Horizon

18

The malice stopped barely two hundred paces off, a little to their right where the road started to bend around the outcrop. It seemed to sniff the air, swinging its great hairless head back and forth. Seven feet tall at least, and Dag guessed from its livid, mottled skin that its initial lair must have lain among gray rocks, which didn’t narrow it much; thousands of dells, cracks, caves, and overhangs lined this valley. The malice looked quite odd, standing out naked in the sunlit green space.

It belonged hidden in cold shadow, where spring didn’t reach and ice lingered and its monstrousness might be concealed.

Dag didn’t know how much those glittering too-human eyes, lurking under brows like their own little limestone overhangs, could see in this light. He prayed the other patrollers had their grounds furled as tightly as his own. Shielded Whit would be an ambiguous glow in its groundsense, a smudgy something, alive yet elusive. It could likely sense the horses by now, growing uneasy behind the rocks.

It certainly sensed something, because it snorted, and a dozen of its mud-men left the road and began to wade through the waist-high scrub toward the outcrop. Even the mud-men flinched from last year’s thorns on the dry blackberry canes, which crackled as they fought through them. The angle between Dag’s position and Barr and Tavia’s was not as wide for crossfire as he would have liked, but their elevation was excellent.

Yes, that’s perfect. Come closer, you suffering brutes, yes.

Dag held his steel-headed arrow loosely nocked and waited some more. Whit was watching him, crossbow clenched and bolt at the ready, with his eyes going wider and wider, as if to cry, Now, now… now?

Dag knelt up leisurely, taking his first and last chance for a perfect shot. He would try for an eye on that approaching… possum-man? Or it might once have been a rabbit. The peculiar relaxation overcame him that occurred when all decision making was over, as when an arrow had been released but not yet found its target. Speaking of which…

He drew. Settled. Released. “Yes,” he hissed. Brain-shot; the possumman squalled once, fell, thrashed, and went still. Dag nocked and drew again while the wild cranking of Whit’s crossbow mechanism stuttered beside him. His second arrow flew just before Whit’s first.

Dag’s brows twitched up at the thwack-crack of Whit’s heavy bolt striking a mud-man’s arm. A belly or brain shot would have been better, but he could swear that bone just broke. Within its short range, the weapon’s projectiles packed an impressive punch. From the corner of his eye he saw more arrows dart out. Two hits, followed by roaring and howling. The mud-men boiled forward, crunching madly up the slope, which was just fine as long as the arrows lasted.

Whit’s next ratchet-and-thrum resulted in a clear miss, but after that was a hard hit that knocked a looming tuft-eared fox-man backward down the slope. Dag was not yet out of arrows when the few mud-men remaining on their feet began to turn tail, or at least withdraw toward their master. Dag didn’t bother counting the ones down, just the ones still up. Some had arrows sticking out of them at odd angles, and shrieked in pain, but they weren’t stumbling nearly enough to suit Dag.

The malice had actually knelt down, its vast gut resting on the road between its spread knees, but it wallowed upright again as its dozen remaining guards drew back around it. Dag let his bow arm swing down out of the way and drew his war knife. “All right. It won’t get any better.”

Out of bolts, Whit started to let his crossbow fall, but Dag said, “Hang it on your back. You might get the chance to collect a few of your misses. Or hits.” Whit shrugged the carrying strap across his chest and took up the ash spear he had borrowed from Sage. The boy yelled once in excitement as they began to run, noticed that everyone else was advancing in dead silence, and clamped his mouth shut. Dag let him plunge ahead and spend his eagerness threshing a path through the thorny scrub, for which the waving spear proved unexpectedly useful.

Barr and Tavia wove down the slope to his right, with the sharing-knife threesome close behind them.

They spread out around the malice; its mud-men responded by throwing rocks, with which this country was only too well supplied.

Their whistling power was nasty, but fortunately the aim was mostly bad, though Remo yelped as one bounced off his shoulder. The malice turned around and around, roaring horribly, but did not retreat. Closing and careful, Dag expended two of his last four steel-tipped arrows putting mud-men down to stay. Another pair lurched toward them; one ran up on Whit’s spear, ripping it from his hands but then falling over its impalement in a tangle. Dag’s war knife opened his mud-man from groin to breastbone. Whit paused to yank back one of his bolts from the fallen creature’s leg, shaking it free of gore.

