Rider at the Gate

But he’d seen Shamesey tonight in a way he’d never seen it. Everything he hated about town and everything he feared about the sheer power of so many minds pushing and pulling at him had crystallized tonight.

Maybe it was Stuart’s feeling he still had: it could be. He didn’t know, but walls had come down tonight—walls between people, walls between townsmen and their precious self-deceptions about safety. His family was so glad of the fresh plaster, so glad of reliable food on the table.

But know a thing else about him? They didn’t even want to wonder. They didn’t want to understand their hellhound son.

The preachers said they’d come in ships down from the heavens, the preachers said they’d begun as glorious beings with a God-given mission to subdue the land and make the fields safe for humankind and their cattle… which meant to go out and make towns and fields and roads as many and as fast as they could.

But, doing that, you had to deal with the world as it was, and you had to have the riders, and somebody had to deal with the creatures of the sinful world, which the preachers said were a temptation and evil.

So how did you work it out, that God arranged it so some people had to sin so the rest could go to Heaven?

Because if not for the riders, no town would stand, and human beings wouldn’t ever have survived their first winter against the predators and the nighthorses that loved human minds, lovedhuman senses, and lusted after their company.

And how did you work it out that the whole wide world was out there full of food, and his mother and his father worked so hard to buy what they could take for free if they just went outside the walls.

He wasn’t sure. Just… there had to be riders.

Hear not the beasts, the street preachers said.

And, while the boss-man called the riders fools, and while others said they couldn’t just let Stuart go off as crazy as he was acting, and they had to do something to stop him before he killed somebody, his own heart was still aching from what he’d learned and his leg still throbbed with a gunshot that hadn’t come near him. Wages of sin, the preachers would say.

Chapter iv

NO SHOT HAD TOUCHED BURN, THE TWO OF THEM RUNNING AND ru

But came a mortal, moral weariness, finally, on the grassy brow of a hill well and away and above Shamesey town.

Burn’s sides and gut were aching. Burn’s legs shook with exhaustion as he slowed and wandered at a slower pace on the dark and dangerous slopes.

Burn stopped, then, with a shake of his neck and a snort of disgust.

Guil Stuart looked down from the height on the cluster of Shamesey lights, lonesome island in the dark of the Wild… and wished it no good, not Shamesey and not the other coward towns. Burn would run farther if Burn could. Burn’s anger and Burn’s desire for blood was no less because he was exhausted. Neither was his.

But Burn was a self-saving creature, sane for both of them. Burn would never destroy himself in some mad desire to escape what a human brain, in its own weighing of priorities, had begun to realize was no immediate threat to them.

Exhaustion was the enemy. Cold was, in this edge of lowland autumn. He began to realize Burn’s aching lungs and wobbling legs as a distress separate from his own crazed pain, and he slid down from Burn’s bare back to give Burn relief from his weight. He managed, gingerly, leaning on Burn’s sweating side, to take his weight on the wounded leg, which proved to him that at least the bone wasn’t broken.

A bullet-trace, he decided, feeling it over with his fingers; leather breeches had split on a nasty raw gouge across the side of his leg, above the knee. He walked a little distance across the steep, grassy slope of the hill. It was to test the leg, that was what he said to himself.

But he couldn’t rest yet. He couldn’t stop moving. He wasn’t tired enough to sit down and try to absorb the shock in plain sight of those smug, safe, lights. He’d start thinking if the pain stopped, and he wasn’t ready to think. He couldn’t realize anything yet but bits and pieces.

<Aby dead. Lying on the horse. In the rocks. >

Jonas… Luke… Hawley… they’d carried on and gotten the convoy through. Aby’d ridden point at Tarmin High Loop, coming down Tarmin Climb.

<High, steep, winding road. Lead truck following Aby, rolling down to the fatal turn, where the woods came near the road. Rogue horse—coming from somewhere on the mountain—crazed, sick from injury—spooking the truckers—trucks going faster and faster—>

Images came at him. He wanted not, not, not, to see. He walked harder and faster, until the pain was affecting his balance, blurring the city lights and the stars and his recollections alike.

He slipped on the grass. <Guil falling down,> he saw in his head. And did, sideways, hard, on one hip.

He grabbed a fistful of grass and ripped it up. Flung the resultant clod at Burn, wanting no images, no thinking.

But the images assailed him anyway, out of his own brain, out of Burn’s, he wasn’t sure.

<Tarmin Climb. Sunlight. Omen and death in every rustling leaf. The riders going in a group, behind the trucks, not suspecting. Aby alone in front. >

He thrust himself up to his feet, wide-legged, staggered further, wanting the pain, cold wind on tracks on his face…

<Road in the sunlight. Trucks winding down the mountain, slow, heavy-loaded with rough-cut lumber, with bales of furs, with broken machinery, craftworks, and such, out of the villages of Rogers Peak, with the mid-sized tankers supplying the convoy as well as the villages.

<Jonas preoccupied with the tankers, that pushed the limit of length that could get up and down that eroded roadway, bringing them up last, so if there was bad road and trouble they’d not take out the road in front of most of the trucks, and not stall the whole convoy on the steep downhill grade… now the long straightaway before the turn—>

That was the instant, the very instant—

He didn’twant to see it.

<The road—no idea and no warning that there was a danger ahead of them. Horse on the mountain—rogue-sending—>

Jonas, he had no doubt, would have been up there riding point with Aby if he’d known any danger in the area. But Jonas and Hawley and Luke had been riding tail-guard, all of them worrying about the trucks, some of the driver-apprentices riding on the ru

“The horse went with her?” he’d asked Jonas, when he’d talked with Jonas and his partners outside the camp gates, because he’d known, he’d known all of it he could possibly face in Jonas’ first thought, and believed in that first heartbeat that Aby had died in a slide, not uncommon on the road.

“It wasn’t a slide,” Jonas had said, then, grimly, arms folded, eyes downcast to the withers of his horse, and he saw <Aby lying next dead horse. Blood. Aby’s red hair. >

And immediately—maybe not Jonas’ intention—he’d gotten all that the nighthorses had seen, all that the riders knew. He’d felt for himself the disintegrated horror of the sending that riders and truckers and horses had picked up at the edge of that woods on Tarmin Height.

<Something in the woods. Something deadly, at the forest edge, something disjointed, dissolute… distant, then. Calling for them. Wanting them. Wanting them all. >

Riders never used loud voices. Sometimes you got almost out of the habit of speaking aloud or parceling out thoughts in human words. Sometimes you forgot you had a voice, or what to do with it.