The Cold Eye

by Laura Anne Gilman

STRANGE HILLS

  Gabriel woke just after dawn, groggy and disorientated, with a rock digging into his shoulder. He reached under the bedroll and dug it out, tossing it aside with a grimace. Waking in a new place was not enough to confuse him, not after so long on the Road, and he felt no alarm, but—

  It was too quiet, he realized, dragging himself into a sitting position, pushing the blanket down even as he reached for his boots. The faint clatter of metal and wood coming from the buildings, and the familiar sounds of the animals grazing nearby, the soft swish of tails and grumbles of flatulence, but there was no birdsong overhead telling him what the weather would be today.

  Did quakes frighten birds the way they did other animals? Gabriel had no idea.

  Isobel’s blankets had already been rolled up, and her pack was missing; he assumed she was taking advantage of the creek to wash up. The thought was tempting, but he’d already slept too late. He sniffed at his wrist and amended that thought. Maybe there would be time for a quick dip, once Isobel was done.

  Isobel came back into the clearing just then, dressed for riding, her face shining with pleasure and the results of cold water as she toweled the ends of her hair dry. “Either go bathe or I’m going to throw you in,” she told him.

  “You smell better.” Duck’s husband had wandered down to watch them loading the supplies, leading his observation with an ostentatious sniff of the air around Gabriel. Since it was nothing less than the truth, he signed “thank you” combined with a semi-rude gesture and continued loading the mule. The bark of laughter in response was followed by a thick-fingered clap on Gabriel’s shoulder that would likely leave bruises.

  To his surprise, and Isobel’s pleasure, the “meager supplies” they’d acquired included not only smoke-dried meats, both deer and rabbit, but chuno —wedges of dried potato —and a packet of coarse yellow meal. Those were Nahua foods, not the sort to be found so far north, but Gabriel had seen stranger things pass through trading routes, and he wasn’t about to question any additions to their menu.

  But the older man hadn’t come down here to comment only on his bath or the supplies. He lingered, resting a hand on the mule’s neck more gently than he’d clapped Gabriel, clearly gathering his thoughts.

  Gabriel finished loading the new supplies, checking over his shoulder to see that Isobel was occupied sweeping their campsite clear and dousing the remains of the fire. The other man’s gaze followed his, then returned to study Gabriel’s face.

  “If you die there.” The plural you, Gabriel noted, meaning both of them.

  “We may,” Gabriel admitted when the other man didn’t seem inclined to go on, his harshly scarred voice obviously painful to use. Gabriel’s hands kept moving, checking the straps on the mule’s packs, adjusting the belly strap and making sure the halter wasn’t twisted, pausing to scrape part of Flatfoot’s coarse forelock out from under the strap, and scratching the base of one floppy ear.

  “Will he blame us if she falls?”

  “He” needed no clarification.

  “If you had no part in it, no blame will fall on you.” There were many things one could say about the devil, some good, more bad, but he was methodical in discovery and more just in his judgments than most Gabriel had met.

  The man didn’t look convinced. Gabriel could understand that: his family was alone here, for whatever reason, and seemingly had nowhere to fall back to, neither one side nor the other. The Master of the Territory’s wrath would seem terrifying under those conditions.

  He thought of the Jack, doomed to wander at the devil’s tug, running errands the likes of which Gabriel could not imagine, even now.

  “There is no safety on or off the Road,” Gabriel said. “Every rider knows that.” That was why they went armed with silver, salt, and bullets. “But we will do our utmost not to die.”

  “She will ease the earth?”

  “If she can.” He was not in a position to make promises for Isobel, and he would not allow her to make promises she could not be certain of. The quakes might be natural events, or the work of earth-spirits, or some other phenomena unrelated. “The devil isn’t our niñera, to wipe our noses every time we sneeze.”

  The man’s eyes narrowed at that, but Gabriel’s words seemed to have eased his mind, and he turned to go without a farewell.

  Gabriel watched him walk away, wondering if he’d said enough or too much.

