Beguilement

Chapter 4

When the faint path he was following up into the hills turned into something more resembling a beaten trail, Dag decided it was time to get off it.

Groundsense or common sense or sheer nerves, he could not tell, but he dismounted and led his horse aside into the woods to a small glade well out of sight and hearing of the track. He hardly needed to lay on suggestions of not-wandering-away; even Copperhead, with his rawhide endurance and his temper, was so tired as to be stumbling. But then, so was Dag. Feeling guilty, he tied the reins up out of the way of front hooves, but left the saddle on. He hated to leave his mount so ill tended, but if he came back in a tearing hurry, there might be no time to fool with gear. Or to hesitate to ride the beast to death, if needs drove hard enough. Tomorrow, or the day after, we shall all take a better rest. One way or another.

He did not return to the trail itself but shadowed the track a dozen paces off in the undergrowth. It was slow work, ghosting like a deer, each footfall carefully laid, constantly alert. Not a mile farther on he was glad of his prudence, freezing in a tangle of deadfall and wild grapevines as two figures came thumping openly along the path.

Mud-men. A fox and a rabbit, at a guess, and he hardly needed his inner senses to tell; they were crude, perhaps early efforts, and marks of their animal origin still showed on their hides, their ears, their misshapen faces and noses.

It was highly tempting to try to do something with that combination, awaken them to their true selves and let nature take its course, but the attempt would cost him his cover, perhaps open him to their master beyond. This was no time for games. Regretfully, he let them pass by, grateful that their clumsy new forms included human limitations on their sense of smell in trade for human advantages of hands and speech.

He first knew he was drawing close to the lair by the absence of birds. This is a day for absences. He drew his groundsense in even more tightly as the first yellowing, dying weeds began to rustle underfoot. I wasn’t expecting this till miles farther in. The lair was much closer to the straight road than he’d thought it could possibly be. It was shockingly clever, in a malice so—supposedly—young, for it to send its first human gulls to take prey so far from its initial bastion. How did we overlook this?

He knew how. We are too few, with too much ground to cover and never time enough. Widen the teeth of the sweeps, speed the search, and risk clues slipping past unobserved. Go slow and close, and risk not getting to all the critical places in time. Well, we found this one. This is a success, not a failure.

Maybe.

By the time he reached a vantage he was crawling like a snail, nearly on his belly, scarcely daring to breathe. Every herb and weed around him was dead and brittle, the soil beneath his knees was achingly sterile, and his tightly furled groundsense shivered in the dry shock of the malice’s draining aura. Indeed, it’s here.

At the bottom of a rocky ravine, a creek wound from his right, ran straight below him, and curled away on his left. Not one living plant graced the cleft for as far as he could see in either direction, although the dead bones of a few trees still stood up like sentinels. A camp, of sorts, lay along the creek side: three or four black campfire pits, currently cold, piles of stolen supplies scattered haphazardly about. On the far side of the creek, a couple of uneasy horses stood tied to dead trees. Real, natural horses, as far as Dag could tell.

Ill kept, of course.

The space below might accommodate twenty-five or fifty men, but it was nearly deserted at the moment. Exactly one mud-man was asleep on a pile of rags like a nest. Dag wondered if any of the absent company might be men his patrol had captured last night. Which implied that the patrol might well arrive on its own at any time, pleasant thought. He did not allow himself to dwell on the hope.

Partway up the other side of the ravine a shelf of overhanging rock created a cave, perhaps sixty feet long and shielded in front by a smooth gray outcrop of stone pushing up almost to meet the overhang. No telling from here how far back in it went. Paths ran out either end, down to the creek and up over the rise behind.

The malice was inside, at the moment. So was it mobile yet, or still sessile?

And if mobile, had it undergone its first molt? And if it hadn’t, how frantic would it be to gather the necessary human materials to achieve that? A

malice’s initial hatching body was even clumsier and cruder than a mud-man’s, which generally seemed to irritate it.

