Страница 28 из 110
But it was a serious decision. It might be a spooked, unwise decision, with the sleet having turned to honest snow by the time they passed the shelter on the trail.
The shelter sat unoccupied, Tara knew that in the same way she knew the ambient and saw no smoke from the chimney. She had no doubt it was stocked and ready for winter—Chad and Vadim had escorted the teams out with the winter supplies the first leaf-turn: clean blankets, grain, preserved meat in strong, pilfer-proof tins, medicines, cordage, anything a storm-trapped rider might need.
She might be foolish. The way ahead of them was turning as white as Flicker’s frantic imaging, and there was safety in those thick log walls and those heavy shutters, if one could keep the doors barred. The shelter would hold her and Flicker both, no question.
But no shelter could help if a rider, in the grip of predator-sent illusions, chose to unbar a door or open a shutter. If you got yourself besieged indoors by a persistent predator, illusions came through walls, through shutters, through barred doors, illusions to confuse a horse and beguile a fool human into lifting a latch.
Flicker snorted and shook herself, never slacking pace as they moved on down the road. Tara agreed by doing nothing and they both committed themselves to the try for at least the next shelter, if not for home. It was a very uneasy feeling in Tara’s several looks back, as the shelter lay farther and farther behind them, as woods closed between and the storm showed signs not of abating, but of getting worse.
It might well have been a mistake, Tara thought. Not necessarily a fatal one, but a rider didn’t get too many such mistakes for free, not in a long life. Staying the night there might have been a mistake, too. She didn’t know. She had no way to judge now, either the weather or the uneasiness about the Wild that still crawled up and down her nerves.
As bad as the weather was looking now, the road crew she’d just taken out to their work might indeed be coming back, all of them, scared by the same storm—so if she’d stayed at the shelter, she might not have been alone for more than the night. If the road crew did decide to winterize the equipment and break camp, Barry and Llew would push through the night if necessary, at whatever pace they could with the ox-teams. They’d offload everything, cache even the supplies, if they didn’t like the look of the weather; and the stolid-seeming oxen could move fast, if they moved unladed, not as fast as nighthorses, but they might be headed for that shelter, all the same.
If shewere in charge instead of Barry, the way it was looking now, no question they’d chuck it and leave that exposed mountain flank before the drifts built up.
Barry, though, was a get-the-job-done man. Village-bred, not a born rider. Villagers liked to deal with him. He made sense to village-siders, and Barry had agreed with this jaunt out to flirt with the weather and been willing to sit out there freezing his fingers and toes off. Not to mention other useful parts.
A cold gust blew up the skirts of her coat, found its way into her bones, and she buttoned the weather-bands tightly around her glove cuffs, then took her hat off to get a closer fit on the scarf that protected her ears from frostbite. She slid the chin-cord tight when she put it on again, and turned her collar up. She had a knitted hood in her inside pocket. It made her face itch and she hated it.
Most of all it restricted her side vision, and she wanted to know what was around her, on the edges of her vision, even if it was misty white and the misted shapes of trees.
But, <white,> Flicker imaged, whiting out the world except the trail in front of them, as if they were nowhere in the universe but this small patch that was real; and Flicker kept up a steady pacing gait, creating the world constantly ahead of her.
Spooked, she said to herself. Too much thinking on disaster in this perilous season. She imaged <scavengers in the rocks, wrecked truck> until she realized she was doing it.
She imaged <winter storm on the mountain> and <frozen bodies> without ru
But that shelter was a long ways behind them now, and the next chance lay a good distance ahead.
<Death on the rocks. Hidden ledges.> Dammit! She couldn’t stop thinking about it.
They knew the trail. Despite the whiteout, she was sure they hadn’t left the road. She could see the markers on the trees arriving out of oblivion and passing by in Flicker’s constant, even strides.
Possible that some new creature had moved into the woods. Humans weren’t native to these mountains—not even native to the world they lived in, the seniors said so: now and again something did show up that nobody’d seen, pushed by the storm winds, driven by fiercer predators or by some unguessable notion of prey to be had this side of the mountain divide, she didn’t know. Sometimes a wild horse would show up with an image you didn’t want to know about. Nobody claimed to have met everything there was to meet in the woods; Flicker was all the opinion she trusted now, Flicker felt something she didn’t like… void and the smell of death, that was what began to come through the ambient, something that crawled with scavengers and came out of the storm, neither dark nor light. It was everything. It was nothing at all.
But it was prickling at the edges of her attention.
Flicker jolted forward into a sudden, neck-snapping run. <Rocks and logs,> Tara imaged in alarm. She had a fistful of mane, and took a second one, closer to Flicker’s head, jerking on it. But in the next instant her own panic overwhelmed her. She believed something was behind them—she threw a look over her shoulder, as Flicker hadn’t, and saw nothing but white light and the ghostly trees jolting and blurring past with Flicker’s reckless strides. <Run!> she thought in fright, looked back, looked to the sides and forward, and again she looked back, and then she thought, an instant’s amazed chagrin—and absolute conviction: it’s not there. It’s not there now.
Flicker slowed, breathing through her mouth in great, cold gasps—and kept making a little forward progress, just a little, a walk on a wider-open stretch of road. There was still one more shelter ahead, the last between them and the village, but Flicker’s reaction to that image, too, was a spooky, wordless no, Flicker wouldn’t stay there. Flicker kept walking, picked up speed on the downhills and trudged up the climbs, an ox-road and as level as the road-builders could make it. The place felt safer now, and if Flicker wanted to rest, Tara was for it.
But she didn’t get off, because if that sending came down again, she didn’t rely on Flicker staying sane or remembering that she was leaving her rider stranded. There was a limit, even to their long partnership, and a goblin-cat confused even a nighthorse, if that was what it was.
Hours on, well into afternoon, they came to that second shelter. Flicker’s legs and chest were spattered with ice now. Flicker’s breath huffed in great heavy pulses. <Rest,> Tara wanted, afraid Flicker would run herself into a heart attack. <Dark behind us.>
Flicker imaged only <cold> and <white> and retook her beat, pace, pace, pace, pace, steady and scared.
The falling snow slowly took on a kind of dim gold haze that passed to a hint of blue, heralding night, one of those snowy, moon-up nights that might have no boundary from the day. The second shelter was no-return now. It was farther back than it was on to Tarmin, and the night was blued and pale.