Rider at the Gate

Chapter XVI

THE ROAD UP FROM ANVENEY WAS THE SHORTEST, FASTEST WAY UP to the High Wild—a good idea, Guil thought as the morning brightened to warmer daylight, good idea, considering both the season and the condition of the rider, because he and Burn weren’t going to make any record time; and he damned sure didn’t want to trek all the way back to the main road and then take that ascent: speed was everything when the weather was chancy, and when you had to factor in that long trek even to get to the other road. He didn’t mind camping on the main road in clear weather. But he didn’t trust it would stay clear of snow long enough for him to get over there and get up the mountain. Its gentle slope was treacherous, piling up snow in overhangs—and the chill was definitely in the air.

Whichever route you chose, the long, avalanche-prone ridge to the south or the steep, icy climb he was on, you didn’t want to be on the ascent or the descent once the snows started in earnest: once he made Tarmin Ridge he had choices and shelters—which in the high country didn’t mean any shabby lean-to: the high-country riders took their storm shelters seriously and stocked them reliably. Get just that far and he could survive the worst the mountain could throw at him.

There was even a shelter at the halfway point of the climb he was on, so he’d heard, but by all he knew it was just a shack, no regular maintenance, no store of food, and he wasn’t going to push himself beyond reason to reach it or stop early to use it. Nothing in the world cost more than an hour or two delay when you were reckoning the weather by the minute.

The ill-famed Anveney service road looked easy, at least the rolling part of it, that went through the sparse, bad-grass hills— but that, he knew, was the gentle prelude. One had only to look up at the towering northeast face of the mountain to see that what the south road did by gentle turns, this road did on the most hellacious grades trucks or ridden horses could manage.

And increasingly as he rode, the mountain took on the appearance of a sheer wall. A series of hairpins, on the most meandering of which he began to realize he’d already embarked, laddered the same steep face that, you had to remember, ten k north, plunged away into river-cut Kroman Gorge, a view straight down for most of a mile. It was a famous sight, it was certainly worth a ten k ride to look at—and he’d seen that vertical slit in the earth at least in Aby’s mind as But Burn imaged it nervously as and he wasn’t sure himself if he went there that he wanted to stand anywhere near that edge.

He wasn’t sure, facing this upward perspective, that it was going to be much better up there.

But the road he was on still looked to be faster than the other from bottom to top, maybe even by a couple of days, even with the road in the condition it was in. He’d lost precious time, two whole days he was relatively sure of, drying out his clothes and his gear and nursing his headache, or his several headaches, counting the knots on his skull.

He’d been concussed, he was almost certain—not thinking too clearly for a day or so; and concussed meant, if you talked to doctors, lie down, do little, eat and sleep, if you had somebody to wait on you.

Fine, he’d rested, between the necessity to get a fire going and to fend for himself. He’d used up money-bought supplies he’d rather not have touched, but a forced lay-up was what such supplies were for—he supposed they were well-spent. He was alive.

He’d done some fool things—but close as he was still to Anveney and doctors, rational or irrational (as he’d been when he’d taken that ride after wood instead of going for an Anveney doctor), he’d turned out all right. He didn’t need any townsman doctor, one he couldn’t talk to, understand, or deal with. He wasn’t going to have any strangers, however well-intentioned, poking around at him while Burn fretted at the gates. He’d known, when he waked that morning with the headache that didn’t go away, exactly what he had, at worst, unless his skull was fractured, which time proved it wasn’t. He certainly didn’t need any high-paid town doctor to tell him that his head hurt, and not to walk any distance in that condition.

So he’d won. So he’d been able to lie about feeling his head expand and contract, and watching the colors come and go behind his closed eyelids, wanting occasionally to pass out until it was over—

Eventually you died or you got better. And since he hadn’t caught pneumonia, and he hadn’t gone into coma, and since the leg the bank guard and the marshals had banged about didn’t seem infected, just ached like hell, swelled, and hurt when he walked on it—he guessed he’d saved himself and the town doctor the bother, and he was still going to make the Ridge before the snows came down. He was going to deal with Aby’s problem, and finish Aby’s business up there. Money was hindmost in that calculation: the doctor would have cost time and kept him off the trail; and the snows would have beaten him.

