“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.
Dag was glad to give over this line of thought as Saun called, “Which should I start with? The biggest?”
Mari, her face screwed up in doubt as she stared down at the damp woman maker, said, “The smallest?”
“I’m not sure it matters,” Dag called back. “Just pick one.”
Saun stepped toward a mud pot, gripped his sword in both hands, braced his shoulders, squinted, and struck. Squalling and splashing rose from the hole, and flying mud; Saun grimaced, pulled back, and struck hastily again.
“What was it?” Mari called.
“Beaver. I think. Or maybe woodchuck.” Saun jumped back, looking sick, as the splashing died away.
Carro’s cry wrenched Dag’s attention around. The makers—all the groundlocked folk—were writhing and moaning in their bedrolls, as if in pain—deep, inarticulate animal sounds. The other two on-duty patrollers hurried to their sides, alarmed. The makers did not seem to be actually convulsing, so Dag stifled a wild look around for something to shove between teeth besides his hook, bad idea, or his fingers.
Artin’s breathing passed from labored to choked. Carro pulled down his blanket and pressed her ear to his chest. “Dag, this isn’t good.”
“No more, Saun!” Dag called urgently over his shoulder, and bent to Artin’s other side. The smith’s lips were turning a leaden hue, and his eyelids fluttered.
“His heartbeat’s going all wrong,” said Carro. “Sounds like partridge wings.”
Just before the archer shoots the bird out of the air? Dag continued the unspoken thought. His heart is failing. Blight it, blight it…
Saun hurried back; Dag raised his glance from Saun’s muddy boots to his suddenly drained face. Saun’s lips parted, but no sound came out. Dag needed no words to interpret that particular appalled look, of a heart going hollow with fear and guilt. You should not shoulder such a burden, boy. No one should. But someone had to.
Not today, blight it.
Help might be coming, if the makers could be kept alive till then. Somehow. He remembered, for some reason, his impulsive attack on the malice’s cave back in Glassforge. Any way that works, old patroller.
“I’m going to try a ground match,” Dag said abruptly, moving to get a better grip on Artin’s shuddering body. “Dance his heart back to the right beat, if I can.” As he had once done for Saun.
Mari’s voice called sharply, “Dag, no!”
He was already opening his ground. Finding his way into the other’s body through his ground. Pain on pain, clashing rhythms, but Dag’s dance was the stronger one. The true world rushed back into his awareness, blight and glory and all, and he became aware of how keenly he’d missed his groundsense, as if he’d been walking around for days with the best part of himself bloodily amputated. Dance with me, Artin.
Dag breathed satisfaction as he felt the smith’s heart and lungs take up a steadier, stronger cadence once more. Dag did not share in such shocking pain as Saun’s injuries, but he could feel the fragility in the maker’s ground, how close it was to the edge of another such fall into disorder and death. Were the others as weakened? Dag’s perceptions widened in increasing fascination.
All the Lakewalkers’ grounds were wound about and penetrated by a subtle gray structure like ten thousand tangled threads. The threads combined and darkened, running out like strands of smoke to the mud-men’s pots. The mud-men’s grounds were the strangest of all: turned black, strong, compellingly human in shape. The fleshly bodies of the animals labored in vain, straining to match that impulsion. Starving in their arrested growth.
The malice spatters on Dag’s ground seemed to be shivering in time with the complex ground structure imprisoning the makers, and Dag had a sudden terror that somehow the still-living malice bits lodged within him were what was keeping this thing intact. Would he have to die for it to be broken…? Ah. No. Affinity both had with each other, no question, but his spatters were as formless as a ground reinforcement, if an inverted one that was negative and destructive rather than positive and healing.
Dag struggled to understand what he was sensing. In normal persuasive making, the maker pushed and reinforced ground found within the object, striving to make things more themselves, as in Dag’s old arrowproof coat where the protection of skin became leather became a shield. In healing, ground was gifted freely, unformed, to be turned into the recipient’s ground without resistance. A ground match, such as he had just done for Artin, was a dance in time. The malices’ enslavement of farmer minds, Dag realized suddenly, must also be such a ground dance, if enormously powerful to work so compulsively and at such distances. But it had to be continuously maintained, as he had glimpsed from the inside during this last kill, and the match died when the malice did. It has a limited range, too, he realized, which was why the malice had been forced to move along with its army.
This groundwork, though…had a range of only a hundred paces, but it had most certainly survived its malice maker. Contained, powerful, horrific…familiar. Familiar? So where have I seen anything like this before? What groundwork both survived its maker’s death and retained the nature of its maker, not melding with its recipient, even after it had been released?
Sharing knives do. On a smaller scale, to be sure, but…scarcely less complex. The ground of the consecrated knife was shaped by its maker into an involuted container for the donor’s future death, and that dissolving ground, once received, was held tight. Altered, if with and not against the donor’s will, to something lethal to malices.
