The Cold Eye

by Laura Anne Gilman

  “Stop that,” she said, pushing the blunt head away, running her hand along his flank to move him to the side so she could get to their supplies. The gelding let her pass, only to have the mule come up and lip her hair, pulling hard enough for her to notice.

  “Stop it,” she told him, then glared at Uvnee, as though daring the mare to try something too. The mare waited placidly, brown eyes watching, waiting for Isobel to get over her temper and offer a treat.

  “All right,” Isobel grumbled, digging one of the last mushy apples out of a pack and cutting it in three. They moved toward it like children offered sugar candy, and Isobel felt some of her anger and frustration fade as she watched them, their tails switching peacefully, the soft sounds of teeth crunching louder than the voices of the men by the fire behind them.

  She yawned and stretched, feeling her back crack, rolling her shoulders. She’d slipped into her skirt and boots the moment she realized they had a visitor, but the boots were unlaced, and the strings of her chemise were untied, too tempting a target for the mule; she laced them quickly, then bent to deal with her boots. The sky brightened even as her fingers worked, and when she looked up again, the stars were already fading, the moon gone before the sun.

  “It’s not like I could have understood what they were saying, anyway,” she told herself, pushing the mule so she could check the scars on its side. It had only been three days, but the claw marks had closed neatly with no sign of infection, and he merely twitched once under her touch and twisted his neck to nose at her hands, searching for more apple, while the horses moved back to their casual grazing.

  “That’s it, mule; no more.” She cast a look over her own shoulder to where the men sat around the fire—one grey head and one dark bent toward each other, Gabriel’s arms moving in sign language—and sighed. Gabriel had sent her away for a reason. She might not like it, but she had to trust him.

  The mule snorted at her, then turned away, shifting its stance and dropping its head to go back to sleep.

  “You do that,” she told it, feeling a twinge of envy. The past few nights, she had not slept well, startling awake in the night, then unable to drop back off, half-waiting for the ground below them to shake again. That it hadn’t almost made the waiting worse. And the whisper this morning . . . Why had it returned? Isobel might have accepted stumbling into things to learn them, but she resented it no less now than she had at the first.

  Feeling strands of her hair cling to her neck and chin like fingers, she began braiding them out of the way, although without the leather tie she’d been using, the end of the braid began to come apart almost immediately, adding to her frustration. The feathers she usually tied into the braid were tucked under her bedroll where she’d placed them the night before. Surely, Gabriel would not object to her returning for those?

  Before she could convince herself that it wouldn’t be eavesdropping on their conversation to do so if she couldn’t understand the language, Gabriel’s voice rose, calling her name.

  The old man was still there, his hands clasped around one of their tin mugs. Gabriel was refilling the second one, handing it to her. She took it, settling herself on the ground next to him, her skirt folded under her legs.

  “His tribe is the one whose camp we saw,” Gabriel told her. “The others left when the ground trembled; he stayed. More from stubbornness than bravery, I think. He saw us arrive last night, watched until a sign came to him that we were to be trusted.”

  “A sign?” She thought immediately of the great deer, but if Gabriel had been told, he was not sharing. She bit her tongue and nodded at her mentor to continue.

  “Near as I might determine”—Gabriel looked at her rather than the old man, who ignored them both—“we were right; something has scared the game away. But it started before the ground began to quake.”

  He glanced at the old man then and made a hand gesture, a sharp move of his right hand and elbow. The old man nodded once, although it didn’t seem to Isobel that he was agreeing. She tried to study him without being rude, to read him the way she’d been trained, but it was like trying to watch a sunbeam; no matter how intently she watched, she could never see it move.

  “Jumping-Up Duck said that the land sorrowed, yes? He says that the land is frightened.”

