Cloud's Rider

Chapter 21

Cloud twitched and brought his head up, an earthquake at Danny’s back, and Danny came straight out of a dream of endless grass and open skies to see, in the dark of night, Tara Chang leaning toward the fire, adding another stick to the small blaze.

“Too quiet,” Tara remarked to Guil, on whose face the firelight cast a slight light. “Yeah,” Danny heard Guil say. Guil’s eyes were half-open.

And having gotten maybe an hour or so of sleep, and considering they were dealing with a beast that could manipulate latches and camouflage itself in the ambient, Danny found himself wider awake.

“I’ll stay on watch a while,” he said to Tara.

“Trust the horses,” Tara said. “They don’t get surprised. No need to lose sleep.”

“We don’t know this thing.” If he hadn’t been waked on the sudden he wouldn’t have argued with a senior rider, but Tara just frowned and looked off into the dark. Guil had shut his eyes, but he wasn’t asleep: the ambient was too live with his thoughts:

“Understand,” Tara said. “Sending you on. I’d no idea about the horse. Or anything wrong.”

He couldn’t come back with what he thought was Tara’s real reason, and He tried to keep his thoughts out of the ambient and had no luck at all. “I knew that,” he said. “Figured it out, anyway. I shouldn’t have moved from the shelter. Hell, I should have shoved Carlo there out the door and we’d have been fine.”

“Except what’s moved in on the mountain.”

“Yes, ma’am. That’s for sure.”

Tara gave a short laugh. “I’m no villager.”

“No—” Ma’am was his mother’s manners. “No,” he said, unadorned.

“Get some rest. We’ll fix things tomorrow.”

“Right,” he said, having presumed as far as he wanted to on senior riders’ patience, and he leaned back against Cloud’s side.

Tara settled down against Flicker. Carlo was out cold, in the ambient just barely, in that very faint way you could pick up someone sound asleep, at very close range.

Carlo and Spook were out, Danny judged, Carlo exhausted from nights of worry, and Spook from nights of exhausting Carlo and the rest of Evergreen village.

Fighting a solitary war with whatever-it-was. Keeping it penned up here, near the lake, because it wasn’t going to drive him off the mountain and away from the rider he’d gone through frozen hell and climbed a mountain to choose.

Stubborn horse. Very stubborn, canny horse.

So was the horse he was leaning against, the one keeping him warm in the icy cold air. He pillowed his head against Cloud and, patting a muscled shoulder, received a rumbling contentment-sound in return.

Jennie had a very scary kind of nightmare. There was a girl, a very angry girl, who wanted a horse to come to her. And she, Jennie, was in the camp on the other side of the wall when a sending came wanting Rain, but she wouldn’t let this girl have Rain. Papa said—papa said you didn’t own horses. Horses just were. You got along with horses.

She was in this girl’s house and she told her that. She told her so very firmly, and told her she couldn’t have Rain and she was sorry, but that was the way it was. And the girl was very angry and told her to get out.

So she flew back over the camp wall and told Rain he shouldn’t listen to this girl.

But something listened. Something came close, and it might be a horse. But she didn’t think so. And she flew back to that girl in the doctor’s house and stood in the middle of the room and wanted to warn her this wasn’t a good idea, and she shouldn’t call out beyond the wall like that.

Then something waked her up and she was in her own bed and mama was in the doorway and so was papa.

“Jennie,” mama said. “Jennie, —what’s going on?”

“I don’t know,” she said, and papa said, “It’s that damned girl. The horse must be back.”

“Is Dan back?”

“No,” mama said, and sat down on the side of her bed and set a hand on the other side of her. “You stay out of the ambient, Jennie. Something’s going on out there.”

“It’s really real?”

“It’s real. You don’t go out there.”

“But she wants Rain!”

“Rain won’t go to her,” papa said. “The ambient’s just really loud tonight. The horses are upset. I’ll go out and calm things down.”

“Probably both of us should,” mama said. And Randy had shown up in her bedroom doorway, dressed, but with his shirt half on. “You stay inside and see Jennie stays inside,” mama told Randy.

“It’s my sister,” Randy said. He sounded scared. “It’s my sister. I know what she sounds like.”

Then the bell was ringing again. Jennie thought confusedly, Serge didn’t tie the bell again. Then another bell was going. And another. The ambient went terribly then, her mama and papa and Randy all scared at once.

