The thing was to humor the swings from fact to fancy and provide the girl a clear baseline of reality.
There was a battered pack of cards in the kitchen cabinet—hours and hours of solitaire had worn them smooth-edged. But she took them out and began to deal them.
“Do you play cards, dear?”
Peterson said they couldn’t open the gate, that they daren’topen the outside gates and he wouldn’t allow it: even relying on the lesser gate, the rider-gate swung too wide and they wouldn’t risk a swarm such as happened at Tarmin.
So they had brought a logging saw, one logger on the village side of the camp wall and Ridley on his with the other grip, ripping through the substantial vertical post that, buried deep in ice and earth, barriering the camp and the village apart from each other, so that no horse could pass it. It had taken too damned long, first arguing with the marshal about going around to the gates and then getting the saw from the supply store, because nobody wanted to go about the street to open the store, but now that they had it, the teeth made fast progress. The log went down in short order and Ridley and the logger, a man named Jackson, grabbed it up and carried it through to the village side, where they tossed it to the side of the gate.
Slip followed through that gate no horse had ever been able to use, not from the village founding.
Callie and the Goss boy, Jennie and Rain and Shimmer came across, too, the horses in a rush as if they expected the gate to shut or the pole to reappear.
It was scary in this dark and strange business. Jennie was scared. Rain was scared. Ridley had no trouble admitting the same to his daughter and anyone else who might ask. With a breakthrough warning gone silent like that—with the unprecedented measure of taking down the barrier between camp and village to get the horses through without using the outside gates—even a child could understand that this had never happened before, and a rider child a lot faster than that.
“Shut that gate,” Peterson said. “Bolt it good.”
“We’d better take a look down at the main gate,” Ridley said. To this hour they didn’t know why the bell had stopped. The only encouragement was the lack of specific alarm from the horses, who carried an ambient void of native presence around the village. But Serge Lasierre had undoubtedly rung the alarm for some reason. And stopped—for some reason.
“I haven’t wanted to scatter people out and about,” Peterson said. “Could be Serge is locked in. Couldbe there’s been a tunneling down there—we don’t know what the hell.”
“I want you and Jackson there both behind walls. Leave the streets entirely to us.”
“We’ll be in the office.”
“Good. —Randy, I want you to go with the marshal right now. Get behind solid doors.”
“I’d rather—” Randy began.
“ Gowith the marshal.”
“Yes, sir,” Randy said, having believed him about obeying the camp-boss and maybe having caught the warning in the ambient. Jennie, meanwhile, was a worry he couldn’t dismiss: Jennie had the one horse that, if they could keep him from panic—and separating him from Jennie wouldn’t help—was the loudest, strongest-sending horse of their three.
He swung up onto Slip’s back and rode to one side of Jennie as Callie rode to the other, down the middle of the village street, through a snow-fall that hazed the few lights left in a tightly shuttered village.
“It’s <scary,”> Jennie said. “Everybody’s <hiding and scared.”>
“Don’t babble,” Callie reminded her. “Talk when you needa word. The ambient’s enough, miss.”
Frightened people were awake everywhere. The shutters were latched. People behind those shutters had guns, every one of them, as much a hazard to them as to any swarm of vermin that might have gotten in. The Schaffer house wasn’t in this end of the street, for which Ridley was entirely grateful. It was down where the marshal and Randy had taken refuge—and where he hoped there wasn’t any native creature the Goss girl could pick up. It had seemed quiet down there, and it still seemed quiet at their backs.
But the warehouses and the granary that lay right along the rider camp gate and those running behind the houses and along the rider camp wall, and those behind the church and the public offices, were a warren they might have to go into. Those would be the target of a breakthrough and a swarm of vermin, if it once sensed food stored there as well as the living food within the houses. The grain-eaters weren’t usually the vanguard of trouble; usually it was the meat-eaters that came through, and the others followed, but the grain-pests were equally as dangerous, partly because they were more numerous, and partly because some of them weren’t averse to a varied diet.
They passed The Evergreen, which wasn’t shuttered, and which cast lamplight through its glass-windowed doors. Patrons were inside, huddling in a <fear> and <challenge> that blazed as bright as the lamplight into the ambient. Jennie, who’d kept quiet after her mother’s reprimand, asked meekly,
“They’re not doing right, are they?”
“No,” Ridley said. “Those are fools. We look out for people doing necessary jobs, first, like us and the marshal and Serge. Second, people taking care of themselves, like in those houses, locked down tight. Foolscome last on our list, always.”
They passed the blacksmith shop and the Mackeys’ house, where God knew the state of affairs and he didn’t care to.
Then the miner barracks, that was at least to outward appearances shuttered tight and proper.
After that came one warehouse set back from Serge’s place and then the Santezes and the Lasierres, who were closest to the wall. Things felt all right there.
They came all the way to the gate, where he saw nothing—nothing but the tracks one might expect about the elevated stairway to the gate-guard’s tower. Serge’s tracks. Maybe another man’s. They were just slightly rounded over by new snow. Serge had gone up there not a long time ago—maybe talked to some other man. Those tracks were trampled over. He’d need more light.
But Slip didn’t like what he smelled here. Truly didn’t like it. Neither did Rain and Shimmer.
“Serge?” he called out.
There was no answer. There was nothing in the ambient to advise him Serge was there—but Serge might be unconscious. Might just have slipped on the icy steps and hit his head. He hopedthat was the case.
He slid down from Slip’s back at the foot of the tower steps. He had had a shell in the rifle chamber all the way down the street, and he carried the gun carefully and had itready as he climbed the steps as far as the first turn.
What—met him—wasn’t a body. It might have been one before something ripped it to shreds and draped it on the rail.
He spun about and took the stairs at a skid. Slip was at the bottom of the steps and he didn’t even think clearly about launching himself for Slip’s back, he just landed there.
He didn’t need to explain to Callie or Jennie. What he’d seen, they’d seen, and Jennie had never imagined the like. She was <scared> and Rain was <scared> with her.
<“Easy,”> he said. <“Easy.> Keep Rain calm.”
“Was <that> <Serge?”> Faint voice. Tremulous voice.
“Most likely,” Callie said firmly. “Look for tracks going away, Jennie-cub!”
“Is < that> them?”
In fact it was: Ridley got off again to take a close look at <long-footed tracks in snow> on the otherside of the stairs, where something had—not vaulted the raiclass="underline" the snow was still intact there—jumped from higher up, was what the intruder had done. He found the depression that indicated a jump clear from the next-to-last tier of the steps, <tracks rapidly filling with snow, tracks going away from the landing it had made and going toward the houses.> He let Slip smell the trail.
Slip snorted and brought his head up, dancing about nervously as Ridley swung up. Slip had smelled it twice, now, and still didn’t have a clear image of it. Shimmer walked back around and smelled the stairs and the railing, and didn’t have an image, either.