  Isobel’s gaze flicked away from the old man, down to the ground at her knee. The grass was sparse but green, dotted with tiny blue flowers she didn’t recognize, six-petaled, with a white center. She touched the fingers of her left hand against the ground and felt only silence in response. She pushed deeper, pressing her palm down to the ground and waiting for warmth to tingle through her, spreading her awareness into the earth, along the bones of stone underneath the soil, the connection to the Territory that the sigil—her Bargain—gave her. Power hummed quietly, a spider’s web stretching forever, delicate and thick, and she felt the now-familiar dizziness as her own awareness melted into something far greater. Isobel stretched a bit further, reassured, before a sharp snap hit the center of her hand, the pain racing up to her elbow and making her entire arm twitch away, her body folding in on itself, cutting the connection like a cauterization.

  No

  All self-certainty Isobel’d had since that first flush of power in her palm shriveled like a leaf in the fire, and her fingers dug into the ground, shoving dirt under her nails, as though to deny what had happened. A pain twisted in her chest, like a sob, a scream, trapped under her ribs. Was she doing something wrong? Had she forsaken her Bargain, somehow broken it unaware? Had the boss . . .

  No. She couldn’t bear to think of it, and so she would not. The whisper. She clung to that: something had driven her to that tiny village, something had called to her again that night. Something wanted her here, wanted her to help.

  Gabriel was still speaking. She forced herself to put aside pointless worry, to make sense of the words.

  “He says he can take us to where it started.”

  Isobel was too quiet. Gabriel tried not to watch her as they packed up the camp, saddled the horses, tried not to let his concern show, not for her sake but because he was not certain of their new companion, not yet, and concern could be taken for weakness.

  Once they were ready, the old man whistled, and a pony nearly as old as he, black-and-white and tough as old roots, came to his side. He rode it without saddle or bridle, legs wrapped around its sides and a hand on the simple halter, and for the first time since he was a boy, Gabriel felt awkward in the saddle.

  They rode all day without speaking, their guide ahead, Isobel and Uvnee to Gabriel’s left, the mule behind, up steep, backtracking trails and through narrow valleys that, just as the old man had said, were devoid of life. Overhead the occasional bird circled, but it never swooped, and the grass underfoot never rustled with the passing of small game. Once, up against the sheer rock face, Gabriel was certain he saw movement that might have been goats, but they were too far away to be certain; they might simply have been rocks, shaped and colored to confuse the eye.

  No wonder the ghost cat had attacked them. No game underfoot, and too ill to flee from the hills, they must have seemed like a gift, delivered into its lair.

  “Forgive us, little cousin,” he said under his breath. “But I had a greater wish to live.”

  And if they couldn’t find game for themselves at some point, well, there were still supplies in their packs, although with three of them, it wouldn’t last for long. He’d survived on grubs and roots once. He’d rather eat the mule.

  The trail took a turn up again, and he leaned forward slightly, trying to take some of the press off his ribs. Sleeping rough and riding up mountains might not have been the best way to heal, but once Isobel went chasing after whatever this was, he’d had no choice but to follow.

  Isobel turned to look at him, obviously wondering what he found amusing. Her hat—brand-new not so long ago —was now sun-bleached and worn at the brim, and there was a dip over one side that made her look oddly rakish. But the stubbo
rn line of her jaw and the set of her mouth were familiar. It wasn’t puzzlement or annoyance —she was upset.

  He kneed Steady closer and spoke softly. “Tell me.”

  Her gaze flicked ahead to where the old man and his pony rode, seemingly unaware he had companions, then back to him. “How do you know . . . How do you know if a Contract’s been broken?”

  He almost laughed again, then realized that she was serious. “Isobel. You can’t break a Contract. That’s what makes it a Contract. What’s bitten you, to even wonder that?”

  “I can’t . . . I can’t touch anything. I’ve been trying. Ever since . . . I’ve been trying,” she repeated. “I can only get so far, and then it stops me. And I thought . . . I was afraid that meant . . .” Her voice dropped almost too low to hear. “That the boss’d decided he didn’t want me anymore.”

  He was about to tell her, again, that she was being foolish, when her choice of words stopped him. “It?”

  She frowned at him, clearly not having realized what she’d said.

