Rider at the Gate

Chapter XII

THE PAIN BLURRED THE SKY. BUT THAT SKY WASN’T BLUE. IT WAS A wooden ceiling, a bare electric bulb for a sun. He had no idea where he was.

Guil sent. Always, on waking, the awareness of Burn, first reality of his world.

But Burn wasn’t there.

And on that stomach-dropping realization, he panicked, staring into this electric, burning sun, trying to reconstruct his route to this place.

Aby was dead, up above Tarmin. That was how everything connected. He was lying on his back on a bare board floor with days-old pain in his leg and recently inflicted pain at various points about his skull.

He’d not realized what it was. Not until the second shot.

He’d slid down, given Burn no choice… he’d thought.

But Burn had charged the mob instead of running away—gone at the townsmen mob dead ahead, and, dirty nighthorse trick, wasn’t where he imaged he was.

He’d… damned well been where the mob had thought he was: third shot, and he’d caught it—it had knocked his leg out from under him and sent him sprawling downhill on the dry grass. He remembered.

He thought they were coming to rescue him, he’d thought they wouldn’t let the town take him: camp rights over town marshals—

< People shouting at each other, while he faced the down-slant of the hill, trying for his very life to get up…

He didn’t remember, after that. For a moment the next connected instant seemed here, under the electric light.

Aby was dead. More… more than that. Aby had died.

But he couldn’t go into that pit yet. There was something in there he couldn’t deal with, a darkness he couldn’t escape if he went in there without understanding where he was now…

He drew a deep breath, about to move.

And knew the smell. Anveney’s stink.

How long ago? God, how long ago?

He rolled over fast, leaned back on his hands as the change of altitude sent pain knifing through his skull. Dizziness sprawled him back onto the floor, onto the lump on the back of his skull.

Stars and dark a moment. He tried it again more slowly, made it halfway.

No furniture in the room, except a bucket. Shut door. No window.

<No window.>

Didn’t even know he’d gotten up. He was plastered face-to on the wooden wall as if he could pour himself through it, arms spread, shaking like a leaf—and deaf, absolutely deaf to Burn’s existence. The whole world had left him: sound, sense, everything.

But the raw, rough wood under his hands was real. It proved he existed.

He could still smell the stench of Anveney around him. That proved something, too, but he couldn’t hear a living soul.

His heart was pounding. Sweat stood cold on his skin. He couldn’t let go of the wall. Couldn’t keep his legs under him, otherwise… couldn’t depend on his balance.

First thing a rider knew: panic killed. Panic led to crazy. Panic gave the advantage away, free to all takers. The sane, thinking man knew he was in Anveney, knew Anveney had no horses in reach to carry the ambient… but… God, he’d never in his life waked up deaf to it; he’d never been in a room without windows, he’d never not known how he got to a place…

He persuaded his knees to hold him—edged along the wall, unsure even of his balance, to try the door.

Locked and bolted from outside. Of course.

He tried to shake it. He slammed the center of the door once, hard, with his fist, and heard only silence, inside his head and out.

Burn—

Burn would be in deadly danger if he came near the walls, and Burn would do that if he didn’t get back before dark.

Burn would come for him, knowing the danger, within range of the rifles that guarded the town… but Burn wouldn’t care. Burn would come in.

He didn’t know how long he’d been out. He couldn’t, in this damn box, tell day from dark, no more than he knew east from west, and he couldn’t count on any rescue. There was no rider camp outside Anveney walls, no camp-boss to negotiate him out—in autumn, there probably wasn’t another rider within 10 k of here, nobody to know if he didn’t come out of this town.

Nobody but Burn.

Townsmen would know there was a horse out there waiting for him. They’d know the hold they had on him—that whatever they wanted, he’d do, rather than have harm come to Burn. That was surely why they’d shut him away like this; they surely had to want something from him, besides some stupid townsman penalty because a rider inconvenienced a bank that shouldn’t have handed out money to a man that didn’t have any right to it—

He remembered. Damn Hawley!

And to hell with the money. He’d have walked out once he knew they weren’t going to give it to him—he’d have left their damn town. He didn’t think he’d pulled any weapon on them. He didn’t remember any. They didn’t need to lock him up in a box and shoot at Burn, who was—surely—surely old enough and wary enough to give them hell without putting himself straight-off into some wall guard’s riflesights.

But he couldn’t depend on that. He hadn’t done too well at escaping town guards, himself.

He staggered along the wall, one side to the other, wasn’t sure what it contributed to the solution—his leg hurt, his head hurt. It seemed moving might clear his thinking, maybe; maybe hurt less than standing still. But if it helped, he couldn’t tell it.

