“We don’t all have to go in. We could set up a camp here. You could stay with Varleen and Griff, Fawn. Blight this deep will be draining, even if you can’t feel it. Bad for you. And…it could be ugly.” Will be ugly.
Fawn leaned on her pommel and gave him a sharp look. “If it’s bad for me, won’t it be worse for you? Convalescing as you aren’t—at least not any too fast, that I can see.”
Mari vented a sour chuckle. “She’s got you there.”
Fawn took a breath and sat up. “This place—it’s something like West Blue, right?”
“Maybe,” Dag allowed.
“Then—I need to see it, too.” She gave a firm little nod.
They exchanged a long look; her resolve rang true. Should I be surprised? “Soonest begun, soonest done, then. We won’t linger long.” Dag braced himself and waved Saun onward.
They rode first past deserted farms: sickly, then dying, then dead, then dead with a peculiar gray tinge that was quite distinctive. Dag knew it well and furled his groundsense in tight around him, as did the other patrollers. It didn’t help quite enough.
“What are we looking for?” asked Griff, as the first buildings of a little town hove into view past a screen of bare and broken buckthorn bushes, someone’s scraggly attempt at a hedge.
“I’d like to find the lair, to start,” said Dag. “See where the malice started out, try to figure why it wasn’t spotted.”
It wasn’t that hard; they just followed the gradient of blight deeper and deeper. It felt like riding into a dark hollow, for all that the land here was as level as the rest of Raintree. The flattened vegetation grew grayer, and even the clapboard houses, with their fences leaning drunkenly, seemed drained of all color. It all smelled as dry and odorless as cave dust. The town was maybe twice the size of West Blue, Dag gauged. It had three or four streets. A sturdy wharf jutted into a river worthy of the name and not just a jumped-up creek, which seemed to flow deeply enough to float small keelboats up from the Grace, and certainly rafts and flatboats down. A square for a day market; alehouse and smithy and forge; perhaps two hundred houses. A thousand people, formerly. None now.
The pit of the blight seemed to lie in a woodlot at the edge of the town. The horses snorted uneasily as their riders forced them forward. A shallow, shale-lined ravine with a small creek running through it shadowed a near cave partway up one side, not unlike the one they’d seen near Glassforge, if much smaller. It was quite empty now, the shale slumping in a slide to half block the water. Alongside the creek the earth was pocked with man-wide, man-deep pits, so thickly clustered in places as to seem like a wasp nest broken open. The malice’s first mud-man nursery, likely.
“With all these people around,” said Griff, “it’s hard to believe that no one spotted any of the early malice signs.”
“Maybe someone did,” said Fawn, “and no one paid them any mind. Being too young and short. The woodlot is common for the whole town. You bet the youngsters here played in that creek all the time, and in these woods.”
Dag hunched over his saddlebow and inhaled carefully, steadying his shuddering stomach. Yes. Malice food indeed, of the richest sort. Delivered up. This was how the malice had started so fast. He remembered its beauty in the silver light. How many molts…? As many as it liked.
“Did no one know to run?” asked Varleen. “Or did it just come up too quick?”
“It came up fast, sure, but not that fast,” opined Mari. She frowned at Dag’s huddle. “Some were killed by ill luck, but I expect more were killed by ignorance.”
“Why were—” Fawn began, and stopped.
Dag turned his head and raised his brows at her.
“I was going to say, why were they so ignorant,” she said in a lower voice. “But I was just as ignorant myself, not long back. So I guess I know why.”
Dag, still wordless with the nightmare images running through his mind, just shook his head and turned Copperhead around. They rode up from the ravine on the widest beaten path.
As they returned down the main street near the wharf, Saun’s head suddenly came up. “I swear I hear voices.”
Dag eased his groundsense open slightly, snapping it back again almost at once, cringing at the searing sensation. But he’d caught the life-sparks. “Over that way.”
They rode on, turning down a side street lined with bare trees and empty houses, some new clapboard, the older ones log-sided. A few had broken glass windows; most still made do with old-fashioned parchment and summer netting, though also split or ripped. The street became a rutted lane, beyond which lay a broad field, its trampled grass and weeds gray-dun. A score or so of human figures milled about on its far end along what used to be a tree line. A few carts with dispirited horses hitched to them stood by.
“They can’t be back trying to farm this!” said Saun in dismay.
“No,” said Dag, rising in his stirrups and squinting, “it’s no crop they’re planting today.”
“They’re digging graves,” said Mari quietly. “Must be some refugees who’ve come back to try and find their kin, same as at Bonemarsh.”
Griff shook his head in regret.
Dag hitched his reins into his hook, for all that his left arm was still very weak, to free his hand. He waved the patrol forward, but with a cautioning gesture brought them to a halt again at a little distance from the Greenspring survivors.
The townsmen formed up in a ragged rank, clutching shovels and mattocks in a way that reminded Dag a lot of the Horsefords’ first fearful approach to him, sitting so meekly on their porch. If the Horsefords had suffered reason to be nervy, these folks had cause to be half-crazed. Or maybe all-the-way crazed.
After an exchange of looks and low mutters, a single spokesman stepped out of the pack and moved cautiously toward the patrol, stopping a few prudent paces off, but within reasonable hearing distance. Good. Reassurances might work better delivered in a soothing tone, rather than bellowed. Dag touched his temple. “How de’.”
The man returned a short, grudging nod. He was middle-aged, careworn, dressed in work clothes due for mending that hadn’t been washed for weeks, an almost welcome whiff of something human in this odorless place. His face was so gray with fatigue as to look blighted while alive. Dag thought, unwillingly, of Sorrel Bluefield again.
“You folks shouldn’t be on this sick ground,” Dag began.
“It’s our ground,” the man returned, his stare distant.
“It’s been poisoned by the blight bogle. It’ll go on poisoning you if you linger on it.”
The man snorted. “I don’t need some Lakewalker corpse-eater to tell me that.”
Dag tried a brief, acknowledging nod. “You can bury your dead here if you like, though I wouldn’t advise it, but you should not camp here at night, leastways.”
“There’s shelter still standing.” The townsman raised his chin and scowled, and added in a tone of warning, “We’ll be guarding this ground tonight. In case you all were thinking of sneaking back.”
What did the fellow imagine? That Dag’s patrol had come around to try to steal the bodies of their dead? Infuriated protests rose in his mind: We would not do such a foul thing. We have plenty of corpses of our own just now, thank you all the same. Farmer bones are of no use to us, ground-ripped bones are no use to us, and as for ground-ripped farmer bones…! Teeth tight, he let nothing escape but a flat, “You do that.”
Perhaps uneasily realizing he’d given offense, the townsman did not apologize, but at least slid sideways: “And how else will we find each other, if any more come back? The bogle cursed us and marched us off all over the place…”
Had he been one of the bewildered mind-slaves? It seemed so. “Did no one know to run for help, when the bogle first came up? To spread a warning?”
“What help?” The man huffed again. “You Lakewalkers on your high horses rode us down. I was there.” His voice fell. “We were all mad with the bogle spells, yes, but…”