“Dag, you’re such a morbid crow—” Razi began.
“Well, gentlemen,” said Mari’s voice. “Do your feet hurt?”
Fawn turned her head and smiled diffidently at the patrol leader, who had drifted up to their table.
Razi opened his mouth, but Dag cut in, “Don’t answer that, Razi. It’s a trick question. The safe response is, ‘I can’t say, Mari, but why do you ask?’ ”
Mari’s lips twitched, and she returned in a sugary voice, “I’m so glad you asked that question, Dag!”
“Maybe not so safe,” murmured Utau, grinning.
“How’s the arm-harness repair coming?” Mari continued to Dag.
Dag grimaced. “Done tomorrow afternoon, maybe. I had to stop at two places before I found one that would do it for free. Or rather, in exchange for us saving his life, family, town, territory, and everyone in it.”
Utau said dryly, “Naturally, you forgot to mention it was you personally who took their malice down.”
Dag shrugged this off in irritation. “Firstly, that wasn’t so. Secondly, none of us could do the job without the rest of us, so all are owed. I shouldn’t… none of us should have to beg.”
“It so happens,” said Mari, letting this slide by, “that I have a sitting-down job for a one-handed man tomorrow morning. In the storeroom here is a trunkful of patrol logs and maps for this region that need a good going-over. The usual. I want someone with an eye for it to see if we can figure how this malice slipped through, and stop up the crack in future. Also, I want a listing of the nearby sectors that have been especially neglected. We’re going to stay here a few extra days while the injured recover, and to repair gear and furbish up.”
Utau and Razi both brightened at this news.
“We’ll do some local search-pattern catch-up at the same time,” Mari continued. “And let the Glassforge folk see us doing so,” she added, with dour emphasis and a nod at Dag. “Give ‘em a show.”
Dag snorted. “Better we should offer them double their blight bogles back if they’re not happy with our work.”
Razi choked on the beer he was just swallowing, and Utau kindly if unhelpfully thumped his back. “Oh, how I wish we could!” Razi wheezed when he’d caught his breath again. “Love to see the looks on their stupid farmer faces, just once!”
Fawn congealed, her beginning ease and enjoyment of the patrollers’ banter abruptly quenched. Dag stiffened.
Mari cast them both an enigmatic look, but moved off without comment, and Fawn remembered their exchange earlier on the universal nature of loutishness. So.
Razi burbled on obliviously, “Patrolling out of Glassforge is like a holiday. Sure, you ride all day, but when you come back there are real beds. Real baths! Food you don’t have to fix, not burned over a campfire. Little comforts to bargain for up in the town.”
“And yet farmers built this place,” Fawn murmured, and she was sure by his wince that Dag heard clearly the missing stupid she’d clipped out.
Razi shrugged. “Farmers plant crops, but who planted farmers? We did.”
What? Fawn thought.
Utau, perhaps not quite as oblivious as his comrade, glanced at her, and countered, “You mean our ancestors did. Pretty broad claim of credit, there.”
“Why shouldn’t we get the credit?” said Razi.
“And the blame as well?” said Dag.
Razi made a face. “I thought we did. Fair’s fair.”
Dag smiled tightly, drew a breath, and pushed himself up. “Well. If I’m to spend tomorrow peering at a bunch of ill-penned, misspelled, and undoubtedly incomplete patrol logs, I’d better get my eyes some rest now. If everyone else is as short on sleep as I am, it’ll be a good quiet night for catching up.”
“Find us lots of local patrols, Dag,” urged Razi. “Weeks’ worth.”
“I’ll see what I can do.”
Fawn rose too, and Dag shepherded her out. He made no attempt to apologize for Razi, but an odd look darkened his eyes, and Fawn did not like her sense of his thoughts receding to someplace barred to her. Outside, the late-summer dusk was closing in. He bade her good night at her door with studied courtesy.