Dar must be giving something of himself away with each knife he made, Dag reflected. On some level, folks knew this, which was why they treated their knife makers with such care. How draining was such a making? Again and again and again? Very. No wonder Dar had so little left of himself for any other purpose.
Dag turned his inner eye back upon the malice’s groundwork. This huge, horrific making was involuted and powerful beyond any scope he would ever have. But—beyond his understanding, as well?
The intuitive leap was effortless, like flying in a dream. I see how this may be broken! He grinned and opened his eyes.
Tried to grin. Tried to open his eyes.
Face, eyes, body were gone from him; his mind seemed one with his ground, floating cut off from the outer world. Gray threads wound i
nto him like little searching mouths, like worms, sucking and consuming.
I’m trapped—
Fawn carefully tucked the dozen new beeswax candles that were her share of the afternoon’s making into Dag’s trunk, closed the lid, drifted out under her tent awning, and stared through the trees at the leaden gleam of the lake under the humid sky. She scratched absently at one of the mosquito bites speckling her bare arms, and pawed at a whine near her ear. Yet another reason to miss Dag, silly and selfish though it seemed. She sighed…then tensed.
The heartthrob echo of pain in her left arm and down her side, her constant companion for three days, changed into something racing. A wave of terror swept through her, and she could not tell if the first breath of it was Dag’s or her own, though the panting that followed seemed all hers. The rhythm broke up into something chaotic and uneven; then it muted. No, don’t die—
It didn’t, but neither did it return to its former definition. Absent gods forfend, what was that? She gulped, flipped down her tent flap behind her, and started walking quickly up the shore road, breaking into a trot till she grew winded, then walking again. She did not want to draw stares by running like a frightened deer.
She passed patroller headquarters, where one of Omba’s horse girls was leading off two spent mounts, heads down, lathered, and muddy. Only couriers in a hurry would ride horses in wet like that, but Fawn quelled hope, or fear, of word from Dag’s company; Fairbolt had said today would still be too soon. Considering the deathly signals he was waiting for, she could not wish for more speed.
She popped up the steps to Hoharie’s medicine cabin—medicine tent, she corrected the thought—and stood for a moment trying to catch her breath, then pushed inside.
Hoharie’s apprentice, what was his name, Othan, came out of the herb room and frowned at her. “What do you want, farmer girl?”
Fawn ignored his tone. “Hoharie. Said I should come see her. If anything changed in my marriage cord. Something just did.”
Othan glanced at the closed door to the inner room. “She’s doing some groundwork. You’ll have to wait.” Reluctantly, he jerked his head toward the empty chair by the writing table, then went back into the herb room. Something pungent was cooking over its small fireplace, making the hot chambers hotter.
Fawn sat and jittered, rubbing her left arm, though her probing fingers made no difference to the sensations. The former throbbing had been a source of fear to her for days, but now she wished for it back. And why should her throat feel as though she was choking?
After what seemed forever, the door to the inner chamber opened, and a buxom woman came out with a boy of maybe three in her arms. He was frowning and feverish, eyes glazed, his head resting against her shoulder and his thumb stuck in his mouth. Hoharie followed, gave Fawn a nod of acknowledgment, and went with them into the herb room. A murmur of low voices, instructions to Othan, then Hoharie returned and gestured Fawn before her into the inner room, closing the door behind them.
Fawn turned and mutely thrust out her arm.
“Sit, girl,” Hoharie sighed, pointing to a table in the corner with a pair of chairs. Hoharie winced as she settled across from Fawn, stretching her back, and Fawn wondered what she had just done for that little boy, and how much it had cost her in her ground. Would she even be able to help Fawn just now?
While Hoharie, her eyes half-closed, felt up and down Fawn’s arm, Fawn stammered out a description of what had just happened. Her words sounded confused and inadequate in her own ears, and she was afraid they conveyed nothing to the medicine maker except maybe the idea that she was going crazy. But Hoharie listened without comment.
Hoharie at last sat up and shook her head. “Well, this was odd before, and it’s odder now, but without any other information I’m blighted if I can guess what’s really going on.”
“That’s no help!” It came out something between a bark and a wail, and Fawn bit her lip in fear she had offended the maker, but Hoharie merely shook her head again in something between exasperation and agreement.
Hoharie opened her mouth to say more, but then paused, arrested, her head turning toward the door. In a moment, boot steps sounded on the porch outside, and the squeak of the door opening. “Fairbolt,” Hoharie muttered, “and…?”
A rap at the inner door, and Fairbolt’s voice: “Hoharie? It’s urgent.”
“Come in.”
Fairbolt shouldered through, followed by—tall Dirla. Fawn gasped and sat up. Dirla was as mud-spattered as the horse she must have ridden in on, braids awry, shirt reeking of dried and new sweat, her face lined with fatigue under sunburn. Her eyes, though, were bright.