Dag opened his shirt and felt for his sharing knives. He pulled the strap over his head and stared a moment at the twin sheaths. The stitched leather was slick with wear and dark with old sweat. He ran one finger over the thread-wound hilts, one blue, one green, drew and contemplated six inches of polished bone blade. Touched it to his lips. It hummed with old mortality.

Is this the day your death is redeemed, Kauneo my love? I have borne it around my neck for so long. As you willed, so I do. This was a vicious malice, big and getting bigger fast. It would nearly be worthy of her, Dag thought. Nearly.

He drew the second, empty bone blade and laid the two back to back. They come in pairs, oh yes. One for you and one for me. He slipped them away again.

Mari too bore sharing knives, and so did Utau and Chato, gifts of mortality from patrollers before them. Mari’s current set was a legacy from one of her sons, he knew, and as dear to her as these to Dag. The patrol was well supplied. Who used theirs on a malice was not normally a matter of drawing straws, or heroics, or honor. Whoever first could, did. Any way they could. As efficiently as possible.

It wasn’t as though there wouldn’t be another chance later.

Dag’s ground was quivering at the drain from the malice’s presence, an effect that would bleed over into his body if he lingered here much longer.

Sensitive young patrollers were often so disturbed by their first encounter with a malice’s aura, it took them weeks to recover. Dag had been one such. Once.

Now: go. Back to the horse, and gallop like a madman to the rendezvous point.

Yet… there were so few creatures in the camp. The opportunity beckoned for a, so to speak, single-handed attempt. Down the ravine side, fly across the creek, up into that cave… it could all be over in minutes. In the time it took to bring the patrol up, the malice too might draw in its reinforcements (and where were they now, doing what mischief?), turning the attack into a potentially costly fight just to regain a proximity he had right now. Dag thought of Saun. Had he lived the night?

But with his groundsense thwarted, Dag couldn’t see how many men or mud-men might be hidden in the cave with the malice. If he went charging in there only to present his head to the enemy, the difficulties his patrol must then face would grow vastly worse. Also, I would be dead. In a way, he was glad that last prospect still had the power to disturb him. At least some.

He lowered his face, fought for control of his hastened breathing, and prepared to withdraw. His lips twisted. Mari will be so proud of me.

He started to push back from the edge of the ravine, but then froze again.

Down a path on the other side, three mud-men appeared. Was that first one a—where had this malice found a wolf in these parts? Dag had thought the farmers had reduced wolf numbers in this region, but then, this range of rugged unplowable hills was a reservoir for all sorts of things. As we see. His eyes widened as he recognized the second in line, the escaped raccoon-man from this morning. The third, huger still, must once have been a black bear. A flash of familiar dull blue fabric over the giant bear-man’s shoulder stopped his breath.

Little Spark. They found Little Spark. How… ?

A more or less straight line over the hills to the valley farm from here was the short leg of a triangle, he realized. He had run two long legs, to get from the farm back to where he’d first lost the raccoon-man’s traces, then work his way here.

They found her because they went looking, I bet. It accounted for the rest of this malice’s absent company; like the two he’d passed on the trail, they had doubtless all been dispatched to comb the hills for the escaped prize. And the malice and its mud-men already knew about the valley farm if they’d recently raided it. Must have known for a long time; his respect for this one’s wits notched up yet again, for it to leave such a nearby tempting target alone, unmolested and unalarmed, for so long. How much strength had it gained, to dare to move openly now? Or had the arrival of Chato’s patrol stampeded it?

The blue-clad figure, hanging head down, twitched and struggled. Beat the back of her captor with hard little fists, to no visible effect, except that the bear-man shrugged her hips higher over his shoulder and took a firmer grip on her thighs.

She was alive. Conscious. Undoubtedly terrified.

