Beguilement (2 page)

“Doubt they could even take out real bandits.” He added after a moment, “Or they would have by now.” And after another, “If they are real bandits.”

“Thought I’d stick the Glassforgers with holding the horses, mostly. If it is a malice, and if it’s grown as big as Chato fears, we’ll need every pair of our hands to the front.”

A short silence. “Poor word choice, Mari.”

“Bucket’s over there. Soak your head, Dag. You know what I meant.”

The right hand waved. “Yeah, yeah.”

With an oof, the woman rose to her feet. “Eat. That’s an order, if you like.”

“I’m not nervy.”

“No”—the woman sighed—“no, you are not that.” She strode off.

The man settled back again. Go away, you, Fawn thought down at him resentfully.

I have to pee.

But in a few minutes, just before she was driven by her body’s needs into entirely unwelcome bravery, the man got up and wandered after the patrol leader.

His steps were unhurried but long, and he was across the yard before the leader gave a vague wave of her hand and a side glance. Fawn could not see how it could be an order, yet somehow, everyone in the patrol was suddenly up and in motion, saddlebags repacked, girths tightened. The whole lot of them were mounted and on their way in five minutes.

Fawn slipped down the tree trunk and peered around it. The one-handed man—riding rear guard?—was looking back over his shoulder. She ducked out of sight again till the hoofbeats faded, then unclutched the apple tree and went to seek the farmwife. Her pack, she was relieved to see in passing, lay untouched on the bench. Dag glanced back, wondering anew about the little farm girl who’d been hiding shyly up the apple tree. There, now—down she slid, but he still gained no clear look at her. Not that a few leaves and branches could hide a life-spark so bright from his groundsense at that range.

His mind’s eye sketched a picture of her tidy farm raided by a malice’s mud-men, all its cheerful routine turned to ash and blood and charnel smoke. Or worse—and not imagination but memory supplied the vision—a ruination like the Western Levels beyond the Gray River, not six hundred miles west of here. Not so far away to him, who had ridden or walked the distance a dozen times, yet altogether beyond these local people’s horizons. Endless miles of open flat, so devastated that even rocks could not hold their shape and slumped into gray dust. To cross that vast blight leached the ground from one’s body as a desert parched the mouth, and it was just as potentially lethal to linger there. A thousand years of sparse rains had only begun to sculpt the Levels into something resembling a landscape again. To see this farm girl’s green rolling lands laid low like that…

Not if I can help it, Little Spark.

He doubted they would meet again, or that she would ever know what her—mother’s?—strange customers today sought to do on her behalf and their own.

Still, he could not begrudge her his weariness in this endless task. The country people who gained even a partial understanding of the methods called it black necromancy and sidled away from patrollers in the street. But they accepted their gift of safety all the same. So yet again, one more time anew, we will buy the death of this malice with one of our own.

But not more than one, not if he could make it so.

Dag clapped his heels to his horse’s sides and cantered after his patrol. The farmwife watched thoughtfully as Fawn packed up her bedroll, straightened the straps, and hitched it over her shoulder once more. “It’s near a day’s ride to Glassforge from here,” she remarked. “Longer, walking. You’re like to be benighted on the road.”

“It’s all right,” said Fawn. “I’ve not had trouble finding a place to sleep.”

Which was true enough. It was easy to find a cranny to curl up in out of sight of the road, and bedtime was a simple routine when all you did was spread a blanket and lie down, unwashed and unbrushed, in your clothes. The only pests that had found her in the dark were the mosquitoes and ticks.

“You could sleep in the barn. Start off early tomorrow.” Shading her eyes, the woman stared down the road where the patrollers had vanished a while ago.

“I’d not charge you for it, child.”

Her honest concern for Fawn’s safety stood clear in her face. Fawn was torn between unjust anger and a desire to burst into tears, equally uncomfortable lumps in her stomach and throat. I’m not twelve, woman. She thought of saying so, and more. She had to start practicing it sooner or later: I’m twenty. I’m a widow. The phrases did not rise readily to her lips as yet.

Still… the farmwife’s offer beguiled her mind. Stay a day, do a chore or two or six and show how useful she could be, stay another day, and another… farms always needed more hands, and Fawn knew how to keep hers busy. Her first planned act when she reached Glassforge was to look for work. Plenty of work right here—familiar tasks, not scary and strange.

