Page 43 of Into the West

Obediently, because he had the feeling her head was a lot clearer than his was right now, he did as he was told. The spicy, minty tea somehow settled his stomach, the breakfast still smelled amazing, and before he quite realized it, he had scraped the plate clean.

By that time the rest of him had settled down as well. His head cleared, his hands stopped shaking, and the sweat dried. He stood up, she passed him his sheepskin coat, and he went out. “Rose, please stay here,” he said, then collected his saddle and bridle from their box on the prow of the barge and hopped off into the still-upset herds to whistle up Arial.

Getting through the jumpy herds of animals proved to be quite the challenge. Normally he’d have been able to just have Arial shove her way through them, but with them agitated, he had to be careful and move without any impression of threat. The hens, apparently, refused to come out of their coop-barges at all, and the geese and ducks had taken to theirs as well, and not even corn tempted them out.

By the time he actually got to the mages’ barge, the most intact of the bodies had already been draped over the roof and there was quite a gaggle of interested parties examining them. He stood in the stern of the barge and watched as they poked, prodded, picked up, put down, and whispered to each other. And the patient Tow-Beasts, first to calm down from the attack, kept right on towing the barge along.

Now that the creatures were dead, if anything, they looked even more terrifying than when they had been in the sky. Long, narrow heads with both teeth and a hooked thing like a beak at the end of their snouts sat atop necks like a heron’s. And the size of them! That was a lot harder to estimate when they were in the air. The wingspan was enormous; wings trailed over the side of the barge and into the water on both sides. They were covered in metallic, black feathers.

“Six limbs?” he said incredulously. It hadn’t registered with him during the fight that the creatures had had forelegs, hindlegs, and wings.

“Made creatures,” Dole said definitively. “There is no living thing that isn’t mage-made that has four legs and wings. Of course, if you just look at them with mage-sight, you’ll know that anyway.”

He could have smacked himself in the forehead for not thinking of that. Maybe he was more shaken up than he thought. Cautiously, he did just that, and the creatures lit up with rapidly fading magical energies that were draining away as the bodies cooled.

“Feathers will be useful,” Dole said dispassionately, as if he wasn’t talking about winged monstrosities that could have hurt or killed not just animals, but some of their children, had things turned out differently. “Feathers retain magic for quite a long time, and we can make use of that.” Now he turned to face Kordas directly. “I assume you brought the carcasses here because they’re ours, now? The carcasses belong to the mages, I mean.”

“I can’t think of a better use for them,” he said. “Oh, and Pelias was outstanding. I think you can elevate him out of his apprenticeship now.”

“I’ll tell his master. Timon will probably agree with you.” There was a gap in the crowd. Dole took Kordas by the elbow and eased him to where he could handle one of the things himself. And it was then that he saw in these creatures what he had seen in the snake-dogs.

“Look at this, Dole!” he exclaimed, holding up the creature’s head nose on to Dole’s gaze. From that position it was obvious that one eye was very much higher than the other in this monster, but not the next one. “And this!” He dropped the head to pick up the two foreclaws. Both of them showed evidence of malformed toes. In one, the claw pointed up instead of down.

“Inbred?” Dole ventured, stroking his bare chin thoughtfully.

“Inbred,” he said decisively. “Just like those snake-dogs. You think there’s someone around here who made these things, scryed and saw us, and is setting their pets on us?”

“Not bloody likely,” snorted Ceri, tossing his head so that the tail of white hair on the top of it lashed the air like the tail of a restless horse. “First thing is, the snake-dogs attacked that village, not us. Second thing, these ugly birds aren’t big enough to cause us much trouble, just inconvenience. Although . . .” He paused and stroked his chin, in an unconscious imitation of Dole. “. . . both raids could have had the purpose of filling someone’s winter larder.”

“Huh.” Dole raised his voice. “What do you lot think? Are the snake-dogs and these things connected? Could their master have been looking to steal food animals?”

Well, that set off a virtual avalanche in which each of the mages had to have their say. This wasn’t all of the mages with the convoy, but it was all of the most senior ones, and they represented a pretty even cross-section of the varied nations in the Empire. Unlike the native Valdemarans who, like virtually everyone in their part of the Empire, were dark of eye and hair and definitely brown-skinned, the mages—the ones whose hair hadn’t turned entirely gray or silver, that is—had every possible shade of hair and eyes and skin. It made them a bit of a startling group when you saw them all together like this.

Normally they were scattered through the convoy, doing the things only mages could do, or assisting with things that magic made easier. Bringing down dead wood from the tops of trees, for instance—there were spells to do that. Or something that Kordas had not even thought of when he’d implemented the Plan, because he hadn’t known there was a spell for it: making the grass grow. Not just grow, but grow fast enough that it was knee-high in a single mark, so that there was always something to browse on for all their herds, no matter how far back in the convoy they were. It couldn’t have been done at all if the animals hadn’t been liberally crapping everywhere they went, because there simply wouldn’t have been enough nourishment available to sustain such an insane rate of growth. But they were leaving trails of poop, and there was plenty of nutrient to feed the grass, and that had alleviated Kordas’s biggest concern about the animals.

It wasn’t going to work when the grass died, which it was likely to do any day because of the cold and frost, but as long as it was alive, the mages could literally work their magic on it.

Kordas had offered to learn the spell himself, and all five of the remaining Six Old Men had turned on him and scolded him for even thinking of it.

“This isn’t a spell for just anyone!” Dole actually yelled, his curly hair seeming to double in size with his exasperation.

“Have you any idea what that takes out of a mage?” Ceri demanded, as if he was a particularly stupid schoolboy.

Koto placed a fatherly hand on his arm, which was somehow worse than being yelled at. “There is only one Baron Kordas,” he pointed out, as if Kordas himself was not aware of that fact. “We have dozens of mages, but only one of you. Do what you do best and leave us to fill in what’s needed.”

It would have stung less if that hadn’t been exactly what Isla had been telling him, almost every other night. And he was trying! But just as he had in the Capital, when he saw a need it was very hard not to jump in and personally fill it.

I suppose I should be grateful they aren’t shoving me toward Arial and telling me to get back to doing my duty.

Finally the ruckus among the mages stopped. One middle-aged woman—so enveloped in an enormous shawl over a bulky knit tunic and loose, thick trews that it was impossible even to guess at what she looked like under all that wool—raised her hand.

“The consensus is that yes, it is entirely possible, in fact likely, that the wave of terror-birds was sent to harvest meat from our convoy. Some of those snake-dogs did get away, and they would have had no difficulty in following your trail back to the river. If the master of the pack controls the pack from afar as would have to be the case if he expected the dogs to bring home meat instead of eating it, he too would have seen the convoy and our herds.”

And that’s why you don’t try to do everything yourself, Kordas. He sighed. You are only one brain, and one set of eyes and ears. They are dozens, and most of them have entirely different experiences than you.

Not that long ago, he might have rushed back to the barge that held his magic books to try to find out what the damned things were, and maybe how they could fend them off better next time, or—

But he stopped himself right there. “As you know, you have every resource I can dig up to figure out what to do about these things and their master, or masters.” Meanwhile, I need to track down those men who were formerly in Lord Hayworth’s personal train, find out what they can do, and assign each of them to a guardsman. I’ve wanted to have the guards going about in pairs. This is a good time and reason to start. “For now, revise the herd-minding for better defense. Double up the Guards into pairs, armed for range. Set a walking line of donkeys on the landward side of the herds, if they aren’t towing. They can smash anything smaller than a pony, and we may as well use them as walking guards.”