“Dag!” Obio cried. “You’re here—absent gods be praised!” His voice seemed to hold more than just relief to see Dag alive. It had the shaken timbre of a man with a crisis desperately seeking someone else to hand it to. One of us is thanking the absent gods too soon, I think.
Dag tried to get both eyes open at once and brace his spine. At least enough to dismount, after which he was determined not to climb back into that saddle again for a long, long time. He slid down and clung to his stirrup leather for a moment, partly for support as he woozily adjusted to standing again, partly because he could barely remember what he was trying to do.
Saun’s anxious voice brought him back to the moment. “You have to see this, Captain!”
He turned, moistened his lips. Got out, “How many? Did we lose.” He felt too close to weeping, and he feared frightening Saun with his fragility. He wanted to explain, reassure: Fellows get like this after, sometimes. You’ll see it, if you’re around long enough.
But Saun was babbling on: “Everyone’s alive that was yesterday. Except now there’s a new problem.”
In a dim effort to fend it all off for just a moment longer, like a man pulling his blanket over his head when called from his bedroll by raucous comrades, Dag blinked at Obio, and asked in a voice raspy with fatigue, “When did you get here?”
“Last night.”
“Where is everyone?”
“We’ve set up a camp about a mile east, just off the blight.” Obio waved toward a distant, greener tree line. “I rested the company yesterday morning, then sent scouts out after you. I started us all toward here at midafternoon, closing up the distance in case, you know. We were getting pretty worried toward dusk, when my scouts hadn’t come back and my flankers ran into a couple of mud-men. They did for them pretty quick, but it was plain you hadn’t got the malice when you’d planned.”
“No. Later. Couple hours after midnight, about twenty miles south.”
“So Saun just said. But if—well, here’s Griff, my scout who found this. Let him tell.”
A worried-looking fellow of about Dirla’s age came up and gave Dag a nod. Griff had been walking for ten years, and in Dag’s experience was levelheaded and reliable. Which made his current rumpled, wild-eyed appearance just that much more disturbing.
“Gods, Dag, I’m so glad you’re here!”
Dag controlled a wince, leaning his arm along Copperhead’s back for secret support. “What happened?” And added prudently, as Griff’s distraught look deepened, “From the beginning.”
Griff gulped and nodded. “The two pairs of us scouts came down here to Bonemarsh late yesterday afternoon. We could track where your veiled patrol had passed through, right enough. We figured—well, hoped—that the malice had moved off and you all had moved after it. Then we found these makers tied to the trees”—he glanced over his shoulder—“and then we thought maybe you must have been captured, instead.”
Because good patrollers don’t abandon their own? Charitable, Griff. “No. We left them tied, passed them by,” Dag admitted.
Griff straightened; to Dag’s surprise, the look on his face was not horror or contempt, but respect. He asked earnestly, “How did you know it was a trap?”
Trap? What? Dag shook his head. “I didn’t. They were a sacrifice to pure tactics. I didn’t want to chance warning the malice there were patrollers coming up this close behind it.”
“You said there was something really wrong,” Saun corrected this, frowning. “And to keep our grounds shut tight when we were touching them.”
“That wasn’t exactly a stretch of my wits by that point, Saun. Go on, Griff.”
“We could see they were groundlocked. Seemed to be. So Mallora did what you do to someone groundlocked, reached in and bumped grounds to break them out of the trance. Except—instead of her waking them up, the groundlock just seemed to, to reach out and suck her in. Her eyes rolled back, and she crumpled up in a heap. The mud-puppies all out in their pots over there”—Griff waved toward the bog—“made these strange bubbling noises and flopped around when it happened. Made us jump, in the dusk. I didn’t notice how silent it all really was, till then. Mallora’s partner Bryn panicked, I think—she reached out for her, tried to drag her back. And she got sucked in after. I grabbed my partner Ornig before he could reach for Bryn.”
Dag nodded, provisionally, but Griff’s face was tightening in something like despair. Dag murmured, “It used to happen up in Luthlia sometimes in the winter, someone would fall through rotten ice. And their friends or their kin would try to pull them out, and instead be pulled in after. One after another. Instead of running for help or a rope—though the smart patrollers there always wore a length of rope wrapped around their waists in the cold season. Except if someone’s slipped under the ice—well, never mind. The hardest thing…the hardest thing in such a string of tragedy was to be the one who stopped. But you bet the older folks understood.”
Griff blinked back tears, ducking his head in thanks. He swallowed for control of his voice, and went on, “Ornig and I agreed he would stay, and I would go for help. And I rode hard! But I think I should have stayed, because when we made it back”—he swallowed again—“the makers were all cut down from the trees, as if Ornig had tried to make them more comfortable, but Ornig was all in a heap. He must have…tried something.” He added after a moment, “He’s sweet on Bryn, see.”
Dag nodded understanding, and stepped away from Copperhead to get a closer look at what was going on in the grove. If only he could find a tree to lean against—not that honey locust, bole and branches bristling with clusters of nasty triple-headed spines—his hand found a low branch from a young wild cherry, and he gripped it and peered. Three or four patrollers, at least one of whom Dag recognized as one of the company’s better medicine makers, moved among bedrolls laid out where space permitted. He counted eight. More and more at risk. Someone had a campfire going, though, and something heating in pots—drinking water, medicine?
All good, but there was something deeply wrong with the picture…oh. “Why haven’t you moved them off this blighted ground?”
Mari, Dirla, and Razi had dismounted during Griff’s recitation, moving closer to listen. Razi still held the reins of Utau’s horse; Utau drooped over his saddlebow, squinting. Dag wasn’t sure how much of this he was taking in.
“We tried,” said Obio. “Soon as you carry someone more than about a hundred paces away, they stop breathing.”
“Must have been a thrill finding that out,” Mari said.
“Oh, aye,” agreed Obio, fervent. “In the middle of the night last night.”
“And if you kill one of the mud-men in their mudholes,” Griff added morosely, “the people scream in their sleep. It’s pretty blighted unnerving. So we stopped that, too.”
“I figured,” said Obio, “that if—when—someone caught up with the malice, the groundlock would break on its own. I intended to detail a few folks to look after them and take the company on, as soon as enough scouts came back to give me a guess what we ought to try next. Except…you say you all did for the malice, but that ugly groundlock’s still holding tight.”
“Dirla did,” said Dag. “With Mari’s sharing knife. Your first personal kill, I believe, Dirla?” It was a shame that the congratulations and celebration that should have been hers were being overwhelmed in this new crisis.
Dirla nodded absently. She frowned past Dag at the unmoving figures in the shaded bedrolls. “Could there be more than one malice? And that’s why this link didn’t break last night?”
Dag tried to think this utterly horrible idea through logically, but his brains seemed to be slowly turning to porridge. His gut said no, right enough, but he couldn’t for the life of him say why, not in words.