The Cold Eye

by Laura Anne Gilman

  And then it was over, the ground stilling again, the world righting itself. Isobel knew it was over, could feel it was over, but unlike the quake the day before, this one echoed in her own body, a sharp and sudden pain that only slowly faded to a dull ache.

  closer too close

  “The blazes was that?” Gabriel, his voice far away, faded.

  Isobel couldn’t answer, tucked in on herself, Uvnee at a full stop below, confused by why her rider had pulled the reins in so tightly, now that the earth had stilled again.

  Show me, Isobel demanded.

  “Isobel? Iz?” Gabriel’s voice faded in and out, the dull hot ache pushing at her, pushing her away, out of this meadow, off this hill, pushing her away. . . .

  Then there was pressure on her skin to match the ache inside, hard warm hands pulling her down, and she cried out when her boots touched the earth, the pain tearing through her again until she was scooped up, cradled like a child, and a familiar, soothing voice in her ear.

  Eventually the fog cleared from her eyes, and she could think again, without the ache or pain.

  “I’m all right. Put—” Her voice cracked, and she tried again. “Put me down.”

  Gabriel hesitated, and she managed to unclench her fingers enough to pat his arm, the fabric of his jacket rough against her skin. “I’m all right.”

  Her voice cracked a second time, but he eased her to her feet, keeping one arm wrapped around her shoulders in case she crumpled again.

  Isobel winced as her legs straightened and her foot touched the soil again, but the earth lay quiet below her, the only pain a faint lingering echo in her flesh.

  “Isobel?”

  For the first time, she thought she heard fear in Gabriel’s voice.

  Isobel thought fear might be better than the numbness she felt, the odd hollow emptiness. She shook her head a little, unsure. “Did you . . . did you feel anything?”

  “Other than the ground trying to kick us back onto the plains? That wasn’t enough?” He took off his hat and ran a hand through his hair, leaving tufts of it sticking up, like the feathers of an upset crow. She didn’t feel even the faintest urge to smile at the sight.

  Uvnee, her reins dropped, had started grazing peacefully as though nothing had ever disturbed them. Isobel stared at the animals, wishing she could forget things so easily.

  “Mayhap,” Gabriel said finally. “Like an itch, the worst itch I’ve ever felt, somewhere I couldn’t reach. It started just before the quake hit, and ended . . . I’m not sure when. But you felt something more. Worse.”

  It had felt like every bone in her body was breaking, cracking under some sudden shock, and she wasn’t not sure, entirely, that nothing had been broken.

  “Duck said . . .” Isobel let the words trail off. The native woman had said that the earth was sorrowing. But that had not felt like sorrow to her. It had felt like rage. Rage so tightly controlled, she wasn’t surprised the earth itself shook. But what caused it? What felt it, to cause that?

  “It has to be part of the Spaniards’ spell,” she said. “Splintered off, landing here. It was meant to unnerve and disturb, to make people doubt . . . to doubt that the boss can protect them.”

  She was convinced that the Territory had somehow altered the spell as it came over the Mother’s Knife that spring, changed it from bad medicine to . . . not good, but less harmful. That was why she had allowed the creature in the hot spring to live, even after it attacked him, because the Territory had claimed it. But Isobel had no idea what else the spell might do, what sort of creatures it might sow, or how they might act.

  “Wonderful. And us without a magician this time.” Gabriel’s voice sounded . . . amused? She swung around to look at him, leaning against Steady’s bulk for support. His face was turned up at the sky, his brimmed hat back on his head and his eyes closed against the sunlight, but his mouth was curved in a tight-lipped smile.

  “What?” she demanded, suddenly angry at him.

  “People ask me if I’m not bored, riding the Territory day in and out,” he said without opening his eyes, still smiling. “Every day, exactly the same . . .”

  Isobel remembered the pain wracking her body, the look in Jumping-Up Duck’s eyes, the rage shaking the ground below her feet. Nothing about any of this was amusing. And yet, she sank to her knees on the dirt, surprised to hear hiccuppy laughter matching his own.