“That’s the breakthrough alarm,” papa said, and she remembered papa and mama had always told her if she ever heard all the bells, the gate’s big and little ones and the church tower and the fire bell all at once, then she should lock everything down tight and get the box of shells and set them on the table.

And never, never, never go out to the horses.

But Rain was out there.

Rain needed her.

“You stay put!” papa said in his harshest tone. “Randy, can you do anything with your sister?”

“I don’t know.”

“Yellowflower,” mama said. And papa:

“Jennie, put your clothes on. Get dressed. Right now.”

“Everybody’s in my room!”

“We’re going over to the village.”

“What about the horses?” She wasn’t leaving Rain. She’d never been so scared in her life.

Then half the bells that had been ringing so frantically stopped— leaving just the church bells and one other.

“Is it done?” she asked.

“No,” papa said. “Get dressed!”

Burn got up all of a sudden—which left his sleeping rider scrambling awake, sore side and all, and reaching after his rifle and struggling, with it for a prop, toward his feet, as the rest of the horses surged to their feet and the ambient that had been very quiet suddenly got louder by reason of one young horse that was overwhelming it with question and fright. There was the sound of bells, was what it sounded like, echoing from somewhere distant. Or maybe it was coming through the ambient, which was and more lively about them than it had been. was contagious.

“Danny, get him quiet,” Guil said, catching his breath, and still leaning on the gun instead of relying on it for protection, because it seemed to him that the danger, like those bells, was very far off.

And it seemed to him that it came from the direction of Evergreen.

Evergreen—where Brionne Goss was resident.

Not a good thing. Not at all a good thing.

“That’s Evergreen,” Tara said. “What did the ride take you, Danny?”

“Half a day. Six hours at least. I stopped some.”

Six hours’ ride from here, if Danny’s account was straight, and neither Danny nor Carlo had been lazing along when they’d covered that distance.

“We’ve got to move,” Guil said, in the full knowledge there was no way he could last on that kind of ride. Bells in the night were a cry for help, from anyone in range. It seemed to him he did hear them with his own ears—and it was possible, given the folds of the mountain that made it that long a run for a horse.

It wasn’t saying the beast used the roads. It was past midnight. Since dark—it had had time to move, and it might well have had a place it wanted to go.

The same place Spook, until tonight, had been discouraging it from going.

Half the bells that had been ringing were quiet now, a sudden, frightening kind of quiet, but the bells of the church and the mayoralty were still ringing. In want of other remedies Darcy Schaffer went about brewing tea. Brionne had come downstairs in the dark, distraught and unhappy, as small wonder the girl would be, with alarms in the night. It felt to be blowing up a storm—which didn’t entirely account for the breakthrough alarm, but it could well be the cause of such an event—creatures getting desperate as they did before one of winter’s truly deadly storms, and all it took was someone near the walls on the forest side not watching their cellars or some warehouse foundation eroding. Creatures didn’t dig well in the rubble fill under the dirt, but now and again water made an incursion.

It was amazingly quiet, yet, but she supposed the barometer at the mayoralty might have dropped and advised the night guards. The air had that feeling about it, and with murder on her doorstep this morning and Brionne’s brothers running, one to his death outside (or to a horse: that was the whisper in town) and the other to the rider camp to stay—small wonder Brionne had complained of bad dreams.

Occasion of her own uneasy rest—the Mackeys had come to call in the afternoon. They disavowed all knowledge of their son’s accusations, and wanted to assure Brionne that they were still taking care of Randy.

“He’s in the rider camp,” Brionne had said in icy tones, with an aplomb which she had inwardly applauded. “The riders have him. You don’t.”

Even that rebuff hadn’t set Mary Hardesty back. “But he’ll have a place with us when they straighten this ridiculous mess out. Our son thinks now he was mistaken. He thinks it could have been another miner he saw quarreling with that Riggs person.”

A wonder Rick Mackey hadn’t come in for stitches after some fall down the stairs today. She’d put various stitches in him during his growing up, usually for falls on the Mackey stairs. So Mary Hardesty had always claimed, and she’d bet any amount that Rick and his father had gone at it.

She hated that woman.

And of course Brionne’s coolness to their well-wishes didn’t dissuade Van Mackey from offering to see that the Tarmin properties were taken care of and that the forge was working.