A cudgel-waving mud-man charged toward Rase, bowling Barr over; swiftly, Dag sent an arrow after it as his threesome kept trying to circle behind the malice, who kept rotating to face them. Inspired, Whit raised his bow and shot his retrieved bolt at the malice. It thwacked hard into the creature’s left shoulder. And vanished.

The malice screamed and heaved its awkward body around. On its left breast, its gray skin parted; from that mouth, the bolt spat into the malice’s up-reaching hand. The skin rippled closed again while the malice was winding its arm back to throw the bolt like a dart. It would not miss; Dag stepped in front of Whit, who was gibbering, “Did you see that? Come flyin’ out just like a watermelon seed! Should’ve gone through its heart…!”

Even through his tight veiling Dag could feel the malice reaching out to ground-rip his tent-brother. The power of it would pry open Whit’s shield like a mussel shell, given enough time. Which of course was also true of ground veiling. The huge arm bunched…

Whit’s shot had been futile as a blow but perfect as a distraction.

In the malice’s momentary and terrible shift of focus, Rase, face gone white, darted up behind it, shut his eyes, and thrust out the pale blade of his sharing knife.

The faint crack as the bone split and released its hoarded death into the malice was the sweetest sound Dag could imagine.

The malice’s scream shot upward in pitch till it felt like hot needles thrust into Dag’s eardrums. Whit clamped his hands over his own ears and bent, mouth opening and closing on words Dag could not make out.

Rase, Neeta, and Remo all stumbled backward; Rase, grazed by the malice’s deathly aura, was curling in on himself and starting to vomit already. Slowly, starting at the top of its ridged skull, the malice began to fall apart, pieces flaking off and spinning away in a stinking cloud.

Destruction spiraled downward, faster and faster, yet slowed when it reached the out-thrust torso. The remains of the creature-god, man, monster, or some clot of all three-slumped in a pile in the middle of the road, several hundred pounds of slimy rubble. The sudden silence was a blessing beyond imagining.

Dag eyed the great formless lump, drew Crane’s primed knife from the leather sheath hung at his throat, and advanced cautiously. He was going to have to open his ground just a hair to check this, and then he was going to regret it. The smell was bad enough. The lingering wrongness blasted through Dag with the force of a bitter wind in a Luthlian winter; his belly knotted and his mouth watered uncontrollably. But the new malice body forming inside the old one was dead, too, or never alive. Dag clamped his ground and his jaw shut again, put the knife away, and swallowed hard against his late lunch demanding instant escape.

Whit was shaken but standing. Barr was sitting on the ground holding his bleeding head; Tavia, with a bright red mark on her face that was going to be a dark blue bruise soon, knelt beside him trying to pull his hands away to check the damage. Rase was now on all fours, emptying his guts, with Remo bent beside him in concern and Neeta watching warily.

“Whit, Neeta,” Dag called. “We’re not done yet. Got to clean up all the mud-men within reach.”

Easy reach, at least. Only a couple of the creatures had escaped across the road, trying to find concealment in the riverbanks or in the scrub up toward the far ridge. They were mindless now-or rather, and more dreadfully, returned to their animal minds trapped in their humanlike bodies. They would die on their own, but only after lingering agonies. The ones still alive in the broken brambles were making the most vile noises, animal screams mixed with almost human-sounding weeping. Dag paused to swap out his bow for his hook again, and drew his knife once more. The downed mud-men were still dangerous in their thrashings, so the three of them worked together, two to hold them down and one to slice through those pitiable throats, ending what should never have begun. It was rightful mercy and Dag hated every wretched minute of it. But the youngsters didn’t need to see that, so he set a methodical and thorough example, for the thousandth time. They collected as many of everyone’s spent arrows as they could find.

Dag made sure Rase wasn’t vomiting blood, then set Remo to haul him back to the horses, away from the remains of the malice. Tavia supported Barr, who looked impressively gory-scalp wounds bled like wellsprings-but had suffered no skull cracks. Dag assigned Neeta to ride after the farmers and get them turned around once more. “Tell them we’ll meet by the wagons!”

As the swift hoofbeats of her mount receded, Whit circled the smelly mound piled up in the middle of the road, shaking his head in new amazement. “That thing must have weighed six, eight hundred pounds. Did Fawn’s malice look like that one? ” he asked Dag.

“Pretty much. Except the Glassforge malice was more dangerous, not being on the verge of a molt.” The Glassforge malice had also acquired language; this one seemed not to have, which suggested hopefully that it had not yet taken any human victims.

