The Cold Eye

by Laura Anne Gilman

  Gabriel felt his eyebrows rise, then pursed his mouth and nodded. No lie there.

  “Most a’ them sigils in there just make a fellow feel too lazy to cause trouble,” Possum went on. “Kinda like giving ’em whiskey without the mean part.”

  Gabriel nodded appreciatively. “I don’t suppose you’d teach me those?”

  Possum snorted, a wet, deeply unpleasant noise. “Nope.”

  Gabriel was surprised both by the answer and the matter-of-fact way it’d been said. Bindings were the sort of thing that were shared freely, for the most part. To refuse a polite request?

  Isolated, he reminded himself. Likely more than a bit wind-touched, some of them. He ought not take offense. They were guests here, however official the marshal’s presence might be, and Isobel hadn’t given her title. Even if she had, nobody save the marshal and the judge need answer to her if they didn’t wish to.

  And perhaps more to the point, the lockhouse was now home to two magicians: it was not all that surprising that the man might not want anyone poking about the wards just then. Isobel had said they wouldn’t wake anytime soon, but he knew her, and he knew she hadn’t been certain on that. So, any sane man’d prefer to be on this side of the walls, if she was wrong, and keep the man responsible for those walls in his good graces, not annoy him with pushing.

  Still. The refusal was odd. Gabriel frowned, hands jammed into the pockets of his jacket, watching as the two men finished their work and came back out into the sunlight, closing the door behind them. The sigil flared once, a barely-there line of flame, before it returned to simply being paint.

  The two men picked up the lines of the sledge and hauled it off without a word of farewell. Possum grunted after them, then turned to stare at Gabriel. “You plan on standing there all day?”

  “No.” He decided, good graces or no, that he didn’t like Possum much, and from the way the two men had disappeared with the now-empty sledge, he didn’t think they did much either. “If you could direct me to the judge’s cabin, I’d be most appreciative.”

  Despite his politeness, Gabriel made certain his tone couldn’t be mistaken for a request.

  “Can’t miss it,” Possum said. “Just keep walking down the way until there ain’t no more to walk.”

  There was a thump from inside the hut, something solid hitting ground, and Gabriel jumped, giving the now-closed door a suspicious look, doubled when something inside let out a muttered curse that lifted the hair on the back of his neck, even through the door.

  “Don’t you worry none about them,” Possum said, looking like he hadn’t twitched since his feet first planted. “Short of them calling down Mother Breeze herself, them walls aren’t going nowhere and neither is they.”

  “You’re certain?”

  “Said so, didn’t I?”

  He could stay and risk whatever Possum might do if annoyed enough, or he could go find the judge —and, by proximity, hopefully also Isobel and the marshal—and tell them that at least one of the magicians had woken.

  Gabriel briefly considered a third choice: getting his horse from wherever they’d stashed him, loading the mule up again, and riding back out through the stockade walls. He’d signed on to mentor Isobel, to make sure she knew how to survive on the Road, how to deal with marshals and handle posses and bandits, how to handle herself in bad weather, and how to feed herself when supplies ran low. He’d done all that.

  In particular—and bargains were all about particulars—he had discharged the terms of his agreement with the devil. Isobel Devil’s Hand could fairly be called competent, with competence, res judicata.

  He clapped a hand onto Possum’s thin shoulder, causing the man to startle where sudden noises did not. “I’ll be off, then.”

  “You do that,” Possum grumbled, and then pretended he was no longer there.

  Following Possum’s directions, Gabriel strode down the roadway, touching the brim of his hat in greeting when he encountered locals, all of them older, most of them male, all of them looking askant at the stranger, though none stopped or spoke to him. The lack of curiosity might be pushed off on their age, but Gabriel compared it to the hunger for news he encountered elsewhere throughout the Territory, and felt a return of his earlier uncertainty.