But Glassforge had been the goal of her imagination for weeks now. It seemed like quitting to stop short. And wouldn’t a town offer better privacy? Not necessarily, she realized with a sigh. Wherever she went, folks would get to know her sooner or later. Maybe it was all the same, no new horizons anywhere, really.

She mustered her flagging determination. “Thanks, but I’m expected. Folk’ll worry if I’m late.”

The woman gave a little headshake, a combination of conceding the argument and farewell. “Take care, then.” She turned back to her house and her own onslaught of tasks, duties that probably kept her running from before dawn to after dark.

A life I would have taken up, except for Sunny Sawman, Fawn thought gloomily, climbing back up to the straight road once more. I’d have taken it up for the sake of Sunny Sawman, and never thought of another.

Well, I’ve thought of another now, and I’m not going to go and unthink it.

Let’s go see Glassforge.

One more time, she called up her wearied fury with Sunny, the low, stupid, nasty… stupid fool, and let it stiffen her spine. Nice to know he had a use after all, of a sort. She faced south and began marching.

Last year’s leaves were damp and black with rot underfoot, and as Dag climbed the steep slope in the dark, his boot slid. Instantly, a strong and anxious hand grasped his right arm.

“Do that again,” said Dag in a level whisper, “and I’ll beat you senseless.

Quit trying to protect me, Saun.”

“Sorry,” Saun whispered back, releasing the death clutch. After a momentary pause, he added, “Mari says she won’t pair you with the girls anymore because you’re overprotective.”

Dag swallowed a curse. “Well, that does not apply to you. Senseless. And bloody.”

He could feel Saun’s grin flash in the shadows of the woods. They heaved themselves upward a few more yards, finding handgrips among the rocks and roots and saplings.

“Stop,” Dag breathed.

A nearly soundless query from his right.

“We’ll be up on them over this rise. What you can see, can see you, and if there’s anything over there with groundsense, you’ll look like a torch in the trees. Stop it down, boy.”

A grunt of frustration. “But I can’t see Razi and Utau. I can barely see you.

You’re like an ember under a handful of ash.”

“I can track Razi and Utau. Mari holds us all in her head, you don’t have to.

You only have to track me.” He slipped behind the youth and gripped his right shoulder, massaging. He wished he could do both sides together, but this touch seemed to be enough; the flaring tension started to go out of Saun, both body and mind. “Down. Down. That’s right. Better.” And after a moment, “You’re going to do just fine.”

Dag had no idea whether Saun was going to do well or disastrously, but Saun evidently believed him, with appalling earnestness; the bright anxiety decreased still further.

“Besides,” Dag added, “it’s not raining. Can’t have a debacle without rain.

It’s obligatory, in my experience. So we’re good.” The humor was weak, but under the circumstances, worked well enough; Saun chuckled.

He released the youth, and they continued their climb.

“Is the malice there?” muttered Saun.

Dag stopped again, bending in the shadows to hook up a plant left-sided. He held it under Saun’s nose. “See this?”

Saun’s head jerked backward. “It’s poison ivy. Get it out of my face.”

“If we were this close to a malice’s lair, not even the poison ivy would still be alive. Though I admit, it would be among the last to go. This isn’t the lair.”

“Then why are we here?”

Behind them, Dag could hear the men from Glassforge topping the ridge and starting down into the ravine out of which he and the patrol were climbing.

Second wave. Even Saun didn’t manage to make that much noise. Mari had better land her punches before their helpers closed the gap, or there would be no surprise left. “Chato thinks this robber troop has been infiltrated, or worse, suborned. Catch us a mud-man, it’ll lead us to its maker, quick enough.”

“Do mud-men have groundsense?”

“Some. Malice ever catches one of us, it takes everything. Groundsense.

Methods and weapon skills. Locations of our camps… Likely the first human this one caught was a road robber, trying to hide out in the hills, which is why it’s doing what it is. None of us have been reported missing, so we still may have the edge. A patroller doesn’t let a malice take him alive if he can help it.”

Or his partner. Enough lessons for one night. “Climb.”

On the ridgetop, they crouched low.

