Rider at the Gate

Burn got him to a place deep in the dripping shadow of evergreens, next a stand of quakesilvers and the edge of the wood where redleaf grew, gone to hollow, pithy stems in autumn, the seedpods all scattered.

Those stalks were what he wanted. He slid down, sat down, unplanned, in a hard landing on his backside on the needle-carpet, with the rifle and all the gear. It sent a jolt from his tailbone to the top of his skull and down to his eyes, and blinded him for a moment.

Unfair, he thought. The pain was entirely unfair, after all the rest. But he was here, he’d seen what he needed to see, even if it took a moment for his eyes to clear and bear the daylight again. He sat still, tucked up into a huddle of knees and slicker and pack, the rifle tucked up with him, and imaged, amid the pain, which he could have gotten up and done, as soon as his head cleared, which might happen in a while—but, hell, Burn could have soon. There’d be Burn could do it.

Burn went over and got and brought it to him and dropped it on the ground in front of him. Burn pawed it with a three-toed foot, head lowered, but Burn didn’t find it.

Guil imaged. God knew what Burn thought in Burn’s different world, maybe that he was looking for the right stalk, so Burn went and dragged back another of the man-tall stalks. And another.

And another, under Guil’s insistence. His head had cleared enough that he could see. He broke them up in chunks, split them with his thumbnail to expose the pith, not trusting himself with the bootknife. Burn nosed into the pile of stalks, still doubtful.

Guil got out the pocket lighter, flicked the wheel, far faster than the burning-glass, more reliable with the broken cloud overhead— and Burn jerked his head back as a little flame jumped from it to the redleaf pith.

He fed his tiny fire more redleaf pith, and then redleaf stalk, and a small pile of only moderately wet evergreen needles swept from off the ground around him.

Guil sent, imaging the quakesilver grove near them.

The headache was still killing him. The pants hadn’t dried, he was icy chill from the hips down, he hadn’t felt anything at all in his feet in at least an hour and the wind was kicking up. But it helped to have something to do. And his fingers at least could be warm in the tiny flame, so long as the wind didn’t scatter his work, or another spate of rain come and drown it.

Burn knocked the deadfall down. Burn was good at destruction. Burn forgot what he was supposed to do—enjoying destroying the tree, Guil supposed, and re-imaged and As the preachers’ tempter to evil and corruption, Guil thought in the extraneity of delirium, Burn was remarkably easily distracted. he imaged, “dammit…”

It arrived. At least half of it did, the stick Burn carried dragging other brush with it in a haphazard string. He wanted Burn to trample it where he dropped it. Burn wouldn’t. Burn went back to get more wood, having figured the rest of it belonged with this part.

So Guil cracked up the sticks he could reach and stuck them in the feeble fire. And cracked others, the bark, the ragged pieces, whatever there was.

Burn brought him a live quakesilver branch with the last sodden autumn leaves still on, but, hell, by now the fire could handle the sap-rich wood. He threw in whatever Burn brought and the fire grew. The heat grew. He felt it against his soaked knees.

And faithful to his promise, with Guil hauled out and and put it on to cook. He needed more wood. Burn wanted more than one bit of bacon. It seemed a workable bargain.

A second supper—was baked potatoes and sausage, which took no thought, no effort, and nobody in Tarmin camp was much interested in food. Tara ate. She didn’t taste it. A quiet, worried day, it had been. She supposed that she ought to report to the village that Chad and Vadim were still out, but the village was wrapped up in its own grim business over the blacksmith’s murder, and there was still the chance—still the chance—that the boys would turn up before she had to explain to the marshal.

She took potato and grain mash with sausage bits out to the horses and listened into the gathering dark, standing between Flicker and Luisa’s horse, patting Mina’s Skip on an insistent nose as she set down the pan.

Then she did something she’d never willfully done, and drew Flicker’s attention first—that was effortless. But she wanted to hear and asked for it.

Flicker heard the usual little spooks around the edges. Tara kept listening, putting her attention out to the ambient, and nudged into Green; and still it was spooks, a lorry-lie, maybe.

Skip’s attention came in without much noise at all, and of a sudden they were reaching far, far out, listening for

What came instead was a disturbance of other minds, and she tried to shut it out, but it was noisy, much too noisy:

She didn’t know what that was. She didn’t like it. She didn’t want panic in the village, some villager picking up on her query outside the walls.