Not terrified enough. But Dag could make it up for her. His mouth opened, to silence his own speeding breathing, and his heart hammered. Now the malice had just what it needed for its next molt. Dag had only to deliver to it a Lakewalker patroller—and one so experienced, too—for its dessert, and its powers would be complete.

He wasn’t sure if he was shivering with indecision or just fear. Fear, he decided. Yes, he could run back to the patrol and bring them on in force, by the tested rules, be sure. Because the Lakewalkers had to win, every time. But Fawn might be dead by the time they got back.

Or in minutes. The three mud-men vanished behind the occluding rock wall. So, at least three in there. Of there could be ten.

To get in and out of that cave… No. He only had to get in.

He didn’t know why his brain was still madly trying to calculate risks, because his hand was already moving. Dropping bow and quiver and excess gear.

Positioning his sharing-knife sheaths. Swapping out the spring-hook on his wooden wrist cap for the steel knife. Testing the draw of his war knife.

He rose and dropped down over the side of the ravine, sliding from rock to rill as silently as a serpent. It had all happened so fast…

Fawn hung head down, dizzy and nauseated. She wondered if the blow she’d taken on the other side of her face would bruise to match the first. The mud-man’s broad shoulder seemed to punch her stomach as it jogged along endlessly, without stopping even when she’d been violently sick down its back. Twice.

When Dag came back to the valley farm—if Dag came back to the valley farm—would he be able to read the events from the mess her fight had left in the kitchen?

He was a tracker, surely he’d have to notice the footprints in plum jam she had forced her captors to smear across the floor as they’d lunged after her. But it seemed far too much to expect the man to rescue her twice in one day, downright embarrassing, even. Imagining the indignity, she tried one more time to break from the huge mud-man’s clutch, beating its back with her fists. She might have been pounding sand for all the difference it made.

She should save her strength for a better chance.

What strength? What chance?

The hot, level sunlight of the summer evening gave way abruptly to gray shadow and the cool smell of dirt and rock. As her captor swung her down and upright, she had a giddy impression of a cave or hollow half-filled with piles of trash.

Or war supplies, it was hard to tell. She fought back the black shadows that swarmed over her vision and stood upright, blinking.

Two more of the animal-men rose as if to greet her three escorts. She wondered if they were all about to fall on her and tear her up like a pack of dogs devouring a rabbit. Although she wasn’t entirely sure but what that shorter one on the end might have been a rabbit, once.

The Voice said, “Bring her here.”

The words were more clearly spoken than the mud-men’s mumblings, but the undertones made her bones feel as though they were melting. She suddenly could not force her trembling face to turn toward the source of that appalling sound.

It seemed to flay the wits right out of her mind. Please let me go please let me go let me go letmego…

The bear-man clutched her shoulders and half dragged, half lifted her to the back of the cave, a long shallow gouge in the hillside. And turned her face-to-face with the source of the Voice.

It might have been a mud-man, if bigger, taller, broader. Its shape was human enough, a head with two eyes, nose, mouth, ears—broad torso, two arms, two legs.

But its skin was not even like an animal’s, let alone a human’s. It made her think of lizards and insects and rock dust plastered together with bird lime.

It was hairless. The naked skull was faintly crested. It was quite unclothed, and seemingly unconscious of the fact; the strange lumps at its crotch didn’t look like a man’s genitals, or a woman’s either. It didn’t move right, as though it were a child’s bad clay sculpture given motion and not a breathing creature of bone and sinew and muscle.

The mud-men had animal eyes in human faces, and seemed unspeakably dangerous.

This… had human eyes in the face of a nightmare. No, no nightmare she had ever dreamed or imagined—one of Dag’s, maybe. Trapped. Tormented. And yet, for all its pain, as devoid of mercy as a stone. Or a rockslide.

It clutched her shirt, lifted her up to its face, and stared at her for a long, long moment. She was crying now, in fear beyond shame. She would deal with Dag’s rescue, yes, or anybody’s at all. She would trade back for her bandit-ravisher.

She would deal with any god listening, make any promise… letmegoletmego...