He bashed the door again, hammered it with his fist, in case someone could heair. He didn’t think all that much time had passed, but he wasn’t sure: it could be getting dark. Burn could be getting restless, waiting for him.

Saner to sit down. Didn’t want to stop moving. Had to have something to do, not to think, didn’t want to think…

Damn, dead, stupid town…

Knees ached and wobbled. He began to get up a charge of anger then, and braked it, in lifelong habit—

But it didn’t matter. They couldn’t hear that, either. He could wish them in hell.

He bashed the door with his arm. Twice. Kicked it, with the bad leg, because he could only keep his balance on the sound one; and that hurt so bad he had to use the wall to hold him up.

Hinges were outside. Door had to open out. No handle on this side. No hinges to take apart. But if the door opened out… maybe he could kick it open, maybe hit it with his shoulder until he split the upright.

He backed off several steps and rammed it. Once. Twice. Felt it give. Shake, at least.

He heard something then. Footsteps. He’d raised notice of some kind.

Voices outside. He tried to understand them, but his own heartbeat was too loud in his ears. He shoved back from the door, stood back as the bolt shot back outside and the door opened.

He wasn’t at all surprised at the three badge-wearing marshals with guns leveled, reinforcing the guard who opened the door. He lifted a hand, palm out. “No trouble here,” he said, trying to keep the ambient calm. And he couldn’t resist it: “Help you with something?”

“Mr. Stuart.” The man who’d opened the door indicated he should come out, so he came out. The men with guns backed up, maintaining their advantage. “Someone wants to talk to you.”

“Fine.” He hoped somebody wanted to talk to him. He hoped somebody had a deal to offer him to get him out of here, and after that, he didn’t remotely care if Anveney burned down.

So he walked obligingly where the guard indicated and the man led, down a dingy hallway, through a maze of halls. He didn’t put it past them to hit him on general principle; he was acutely aware of the armed men behind him, and acutely aware he couldn’t forecast what way their minds were running—he hated the way townsmen dealt with one another. You could blame practically any craziness on the fact they didn’t know, never knew, only guessed what another man wanted, or what he was about to do.

Hell of a way to live.

Meanwhile the man in the lead opened a door onto the daylight and Anveney streets.

He drew a shaky, ill-flavored breath, tucked his hands in his pockets, and amused himself, as they went out, seeking deliberate, surly eye contact with the rare passers-by, who, understandably spooked by the police armament, ducked to the other side of the street. And gawked, until they chanced into his angry stare.

Twice spooked then, they averted their eyes and found something urgent to go to.

They went halfway down the block like that, the guard in front, him in the middle, the police behind, until the guard came to what looked more like a house than an office, and showed him and their gun-carrying escort into a broad, fancy-furnished room with polished wood and fringed rugs.

Stairs went up from here, but the guard turned left. There were doors upon doors in the hall they walked. The guard led him past all of them, and through the double door at the end into a room where an overweight old man in expensive town dress sat in a green overstuffed chair roughly equal to his mass.

Smoking a pipe. God, did anybody in Anveney need more smoke?

“So,” the man said. “You’re Dale’s partner.”

First soul in Anveney that spoke sense to him, putting things like partnership in their right importance. His shoulders relaxed a little, guns or no guns, and he didn’t care all that much of a sudden that the room reeked of smokeweed.

“Stuart,” he named himself, and made a guess. “You’re Lew Cassivey.”

The man inclined his head, seeming gratified to be famous, at least to Aby Dale’s partner. Head of Cassivey & Carnell, the man Aby would risk high-country weather to keep happy—his intervening made some sense, but it didn’t guarantee his good will, or his good intentions.

“Sorry about Dale,” Cassivey said, sending up a series of short puffs. “Real sorry.”

The man wanted a reaction, Stuart realized, in a sudden new insight how deaf townsman minds had to work. The man didn’t know. He prodded. He waited to see how he reacted.

Guil tucked his hands up under his arms, and in his best approximation of an outward reaction, shrugged and looked sorry himself. He felt the weight of the building on his back. He felt the scarcity of air. Smelled smells he couldn’t identify. < “Rogue horse,”> he said. He couldn’t stop expecting the man to see it, feel it, know it. “You heard that part.”

“I heard how she died. Couple of the riders came in with the bad news. Lost a truck and driver, too.”

“Sorry about that.” He attempted town manners, town courtesy. He wanted help. This was the man that could give it—or have him shot, directly or indirectly. “I’m on my way to Tarmin.”

