Crecheling (17 page)

***

Chapter Eighteen

“That way!” Dyan pointed.

A cluster of sheep tumbled away from the road and down towards the river. Eirig turned and followed after them. Dyan was about to remind him to try to stay exactly behind the sheep, but he was clever enough that he didn’t need the warning.

Jak raced in a quick loop around the road, hallooing to scatter the little herds in all directions, and then he was on their tail. The ground dropped steeply down into the Snaik Valley. The river’s edge was thick with straight-trunked, silver-barked trees, and Eirig headed for them.

The trees would help, Dyan thought, but they would only add a small delay. Jak pulled forward beside her and Eirig, as the last of the bleating sheep fell away, and they crashed into the thicket. They slowed their horses to a brisk walk.

Dyan heard shouting in Narl’s canyon, probably in the meadow. They had gained a few minutes, she thought, and she tried not to let it go to her head.

“We have to get among other people!” Dyan told her companions. “Or animals. We have to hide our heat signature!”

“Marsick’s this way!” Jak turned his horse and ducked to slide beneath a thick branch. “I don’t know anything else around for miles.”

The trees hid them from the heatvision goggles, Dyan hoped, but they slowed the pace of travel. She continued to hear occasional yells, and tried to guess what they meant. In her imagination, as she batted aside branches and squeezed through the trunks, Shad and Cheela cursed, chasing down one knot of sheep after another. In reality, Dyan had no idea.

In the daylight, she knew, the trail she was leaving would be visible to the worst of trackers, and Shad would follow it like a signposted highway. By then, she hoped to be far away.

She wasn’t as confident in her evasion efforts as she’d have liked. This was the stuff Shad was good at, much better than she was. She needed something else.

In a sheltered depression right on the edge of the water, surrounded by huddling gambol oak, she stopped them.

“Jak,” she said. “I want you to ride up into those trees, ride around in them in a circle, and then ride back. Stick as close as possible on the return to your original path. Okay?”

“Okay,” Jak agreed. He surged through the woods into a grove above the depression. Through Lorne’s goggles, he looked like a bulky red monster, thrashing around in cool green darkness.

Dyan quickly dismounted and opened Outrider Lorne’s saddlebags.

“What do I do?” Eirig asked.

“Hold still.”

Dyan quickly found the bottle of liquid petrofuel and a sparker. She snapped dead, dry branches from the underside of one of the oaks, broke them up, and tucked them into a rocky niche on the riverbank. By the time Jak and his horse returned, she had squirted the branches with a little petrofuel and lit them with the sparker. She shut her eyes in the moment of sparking to avoid being blinded by the flash of heat in the goggles.

“We’re not making camp here.” Jak inflected his words somewhat like a question, and also somewhat like an order.

“No,” she agreed. This was no time to have a fight about who was in charge. “We’re going to slow them down by making them think this”—she pointed at the fire—“is a fake camp, and that”—she pointed to the trees where Jak had trampled in a circle—“is where we are lying in ambush. They’ll waste fifteen minutes at least, and maybe more, before they figure out we’ve moved on.” She was making the number up, but it might not be wrong.

“They’ll just see our trail, won’t they?” Eirig asked. “I mean, since they can see in the dark and all?”

Dyan shook her head and pointed again. “Here’s where we go into the river.”

She hoped she was right. She hoped that by the time Shad and Cheela got this far, some of the heat of the passage would have faded, and it wouldn’t be immediately obvious where they had gone. In any case, she didn’t have a better idea.

“Okay.” Eirig walked his horse into the river. Jak followed.

“Make for the trees on the other side,” Dyan suggested. “And we need to be quick. While we’re out here in the river, we’re exposed.”

She let Eirig guide the horse and turned at the waist to look behind them. This was a gamble; if anyone looked in their direction and could see, they’d stand out like a fire on the river. She saw the flame she had just lit, blazing bright on the riverbank. She saw the heat of Narl’s cottage like a faint glow over the rock of the mesa. She saw lots of sheep, each a little red pinprick in the night. To her relief, she didn’t see anything that looked like a mounted rider, not in the trees or on the slope above.

Her tricks had worked better than she’d hoped.