“How do those molts work? You keep talking about them like they was a bad thing.”

Dag shrugged. “You understand how mud-men are made, right? The malice places a live animal in the soil, and alters the creature’s ground to impel its body to grow into a human form.”

“I heard Fawn describe the ones she saw in Raintree. I wouldn’t rightly claim to understand it, but I guess I get the picture.”

“Ground is the underlying truth of the world. The malice turns it into a lie, or at least, into something else, and the matter labors to match it.”

Whit looked much blanker; Dag swiftly gave up on maker theory.

“It’s like the malice uses its own body as a mud-pot to grow its new one in. A newer, better, more advanced, usually more human-looking one. Depending on what people or animals the malice has found to consume. Ground-rip, that is. A malice uses those grounds to teach its new body how to grow.”

Whit’s nose wrinkled. “You’re saying the malice gives birth to itself?”

“There’s a reason we call it molting and not birth. When it reaches full size, the malice abandons its old body, which dies around the new one, and the new one, er… fights its way out of the old skin. The new body is usually near as big as the old, so a malice on the verge of a molt is sessile-immobile. It holes up for days or weeks and doesn’t move till the process is complete. They’re pretty helpless at that stage, and easy- well, easier-to slay.”

“What about when it gets more human, like the one you saw in Raintree? That you said was so beautiful? ”

“Same process. Messier, I guess. They tend to molt less often as they advance.”

Whit stared at the pile of rubble and scratched his head. “Huh. You wouldn’t want Fawn to see that just now, I reckon.”

Trust Whit to blurt out what was better left unsaid. Dag didn’t know whether to laugh or sigh. “No,” he agreed. “I sure wouldn’t.”

But Whit was already in pursuit of another thought. “So-back when you two met near Glassforge, Fawn did what Rase just did, more or less? ”

“Yes. She slew a malice, with a primed sharing knife. Just like that.”

Whit was silent for a very long time. “My little sister,” he finally said.

His tone was not especially readable, but Dag thought it might be wonder.

Or awe. “Huh.”

–-

Fawn was relieved to camp that night back at the shallow ford where they’d left the wagons, despite the exhausting trek to regain it. Grouse wasn’t the only farmer to grumble about having ridden twelve miles down the road only to ride twelve miles back, just the loudest.

“It was a long day’s work to end up right back where we started. What did we gain? ”

“Practice,” said Sumac, without sympathy. “Practice is never wasted.”

Once Fawn had convinced herself of Dag’s uninjured state, she viewed the victorious but battered patrol with what concern she had left over. Whit assured her that Barr yelped far more for Arkady stitching up his head than he had for the mud-man hitting him with the original rock. Remo moved stiffly, and couldn’t raise his right arm higher than his shoulder, but made no complaint. Everyone including Tavia seemed to think the bruise on Tavia’s face was more showy than serious.

Rase, untouched by any blow, was by far the sickest. Fawn gladly shared her dwindling stock of anti-nausea medicine with him, but it was after sunset before he could keep so much as a sip of water down.

Dag seemed unalarmed, but made sure the boy stayed in his bedroll.

The Lakewalkers all agreed Rase deserved a proper bow-down, a party patroller-style to celebrate his first malice kill, but that it would have to be put off till he was in shape to enjoy it, which Dag said could be as much as a week.

The patrollers collected around the fire after supper to piece together Rase’s spent knife and carefully wrap the shards in a makeshift cloth shroud until it could be returned to New Elm Camp for burial.

They didn’t seem grave enough for Fawn to call it a ritual, nor cheery enough to call it a celebration, but Sumac led them in a song Fawn recognized from the bow-down she’d seen back in Glassforge-not with a bone flute this time, just with naked voices. The words turned out to be not about malices or death or sacrifice, but about a garden by a lakeside where two lovers met. It ought to have sounded lyrical, but somehow came out more like a hymn. Fawn could not have said why, but she felt the tune must be very old.

Berry, listening as the verses found their culmination, drew her hickory-wood fiddle from its bag and, despite her healing fingers, took up the melody in winding variations each sweeter than the last. The flickering firelight gleamed off tracks of tears on Rase’s face as he listened from his bedroll, and when she finished, he murmured, “Thank you,” very sincerely. Fawn wondered how close to his great-grandfather the young patroller had been.