With a slow, deliberate motion, the malice lifted her skirt with its other hand, twitched her drawers down to her hips, and drew its claws up her belly.

The pain was so intense, Fawn thought for a moment that she had been gutted.

Her knees came up in an involuntary spasm, and she screamed. The sound came so tightly out of her raw throat that it turned into near silence, a rasping hiss.

She lowered her face, expecting to see blood spewing, her insides coming out.

Only four faint red lines marked the pale unbroken skin of her belly.

“Drop her!” a hoarse voice roared from her right.

The malice’s face turned, its eyes blinking slowly; Fawn turned too. The sudden release of pressure from her shirt took her utterly by surprise, and she fell to the cave floor, dirt and stones scraping her palms, then scrambled up.

Dag was in the shadows, struggling with three, no, all five of the mud-men.

One reeled backward with a slashed throat, and another closed in. Dag nearly disappeared under the grunting pile of creatures. A shuffle, a rip, Dag’s yell, and a mess of straps and wood and a flash of metal thudded violently against the cave wall. A mud-man had just torn off his arm contraption. The mud-man twisted the arm around behind Dag’s back as though trying to rip it off too.

He met her eyes. Shoved his big steel knife into the nearest mud-man as though wedging it into a tree for safekeeping, and ripped a leather pouch from around his neck, its strap snapping. “Spark! Watch this!”

She kept her eyes on it as it sailed toward her and, to her own immense surprise, caught it out of the air. She had never in her life caught—.

Another mud-man jumped on Dag.

“Stick it in!” he bellowed, going down again. “Stick it in the malice!”

Knives. The pouch had two knives. She pulled one out. It was made of bone.

Magic knives? “Which?” she cried frantically.

“Sharp end first! Anywhere!”

The malice was starting to move toward Dag. Feeling as though her head was floating three feet above her body, Fawn thrust the bone knife deeply into the thing’s thigh.

The malice turned back toward her, howling in surprise. The sound split her skull. The malice caught her by the neck, this time, and lifted her up, its hideous face contorting.

“No! No!” screamed Dag. “The other one!”

Her one hand still clutched the pouch; the other was free. She had maybe one second before the malice shook her till her neck snapped, like a kitchen boy killing a chicken. She yanked the spare bone blade out of its sheath and jammed it forward. It skittered over something, maybe a rib, then caught and went in, but only a couple of inches. The blade shattered. Oh no—!

She was falling, falling as if from a great height. The ground struck her a stunning blow. She shoved herself up once more, everything spinning around her.

Before her eyes, the malice was slumping. Bits and pieces sloughed off it like ice blowing from a roof. Its awful, keening voice went up and up and higher still, fading out yet leaving shooting pains in her ears.

And gone. In front of her feet was a pile of sour-smelling yellow dirt. The first knife, the one with the blue haft that hadn’t worked, lay before it. In her ears was silence, unless she’d just gone deaf.

No, for a scuffle began again to her right. She whirled, thinking to snatch up the knife and try to help. Its magic might have failed, but it still had an edge and a point. But the three mud-men still on their feet had stopped trying to tear the patroller apart, and instead were scrambling away, yowling. One bowled her over in its frantic flight, apparently without any destructive intent.

This time, she stayed on her hands and knees. Gasping. She had thought her body must run out of shakes in sheer exhaustion, but the supply seemed endless. She had to clench her teeth to keep them from chattering, like someone freezing to death.

Her belly cramped.

Dag was sitting on the ground ten feet away with a staggered look on his face, legs every which way, mouth open, gasping for air just as hard as she was.

His left sleeve was ripped off, and his handless arm was bleeding from long scratches. He must have taken a blow to his face, for one eye was already tearing and swelling.

Fawn scrabbled around till her hand encountered the other knife hilt, the green one that had splintered in the malice. Where was the malice? “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I broke it.” She was sniveling now, tears and snot running down her lip from her nose. “I’m sorry…”

“What?” Dag looked up dazedly, and began to crawl toward her one-handed in strange slow hops, his left arm curled up protectively to his chest.