In the middle of the Snaik, the water was high enough to soak Dyan’s thighs. She worried that it might get deeper still, and become a real problem, but the riverbottom began to rise again, and a few minutes later, they sloshed out of the water on the far bank.

“Into the trees,” Jak urged them.

They went as deep as they could into the thickets and turned to follow the river downstream towards Marsick. Now Dyan worried that she had been too clever by half. Her fire and false ambush trick might work against her. It might attract Shad’s attention, tell him where she had crossed the river, and let him pick up her trail again.

No, she thought, that was ridiculous. He’d follow her trail as far as the river easily enough, with or without the fire. The fake ambush might not slow him down, but it certainly wouldn’t speed him up.

The trees on this side of the river ended in a split rail fence that ran right to the edge of the Snaik, enclosing a large pasture of dozing cattle. They had reached the edge of Marsick, Dyan realized. They weren’t safe, they weren’t home free, but they were alive. And it felt like she was winning.

“There’ll be a road up here to our right,” she said.

“Don’t we want to go through the pasture?” Jak’s words were definitely a question this time, and a deferential one.

Dyan felt pleased. “We do,” she agreed.

She took the reins as Eirig dismounted. The one-armed boy pulled two parallel rails out of their sockets to open a gap in the fence. When Dyan and Jak had ridden through, he mounted up again, this time behind Dyan.

They rode slowly through the cattle, and hunched low over their mounts. From far away, Dyan hoped, they wouldn’t look like riders at all, but like grazing animals awake in the middle of the night.

Her heart began to feel lighter. She even sang a little, though the only song that would come to her was the one to which she didn’t really know the words. “Sally, she married a soldier, a Captain named William Lee … hmmm, hmmm, hmmmm-mmmm, Sally always loved me.”

At the top of the pasture were a barn, a cattle shed, and the farmhouse. Eirig dismounted again to open the gate.

A light snapped on in the darkness and Dyan started, almost falling off her horse. Had Shad and Cheela seen them and circled around by the ford? She struggled to pull the goggles off her eyes, seeing flashing spots.

“What in Mother’s name are you doing in my field?” barked a rough, scratchy man’s voice. “You touch my cattle?”

Then Dyan realized that the light wasn’t the bright white of a light stick, but the yellow of a petrofuel lamp. She could even smell the burning petrofuel. The light shot out in a beam so she couldn’t see the holder, but that just meant it had shutters around the sides.

“We’re no rustlers,” Jak said. “Just passing through.”

“Passing through the wrong blasted property!” the rancher snarled. “I’m armed.” A long, slightly hooked knife blade flashed in the lamp’s yellowish beam. “And my hired men are on their way. Get off your horses. We’re going to go have a little talk with the Sheriff.”

Jak hesitated.

Dyan had an idea. “We’re Outriders,” she said in the sternest voice she could muster. “On Buza System business. Is this really a fight you want to pick, Landsy?” She flashed Outrider Lorne’s five-branched tree badge in the lamplight.

The rancher guffawed. “Or you could be a thief. Either way, the Sheriff’ll sort it out.”

Dyan held up Lorne’s whip in her other hand. “I think I’d rather sort it out right here,” she said.

“Mother’s teats you do!” The cattleman laughed. “What you’d rather do is get away to Silvertoon so you can sell your loot!”

Dyan struck with the whip.

She didn’t have Cheela’s skill with any of the Outrider’s weapons, but that didn’t mean she wasn’t good. She was trained, like any System Crecheling was, to be completely at ease with the monofilament whip, capable of defending herself with it. That meant, first and foremost, the skill to use it without cutting herself in half, but it also meant accuracy. It also meant knowing how to strike with the filament only partially extended, so as to strike a near target without automatically slicing through whatever lay behind it.

She cut right through the lamp and the tip of the farmer’s knife, the whip’s counterweight
snicking
neatly back into its home at the end of her blow.

Lantern wreckage, knife blade and petrofuel hit the ground in a sound that was part
clunk
and part
splash
.

There was a moment of stunned silence.

“Mother!” the rancher hissed. His feet crunched on the earth as he backed away several steps from the fuel burning on the ground.

“So we’ll be moving along now,” Eirig said. He opened the gate. “You go ahead and tell the Sheriff you saw us. Maybe he can get you a new knife.”