Berry lightened the mood with a brisker reel, inspiring Plum to drag her little brother Owlet to the fireside in a valiant attempt to dance. The two held hands and swung arms with more enthusiasm than grace, and Owlet squealed his delight as Plum twirled her skirts.

In this warm weather Owlet ran about dressed in a cast-off shirt, as good as a gown on him, and nothing else; below the hem his dimpled knees pumped and his little bare feet tromped the dirt, and even Bo and Dag smiled.

After Berry shook out her hands and put the fiddle away, Bo offered a tale or two, both outrageously unlikely, which led to some reminiscing from the patrollers, the likelihood of which was harder to judge. A few hoarded bottles passed from hand to hand. Arkady’s contribution won the most respect; the one sip that Fawn dared went down like liquid fire. Even Grouse took a swallow of that one.

When the moon rose, Fawn lay in their bedroll and listened to the munching and muffled snorting of the grazing animals, scattered up the creek side. From the way he’d picked at his dinner, she thought Dag shared some of Rase’s queasiness, but she wasn’t sure how it compared with how he’d felt after the Glassforge malice, as she’d been in no condition then to notice. So had Rase’s ground veiling just been unpracticed, or would he grow into a maker someday, too? Dag walked his perimeter patrol very wide; it was a long time before he joined her. They found their familiar positions, legs interlaced beneath the blankets, face-toface in the silvered dark.

“Was it a hard fight today? ” she asked, stroking his furrowed forehead, winding her fingers in the unruly curls of his hair in which no gray strands yet gleamed.

“No. As straightforward as any other sessile, truth to tell.”

“Did Whit’s shield work right? ”

“As far as I could tell. Well, I don’t know how long it would have stood up to a serious attempt at ground-ripping, but it resisted mind slaving. If only because it made Whit’s ground so blurry the malice couldn’t figure out what he was. We didn’t give it time to puzzle out the problem.”

“Your patrollers were all right? ”

“Oh, yes.”

Fawn said carefully, “I’m not sure they know you think that. You’ve been sort of grim and glum tonight.”

His brows lifted. “The youngsters did very well. Whit, too. He pulled his weight, and they all saw that he did. Won’t any of ’em look at farmers quite the same way again, I daresay.” He was silent a moment.

“It’s the malice bothers me.”

“Why? ”

He drew breath, let it out slowly. “I don’t know. It just… niggles. Every malice is akin, yet every one is a little different. Why was it out on the road like that? ”

“Maybe it was just changing its lair. Looking for a better place to molt.”

“Possibly.” Dag didn’t sound convinced. “But this one seemed awfully aggressive for a pre-molt. Usually by the time they reach that stage they just lay up and let their mud-men bring them their prey.”

“Maybe… I don’t know. Maybe it ground-ripped some rabid animals?”

“I don’t think it would work like that.” He shook his head, hugging her in close as she turned to fit the curve of his body. “But I’ll say a few good words to the youngsters tomorrow. They earned it.”

–-

The next day dawned clear; the company made a creaky but willing enough start shortly thereafter. Rase had recovered enough to sit his horse, although he had to let Indigo saddle it and two of his comrades help boost him aboard. Four miles up the road came a delay when everyone who hadn’t been on the battlefield got dragged over it by everyone who had for a blow-by-blow description of the fight. Fawn watched from atop Magpie, a trifle worried about the effect any lingering blight might have on her child. She was waiting eagerly for the first flutter of quickening, down there deep in her belly. She had not confessed even to Dag her unfounded conviction that if only she could bring this pregnancy past the point where her first had failed, it would be a sign of hope, like breaking a curse. To encounter a malice just now, bringing back such evil memories, had shaken her more than she’d let on.

But Whit and the patrollers finished babbling about their every bow shot at last, and they moved on.

Late in the morning, they came upon the spot where Dag said the malice must have first turned onto the road, and Dag led a mixed party of patrollers and farmer boys up toward the eastern ridge to search for the lair. Sumac stayed with the wagons to watch over Rase, with Neeta, who had seen lairs in Luthlia, assigned as support. Bo also declined the treat, and Hod as usual stuck by him.

Berry, grinning, leaned across her saddlebow to whisper to Fawn, “I expected Bo to have a worse head than this, come this morning. At midnight last night he was swearin’ to me he’d seen bats the size of turkey vultures flyin’ over the moon.”