The next morning Dag woke at dawn, but Fawn, to his approval, still slept. He went quietly downstairs and nabbed two patrollers from their breakfast to lug the records trunk upstairs to his room. In a short time he had logs, maps, and charts spread out on the room’s writing table, bed, and, soon after, the floor.
He heard the muffled creak of the bed and Fawn’s footsteps through the adjoining wall as she finally arose and rattled around her room getting dressed. At length, she poked her head cautiously around the frame of his door open to the hall, and he jumped up to escort her down to a breakfast much quieter than last night’s dinner, as a last few sleepy patrollers drifted out singly or in pairs.
After the meal, she followed him back upstairs to stare with interest at the paper and parchment drifting across his room. “Can I help?”
He remembered her susceptibility to boredom and itchy hands, but mostly he heard the underlying, Can I stay? He obligingly set her to mending pens, or fetching a paper or logbook from across the room from time to time—make-work, but it kept her quietly occupied and pleasantly near. She grew fascinated with the maps, charts, and logs, and fell to reading them, or trying to. It was not just the faded and often questionable handwriting that made this a slow process for her. Her claim to be able to read proved true, but it was plain from her moving finger and lips and the tension in her body that she was not fluent, probably due to never having had enough text to practice on. But when he scratched out a grid on a fresh sheet to turn the muddled log entries into a record visible at a glance, she followed the logic swiftly enough.
Around noon, Mari appeared in the open doorway. She raised an eyebrow at Fawn, perched on the bed poring over a contour map annotated with hand corrections, but said only, “How goes it?”
“Almost done,” said Dag. “There is no point going back more than ten years, I think. Quiet around here this morning. What are folks up to?”
“Mending, cleaning gear, gone uptown. Working with the horses. We found a blacksmith whose sister was among those we rescued from the mine, who’s been very willing to help out in the stable.” She wandered in and peered over his shoulder, then leaned back against the wall with her arms folded. “So. How did this malice slip past us?”
Dag tapped his grid, laid out on the table before him. “That section was last walked three years ago by a patrol from Hope Lake Camp. They were trying to run a sixteen-man pattern with just thirteen. Three short. Because if they’d dropped it down to a twelve-pattern, they’d have had to make two more passes to clear the area, and they were already three weeks behind schedule for the season. Even so, there’s no telling they missed anything; that malice might well not have been hatched out yet.”
“I’m not looking to lay blame,” said Mari mildly.
“I know.” Dag sighed. “Now, as for neglected sections…” His lips peeled back in a dry smile. “That was more revealing. Turns out all sections within a day’s ride of Glassforge that can be patrolled from horseback are up-to-date, or as up-to-date as anything, meaning no more than a year overdue. What’s left are some swampy areas to the west and rocky ravines to the east that you can’t take a horse through.” He added reflectively, “Lazy whelps.”
Mari smiled sourly. “I see.” She scratched her nose. “Chato and I figured he’d lend me two men, and we’d both send out sixteen-groups, dividing up the neglected sections between us. He and I are both going to be stuck here arguing with Glassforgers about what we’re due for our recent work on their behalf, so I’d thought to put you in charge of our patrol. Give you first pick of sections, though.”
“You’re so sweet, Mari. Waist-deep wading through smelly muck, with leeches, or sudden falls onto sharp rocks? They both sound so charming, I don’t know how I can decide.”
“Alternatively, you can roll up your sleeves and come he
lp me arm wrestle with Glassforgers. That works exceptionally well, I’ve noticed.”
Fawn, who had set down the map and was following the talk closely, blinked at this.
Dag grimaced in distaste. In his list of personal joys, parading their wounded to shame farmers into pitching in ranked well below frolicking with leeches and barely above lancing oozing saddle boils. “I swore the last time I put on that show for you, it would be the last.” He added after a reflective moment, “And the time before. You have no shame, Mari.”
“I have no resources,” she returned, her face twisting in frustration. “Fairbolt once figured it takes at least ten folks back in the camps, not counting the children, to support one patroller in the field. Every bit of help we fail to pull in from outside puts us that bit more behind.”