And by the time they’d gone up a distance, with him walking and limping on the steep grade, he began to fear they weren’t going to make the speed he would have wanted today: his sore leg was aching, his good one was burning, his head was splitting, and his breaths came as if he’d run a race. He leaned on Burn’s side and stood there a while staring up at the first true hairpin before he could find it in him even to consider going on up the grade.

He walked as far as he could: Burn wasn’t going to make any speed, either, slogging along under his weight at the angle the road climbed.

A turn or so higher, Burn took him up, and when Burn tired again—where they stopped for breath and for him to get off—the view down, where the edges had eroded in a series of slides, was absolutely spectacular: raw rubble spiked with trees that had found a foothold on the slopes; while the view up from there was enough to give a man or a horse serious doubt whether they were sane to try this road at all. He couldn’t see some of the roadway, the angle was so steep—what he could see of the zigzagging trace of back and forth hairpins and phone lines was daunting, entirely.

But underfoot, tribute to mechanical persistence, he could still see the scarring that trucks this summer or last had made on the road, such tough, small trucks as ran emergency supplies and phone lines for the line-riders.

The modern log and lumber monsters, and the tankers, couldn’t hope to take even the lowest and easiest of the turns to get up here. It was risky, his eye could well judge, even for the line repair trucks, and they couldn’t go all the way up these days.

Once that happened you hadn’t a chance, no way to recover your traction.

He pulled back from that thought, heart pounding as if he’d been on that edge. He started walking, diverting himself with the pain in his leg and the search for breaks in the phone line, not that he could do anything about them, but Cassivey had promised him to call Tarmin and warn them if the lines were up.

If he knew a call could get through—that would take at least some weight of necessity off his mind. But it looked chancy. Watching where the line climbed, ahead of them, he saw poles braced up with rocks—some of them leaning in impending breaks. Wait till the winter winds, he thought. Wait till the ice. They wouldn’t hold. They might not have held on the road above.

No phone line at all on the main road—that was why they’d kept maintaining this old run on Anveney West, specifically because the phone lines were already here and because avalanche was constant hell on the other one in winter, sweeping poles and all away, more than they lost here to slides. So Aby’d said. And they kept the phones going.

Fifty years ago, when the gold fever had been rampant in the hills and speculators in every sort of vehicle had made Anveney their base of operations, this ill-conceived switchback had been all the road that served a network of mining roads and little, isolated camps. Most who had tried winter camp, with just their guns and their gold-fever to insulate them from the Wild, hadn’t made it through the first winter, but by the second winter, the survivors had clumped in larger camps and the survivors of those had made a dozen villages up on the Ridge, only a few of which still held out— compared to those that had once been. That, also, Aby had said: her man in Anveney told her so.

And, headache and all, he looked for line-breaks. But you couldn’t, as the inside edge of the road grew more wooded, always see the poles, let alone the lines. Thickets of greenwood and shag had grown up around them, unrestricted.

Worse, washouts were multiplying, eroding away the outside edge of the road in graveled gullies that were a real danger to the trucks. Weeds, untouched by trucks’ undercarriage chains, had grown up on the center ridge. Scrub leaned well over the wheel tracks, and grass had grown up in the tracks themselves. It had to have been some time since the last line repair truck had come up here—let alone the road crews it badly needed.

And that neglected road repair, it took no intelligence even for a lowland townsman to guess, increased the frequency of spooks along the way: like weeds, spooks were, no single breed, just vermin, prolific and nuisanceful to humans. Hunted out of any traveled territory, they expanded right back into any territory where brush provided adequate cover. He heard them as he rode: a constant shifting image of giant grass and the noise of something large and the fear of something nearby—which was, of course, themselves, and the grass wasn’t giant except to the creature doing the sending. Burn heard them very well, and occasionally sent out his and image, which cleared the area in short order.

The little spooks were no harm to a rider, or anyone a rider escorted. But once little spooks grew plentiful, they made rich hunting for midsized spooks, which would happily add the vermin-rich offal heaps of villages like Tarmin and Verden to their hunting range; they’d dig and gnaw and try the defenses of supplies in the rider-shelters—and clear out fast if riders showed up.