“Were they anything like the hoop snakes he told me southern folks used as wagon wheels? ” said Fawn. “Or the alligators hitched up in teams to draw racing boats in the swamps? Or the time it rained so hard that he saw catfish swimming up the road overhead, and fellows caught them in their hats? ”

“I expect so. This fish wasn’t biting, though.”

Fawn snickered, and kicked Magpie along. She wouldn’t be surprised if Bo had seen vultures; those unburied mud-men corpses stank, and would draw scavengers soon. Did vultures search for carrion by moonlight?

The fire scrub ran on for miles, and Fawn tried to imagine the size of the blaze that had leveled these woods. How fast had the wind whipped the orange wall of death? She was reminded that malices were far from the only great uncaring hazard in the world. Between being burned to death or blighted, she could see little to choose. Yet the fire scars were recovering in years, not decades or centuries, and from the point of view of blackberry brambles and fireweed, might almost be considered a blessing.

Her ruminations grew darker when they stopped for lunch at a stream crossing by what was plainly a burned-out village, destroyed by that same three-years-back fire. The lack of settlers in this valley seemed suddenly explained. She walked among the traces of houses and sheds, blackened char sticking out from the green weeds like bones through skin.

“We could stop right here,” said Grouse, eyeing the bit of flat land along the feeder creek that had doubtless been what first attracted the burned-out folks.

“I’m not stopping in this accursed country,” said Vio sharply. “Monsters and fires and bear-men and who knows what all…” She had to break off to run and rescue her toddler Owlet from a determined attempt to fall headfirst into an old well. As she was snatching him away from death, and he was thrashing mightily in protest, she glanced down and shrieked.

Fawn hurried to her side, as did Sage and everyone else in earshot.

The sun overhead lit the well shaft, revealing a mess of bones at the bottom all tangled together. The flesh was gone, but a few scraps of hair and clothing still showed.

“They must have gone down into the water there to try to get away from the flames,” said Sumac, coming over to look, “and suffocated when the fire passed over.”

“Or drowned,” opined Bo, “if they climbed on each other.”

Fawn swallowed and walked quickly away. Several sizes of bones, down there. A family? A couple of families, maybe.

“Wasn’t there anyone left even to bury these? ” asked Calla.

“Maybe the survivors decided to let this be their grave,” offered Sage.

“Not wanting it for a well anymore.”

After some debate, it was decided to leave the well-grave as it had been found. Fawn had lost her appetite for lunch, and was glad to be gone from the haunted place.

The malice lair expedition dropped down to rejoin them a few miles farther on. Dag had told Arkady he would be sorry if he came along, and the maker looked it, his face clammy with a Rase-like paleness. Sumac hurried to help him, but he just shook his head. The two parties traded fire-village and malice-lair descriptions, equally gruesome, and for once Bo offered no silly tales to top them.

Late in the afternoon, Fawn found herself riding between Dag and Finch at the head of the company. Everyone was starting to keep an eye out for a likely spot to camp for the night. Dag said that they might reach the pass at the head of this long valley late tomorrow. A debate was afoot whether it would be better to rest the animals for a day before or a day after the climb, but Fawn thought most folks were in favor of after. No one much liked this country anymore.

Finch was still full of his first sight of a malice lair. “Never would have believed! Everything dead gray for two hundred paces around. And those pocky holes where the mud-men came out, just like you said, Fawn!”

“Was it very bad? ” Fawn asked.

Dag shook his head. “Nothing you haven’t seen, Spark. And less. It still puzzles me.” He turned in his saddle, frowning. “I sure wish we’d seen some other traffic today. Either direction.”

Sumac was riding behind them, along with a recovered but rather quiet Arkady. “That reminds me, Dag,” she remarked. “We should log a report at Laurel Gap Camp. They should have cleaned out that malice before we found it.”

“Writing a patrol report, ah, yes,” said Dag. “That’ll be a good thing for you to teach the youngsters how to do.”

She stuck out her tongue at him.

He grinned unrepentantly, but added, “We can leave it at the courier drop point in Blackwater Mills, when we get there. No need to go out of our way.”

“Though I’d sure like to know where their patrol has got to,” said Sumac.

Dag grimaced. “Aye.” His puzzled gloom returned.

Inspired, Fawn sat up in her saddle. “What if that malice wasn’t attacking us, Dag? What if it was running away from something? ”

“What does a malice have to run away from? ” asked Finch.