  The roadway continued its curve, and to distract himself, he mapped it out in his thoughts, the hard-packed dirt and the low buildings and the stockade walls that rose twice as high overhead, curving like the cup of hands around the town itself. A single entrance at front, anyone entering forced to pause just inside the gate, then splitting around the common area to rejoin in the back . . .

  He smiled, satisfied to see his assumption was correct: he came to the end of the roadway, a small smithy on his left and more of the low cabins to his right, with a square box of a structure directly in front of him, the palisade wall rising strong at its back.

  More than a cabin, this; Judge Pike had himself a proper courtroom. Gabriel shook his head, half-amused. Some judges rode circuit, same as the marshals, and some set up shop in places where marshals and folk could find them easy, but few of them felt the need to replicate the formalities of Law elsewhere. It didn’t apply the same here in the Territory.

  But Gabriel wasn’t going to deny the tendril of anticipation he felt, seeing the scales carved below the marshal’s Tree over the doorframe, even though he was there only to witness, not prosecute. But when he heard yelling coming from within, all humor dropped and he knocked the door open with his hip, knife out of its sheath and in his hand before wiser thought could prevail.

  LaFlesche was the one yelling. Another woman, younger and slighter, looked like she was the target. The judge was standing between them, trying to keep the peace.

  Isobel. Where was Isobel?

  “It wasn’t my fault! She just . . . collapsed!”

  Those words reached Gabriel at the same instant he saw Isobel stretched out on a bench, her arms placed over her stomach, unmoving. Another figure hovered over her, holding a cloth, and he realized with a sudden sharp sinking pain that the dun-colored fabric was marked with blood.

  “What happened.”

  His voice cut through the yelling, a razor against skin, and a dread silence fell. His boots made a heavy, muffled noise against the plank floor, accompanied only by the exhale and inhale of the others in the room as he reached Isobel’s side.

  “What happened?” he asked again, taking the cloth from Tousey’s hand and dabbing gently at the red stream still flowing from her nostril. Her eyes were closed, her skin clammy, and the throb at her neck was too quick for his satisfaction.

  Had he only just been thinking he could be rid of her? He eased the fury rising and waited for someone to answer him.

  “We’re not sure,” LaFlesche said. “She went with Lou here to look at the wardings. And something happened there.”

  “Nothing happened! She came and looked, and she asked me a few questions, and then she fell over.” Lou sounded distraught and more than a little afraid. Gabriel could almost feel sorry for her: getting on the wrong side of people who could bring in two magicians without obvious harm to themselves must be terrifying.

  Tousey had taken a few steps back when Gabriel came in, hovering just out of reach, his gaze flickering between them all. Poor bastard had been thrown headfirst into the brambles of the Territory; Gabriel wasn’t sure he’d have been anywhere near as calm, were their conditions reversed, but he didn’t have time to coddle him now.

  “What questions?” he asked Lou, forcing his voice to stay even, the way he’d once questioned witnesses prone to emotion.

  “Don’t remember; something about how old they were? And then she went all pale and pitched forward, I swear it.”

  He risked looking away from Isobel to take in LaFlesche and the judge. “I didn’t feel anything flicker in the wards,” Gabriel said. “But this isn’t my town; I might not’ve. You two?”

  LaFlesche shook her head, sucked her cheeks in before responding. “N
o. But we were already in here when it must have happened.”

  Judges’ quarters were sigil-warded, same as a marshal’s badge-house and —he realized suddenly—the lockhouse. Had his being close to Possum’s work kept him from feeling trouble when it reached out?

  “She didn’t even touch them; I don’t see how—”

  “Touch?”

  “The bones.” Lou took in his expression, then turned to look at the judge as though for support, but he shook his head, as confused as she by his reaction.

  “Your wards are set in bone?”

  “Well, yes. We saw no need to —” The judge stopped and looked at LaFlesche, as though expecting her to explain, but she merely shrugged.

  “The wards were a gift,” Lou said, her voice quavering. “From the natives who lived here at the time. I told her. We’ve used ’em ever since.”

