“Cloud, stop!” He grabbed at Cloud’s mane mid-neck and pulled up, signaled <back up> with his legs, but Cloud ducked his head, jerking the mane out of his hand, and plowed ahead.
<Rogue,> Danny thought, and helplessly remembered: <Fire on glass. Log buildings. Village gates. —Cloud stopping. Cloud stopping.>
But Cloud sent <blood > and <fight > and carried him willy-nilly toward the chaos in Cloud’s thoughts.
Maybe the rogue was calling to them. Maybe Cloud was going crazy himself. He didn’t know what to do. If he got off he couldn’t hold Cloud back at all. Cloud would be helpless, prey to whatever Cloud believed he was seeing.
<Men taking Danny’s gun,> he sent. <Harper taking gun. Cloud stopping.>
Suddenly walls appeared through the veil of falling snow, walls at the side of the road—<log walls, a bell-arch, standing hazed in falling snow. Gates wide open to the night—the main gate standing wide.>
And rising from inside those walls: <eat and gnaw. Blood and flesh. Sugar and salt.>
<Nighthorse,> Cloud sent of a sudden. <Angry nighthorse.> And charged the open gates so suddenly that Danny scarcely grabbed a handful of mane.
They burst through into a street still reeking of smoke, a street where vermin by the hundreds, black against the snow, swarmed from under Cloud’s charge, snarling and spitting and squalling as they fled the street for the porches, the porches for the shadows. Vermin poured over walls, ran down the street ahead of them, a hissing recalcitrance all up and down the street.
Something sizeable went over the porch of a house near them, a house with what looked bodies lying on the porch. Scavengers scurried across the unmoving shapes and into the dark between the houses.
<Nighthorse,> was all Cloud’s sending. <Angry horse. Dark and blood. Clouds and lightning.>
Danny sat paralyzed on Cloud’s back as Cloud paced down the street. There was no real defiance, no <fight> coming back at them—the scavengers rolled back like a black tide in the force of Cloud’s warning, willy-wisps running for cover, lorry-lies clambering up over the walls, flitting shadows diving off porches and under them and down the spaces between the houses.
There was no horse present. No answer to Cloud’s challenge. Charred, skeletal timbers that had been buildings. The stench of smoke. A burned building standing next to a stone one that wasn’t touched at all, its windows appearing intact.
Bodies—thick in some places, bodies and what was left of them, sometimes just gnawed pieces, animal or human, he wasn’t sure.
A backbone that small teeth hadn’t taken apart turned up in the snow where something had dragged it and left it. For a second he wasn’t sure what it was. He’d not thought before what pieces would resist the scavengers longest—if a human or a horse went down out here. He’d not seen anything to match this destruction, not even from the images seniors carried with their stories—nothing, nothing this complete.
“Anyone?” he called aloud, scared to make a noise. His voice sounded thin and strange in the snowy silence that had succeeded the hissing.
He sent <horse and rider> into the ambient, but he feared no villager holed up in any refuge would dare put their head up until they heard a human voice. “Hello! Anyone hear me? Call out! You don’t need to come outside—just yell! I’ll find you!”
There wasn’t any sound. Scared, he thought, if anybody was alive—he’d endured only a few minutes of the scavenger babble before Cloud had sent them running; and he’d had a horse under him.
Any survivor would have had to hold out sane—God, since he’d seenthe images of the attack. The village had cried out into the ambient for help—with only the rogue to image for them. No one had come. No one had answered. There were supposed to be riders here. And they hadn’t saved the village.
“Anyone?” he called out, louder. “I’m a rider up from Shamesey! Do you need help?” Stupid, stupid question. “God, —can anybody hear me?”
He thought then that he did hear something, thin and far, he couldn’t be sure, except he thought he heard it through Cloud’s ears, too, and Cloud’s ears had pricked up.
Then Cloud quickened his pace, imaging <disease> and <fear> and <fire> as he went—Cloud went as far as a building at the end of the street, and stopped, a shiver going up his leg, his head up, his ears up—<disease,> Cloud maintained. <Blood. Vermin.>
But something else came through: <room with bars> and <dark> and <fear> and <cold,> all jumbled up together.
“Who’s in there?” Danny called out. “Come out! I’m right outside. It’s safe.”
“We can’t,” a voice cried from inside. “We’re locked in. God, oh, God, get us out of here.”
He wasn’t sure. He had no gun, he had no advice; he only had Cloud to keep vermin from going at his legs if there was anything lurking under that wooden porch, and if the rogue should come back—God knew what they could do, at this bottled-up end of the street and with the wide-open gate and escape far, far off at the other end.
He was scared to go up the steps—he was scared to open the door; but he was scared to linger here, either, dithering while trouble could be making up its mind and coming toward them. He leaned on Cloud’s withers and slid down, climbed the snow-blanketed steps and tried the door.
Latched. The paint was raked off the door and the door-frame, down to bare wood, the same spreading out over the wall and the storm-shutters. Several of the claw-marks were head-high, and deep.
“Get us out! Please, let us out!”
He didn’t know what to do. He didn’t want to raise a lot of racket. He called out, “Can you unlock the door?”
“No,” one voice said, and, “Break it down,” the other called out. “Please. God, please! We’re locked in!”
Images came at him, <gunfire outside the windows> and <woman with gun. Them shouting. Gun going off in the woman’s hands. Spatter flying—red on walls, on bars, on floor—<rogue-feeling > in the ambient—>
It was so real, for a moment Danny’s heart reacted. He cast a look back at Cloud and down the street to see if any other source of that feeling was out there. Cloud snorted, circled out and back, fretting; but there wasn’t anything; it was Cloud hearing it and carrying it to him from inside the building.
“Hell,” Danny muttered between his teeth, checked which way the door hinges were set—inward opening, which was only safe inside towns; and it was the only break he’d gotten. He rammed the door with his hip and felt play in it, hit it with his shoulder and finally, holding to the rail outside, hit it with his hip again, above the doorknob, over and over.
Wood splintered. The door flew back too fast and banged half-shut again.
“Oh, God,” a voice said. “We’re here! We’re here!”
It was a house, maybe. But, walking in, he couldn’t see where he was. He took a match out of his pocket and lit it—saw bars in the back, two haggard faces behind them.
God, it was the village jail.
He didn’t want to let loose criminals—but—
Did you leave anyone—any living creature—in a cage like this, to be eaten alive by things small enough to swarm through the bars?
The match burned his fingers. He dropped it—saw it burning on the wooden floor and stamped it out.
He saw in the last impression on his eyes, the lump that was a woman’s body. The sheen of gunmetal, all in the same memory of matchlight.
Cloud was insistently <wanting Danny on porch,> and he imaged back, teeth chattering, <Cloud in doorway, coming inside.>
“There’s a lamp,” one of the voices said. “On the table by the door.”
“It went out,” the other said. “It burned out.”