  “What was that about?” Isobel asked, approaching him as he finished with the mule. Her hair, dry now, was braided again, wisps of it already escaping to frame her face, her battered, brimmed hat hanging from a leather thong. The clear, dark eyes that looked back at him from that sun-browned face were not the eyes of the girl he had met only months before in a crowded, noisy saloon.

  He studied her now, deciding how much of the conversation to share. “He was telling us not to die.”

  “Oh.” She thought about that, her expression serious, one hand reaching out to tug one of the mule’s ears in rough affection. “Good advice.”

  Despite himself, despite the situation, despite the pain still digging at his ribs, and the scar on his face that would likely never heal, despite days of riding ahead of them to face the devil-knew-what, despite the niggling worry Abner’s letter had lodged in his brain, and the worries he carried with him day to day, there wasn’t a place he’d rather be just then than to ride into trouble —again—at her side.

  She gave him an odd look when he laughed. The devil might not take him for a fool, but he was assuredly a madman.

  He slapped the mule once on the neck, letting it know it was done with humans fussing over it, and turned to Steady waiting patiently. He pulled the stirrups down and swung up into the saddle, reins comfortably settled in one hand. The gelding shifted under him, then rocked forward, ready to be gone again.

  “Where’s our direction, Isobel Left Hand?”

  He was her guide, her mentor, but he no longer led. His job was to make sure that she learned what she needed and didn’t die while she puzzled it out. So, he waited.

  “West and north,” she said finally, her brows drawn together, lines of tension visible around her mouth. “I can’t . . . but there’s something there, like . . . like a rock or root under my bedroll.”

  The fact that there was no clear threat should have reassured them: no emptied-out towns or monstrous creatures of foreign magic. And yet, somehow, this was worse. They were riding blind and deaf, into trouble even the Master of the Territory might not contain or control.

  He had to say it. “We don’t have to do this. It’s not your burden to carry.”

  Isobel looked down at the ground, her face hidden for a moment, then swung into Uvnee’s saddle with ease, tucking the fabric of her skirt between her leg and the mare’s side to keep the fabric from flapping when she rode.

  “Yes, it is,” she said. “Because they can’t, and I’m here.”

  And there was the Isobel the devil’d chosen.

  He tk-tk’d at the mule to get its attention, and the three of them followed Isobel and Uvnee away from the small meadow, and up into the silent hills.

  Isobel felt the lack of the Road deeply; there was a trail of sorts to follow, if she could describe the faint pattern of trampled grasses as a trail, but only if she looked hard and hoped, and there was no welcoming hum when she reached down, to reassure her. But that feeling of wrongness remained, and for lack of any other guidance, she followed it, Gabriel, Steady, and the mule at her back.

  After a while, she noticed something. “The grass is different here.”

  Gabriel fell back into teacher voice without hesitation, pulling alongside her to point particular plants out. “Sagebrush, you know. Those yellow flower clumps are wild buckwheat.” They rode along a bit, then he admitted, “I’ve no idea what the blue ones are, though. And oh, bitterroot!”

  She scrunched her face up at the reminder. “But no lamb’s-quarter.”

  He laughed and quizzed her on the trees they were pa
ssing, fewer and fewer as the gentle slope turned into a steeper climb. At every turn, Isobel expected to spot curl-horn sheep or wild goats, but the scat they passed was several days old and dried. It might be that Four Wolves and his kin had hunted this area out, or another predator had claimed it.

  Or, like their goats, all the wild things had fled.

  That thought made her uneasy, layering on top of the wrongness they’d been chasing. And not only her: when she looked back, Gabriel was checking his flintlock, the tie-down of his knife sheath visibly loosened. She did the same with her own, then asked, “Should I load?”

  “Only if you’re willing to hold it ready until such a time as you need to fire.”

  “But what if I can’t load in time, if something attacks?”

  He kept his face perfectly straight. “Then club it over the head with the stock until I can shoot it.”

  She sniffed, then turned back to stare at the ground ahead, the silence broken only by the scuffle of hooves, the trail rising farther into the hills.