“Then why don’t we pull in more? Isn’t that why farmers were planted in the first place?” The argument was an old one, and Dag still didn’t know the right answer.
“Shall we become lords again?” said Mari softly. “I think not.”
“What’s the alternative? Let the world drift to destruction because we’re too ashamed to call for help?”
“Keep the balance,” said Mari firmly. “As we always have. We cannot ever let ourselves become dependent upon outsiders.” Her glance slid over Fawn. “Not us.”
A little silence fell, and Dag finally said, “I’ll take swamps.”
Her nod was a bit too satisfied, and Dag wondered if he’d just made a mistake. He added after a moment, “But if you let us take along a few horse boys from the stables here to watch the mounts, we won’t have to leave a patroller with the horse lines while we slog.”
Mari frowned, but said at last, reluctantly, “All right. Makes sense for the day-trips, anyway. You’ll start tomorrow.”
Fawn’s brown eyes widened in mild alarm, and Dag realized the source of Mari’s muffled triumph. “Wait,” he said. “Who will look after Miss Bluefield while I’m gone?”
“I can. She won’t be alone. We have four other injured recovering here, and Chato and I will be in and out.”
“I’m sure I’ll be fine, Dag,” Fawn offered, although a faint doubt colored her voice.
“But can you keep her from trying to overdo?” Dag said gruffly. “What if she starts bleeding again? Or gets chilled and throws a fever?”
Even Fawn’s brow wrinkled at that last one. Her lips moved on a voiceless protest, But it’s midsummer.
“Then I’ll be better fit to deal with that than you would,” said Mari, watching him.
Watching him flail, he suspected glumly. He drew back from making more of a show of himself than he already had. He’d had his groundsense closed down tight since they’d hit the outskirts of Glassforge yesterday, but Mari clearly didn’t need to read his ground to draw her own shrewd conclusions, even without the way Fawn glowed like a rock-oil lamp in his presence.
He rolled up his chart and handed it to Mari. “You can have that to tack on the wall downstairs, and we can mark it off as we go. For whatever amusement it will provide folks. If you hint there could be a bow-down when we reach the end, it might go more briskly.”
She nodded affably and withdrew, and Dag put Fawn to work helping him restack the contents of the trunk in rather better order than he’d found it.
As she brought him an armload of stained and tattered logbooks, she asked, “That’s twice now you’ve talked about planting farmers. What do you mean?”
He sat back on his heels, surprised. “Don’t you know where your family comes from?”
“Sure I do. It’s written down in the family book that goes with the farm accounts. My great-great-great-grandfather”—she paused to check the generations on her fingers, and nodded—“came north to the river ridge from Lumpton with his brother almost two hundred years ago to clear land. A few years later, Great-great-great got married and crossed the western river branch to start our place. Bluefields have been there ever since. That’s why the nearest village is named West Blue.”
“And where were they before Lumpton Market?”
She hesitated. “I’m not sure. Except that it was just Lumpton back then, because Lumpton Crossroads and Upper Lumpton weren’t around yet.”
“Six hundred years ago,” said Dag, “this whole region from the Dead Lake to nearly the southern seacoast was all unpeopled wilderness. Some Lakewalkers from this hinterland went down to the coasts, east and south, where there were some enclaves of folks—your ancestors—surviving. They persuaded several groups to come up here and carve out homes for themselves. The idea was that this area, south of a certain line, had been cleared enough of malices to be safe again. Which proved to be not quite the case, although it was still much better than it had once been. Promises were exchanged… fortunately, my people still remember what they were. There were two more main plantations, one east at Tripoint and one west around Farmer’s Flats, besides the one south of the Grace at Silver Shoals that most folks around here eventually came from. The homesteaders’ descendants have been slowly spreading out ever since.
“There were two notions about this scheme among the Lakewalkers—still are, in fact. One faction figured that the more eyes we had looking for malice outbreaks, the better. The other figured we were just setting out malice food. I’ve seen malices develop in both peopled and unpeopled places, and I don’t see much to choose between the horrors, so I don’t get too excited about that argument anymore.”
