Into the West, page 24
“What’s a skink?” Delia whispered to Venidel.
“Kind of lizard,” he whispered back.
“So we have a singleton that seems to match all the earmarks of a Change-beast, and we have two packs of creatures of two different kinds that have the earmarks of being mage-made.” Jonaton did not seem to feel the cold as night closed down, but Delia couldn’t help but shiver when stray gusts of wind managed to get down her neck despite her collar being up. Or maybe it was fear.
Probably it’s both.
Endars pulled on his lower lip, which meant he was thinking. But Briada spoke up before he could say anything.
“If that weird forest is what Change-Circles look like, there’s good odds the bear came from there, rather than back downstream,” she said. “I can’t imagine having parts of you exchanged with lizard parts is anything but painful. A bear would have run a pretty long way after being hurt like that, and it would certainly have followed the river. They can run leagues without stopping if they’ve got a mind to or something terrifies them. And the bear doesn’t match the descriptions you gave of the terror-birds and the snake-dogs, where you can’t say, ‘Oh, that’s a snake head, and that part is a black eagle.’ It looked pretty much like patchwork: ‘Here’s a lizard belly, here’s lizard claws.’”
“According to what Rose saw of the birds and the dogs,” Amethyst spoke up, “that’s very much the case. The birds look like entire creatures, not bits of two or three thrown together. The dogs were the same, only more so. It wasn’t a patchwork where mismatched things are fitted together. It was, I would say, seamless.”
“Planned and designed, you mean?” Alberdina asked.
“I would say so, yes,” Amethyst confirmed.
“So the long and the short of it is that we have come into a land where—even if we can’t find much at the moment—magic energies must be readily available,” Endars said. “Available enough that mages can actually create living creatures—”
“Maybe, maybe not,” Sai replied, the flickering firelight making his face look slightly sinister. “We’re getting closer to where those wars five hundred years ago were fought. These things could be left over from that. The terror-birds and the snake-dogs, that is.” He brushed his long, straight hair behind his ear, a habit he had when he was thinking aloud. “If there weren’t a lot of them to begin with, they’d be inbred pretty quickly.” He poked at the fire with a stick. “The impetus for why they showed up to us or to the convoy, though, seems to be quite different as well. The bear probably found us completely by accident. But I just don’t like it that the birds attacked after Kordas drove off the dogs. What are the odds of that?”
Jonaton sighed. “I don’t like that either. It’s too much of a coincidence, don’t you think?” He looked at Endars, who shrugged, sending writhing shadows all over his torso.
“Or there are more packs of both of those creatures than we know of, and it was just a matter of time before they found us,” Endars pointed out. “If we don’t assign causality. True randomness includes clusters. And at any rate, the Gate will take us far away from this part of the river. That just might answer the question as to whether this was a targeted, deliberate attack or a mere coincidence. If they come after us when we are on the other side of the new Gates, then clearly, we should adopt the posture that they’re sent to attack us.”
Sai nodded, and the conversation turned to how quickly they could get Gates up and get moving, because winter was not “coming” anymore, it was here. Sooner or later they were going to have to stop and wait it out, and they were going to need a pretty large expanse of safe, not-flooding-in-spring land to hold all of them. But are the Gates taking us to where the lizard-bear came from? Delia wondered. And are there more monstrous things there that we haven’t any idea about? And what about that forest has Jonaton so perturbed?
The other two teams came back on the morning of the fifth day, and the work erecting the Gates began. By this point the third and fourth set of Gate uprights had arrived on their own barges, towed by a pair of mages, each riding a Charger. They weren’t mages Delia knew well, so she just greeted them and stood back.
The first and second sets of uprights had already been unloaded—not by magic, nor Fetching, but by the simple expedient of putting planks under each end and sliding them down to the riverbank. They didn’t roll, because they were curved, but they slid just fine. The new uprights came off their barges the same way, and went back on the scouts’ barges while the mages worked on the first Gate.
