Cloud's Rider

But sometimes that wasn’t a good decision, and they’d been feeling things generally spooky on the mountain for weeks. There was the ghost of that feeling in the ambient now.

The question was—where had a rider come from, and why come here and not to the rider’s own village?

“I can’t pin it down,” Callie said finally, and Je

“I’m scared. Rain’s scared, too.”

“Calm him down,” Ridley said, with no sympathy. “Right now. Think of <flowers.”> That was what they’d always taught Je

“Callie,” Ridley said, “tell the marshal what we’re picking up. Better put more guards up.”

“Bitter night,” Callie said. “Awful time to be out.”

“Sure don’t envy them,” Ridley said. Callie didn’t argue with the need to get the marshal and didn’t argue about who was staying in camp with Je

“Clever child,” Callie said. “Deserve your ears boxed, is what.” Callie left at a fast pace. The light died as Callie disappeared through the shattered passage door.

Shimmer wanted to follow Callie into that passage and did, though she wouldn’t get past the barrier that sealed off the village passages from the horses and would have to back out; while close in the company of Slip and Rain, Ridley put his arm around Je

It didn’t make sensethat anyone was out there. Ice wind was what they called storms like this on Rogers Peak. If one got started, you didn’t run the risk: you tucked in and kept low until the wind stopped.

This rider—these presences in the storm—hadn’t done that.

And in the last of autumn the mountain hadbeen carrying frequent disturbance to them, night visions of fire and blood, game on the mountain seeming to run in surges, abundant one day, gone the next, with no ordinary sense to the movements. The seniors had said things like that happened worst of all when it was setting on a bad winter. The wild things sensed the weather coming—so the seniors had said.

And there were stories how when the vermin got to moving in waves, they’d surged right over defenses and right down some miner’s burrow. You stopped it fast and drove them back with shotgun blasts, or you went under for sure.

He didn’t want to think about that with Je

“Silly lad,” he said, and patted Rain’s neck, while Slip was standing close by, great fool that he was, sending <fierce nighthorse male,> and at the same time seeking shelter in the human presence.

Rain was, he decided, no small part responsible for the rolling panic that had now sent Callie over to scare hell out of the marshal and his deputies, and, remotely possible, Rain might be the entire reason the autumn had felt as spooky as it had. Rain was weaned this fall, he was coming on puberty this winter, and a young horse in that mood was all ears and all sensation. Rain kept the neighborhood disturbed, and with mating season on them, was having sensations beyond the understanding of an eight-year-old, even if she had seen Slip and Shimmer getting babies.

Slip, who’d have chased a young male out of his territory without hesitation in the Wild, was just, seniorlike in the band, increasingly out of patience with a noisy youngster. That might be all it was, and all that was out there might just be a late-season arrival with nothing really frightening about it—because they had twospooky minds to contend with, Je

“Everything villageside is quiet,” Ridley reminded her—because she was trying to listen into that dark where Callie had gone, and Je

“They’re deaf over there,” Je

“Probably,” he said. “But if they don’t, you can bet your mama’s going to wake them up. Your mama’ll wake the marshal up, first.” He felt Je

“A little.”

He had her sit on the grain-bin and tuck up her legs in the blanket. Rain came and licked Je

Or maybe not. It came and it went, maybe with the attention of a horse out there.

It wasn’t a safe feeling. That was one thing he knew.

Chapter 5

With the storm-light all around them, and with the snow coming down on a steady wind, the woods took on an illusory sense of peace, a wind-swept, chill peace that bid fair to swallow down the weary— the mountain proving too vast, the snowy night and the wind trying to fold them in—fatally so. What had been traction was getting to be a knee-high barrier to horse and human.

“We’ve missed the shelter,” Carlo said.

“We’ll get there.”

“I think it’s behind us.”

“What do you want? Go back and run into that horse?”

“You said it wouldn’t follow us!”

“Yeah, well, best guess.”

“It can’t be this far!”

“So hire another rider!”

“Don’t give me an answer like that! What are we going to do?”

“If we’ve missed it,” Da

“There’s another! God, it’s hours on! It’s getting late! The sun’s gone! We could miss the shelter ahead of us, too, Da

“We don’t know we’ve missed the first one!”

“There’s logging trails that spur off this road. We could be off on one of them!”

“I know. I know about them. There’s three. We never bear right into the trees. That’s what Tara said. All I can say. Keep walking.”

“Dammit,” Carlo said. “Dammit.”

“Yeah,” he said. He ran out of breath for talking. The shadow that was Cloud was pulling ahead of them again, nothing but a grayness in the ambient and a grayness in the softly felling snow.

They’d pull and breathe, now, pull and breathe, Randy on the travois, half-aware, neither of them who were pulling having breath to talk. But that ominous <blood on snow> sending came to them now and again and drove them to greater effort. Da

We’re in trouble, was all Da