She drew away from the horses, wished and walked completely out and away from the den.

Not a ripple in the ambient from Vadim and Chad. But, she said to herself, the likelihood was that the boys would come riding back with some gruesome story they truly didn’t want to take to the grieving family. That in itself could keep the boys out a little longer—if they found something they couldn’t get quiet in their own minds: a rider didn’t put as first priority the friends waiting and worrying about him. A rider had loyalty to his horse first; his actual working partner second; his partner’s horse third; his responsibilities to his hire somewhere after that; and his lovers wherever they crossed the ranks of partners or friends—

Which meant neither Vadim nor Chad would desert the other out there, where two horses might stand off what one horse couldn’t, and where two minds might find a calm one mind couldn’t recover.

But it damned sure left three women in Tarmin camp pacing the floor and sweating out the hours, while reasons for them to hold back bad news at least from the Goss family had evaporated on a gunshot: the Goss family was shattered. Chad and Vadim couldn’t know that unless they heard her sending. And there was no sign they had.

The sky was headed for its second full dark, and cloud was moving in, girding Rogers Peak now with a gray, impenetrable ceiling—heralding earlier dark, the chance of snow, and a chance of storm, if that cloud just kept coming, as well it could—this eastern face of the mountain had better weather, but it gave you surprises you didn’t take lightly.

The shadows had already gone blue and vague. Tara took the by now well-worn trail toward the porch, not quickly. But the feeling of harm was in the air.

She walked as far as the wooden steps, had her foot on the first when the summons bell rang a gentle request for attention on the village side, and the rider gate opened.

Townsmen came in, the mayor and the marshal.

Mina and Luisa had heard the bell. They came out onto the porch, hugging sweatered arms against the cold as the delegation trudged closer across the cracking, potholed ice.

“Need to talk to Vadim,” the marshal said.

Tara took a deep breath. “Not here.”

“Where is he?”

“Out looking for the Goss kid.”

“He didn’t say—”

“There wasn’t a need to say.”

“Not a need!”

“He’s doing his job, that’s all. He and Chad. They’re looking around out there. What can I do for you?”

“Talk,” the mayor said. “Inside.”

Light was fading fast. A wind was getting up. Tara nodded, uncertain in her capacity as senior rider—it was unprecedented that village authorities should ever have the urge to cross through that gate unless it was something involving the whole village-rider agreement, but she nodded, and Luisa and Mina went inside as she preceded the mayor and the marshal up the steps and into the lamplight.

“Tea?” Mina asked.

“We’ll make this brief,” the mayor said. Bay was his name, and by his manner he didn’t intend to sit, take off his coat, or ask any hospitality. “We’ve got a meeting going on right now. Judicial meeting. Andy Goss’ son shot him. The older boy. Carlo. He doesn’t deny it.”

“There were circumstances,” Tara began, but the mayor cut her off.

“The whole village knows the circumstances. The boy hated his father.”

“Loved his father,” Tara said, though she wasn’t quite sure she understood love as villagers had it. It felt the same. “It was his sister he hated.”

The mayor and the marshal didn’t look impressed, just nervous.

“This is a bad time to be down to three riders,” the mayor said. “This is a real bad time.”

“You can’t find anything out sitting inside the walls.” She found herself unwillingly defending Vadim’s decision, and had a sudden dark thought: Damn. Damn! They’re hunting it. That’s what they’re doing.

“No word of the road crew either?”

“No word,” Tara said, “no word from Vadim and Chad, either. I’ve listened.”

The mayor looked as if he’d swallowed something unpalatable. The village couldn’t tell the riders how to run their affairs. They weren’t obliged to like it. Or to accept how riders knew things.

“Is there a possibility,” the marshal, Delaterre, asked, “that the girl was murdered? That the boy had something to do with that?”

“Absolutely not.” Tara was appalled. “The boy’s not a killer. I can swear to that. Brionne, on the other hand—”

“Possible that the boy enticed her outside, knowing the danger out there right now, in the hope she wouldn’t—”

“Marshal, the girl’s a spoiled brat—she sneaked out the gates. She knew the danger out there same as anybody over five. The boy and Goss himself were in our camp looking for her.”