“Alone?”

He shrugged, a lump of raw fear in his throat, because they’d arrived at the life-and-death points and he was feeling in the dark after reactions. “My horse. I need to get out there.”

“Hear you had a real commotion at the bank.”

What could he say? He hadn’t intended it.

But no townsman knew that if he didn’t say it.

“Didn’t mean to,” he muttered. God, he didn’t know how to talk to these people. He didn’t know what else they couldn’t guess, blind and deaf as they were. “I tried my best to calm it down.”

Cassivey seemed amused for a heartbeat, whether friendly or unfriendly amusement he couldn’t tell. The amusement died a fast death. Smoke poured out Cassivey’s nostrils. “I hear the bank gave her money to her cousin.”

“My money, too,” he said. “Everything.”

“Your money?”

“Same account. They said it was town law.”

“It’s not that simple,” Cassivey said. “But I doubt you’d want to sue.”

“Go to court?” He shook his head emphatically.

“Not if it means staying around Anveney, is that it?”

“Weather’s turning.”

“Meaning?”

“Hard to hunt.” He felt stupid, saying the obvious. He wasn’t sure it was all Cassivey was asking him. “I have to get up there. Get it before the deep snow.”

“With no help?”

“I need a gun,” he said.

“Where’s this man’s property?” Cassivey asked the guards. “Who’s got his belongings?”

“He didn’t come with any,” the one in charge said.

“No gun? No baggage?”

“Knives,” Guil said. “Two.”

“I’m paying his fine,” Cassivey said. “Somebody go get his belongings. Stuart, sit down.”

There was another chair near him, stuffed like the one Cassivey sat in. Guil put his hands on the upholstered arms and sank down gingerly, not sure how far he would sink. There was a sharp pain in his sore leg when it bent and his knees, now that he heard ‘fine’ and ‘paying’ and ‘get his belongings,’ suddenly had a disposition to wobble out of lock. The room swam and floated.

“You want a drink?” Cassivey said, as the guards cleared the room. “There’s a bottle on the table.”

“No,” he said. It wasn’t worth the risk of getting up. “Thanks.”

“You need a doctor?”

“I just want out.” His breath was shaky. He didn’t intend so much honesty. “But thanks. What do I do for you?”

“Dale was reliable. You could trust things didn’t get pilfered.” Puff. Second puff. “What’s your record on reliability?”

“Same,” he said, embarrassed to have to make claims, when he didn’t know how Cassivey should believe a man who’d come in with armed guards. “Mostly I work out of Malvey south,” he said, and not sure Cassivey was remotely interested in his explanations, he remembered how the bank had phoned. “You could phone Moss Shipping in Malvey. They know me.”

“I might do that,” Cassivey said. “Dirty trick, what Dale’s cousin did.”

He shrugged. It was. But that was his business and he didn’t answer.

“The job I have for you,” Cassivey began.

“I,” Guil interjected, fast, before the man committed too much. “I have to get up to Tarmin Height before the snow. I have to get that thing.” Maybe it was stupid. From time to time since he’d left Shamesey he’d not even been sure he cared. But the realization— the reality—of Aby’s death had made itself a cold nest in the middle of his thinking.

And she wouldn’t rest until he’d cleared Aby’s trail for her, mopped up all the loose business. Settled accounts to her satisfaction.

Which might make him lose this man’s offer, when he was indebted for a fine he couldn’t pay, with no gun, no way out. But that was the way it was; he hoped the man was reasonable. “I’m sorry,” he said, “I have to go up there. Just get me out of here. I’ll work it off for you next spring.”

Cassivey stared at him, expressionless, the pipe in his hand. Then: “Don’t turn down my offer until you’ve heard it. A commission. Enough money, supplies, whatever you need to go upcountry—the best commissions when you come to town again in the spring. Preference. Top of the list preference. What’s that worth to you?”

It was beyond generous. It was Aby’s deal with this man. It had to be.

“I still have to go up there. I have to hunt that thing. Local riders might get it. But they might not. You can’t use that road till somebody does get it. It won’t be safe.”

“I don’t argue that. You go up there, you get the horse that got her, and you do one more thing for me.”

“What’s that?”

“What kind of man is Jonas Westman?”

He didn’t expect that question of all questions. He didn’t know why Cassivey asked it. He was feeling in the dark again. And he didn’t know how to put words around the answer that a townsman would understand. He drew a breath, said what said it all. “High-country rider.”

“Honest?”

“Yeah.” There were qualifications to that. “Enough.”

“Honest as Dale was?”

