though she’d been riding all day without water.

  The Road had refused her. Isobel rubbed at her arms, feeling a chill that had nothing to do with the fact that she’d taken off her jacket, or the clouds that slipped across the mid-morning sky. She didn’t understand, didn’t understand anything.

  She needed to talk to Gabriel.

  “Drink.” Margot held a wooden cup to her lips, and Isobel drank, unquestioning. Honey-water, sweet and cold.

  “Slowly. A sip at a time.”

  Isobel knew that, her hands coming up to wrap around the cup, the sides smooth against her skin, almost too smooth to hold.

  “You’re shaking.”

  “I’m all right.”

  Margot’s blue eyes studied her, and Isobel thought that this woman would have done well in the Saloon, would have gained the boss’s approval.

  “You need to rest. Come,” and she tried to lead Isobel to the nearest cabin, but Isobel pulled back. “I’d rather be outside.”

  Margot sent one of the older children to fetch Isobel’s pack, helped her make camp on a flat patch of ground distant enough that she could breathe, but still within the wards, then let her be. The others had disappeared, back inside or elsewhere. Margot was kind, they had all been kind, but they did not trust her entirely.

  “Not everyone welcomes the reminder that they live at the devil’s sufferance,” Gabriel had said once. He had been speaking of the folk who settled in Patch Junction, but she supposed some tribes resented him too. The agreement their elders had made however many generations ago bound them as tightly as it did new-come settlers. And those caught between, like these children, given the comfort of neither tribe nor town yet bound by both.

  If this place was not safe for them, where would they go?

  Isobel took a deep breath, then exhaled, her hands moving in a familiar pattern as she groomed Uvnee’s hide. The mare’s coat was dry and clean of mud and road dust, but Isobel kept running the flat brush over her flanks, letting her other hand trail across the warm horseflesh in reassurance —although to reassure whom, she wasn’t quite sure —until the long, coarse brown strands of the mare’s tail were untangled and smooth. Isobel briefly considered braiding them like her own hair before admitting defeat. Hoof to ears, the mare was spotless.

  “What now, Uvnee?” she asked the mare, who merely flicked one reddish-brown ear at her and shifted her weight to lean against Isobel, gentle lips and teeth nipping at the flat of her braid.

  For now, she would wait. The boss met those who’d ask him a thing across the card table, took their measure with the way they played. So would she. For what, Isobel wasn’t certain—another quake, she supposed; if the quiet told her nothing, then perhaps an outburst would tell her something.

  Or the whispering voice might return and send her on. That thought made her palm twitch: she would happily spend her life without that sensation again. But she had given over control of her life when she made Contract with the devil, even if she hadn’t understood then what it would mean.

  Never bargain more than you can afford to give. All she’d had was herself to offer.

  And if she did ride on . . . Gabriel had no notion of where she’d gone, what had happened to her. Gabriel also had their supplies, their extra water, the ammunition—everything. All she had were her horse and weapons, trail rations, and an extra set of unmentionables packed in her kit.

  And the packet that had been addressed to him and left in the waystation. Isobel allowed herself to admit that more than curiosity weighted the desire to open the letter; she was envious of the letter itself, the connection to someone who thought of him while he was not there.

  Not that she expected Marie to write to her, or any of the others at the saloon, since she had not written to any of them. She wasn’t April, to compose long letters for reading out loud to everyone, after chores were done. What could she say to them; what was she allowed to say?

  The Left Hand was the silent knife, not the garrulous one.

  In the midst of what Isobel admitted was a bout of unadmirable self-pity, Uvnee suddenly snorted and bucked in alarm, nearly knocking Isobel off her feet.

  “What now?” Isobel rested a hand on the mare’s neck to calm her, even as her own heart raced, glanced about for what spooked the mare. There were no trees close enough to hide a threat, nothing overhead in the sky save clouds, and the wind smelled of nothing except sage and —her thoughts broke off abruptly as the ground underneath them . . .

  Flexed was the only word she could think of. It flexed like a snake slithering sideways through the grass, a fish flipping through water, as though the very bones of the earth had gone soft like a pudding.

  And then it stopped, leaving her feeling as though she were the one wobbling, not the ground below.

  Her breath caught, the skin on her arms prickling in unease.

  “That . . . was unpleasant,” she said to Uvnee, who rolled her eyes backward, the whites showing, and flicked her ears, this time as though
to agree, but she hadn’t bolted. “Good girl.” Isobel leaned against the mare’s trembling flank, an arm over the crested neck as much for her own support as the mare’s, and tried to calm her breathing. If that had been what the others had felt when they described the ground moving below them, she could not blame them in the slightest for being upset.

  Isobel had lived through storms before; she knew that wind and water were unpredictable. But stone and dirt were meant to be solid, dependable. They did not refuse to answer; they did not suddenly move.

  Then Uvnee snorted again, half-turning toward the road as though in anticipation. Isobel braced for another quake before realizing that the sound the mare was responding to was hoofbeats.

  Jumping-Up Duck’s people did not have horses, and the sound was too deep for it to be their goats returning. Panic turned to planning, and she turned, trying to gauge the distance between herself and her pack on the ground, the musket and knife still out of reach.

  Then the sound came closer, and she recognized the shape of horse and rider, and the long-eared mule following close behind.

  Isobel had been trained to stand back, to judge, to observe, but the moment Gabriel dismounted, she rushed at him, flinging her arms around his waist, knocking her jaw against his shoulder. There was a hesitation, his body jerking back, then his arms came over her shoulders and she was surrounded by the smell and feel of familiar.

  He didn’t say anything, just let her rest her face against the rough fabric of his coat. She was sure the others had broken off from whatever they were doing, were watching, but she couldn’t bring herself to care. A warm, whiskered muzzle shoved against her leg, and she shifted one hand to dig into the mule’s rough coat, feeling its side shuddering as though they’d been running for too long.