The meeting and greeting didn’t take long. The two mages turned the empty barges to point downstream, hitched up the horses, and were away before anything but a few courteous words, some warning about the terror-birds, and a quick meal in the form of flatbread wrapped around steamed fish filets and herbs.
Delia couldn’t help but notice the two mages kept one eye on the sky as they rode off. She didn’t blame them. According to Amethyst, the birds hadn’t gone after human adults in the convoy, but they were huge, and they might consider a massed attack on two humans with two horses to be worth the risk.
The uprights for the temporary Gate were spaced so closely together on the narrow shoreline that there was just enough room for the Tow-Beast to get through, dragging two of the uprights behind him. If Delia understood correctly, they’d have had to make the opening that small no matter what; the amount of power coming via the anchor right now just wasn’t enough for anything larger. They could make a temporary Gate on that side, but not only did it have to be small, they couldn’t keep it open for long. Once the proper Gate had been set up, there would be enough power for both Gates to operate all day and all night.
Now they split the party in half. Jonaton went through the Gate to the other side accompanied by Ivar and Hakkon; obviously, being the expert, he’d be able to get the receptive Gate up in the course of the morning, and that new ley-line would be feeding magical energy to the entire arcane construct in no time. As soon as his crew was through, Sai set about the work of creating a mooring point for the water-side upright. Jonaton would be doing the same, of course; in fact, that would be his team’s first task.
Delia had no idea what Sai was doing, and he didn’t bother to explain any of it to her. It was obvious that he was doing something; he kept staring at a point in the river that was about a cart-length from the bank. Far enough that the barges would be able to move smoothly through it even if their roofs were laden with things that stuck out over the sides. He made odd little movements in the air with his fingers, and his furrowed brow had little sweat beads on it.
Then she spotted something dark just under the surface of the river, right where he was staring. It wasn’t long before it rose slowly to the surface and broke it, like a fish coming up for a fly: a perfectly square pillar of what looked like rock. Gray rock. A bit darker than the water today. Is it rock? Or is it made of magic, somehow? It looked a lot like the rocks here on the shoreline, but what did she know? The Emperor had mages that could build entire manors with magic, after all.
When the top of the pillar was just about exactly even with the shore, Sai straightened and dropped his hands to his sides. “Well, that’s the hard part done,” he said to Delia. “The hard part on our side, at least. All of the uprights are tuned to each other, so they all resonate at—” Delia must have looked baffled, because he barked a short laugh. “I’ve spent too much of my life with other mages. Doesn’t matter. Endars, Venidel, and I will move the upright and make it one with the pillar, do some other things you won’t be able to see, and invoke a full Gate spell with the power for it coming from Jonaton’s ley-line. Jonaton will be doing all the work on his side, and everything will be controlled from his side. Then Endars, Venidel, and I will need to fall into our beds for a while, Jonaton will need to do the same, and the Fairweathers will be in charge of bringing the barges through to Jonaton’s side.”
“Is there anything I can do to help?” she asked anxiously.
He pinched the bridge of his nose and closed his eyes. “Police the campfire, make sure no one’s left anything that should be in the barges, load whatever’s been left onto a barge—it doesn’t matter which one—and make sure the fire is out, the embers soaked and scattered. Oh! And if there are any fodder balls left, or wood bundles, load them on a barge. No point in wasting them.” He then turned to Venidel and Endars, who had waited until he was done talking to her to approach, and the three of them went into a conference. They were stopped by Sai for a moment, and he said, half-turned her way, “You’re adapting to the life of a scout pretty well.”
Delia felt a blush, and beamed.
