He hadn’t expected them to work up to him, however. “Dag,” said Mari, with her usual directness, “the bags under your eyes are so black you look like a blighted raccoon. Have you had anybody look you over yet?”
He’d been thinking of quietly hauling one of the better field medicine fellows out of range of the grove to examine him. Mari, he realized glumly, was not only at the top of that list by experience and ground-sense skill, but would corner any substitute and have the story ripped out of him in minutes anyway. Might as well save steps.
“Come on,” he sighed. She nodded in stern satisfaction.
He led off to his stump of last night, or one like it, sat, and cautiously opened himself. It took a couple of minutes, and he ended with his head bent nearly to his knees. Still hurts.
He heard a long, slow hiss through her teeth that for Mari was as scary as swearing. In a tone of cool understatement, she observed, “Well, that don’t look so good. What is that black crap?”
“Some sort of ground contamination. It happened when I…” he started to say, ground-ripped the malice, but changed it to, “when I tried to draw the malice off from Utau, and it turned on me. It was like bits of it stuck to me, and burned. I couldn’t get rid of it. Then I closed up and passed out.”
“You sure did. I thought you were just ground-ripped—hah, listen to me, just ground-ripped—like Utau. Does that, um…hurt? Looks like it ought to.”
“Yeah.” Dag turned his groundsense on himself, closing his eyes for an instant to feel more clearly. Two of the gray patches on his left arm, separate last night, seemed to have grown together since like two water droplets joining. I’m losing ground.
Mari said hesitantly, “You want me to try anything? Think a bit of ground reinforcement might help, or a match?”
“Not sure. I wouldn’t want to get this crud stuck to you. I suspect it’s”—lethal—“not good. Better wait. It’s not like I’m falling over.”
“It’s not like you’re dancing a jig, either. This isn’t like…Utau’s ground, it’s like it’s scraped raw, shivering and won’t stop, but you can see it’ll come right in its own time. This…yeah, this is outside my ken. You need a real medicine maker.”
“That’s what I figured. Hope one shows up soon. Meantime, well, I can still walk, it seems. If not jig.” Dag hesitated. “If you can refrain from gossiping about this all over camp, I’d take it kindly.”
Mari snorted. “So if this had happened to any other patroller, how fast would you have slapped him onto the sick list?”
“Privileges of captaincy,” Dag said vaguely. “You know that road, patrol leader.”
“Yeah? Would that be the privilege to be stupid? Funny, I don’t seem to recall that one.”
“Look, if anybody with more skill shows up here to hand this mess on to, you bet I’ll be on my horse headed east in an hour.” Except that he could not ride away from what he carried inside, now, could he? “I have no idea who the Raintree folks can spare or when, but I figure the soonest we could get help from home is six days.” He stared around; the afternoon was growing hazy, with a brassy heat in the air that foreboded evening thundershowers.
Mari glanced toward the grove, and said quietly, “Think those folks will last six more days?”
Dag let out a long breath and heaved himself to his feet. “I don’t know, Mari. Does look like we need to rustle up some kind of tent covering to gather them under, though. Rain tonight, you think?”
“Looks like,” she agreed.
They strolled silently back to the dead grove.
He wasn’t sure how much Mari talked, or didn’t, but a lot of people in the grove camp that evening seemed to take it as their mission to tell him to go lie down. He was persuadable, except that with nothing to do but sit cross-legged on his bedroll and stare at the groundlocked makers, he found himself drifting into hating them. Without this tangle, he could have gone home with today’s patrol. In three days’ time, held Spark hard and not let go even for breathing. His earlier weariness of this long war was as nothing to his present choked surfeit. He slept poorly.
By late the following afternoon, two of the older makers had lost the ability to swallow, and one was having trouble breathing. As Carro, one of Mari’s cronies from Obio’s patrol, held the man up in her lap in an effort to ease him, Dag knelt beside the bedroll and studied his labored gasps. Breathing this bad in a dying man was normally a signal to share, and soon. But was this fellow dying? Need he be? His thinning hair was streaked with gray, but he was hardly elderly; before this horror had fallen on him, Dag judged him to have been hale, lean and wiry. Artin was his name, Dag didn’t want to know, an excellent smith and something of a weapons-master. Under his own tracing fingers, Dag could read a lifetime of accumulated knowledge in the subtle calluses of Artin’s hands.
Mari blotted the face and hair of the nearby woman she had just spent several fruitless minutes trying to get water down, while the woman had writhed and choked. “If we can’t get more drink into them in this heat, they aren’t going to last anything like five more days, Dag.”
Carro nodded to the man in her lap. “This one, less.”
“I see that,” murmured Dag.
Saun paced about. Dag had guessed he would volunteer for the patrol lingering in Raintree to assist the refugees, and indeed he’d scorned an offer to ride back to Hickory Lake yesterday; but, taking his partnership with Dag seriously, he’d instead requested assignment to this duty. He slept in the now-reduced camp to the east off the blight, but lived at Dag’s left elbow in the daytime. Which would be a fine thing if only Saun acted less like a flea on a griddle in the face of these frustrations.
Now he declared, “We have to try something. Dag, you say you think these makers are still supporting the mud-men. If that’s so, doesn’t it make sense to cut off the load?”
“Obio and Griff said they tried that,” said Dag patiently. “The results were pretty alarming, I gathered.”
“But no one died. It could be like one of Hoharie’s cuttings, hurting to heal.”
It was a shrewd argument, and it attracted Dag more than the prospect of just sitting here watching while these people suffered and failed. My company. He wasn’t quite sure how these Raintree makers had become honorary members of it in his mind, but they had. His three unconscious patrollers were the least depleted, so far, but Dag could see that wasn’t going to last.
“I admit,” Dag said slowly, “I’d like to see what happens for myself.” Although how much telling detail he was likely to observe with his groundsense closed was a bitter question. “Maybe…do one. And then we’ll see.”
Saun gave him a quick nod of understanding and went to fetch his sword. It was the same weapon that had put Saun in harm’s way back at Glassforge; Dag had heroically refrained from pointing out how useless the deadweight had been to Saun on this trip, too. But for dispatching mud-men in their pots, it would do nearly as well as a spear, and better than a knife.
Sword over his shoulder, Saun trod determinedly back through the grove and out toward the boggy patch, his boots squelching in the mud from last night’s rain. He slowed, trying to pick his way more cleanly upon clumps of dead grasses, and peered down into the mud pots with a look of curious revulsion.
The unformed monsters therein were in a revolting enough state, distorted past any hope of returning to their animal lives, and equally far from transformation to their mock-human forms. Innocent but doomed. Dag’s brow furrowed. So—if their transformation could somehow be completed, with the malice dead would they switch their slavish allegiance to the Lakewalker makers? It was a disturbing idea, as if Dag’s brain didn’t teem with enough of those already. The more disturbing for being seductive. Powerful subhuman servants might be used for a multitude of desperately needed tasks. Had the mage-lords of old made something like them? All malices seemed to hatch with the knowledge, not to mention the compulsion, of such makings, which suggested it was an old, old skill. But the mud-slaves presumably would require a continuous supply of ground reinforcement to live, making them lethally expensive to maintain.