He shook his head. Complicated question. He wondered just what shape of beast Cassivey was tracking with his question—or whether Cassivey in any way understood any rider. Sometimes he seemed to, and sometimes not.

“Aby liked you,” he said to Cassivey, and still didn’t know if Cassivey understood him. “Jonas Westman and his brother— they’re Hawley Antrim’s partners. Hawley’s Aby’s cousin. He’d do what Aby said, as long as she put the fear in him. So they might. On a good day.”

“Aby wouldn’t steal.”

Steal. Pilfer. Town words, for relations between townsmen and riders. Different, in a camp, among riders—where some would and some wouldn’t. “If you didn’t cheat her,” he said, “she wouldn’t steal from you.”

A pause, while Cassivey relit an evidently dead pipe. “Not even if she had a chance for real, real money?”

“How much?”

“Three hundred thousand. Maybe more.”

He laughed, sheer surprise—tried to think how much money that would be, and it came up ridiculous.

“What’s funny?” Cassivey asked.

Nothing, thinking of it. It was a townsman amount of money. A scary amount of money. It was an amount of money you found in banks.

And where would a rider come near that kind of money? More, what could a rider do with it if she had it?

Cassivey sent out another puff of smoke. “The truck that went off the road?” Cassivey said. More puffs. “Gold shipment.”

Stunned comprehension. He stopped the breath he was drawing. Didn’t move for a second. Couldn’t reach after the ambient, much as he wanted to. It wasn’t there.

But then, Cassivey couldn’t know what he was thinking, either. Cassivey had just told him where enough money was that rich townsmen would kill each other in droves to get it.

Enough money that a rider, if he had it stashed, could take to the roads and the hills and never work again for the rest of his life— but he’d never sleep easy about it.

“Dale knew what was on that lead truck,” Cassivey said.

Now he did. Townsmen would kill each other to know what he knew.

Except that townsmen, even heavily armed, even posting guards over their sleep, and traveling with more than one truck, weren’t safe going up there into the High Wild to reach that wreckage.

Not safe from the weather.

Not safe from the rogue that could overwhelm all their defenses.

But somebody from the villages up there was inevitably going to get down to that truck. Its apparent cargo—what he’d seen in Jonas’ image—had been lumber, which wasn’t damn valuable on a forested mountainside, but just the metal in that truck had value. The engine parts. The tires and axles. Every piece of it was valuable salvage to a village. And if some village crew got to stripping it—

“Find the box,” Cassivey said. “Turn it over to the head of Tarmin Mines, at Tarmin. That’s Salmon Martines. Simple job.”

“Simple.”

“Truck went off on the downhill, on that bad turn—you know the road?”

“Seen it.” He didn’t say it he’d only seen it in Aby’s mind. Cassivey wouldn’t understand and it didn’t matter. He’d seen it in Jonas’ image. A rogue horse and that turn. Hell.

“Must be ten, fifteen trucks have gone down there.” Cassivey puffed smoke. “There, and hitting the wall at the end of the grade. Rock’s soft. Surface skids with you. Nasty, nasty turn.”

“What’s the weight?” He was suddenly in territory he knew, negotiating with a shipper, on technicalities he understood.

“More than one man can haul up a mountain. You’ll have to bring it up part at a time. Hire an ox-team and drivers at Tarmin. It’s going to take that. You ride guard on the crew, say it’s company papers you’re after, and make sure all of it gets to Martines. When the weather opens up next spring, and you’re sure you can make it down with the load, you hire that same ox-team and bring it down to Anveney. Pay’s equipment now, and a thousand in the bank. When we get that box back… I’ll drop five more thousand into your account.”

He saw why Aby had gone out of her way for this one shipper. And he knew, in one moment of revelation, what Aby had been guarding on these annual end-of-season convoys, and why Cassivey had gone out of his way to keep one honest, reliable rider very well paid.

“You’re giving me the deal she had.”

“I asked her once who else I could trust, if it ever happened she couldn’t take a convoy through.”

The air in Anveney suddenly didn’t smell half so bad. “I need a rifle. Ammunition, blanket, carry-pack, flour, oil, burning-glass… couple of sides of bacon. Got to have that.”

“You’re a very modest man, Stuart. What in hell happened to your gear?”

“No matter,” Cassivey said. “None of my business. Six hundred do it on the gear?”

“Four. She said I was honest.”

“Five. Get a pistol, too. A rifle’s not always in reach. I want you back with my money.”