“You think Rick can do that?” she’d been cold-blooded enough to ask. Rick’s lack of meaningful competence was well known even outside of Evergreen, by what she knew, but Mary Hardesty never flinched.

“Well, until we can hire help. In the girl’s name, of course.”

She’d gotten them out the door shortly after that, smiling all the while she was wondering whether the Mackeys had heard about Ernest Riggs’ proposal to her and whether that had been the reason for Riggs’ violent demise.

They never had found the body.

She poured the tea. She added spirits to her own. She set a cup in front of Brionne, who sat in Faye’s nightgown and Faye’s lace-collared robe. Brionne’s golden curls were tousled from the pillow—Brionne had banged her shin and overset a chair in the dark in the lower hall, scaring the wits out of her.

But Brionne didn’t ask about the goings-on, or the bell, probably because it was perfectly clear that there was an alarm, as there would have been in Tarmin, Darcy was sure. Brionne didn’t seem to want to acknowledge the crisis, after embarrassing herself in the lower hall, and Darcy didn’t mention her own apprehensions of a breakthrough and reasons the marshal and the village guards might be abroad tonight. It wasn’t their business, after all. They had their latches tight, and her house was near the rider wall, not the outside, so there was no need to check the foundations for burrows from beyond the village confines. They’d done their part.

She sat down at the table with Brionne. “It feels like blowing up a storm, doesn’t it?” she asked, to fill the silence. “It’s been snowing all day.”

“I don’t care,” Brionne said. And apropos of no remark of hers: “He had no right to go out there! He hates me.”

He was very clearly the brother. And that was at least a clue to Brionne’s state of mind. She didn’t know whether it was the truth, what Brionne had said this morning about her elder brother shooting their father. But she had no reason to doubt it, either. “Honey,” she said gently, “don’t think about it. You’re safe here. And you don’t ever have to go with him. We’ll go to the judge. We’ll be sure he hasn’t any rights over you.”

Brionne wiped her eyes.

“I hate him.”

“Don’t hate people, honey. It’s not good for you. —You know what we should do? We should both go to the store tomorrow. You’re strong enough, aren’t you? And we’ll get you a new coat, and some yarn for sweaters if we can’t find one we like. What color would you want?”

“I want a leather coat. Like riders have.”

“What about for church?”

“A red one.”

“And for Saturday nights? We used to have supper at the tavern on Saturdays. And everybody shows off their nice clothes. What would you like to wear?”

Brionne seemed to be thinking. She stared off into nowhere.

“He hears me,” she said. “He hears me. I can still talk to him. He won’t go with my brother.”

“Brionne. Honey.”

“He’ll come for me. He will!”

Horses. Adolescent fancies. Children pressed to the limit by a violence within the family that had finally found a way to attract outside attention. There was nothing, on the surface, amiss with Carlo Goss. But there’d been something deadly wrong in that household. Maybe it was Carlo. Maybe it had been the parents. But Brionne sat talking about going off with horses when this morning she’d accused her brother of murder. There was a certain tendency toward denial in the Goss children, which she could plainly see. But knowing that, she could afford her dear Brionne a little extra understanding and bring the girl to love her.

The thing was to humor the swings from fact to fancy and provide the girl a clear baseline of reality.

There was a battered pack of cards in the kitchen cabinet—hours and hours of solitaire had worn them smooth-edged. But she took them out and began to deal them.

“Do you play cards, dear?”

Peterson said they couldn’t open the gate, that they daren’t open the outside gates and he wouldn’t allow it: even relying on the lesser gate, the rider-gate swung too wide and they wouldn’t risk a swarm such as happened at Tarmin.

So they had brought a logging saw, one logger on the village side of the camp wall and Ridley on his with the other grip, ripping through the substantial vertical post that, buried deep in ice and earth, barriering the camp and the village apart from each other, so that no horse could pass it. It had taken too damned long, first arguing with the marshal about going around to the gates and then getting the saw from the supply store, because nobody wanted to go about the street to open the store, but now that they had it, the teeth made fast progress. The log went down in short order and Ridley and the logger, a man named Jackson, grabbed it up and carried it through to the village side, where they tossed it to the side of the gate.

Slip followed through that gate no horse had ever been able to use, not from the village founding.