One had to know, though, that after the middle-sized spooks like nightbabies and lorry-lies moved in, serious trouble was right behind: goblin-cats and spook-bears and bushdevils and every other sort of creature that could make a village’s dreams uneasy. Tarmin and the rest of the high-country villages in Anveney’s mining union should have raised hell about the washouts and the brush. It was a steep, steep face, and if it grew brushy and the road got beyond even riders, then there was a breeding area and hunting ground for things the villages up on the Ridge might not like for neighbors.

But figure it, too, that Anveney with its smelters and furnaces was the chief customer of the mining camps, chief user of the phone lines between Anveney and the camps, and while the mining and logging camps had riders encamped and accessible, even semipermanently resident, Anveney, alone of towns, didn’t have riders, especially in the current feud with Malvey, to maintain those lines.

So blame the want of action on the camps and the villages, he decided, who might regret it once their politicking with Anveney or their neglect had let the whole east face of Rogers Peak go back to the Wild.

Two more turns and the road grew worse, with washouts trenching the whole road surface, with rockfalls lying in the roadway some rocks of which were considerable—if you met that kind of thing with a convoy you stopped and with shovels you filled the washes and fixed it as best you could—

Or you hoped you hadn’t gone too far from a truck turn-around.

With a horse—and no trucks to worry about—you rode past and hoped it didn’t get worse up above. But he had faith in Burn.

Burn thought. Burn didn’t approve of the road. But Burn didn’t argue to turn around, either. Burn had the high-country wind in his nostrils. Burn thought and and

The way-shelter that was supposed to exist at sundown turned up well short of that—not that he was ahead of schedule—but that the shelter was a collection of scattered logs and scattered rags several turns below where it was supposed to be. He saw part of the foundations further up: a boulder had swept it right down the mountain face.

It left a flat camping area, once he did reach it, at the edge of night, but not one he was tempted to use. He cast a misgiving eye up at the sheer face of the mountain, wondering what other brothers those boulders had poised and waiting up there, and kept moving until dark dimmed the road too much to see.

Then he camped in a little stand of brush as sheltered from the wind as he could manage. There were spooks—he thought one was a nightbaby, by the distressing images it sent.

Something evidently believed it. Whether it caught supper or whether it became supper, it went silent, and the ambient was quiet for a while.

He’d collected dead wood for some distance along the roadside before he camped, as much as he could conveniently carry—and now sheltering his little construction with his body and Burn’s, in this wide spot among the rocks where saplings clung, he built a tiny, well-protected fire, not easy when the wind searched out every nook and cranny.

So there was for Burn, and cakes for them both.

Not so bad, he said to himself, snugged down dry and warm with Burn for a backrest. He had his single-action handgun resting on his lap beneath the blanket—hand on the grip but his finger prudently off the trigger, ready, if Burn heard something that Burn couldn’t scare.

He heard only nuisance spooks, all during supper.

They sang. They imaged their fierceness. He settled to sleep against something that, if Burn roused and grew annoyed, could send louder than the lot of them.

Which Burn did from time to time, though not troubling to get up, when the ambient grew noisy with the nocturnal pests.

Guil sighed, imaged and shut his eyes in all confidence of Burn’s hearing the ambient even when Burn was asleep.

Danny decided, huddled in the lee of tumbled rocks, as another night came down. It had to be

Cloud hovered close, hungry and in an ill mood, but Cloud had kept that uncommon quiet, taking no chances, and imaging and so consistently Danny could hardly, at times, realize he was hearing Cloud and not seeing

He’d never known Cloud to do that before. He sometimes feared that something was wrong with Cloud’s mind; but Cloud grew disturbed when he tried to get Cloud’s attention—Cloud imaged and then went back to his so loudly he couldn’t see anything but that.

He didn’t know what they were going to do about food. He’d gone to sleep hungry one night, now it was the second, and he didn’t know where they were going to get food for either of them. He was mad at himself for not thinking to grab his packs, or anything— but he hadn’t been thinking at all when he’d run from the camp, and not thinking a lot today, in their forest of He was mostly scared.

They’d moved, today, and they’d seen game, but Cloud hadn’t wanted to hunt and he had no gun.