The man wasn’t just any townsman. He couldn’t be a rider. Trucker, Guil decided. Maybe a high-country miner. At least someone who’d not sat behind town walls all his life. Aby hadn’t said. Aby’d kept all her inside-buildings dealings at Anveney to herself, partly because he wasn’t interested in towns. There was just the single surface thought urging him to join her on this run. The rest—he hadn’t discussed.

This man was clearly a debt of hers. This man had asked her not to talk about his business. Somewhere, somehow, she’d owed Cassivey, in a major way. He understood it. He wondered if Cassivey did.

“Understand,” Cassivey said, “you don’t talk about what’s in that truck. You don’t talk about the thing those trucks sometimes carry.”

“Aby never talked your business to me.”

Cassivey nodded slowly. Made several slow puffs, staring at him. “A damn good woman.”

He couldn’t talk for a moment. He knew now. Aby’d not done anything out of order, hadn’t changed, hadn’t been other than the woman who’d grown up with him. Aby had pleaded with him to join her—and himself, thick-headed, he’d seen only the evasions and getting mad about it. But it was Aby. It was the woman he knew. She came back to him—dead, she came back to him the way she had been, she hadn’t lied to him, and a weight went off his back.

“Yeah,” he said finally.

“I’ll make you out a contract,” Cassivey said, and laid aside the pipe. “I’ll send someone to the bank. One fine’s enough.”

He went out with what was newly his and with a contract in his pocket, riding in the open back of a Cassivey & Carnell truck, through the main town streets and down through the town gates.

One part townsman arrogance, he’d have thought it, without having met Cassivey, to send a truck outside Anveney gates with no horse to protect it, to deliver a rider back to the Wild.

He’d have taken it as an affront to his pride and his profession— under other circumstances; points for an old trucker, scored on a rider who ordinarily would watch over anybody going a stone’s throw out past the gates of any other town.

Not at Anveney, the point surely was. At Anveney, armed guards weren’t riders, and they didn’t need help—in their grassless desolation.

Right now, with his leg hurting like unforgiven sin, he was just damned grateful that Cassivey took the trouble to save him some walking, and he was glad enough of that courtesy that he was willing to make idle conversation with the guard in the back of the truck, a guard who chattered about the weather and the coming winter and how he’d like to drive the long routes, but he wasn’t sure his wife wouldn’t take up with somebody else if he did.

So why didn’t his wife drive or ride guard in the cab? Guil wondered, and remembered—he was more practiced at it than this morning—that the guard didn’t remotely know what he wondered, no horses being near.

He was even moderately curious what the guard thought, after his experience with townsmen. He wondered to a greater extent than he ever had just what went on in townsmen minds—so much so that, on a further thought, he troubled to ask his question aloud.

“Yeah, but all those village girls… with my wife along?” the guard asked him in return, and laughed and elbowed him in the ribs as if he should understand.

But he wasn’t sure he understood the guard’s logic. He still felt dull and deaf to townsman cues… and he didn’t understand ‘wife,’ he suspected, or at least, didn’t understand Anveney expectations of wives and husbands.

But before he could ask into that odd remark, or try to figure where he and Aby had fit against that pattern in their own arrangement, they’d reached a turn-around at a fork in the dirt road.

The truck stopped, and the driver said that was as far as they were supposed to go.

So he climbed down—sore from head to foot, with a miserable headache and a spot on his temple that hurt like hell when he frowned into the evening sun. The stink was all around them, or he’d imagine it for days, and it clung to everything he’d gotten in Anveney.

But he wished them both a safe trip back, got information from them where the forks led, one to Anveney West Road—he’d thought he was right—and one to a mining pit he didn’t want to visit.

They turned around and drove off in a cloud of dust, and he slung his new-bought belongings to his shoulder and walked, a little dizzy, limping, decidedly with more load than he had the strength to carry for very long or very far.

By stages and resting a bit he could, he told himself, walk to the junction of roads and the rider stone—he didn’t know how he’d have done without the lift, but he was glad he didn’t have to try, the more so since a bank of cloud was moving in, just the gray edge advancing from off the mountains over the foothills, promising weather before dark—cold rain down here and undoubtedly snow in the high country last night, he said to himself. A cold, damp wind, blowing off the peaks of the Firgeberg, fluttered the fringes of his jacket. Its occasional gusts bent the flat brim of his hat.

Before he’d reached the next hill the temperature had dropped several degrees.

Which said he’d better hurry, as much as he could.

Various parts of him might hurt—but he hadn’t even marked down a grudge against the bank: thanks to Cassivey, who’d yanked strings on everybody including the bank, the marshal’s office, and the town judge, he’d no record of any wrongdoing, he’d been able to buy everything he remotely needed in the way of supplies, money was, by arcane townsman miracles, back in the bank, under a new number with a new card that had only his name on it and no next-of’s to enable anyone to rob him.