  “You said ‘it.’ Not ‘something’: ‘it.’ ”

  Her shoulders lifted in a shrug, a one-sided flip he recognized from his own movements. “It,” she agreed. “Does it matter?”

  He had been trained as a litigator; word choice mattered. But he let it go for now. “To calm your fears, if the devil were to cast you aside, you would be in no doubt of it. But he did not. He never throws away a thing of value.”

  She gave him a wan smile at that, but it was better than she’d looked before.

  “That settled . . . are you all right?”

  “Gabriel.” Now she sounded exasperated, which suited her better. “No, I’m not all right. Something dragged me —us—all the way up here, I can’t feel, and I don’t know what to do, and now we’re following some old native who won’t even give us a name, to somewhere we don’t know, to find we don’t-know-what that’s doing we’re-not-sure-what, on the chance that maybe I’ll be able to stop it from doing whatever it’s doing, and I can’t even . . .”

  She ran out of breath, or words, and heaved to a stop, her jaw tightening again. She stared over Uvnee’s ears, reins tight in her fingers, and shook her head, a tic jumping in the side of her face. “No. I’m not all right. But it doesn’t matter, does it?”

  No. It didn’t. That was the other thing about being of value to the devil, he supposed, and thought again of the exhaustion in the eyes of the Jack, unable to stop save at his master’s order.

  “What does it tell you?” He glanced at her left hand, and her gaze followed suit without prompting.

  “It’s quiet. I don’t think it knows either.”

  Gabriel didn’t like that. The sigil was more than a sign of who she belonged to; it was her connection, the conduit of whatever power she wielded. More, it had warned her of danger before. For it to be silent, when she needed it . . . The devil’s hold only extended the length and breadth of the Territory, be it by his own decision or another’s. Maybe they were too close to the borders . . .

  No. Her mark had flared when they were in the Mother’s Knife itself, in places once ruled by the Spanish. Here, he should be able to reach her.

  “I can’t feel,” she had said.

  Unless whatever blocked them from touching the Road blocked the devil as well.

  The idea that something could stop the Master of the Territory within his own borders was not one Gabriel wanted to consider. The devil had sent Isobel to be his eye and his ear as well as his hand. If something were able to circumscribe his reach . . .

  . . . what else was happening that the devil might not know about?

  Gabriel thought of the letter in his pack, of the forces pressing against the Territory, and remembered the half-dream and Old Woman’s words. Be wary. Be wary, and step lightly.

  It might have meant nothing, might be nothing. He should have told her of the letter. It was too late now.

  “Ici.”

  Isobel recognized that word when the old man finally spoke, so she reined her mare in and looked around.

  It didn’t seem all that different from any other valley they’d ridden through. The sunlight was beginning to fade, but there was enough light to see that the grass appeared undisturbed, the rocks unshattered, none of the devastation that the boss had said would happen where the earth shook so violently. She looked at Gabriel for a lead, but he was swinging out of his saddle, briefly out of view on the other side of the gelding.

  She made a face and followed suit, letting her boots land lightly on the dirt, not aware that she was braced for something to happen until nothing did. Her feet pressed against the ground, and nothing pressed back. It was as still and silent as it had ever been before she took Contract with the devil. No, even more silent. In Flood, she had felt the town itself, the protective boundary-wards that encircled it, the constant flow of power through the very floorboards of the saloon, though she’d not realized then what it was. She had grown up in proximity to the devil; power had been as present in the air she breathed as the sulphured smoke from the blacksmith’s forge.

  Here, there was only the sharp, bitter smell of the trees covering the slopes around them, a perfume of flowers she couldn’t identify, and under it all, the faint acrid bite that had met them when they entered the hills that they’d ascribed to the ghost cat.

  Then, it had been unpleasant, the smell of illness. Here, it reminded her somehow of home, of the morning stink of Gregor’s smithy, and the smell of dough rising—except unpleasant, unnerving.