Fawn pointed a trembling finger. “I broke your magic knife.”

Dag stared down at the green-wrapped hilt with a disoriented look on his face, as if he was seeing it for the first time. “No… it’s all right… they’re supposed to do that. They break like that when they work. When they teach the malice how to die.”

“What?”

“Malices are immortal. They cannot die. If you tore that body into a hundred bits, the malice’s… self, would just flee away to another hole and reassemble itself. Still knowing everything it had learned in this incarnation, and so twice as dangerous. They cannot die on their own, so you have to share a death with them.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I’ll explain more,” he wheezed, “later…” He rolled over on his back, hair sweaty and wild; dilated eyes, the color of sassafras tea in the shadows, looking blankly upwards. “Absent gods. We did it. It’s done. You did it! What a mess. Mari will kill me. Kiss me first, though, I bet. Kiss us both.”

Fawn sat on her knees, bent over her cramps. “Why didn’t the first knife work?

What was wrong with it?”

“It wasn’t primed. I’m sorry, I didn’t think. In a hurry. A patroller would have known which was which by touch. Of course you couldn’t tell.” He rolled over on his left side and reached for the blue-hiked knife. “That one’s mine, for me someday.”

His hand touched it and jerked back. “What the… ?” His lips parted, eyes going suddenly intent, and he reached again, gingerly. He drew his hand back more slowly this time, the lunatic exhilaration draining from his face. “That’s strange. That’s very strange.”

“What?” snapped Fawn, pain and bewilderment making her sharp. Her body was beaten, her neck felt half-twisted-off, and her belly kept on knotting in aching waves. “You don’t tell me anything that makes sense, and then I go and do stupid things, and it’s not my fault.”

“Oh, I think this one is. That’s the rule. Credit goes to the one who does, however scrambled the method. Congratulations, Little Spark. You have just saved the world. My patrol will be so pleased.”

She would have thought him ragging her mercilessly, but while his words seemed wild, his level tone was perfectly serious. And his eyes were warm on her, without a hint of… malice.

“Maybe you’re just crazy,” she said gruffly, “and that’s why nothing you say makes sense.”

“No surprise by now if I am,” he said agreeably. With a grunting effort, he rolled over and up onto his knees, hand propping him upright. He opened his jaw as if to stretch his face, as though it had gone numb, and blinked owlishly.

“I have to get off this dead dirt. It’s fouling up my groundsense something fierce.”

“Your what?”

“I’ll explain that later”—he sighed—“too. I’ll explain anything you want.

You’re owed, Little Spark. You’re owed the world.” He added after a reflective moment,

“Many people are. Doesn’t change the matter.”

He started to reach for the unbroken knife again, then paused, his expression growing inward. “Would you do me a favor? Pick that up and carry it along for me. The hilt and the bits of the other, too. It needs proper burying, later on.”

Fawn tried not to look at his stump, which was pink and lumpy and appeared sore.

“Of course. Of course. Did they break your hand thing?” She spotted the pouch a few feet away and crawled to get it. She wasn’t sure she could stand up yet either. She collected the broken bits in his torn-off sleeve and slid the intact knife back into its sheath.

He rubbed his left arm. “Afraid so. It isn’t meant to come off that way, by a long shot. Dirla will fix it, she’s good with leather. It won’t be the first time.”

“Is your arm all right?”

He grinned briefly. “It isn’t meant to come off that way either, though that bear-fellow sure tried. Nothing’s broken. It’ll get better with rest.”

He shoved to his feet and stood with legs braced apart, swaying, until he seemed sure he wouldn’t just fall down again. He limped slowly around the cave collecting first his ruined arm contraption, which he wrapped over his shoulder by its leather straps, then, fallen farther away, his big knife. He swiped it on his filthy shirt and resheathed it. He rolled his shoulders and squinted around for a moment, apparently saw nothing else he wanted, and walked back to Fawn.