“Goss hit the boys,” Mina said. “Goss beat them.”

She was twice shocked. Mina never spoke her mind in front of villagers.

“There’s no evidence,” the marshal said. “The wife is testifying against the boy—”

“The wife helped,” Mina said shortly. “They beat hell out of the boys. Brionne could do no wrong.”

The horses weren’t anywhere near. The ambient through the camp was all but dead still, quiet, hushed. Even villagers might feel it.

“Will you give a deposition to that effect?” the mayor asked.

“I swear.” Mina held her hand up. “I swear right here. You’re witnesses. You can swear for me in court. A rider doesn’t need to go there.”

There was silence in the room, just the crackle of the fire. The rattle of a shutter in a rising wind.

“They’d no business,” the mayor said, “the senior riders going off the way they did. The village is their first job.”

Tara frowned and plunged ahead. “I’ll tell you something, mayor Bay. There’s something out there scared hell out of my horse. But the Goss girl went out on her own, looking for a horse she heard. That’s what happened.”

“We’re not sure,” the marshal said. “You said it. The boys hated the sister.”

They were wanting to think ill of the boys. They had their case made. She didn’t need the ambient to see that. And it turned a corner she hadn’t expected. She stuck her hands in her pockets and waited for clarification.

“You saw the girl leave?” the marshal asked. “Or not?”

“Didn’t see, didn’t hear,” Tara said. “We had a sick horse. Mine. It was too noisy to hear anything in the camp. Not in the village. Not if that kid was listening to the Wild.”

The mayor and the marshal looked uncomfortable—villagers didn’t want details about the horses, or anything else in the Wild. They wanted their walls to prevent that.

“Meaning you wouldn’t know. You’re guessing.”

“We wouldn’t know,” Tara said. “That’s the point. But footprints went out the gate.”

“Alone?”

“Goss and his kids all accepted it was the girl.” She remembered queasily that they didn’t immediately see in their minds what she saw. She tried to build the picture for men that didn’t see. “The snow hadn’t been tracked. Just the ice-melt from the den roof. The tracks. The gate being pulled inward made a scraped mark. About as wide as a girl needed. Tracks going out, about her size feet, no tracks going back.”

“Where are these tracks?”

“Gone now. Horses tracked over them, all over out there.”

“That’s real convenient,” the mayor said.

“Mayor Bay, there’s one way out that gate. Horses had to take it to go out to look for her. And that’s what the boys are doing— looking for her.”

“Single tracks?”

“Pointed-toed boots.” She had a good mental image of the boys’ feet. Their tracks. Her brain saved things like that. “The boys’ boots are square-toed. The blacksmith’s—his were round. These tracks were smaller and lighter. No rider wears boots like that.”

“Andy Goss identified them?”

Absolutely no doubt in her mind. “The father had just found out,” Tara said reluctantly, “how much the boys hated the sister. They were standing near the horses. They heard more than they wanted to hear about each other. I was there. I heard it. I couldn’t help hearing.”

“You’d better come across,” the marshal said. “Give a deposition, too.”

“I’ve sworn to things before,” Tara said. She didn’t like village justice. And it didn’t take a rider’s word. “I saw what I saw. And heard what I heard. I agree with her. Write it. I’ll sign your paper.”

“Better you should swear to it over village-side,” the mayor said. “Tonight. Where the village can hear. We want this case disposed. Feelings are running high over there.”

A damned hurry, Tara thought, and looked at Luisa and Mina, and drew shrugs there. But the Raths, the mother’s family, were damned well-to-do. Deacons of the church. Pillars of the village council.

“All of you,” the mayor said.

“Got to get our coats,” Luisa said.

“All right,” the marshal said and, with the mayor, headed for the door and out, no hesitation.

“What did you mean,” Tara asked Mina, an urgent whisper, “the wife helped, the wife beat the boy? For God’s sake, you don’t know that for a fact! —Do you?”

Mina shrugged. “Goss is dead. What good’s it going to do to shoot the boy, too? He’s not a bad kid. Goss beat the boys—and what was she doing for sixteen years?”

It was logic. She had to admit that. Save the salvageable. Villagers couldn’t tell truth from untruth in a rider’s mind. They could save the boys. And the Raths weren’t going to like it.