  She hadn’t realized she was walking toward something until she felt the others gather behind her, Gabriel at her shoulder, the old man a few paces behind. She paused, the toes of her boots neatly lined up as though a ward lay in front of her, telling her to stop. The grass and flowers past her toes looked the same as every other part of the meadow, nothing jarring or out of place.

  “Careful”—and Gabriel’s hand was on her elbow, fingers curling around the fabric of her jacket, digging through the cloth. “There’s something . . .”

  “I feel it,” she agreed. She turned, her face lifted to the sky, pushing her hat back, watching a single bird winging across the broad blue expanse. It was massive, the sun glinting off dark feathers, and she knew she should feel fear: that was a Reaper close overhead.

  Instead of fear, awe overwhelmed her, awe and trepidation; the sense that every beat of its wings was echoed in the thud of her heart, the catch of her breath. Reapers, like buffalo, were creatures of the Territory; they carried some of its medicine within them. Watching it, her head tilting back, the sun glinting at the corner of her vision, Isobel was able to forget, briefly, that she had been cut off, was able to forget anything existed beyond that beat pressing through her flesh, down deep into the bones of the Territory itself.

  Then awareness returned. Reaper hawks were hunters, not scavengers: Gabriel had warned her to be careful, that it would not hesitate to attack a slightly built human if it were hungry enough.

  “What is it looking for?” she asked. If it lingered here when there was no hunting to be found, there was a reason. Might it also be ill? She remembered the ghost cat, remembered the feel of the plague-ridden settlement of Widder Creek, the stink of the camp burning in their wake, then sniffed the air again, as though something that far away, that high above, could be scented. The air smelled as it had before: tainted, but not ill.

  Her feet carried her to the left, the two men following her, until she came back to where the horses and mule waited, clustered together and watchful, well aware of the threat overhead. Only then did Isobel realize she had paced off a circle, large enough for a decent-sized camp, room for people and a fire and horses to move comfortably—but she would no sooner set up camp within that circle than she would walk into a fire. Nothing within the confines seemed any different from outside: the same grasses and flowers, the same ground underneath, the same . . .

  She blinked, half-expecting that her eyes were playing tricks on he
r. Something had moved within that circle. Something unseen, and yet she could see it, indirectly, out of the corner of her gaze, the turn of her head. Directly, it was not there.

  Underneath the surface of that circle. Something . . . seethed.

  The old man grunted once, a satisfied noise. “Ici, came,” he said, the first word he’d spoken in English, and then he used a word she didn’t understand. From Gabriel’s expression, neither did he. The old man said it again, then made a complicated gesture with both hands, ending with a move as though tossing his hands away in disgust.

  “Strangers,” Gabriel said. “Strangers with . . . Strangers coming with harm. He says that this is where men came, with intent to do harm. I think.”

  “Strangers . . . Who?”

  Gabriel slapped his hands against his thighs, and turned to the old man again. “Qui, grandpapa? Qui ai venu? Absáalooke? Sutaio? Des blancs?”

  He got a grunting assent then, and another hand gesture, this one looping like a bird’s flight.

  “Des blancs . . . Avec les couleurs de qui? Ont-ils portent des bannières?”

  Another series of hand movements, and then the old man fell still again, his dark eyes intent on Gabriel’s face. He had yet to acknowledge Isobel’s existence at all.

  “Many men,” Gabriel said. “I think that’s what he says. White men, but not together, not one band . . . not one tribe. Many white men gathered here. Meaning harm.”

  “A fight?” That was all she could think of, to have that many men in one place, not coming together. A fight or a gathering to avoid a fight, the way men came to talk to the boss, some years, late nights with whiskey and Marie bringing trays of food into the boss’s office, low voices talking and then leaving, and the boss looking tired the rest of the day, as though they’d taken something out of him.

  She’d thought that’s what she’d be doing when she’d gone to the boss: bringing in trays and helping soothe tempers, not . . . not standing on a mountain with a Reaper hawk circling overhead, without any idea what she was supposed to be doing.