  Despite her unease, Isobel couldn’t stop marveling at their surroundings. She had been raised with the sweeping flat sameness of grass and sky broken by the occasional tree and the distant smudge of hills. Even when they’d ridden up into the hills to De Plata and along the lower ridges of the Knife to Graciendo’s cabin, she’d been so taken by the trees around her, so many and so tall, she’d not been able to imagine the idea of mountains.

  Here, it was impossible to ignore. Bare, reddish-brown rock surrounded them, jagged patches of top-heavy green spires growing at angles, bent before the wind, and beyond that were blue-shadowed peaks taller still, their tips blunted as though they’d run into the sky and been pushed back down again.

  Anything could lurk at such heights, anything could hide there, sweeping down on them like a Reaper hawk grown into a monstrosity.

  “Impossible,” she said out loud, willing her heart to slow its sudden patter. If there was anything larger than a Reaper, even here, rumor would have made it to the boss, hunters would try to trap it, some warning would have come down. “Stop cooking trouble you can’t eat, Isobel. It’s not as though your plate’s not already full.”

  Uvnee snorted as though in agreement, and the mule, who had wandered off the trail to mouth at an unfamiliar clump of yellow-green leaves, flicked its ears at them as though to tell them both they were being foolish.

  Gabriel had told her once to watch the horses if she thought there was trouble; that they would know before any person. All three were relaxed, almost playful, their ears easy and their tails swishing lazily against the occasional insect. “Listen to them,” she told herself. “There’s no threat here.”

  She remained uneasy, and Gabriel’s knife remained loose in its sheath.

  They splashed through a little creek running downhill and reached a point where no grasses grew, only the occasional stubborn sagebrush clinging to rocky soil. As Gabriel had predicted, they saw no game, although birds sang from invisible cover, and as they reached the top of the slope, she thought she saw the brown shadow of deer in the distance, but when she tried to find them again, they were gone.

  “Better to look for bears,” Gabriel said when she mentioned the deer. “They’re mostly going to be down by the river”—and she didn’t ask how he knew there was a river; that was a thing he would know better than she —“but if we’re careless and get between mama and a cub, it could go badly.”

  “I’ve never seen a bear.” She’d seen the claws of the great brown bears strung around a marshal’s neck. She’d also seen the scars the man carried, scoring down his arm, too close to the marks on Gabriel’s ribs for comfort. She thought maybe she could be happy without seeing a bear that close ever. Especially one that was upset with her.

  They paused briefly mid-day, letting noon pass them by, then rode on slowly, allowing the horses to pick their way up the slope, the sun warm on their skin and the air thin in their lungs, filled with the scent of pine and sage. Although they saw no birds or animals, tiny butterflies flitted around them, blue and red and orange, and when they came around a curve that looked out over a vast meadow, Gabriel pointed out a dusty wallow where buffalo had been, making Isobel feel a twinge again for the slaughtered animals she’d found and had to abandon, her promise yet unkept.

  It seemed such a small thing now, and yet she had made a promise.

  Isobel shifted her reins, curling her fingers into her left palm, fingertips pressing against the sigil as though to force an answer into the air.

  “Boss?” she asked quietly, although it had never done her service before. She could almost imagine that she felt his hand on her shoulder, the warm, smoky scent of his whiskey and tobacco, but she knew it was only imagination. The boss was weeks away. He had sent her here to be his eyes and his Hand, not for him to hold her hand.

  She was on her own.

  “Damn it, Flatfoot, get your nose off my knee; I’m not your momma.”

  Isobel grinned, glancing slantways to see the mule backing away from Gabriel, looking offended at having his muzzle slapped. No, not on her own. And not unprepared, not anymore.

  Isobel closed her eyes and stretched her awareness out again, letting herself slide down her spine, through her legs, dropping in a way she could never quite explain out the soles of her boots and down into the ground.

  She was the devil’s Hand. She could not be cut off from the Territory, not so long as the Agreement held.

  Show me, she asked it. Show me what is wrong.

  The bones were there, deep and still. But where she expected the now-familiar dizzying hum of connection, the feel of power rising up to meet her, there was only a flickering awareness, something hot and heavy slipping away when she tried to touch it, shying away as though it were avoiding her.

