Eye Spy

by Mercedes Lackey

  And then the bird abruptly stopped singing.

  At exactly that moment, Abi suddenly felt as though someone was watching her. Stev’s head came up, and he stared at her. Under the cover of his voluminous sleeves, the Mage began frantically sketching tiny sigils in the air between his legs, and Korlak’s crow went as rigid as a stuffed bird.

  Even the hinnies stirred uneasily. Only Jicks seemed unaffected, but her eyes narrowed as she paid close attention to the rest of them.

  “We’re being scryed,” Korlak mouthed. Abi nodded slightly.

  She didn’t need to tell them to act normally except for poor Korlak, who just hid his hands in his sleeves and slumped over, staring at the fire. She and Jicks and Stev began what would have sounded like an ordinary conversation to an outsider.

  “I want to try for a couple hares tomorrow,” Abi told them. “We’re making such good time I think it’s worth my going off the road for some fresh meat to put in the pot.”

  “From the look of the countryside and the tracks on the road, your odds should be all right,” Jicks told her. “I don’t see signs of a lot of travelers coming this way.”

  Stev chimed in with his favorite recipe for hare and another for grouse. Jicks scoffed at the idea that he had ever hunted grouse; he replied with indignation. Abi teased him. And all the while, she felt those unseen eyes on them.

  Then, as abruptly as it had begun, the feeling ended. Korlak’s fingers wove, and his posture relaxed. “They aren’t watching us anymore,” he said aloud.

  But Jicks didn’t relax at all, and neither did Stev. “We let the fire die down, and smother the coals in ashes,” she said tersely. “We crawl into the wagon. When I give the signal, we crawl out the back, each take a hinny and make for the trees.”

  “But—why?” Korlak asked, bewildered.

  Abi answered before Jicks could. “That scrying probably means the Karsites were looking for us. If they’ve decided they’ve found us, they’ll attack tonight. We can afford to lose the wagon. We can’t afford to lose the hinnies. All that magical and priestly protection on the wagon might hold, or it might not, so we don’t want to be inside when the demons attack. But the hinnies don’t have much of that protection, and the demons will almost certainly attack them if they are within reach.”

  As Korlak’s eyes widened, Stev picked up the narrative. “Every briefing I have ever had on Karsite demons said that they are sent to specific places to attack, rather than sent to attack specific people. They’re not that bright and can’t tell humans from anything else, much less tell humans apart. So they’re sent to a place, allowed to run rampant for a time, then recalled. Anything in that spot that isn’t protected will be minced.” He grimaced. “When the Karsite priests send demons, they don’t particularly care who gets in the way. They always say ‘The God will know his own.’”

  Jicks nodded. “So we’re going to get out of this spot. And when the demons come, we’ll be—hopefully—out of their sensing range.”

  * * *

  • • •

  The fire was out. The only light came from a half moon, but the line of trees in the distance seemed clear enough to Abi. She slipped out first when Jicks nudged her and got her hinny, Belle, from the picket line. Jicks followed. Stev and Korlak, Korlak’s crow riveted to his shoulder, each took one of the wagon hinnies. Following Jicks, who seemed to have eyes like a cat, they made their way through the darkness to that distant line of trees.

  She stumbled a lot, and it was Belle who kept her upright, waiting patiently, steady as a rock, for her to get her balance again. Eventually instead of trying to lead the hinny, she draped her arm over Belle’s back and let Belle lead her. She got the sense that Belle was “feeling” her way with her feet, finding roots and stones and holes before Abi could. And the entire time they crept their way through the gorse and bracken, she kept expecting to have that sense of eyes on her again.

  Somehow, although it seemed as if they had been moving through the night forever, when they got to the shelter of the trees, Jicks looked up at the stars, and whispered, “Not quite midnight.” She urged her hinny to lie down, and lay down beside her. Abi copied her. Korlak had some trouble until his crow cawed, very softly, twice; then the hinny folded up her legs and went down nicely.