He could at least have made a fire. He had his burning-glass in his pocket, he’d some wrapped, waxed matches on him, but he was scared to do it for fear that Harper or a horse he didn’t want to meet or even think about would smell it on the wind, in this place where smells you didn’t notice downland were very, very obvious as man-made. So he’d made his bed with evergreen, the same as last night, with less desperation, with more care. And he really truly hoped Cloud would find them

But that wish got him nothing but so persistently it upset an empty and already chancy stomach.

They’d found a berry bush with berries still left out of reach of smaller creatures, and Cloud could eat the berries, so they were probably all right, but that wasn’t always true: human beings weren’t of the same earth-stuff as horses, and you couldn’t always rely on the safety of plants horses could eat—so once he’d seen Cloud go at them, he’d tucked handfuls of the autumn-dried berries in his pockets and eaten just one of them, figuring to test if he got stomachache or went strange afterward.

He hadn’t, and they were still in his pocket, so he nibbled a few. They were sour and set his teeth on edge, but they were better than an empty stomach.

Cloud found a few sprigs of dried grass that grew about the rocks, and licked lichen or some kind of fungus off the stone; at least it looked as if Cloud was getting something to eat out of all that effort—the image was now for variety, instead of

Which was probably smart to do, this business. But it made thinking and planning hard.

He watched Cloud for a while, wondering if the stuff on the rocks was edible—but he wasn’t greatly tempted to peel it off and have a try at any scummy fungus, no more than he was tempted to abandon the little warmth he’d found to go collect it.

He didn’t know where he’d go next, or, more to the point, where Cloud would be willing to take him. He was, he had to admit it to himself, lost—not lost, in not knowing where down was on the mountain, any fool could tell that, but lost because he didn’t know which side of the road he was on, and he didn’t know whether the nearest village was behind him or in front of him, above him or below him on the mountain. They hadn’t crossed a clear-cut, or seen any other indication of a road in any place they’d crossed.

Most disturbing—he figured that Cloud was imaging so fervently because there was a good reason for hiding.

Which made him, unwillingly, think about the and that he didn’t want to feel.

Cloud snorted and shied away from him, with louder than ever until he stopped and plunged his head into his hands and swore to the God back in Shamesey town he was through being a hero: he wanted Cloud would have his winter in the Wild, just not in the high country—

Because Cloud’s fool rider, having gotten them into one human mess after the other, had now lost all his gear and everything he owned. Cloud depended on his rider to see ahead and think ahead, and understand the Wild, and his fool rider hadn’t even understood human beings. He wasn’t any help to anybody, and the best thing he could do was get them off the mountain alive and get Cloud fed and safe.

<(Desire,)> came a thread of feeling. <(Bodies together, dark nighthorse bodies, feelings intense as the dark… )>

Danny caught a breath, roused out of sleep, suddenly beset by feelings he didn’t know where they’d come from—out of control, but he wouldn’t, he wouldn’t, he didn’t understand what was happening to him…

<(Wanting—wanting closeness, wanting—)>

came down on him, cold and quiet, poured down until he was lost in a breathing, snowy night. That was Cloud. He knew it was.

<(… bodies merging, tearing, ripping apart—)>

<<… Watt, running through the dark, running and running— chest aching, breath coming edged with cold and terror, not enough air, branches breaking against arms and face, jabbing at eyes, branches crashing and breaking—> >

Stuart on the porch. “Stay with your horse.” Jump across time. Another moment. “Stay with your horse.” Danny and Cloud at the fireside. “Stay with your horse, whatever goes wrong, stay with your horse.”

< >

Danny gasped, jerked, caught at the ground, couldn’t get breath, couldn’t overcome the falling-feeling—

< >

Then could. Danny sucked in a breath, his ribs able to move.

He got another, and another, and his gloved hands knew the solid ground was under him, he hadn’t fallen. He wasn’t falling. That was somebody else—somebody was dying.

He sat there with his heart pounding, sure he’d been somewhere else—that he’d been somebody else. He was sure that something had been behind him, but when he looked he saw only the night-shadowed trees and the solid stone of the mountain.