Smoothly, Saun strung his bow. Less smoothly but just as quickly, Dag unshipped and strung his shorter, adapted one, then swapped out the hook screwed into the wooden cuff strapped to the stump of his left wrist, and swapped in the bow-rest. He seated it good and tight, clamped the lock, and dropped the hook into the pouch on his belt. Undid the guard strap on his sheath and made sure the big knife would draw smoothly. It was all scarcely more awkward than carrying the bow in his hand had once been, and at least he couldn’t drop it. At the bottom of the dell, Dag could see the clearing through the trees: three or four campfires burning low, tents, and an old cabin with half its roof tumbled in. Lumps of sleeping men in bedrolls, like scratchy burrs touching his groundsense. The faint flares of a guard, awake in the woods beyond, and someone stumbling back from the slit trenches. The sleepy smudges of a few horses tethered beyond. Words of the body’s senses for something his eyes did not see nor hand touch. Maybe twenty-five men altogether, against the patrol’s sixteen and the score or so of volunteers from Glassforge. He began to sort through the life-prickles, looking for things shaped like men that… weren’t.

The night sounds of the woods carried on: the croak of tree frogs, the chirp of crickets, the sawing of less identifiable insects. An occasional tiny rustle in the weeds. Anything bigger might have been either scared off by the noise of the camp below, or, depending on how the robbers buried their scraps, attracted.

Dag felt around with his groundsense beyond the tightening perimeter of the patrol, but found no nervous scavengers.

Then, too soon, a startled yell from his far right, partway around the patroller circle. Grunts, cries, the ring of metal on metal. The camp stirred. That’s it, in we go.

“Closer,” snapped Dag to Saun, and led a slide downslope to shorten their range.

By the time he’d closed the distance to a bare twenty paces and found a gap in the trees through which to shoot, the targets were obligingly rising to their feet. From even farther to his right, a flaming arrow arced high and came down on a tent; in a few minutes, he might even be able to see what he was shooting at.

Dag let both fear and hope fade from his mind, together with worries about the inner nature of what they faced. It was just targets. One at a time. That one.

And that one. And in that confusion of flickering shadows…

Dag loosed another shaft, and was rewarded by a distant yelp. He had no idea what he’d hit or where, but it would be moving slower now. He paused to observe, and was satisfied when Saun’s next shaft also vanished into the black dark beyond the cabin and returned a meaty thunk they could hear all the way up here.

All around in the woods, the patrol was igniting with excitement; his head would be as full of them as Mari’s was in a moment if they didn’t all get a grip on themselves.

The advantage of twenty paces was that it was a nice, short, snappy range to shoot from. The disadvantage was how little time it took your targets to run up on your position… Dag cursed as three or four large shapes came crashing through the dark at them.

He let his bow arm pivot down and yanked out his knife. Glancing right, he saw Saun pull his long sword, swing, and make the discovery that a blade length that gave great advantage from horseback was awkwardly constrained in a close-grown woods.

“You can’t lop heads here!” Dag yelled over his shoulder. “Go to thrusts!” He grunted as he folded in his bow-arm and shoved his left shoulder into the nearest attacker, knocking the man back down the hillside. He caught a blade that came out of seeming-nowhere on the brass of his hilt, and with a shuddering scrape closed in along it for a well-placed knee to a target groin. These men might have fancied themselves bandits, but they still fought like farmers.

Saun raised a leg and booted his blade free of a target; the man’s cry choked in his throat, and the withdrawing steel made an ugly sucking noise. Saun followed Dag at a run toward the bandit camp. Razi and Utau, to their right and left, paced them, closing in tight as they all descended, stooping like hawks.

In the clearing, Saun devolved to his favorite powerful swings again. Which worked spectacularly bloodily when they connected, and left him wide open when they didn’t. A target succeeded in ducking, then came up swinging a long-handled, iron-headed sledgehammer. The breaking-pumpkin sound when it hit Saun’s chest made Dag’s stomach heave. Dag leaped inside the target’s lethal radius, clutched him tightly around the back with his bow-arm, and brought his knife up hard. Wet horrors spilled over his hand, and he twisted the knife and shoved the target off it. Saun lay on his back, writhing, his face darkening.