  “Too much,” Gabriel said finally, when they’d both calmed down. He handed her a square of cloth, the red fabric sun-faded but clean, and she blew her nose, then tucked the square into her own pocket rather than handing it back filled with snot.

  “Ow.” He shifted, placing a hand over his ribs, shaking his head at Isobel when she would have scolded him. “Scabbing held, just aches a bit. Laughing hurts, but it helps, too.”

  He was right. Isobel didn’t understand why, but some of the pressure she’d been feeling had lifted off her, some of the echoing emptiness filled.

  More than just today, just then, she thought. Weeks she’d felt that pressure, maybe longer. Since she’d felt the Spaniard’s spell break against the Territory, seen it cause illness, death, where it landed? Since she discovered what carrying the devil’s sigil would require of her, would make her?

  Maybe longer. Maybe since the morning of her sixteenth birthday, when she’d told the boss she wanted to stay . . . only to have him shove her out of the house like a second-hand tool loaned to someone else.

  Isobel knew every bargain had a price. She’d read her Contract, she’d seen the words, but she hadn’t understood what it would feel like to pay it. Maybe nobody ever really did.

  She took her own hat off, wiped the line of sweat away from her hairline. Molly would be horrified at how tangled her hair was, how cracked and ragged her nails were. Neat and presentable, Izzy, she’d say. Always be neat and presentable, no matter what you were doing.

  Isobel felt a giggle trying to rise up again, imagining doing what they did wearing a saloon dress and slippers. Then she imagined Gabriel in a saloon dress and slippers, and the horror of that sobered her faster than running water in winter.

  She thought about what Gabriel had said. “Would having a magician here be better or worse?” Bound to the winds and craving power they stole from others, a magician had been no soothing thing to travel with, but Farron had been useful, and Isobel thought that perhaps, in his own way, he had been fond of her as well.

  “Worse,” Gabriel said promptly. “He may not have been our enemy, in that time and place,” he added, as though reading her thoughts. “But he wasn’t our friend, either. Never forget that, Iz.”

  “I know.” She did. Even the boss gave magicians a walk-around when he could. Dream-walkers and medicine folk, people with skills, they remained themselves, no matter how skilled they became. Magicians did not. The winds rode them, filling them with power, and that made them changeable as the winds and twice as mad. They were not to be trusted.

  She still missed him.

  “If this is another spell-creature . . .” Isobel put her hat back on her head, the weight against her hair like an embrace, the shadow it cast over her eyes a welcome relief. She looked down at her hands, curling her fingers over the black sigil on her left palm, the circle and infinitas that told anyone with sense that the thing so marked belonged to the devil.

  “If it is another spell-creature, you will track it down and deal with it,” Gabriel said, so matter-of-fact that she had no choice but to believe him.

  It didn’t matter that she hadn’t understood, not entirely. Maleh mishpat, the boss had said, and even if she hadn’t understood them, she had felt the words in her own bones, in the marrow and blood like a thunderclap. She would become the cold eye and quick knife, the final decision-maker in the isolated expanses of the Territory when the devil himself could not be.

  Gabriel’s responsibility was merely to keep her safe, to teach her what she needed to know to survive. This . . . whatever waited in the hills above them was
her responsibility, not his.

  “Back in the saddle,” Gabriel said before she could marshal an argument to that point, checking to make sure Steady’s saddle was still cinched tight, and then swinging himself onto the gelding’s back. His look told her clearly that they were in this together and she was to stop being foolish about it, and she wondered if she should worry that he could read her that well. “If the quakes are worse as we ride to the north, then that’s where the source is, most likely. Into the hotlands. Another day’s ride at least, assuming the ground stays still for us.”

  A day’s ride without the guidance or safety of the Road, into hills that refused to let her see them, where the ground underfoot could hide boiling pools, to find a creature, possibly spell-born, that was in such pain and rage that it wanted to do nothing but destroy. It was nothing to laugh about—none of this was anything to laugh about—but as Isobel remounted, she felt a bubble of that laughter lingering nonetheless.