“They got the malice,” Fairbolt announced, and Hoharie let out her breath with a triumphant hoot that made Dirla smile. Fairbolt cast Fawn a curious look. “About two hours after midnight, three nights back.”
Fawn’s hand went to her cord. “But that was when…What happened to Dag? How bad was he hurt?”
Dirla gave her a surprised nod, but replied, “It’s, um, hard to say.”
“Why?”
Fairbolt, his eyes on Hoharie, pulled the patroller forward, and said, “Tell your tale again, Dirla.”
As Dirla began a description of the company’s hard ride west, Fawn realized the pair must have come to find Hoharie, not her. Why? Get to the part about Dag, blight you, Dirla!
“…we came up on Bonemarsh about noon, but the malice had moved—south twenty miles, we found out later, launching a big attack toward Farmer’s Flats. Dag wouldn’t let us stop for anything, even those poor makers. I’d never seen anything like it. The malice had enslaved the grounds of these Bonemarsh folk, somehow making them cook up a new batch of mud-men for it, or so Dag claimed. It left them tied to trees. The patrol was pretty upset when Dag ordered us to leave them in place, but Mari and Codo came in on his side, and Dag had this look on his face that made us afraid to press him, so we rode on.”
Fawn gnawed her knuckles through Dirla’s excited description of the veiled patrol slipping through an enemy-occupied farm at night, the breathless scramble up a hill, the rush upon a bizarre crude tower. “My partner Mari had almost made it to the top when the malice jumped down—must have been over twenty feet. Like it was flying. I never knew a malice could look so beautiful…Utau went for it. I had my ground shut tight, but later Utau said the malice just peeled his open like popping the husk off a hickory nut. He thought he was done for, but then Dag, who didn’t even have a sharing knife, went for the thing barehanded. Bare-hooked, anyway. It left Utau and turned on him. Mari shouted for me and threw me down her knife, and I didn’t quite see what happened then. Anyway, I drove Mari’s knife into the thing, and all its bright flesh…burst. Horrible. And I thought it was over, and we were all home alive, and it was a miracle. Utau staggered over and draped himself on me till Razi could get to him—and then we saw Dag.”
Fawn rocked, hunched tight with her arms wrapping her waist to keep from interrupting. Or screaming.
Dirla went on, “He was passed out in the dirt, stiff as a corpse, with his ground wrapped up so tight it was stranglin’ him, and no one could get through to try to make a match or a reinforcement, though Mari and Codo and Hann all tried. For the next few hours, we all thought he was dying. Half-ground-ripped, like Utau, but worse.”
“Wait,” said Hoharie. “Wasn’t he physically injured at all?”
Dirla shook her head. “Maybe knocked around a bit, but nothing much. But then, around dawn, he just woke up. And got up. He didn’t look any too good, mind you, but he made it onto his horse somehow and pushed us all back to Bonemarsh. Seems he was fretting over those makers we’d left, as well he might.
“When we arrived, the rest of the company had made it in, but those makers—their groundlock didn’t break when the malice died, and no one could figure out why not. Worse, anyone who tries to open grounds to them gets drawn into their lock, too. Obio lost three patrollers finding that one out. Dag believes they’re all dying. Mari coul
dn’t get him to leave them, though she thinks he should be on the sick list—it’s like he’s obsessed. Though by the time us couriers left that evening, we’d at least got him to sleep for a while. Utau and Mari, they don’t like any of it one little bit. So”—Dirla turned her gaze on the medicine maker, her hands clutching each other in unaccustomed plea—“Dag said he wished he had you there, Hoharie, because he needs someone who knows folks’ grounds down deep. So I’m asking for you for him, because Dag—he got us through. He got us all through.”
Fairbolt cleared his throat. “Would you be willing to ride to Raintree, Hoharie?”
An appalled look came over the medicine maker’s face as she stared wildly around at her workplace. Fawn thought she could just about see the crowded roster of tasks here racing through Hoharie’s mind.
“—in an hour?” Fairbolt continued relentlessly.
“Fairbolt!” Hoharie huffed dismay. After a long, long moment she added, “Could you make it two hours?”
Fairbolt returned a short, satisfied nod. “I’ll have two patrollers ready to escort you, and whoever you need to take with you.”
Fawn blurted, “Can I come with you? Because I think I’m part of Dag’s puzzle, too.” She nearly held out her left arm in evidence.
The three Lakewalkers stared down at her in uncomplimentary surprise.
Fawn hurried on, “It’s not a war zone anymore, and if I went with you, I couldn’t get lost, so I wouldn’t be being stupid at all. I could be ready in an hour. Less.”
Dirla said, not scornfully but in a tone of kindness that was somehow even more annoying, “That fat little plow horse of yours couldn’t keep up, Fawn.”
“Grace is not fat!” said Fawn indignantly. At least, not very. “And she may not be a racehorse, but she’s persistent.” She added after a moment, as her wits caught up with her mouth, “Anyhow, couldn’t you put me up on a patrol horse just like Hoharie?”