“Oh, good, you’re back,” said Pakko. A tension in his tone reminded Dag of just how long Pakko had lain up here alone, lost and hopeless.
Dag settled himself by the man’s side, leg out. “Ayup. Water? ”
“It’ll just make me piss myself again.” Pakko grimaced, looked away, hiding helpless shame.
“I’m a medicine maker. I’ll deal with it.” Dag revised this slightly.
“You help guide the bag, I’ll hold your head up.” He slipped his hand behind Pakko’s head; Pakko raised an arm, though it made him gasp.
Together, they managed to get another good drink down the injured man. Absent gods, what a pair. We’re not half a patroller between us.
Owlet circled around Pakko and crept into Dag’s lap; Dag gave him a drink, too, with rather more spillage, but the threat of howls passed off with only a few sniffles.
In the daylight, Pakko squinted at Dag in new curiosity, Dag hoped not too tinged with dismay. “Except for the hand, I’d have taken you for a patroller.”
“I was, once.”
“Is that why you went for maker, instead? How was it you were traveling with farmers? ” He looked over at the scabbed and grubby Owlet as if the child were the most unlikely part of all this.
“It’s a long story. A couple of long stories.”
“I’m not going anywhere.” Pakko’s air of indifference was a bit too carefully held. Some tale-telling would keep his rescuer safely planted under his eye, right.
Dag sighed. “Yeah, me neither.” But before he could choose a beginning, a ragged motion through the trees snagged his eye. He sat up, squinting, then grabbed his stick and clambered abruptly to his feet;
Owlet, dumped, whimpered in protest. “ ’Scuse me.”
He ducked out from under the overhang, and dared to flick open his groundsense. Mud-bat! He snapped closed again. Limped a few dozen paces along the hillside to where a rock slide had plowed open a wider view of the sky, and of the treetops falling away.
Several hundred paces below, a laboring mud-bat crashed into the branches, fought loose, and struggled for altitude again. It was flying very badly. Injured? Burdened with a load or a captive? It was too far off, Dag thought, for him to pull yesterday’s risky trick with a precisely placed ground-rip, yet if it was taking a prisoner back to its malice, he’d have to try something. But as the creature pumped frantically upward, Dag saw that its back claws were empty.
It lurched nearer. Had it seen him, was it attacking? One bent boot knife and a cut sapling weren’t going to be enough to bring it down. Dag took a breath, opened himself again, reached.
Stood stunned. There was nothing in the mud-bat’s ground but bat, natural bat. Voiceless, wordless, stripped of reason. Terrified and confused to find itself in this all-wrong, too-heavy, dying body. Frantic to reach the cool refuge of its dimly remembered cave, far to the east, out of the horrible hurtful light. In the hot speed of its flight, with no support from its malice master, its disintegration was proceeding rapidly.
There was no mistaking the ground of a mud-man that had lost its wits; Dag had seen the little tragedy played out countless times, most recently two days ago.
Someone has dealt with the malice!
A good half of the thousand pounds of worry weighing Dag’s heart lifted. His mouth opened, and his lips drew back in an uncontrollable grin.
The mud-bat crashed again, rose again, and finally tumbled out of range over the ridgeline. Dag tottered back to their shelter. If he could have, he would have danced the distance.
“Hey, hey, hey, Pakko!”
“What is it?” Pakko clutched the only weapon he had, the water bottle.
“No, good news! Your patrol must have found the malice’s lair! Its mud-men are skinned of their wits and scattering. If we just hold out, help has to come. My people might get up here by the end of the day. Yours could even be out looking for you already! They were what, you said, only about fifteen miles north of here when you parted ways? ”
Pakko made a sound of profound relief. His head fell back limply.
Despite everything, his lips, too, stretched in a grin.
With a sense of joy, Dag flung his own ground open wide, releasing that cramped, deaf, blind, No one here and changing it for a flag of welcome, Here we are! Come get us! Pakko’s grin went wider. Even Owlet looked up and cooed, bemused by the sudden cheer of the mysterious, scary grown-ups.
Dag escorted Owlet back to the streamlet for an overdue morning cleaning, then settled himself again and offered the child a celebratory half plunkin strip, which was grabbed with alacrity. Pakko accepted the other half. The child climbed back into his lap refuge, to gnaw and drool happily. “So, let me see.” Dag thought he might be babbling, but he didn’t care. Pakko was surely the most captive of audiences, and Owlet seemed to find the rumble of Dag’s voice soothing. “You asked for my life story.”
“I sure do wonder how you stumbled onto me, I’ll say that,” Pakko allowed.
“Well, I’m from Oleana, originally, but I took a walk around the lake…”
–-
Later, Dag passed some time tricking a few luckless squirrels and a mourning dove into becoming lunch, a process that both fascinated and fed the fretful Owlet. Peeled, cut up, and cooked on a toasting stick, the game produced hardly a mouthful, but Owlet’s was a little mouth.
Dag was more worried for Pakko, who seemed barely able to swallow.
It was midafternoon when Tavia arrived with Arkady, wonderfully sooner than Dag had dared hope. Unexpectedly, they also brought Calla, Indigo, and pack loads of supplies. Dag ducked out from under the ledge, where Owlet was napping, and hobbled forth to greet them.
Arkady, still catching his breath from the climb, grabbed Dag by the shoulders as though he didn’t know whether to hug him or shake him. “I never thought I’d see you alive again! Ye gods, what horrible things have you been doing to your ground this time? ”
“Did a little surgical ground-ripping on some mud-bats. That’s how we all ended up here and not as meat in the malice’s lair. Arkady, we’re saved! Someone’s done for the malice!”
“Yes, we saw.” Tavia nodded vigorously. “There are dying mud-bats scattered all over the valley. We passed two on the way here.”
“Where’s Fawn? And the others,” Dag added conscientiously.
Arkady and Tavia looked at each other in a way Dag didn’t much like. Arkady said, “After you three were carried away, we made it to the trees, and the attack broke off. A mud-bat tried to take Barr, too, but it dropped him and shattered his leg. I put it back together as best I could, but there was no moving him far, so Sumac had me, Barr, and Rase hide up in a cave. Of sorts. Sumac decided she’d take everyone else west over the ridge, try to reach Laurel Gap.”
Best patrol procedure, get the children and women out of range of the malice, spread the warning. Or, efficiently, both at once. “Good for her.” Was Fawn safe on her way to the Lakewalker camp, then?
Evidently not, for Arkady added, “After that, Calla had better tell the tale.”
The half-blood girl took a deep breath. “We were partway up the hill last night, trying to cross that saddle, when the mud-bats came back. The malice came with them. It was flying.”
Dag’s belly chilled, but he reminded himself that however appalling this malice’s form, it was dead now.
“It looked sort of like a mud-bat, only bigger and, and… more beautiful, I suppose. Once you’d seen it, you wouldn’t ever mistake it for anything else, not for a second.”
Dag nodded understanding.
“It took our minds. It was the strangest sensation. Like I was calm on top, but screaming underneath.” Her tremors were long gone, in this bright afternoon, but Dag sensed a bone-deep exhaustion left in their wake; a familiar state, after dealing with the terror of a malice.
“It didn’t keep hold of her mind the way it did ours, though,” said Indigo. He, too, was pale with more than the night’s exertions.
Calla scowled in memory. “It was like all these wild ideas kept fading in and out of my thoughts. Arkady thinks I was trying to veil myself.”