  She’d been so proud of herself before. She had traveled with a magician, conversed with a dream-walker, outwitted Spaniards, defeated a creature of power, and she had thought that she’d conquered a mountain—only to discover that she was standing on the plateau of foothills, the larger range still to come.

  Isobel was thinking something. He could tell from the way her shoulders flexed every so often, as though shaking off one idea only to have another settle. He watched but did not interrupt, keeping alert to their surroundings and letting her work her way through.

  The ground beneath them remained stable, but there was a sense of tension in the air that Gabriel did not like, reminding him far too much of the queasy stillness before a demon-wind blew through. He studied the ground to either side, constantly looking for potential shelter, and when they paused at another stream to refill their canteens, he looked for the glimmer of fish in the shallows but saw nothing but stones and mud.

  Still, that proved nothing. The fish might have been spooked by the quake, taking to deeper levels or shadowed alcoves. That would explain why they’d seen no deer grazing, no rabbits in the grass. He thought of the supplies they’d taken on, and mentally recalculated how long they would last, if they could not find any fresh meat at all, and the gentle warmth of the day, the clear blue skies and soft air suddenly felt more ominous than any gathering clouds. Even the mule seemed to feel something, not straying to investigate anything that looked tasty but staying close by, until Isobel lifted her head to sniff at the air, then took a deeper sniff and let out an exclamation of disgust. “What’s that smell?”

  He tested the air and recoiled as he caught what she had.

  “It’s worse than the buffalo,” she said. “Like . . .”

  “Like it was ill when it died and the carrion-birds won’t touch it.” He looked up and noted that there were, in fact, several carrion-birds circling overhead. He squinted and wished for a spyglass: one of those birds seemed too large to be a buzzard.

  A Reaper hawk here would not be unusual—in fact, this was the sort of ground they preferred: high cliffs for their nests and scattered meadows where prey could be flushed and caught. But buzzards normally cleared the sky when a Reaper appeared, since they could become prey as easily as anything on the ground.

  He scanned the ground again for whatever was causing the smell but saw nothing. The smell was faint enough that it might have been hidden in the tree line, though he hadn’t thought the breeze strong enough to carry corpse-stink that far.

  Or maybe, he thought, whatever it was wasn’t dead yet.

  Isobel moved her mare closer, the two animals matching steps near perfectly, the mule close behind. “Something’s watching us.” She took the pocket square he’d given her earlier and held it over her mouth and nose, attempting to keep the smell away. Her voice was muffled behind the cloth. “Again.”

  “Another demon?” They’d attracted the attention of one before, when trailing the Spaniards. But that demon had been sent packing, and they’d heard or seen nothing since then. And demon didn’t smell like this, didn’t smell at all that he’d noticed; it would be easier to find —and avoid —them if they did.

  “No? No.” She sounded more certain the second time. She looked up then, too, and seemed to notice the Reaper overhead. “I think we should find cover, get out of sight.”

  Gabriel didn’t think she was aware of the timbre that crept into her tone, the dark echo that lingered around her words, but when she spoke in that voice, Gabriel listened. He knew what she was.

  And even if he hadn’t, he was not a fool.

  “Trees?” To their left, there was a cluster of narrow pines with enough room for a horse to pass between. Gabriel had grown up in the deep woods, spent much of his early life following his uncles and cousins as they gathered their lines, but he didn’t like taking them under tree cover; his line of sight was too limited, and things could be lurking overhead as well as behind every trunk, hiding in every shadow. But if Isobel’s instincts said to hide, they would hide, and this was the only cover available.

  She nodded, and turned her mare toward them, kicking the horse into a fast trot. The mule followed her, and he picked up the rear, shifting the reins into his left hand so that his right was free to reach for the knife in his boot or the one tied to his saddle equally. The carbine strapped to his saddle would be of no use except as the club he’d teased her about before, but he loosed the strap around it nonetheless.

