Rider at the Gate

“Stuart better make it fast,” Luke said, dealing cards to Hawley. “That’s getting mean out there.”

“Can’t have gone past,” Hawley said. “He’d at least check it over.”

Da

Hawley and Luke resumed play with Hawley’s frayed pack of cards.

They were safe enough. Jonas had taken exactly the position that Da

So they’d get Stuart to join them, and shelter here until they’d rested up—

And wait until the rogue came to them, he supposed. That made sense. It made a vast amount of sense if you didn’t think about the other villages up on the road, higher on the mountain, or if you just took for granted the rogue would stay around the area—

He didn’t understand what Jonas pla

And maybe Jonas was just a son of a bitch who didn’t explain his plans, ever; and maybe Jonas had the notion he’d had—that if there was co

That kind of thing, he understood with no trouble: hard choices, greater and lesser risk, foolhardiness and courage—there was a dividing line. Papa had always said so. In that sense they were protecting the villages on the High Loop just by sitting here and protecting themselves, and he supposed that was good and he was on the right side.

But he didn’t understand the dying. Didn’t understand the bodies out there—nor why a reasonable God let it happen to people who’d, in the preachers’ economy, had no defense but not to listen, to shut their ears, inside and out. These were people who’d paid their tithes and gone to church and not been riotous and drunk too much and danced. And they were dead.

His own mother and father and Sam had bought that life for themselves. They believed in it. They believed righteousness made you safe.

But, God, it was all so fragile. It was all so terribly fragile. Five riders hadn’t been enough—the way he understood the boys’ image of the situation: five in town, two out on road repair—and none of them had stopped it.

In that thought, too, Jonas was doing absolutely right, holding them here. But the man was so damned cold. As if—

The ambient changed. Something more was out there than had been—he couldn’t define the change, he didn’t know why he was suddenly feeling the mountain more strongly, just that background noise that was always there—that now was more to the fore of his mind.

He didn’t know what else had come in, but he wasn’t alone in perceiving that something had—every rider in the room had gone still. The card game had stopped—Luke and Hawley looked toward the wall, toward the outside and the east. Jonas, who’d been cleaning and oiling his pistol, hesitated just ever so slightly, then snapped the cylinder into lock, a sound that made the boys jump, the general spookiness in the air surely having its effect on them as well.

“What is it?” Randy asked. <Terrified,> came flooding through from both the boys. They had guns. They’d at least had Luke’s short version of how to aim and hope to hit something, and how not to empty the gun, ever, until you were down to the thing coming dead at you with no way to miss: they’d found the boys simple revolvers, single action, no rounds to lurk in the chamber and no safety to remember to take off. Pull the trigger and they went off— a danger to themselves and everything around them if they spooked.

“Could be Stuart,” Da

A horse had come up onto the walk outside. Cloud wanted <Da

Jonas went and opened the door—Jonas didn’t tell anybody what he thought and you didn’t get it even now through the ambient, not past Shadow’s blurred images—but Cloud came in, snow-blanketed, with thunderous steps on the boards.

Knocked into a stack of pails as he dodged past Jonas. They fell and rattled. Cloud spooked another couple of feet and stopped, shedding snow with a whip of his tail.

Da

Something large was definitely out there in the woods. Maybe morethan one.

“Is it the rogue?” Randy wanted to know, picking it up himself, or reading the distress in the room.

“Hush,” Carlo said. “They know. Let them alone.”

Carlo had the right of it: they didn’t want distraction—but they didn’tknow, that was the trouble. It might be any large creature— several of which had gone over the wall last night, and might have grown braver during the day: autumn brought voracious hunger, hunger that outweighed fears and better sense. The little slinks were back in the upper end of the village, around the marshal’s office, Da

They might well be the source of some of the alarm, although he had a strange conviction it was generally eastward—like waves rolling on the sea, one to the next, to the next hearer.

“If it’s Stuart he’s on his way here,” Jonas said. “He’ll hear us in good time.”

“Weather’s one hell of a mess out there,” Hawley said.

“Doesn’t keep this from being the safest place in the district,” Luke said. “Just sit still. He’ll hear us. He’ll want shelter tonight. You hearthat out there?”

Cloud was dripping puddles onto the board floor, snow melting off his back. The view outside, beyond the porch, had been snow-veiled, enough to haze the buildings across the street. Da

“But we don’t know it’s Stuart,” Jonas said.

“I’m going,” Da

But he got a <Da

“I came here by myself,” Da

“That’s fine. Use your head.”

“I am using it. He might need some help out there.”

“He could,” Luke said, redeeming himself in Da

Jonas wasn’t happy. <Cold, snow, and vermin> dominated the images. But Jonas thought about <Stuart,> too, or somebody did. Jonas, still frowning, picked up his jacket. “Fisher,” Jonas said, “you stay with the village kids. It might not be him.”

“Then you need—”

“I said—stay with them. Do I need to explain? You’ve been wantingStuart into the ambient for an hour, Fisher. Use your head.” <Rogue and panic, Carlo and Randy afoot among the horses, down at the gate. Guns and gunfire.>