Callie and the Goss boy, Jennie and Rain and Shimmer came across, too, the horses in a rush as if they expected the gate to shut or the pole to reappear.

It was scary in this dark and strange business. Jennie was scared. Rain was scared. Ridley had no trouble admitting the same to his daughter and anyone else who might ask. With a breakthrough warning gone silent like that—with the unprecedented measure of taking down the barrier between camp and village to get the horses through without using the outside gates—even a child could understand that this had never happened before, and a rider child a lot faster than that.

“Shut that gate,” Peterson said. “Bolt it good.”

“We’d better take a look down at the main gate,” Ridley said. To this hour they didn’t know why the bell had stopped. The only encouragement was the lack of specific alarm from the horses, who carried an ambient void of native presence around the village. But Serge Lasierre had undoubtedly rung the alarm for some reason. And stopped—for some reason.

“I haven’t wanted to scatter people out and about,” Peterson said. “Could be Serge is locked in. Could be there’s been a tunneling down there—we don’t know what the hell.”

“I want you and Jackson there both behind walls. Leave the streets entirely to us.”

“We’ll be in the office.”

“Good. —Randy, I want you to go with the marshal right now. Get behind solid doors.”

“I’d rather—” Randy began.

“Go with the marshal.”

“Yes, sir,” Randy said, having believed him about obeying the camp-boss and maybe having caught the warning in the ambient. Jennie, meanwhile, was a worry he couldn’t dismiss: Jennie had the one horse that, if they could keep him from panic—and separating him from Jennie wouldn’t help—was the loudest, strongest-sending horse of their three.

He swung up onto Slip’s back and rode to one side of Jennie as Callie rode to the other, down the middle of the village street, through a snow-fall that hazed the few lights left in a tightly shuttered village.

“It’s Jennie said. “Everybody’s

“Don’t babble,” Callie reminded her. “Talk when you need a word. The ambient’s enough, miss.”

Frightened people were awake everywhere. The shutters were latched. People behind those shutters had guns, every one of them, as much a hazard to them as to any swarm of vermin that might have gotten in. The Schaffer house wasn’t in this end of the street, for which Ridley was entirely grateful. It was down where the marshal and Randy had taken refuge—and where he hoped there wasn’t any native creature the Goss girl could pick up. It had seemed quiet down there, and it still seemed quiet at their backs.

But the warehouses and the granary that lay right along the rider camp gate and those running behind the houses and along the rider camp wall, and those behind the church and the public offices, were a warren they might have to go into. Those would be the target of a breakthrough and a swarm of vermin, if it once sensed food stored there as well as the living food within the houses. The grain-eaters weren’t usually the vanguard of trouble; usually it was the meat-eaters that came through, and the others followed, but the grain-pests were equally as dangerous, partly because they were more numerous, and partly because some of them weren’t averse to a varied diet.

They passed The Evergreen, which wasn’t shuttered, and which cast lamplight through its glass-windowed doors. Patrons were inside, huddling in a and that blazed as bright as the lamplight into the ambient. Jennie, who’d kept quiet after her mother’s reprimand, asked meekly,

“They’re not doing right, are they?”

“No,” Ridley said. “Those are fools. We look out for people doing necessary jobs, first, like us and the marshal and Serge. Second, people taking care of themselves, like in those houses, locked down tight. Fools come last on our list, always.”

They passed the blacksmith shop and the Mackeys’ house, where God knew the state of affairs and he didn’t care to.

Then the miner barracks, that was at least to outward appearances shuttered tight and proper.

After that came one warehouse set back from Serge’s place and then the Santezes and the Lasierres, who were closest to the wall. Things felt all right there.

They came all the way to the gate, where he saw nothing—nothing but the tracks one might expect about the elevated stairway to the gate-guard’s tower. Serge’s tracks. Maybe another man’s. They were just slightly rounded over by new snow. Serge had gone up there not a long time ago—maybe talked to some other man. Those tracks were trampled over. He’d need more light.

But Slip didn’t like what he smelled here. Truly didn’t like it. Neither did Rain and Shimmer.

“Serge?” he called out.

There was no answer. There was nothing in the ambient to advise him Serge was there—but Serge might be unconscious. Might just have slipped on the icy steps and hit his head. He hoped that was the case.

He slid down from Slip’s back at the foot of the tower steps. He had had a shell in the rifle chamber all the way down the street, and he carried the gun carefully and had it ready as he climbed the steps as far as the first turn.