  Once they were through the first line of trees, Isobel slid down from the mare’s back, picking up the reins and leading her deeper into the gloom. The mule looked as though it might balk, and Gabriel had a moment’s rare sympathy with the beast.

  “She knows what she’s doing,” he told the mule as he dismounted as well and followed them into the shaded cover, hoping he sounded more confident than he felt. At least, he noted, the trees were old enough that their lower branches had died off, removing one potential source of ambush.

  “Here.” She stopped, although that patch of ground seemed no different to him from any of the others they’d walked over. “This is good?”

  She’d chosen a natural clearing where an older tree had died, the fallen trunk slowly crumbling back into the soil. The clearing was blocked at one end by a massive chunk of reddish-brown rock sticking out of the ground, a little higher than Steady’s shoulder, two trees bent to grow around it. The space between the remaining trees was reasonably flat, open enough for all three animals to move freely without stepping on one another or their riders, but not much more than that. He wasn’t sure he’d be willing to risk a fire, but the stone outcrop was wide enough to block the wind, and it wasn’t likely to become too cold, or to rain, since the sky had been clear. . . .

  He took a deep breath and exhaled slowly, reaching for the ever-familiar pull of flowing water. For a moment, he couldn’t find it, his pulse racing in near-panic, then he felt the steady trickle of an underground spring, muffled and distant, as though he were hearing it through a heavy fog.

  “No fresh water nearby,” he told her, sparing her how difficult it had been to discover even that. “Good thing we refilled the canteens.”

  “I thought springs were common here?” She was untacking the mare already, setting the saddle carefully to one side of the fallen trunk, then pulling out a brush to clean sweat-matted hide and hocks.

  “Further west,” he said, doing the same for the mule, who had come to stand next to him. “But from what I’ve heard, even the ones that aren’t burning hot aren’t ones you’d want to drink from. Ask me before you drink from anything, unless I’ve already checked it.” He wasn’t willing to risk a bad case of flux, or worse, when simple caution could avoid it. He finished untacking the mule, placing the packs on the ground, and turned back to start working on Steady. “Are you sure —”

  He never got the chance to finish the sentence. Something hit him in the side, a heavy blunt blow that he was able to identify from past experience as hooves, and the world went dark red, and then b
lack.

  “Gabriel. Gabriel Kasun. Open your eyes.”

  The voice was familiar, strained with panic, tied to a sense that he needed to be up, needed to . . . do something.

  Open his eyes. He could do that.

  The knife clutched in his hand was bloody, but so were his arm and chest, either from the old wounds reopening or new ones he couldn’t tell, and from the way Isobel’s wide brown eyes kept flicking back and forth, he suspected there was blood on his face as well.

  “What happened?”

  Isobel shifted back on her heels, and behind her, sprawled on its back, was the largest ghost cat he’d ever imagined —no, larger than that, nearly as long as a horse, its tawny pelt marked with black at head and tail.

  But even from that distance he could see its ribs through the pelt, and when he took a deep breath, the same smell they’d both picked up earlier: something dying.

  “Waters of Jordan,” Gabriel said, and collapsed onto his backside, wincing as the scarring on his ribs joined the new welts in a chorus of argument. “Waters of Jordan, the size of that thing.” Then the last seconds before the attack came to him, and he twisted, trying to see the rest of their camp. “Flatfoot?”

  Isobel paled, and shifted on her knees, both of them seeing the mule down on its hocks and struggling to get up, its own hide striped with claw marks and blood. “Oh!”

  “He took it down, not me,” Gabriel was saying even as he crawled toward the mule. Steady was already there, muzzle down against the mule’s neck as though to give comfort, Uvnee whickering her own concern but unable to move closer, unwilling to step over the cat’s corpse. “Flatfoot became Flying Foot.” He reached the mule and spoke softly to it, running a hand over the heaving flanks. “Get the mare before she bolts,” he snapped. Isobel started, then jumped up, stepping cautiously over the corpse, draping a cloth over the mare’s eyes to lead her to where Steady waited. Gabriel turned back to the mule, looking him over again before doing anything.