Her sharpening cramps almost doubled her over when she tried to rise; he gave her a hand up. She stuffed the pouch and rolled sleeve in her shirt. Leaning on each other, they staggered for the light.

“What about the mud-men? Won’t they jump us again?” asked Fawn fearfully as they came out on the path overlooking the dead ravine.

“No. It’s all over for them when their malice dies. They go back to their animal minds—trapped in those made-up human bodies. They usually panic and run. They don’t do too well, after. We kill them for mercy when we can. Otherwise, they die on their own pretty quick. Horrible, really.”

“Oh.”

“The men whose minds the malice has seized, its fog lifts from them, too.

They revert.”

“A malice enslaves men, too?”

“When its powers grow more advanced. I think this one might have, for all it was still in its first molt.”

“And they’ll… be freed? Wherever they may be?”

“Sometimes freed. Sometimes go mad. Depends.”

“On what?”

“On what they’ve been doing betimes. They remember, d’you see.”

Fawn wasn’t entirely sure she did. Or wished to.

The air was warm, but the sun was setting through bare branches, as though winter had become untimely mixed with summer. “This day has been ten years long,” Dag sighed. “Got to get me off this bad ground. My horse is too far away to summon. Think we’ll take those.” He pointed to two horses tied to trees near the creek and led her down the zigzag path toward them. “I don’t see any gear.

Can you ride bareback?”

“Usually, but right now I feel pretty sick,” Fawn admitted. She was still shaking, and she felt cold and clammy. Her breath drew in as another violent cramp passed through her. That is not good. That is something very wrong. She had thought herself fresh out of fear, a year’s supply used up, but now she was not so sure.

“Huh. Think you’d be all right if I held you in front of me?”

The unpleasant memory of her ride with the bandit this morning—had it only been this morning? Dag was right, this day was a decade—flashed through her mind.

Don’t be stupid. Dag is different. Dag, on the whole, was different from any other person she’d ever met in her life. She gulped. “Yeah. I… yeah, probably.”

They arrived at the horses, Fawn stumbling a little. Dag ran his hand over them, humming to himself in a tuneless way, and turned one loose after first filching its rope, shooing it off. It trotted away as if glad to be gone. The other was a neat bay mare with black socks and a white star; he fastened the rope to her halter to make reins and led her to a fallen log. He kept trying to use his left limb to assist, wincing, then remembering, which, among all Fawn’s other hurts, made her heart ache strangely.

“Can you get yourself up, or do you need a boost?”

Fawn stood whitely. “Dag?” she said in a small, scared voice.

His head snapped around at her tone, and tilted attentively. “What?”

“I’m bleeding.”

He walked back to her. “Where? Did they cut you? I didn’t see…”

Fawn swallowed hard, thinking that her face would be scarlet if only it had not been green. In an even smaller voice, she choked out, “Between… between my legs.”

The loopy glee that had underlain his expression ever since the killing of the malice was wiped away as if with a rag. “Oh.” And he did not seem to require a single further word of explanation, which was a good thing, as well as being amazing in a man, because Fawn was out of everything. Words. Courage. Ideas.

He took a deep breath. “We still have to get off this ground. Deathly place. have to get you, get you someplace else. Away from here. We’ll just go a little faster, is all. You’re going to have to help me with this. Help each other.”

It took two tries and considerable awkwardness, but they both managed to get aboard the bay mare at last, thankfully a placid beast. Fawn sat not astride but sideways across Dag’s lap, legs pressed together, head to his left shoulder, arm around his neck, leaving his right hand free for the reins. He chirped to the horse and started them off at a brisk walk.

“Stay with me, now,” he murmured into her hair. “Do not let go, you hear?”

The world was spinning, but under her ear she could hear a steady heartbeat.

She nodded dolefully.