  The judge nodded. “Way I heard the story, there wasn’t much choice. To not use them would have given insult.”

  Gabriel was putting pieces together, and he didn’t like the shape of any of them. Trusting your safety to someone else, someone else’s long-dead-and-gone . . . it made Gabriel’s skin crawl, but he supposed out here, deep in the winter, you had to trust someone. And it seemed to work for them.

  But it would explain why Possum wouldn’t show him what he’d done, why nobody here seemed interested in news from the rest of the Territory, and maybe why Isobel’s poking at the wards had caused them to strike back—the devil’s mark on her might have been seen as an attack or insult.

  Or it could be something else entirely; he didn’t know. Couldn’t know until Isobel woke up.

  “Iz?” He patted her cheek gently, brushed a fingertip across her neck, testing the heat of her skin, the throb of her pulse, then lightly touched her closed eyelids to see if there was any reaction at all.

  She stirred restlessly under his hand, then sneezed, turning her head away from him.

  “Hey, there.” He sat back on his heels in relief, slipping his hat off and placing it on the floor next to him. The trickle of blood from her nose was only a drop now, and he cupped the side of her face, turning her head gently to look at him.

  Her eyes were half slitted, as though the dim light from the lamps hurt them, but she seemed to be tracking and aware.

  “Welcome back.”

  “The wards . . .”

  “Yah. Do you know what happened? You fell . . .”

  “Bones.” The word seemed to exhaust her. “Their wards . . .”

  “Tribal warding. So I heard. Is there a problem?”

  Was there a problem that the Devil’s Hand needed to deal with, he meant.

  She closed her eyes, then nodded once.

  “Blast and tarnish.” Magicians and American interference, shaking ground and unhappy natives, a vicious haint, and now this . . . He was remembering why he rarely rode this far north, beyond civilized behaviors. “Is it on fire?”

  A hesitation, then a single shake of her head. They had time to deal with it. He combed his fingers through her hair, loosened from its braid, and said the very last thing he wanted to tell her just then.

  “Iz. I think one of the magicians woke up.”

  Her eyes opened, that forthright stare filled with such exhaustion, he almost told her not to bother, that they could deal with this without her.

  But they couldn’t.

  There was nothing, then faint, muted noises, like listening from under a heavy blanket, voices from far away and downstairs. Then Isobel was vaguely aware of the flurry of activity around her, the voices clearer, urgent, and she was being moved, being lifted, a blanket over her shoulders she didn’t need, and a mug in her fingers that she didn’t want.

  The liquid in the mug was warm, though, and when she sipped the broth, she found that she was starving.

  “Slowly,” Gabriel warned her when she would have drained the mug. “A sip at a time.”

  She nodded and took another sip, blinking as her vision cleared. Plank floors, worn smooth underfoot. Four walls around them, also plank; a large room, almost a hall, unfamiliar and yet—

  She realized with a sudden shock that the room reminded her of the main room back in Flood, early in the morning before the tables were set up, the floors swept clean: that same sense of a space waiting to be used. The sensation was so strong, she found herself looking for the boss, flaring her nostrils to catch the warm, familiar smell of spice and whiskey and smoke that always accompanied him.

  Gabriel’s scent filled her nose instead, and an odd, acrid tang of something metallic. She raised the hand that wasn’t holding the mug and touched under her nostrils. Her fingertips came away stained pink.

  “Nosebleed,” Gabriel told her. “It’s stopped now.”

  His voice sounded strained, and she worried that he had hurt himself again, wanted to tell him to take off his jacket and shirt so she could check his bandaging. It had only been . . . how long since he was injured? Her thoughts wouldn’t focus; she couldn’t remember. Days . . . weeks?

  “My head hurts.” It came out as a whimper, and Isobel cringed in embarrassment.

  “The broth will help,” Gabriel said. “It will be all right.”