  Stev had already gotten his hinny down.

  Abi lay down next to her hinny and looked back in the direction of their wagon. Now she saw why Jicks had taken this position. Besides making themselves less of a target, hidden in the shadows under the low trees, from this angle the wagon stood out clearly, a stark black patch against the night sky.

  “If they come, they’ll come at midnight,” Stev said quietly.

  “If they don’t, no harm done,” Jicks replied.

  And so they waited, in the insect-buzzing night, with another of those birds nearby singing its heart out.

  Until it stopped.

  And an unearthly howl came from the direction of the wagon.

  Abi’s blood froze in her veins, and she was so terrified she couldn’t have moved if she’d wanted to. Belle went into a paroxysm of shivering but didn’t attempt to move.

  The howl was joined by a second, a deeper note, and the night air, no longer peaceful, filled with such horrible cries that Abi clapped her hands over her ears trying to shut them out, in vain. She literally could not move once she’d covered her ears, and she didn’t want to look, and yet her eyes were pulled to that black patch where the wagon stood.

  She only caught a vague glimpse of something, something moving too quickly for anything but a sense that there was something there, around the wagon.

  If the trip across the gorse to the forest had seemed to take all night, waiting in the trees seemed to take forever. The tiny bit of Abi that was still able to think was certain that if the screaming and howling went on for a single moment more, she’d go mad with fear.

  And yet it did, and she didn’t.

  This was terror that turned her insides to water, that almost stopped her breath, and yet inexplicably allowed her to take shallow gasps that didn’t seem nearly enough. Now she thoroughly understood what poor Korlak must have endured, and she could not possibly have felt more sympathetic toward him.

  That was when she felt warmth penetrating her tunic and breeches at each hip.

  Somehow, fighting the terror that assured her that if she moved at all, she’d be spotted and torn to small bits, she brought her right hand down to that patch of warmth. Her hand closed around the hilt of one of the two daggers that the Mage-smith had given her.

  And the second her hand touched it, the fear ebbed.

  It didn’t vanish, but it no longer left her paralyzed and unable to think. She pulled the dagger from its sheath—and, gods be thanked, it did not glow, since that would be a dead giveaway to anyone watching where they were—and pressed it to her chest. The warmth spread from the dagger into her frozen body, and with every passing moment, she was able to think more clearly.

  Moving as slowly and imperceptibly as her father had taught her, she clasped the dagger against her with her left hand and edged over to Jicks.

  Jicks was rigid to the touch; all her experience had not saved her from that same paralysis of fear. Abi unsheathed her left-hand dagger, felt for Jicks’s hand, and pressed the unsheathed dagger into it.

  Almost instantly, she felt Jicks relax. Several long moments later, as the howls and screams continued to fill the valley, Jicks patted her shoulder, and she edged over to Stev.

  In his case, she shoved the flat of her dagger against his hand, sharing the warmth, and when the hand and arm relaxed, guided it down to his sword—which was also, as she had hoped, radiating warmth.

  Good against evil . . . it might not be a lot of help, but it’s something, and I’ll gladly take the gift.

  Now she moved past Stev to poor Korlak, fearing the Mage had passed
out cold. But she found him still alert; rigid, but listening to his crow, who was muttering into his ear. She grabbed his hand and pressed it to the hand holding her dagger, and she heard him let out a faint sigh that was half sob as he too felt some of the fear ebbing away.

  The time they spent besieged by terror were the longest candlemarks in her entire life. It wasn’t just that those howls invoked fear. It was what was under the fear.

  You are alone. You will always be alone. You will die alone and no one will care.

  You are nothing, and no one. Insignificant. You matter less than a grain of sand.

  And everyone knows this. When they think of you at all, which is almost never, they laugh at you and your pretensions.

  The world would be a better place with you gone from it.

  Die. Give up. Now.