They rode past the farmhouse and found themselves on a dirt track, wide and gravelled flat. Other farmhouses dotted the road on both sides and in both directions. Dyan helped Eirig up onto the horse’s back behind her and turned towards Orvyl Rich’s store and the other buildings at the center of Marsick.

She managed to keep from laughing out loud until the farmhouse was well behind them, and then she restrained the laugh into a choked giggle. The few passersby in the darkness, mounted or on foot, ignored her slight outburst. Eirig patted her on the back.

The realization that they were almost the only people on the streets of Marsick sobered her quickly.

“Shad will track us in the daytime,” she said. “We have to make more distance, and we have to stay out of sight.” She pulled her goggles onto her face and looked back across the river. Her vision was obscured by distance and by intervening farm buildings and trees, but she didn’t see any heat-giving presence on the other side of the river that didn’t seem to be a sheep.

Did that mean that Shad and Cheela had crossed the river already and were close behind them? Were they hidden in the trees because they were maneuvering to sneak up to Dyan’s false ambush site, weapons in hand? Or were they following a sheep’s trail up some box canyon, cursing her name?

She almost laughed again at the thought.

“The river,” Jak suggested.

Dyan nodded in agreement. “But we can’t just ride out into the ford now. We’ll be visible for miles.”

They rode up the hill and out of Marsick. This far, Dyan felt reasonably safe. They should only be visible as heat signatures, and there were fires all around them, buildings and farm animals that would show through heatvision goggles as warm red blobs.

Once over the hill, she breathed even easier. They cut off the road through more pastures, riding faster and down towards the river. When they reached the Snaik again, they were around the bend from Marsick and definitely out of sight of Narl’s canyon or the false ambush. They rode into the shallows and turned downstream, towards Nemap on the Lull Sea.

The night became colder, but their continued movement kept Dyan warm. She hummed to herself and looked over her shoulder a lot. She saw deer in the valley, and smaller animals, but no pursuit. She wanted to talk with Jak, but once the excitement of the chase was over he slumped into himself, riding with that sunken-chested, evasive body posture he had had when she had first seen him. She whispered short questions to him about how he was managing without an actual saddle, but his answers were grunts.

She didn’t dare mention Aleena.

She asked Eirig to sing the song to her, the one about Sally and William Lee and the unnamed singer who loved a woman he couldn’t have. Eirig sang it once, and while she was trying to sing it back to him, he fell asleep on her shoulder.

Dyan contented herself with humming softly, checking to see that they weren’t being pursued, and following the river. Their heat signatures behind them wisped immediately off the cold river and disappeared.

It seemed like they had been riding all night, but eventually the valley widened and the Snaik flowed into the wide, flat pan of the Lull Sea. The fires and bodies of Nemap on the shore burned bright through Dyan’s goggles, and she hesitated.

“We could camp here,” she suggested, looking at the long grass and scrubby desert trees around them.

“I don’t know about Nemap,” Jak said, “but Ratsnay Station kept its gates shut at night. Shut and guarded.”

Dyan pondered that question. “Would the guards at Ratsnay Station open the gates for an Outrider?”

Jak nodded, his head a bobbing light.

Eirig didn’t wake up when Dyan dismounted, but just slumped forward over the saddle. The night air was chilly on Dyan’s skin as she stripped down to her underthings for the second time in front of Jak. This time he didn’t look away.

“You’re beautiful,” he said. He sounded sad.

She laughed, trying to lighten the moment. “You can’t even see me.
I
have the nightvision goggles.”

His laugh was harder-edged, and he pointed at the sky. “You’ve stared so long through those things you’ve forgotten the moon and stars,” he said. “I have more than enough light to see you by.”

Dyan put her System clothing back on, shirt, trousers, and coat, and she pinned Outrider Lorne’s badge to her chest. She left the goggles on, because she still wanted to check for pursuit and because they helped disguise her face. Not that she thought anyone in Nemap could possibly recognize her, but she felt more comfortable with her eyes hidden.

Nemap’s gates were shut and barred from the inside. A heavy woman on the stockade wall leaned on her spear and squinted down at Dyan in the light of long torches punched upright into the earth at intervals around the gate. Dyan shut off the heatvision to avoid burning her eyes from the glare.