Page 30 of Into the West

There was a very cold silence between them for a while.

If the Spitter misfired without Beltran, it wasn’t because the spike ruptured the pellet, it was because the pellet ruptured on its own. Contained by the chamber, the pellet decompressed and launched the bolt. If it hadn’t been in that chamber, the pellet could have detonated in every direction. Beltran would have been blown apart. And he was carrying reloads. One of the creatures nearly reached me, too, Kordas thought, and with that came a mental image of everything enchanted he had on him either igniting or exploding. Both of them had come a horselength away from a terrible end.

None of the villagers looked happy about being near enough to the things to stack the bodies. Ultimately, they didn’t pile them as much as pull them near each other and back off. Kordas pulled on the ley-line until he was full of power, then released it with a gesture at the pile of loathsome bodies. Fire erupted from them with a whoom, and a wavefront of heat that made everyone stand back.

The villagers all stared at him with expressions of awe that were very gratifying to him. Even more gratifying was when their expressions changed, first to faint surprise suggesting that something had occurred to them, to a mixture of gratitude and something else, which he suspected meant they had just now put two and two together and come up with a very unsettling “four.”

That he’d had this power all along.

That he could have used it on them to drive them out of their homes and resettle his people in their village.

That he hadn’t. That he’d instead bargained for passage like a peaceable and reasonable fellow.

The expressions turned again, to bewilderment. Because since he did have all this power, why hadn’t he used it on them?

To be honest, he really didn’t want to get into an explanation. Just let them keep wondering and counting their blessings.

“Now,” Kordas said, “I think we’ll be getting on. We may have a very long way to go before we find our new home. But I suggest,” he added, prompted by his training, “that you make some plans, and perhaps some channeling-walls and pit-traps, in case those creatures do return. Where did they come from?”

The blacksmith answered gravely, “North an’ west. We thought y’was mad to take the river. Everything bad in the world is up there.”

Of course it is.

A guard and a villager briskly approached, and offered up sacks of—he didn’t want to go into that right now, but they were undoubtedly body parts from the things. “We was pickin’ up, an’ we thought the mages would want parts of ’em. An’ we was policin’ bolts an’ arrows, an’ we—we thought you oughta see this.” The villager handed over a fistful of arrows she’d tied together. Their tips were spotless, serrated steel backswept barbs, designed to bite deep and stay there, and they bore helical fletching to induce silence and accuracy. None of the arrows were fully intact, but two things were crystal clear about them.

They all had fresh monster blood drying on them, and they were neither of villager nor Valdemaran make.

The silence around the scouts’ campfire was absolute, and it was so cold now that the sun had set that the only sounds to punctuate that silence were the lapping of water against the bank and the barges, and the crackling of the fire in the middle of their circle of tired and hungry faces. The downriver scouting hadn’t been obviously dangerous but it had been painstaking for them, and stopping for rest and reporting over a warm meal was welcome all around. Delia and the scouts listed off the things they’d made note of, and then Amethyst spoke up.

When Amethyst stopped her calm recitation of the encounter Kordas and his Guard had had with the monstrous hound-things, the expressions of weariness, at least on the faces that Delia could see, had been banished. Though they all had food in their hands, no one was taking another bite, and no one was chewing.

For her part, Delia stared at Amethyst in mingled shock and outrage. “Why did you wait until we stopped for supper and sleep to tell us all this?” she demanded, before any of the others could speak.

“Because nothing bad happened,” Amethyst said placidly. Delia continued to stare at her in disbelief. Anger started to rise in her. How dared the Doll not tell them—or at least her!—that Kordas had been in danger? Amethyst had no right to keep such things from her!

But before she could have another outburst, Sai tossed a pebble at her, hitting her cheek and distracting her.

“Amethyst is right,” he said. “There was no point in stopping to hear what was going on. We were all busy with the task the Baron set us, which was to scout ahead for dangers and for potential places to build a settlement. It doesn’t affect us—”

“I’d dispute that,” Ivar replied mildly. “We need to watch out for packs of monster snake-dogs. Or were they dog-lizards? With poison fangs, apparently.”

“All right, point taken,” Sai replied, a little crossly. “But aside from that, we are much too far ahead of the front of the migration to have gotten back in time to help, and Kordas is a perfectly capable mage on his own, besides having had some of his Guard with him. He had Rose. He could easily have had her summon more guards, or more mages from parts of the convoy that actually were close enough to be of some help. No matter what happened, Amethyst knew it would all be over before anyone here could say ‘We must ride to the rescue!’ which would have been stupid, anyway.” He turned back to Amethyst. “Is there anything else we need to know?”

Amethyst shook her head.

“All right, then.” Sai went back to setting up the big pot full of hearty stew they’d be eating in the morning after it spent the night buried in the coals and ash of the cookfire. “Now we know there are strange and dangerous creatures out here, and we need to be more vigilant. There are things that Jonaton, Venidel, and Endars and I can do that will give us some protection.”

“Shield shells,” said Jonaton, rubbing his hands together with anticipation of something more interesting to do than keeping a bored eye on the forest bordering the river. “We aren’t going to need shields all the time, and it would be a waste of energy to keep them up that way, but we should have spell keys and break triggers made up so we can deploy shields in an instant. Big ones for the boats and camp, small ones for each of you.”

“I’ve got good night sight,” offered Endars. “I don’t mind sleeping days to keep watch at night. We won’t be moving in the dark, so the shield won’t have to be as large to cover us and the horses. Might be a time saver, over protecting a whole boat.”

Venidel, Sai’s apprentice, added, “Our first ones should probably make spherical shields, to save time. They can’t stop everything, but they’re strong for their size. I guess we should just go for fast and simple.” Venidel was an earnest, gangly, ginger-haired lad near enough to Delia’s age not to matter, who looked useless, and was anything but. A farmer by birth, affable Venidel had come into his power fairly late by mage standards, but he took it seriously. “Hotseeds could hold the spellcharge, since none of it’s meant to be permanent. I think we have hotseed pod shells in the provisions, though I hate to use them up.”

“We can live with bland soup, as long as we’re living.” Jonaton chuckled. “Straight twigs, cleaned mud, seedpods, what else will we need—”

The four mages dove into a conversation that left the rest of them out in the cold, but Delia didn’t mind; she was too busy trying to sort out her galloping feelings. On top, and dominant, was that Kordas had been in danger and she was angry she had not been there to help him.

Because surely, went her runaway fantasy, he would have seen that I had run to help him, rather than running away to hide. And maybe one of the creatures would have attacked him at a moment when he was unaware, and I could have saved him, and he would have taken me into his arms and . . .