What—met him—wasn’t a body. It might have been one before something ripped it to shreds and draped it on the rail.

He spun about and took the stairs at a skid. Slip was at the bottom of the steps and he didn’t even think clearly about launching himself for Slip’s back, he just landed there.

He didn’t need to explain to Callie or Jennie. What he’d seen, they’d seen, and Jennie had never imagined the like. She was and Rain was with her.

<“Easy,”> he said. <“Easy.> Keep Rain calm.”

“Was Faint voice. Tremulous voice.

“Most likely,” Callie said firmly. “Look for tracks going away, Jennie-cub!”

“Is <that> them?”

In fact it was: Ridley got off again to take a close look at on the other side of the stairs, where something had—not vaulted the rail: the snow was still intact there—jumped from higher up, was what the intruder had done. He found the depression that indicated a jump clear from the next-to-last tier of the steps, He let Slip smell the trail.

Slip snorted and brought his head up, dancing about nervously as Ridley swung up. Slip had smelled it twice, now, and still didn’t have a clear image of it. Shimmer walked back around and smelled the stairs and the railing, and didn’t have an image, either.

“Where did it go?” Jennie asked—justified question.

“Houses. It jumps and climbs.” was what he was thinking. There was a snow ridge across the tracks and he rode Slip through it—picked up the trail of footprints on the other side, both scent and tracks, until it reached the Lasierres’ porch.

The Lasierres seemed He didn’t want to disturb them or have them unbolting doors to the night—and possibly they’d caught the disturbance and warning from their horses out on the street and were staying close by their fireside.

They made a circuit of the house. He rode in front. Callie and Jennie rode at a little distance back so they could get a vantage for firing at anything

The tracks that had disappeared at the porch didn’t show up on any side. He considered the gap between the Lasierres’ roof and the Santezes’ roof, and it was wider than the gaps between most. But if whatever it was wasn’t lurking up there—it had jumped it and headed further up the street.

Silent in the ambient.

Slip sucked in a breath and blew it out again. There was that to track it by, a muskiness Slip amplified for his senses.

Jennie was aching with And

“Horses don’t know what it is,” Callie said to her. “They’ve no clear image. We’ve never seen those tracks before, and they’ve never smelled it.”

“Let’s go back up the street,” Ridley said. “Get away from the overhangs.”

They did that, and rode up again past The Evergreen. “Fool-time,” Ridley said. He slid down, his dismount bringing Slip to a halt, and with Callie and Jennie to watch the roof edges, he went up the steps to try the door.

Locked, at least. Light came brightly through the frosted glass. He could see patrons inside through the clear lines in the etching. He could hear the talking stop as he knocked.

“It’s Ridley Vincint!” he called out to the occupants. “You don’t have to open the door—just take your drinks and get away from the glass! Get into the back room and lock the doors! Don’t come out! Something’s inside the walls and it’s traveling on the roofs! It’s killed Serge Lasierre! We don’t know what it is!”

A buzz of dismay broke out inside. They’d heard him. He didn’t wait for anyone to acknowledge the warning and he didn’t wait to argue or provide details. He went quickly down the steps and vaulted onto Slip’s back.

Telling the marshal had to be the next step.

Then all of them had to patrol the street until they had daylight to help them find a target.

And they could only hope daylight didn’t signal it to hole up somewhere in the village.

It was twenty-one and a stack of counters. Poker and twenty-one was what Darcy had played with Mark when they’d courted. She played twenty-one with Brionne between occasional moments that the storm-feeling grew terrible.

At such moments Brionne would rise from the table and pace the floor in an angry frenzy.

“Go away!” Brionne shouted now, and leapt to her feet, and looked up toward street level, which was well above the floor of the house’s sunken kitchen. “Go away!” It was a scream, a shriek against which Darcy steeled her nerves, having determined that ignoring the behavior was the best course.

“Come back to the table, dear.”

“They’re hunting, is what they’re doing! The horses are hunting. But it’s too clever for them!”

“Dear—”

“I hope my brother dies!” Brionne cried. “You hear me? I hope he dies!”

“Dear—”

“Get away from me!”