  But when she tried to grab at it, that sense of unease pushed back, powerful enough to shove her, hard enough that Uvnee hesitated, flicking an ear back to ask her rider what was wrong.

  Isobel steadied herself in the saddle, weaving her fingers into the mare’s rough-textured mane for reassurance, and called out to get Gabriel’s attention.

  “Iz?” He looked worried, reaching out to touch her shoulder. “What’s wrong?”

  She shook her head, settled the reins better in her hand, refusing to look at the black lines on her palm, for fear. . . . She wasn’t sure for fear of what, but the unease had grown in her, real and heavy. “When I . . . when I go deep, past the bones, to see the things I see . . . what am I touching?”

  Power, yes. But she’d felt power before, in the hum of the Road, the workings of wards, the swirling risk of crossroads, even the sensation of being greeted by spirit-animals, of standing in the presence of magicians and demon. Standing before the boss, their blood drying together on a Contract. This had been different.

  Gabriel hesitated before answering, but she thought it was the hesitation of someone thinking about their answer, not because he was avoiding it. “Truth, Iz, I don’t know. What you do, the way you can look, what you can see . . . that’s the devil’s own skill, not something I’m given to understand.”

  People had small skills, small medicine. To ease pain or find water, like Gabriel, find the Road, cajole beasts, read dreams, or make things grow. A greater medicine was to walk the winds the way magicians did, and it came with a greater price.

  The Hand bore the mark of the Master of the Territory, carried his medicine. And he had sent her out not understanding what that meant.

  She trusted the boss with her life, but for the first time ever, she wanted to shake him, too.

  “It won’t let me in,” she said. “How’m I to be useful if I can’t reach it?”

  “It’s not only you, Isobel. I can feel the water here. I know there’s a river down a ways to our left, that there’s a stream running underfoot . . . only, it’s like listening to the rain through a roof, or voices through a wall. Faint, muffled. And I can’t feel the Road at all. Not even behind us, where I kn
ow it runs.”

  “That makes you nervous.” She rubbed a hand against the back of her neck, squeezing tense muscles to force them to ease.

  “That, plus what you’re telling me, makes me tremble in my boots,” he said without any hint of shame, pulling his canteen out and taking a long drink. “There should be something, Isobel. There’s no portion of the Territory that hasn’t been walked by someone. Some hunter’s trail or journey-path, a cut between two villages, or trapper’s route. My reach isn’t as far as yours, but I’ve experience to offset that. There’s always something. And here, it’s . . . gone.”

  He replaced the canteen on his saddle and pulled his hat down farther over his forehead, which she’d learned meant he didn’t want to talk any longer.

  She studied his profile, then turned her attention back to the mountains above them, trying to listen, trying to hear something deeper than her own breath, or hoofbeats against grass and stone.

  The lack frustrated her, made her feel a failure, failing the boss, failing her Contract.

  Shhhhhhhh.

  Slowly, the frustration was replaced by the memory of having a fever as a child, wrapped in heat, cooling cloths over her skin, the murmur of soothing voices rolling over her, warm comfort telling her to rest, to not worry, to sleep and all would be taken care of. But when she pushed further, underneath that murmur was the roiling stink of illness and fear, the fever-burn and sweat-chill, something queasy-making in her gut, pushing to escape. . . .

  no! Something flared in her chest, like a chicken trying to escape the hammer, wings beating furiously.

  A massive cloud of butterflies erupted from the grass ahead of them, swirling in a mass before disappearing into the sky. Gabriel swore in surprise even as Uvnee danced a little, shying away from the dozens of wings. Then there was silence, too quiet, the greenish hush of the sky before a tornado, and Flatfoot’s sudden loud bray nearly sent Isobel out of her skin.

  “God have mercy,” she heard Gabriel say, before the ground disappeared under Uvnee’s hooves, sending the mare scrambling for footing, Isobel nearly falling out of the saddle, her fingers digging into the mare’s mane, her legs wrapping around the mare’s body even as she tried to adjust to help the mare stay upright, trying not to do anything foolish, knowing that something was terribly wrong but too busy to figure out what.