So Cassivey assured him, Cassivey having full confidence, Cassivey said, in the men he’d sent to make things clear to the woman at the bank. Cassivey’d paid the fine, the business was off, as townsmen called it, the books. All of which was, at the moment, more help than he’d remote interest in comprehending—if he survived the winter he’d be very interested.

But that was on the other side of winter.

He still wasn’t sure if the bank business was going to work. He personally suspected it was a way contrived for townsmen to cheat riders, and the bank still held they’d been justified in dealing Aby’s funds out to Hawley.

Which confused him—and which was the one reason he was remotely interested, right now, in what was the law with the bank. On one level he knew that he was right and that Hawley was wrong. But, town law holding to the contrary, and things having worked out in some kind of justice, by town law and townsman generosity—two words he hadn’t thought possibly fit together—it left him in enough doubt about the right and wrong of what Hawley had done that he wasn’t sure he’d even mention the transgression to Hawley, though he’d recently sworn he was going to get it out of Hawley, and then beat Hawley into horse-food.

He didn’t, now, know how much fault was Hawley’s and how much was because the bank women had suggested it to him. Hawley wasn’t damn bright in certain matters, smart enough on the trail, as far as staying alive, but he could have let his wants and what the bank told him get ahead of his common sense.

He could understand that. He knew Hawley with all his faults.

But it would still be a good idea if Hawley and both his partners were out of Shamesey before he got back next spring. It would be a good idea if they just happened to find jobs elsewhere, but on roads he traveled, for a couple of years. A couple of years might be enough to let him cool down enough, and enough to let him figure what he thought about what Hawley had done—

Right now, still damn him to bloody hell.

Damn Shamesey and Lyle Wesson, too, who could have been a lot more helpful—a lot more forward getting his belongings to him outside Shamesey gate, for one thing. Getting his belongings was why he’d gotten shot, and getting shot was why he’d not had a chance to talk to Hawley and his partners.

And Hawley and Jonas and Luke hadn’t been damn forward, either, to round up what was his and get it outside the gates, and maybe to signal there was more to tell him, and maybe, just maybe, like friends, to just camp outside the walls that night and make themselves available for talk, for errands, for whatever a man needed who wasn’t steady enough to go into the largest camp in the settled world. Put themselves out? Make themselves available?

Hell, no, they headed for the bar and warm beds.

Nobody’d been a damn lot of help, once he started adding up what certain people should have done and hadn’t. There was enough blame to go around in the situation as far as he was concerned—a lot of people in the class of riders that he wasn’t damned happy with, which was why the business at the bank in Anveney had sunk away into cool indifference. Townsmen could be fools all they liked and you expected it. But riders had screwed him, people he dealt with, people with a history with him, and that made him damned mad.

Only Aby…

He knew, dammit. He knew the woman and he’d been the one to fail, thinking she’d changed. He didn’t know what the debt was—he didn’t have to know. She’d have paid it. If silence was what the man asked, regarding those shipments, and she owed Cassivey—

She’d done all she could to get him into Cassivey’s employ, cajoled, pleaded. Truth be told—he’d refused to go up to Anveney for many more reasons than the smell on the money. He’d offered his own proposal: Come down to Malvey.

Why’s it always your way? he’d asked, he thought, reasonably. They’d quarreled. He’d been mad. Aby’d gone off mad—and hurt, he’d picked that up in the ambient.

But nothing of her reasons. Aby could throw that anger up like a wall. And had.

They’d thought there was forever.

But she’d owed a man. And, damn, the woman he knew never betrayed a trust. Never. He had.

A sudden apprehension came shivering its way through his consciousness that he’d just slipped into Aby’s last set of motions, working for the same man, following the same route—retracing, in short, everything Aby’d done down to leaving Anveney in Cassivey’s employ, exactly where Aby’d wanted him to be when they’d had their last quarrel.

So he’d just taken that job Aby had wanted him to take—more, he owed Cassivey. It was her job he inherited, her obligation, her promises.

He wasn’t superstitious like the preacher-men, but he kept thinking about that first step they kept talking about, the one on the slide to hell. He’d failed Aby; she’d have lived if he’d been there. He wouldn’t have been riding at the rear, leaving Aby on point at the worst damn turn on the mountain. He’d sent her off to partners who’d failed her. He’d sent her off to die; and maybe, in the economy of the preachers’ God, maybe he was going up where he was somehow supposed to have been in the first place.