She grabbed her scarf and hat, and went out with Luisa and Mina, the three of them resolved on a lie, and no horse near to tell the mayor or the marshal.

No horse near to tell them what was going on outside, either. They crossed the icy yard behind the villagers and entered together through the village-side gate… it was farther than they liked to be from the horses, Tara felt it and she felt the same from Luisa and Mina.

But they walked, all the same, and heard a commotion out in the winter cold, saw lanterns lit, and a steamy-breathed crowd gathered under the lanterns.

They proved more conspicuous than they liked, as they walked into that crowd in the mayor’s wake, and followed (Tara supposed they were to follow, and nobody stopped them) all the way to the porch of the marshal’s office and the village lock-up, which was mostly for midwinter drunks, if they got to breaking up the village’s single bar.

This time, though, there was a gathering of the village officers, the clerk and the justice in front of a lot of the village—men, women, and children—and now the mayor and the marshal and, lastly, themselves, up the steps and onto the wooden porch that fronted the marshal’s house and the jail and the court office, that being all the same building. They’d hung lanterns from the porch-posts and set a table and a chair between them. The judge sat at the table. The village clerk sat at a right angle to him, to do writing.

“Say what you said to us,” the marshal said, and Tara couldn’t feel Mina panic, but she saw the flinch. Mina said it again, in a quiet voice:

“The kid had cause.”

“Louder,” the mayor said, and shouted for quiet, and the judge bashed the table with a metal hammer and said he wanted quiet in the hearing. There was the hammer on the judge’s table. Lying near it, jumping when he hammered for order, there were two large-caliber bullets.

That was the way it was. Tara was appalled; and she nudged Mina, saying: “Tell it good.”

So Mina spoke up. “Goss and his wife beat the boys. He could have killed them. It was real clear. They didn’t want Brionne back.”

A woman’s voice—Goss’ wife, Mindy Rath, Tara saw, off to the side of the porch: “They did it!” the woman shouted. “They were always bad boys! They were always a trouble in the house! I want my Brionne! I want my Brionne! What have you done with her, what have you done with her, Carlo? You put her outside the gate, didn’t you? You lied to her, you made her go out there!”

“That’s not so,” Tara said. The magistrate was pounding with the hammer, and the bullets fell off onto the porch. The clerk scooped them up again and put them on the table.

“Say it again, rider Chang,” the marshal said. “Say it louder.”

“I’ll say it,” Luisa said, and raised her voice. “She’s wrong. There were tracks going alone out the gate! Tara saw them!”

The crowd broke out in murmurs, in calls of “Liar!” from the wife, and “Hearken not to the beasts!” from one of the village religious enthusiasts.

“Say what you know!” the mayor said. “Rider Chang?”

People were shouting. The elder boy shouted, too, all but crying, “I didn’t want to shoot him, he made me shoot him!”

Right then Tara got the same impulse Mina had confessed to; and drew in a guilty breath, and remembered at the same instant that nobody could hear what she thought.

The judge pounded the table, to no avail, until the marshal fired off a gun, into the air and off over the walls.

“Rider Chang,” the judge said. “Ordinance of Incorporation, Article Twelve, a rider can’t take oath. But you can give an unsworn deposition. What did you observe?”

“I talked to Brionne Goss in the horse den this morning. I saw her tracks, alone, going out the gate. I saw, at sunset, Andy Goss, Carlo, there, and Randy, coming in to ask about her whereabouts.”

“Fornicator!” the religious yelled.

“—and those tracks.” Tara raised her voice, thinking only of the boys now, the way Mina had thought, and with the queasy notion that she could lie or tell the truth on this side of the wall and the minds in front of her wouldn’t hear the difference. “Were only of the girl. Goss identified them and I personally heard Goss threaten the boys, I personally heard the boys complain of beatings and blame unfairly placed on them.”

“Liar!” the wife shouted.

“Mr. Goss agitated my horse with his behavior. I advised him and his sons quit the camp for their own protection. Vadim and Chad went out the gate in search of Brionne Goss. They aren’t back. They’d promised to come straight back. I can personally report—” There was a rising murmur and she outshouted it with what she’d decided the town had damned well better know, and she needed to be sure the town knew. Two nights and no word from Vadim and Chad meant the odds weren’t in their favor, and the Gosses had already made fatal mistakes. “I can personally report, there’s something out there that scared my horse and me. Evidently Brionne heard it and didn’t have the sense to be scared.”