“So Lakewalker’s were here before farmers,” said Fawn slowly.
“Yes.”
“What was here before Lakewalkers?”
“What, you know nothing?”
“You don’t have to sound so shocked,” she said, obviously stung, and he made a gesture of apology. “I know plenty, I just don’t know what’s true and what’s tall tales and bedtime stories. Once upon a time, there was supposed to have been a chain of lakes, not just the big dead one. With a league of seven beautiful cities around them, commanded by great sorcerer-lords, and a sorcerer king, and princesses and bold warriors and sailors and captains and who knows what all. With tall towers and beautiful gardens and jeweled singing birds and magical animals and holy whatnot, and the gods’ blessings flowing like the fountains, and gods popping in and out of people’s lives in a way that I would find downright unnerving, I’m pretty sure. Oh, and ships on the lakes with silver sails. I think maybe they were plain white cloth sails, and just looked silver in the moonlight, because it stands to reason that much metal would capsize a boat. What I know is the tall tale is where they say some of the cities were five miles across, which is impossible.”
“Actually”—Dag cleared his throat—“that part I know to be true. The ruins of Ogachi Strand are only a few miles out from shore. When I was a young patroller up that way, some friends and I took an outrigger to look at them. On a clear, quiet day you can see down to the tops of stone wreckage along the old shoreline, in places. Ogachi really was five miles across, and more. These were the people who built the straight roads, after all. Which were thousands of miles long, some of them, before they got so broken up.”
Fawn stood up and dusted her skirt, and sat on the edge of his bed, her face tight with thought. “So—where’d they all go? Those builders.”
“Most died. A remnant survived. Their descendants are still here.”
“Where?”
“Here. In this room. You and me.”
She stared at him in real surprise, then looked down at her hands in doubt. “Me?”
“Lakewalker tales say…” He paused, sorting and suppressing. “That Lakewalkers are descended from some of those sorcerer-lords who got away from the wreck of everything. And farmers are descended from ordinary folks on the far edges of the hinterlands, who somehow survived the original malice wars, the first great one, and the two that came after, that killed the lakes and left the Western Levels.” Also dubbed the Dead Levels, by those who’d skirted them, and Dag could understand why.
“The
re was more than one war? I never heard that,” she said.
He nodded. “In a sense. Or maybe there’s always only been one. The question you didn’t ask is, where do the malices come from?”
“Out of the ground. They always have. Only”—she hesitated, then went on in a rush—“I suppose you’re going to say, not always, and tell me how they got into the ground in the first place, right?”
“I’m actually a little vague on that myself. What we do know is that all malices are descendants of the first great one. Except not descended like we are, with marriage and birth and the passing of generations. More like some monstrous insect that laid ten thousand eggs that hatch up out of the ground at intervals.”
“I saw that thing,” said Fawn lowly. “I don’t know what it was, but it sure wasn’t a bug.”
He shrugged. “It’s just a way of trying to think about them. I’ve seen a few dozen of them in my life, so far. I could as well say the first was like a mirror that shattered into ten thousand splinters to make ten thousand little mirrors. Malices aren’t material at all, in their inner nature. They just pull matter in from around them to make themselves a house, a shell. They seem to feed on ground itself, really.”
“How did it shatter?”
“It lost the first war. They say.”
“Did the gods help?”
Dag snorted. “Lakewalker legends say the gods abandoned the world when the first malice came. And that they will return when the earth is entirely cleansed of its spawn. If you believe in gods.”
“Do you?”
“I believe they are not here, yes. It’s a faith of sorts.”
“Huh.” She rolled up the last maps and tied their strings before handing them to him. He settled them in place and closed the trunk.
He sat with his hand on the latch a moment. “Whatever their part really was,” he said finally, “I don’t think it was just the sorcerer-lords who built all those towers and laid those roads and sailed those ships. Your ancestors did, too.”