Only this time Aby wouldn’t be there for him. Turn about was fair play.

Got her back and the woman began to bother him again.

Got her back and he had to ask—where in hell did she spend the money?

Or had she spent it? She’d never said exactly what she’d had in the account. He couldn’t read the damn card. No more than she could. And she’d never said.

How much did the bank give to Hawley, anyway?

His legs wobbled. The sky went violet and brass. His shortness of breath took him by surprise. The rifle, the pistol—a winter’s ammunition, the food, all added up, considering he’d taken no few knocks. But he needed the gun. Needed the supplies. Couldn’t lay anything down.

And Burn depended on him—Burn couldn’t afford to have him go down on his face out here and freeze in the coming storm. He couldn’t bet Burn’s life that Burn would use the road to come looking for him. A nighthorse wasn’t held to roads.

He couldn’t faint out here, for Burn’s sake, he couldn’t faint and he couldn’t quit. He set his goal as the next hill down the barren road and walked that far. Then he set his intention as another hill—struggled up to its crest, telling himself now that he’d done the hard part, he could make the downhill, at least.

But his breath was short and when he looked up his blurred vision was starting to give him two barren, eroded horizons, two road-traces among doubled rocks.

His head was light. His heart began to pound. Straight line was more efficient. Wandering used up his strength faster. Had to walk straight, had to stay conscious, above all else—if he was conscious, he persuaded himself, Burn might find him; if he wasn’t, Burn might not hear him and go right by.

He walked the next uphill—and sat down at the top, in an act of prudence, to nurse his splitting headache at the road edge, rather than the middle of it, in the vague notion a truck could come along. Which common sense then told him wasn’t possibly going to happen again in this country until next spring, but that had been his thought when he sat down—he didn’t want to be hit by traffic.

He didn’t want to freeze, either. He could sit here till winter snows covered him, the way he felt now. The pain shot through his skull from front to back and off his temples. He squinted and it was worse.

So he rested his head on his arms and sat that way to wait for his breathing to slow down. Raw air burned his throat. He coughed and coughing hurt his head. The cold of the bare ground had numbed his feet, and the bite of the wind that swept down off the mountain wall chilled his back. He wished he’d sent Cassivey’s man after that sweater he’d seen. Rust and black one. Aby’d have liked it.

Then he must have shut his eyes for a moment—he couldn’t tell whether the sudden darkening of the land and the advent of a brassy light was the thickness of the clouds overhead or the cumulative effect of blows to the head.

He heard the sound of thunder, and thought—damn!—with the kind of sinking feeling a man got when he’d realized a serious, serious mistake.

He knew he had to move. He sat there a time more, breathing deep to gather his strength, needing to be sure he could get up and not pass out; and while he sat, a colder wind began to gust along the ridge, raising dust. He saw it coming, adjusted his hat and scarf and pulled the cuffs of the sweater he did have down over his gloves as the first fat drops spatted into the barren dust at his feet.

That was it. God had decided. He had to move. He drew a breath tinged with copper and the smell of cold rain, and put an all-out effort into getting up.

Muscles had stiffened. He used the rifle for a prop—might not have made it to his feet, he feared, without it.

He used it for a support to bend and heft the two-pack, slung its not inconsiderable weight and the rifle-strap over his shoulder. Then he started walking, heavy drops spattering the powdery dust around him, making small red craters. It felt like liquid ice where a drop found its way past the brim of his hat, down his neck or into his face.

Then—fool, he thought, remembering in the general haze of his thoughts that he’d bought a slicker—he slung the two-pack around to get at it, and had to take his gloves off.

The slicker was one of those new plastic things that didn’t hold body heat worth a damn, but he hadn’t wanted to carry the weight of canvas, especially on the climb they faced; and the thin plastic at least kept you dry, life and death in the cold seasons, when a soaking and a cold wind could freeze a man faster than he could make a shelter. Cassivey’s man had sworn it was tough—it could double as a ground sheet, and kept you drier than canvas.

If it wasn’t flapping and cracking in the gale. If your fingers didn’t freeze, finding the catches.

He had to drop the rest of the stuff to wrestle it as it snapped and fluttered in the wind, threatening escape from his numbed fingers, but he fastened latches one after the other and held it fast. It smelled worse than Anveney smokestacks, even in the gusting wind, but between that and the coat and the sweater and all, he had to own it kept the wind out. He felt warmer.

He put his gloves back on, gathered up his gear again, took the weight and walked all the way up to the top of the next hill before he ran out of breath and had to stand there leaning on the rifle and gasping and coughing.

