Rider at the Gate

At least the shapes the burning edges made were all random and without motive.

Chapter vii

SLEET BEGAN TO COME DOWN IN EARNEST, WHITE DUST RATTLING against the evergreens—not an unusual occurrence if it were midsummer on Tarmin Height: the Firgeberg spawned occasional sleet year-round.

But when a flurry came on an autumn morning after quakesilver leaf-fall, a rider, however well prepared, looked anxiously to the sky above the woods and the mountain for a hint of what might be rolling in.

<Cold, frosty breaths, feet crunching snow.> That was Flicker’s thought, but Flicker’s rider thought snow would not come yet.

<Melting drops on green needles, sun shining,> Tara Chang sent back, riding along the wooded road. <Road free and clear, white lines of sleet blowing across the dirt, sticking in the autumn leaves.>

Flicker tossed her shaggy head, shook her mane and still thought differently, sending unease out into the air. They’d intended hunting if they had the chance: they’d escorted the road crew out to their camp yesterday, they’d turned them over to Barry and Llew, who were stuck out there shooting dice for pe

If the sleet spooked them, the crew they’d just delivered safely would be insisting that Barry and Llew take them right back home, and the whole crew would be chasing her heels all the way back to Tarmin, after yesterday’s trek getting foot-dragging fools in an oxcart out there…

But she didn’t blame them: one didn’t take chances once the weather began to turn, and the road crews had one of the nastier jobs, crawling out and around slide zones, shoring up the road with timbers they had to drag by ox-power out of the woods—they managed with oxen, because they couldn’t waste fuel for trucks up here, where it didn’t come by nature—or at all cheaply. The village tanks, since the last convoy out of Anveney, were full-up, and they’d stay that way until they needed the emergency heaters in the village common hall for days when the ice closed in and the wood ran low. Tarmin year-round burned wood for its stoves, and by autumn had barns full of hay that kept the goats alive and the oxen strong for such winter-hauling as the weather demanded.

And they never waited until the last minute to see to those stores. Tarmin always remembered the story of Parman Springs, which they’d been telling as long as Tara had heard stories: a rider coming into Parman Springs one winter had turned up with every last building taken down and burned but one—and the wall breached. Not a living human being was ever found, just a little scatter of bones.

That had been back in the boom days, when every lowland fool with a notion of instant riches had flooded up into the mountains, and the disasters had come yearly, when new-made camps either set themselves with no regard to the avalanche traces on the slopes, or never asked themselves why several big boulders sat on the flat they’d chosen; when stubborn lowland-bred miners had used transmitters for non-emergencies and thought that rifles could deal with the consequences.

The survivors had stayed to log and do the little winter mining that paid off, winter being the heaviest mining time because the temperature in the shafts was constant and bearable in months when logging, which sometimes paid better, was all but impossible. Verden, the other side of Verden Ridge, on the High Loop, was all underground, the whole settlement having discovered what its digging was really good for. They piped fresh air in and vented smoke out—precariously, to her mind—up a complex arrangement of flimsy tin pipes.

Spooky place, and dirty. It depressed even miners, from what she heard in Tarmin. Riders didn’t like it and wouldn’t go inside. She had, once, out of curiosity, and come out again anxious for sun-warmed air, having no desire to do it twice.

She wanted the sky over her head. Truth be known, she liked the snow, she liked the quiet months of isolation that the weather enforced in the High Wild, when there was precious little work for riders but hunting and trading off the take to the town butchers and the ta

So she’d shared-in and found herself as happy as she’d been in her life, settling in with a group of riders, all of whom, senior or junior, she could count on in any pinch. She’d gone hungry and she’d slept alone in her junior years, completely on her own since her mother died—and after five years of hell, first as a junior and then as a senior riding Darwin Ridge, she’d ridden into a camp on Rogers Peak too easy to live in and too hard to leave. She’d become pi

<Steak cooking. > Flicker was definitely interested in camp and food and nighthorse company, out of the skitter and scatter of her thoughts. <Tarmin camp, fires and ham roast. > Flicker was also glad enough to know where such things always resided—glad, too, to be going back to civilization all in one long push today, and not minding the long walk. Flicker never liked road guard and Tara had had her own fill of it this fall. It was boring, and this late in the year it meant standing around in windy places in the sleet where there was nothing to eat, and nothing to do but shift from one cold foot to the other and try to keep the wind from blowing up at your underside.

Until even a rider might hope, after a few weeks on duty, for a goblin cat or some such to make a meal of the crew, so she could go home.

But a rider didn’t make such jokes around nervous villagers. A rider just sat and watched the ambient with nighthorse senses, trying to keep a restive horse from equally bored and very vivid amusement.

So, having served their time in purgatory on the last trip to Verden, and Llew and Barry having gotten the short end of the draw, she and Flicker were homeward bound through the spitting sleet.

Flicker was putting on her winter coat early this year—had been at it for a month, and the sleet stuck to the longer hairs of her body, and to her ears and mane. Flicker had voluntarily picked up the pace since that fleeting thought of pork roast: she was enthusiastically bound for Tarmin, and way-stopping at one of the two lonely storm shelters on their way, then having the next day to turn around and ride out through the snow to restock it (there being no rest for a Tarmin rider when a shelter wanted stocking) was not in Tara’s plans, either.

If they traveled late, they could make it on in with no real need of a way-stop. It was the first winter squall of the season lurking up there about the peak, but not a serious one, she had the skill to bet knowledgeably on that outcome—and the skill to cover that bet and save them both if things went wrong. No mere storm was going to stop them for more than a nasty cold night in the open if they misjudged, and they’d winter-camped many a night out in her starving junior years over on Darwin, where the weather was, if only in her memory, very much worse.

But there’d been a spooky feeling on Tarmin Climb—the worse with the wind howling about the rocks. The road crew there had found an accident, a wrecked truck, logs strewn all to hell and gone up and down the rocks at that hairpin that started the only 20 percent grade on the Climb, a notorious turn, and not the first truck that had ever lost it all on the curve. That section was old road, hard to improve because of where it was located, and often as crews from Tarmin and the higher Ridge villages shored the slip zone up with timbers and fill, it eroded. It was a battle with the weather and the wear of the trucks’ brakes on a grade the road crews couldn’t improve without blasting a whole lot of mountain down and maybe, by what she’d heard, making matters much worse.