Fawn brightened further. “Patrollers! Maybe we’ll run into those Laurel Gap patrollers up the road a piece.”

“Will they be mad that we poached their malice? ” asked Finch. Who hadn’t been there when the malice had been slain any more than Fawn had, but somehow Whit as representative farmer cast a reflected glory on all the boys. Fawn didn’t think it a bad thing.

“After a time,” said Dag, “you learn there’re plenty to go around. We don’t hoard them.”

Sumac said, “Though I trust the Laurel Gap patrol will be embarrassed. In fact, Uncle Dag, I believe I will write that report. Just to make sure of it.”

Dag’s smile flickered, but faded again. “I shouldn’t think that malice would’ve run from a patrol. In the first place, it was so new-hatched it wouldn’t have known to, and in the second, malices regard us as meals on legs. It’d be like running away from your dinner. We try to make the sharing knives a surprise to them.”

Which gave Fawn a peculiar picture of her next meal leaping up off her plate, grabbing her knife, and attacking her. She shook it from her head. She didn’t want to try to imagine what malices thought; she was afraid she might succeed. Maybe she needed a nap. She glanced up at Dag, and her belly went cold. His face had gone absolutely expressionless, as if he’d just had an idea he really, really didn’t care for. “Not likely…” he breathed.

What isn’t likely, beloved?

The fire blight was at last giving way to patches of never-burned trees. A quarter mile up the road, Fawn could see a clear line where the woods closed back in. Had sudden rain saved it? Or a change of wind direction? The sun’s rim touched the western ridgetop, whose eastern slopes were already in shadow. She squinted at movement near the road at the tree line, doubly dusky.

“I’d vote for the first good stream past the trees for camp tonight,” said Finch, peering too. “Huh. What is that? Turkey vultures have got themselves a party, looks like.”

Half a dozen dark, flapping shapes surrounded a carcass. “A goat? ” said Fawn. “A dog? ”

“Maybe a fawn? ” said Finch, then snickered at her peeved expression.

Dag stood abruptly in his stirrups, staring hard. “That’s not a goat. It’s a mule.”

“Can’t be,” scoffed Finch. “That’d make those bird wings ten, twelve feet across.”

“Those aren’t birds. Sumac? Lend me your eyes. And your groundsense.”

Sumac kneed her horse forward, peering along with Dag. Her breath hissed in. “What the… Dag, what are those ugly things? ”

“Mud… men? ” His voice sounded remarkably unsure. “Mudbat… things. No feathers. Joints are wrong for birds. Bat wings.”

“Malices can make bat-men? ” said Finch blankly. “Why didn’t you say? ”

“I’ve never seen the like,” said Dag. “Wolf-men and dire wolves, yes. So why not bats? ”

Fawn could think of a dozen good reasons why not bats, right up there with why not alligators? No, ick, eew!

“Absent gods, they’re huge,” said Arkady, who’d ridden up to look.

His voice held a very un-Arkady-like quaver.

At the mule carcass, one shape was driven back by its feasting friends. It spread long, leathery wings, and vented a sharp snarl like a mill saw jamming.

“More leftovers? ” said Fawn. “Like the ones you said got away over the river? ” She hoped fervently that these were leftovers. Because the alternative…

What in the wide green world would a malice have to run from?

Nothing.

Except-a worse malice.

“Are those hands at the tops of those wing joints?” said Sumac.

“With… claws? ”

“Blight,” said Dag. “Fawn, Finch, ride back and stop the wagons. Sumac, round up the patrollers. I’m going for a closer look.”

“Not alone, you’re not!” said Sumac sharply. “Arkady, you alert the patrollers.”

Arkady gulped, nodded, and wheeled his horse. Reluctantly, Fawn followed, turning awkwardly in her saddle to watch over her shoulder.

As Dag and Sumac cantered up to the carcass, the bat-creatures scattered from it, making more jamming-saw noises. They were awkward, crawling on the ground with their wings trailing like half-folded tent awnings. Two clawed their way up nearby trees. Others made for a pile of rocks, scuttling up one after, or over, another to gain height. Another turned and screamed, rearing up and flapping its wide leathery wings like a crowing rooster; both Dag’s and Sumac’s horses spooked, pivoting and trying to bolt. Dag couldn’t force Copperhead close enough to slash with his knife, but did persuade his mount to spin and lash out with both hind legs. The shod hooves connected; Fawn could hear the bone-crack.