“You liar!” the mother started shouting—and nothing came through the ambient. It was a curious numbness.

“She wanted the horses!” Tara shouted back. “And thanks to the fact she didn’t tell us, and she went out that gate on her own, and without our advice, she’s probably met something we could have wished she hadn’t. It wasn’t the Goss boys’ fault. I saw the father beating the boys; I saw it in his mind and I saw it in theirs!”

“Blasphemy’s not court evidence!” the religious yelled. “You can’t blaspheme against the almighty human God and call it evidence!”

“God,” Tara muttered in disgust, and cast a look at the judge, who hammered the table furiously.

“She is a liar!” the mother screamed. “She was luring our Brionne to perversions! They’re responsible!”

“Then you can go to bloody hell!” Mina yelled. “There’s a rogue horse out there! Your precious Brionne went out to it! If she’s lucky, it didn’t take her! If she’s not—God knows what we’re in for! So if you want to winter here without riders, you’re on your way, woman! The road crew’s not back and the two that went out looking for your daughter were supposed to be back in a couple of hours—yesterday! So go to hell! We’ll take care of our own, if that’s where we stand!”

People were shouting over the last that Mina had to say, people who were scared about the rogue and scared as hell to have the riders offended, people yelling about God and blasphemy, going quickly from words to shoving and pushing—the judge was getting no attention from anyone with his hammering; and Tara grabbed Mina by the arm to get her away from the edge of the porch before rocks went flying.

“Take it easy, for God’s sake!”

“I’ll be out that gate! I’m not trading us for these fools!” Mina jerked away, headed for the side porch steps, and Tara grabbed her again.

“Mina, use your head!”

“I’ve used my head, I’ve waited. If you’re with them ahead of us, maybe that’s your choice, Tara, but it’s not mine.”

“Mina!”

Mina had jerked to be free, and Tara jerked hard back, realizing in the moment she did it that there was an ambient now. It had come flooding around them subtle as body-temperature water— you didn’t know it was there, and it was, and it ran over the nerves and stole the breath. “Mina, dammit!” Crowd-noise was everywhere. Minds were everywhere. A gunshot went off, right next them, but that was a gun on their side, the marshal firing his pistol off.

“Shut up!” the marshal yelled into a sudden silence, and Tara dragged Mina back to Luisa’s spot near the rear of the porch. The marshal was yelling about law and order and how they’d better listen to the judge or he was going to start making arrests.

“You can’t argue against almighty God,” somebody yelled; and the judge ruled the man in contempt and fined him fifty on the spot. Other howls went up over that, and the mother started yelling about justice again—

“Shut up!” the judge shouted, and banged the hammer, until it had to dent the table top. “It’s clear we’ve got witnesses missing.”

“You can’t take testimony—” —from riders, the religious was clearly about to argue, but the hammer came down again.

“Another fifty! I say I’m not finding cause for a trial until after we’ve got all the principals, and they’re not here. Marshal, lock these boys up until somebody—”

But the words faded out. There was just

Tara felt felt in angry distress… felt

“Mina!” Luisa screamed, halfway down the steps, in pursuit of her partner, but Tara grabbed the railing and got focus enough to will

“Damnation!” a resisting mind cried, but the ambient was gibbering nonsense, and something more.

Tara needed the railing to keep her balance, and she fought with that noisy mind, with a deliberate <behave!>

A scream. Shocked quiet, after. She could feel the railing wobble under her gloves. She looked up at the marshal with a sense of desperation, her partners having cleared a space for themselves in the yard. The ambient was complete chaos.

“Something’s wrong,” she said, maybe louder than she should— her ears weren’t hearing: her mind was, and she felt she had to shout. “Keep that gate closed. If the kid comes back and wants in—don’t listen. Keep that gate closed!”

Her partners went toward the camp. She had to be there. She was the only one who might argue Mina out of doing something foolish, but they were and she suddenly could hear Flicker—

Bang! something went at the Little Gate. Bang! of nighthorse hooves.

She didn’t know what the marshal answered. She overtook her younger partners on the run, the crowd seething with questions and fears of the unknown outside—more than one voice was raised in screaming panic.

No comfort existed in the ambient.

Danger! Now!>