  She got the sense that even if someone escaped the terror and the claws of those beasts, this relentless message would burn itself into their souls and send them into a despair from which the only escape would be death.

  Korlak squeezed the hand holding the dagger, and she reached out and caught Stev’s free hand in hers, and she hoped he stretched out his to Jicks. Because that, and not the warmth and magic of the daggers, was what drove that message out of her heart and showed it to be a base lie. Here they were, a human bulwark against despair. They mattered to each other.

  Then, all at once, the howls stopped. So did the terror. And after an interminable silence, a lone, brave bird began to sing.

  Exhausted, Abi let go of Stev’s hand, and Korlak’s, and she put her head down on her arms and, somehow, slept.

  She woke instantly when Jicks moved, raised her head, and saw that the first fingers of dawn had broken over the hills. Jicks was getting stiffly to her feet, dagger still held loosely in her hand as if she did not dare let go of it. Abi got slowly to her knees; Stev and Korlak were doing the same. She peered in the direction that Jicks was staring. The wagon still seemed to be there, though whether or not it had been ransacked was impossible to say from this distance.

  “Are they scrying us?” Jicks asked quietly, never taking her eyes off the wagon as her hinny lurched to her feet.

  “No.” Korlak seemed quite sure, and Abi was inclined to trust his judgment. She got Belle up at the same time as the other two hinnies, and with Jicks leading the way, they limped, stiff and sore, to the encampment.

  As they got to the halfway point, she thought the wagon looked a bit odd. As they reached the three-quarter mark, she realized why. The canvas and wood had been splashed with red.

  But it wasn’t until they got right to the encampment itself that she understood that red was blood.

  It looked as if the demons had scoured the area in a clearly defined circle and slaughtered every single animal within that circle. Blood was everywhere, and bits of fur and skin. Poor hares. And—was that a hoof?

  “As I said,” Stev said, with unnerving calm, “Demons aren’t too smart.”

  “Bloody hell,” Jicks muttered, looking at the trampled and torn up campsite, the blood, the sheer carnage, she shook her head, then hung it. “This is . . .”

  “The Karsite way. So I’m told, anyway.” Stev held his hinny’s bridle loosely and looked from Jicks to Korlak and back again. “Now what? We didn’t move as you’d planned while we were still under the cover of the darkness. If we move now, all they have to do is scry this spot to know we escaped. Wagons don’t move by themselves.”

  “Maybe we can use that to our advantage,” Abi said into the silence. “They probably will scry this spot soon.”

  “Not soon; calling up demons and controlling them takes a lot out of you.” This was the first thing Korlak had said since they’d left the camp in the night. “But you’re right, Abi, they will scry this spot to see what the demons did.”

  “I think they’ll want to make sure,” Abi continued, trying to think what she would do, if she were in their shoes, as Mags had taught her. “How good is scrying, Korlak? I mean, what can you actually see?”

  “If these priests can control demons, they can see very clearly.” Poor Korlak chewed his lip, and the crow nodded as if it understood.

  “So we need to clean up the bits so all they see is blood,” Abi decided. “If we do that, I think they’ll scry first, then come in person to look for body parts.” I cannot believe I just said that. . . . “Can we set up an ambush?”

  Jicks’s head came up. “That’s the best idea I’ve heard in two days,” she replied, eyes alight. “Stev, can they invoke demons in the daylight?”

  “I—” He paused. “I’ve never heard of them doing that.”

  “Well, that’s good, if it’s true. Do you have any idea how these priests dress?”

  He looked at her as if he wondered about her sanity, but answered. “Normally, long robes, either red or black. But they’re passing as us, remember? They’ll be dressed normally, probably in clothing they bought somewhere around here.”

  “Or stole from someone they murdered,” Abi muttered.

  “Bloody hell. So they can come across country without getting tangled up, which means instead of coming up the road, they could come from any direction—”

  That was when Abi noticed something as she finally went to sheath her dagger. While it wasn’t glowing—the point was blood-red.

