Rider at the Gate

He’d have screamed at Jonas to shut up, let him alone. He’d forgotten how to make such sounds at need. Or, rider-born, never learned how at all.

“Stuart?” Jonas Westman had said, maybe wanting to tell him more than he had already said, but he couldn’t bear it. And Jonas had known, and thought <Snow. Cold, white, trackless snow,> as Jonas would, when things went wrong. “Guil. We’ll hunt it. We’ll get it—”

But he’d already started to run—run and run to clear the vicinity, run until his lungs hurt, until pain and lack of wind had wiped his mind clear.

Run until Burn had caught him, and carried him away up the steep hill.

He’d had no idea even where he rode, after that. And he’d thought… his first sane thought… that he had, for numerous reasons, to go up to Tarmin before the snows closed the passes. That had made sudden, necessary sense to him. Kill the rogue that had killed Aby and haunted the convoy down the mountain. Jonas didn’t want to go back. Jonas had enough bad dreams.

And he’d known, when he’d thought that far, in the carefully guarded, piece-by-piece way he dared let conclusions form in his mind now, that he needed his rifle, that he’d left in his hostel room. All he owned was there.

<Gates in the darkness. Bell-arch of Shamesey camp.>

<Main gates opening, to Shamesey town itself. The night-guard with their long rifles… >

The gun and the gear he needed was all he’d asked, his own belongings, when he’d gone toward the gates. He thought, at least now, that he’d only wanted that, and that he’d never harbored any darker intentions against the camp.

But the town had come out to resist him—for no reason.

<Death. Hate. Dissolution and open space, rider and horse swept away in front of tons of metal, at the turn. The truck going off the edge in dreadful slowness, the driver trying to clear the truck, door open, as it slides off the edge… but the rider and the horse go quickly and together. >

<Dead. Dissolved. Blood on the rocks. But the riders can’t go down to her, can’t reach her, where she’d fallen, without risking lives. Boss trucker is angry. The riders, spooked and uncertain, leave her for the slinking carrion-eaters. Damn them. Damn the lot of them. >

The night-watch had shot at him out of fear. The riders of Shamesey camp had kept within their gates—for fear of him.

That should tell him something of what sane people felt in his anger and his intentions, and maybe the townsmen had been right. He didn’t trust himself to try another approach to the town, least of all to talk to Jonas, whose decisions had been coldly, professionally correct. Save the convoy. Get it safe. The dead could wait for the scavengers. Even Aby.

The hazard of autumn was in the wind and the grass, in the cold which seeped from the air into the bones, like solitude, like chill, like foreknowledge of luck turning brutal and foul. And his anger was too profound, too broad, too unreasoning to be only his anger. Other resentments had gotten loose in Shamesey camp. Other reasons had risen up and taken on life in the town. It was no place for an angry man to stay.

He wiped at his face. The ache in his leg so long as he walked absorbed all his logical thinking, a cherished, protective pain. He wasn’t thinking at all clearly in such weather. Nighthorse instincts were in the way, coloring everything, making everything raw emotion… even before the rifle shot had resounded off the walls, even before the blinding red and the pain had washed across his mind.

Just… he couldn’t think clearly now what to do. He was thinking Burn’s thoughts, and they were all anger; all selfish… bitter… anger… at the town that wasn’t at fault for wanting lumber and comforts for the winter.

He wanted someone to die, he wanted to see it, he wanted to do it with his own hands…

He wanted Shamesey town to know a woman had died so that they could have light and heat and repair for their walls, and they could go to hell for it.

But she was only a rider, only a damned-to-hell rider, it didn’t matter to them, they didn’t need to care. Shoot the horse if a rider went like that. Make sure it was dead. That was all they’d want to know.

He could take to the hills, go south, not north, and he and Burn could forget what they couldn’t mend—they didn’t need to avenge Aby’s death. It just was. What had killed Aby and Moon had no relation to anything, no grudge, no personal reason. It just was. And if in winter snows it came down the mountain, if it haunted the road next season, if it killed villagers or townsmen, what did he care?

If Shamesey went without lumber or tin next year, what should he care?

That more riders could die by the thing that killed Aby, all right, he did care, little that it deserved. He didn’t owe any of them, didn’t get any damn help from them, not even from Jonas. He didn’t know why he shouldn’t let someone else hunt the thing. He could live elsewhere. He could find other hire. No place and no person mattered to him with Aby gone. Shehad brought him into towns. She’d always been the go-between for him with people.

But his dreams wouldn’t change until the rogue was dead. And he would dream about it. He’d wonder every night whether it was still out there, still surviving, still sending out the images that lied to horse and rider about what was friend and foe, or where the edge of the road was…

Walk and walk, and walk, and he found himself walking north across the slope. He found Burn trailing him, aching-tired himself, waiting for a foolish rider to fall down again.

<Guil sitting down. Legs ache.>

<Town lights, > he imaged in his own turn, not consciously thinking. Town was just too close, too dangerous, too loud, too evocative of anger.

< Hills and grass in the moonlight, > Burn answered him. < Hills and grass. Hills and grass. > Burn shook himself, and snorted. An image of blood and raw meat. <Kill cattle. >

Burn didn’t forgive. Burn might lose his train of thought and forget. But Burn didn’t know how to forgive.

It was why he kept walking.

“Hunt him down,” was Ancel Harper’s word in hastily convoked Meeting, in the tavern yard under the gaslights, in the small hours of the morning. “He’s Shamesey’s problem.”

No, Da

But other, senior, riders stood up from the benches without hesitation and said no, there was no call for such drastic measures.

“He wanted what’s his,” one of that number said. “His belongings are all in camp. He has a right to ask for them.”

“He has no right, after what he’s caused,” somebody else shouted, and a dozen riders from Hallanslake got up and added their voices.

“We come down here to the lowlands for a quiet, safe camp,” the Hallanslake leader said. “I know what I’m talking about. A man ru

“No,” the general murmur rose in rebuttal; Da

“That’s what you do, that’s what you have to have the guts to do. That’s a borderer up there hovering over this town. He knows what he’s asking for, staying around here, spooking the town into riot. You got fifty, seventy thousand people in town here, a lot of them not liking each other. You want to think, boss-man, about what could happen in the streets the other side of that wall if he panics this town? Stuart’s as crazy as what killed that woman up in the hills—that’s how they go, one to the next—the sickness spreads. You got to shoot both of them, fast, so they don’t know one’s dead! It spreads, boss-man! I’ve been there! I know!“