  She couldn’t remember what had happened. Where were they? What had —

  A voice caught at her, and she looked across the hall. Two men sat on a bench, enough space between them to tell her they did not want to be there, took no comfort from the other, making her aware of how close Gabriel sat to her, his arm draped over her shoulder, and how much comfort she took from that.

  The shorter of the two men looked up, scowled at her, and a click click click of bootheels coming down stairs was her memory and she knew who they were: the strangers who had provoked the magicians, then called false insult against them. They were here in Andreas and —

  “The magicians!” She tried to stand, but Gabriel’s arm turned into an immovable weight, keeping her still.

  “Easy, Iz.”

  “You said they were waking.” She could feel her blood rushing, skin prickling, urgency driving her, but was unable to slide free from his hold.

  “One. But the lockhouse can hold them for a little while longer. Drink the broth; you’re going to need to stand up and be presentable soon.”

  Isobel knew that voice, knew it would be useless to protest. Despite his warnings, she drained what remained of the broth in one gulp, grimacing at the silty, overly salted dregs at the bottom. Broth for blood, Molly used to say when one of them had their cycles. She thought about telling Gabriel that, then decided against it. He was skittish enough when she bled; no need to remind him of it. Men were awkward that way.

  She blinked down into the cup, feeling the warmth slowly creep back into her flesh, aware that she was thinking foolishly, that Gabriel was right; better she sit and be still a while longer.

  “Maître Isobel.”

  She looked up as the man approached. Old, balding, a shirt buttoned to his neck, neatly darned at the elbows . . . Judge Pike, she remembered. He’d met them at the gate, and then . . .

  “No, don’t you stand,” he reassured her. “Marshal LaFlesche has already given her word; all I’ll be needing from you is why you say these men have brought false claim, and there’s no need to be formal about it with only us here. You being who you are, your word will be enough.”

  Isobel blinked at him, then looked at the marshal standing a few paces behind. The older woman shook her head once: she hadn’t told the judge anything. But she’d said she was of Flood, and he’d mentioned the boss, not her. . . .

  Isobel bit her lip. When she’d first left Flood, she’d thought the name alone would make people look up to her, give her some kind of power. Now, months of travel from home, that name elicited the respect she’d craved, and she didn’t trust it.

  She wasn’t fool enough not to understand why. This far out, the boss wasn’t even a name; he was a figure, faceless and powerful. All they needed to know was she came from Flood, and
she had authority. Her word would hang these men.

  The Americans had given false witness, whether they’d understood that or not. Everyone in the Territory had to abide by the same rules. But she would give them fair telling.

  She straightened her back and lifted her chin, putting the now-empty mug into Gabriel’s hand, as though she were making her evening report to the boss, telling him what she’d seen, what she’d observed of the players at the table, the loiterers along the bar.

  “My mentor and I were riding north along the Road when I was called to witness.”

  No need to say she’d been alone and asleep, or that the whisper hadn’t been a dream-call, not truly; explaining all that would take more strength than she had, with what she had yet to say.

  And the whisper itself . . . Her thoughts of that, her dizzy, impossible thoughts, the sensation of something replacing herself with itself, she’d keep to herself. For now.

  “We first encountered a homesteading, where the residents told us of the earth shaking, that there was a . . . something wrong, further north. That the ground shook and the animals fled.”

  Had this been the boss, she would have told him of the sadness Jumping-Up Duck had described, had told him about the way they had seemed afraid of what was happening, the sorrow and anger they had described. But such things had no place, no weight in what this man must judge.

  “Following their guidance, we rode further and came to a valley where . . .” She hesitated, suddenly wishing for the mug to be back in her hands, to give her something to hold on to, clench her fingers around. Instead, her fingers dug into her palms, feeling the cool lines of the sigil on her left, the warm, unmarked flesh on her right. “Some terrible medicine had been worked there,” she said finally. “A circle of power, a trap set . . . and death.”

  So far, nothing she had said had made the judge react; she did not know if that meant her words matched the marshal’s or he simply had the ability to keep his thoughts from showing in his face or body.