The bat-creature screamed again and flapped over the ground trailing its broken wing. Copperhead bounced wildly.

The bat-creatures who’d made it to the rock pile took off one after the other in great noisy wing flaps, barely clearing the ground before they started their climb into the air. They could fly, oh no! Roughly batshaped, with flat, oddly rectangular bodies like a flying squirrel’s, heads large, with backswept, pointed ears. Fawn couldn’t see the shapes of their mouths from here. Worse, they could fly well. Gaining height, the nightmare trio sped off over the woods.

Sumac gestured, mouth moving; Dag nodded. Both came galloping back to the wagons.

“Get everybody turned around!” Dag gasped.

“Not again!” wailed Grouse.

Fawn hesitated. “Dag-it’s open country for miles behind us. If those things can drop down out of the air on us”-and it sure looked like they could-“wouldn’t we be better off amongst the trees, where they’d tangle their wings? ”

He stared at her openmouthed, eyes dilated. “Ah,” he wheezed.

“Point.”

“At least,” called Sumac, whose horrified horse still fought her, “close up under the trees till we can scout and take stock. Knives are going to be no good on those things. We want spears and bows.”

“Axes, too,” suggested Fawn. The ones with the good long hafts.

Everyone who was mounted rode up and clustered around to listen;

Sage left their team’s reins to Calla and came running up to hear as well. Shrewdly, he bore his long-handled sledgehammer, though his hands shook as he clutched it.

The wagons lurched forward once more. Fawn stuck close to Calla’s.

All the patrollers except Rase, and half the farmer boys, rode forward to make another attempt at slaying the mud-bats. They closed rapidly on the fallen one; when they parted, the shape lay still, like a collapsed tent. The remaining two seemed to have snared themselves in their tree branches. A rider might reach one with a spear, but the horses wouldn’t go near; Whit had already dismounted. Fawn could hear the ratcheting of his crossbow, and see him exchanging gestures with Sumac about the angle of his shot.

So Fawn had a clear view when a black cloud of about fifty of the batthings burst over the eastern ridge and stooped upon them.

She’d never been much for shrieking, or making squeaky girly noises, but she screamed in earnest now. Magpie reacted to the vast flapping wings much like the other mounts, plunging under Fawn and almost unseating her, carrying her away from the wagons in an all-out attempt to bolt. If only the mare had run toward the trees, Fawn would have let her carry on. Fawn sawed the reins, trying to get Magpie’s head turned around in the hopes that her body would follow.

Water streamed from Fawn’s eyes and whipped away in the wind as she bounced in her saddle. She gasped in terror of falling hard and maybe losing the baby, till she realized that at this speed she was more like to break her neck; the thought was oddly liberating. She gripped with her legs, felt herself slipping with every hard stride, then abandoned her reins to grab her pommel.

Every animal in the party was bolting or trying to. The Basswood’s wagon was slowed because the two leader mules were tangled in their traces, and Sage and Calla’s wagon was jammed behind it. Grouse had evidently fallen off, but he leaped after his rig jabbing upwards at mudbats with his spear. Vio was braced on the box with one hand around the roof hoop and the other swinging an iron skillet. The wagon was covered with swarming bat-creatures, much as they’d mobbed the dead mule.

They used their wing hands to hold on, mostly, but tore strips out of the canvas roof with their clawed feet, reaching down as if feeling around inside. Vio banged her skillet down on the clutching claws like a hammer, which made them jerk back, and whanged other mud-bats in the face or body as she could reach. She drove off some, but more came.

Vio’s screams shattered when a bat-creature beat its wings and began to rise, clutching her toddler in its two feet. Owlet’s mouth went square with terror and pain as he was lifted into the air, his shirttail flapping wildly around his churning knees. From the corner of Fawn’s eye she saw a patroller boy, she wasn’t sure which one, unseated and pulled struggling from his horse. Three mighty wing beats, and he fought free, only to fall with a cry cut off too sharp and a sickening bone-crack noise. Arm, leg, neck? Yanked around by Magpie, Fawn couldn’t see where he fell.