  That’s . . . odd. Experimentally, she moved it around. The further away from south-southeast she pointed it, the less of the point was red.

  “They could—but they won’t,” she said, as sure of that as she was of her own name. “Look.”

  She held up her dagger. Jicks blinked, then lifted the second, temporarily forgotten dagger and repeated the experiment.

  And grinned.

  “Now we can set up an ambush.”

  But to Abi’s bewilderment, the first thing she did was go to the wagon. “Abi, make us something to eat, please,” she said, handing out supplies. “Korlak, start cleaning up the bits. Your crow—”

  “—is already eating them,” Korlak said. “I think we can leave him to it, there are not that many bits left. I think the demons must have eaten most of them.”

  “Good, then come here, please.” As Abi portioned out traveler’s biscuits and dried meat, Korlak went to the back of the wagon and came away burdened with the grain sacks Jicks had thriftily stowed away as they used them for the entire trip. He staggered over to where Abi was eating and resolutely ignoring the crow, who, having stuffed himself, was now carrying more bits off to hide in the grass, bracken, and gorse.

  “Oh! Grass suits!” exclaimed Stev, who evidently recognized immediately what she was about to do.

  “If those bastards stay passed out long enough, we can have ourselves four sets by noon,” Jicks said, with a grim smile. “You show Korlak what to collect. Bring a big pile--I want these things done right.” She sat down with a traveler’s biscuit between her teeth and began unpicking the seams of the bags. Well, I can do that, Abi thought, and joined her.

  When they had twelve bags unpicked, Jicks started sewing them together. “Three bags per suit should be enough,” Jicks said. “Make it like a burlap blanket.”

  Meanwhile, Korlak and Stev went out into the area around them and began selectively harvesting long grass, branches of brush that were not gorse, and bracken fronds, making three separate piles. By the time Abi and Jicks got done sewing together four burlap “blankets,” they had three tall piles.

  “All right, now watch, you two,” said Jicks. “Pay attention to how Stev and I attach the stuff to the burlap. That grass is going to serve as our yarn. I don’t have time to unravel this burlap, and even if I did, it’s the wrong color to blend in around here.” Abi watched carefully as she poked holes in the burlap with her knife, threaded hanks of grass through, and used the grass to knot the bracken and branches to the burlap, laying it all in one direction. Korlak prove
d surprisingly adept at this task, and with all four of them concentrating on it, they had four blankets of foliage they could use to hide under some time after noon. Abi’s fingers were sore and a bit cut by the sharp edges of the grass, but she was pretty pleased with her result.

  “All right, you can see what we’re going to do, I’m sure,” Jicks said. “Now we’re going to move some supplies, the hinnies, and our hides back to where we were in the forest. Korlak, can you tell from where we were if they start scrying the area again?”

  Korlak seemed to have grown in confidence since yesterday. He nodded.

  Without any further ado, they loaded up the hinnies with the camouflage mats and the supplies and got into the shelter of the trees as fast as they could. Jicks was taking no chances that the priests might wake up from their stupors and start looking for evidence that they really were dead.

  The hinnies were just as happy with the brush and sparser grass under the trees as they had been with the better pasture out in the open. The four humans settled themselves in a rough camp. They’d brought their bedrolls along this time, and they took some time gathering more bracken and spreading their blankets over it.

  Meanwhile, the afternoon grew warm, insects buzzing everywhere. With a full belly and water, Korlak and his crow on the watch, she sat down on her bedroll and felt she might be able to relax.

  And the next thing she knew, Jicks was nudging her awake with more traveler’s biscuits and a water bottle, and the sun was setting. “Any sign?” she asked.

  “Nothing,” said Korlak, cross-legged on his bedroll, squinting at his master’s spellbook. “Kaw is out there on the wagon until sunset. If he feels someone scrying, he’ll come to us.”