But when he cleared the cold-weather tearing from his eyes, he saw clumps of grass around him, sparse, twisted, and brown with the season. He’d almost reached the junction with the boundary road. He was that close.

he sent into the silent ambient, knees wobbling; desperate for some sense of presence, feeling the wind cold against his legs as the slicker flapped open. He had to keep going, he said to himself, and walked, using the rifle for a stick.

A flash of lightning blazed through his headache, blinding him, making white edges on the rocks; immediately the thunder crashed around him, total environment, deafening, pain ricocheting inside his temples and behind his eyes.

Then the rain hit in earnest, a deluge so thick it made a vapor on the blowing wind. Rain pooled in the brim of his hat and made an intermittent waterfall off the edge. He kept moving, tightening his scarf about his neck to keep the water from going down his collar. His knees were soaked below the slicker. His feet were beginning to be soaked through despite the oil coating he maintained on his boots, and the last feeling in them was going—no help at all to his balance.

Then flashed across his vision,

The whole universe opened up, a sense of location, a map of relationship to the whole landscape, and he looked uphill through the veil of rain and twilight. A dark shape was trotting toward him, brisk, angry, shaking itself as it came.

He didn’t sit down. He wanted to collapse right there in the road, his legs were so weak—but he’d only have to get up again, and be all over mud.

he promised Burn, but even that didn’t prevent Burn from detecting the pain and the exhaustion, and didn’t prevent Burn’s growing agitation as Burn came slogging up in the mud, dripping wet and imaging

Burn stopped alongside him. He leaned against Burn’s rain-slick shoulder, feeling its fever-warmth against his face, with the cold rain coming down on them—stood there, Burn smelling him over and snorting in disgust, finding despite the rain.

Burn was warm. Burn was a windbreak. Burn was solid. Most of all, his sense of the whole world was back. Burn didn’t ask how he’d hit his head. Burn wasn’t curious about done-things, just possibly-to-do things, and if Burn’s rider was hurting, Burn was mad at the hurt and wanted it to go away. Burn wanted if men were responsible, but Guil sent.

Burn insisted.

He was too sick to argue. He just wanted up on Burn’s safe back and the two of them away from here and under shelter of some kind, and he didn’t think he could make the jump up—knew he couldn’t, with the two-pack. He slung the weight over Burn’s withers, wishing Burn not to object and still figuring to have an argument, with Burn in that negative mood, figuring possibly to be left in the roadway in the rain,

Burn didn’t sulk at all about the pack. Burn even dropped a leg to make it easier for a wobbly rider… but Burn’s rider couldn’t make it that way. He wanted Burn square on his feet again, and (the arm with the rifle all the way over Burn’s withers and probably jabbing him in God-knew-what places) he couldn’t do more than jump for it and land belly-down like a kid. He slithered a leg over with no grace at all, trying not to hit Burn again with the rifle barrel or knock the pack off Burn’s shoulders—he caught it, squared it, pinned it with a knee and shakily tucked the slicker about him, wet knees and all, Burn standing still as a rock the while, for which he was very grateful.

Burn slowly started moving, testing his rider’s balance. Burn’s heat reached the insides of his legs, traveling upward under the slicker, wonderful, wonderful warmth. He could hug the slicker around him and hope for the warmth below to meet the lesser warmth he’d saved in his upper body, if he could stay upright so long.

He shivered, waiting for that to happen. His legs jerking in spasm bothered Burn, whose thoughts on the matter weren’t coherent, something like and and because the twitches were signaling Burn directions he didn’t mean and didn’t want.

Burn figured it out, though, worried about it, and got mad, imaging and But Guil imaged and < rider-stone, > and Burn began to pick up his pace, imaging and and

< Rider-stone, > Guil insisted, because there was a shelter where this road joined the boundary road. Intersections were places you could always look for shelter, and where there was shelter of any kind, riders set up a marker, be it wood or stone, in this otherwise desolate land, to carve or scratch over with messages to riders who came on the same road.

Burn agreed, finally, while the rain spattered about them and gullied down the hills. Burn had been waiting for him in that shelter, in a < barren, bad place, > and had only come after him when the weather turned… he already saw the refuge Burn was taking him to,

Didn’t have to say things out loud for Burn. Damn lot smarter than townsmen, Guil thought muzzily. Friendlier than bank-women.

Burn agreed, splashing along the barren, puddled road, pace, pace, pace, pace, never missing a beat, strong and confident. All around them, water sluiced unchecked down the hills, remaking the gullies and washing at the roots of the feeble grass.

But at least the ground cover that held out grew more frequent.