The eye that took in constant information from such tracks could say there were a lot of them, and they were all nuisance-spooks, nothing serious.
The mind—understood a threat in that pattern: there should be bigger hunters abroad, even with a local number of horses in the ambient. A horse wouldn’t drive the hunters out. Compete with them. Annoy them. Yes.
But not interfere with a hunter’s predations among so many, many small spooks—unless human riders wanted to clear the area. That would be the obvious conclusion—if this rider didn’t know there was another, more ominous possibility.
The predators gave each other as much room as they needed, unless hunger or human presence drove them into a fight that neither ordinarily would pursue: their sign and their sendings defined where that back-to-the-wall point was, so they passed with bluster and bluff; the life-and-death struggle was all with prey, and prey never lacked predators.
Never lacked predators.
It didn’t make either of them comfortable, the horse-image in his head when he thought that.
The ground showed occasional tracks, never enough of them. The ambient held the occasional spook-image from the bushes. They walked along together, or Guil rode, and walked again, as Burn pleased. They had the morning’s biscuits as bacon sandwiches, had a couple of targets if he’d wanted to hunt, but they had supplies enough and he could get a good meal at Tarmin this evening. He didn’t want to shoot off a gun and spook everything into behaviors that said everything about the gunfire and nothing at all about what he was hunting. And he might not stay in Tarmin after he got there. He might sit out and listen—if there was a place he could fortify and quiet enough near the village to sit out in the dark and listen.
Because he never forgot what the job was: he just broke it up into smaller pieces that never left him daydreaming his way across the mountain—quick way to disaster, that was; of all mistakes Aby had made, he knew it wasn’t that one—she’d been too long in too many bad places to get caught napping.
The phone lines and the clear-cut were a guide along the easy way—no need to worry about pits, rocks, and hidden holes: Burn was willing to move—Burn had <village at evening> and <females > in his head, and wanted <moving fast> again now that Burn had caught a breath and rested his back.
Guil took a fistful of mane and was about to do that when he saw a strange growth on the mountainside above them, like slats or a curiously regular weed growing out of the rocks. That was the first blink.
Then he realized it was bone supporting a coating of snow. A rib cage, or a part of one, and large. <Horse-bones, > he thought, and Burn flared his nostrils and looked, sniffing for <trouble.>
Guil swung up. Dead horse up there. Possibly a wild one. Hard to say how long dead, but the very fact the bones were hanging together—though they might have frozen in that state—made it worrisome.
<Shelter,> he thought. He’d ridden all along with a shell in the chamber, not a practice he’d have recommended to juniors—but juniors weren’t riding where he was riding, with maybe a hairbreadth margin of decision between himself and something that could take a nighthorse.
A fall was always possible. A broken leg, a stone-edge gash, a death by freezing or blood loss or even old age. But that was the way you’d explain a horse death on mountains where you didn’t have other, worse, possibilities, and he listened into the ambient, in case there was a rider stranded and dug in somewhere.
It was very, very quiet in the area—which wasn’t unusual in areas of the deep woods. But it wasn’t an ordinary area, in which a nighthorse had met with something it couldn’t deal with. He could wish it was the rogue and that whatever injuries it had had just caught up with it—but he didn’t bet their lives on it.
Burn didn’t take great upset at the sight at all. <Bones> were <bones > and the woods were full of them, few hanging together for any length of time—that a few did argued that the horse hadn’t died too long ago; and that made Burn prick up his ears and sharpen his other senses into the ambient, not recklessly: Burn listened, and Burn’s rider sat astride and listened, in as close a borrowing of nighthorse senses as a human being could use.
All around, just a sense of life, little life, distant life, a whisper in the ambient, the awareness he’d dropped out of only in the desolation as Anveney.
That hush, everywhere about the mountainside. The rogue, if it was within reach, was quiescent for some reason.
Sleeping, maybe.
Or involved with something near and preoccupying to it, if it shared any traits of sane horses.
<Shelter, > Guil imaged, thinking of riders potentially in trouble. Burn made no objections to that idea. <Shelter> was a very good idea with <danger> in the area, but the danger was all <Guil danger.> Burn didn’t find a source of it in the ambient.
Burn picked up his pace, hit his meaning-business gait and kept at it, whuffs of breath and hoof-falls in the snow assuming one quick rhythm. Over close to an hour, the road led down across a rough spot in the mountain flank and around into a climb to a place protected by trees and the angle of the mountain.
It was a place a rider would look to find a shelter built, if he knew one was due; and Guil had no trouble spotting it among the evergreens a little above them on the mountain.
But there was a darkness about the door. It was standing wide; and when he and Burn turned off the road and went higher on the slope to investigate the place, vermin scurried madly and darted from the open doorway.
<Rider opening door,> Guil thought uncomfortably, and sat astride Burn and called aloud, “Is anyone here?”
There was no answer. Not a one. A last willy-wisp racketed about the interior and ran out in desperation past Burn’s feet.
<Horse bones,> Guil thought, and Burn snorted the scent of the place out of his nostrils and turned his head without Guil asking, going <downslope> and <toward the road> and <toward den and females.>
A restocking of the supplies in a shelter didn’t accidentally leave a door unlatched. A rider wasn’t that careless or he was dead in his first year.
<Horse bones,> Guil thought, and probably <human bones> not far from the others. Opening a door under attack was the last thing a rider would do, except maybe to save a partner, maybe to get off a shot at the attacker—but, first off, there was a gun-port; and second, if you did go out, you latched that door. Leaving that door open behind one’s back was a mistake only a fatally confused rider might make, under circumstances when places of safety and places of threat might trade places—when even a rider used to sendings might not be sure what he’d done and not done, or where the enemy was.
They turned back down to the road and found, as they went, supplies strewn along the ground, a blanket hanging in a bush, a big tin of what had probably been flour, very clean, shiny, dented and scratched, and missing both flour and lid, lying in the roadway. It had snow inside the open end and a deep blanket of snow lying undisturbed on the upper surface.
That also said something about when the occupants had died.
It wasn’t the last of the debris. Rags turned up here and there, a few bones hanging together that didn’t look to be horse bones. The scavengers were quick and thorough. There’d been one at the bones only a moment ago, but it fled into the bushes.
Burn maintained a very close, very soft contact with the ambient, listening, lowering his head and smelling the bones and the vermin-tracked snow—but only briefly, obtaining nothing definite, from what Guil could detect, besides the expected blood and ani-mal smells. There were many more ways to reach that cabin than from the road, given the surefootedness of a horse.