Possibly hysterics had worked in a family that didn’t have normal mechanisms for a young girl getting attention. Perhaps that had been the mother’s tactic. Or perhaps shattering the other party’s nerves had been the way to win acquiescence or attention in that family. She refused to react at all. “Pick up your hand, honey. This could go on a long time. Sit down and concentrate.”

“My brother’s out there. My little brother. I can hear him.”

“If the horses have come over, I do imagine they’ve brought him, too. I don’t need to hear the horses to understand that.”

“I hear them! I hear everything they’re thinking. They’re thinking, Let’s not let Brionne associate with us! We’re too good for Brionne. We’re too important! They hate me! They’re too stupid to know I hear everything they’re thinking! Shut up, do you hear me?”

Pans littered the kitchen. This time Brionne picked up an iron skillet, whirled it around and let fly.

It hit the bottom cupboards and dented the door.

“Your deal,” Darcy said calmly. “Don’t pay attention to disagreeable people, dear. That’s the way to handle such things.”

“Do you hear them?”

“No, dear, I’m sure I don’t. I don’t hear horses.”

“I do. I hear them perfectly clearly. You hear me, Randy? You’re a brat! You’re an unspeakable little brat!”

“Do sit down. I’d rather play cards than listen to them. Hadn’t you? They’re not important people.”

“They’re hateful. ”

“I know, dear, but it’s just no good worrying about other people. No one else in town can hear them. Whatever they think. So just tell them they’re hateful and sit down and let’s play cards.”

“I don’t like cards.”

“Well, what would you like to do?”

“I don’t know.”

“Why don’t we go into the sitting room and I’ll read to you.”

“Because I don’t want to!”

“You’d rather sit here and mope.”

“Yes!”

“What would make you happy? —Would you like to go to the store tomorrow? I’ll bet some of Faye’s things would fit you. And then you and I can go to the store and buy anything you like.”

Brionne drifted back to the table. “Anything?”

“The finest things in Evergreen. You and I will go to the tavern Saturday night and we’ll get a table. That’s where everyone comes. And we’ll have the nicest clothes and all the young people will think you’re the prettiest girl on the mountain.”

Brionne sat down. “Do they have nice things in the store?”

“Oh, very nice. And if you don’t see what you like, we’ll go to the tailor and pick out patterns.”

“I want a fringed jacket. Just like the riders.”

“Well, I’m sure no village girl ever had a fringed jacket.”

“I want one.”

A social disaster, Darcy thought. A religious calamity. Or a fashion. “We can have one made. Of red suede. Would you like that?”

There were gunshots. She knew gunshots. She flinched in spite of herself, and dealt out cards, not asking a girl who didn’t know her own mind whether or not she would play.

“Someone’s shooting,” Brionne said.

“I’m sure it’s the riders after vermin. It’s perfectly fine.” She arranged her cards. “Oh, I think I can beat you with this.”

Brionne picked up hers and began to arrange her own hand. Brionne’s frown grew. Darcy wished she knew how to cheat at cards. Brionne was far happier when she was winning, and she wished she could arrange that a certain amount of the time.

Brionne simply could not add worth a damn.

Gunshots again. A lot of them. Brionne hadn’t wanted to go to bed. She’d wanted to sleep on the couch in the front room, but Darcy didn’t want that, thinking of the windows there.

And very quietly she went and got the gun from Mark’s office, and put it in the pocket of her robe, and came back to find Brionne sleeping, or seeming to, with her head down on her folded arms.

At least the bells had stopped, one by one. She hoped it meant all clear.

There’d been nervous fingers on triggers toward the forest wall— that had proved nothing, after they’d ridden breakneck to the site: the Jorgensons, opening their front door and shouting at them there’d been something trying their downstairs back window, but whether they’d fired first in a set of three houses claiming disturbance, was impossible to say. No one was killed and, in Ridley’s earnest hopes, the nervous trigger fingers had scared the intruder back over the wall.

But their initial search had turned up nothing, and they’d been all the way back up to the marshal’s office and, leaving Randy with the marshal’s wife, picked up the marshal, the deputy, and the hunters, all armed with shotguns and rifles, to go on a house-by-house patrol.