A stench and a hot wind buffeted Fawn in the back, and suddenly a clawed foot anchored itself in her shoulder. Her cry of pain came out a stretched wail, “Go away! Go away! Go away!” as she beat at the creature with her hands, only to have it grab her around her other arm and flap its vast wings again and again. Its claws were like iron, its thin muscles like cable. Without the grip on her pommel, she began to rise from her saddle, and frantically wrapped one foot into a stirrup strap. Galloping Magpie jerked them along as if the mud-bat was a kite and Fawn the kite string. If the creature let go and she fell she could be dragged by her ankle, but if she let go she could be carried off like Owlet…

Copperhead, half bolting, half bucking, appeared in the right of Fawn’s vision. Dag was somehow still aboard, gasping for air, gold eyes demented. There was no sign of his steel knife, but he swiped frantically with his hook and connected at least once, tearing a strip from a leathery wing beating against his face. The mud-bat yelped and drew its foot claws from Fawn’s right shoulder, which welled with blood.

At Dag’s next swipe the mud-bat caught his hook in its foot and held hard, releasing Fawn’s left arm, too. She grabbed at her saddle as she fell, ripping several fingernails half off, but yanked her ankle from her stirrup strap and came tumbling to the ground on her feet and not her head, rolling in the damp earth and weeds. She scrambled to her knees, rearing around dizzily and trying to spot Dag again.

Magpie shied away. Copperhead, made frantic by the flapping monster fixed overhead, got his head down and gave a mighty twisting buck that would have launched his rider into the air even without the aid of a mud-bat. A second mud-bat swooped near.

“Take leg!” screeched the first as Dag wrenched, kicked, punched, and struggled. The second mud-bat got a claw into one of his boots, then brought its other foot down for an iron grip on Dag’s ankle. Somehow, the two sorted themselves out so their beating wings didn’t knock into one another, and rose higher.

They talk! They have wits! They work with each other! Oh no, no… Fawn staggered along beneath the swooping shadow. She thought she was crying, but no sound seemed to be coming out of her bone-dry throat.

Higher overhead, Dag twisted, heaved, swore. Fawn remembered the falling patroller, and screamed upward, “Dag! Don’t fight them till you’re closer to the ground!”

He stared down wildly at her, seemed to realize how high he’d been dragged, and abruptly froze. He heard, he understood, oh thanks be! With his hand, still free, he clawed at his throat. Snapped the leather thong that held Crane’s knife.

“Spark, take the knife!”

She stared up openmouthed, bewildered. The sheathed knife fell, turning in air, into the weeds, where it bounced unbroken in soft soil.

She looked up to see Dag rising higher, higher…

In the distance, the howling toddler was being carried eastward; behind him, a madly flapping mud-bat seemed also to have Tavia, although it was struggling for altitude with her greater weight. Fawn didn’t think the evil things could weigh more than forty pounds, wings and all, but the biggest ones seemed to be able to lift upwards of a hundred. Fawn weighed less. She squirmed in the dirt and sought a well-anchored sapling to grip as more mud-bats swooped overhead, but they didn’t appear to be able to take prey right off the ground without fouling their wings. Once fallen and awkward, they could be outrun even by her, she thought.

She raised her head again. The wagons and the riders had reached the shelter of the trees, a litter of dead or injured mud-bats left in their wake.

The slaughter was no consolation. Tavia’s horse was down, making dreadful noises, gut-gouged and bleeding. Some mud-bats were attracted to its helplessness like the swarm around the dead mule, but most of the survivors took to the air and followed their comrades bearing the captives, screeching garbled abuse and clear calls to Come! at the hungry lingerers.

Along the woods’ edge to the east, Fawn thought she glimpsed Sumac spurring her horse in and out of the trees in a futile effort to follow.

Fawn crawled forward and gathered up the sharing knife, gripping it with trembling, bloodied fingers.

Whit galloped back out from under the trees toward Fawn, slid from his saddle, threw her up, and climbed after. She drew breath in stuttering gasps, unable to speak, but stuffed the knife in her shirt as they dashed for the woods once more. Beneath the screen of the branches at last, she slid down, then down to her knees, shaking too hard to stand. She wanted to faint, to escape this horrific moment, but she’d never mastered that trick.

She was going to have to get up and deal with whatever came next.

“He giv’ you his knife! Why’d he drop you that knife?” Whit wheezed. “Last thing!”

Neeta, scratched, bleeding, and wild, strode up. “I saw. Madness! Dag’s got as good a chance of using it as we do-better! Absent gods, it’s the only sharing knife we have left!”

Fawn stared fearfully up through the leaves at the luminous, empty sky, and thought, No. He’s got one other.