Bret and Bart were already harnessing up the horses and either putting them in place to tow, or tethering them on very long leads to the other barges. Amethyst, Alberdina, and Briada vanished inside barges to make sure everything was stowed and secured. That left her with the camp—which was not a great deal of work. Sai hadn’t left so much as a cucumber seed behind, it was the work of a moment to Fetch the last four bales of fodder and secure them to the already-secured wood on the top of the supply barge, she Fetched about four bucketfuls of water right down on top of the fire with a sploosh, and after that, there was nothing left to do but make certain the embers were stone cold and scatter them.
And meanwhile, all three mages were practically staring holes in the Gate upright, as it drifted smoothly and serenely toward its stone pillar, eased softly down to its proper place—
And then there was a brief flash of light that blinded her for a moment. When she could see again, the Gate upright was in place, looking as if it had always been there, standing tall and slightly curved against the background of water and riverbank. And between this upright and the one still on the bank stretched the peculiar reflective-water effect of a Gate that was ready to use.
“Has Jonaton gotten his Gate up already?” she asked Sai in open astonishment.
The old man sighed and sagged a little. “Very likely. Of course, this just might be a sign that the power from the ley-line on the other side is coming to this Gate through the anchor, but I doubt that very much. The boy is good, and he’s younger than we are, curse him. He can do alone what it takes two or three of us Old Men.”
“And he’s handsome, too! This is how we know all the gods hate us,” Venidel chimed in.
“Every last one,” Endars agreed.
At just that moment, there was a plop and a splash—and a crude little boat made of bits of wood held together with a bit of string with a leaf for a sail swirled away from the Gate on the sluggish current.
“Well, there’s the answer. The other Gate is up. Jonaton did all the heavy work at his end, and we might as well get moving,” Sai said.
“You are going to lie down in your bunk,” Briada Fairweather said, with a jerk of her head toward the barges. “Leave the moving to us.”
Since there really wasn’t anything else to be done at the camp, Sai allowed his fatigue to show, and plodded over to the men’s barge, followed by Endars and Venidel. Delia ran back and jumped onto the middle barge to keep a lookout next to Amethyst. She was pleased to see that the Fairweather lads took up similar positions on the first and last barges bearing full-sized crossbows and deadly war bolts meant for piercing armor.
As for Briada, she had a war bow of her own, and was mounted on the Charger that Kordas had given her. Anything that the arrows or Delia brought down, the horse would turn into broken bones, blood, and feathers. Briada chirruped to the Tow-Beast to tell him to move on.
The Tow-Beast knew his business and did not need a leader or someone to guide him; he responded completely to voice commands. And now he strained in his harness, and Delia braced herself for the little jolt as the barge ahead of hers started to move, the ties strained, and her barge jerked into motion.
She braced herself again for the Gate transition, but this one must have covered a shorter distance than any other transition she’d experienced, because it was just a momentary sensation of cold and falling.
And then . . . they were on a whole new section of the river. And the noise! She looked behind her, and since the Gate didn’t even cover a quarter of the river, she had a clear view of the rapids that they had just bypassed. But she would have known they were there without looking; the water roared and thundered, and the barges actually vibrated with the sound. There was so much spray in the air that it smelled like rain, and thanks to all that moisture, the air felt like ice.
She’d never actually seen rapids before—there hadn’t been anything like rough water at Crescent Lake, and all the waterways around the Valdemar manor were man-made canals. One look at the churning river and enormous boulders sticking up everywhere made her knees feel a little wobbly. On this side of the river was what was left of a cliff; it looked as if at some point in the past the entire thing had collapsed into the river, narrowing the channel and forming the rapids.
We’d never have survived trying to tow the barges through that.
And . . . the collapsed cliff went back as far as she could see—and a lot farther beyond that, since it must have taken Jonaton and Briada at least a day to ride past the rapids to this point. What brought that much rock down all at once? It looked as if it had happened a long, long time ago. Was it that war of mages they keep talking about?
The Gate had been set up at a point where the river resembled the stretch they had just left behind, and immediately after that the banks narrowed dramatically and the water, now forced to go through a smaller channel, sped up to the point that it surged over the rocks in its path and leapt into the air in standing waves.