A presence went past them then, fast, like a blink of starless dark—it swirled and it reeled dizzily, it wanted, it fell, it rose, it was a man and it wasn’t—it was lost and it was angry and it was looking for someone, it lusted after sex, after touch, after feeling, after something it had <(lost and couldn’t find)>—

He suffered a spasm of chill, then of arousal, but he held himself still, too wary to catch. He felt on his face, and after a time of harsh, measured breathing the lust and the hurt and the wanting went away, sucked away into the dark farther and farther and farther, faster than any horse alive could run.

He thought at first it was another kind of falling, and clung to the rocks, shaking and afraid that the whole mountain would dissolve around him—straight outward into the air.

<(Hunger. Fright. Pouring through the woods—something chasing it. One and the same, predator and prey, feeding and fed upon. Pain and hunger embracing each other, tearing and biting—)>

—and shot dead.

Cloud thought, telling him he was stupid.

He felt his fists knotted up. Every musle was stiff. He was dreaming, he said to himself, remembering with eyes wide awake—he didn’t know for sure it was Harper. Things you heard in the ambient sometimes didn’t come to you full blown until later, sunken things rising to the surface ofyour mind with more and more detail. He kept seeing that dead face—

He was holding evergreen bits in his hands. He was on the ground, on his evergreen bed, testing whether he could breathe on his own, and whether the ground would stay still and the rocks not fly off into the night—his brain knew better than to trust what he’d just lived, but he couldn’t let go for a long while, couldn’t understand what had just happened, until he suffered a panicked fear and found Cloud nuzzling his cheek.

All right, he said to himself, all right, Danny Fisher, that was the rogue. You found it. That’s what you wanted. It’s up here. No gun. Nothing. Cloud’s got to get us out of here…

A rogue could send far, far across the mountain.

But if it wasn’t near them it couldn’t hear them, because sending that far, that was what it did—but it couldn’t hear farther than they sent—and they weren’t nearly as strong or as loud. Except—

Except the creatures near them. It picked that up, the same as they could, only maybe—better than they did.

It had been near Watt. He’d heard—he’d been Watt: the dark and the falling-feeling came back to him, the mind-taking pain of branches gouging an eye, tearing across his face—

Harper might still be alive. Quig might. He didn’t think Watt was. Somewhere on the mountain, Stuart might be alive. They might get the rogue. They might shoot it.

He had no gun. He sat and shook in the dark and fished a berry or two out of his pocket to take his mind off his fear.

Cloud came closer to him, hungry and Cloud could smell.

And suddenly he realized Cloud wasn’t stuck on the image any longer. Whatever Cloud had been saving them from—was gone from the ambient.

So Cloud got the berries. All he had. They weren’t much for Cloud’s big body, but Cloud got them, and Cloud’s rider had only one last one. Cloud was due that much.

Cloud would find more berries tomorrow, and they’d take the chance they had and go down the mountain, please God. He’d been stupid. He’d run off from his parents and come up on the mountain where a stupid kid hadn’t any experience or any business being. God punished people like that. But maybe they had one more chance to get out of this.

Cloud snorted, mad. Cloud didn’t understand God. But if that was God that was out there in the dark, Cloud took exception to his thinking about God: Cloud came between him and the wind and licked vigorously at his face, making it wet in the cold air. He tried to shove Cloud off, but Cloud wouldn’t leave him, Cloud pressed in so he had to tuck up tighter in his nook or have his face scrubbed raw.

He was warm, though. He shivered, and whenever he thought— as he had to—that what he’d felt was real, and Watt had run through the woods, and Watt had fallen off the edge of some cliff—he disturbed Cloud, who didn’t want him to, and who thought about where they were and about until he gave up trying to think of anything else.

He thought it was Cloud’s imaging. But he opened his eyes and felt it on his face when he looked up. It whitened the evergreen that made their blanket. It stuck to Cloud’s back.

The terror didn’t come back. Maybe the rogue was asleep.

Maybe it had found what it was hunting. But he hadn’t felt it satisfied. It had just—flown away, not finished with what it was doing.

—until the man was dead.

He squeezed his eyes tight, not wanting to think about that. So he thought, like Cloud, about and bore down on that thought very hard.