Cloud's Rider

Their combined experience as riders just didn’t cover what was going on up above them. One heardabout rogues—rare as the condition was. But the folklore had never prepared them for the destructive force it had loosed, the lingering spookiness on the mountain even after the rogue was dead. They hadn’t expected the mass movements of game that seemed to go one direction and then the other on the face of the mountain with no reason, with absolute vacancy at the heart of it. Weather had had thempi

A massive hole in the ambient, this moving darkness.

“You know, one thing that blank spot could be,” Guil said, tucking a medium-sized piece of wood into the fire below the soup pot. “Big predator.”

“Nothing ever like this that I ever heard,” Tara said, hugging her arms across her, and added a moment later: “The roguemight have felt like this—in deep winter—if there weren’t a lot of racket.”

Meaning the natural noise in the ambient that all those lives had made in Tarmin village was gone now. Humans didn’t send far without something to carry it—but an aggregation of living things even like a herd of cattle was noisy.

And in the silence on Rogers Peak they ought to have been able to hear very, very for across the mountain right now, not any specific creature, just—presence. Life. It was possible the villages were aware of that silence. It was possible they weren’t. Too many people—like too much light—came with settlements. You couldn’t see the fainter stars. You couldn’t get a fair listen to this thing.

Kids, on their own, making their way perhaps as slowly as they were against hostile weather, could blunder right into it. It had worried him through the days that they were pi

Tara moved to have a look at the soup, and stripped the gloves off hands that just weren’t used to the amount of wood-cutting she’d had to do lately, hands that, in the firelight, showed raw sores the gloves hadn’t prevented.

He captured a hand and had a closer look.

“It’s all right,” Tara said, and freed it for a look under the lid of the soup-pot. Then added: “It’s all right—just like your head.”

Wicked woman. Halfway up the mountain looking for kids she maintained she didn’t want to find about half of every day. She’d taken the risk, committed herself, given a damn; she was in danger of outright charity—figuring she could have stayed put and not budged from first-stage and not helped. She’d worked hard out there; holding and being held felt very good right now, in the absence of anything else to do, to make it clear he was very appreciative of the stack of firewood he hadn’t had to cut. His head hurt. Her hands hurt. If they held a competition they could probably find other spots, but at least the couple of stitches she’d put in his side, front and back, some days ago, had held up during today’s climb, and they were doing pretty well for a couple of fools.

Meanwhile the horses were cavorting around the rocks out there and one just hoped, as the ambient went scary with <near fall> from one of the two fools, that they didn’t fall off a snow-buried cliff.

“Supper’s ready,” he said into her hair. “I made the whole mess of potatoes up. Figuring we can carry it.”

“Temperature’s just floating out there. It may go above freezing tonight. If it does—it’s going to be just real nasty conditions. An early winter, but a slow one setting in. We could get real damn tired of potatoes.”

“Beats bushdevil.”

“By a bit,” she agreed, and having found interest enough to be hungry, she served up the soup that was destined for supper and breakfast-to-come, and they settled down to one more night with the temperature still hovering. He’d cut up the whole supply of potatoes which the kids had left at first-stage and they’d carried it up with them: the perishables left there would have frozen soon, as they’d slightly frozen on the climb, in spite of the protection in which the stores had been buried. Tara had escorted a cart out with that load of perishables not too long before the disaster, supplies the road workers should have used fast, but, Tara had said grimly, certainly nobody down on first-stage level was going to need them— including two more of Tarmin’s riders, friends of hers, besides the ones who’d died in Tarmin.

So at least they went to someone’s use, and if they got bad weather they’d at least have potato soup for days before they ever had to resort to what might be very thin hunting on this face of the peak. But if they got their wish and the weather turned to deep cold and reliable freezing, their next night’s supper, frozen, could pack up and go with them up the mountain, for an open-air camp or for very fast moving in their effort to get up to Evergreen. Then they could find out, in the best news they could expect, that the kids had made it alive and didn’t need their help, or that the kids were stranded down at midway and weregoing to need help.

Better if the kids had been able to go this direction. But Tara couldn’t have shown Da

Their own horses of course wanted into the cabin, now that potato and ham soup had entered the ambient in a very vivid way. Tara did the getting up and let in two snow-caked horses.

And the instant two humans settled down again to their supper Burn leaned his head on his rider’s shoulder in ambitious anticipation of tasty bits, namely all the ham and considerable amounts of the sauce. Flicker moved in on Tara in the same way, to look doleful and coy from the front.

They both could be quite hard-hearted until, dammit, they were through. Thenthey poured out a couple of bowls on the hearthstones—quite a suitable platter for horses, and very unlike their dumping of snow and drip of melt onto the floor, there wasn’t a smidge of soup left to mop.

Guil put a cover on the pot, determined to keep horse noses out of their several days’ supply. And they sat, after the horses had cleaned the stones, watching patterns in the fire. Burn and Flicker settled down to mutual grooming and Tara—

Suddenly Tara thought of <cutting wood on the hillside, among the trees, lonely feeling, empty ambient.> She thought of stopping, looking uphill, trees and white.>

She seized his hand, hard. “Think of something else. Now!”

<Still water.> It was the earliest childhood calm-down. <Sun sparkle on ripples. Stones beneath.>

<Fish,> she added.

The horses lifted their heads, hungrily and vividly interested in <fish,> though they were stuffed with hay and grain and had ham and potatoes to chase that.

Tara laughed.

Laughed and laughed, out of proportion to the image.

Guil knew where she was headed, the collapse after long and impossible strain. He sent her <fish on a spit> and Tara lay on the floor holding her stomach, the spasms were so intense. She’d sober up— and break out laughing again until laughter gave way to helpless sobs for breath.

Then came just hard breathing, and panic—panic that she’d stopped up since that night she’d spent <listening—listening to the Wild, hearing the slaughter at Tarmin and knowing her partners were dying—>

<White> hit the ambient, <white,> the way Flicker would send when Flicker wanted to hide. Guil tried to take hold of her: mistake. She shoved hard at him. It hurt his side.

Thatgot through to her. It hadn’t on other occasions. It brought her out of herself. “I’m sorry,” she said, and threw her arms around him while he was trying to get hisbreath back.