In Ridley’s hopes, too, no one would mistake them for intruders as they made their slow pass down the street, knocking on doors and giving out verbal warnings building by building and house by house—at least Peterson and Burani did that duty, the hunters escorting them with rifles and watching the perimeters of the porches while the three of them stayed on horseback in the middle of the street and watched the roof edges. He was aware of in the houses. He knew the horses made themselves felt when they went near a building—and he was glad to have two of the town guards and the marshal’s wife and daughter, all with guns, to keep watch in the upper end of the village, near the Schaffer house, where he didn’t want to take the horses.

kept entering the ambient. It kept Jennie spooked, though Jennie was doing amazingly well at holding herself calm and not talking. Rain, between Slip and Shimmer, was behaving with more sense than he’d have believed, part of that to Jennie’s credit, as he meant to tell her at some moment on the other side of this.

But the snow-fall was the creature’s friend if it was still in the village. Now and again the horses caught a whisper of something in the ambient that made all three of them in direct contact with the horses entirely uneasy, it was impossible to see what might be more than three buildings away, and hard to focus up into falling snow to check the roofs.

“Papa,” Jennie said once, in a very quiet voice—a kid asking for reassurance; but with good reason.

“Hush,” Callie said. “We know. We—”

Shots went off down the street. A flurry of them. Glass broke. He wanted—and Slip was off, Shimmer and Rain close behind, leaving the marshal and the hunters and the others to hold the middle of the street in mid-village as he and his went down the street, Jennie clinging like a burr to Rain’s mane and staying up with them all the way to the black clot of scared men grouped in front of The Evergreen.

Those men, some with guns, were screaming in panic at others still inside to get down as sounds of breakage resounded in the building. The shattered glass still in the doors showed dark spatter against the light, more dark spatter showed on the walls and a chaotic wreckage of overturned tables lay inside— was in the ambient, and something else. Alive. Hurt.

And

“Stay he said to Callie and Jennie, and rode Slip for the side of the building, the and the

He saw what looked and felt like and in that split second too long knew it wasn’t a man as it swarmed up an evergreen in the back of the tavern and up to the roof in a cloud of dislodged snow.

He let off a shot, and knew from that they were aware of him, and aware of danger, His own shot hadn’t hit anything—the ambient held nothing of the thing he’d seen, and that was something he’d never had happen to him or to Slip.

He rode Slip breakneck back around the building, fearing that at any moment the thing might come or onto where the ambient from the miners was awash with and the air was confused with shouting voices.

He reached Callie and Jennie, and shouted for order among the miners who, the worse for drink and the scare of their lives, were all trying to report and debate what had happened. Hell, he knew what had happened—broken glass and was what had happened, with carnage left and right.

Laughing at them. Eluding them.

Slip wanted So did Shimmer, now. Shimmer’s peace had been challenged, the vicinity of her winter den disturbed.

But something else had flared into the ambient: and and Jennie was outraged, for Rain, for the ambient and her own place in it. It was Jennie first and foremost that that sending challenged, not them. It was his daughter who flung that challenge back, and the threat of Brionne Goss calling out and welcoming that thing that had come into his village, the threat of Brionne Goss challenging his daughter for whatever was at issue between them diminished the miners and their bloody calamity to a distant concern in his world.

“Dammit,” he said to the clatter of miners shouting appeals and drunken orders at him, “get

<Jennie and Rain> was the defiance at that instant blazing out into the snowy dark, a challenge to all comers, flung out with all the force a young fool horse could throw into a sending. Rain wanted Rain wanted his territory.> Rain’s rider wanted away! from her village and knew no sensible fear of the threat: <Jennie and Rain> were in possession of the street and the village that was their world, and nothing could come into it and take it from them.

“Stay with us!” he ordered Jennie, and fought Jennie and Rain for the lead as they bolted up the street. He was just barely able to cut Rain off short and prevent a charge right to the Schaffer house as they reached the marshal’s position. “Hold him, dammit, or get down!”

He’d never sworn at Jennie. He’d told her from earliest time that the way to stop a horse that wouldn’t otherwise stop was to slide off, and she didn’t do that—she wanted and somehow made it stick, clinging to Rain and holding on, because she wouldn’t let him go across that street toward the

Neither was Slip going to lose one of his own herd, young male or not: Slip was sending a strong boss horse, and Shimmer came in with <mama> fit to chill the spine of an intruder.

They’d stopped in the midst of the marshal’s group, guns all around them, guns aimed toward roof edges—when all of a sudden rushed right under them and up the street.

“God!” Peterson cried.

Callie said, “It’s found the passages.”