She had expected Jonaton to have set up a camp here, but he just added his horse to the Tow-Beast so they were now pulling double in harness, waited for the men’s barge to come even with him, and with assistance from Ivar, managed to roll himself over the railing and onto the barge, where he lay on the narrow deck for a moment. Then Venidel helped him up and into the barge itself.
. . . if something comes along that only magic can defeat . . . we are in big trouble. With all of the mages needing rest, was this really the time to be moving forward?
On the other hand, you couldn’t hear much of anything here, and the damp and cold couldn’t be good for them. Maybe it was better to move. Ow. This mist coating everything we have in ice would be dangerous, and there would be more every day, if we stayed here. We’d be found in the spring melt, glazed like a bad candy.
Ivar mounted his horse, which was tied up beside the Gate, and sent it trotting up to Hakkon. She couldn’t hear anything they said over the roar of the water, but he came back to her barge, loose-tied Manta to it, and he and Bay leapt aboard.
He and Bay clambered up on the roof to sit there beside her and Amethyst. The Doll began petting Bay’s enormous head without prompting, and the dog put his head in her lap, overcome with doggy bliss. Strange how all the animals seem to like the Dolls, she thought. Maybe they understand that the Dolls would never hurt them.
“We’ve got a campsite marked out ahead, away from the rapids but before the weird forest,” Ivar told her in a half-bellow. “We have to get away from the rapids, no matter what. Otherwise we aren’t going to be able to hear conversations, much less hear things coming through the brush at us. And I don’t fancy trying to sleep in damp blankets even once. Jonaton and Briada said they didn’t have any trouble passing through that uncanny forest, but I got a look at it, and I don’t want to take any chances.” He paused a moment. “When we reach it, don’t leave the barge. And don’t kill anything. I . . . just have a feeling. Keep to supplies aboard. Even if you think we are desperate for firewood, don’t snap off what look like dead branches; don’t Fetch anything that isn’t lying on the ground. The further north we go, the weirder the animals get. This time out, we spotted vanishing herons. Turn to the side and they disappear; just their legs show. Anything hidden by feathers? Invisible. We only saw them when we were two horselengths from them. Find that on a predator, or on razorvine, well. Bad day. We may not be able to trust what we see.”
It wasn’t just because of the damp cold that she shivered. “Can we get through it in a day?” she asked.
At this point, Briada noticed they were talking, added her horse to the string, and dismounted with impossible agility and skill right onto the barge. “Please tell me we are stopping short of the forest,” she shouted.
“We’re stopping short of the forest,” Ivar told her. “Delia is concerned about whether we can get through it in a day.”
“That won’t be a problem. My horse couldn’t get out of it fast enough. If we start early-early-early, feed the horses and mules well overnight, and hitch every animal to the barges, we should get out of it well before sunset. The beasts are going to need a good rest afterward, but that’s a small price to pay for not being in that place when the sun goes down.”
“I am relaying all this information to Rose,” Amethyst said, pitching her voice high to carry over the noise of the water.
There was no forest right here by the rapids, only rocky banks in the bottom of a narrow valley covered in scrub brush and tall grass. Now Delia was very glad that she’d loaded down the last barge with wood, although it didn’t look as if they were going to be in any need of fodder for the horses.
She glanced up ahead; it looked as if the river made a big curve to the west, following the valley. Perhaps that would cut off some of the sound from the rapids.
Briada and Ivar were talking, but she couldn’t hear them. It didn’t really matter; neither of them looked at her for a reaction or an answer to anything, so they were probably discussing the camp and what provisions to make for guarding it. She went back to watching the sky. Bay would certainly alert if something came over the hill, and his senses were far superior to hers. But he probably would not pay attention to the sky; dogs were seldom attacked by anything overhead. Really, what could successfully attack a mastiff the size of Bay that could also fly?
