“Just stay put,” he said to Randy, who was starting to struggle. “Catch your breath. Don’t move, dammit. ”
Cloud would realize their predicament. Cloud would give him vision if he waited. It wasn’t just iced rubble where Randy’s momentum had carried them. It was slick as glass. And Cloud was coming back now, worried, picking his way, fearfully imaging <dangerously slick ice, Danny in danger.>
<Cloud stopping,> he sent back, frightened for Cloud’s safety more than their own at the instant; he could see <Danny and boys and travois> through Cloud’s eyes, but that warning wasn’t going to stop Cloud long from a rash approach if they didn’t move immediately to get out of their predicament.
“What’s holding us?” he asked Carlo, and Carlo managed to say,
“My foot. On the snow. On our right. ”
“Can you pull us?”
“No! You’ll slide!”
His brain had started working. He had both hands occupied at the moment—but at very worst he had a knife in his right boot, if he could grab it and use it fast enough to hold on the ice; but he didn’t want to do that if he had an alternative. He worked and found a little, little toehold for leverage. “Randy. You take hold of my arm. You crawl over me. Onto the travois. Over to Carlo. ”
“Can’t. ” He could hardly understand the kid. “Can’t. ”
“Calm down. Grab my arm. Then the rifle—the strap’s solid around me. Just crawl right over my back. ”
The kid moved. Grabbed his arm—grabbed the rifle barrel and Danny pressed his face against the ice and hung on as the kid clambered over him. Everything shifted, slid sideways—the travois turned slowly in the shift of weight and by God knew what effort of Carlo’s arms, angled him slowly toward the snowbank.
Danny got a foot onto it and let Carlo drag him and Randy both to the snow, where he could get a knee under him and get up, and they could walk.
Carlo had saved them, saved the damn travois andhis sister—and he trudged uphill with Carlo, pulling the travois with Brionne and Randy to the snowy spot where Cloud waited for them.
“Up. ” Carlo hauled Randy up by one arm then and let him go. “Walk on the snow. Hear?”
Randy tried, but the scare and the cold of the ice had taken all the shaky strength Randy had left. The kid was exhausted, trying to walk, but staggering left and right, knees shaking under him. Danny got a dizzy feeling and felt pain he thought was Randy’s.
“We’re in real trouble,” Carlo gasped. “Aren’t we?”
“Shelter’s going to be soon,” Danny said. “It’s got to be. ”
“Maybe it isn’t, you know?” There was a wobble in Carlo’s voice. “Maybe we got off the track somewhere. ”
“There isn’t anywhere we can get off. They cut the road out of the mountain, they shore it up with logs—there aren’t any side roads. ”
“You’ve never been up here!”
“I’ve seenit, trust me that I’ve seen it. ”
“I saw what you saw!”
“Don’t take it for granted. ” A senior rider had said it to him once, when he was a week with his horse, and he hadn’t believed it then, but he fell back on it now as the only authority he had. “You don’t pick up the details I do. Tara told me plain enough what the road is. ”
“Maybe we ought to make a camp. We could find a place in the rocks—we’re not going to get snowed under in a blow like this. ”
“There’s no place to camp!” He didn’t mean to attack. But he didn’t have breath to argue, and if Carlo wanted to quibble and object to the only advice he had they were in real trouble. “Shelter’s coming. Be patient. ”
“You’ve been saying that!”
What came through Cloud wasn’t confidence. It was spooky-feeling, bite and kick.>
<Blood on the snow> he heard then.
“Oh, my God,” Carlo said.
“Easy,” Danny said.
“It’s behind us! It’s that horse again!”
“Calm down. It could be the kid. Could be he’s dreaming. ”
“It’s not coming from him! It’s followed us up here! It’s still behind us!” Carlo pointed back the way they’d come with an accuracy his own direction-sense echoed plain as plain. More, Cloudfelt it, <wanting fight.>
“ No!” Danny let go the travois pole without warning to shove against Cloud’s chest and sent a strong <quiet water.>
<Blood. Rifle crack ringing off the mountainside. Pain. And shock.>
“You said,” Carlo insisted in rising panic, as if he hadn’t heard. “You said it wouldn’t come up here—”
He’d thought so. And as strongly as it had come—the <blood on snow> image vanished on them.
“It just wants help. ”Randy was weaving in his tracks. “Maybe it could help us. ”
“No,” he said, more strongly than he intended. “Toss the rest of the supplies. Everything but the shotgun and the shells and the food we’re carrying. Food packets might stall it off. —Randy, you get on the travois. ”
“No,” Randy said, but Carlo was already jerking at the ties on the supplies.
Chapter 3
The shutters banged and rattled and the flashing on the stovepipe on the barracks roof sang with a rising and falling note. All of Evergreen village was on the other side of the rider camp wall, and neither Ridley nor either of his two barracks mates, namely his wife and his daughter, could completely ignore that fact even in the quiet of the minds over there, a hundred meters isolated from the horses.
They lived at the very top of the world—well, at least halfway up Rogers Peak, a very respectable mountain in itself, outlier to the towering Firgeberg. And at this top of the place they called home, the horses were in their warm den, the fire was crackling in the fireplace, and Ridley had his feet up, soles to the heat, doing a piece of leather stitching, and didn’t plan to budge out of the barracks tomorrow and maybe the day after that except to see to the horses.
They could be the only three people on the planet when the wind settled in to blow like this. And he didn’t mind. Summer was full of hard work. Fall was long hunts and a last-minute flurry of activity stocking the winter shelters. It had been a hard autumn this year, a spooky, chancy autumn coming down to bad dreams and cold sweats in the night for no damned reason the last couple of weeks. Personally he was gladto see the advent of a good, hard, beginning-of-season storm.
Now it was well-earned rest. Predators and prey alike spent more time in their burrows. Some dug deep as the hunger grew and went to sleep, to wake again when the world was new with spring growth and the old year was gone. Autumn was a blood-time, a death-time, hunters’ season, two-footed and otherwise. Autumn was for killing. Winter was for ease and a rider’s own concerns. And for love. There was that, too, passionate in every species that wasn’t numb to the rhythms of the world.
But a lonely clangor started up in the fierceness of the gusts. The ringing of a distant bell disturbed the peace and kept up in that regular and erratic way that spoke of wind, not a human hand.
The gate bell had come loose in the blow, was what had just happened, and Ridley could blame Serge, whose job, on the other side of Evergreen camp’s wall, was to guard and maintain the village gate, for not tying it down better—but he couldn’t quite blame Serge for not getting out and climbing after it while the wind was blowing the way it was.
So there it was, Serge’s Fault, tolling a plaintive cadence in the violence of the storm, and they’d hear the damn thing all night. Pity the Santez and the Lasierre households, who lived nearest the gate, and pity the miner barracks and the logger’s hostel, which were nearer still.