The wind outside is screaming like a lost child in a crowd. The snow on the cabin’s sides sounds like cannonfire, each flake fit to cut you stem from stern. The cold came inside with me and is leeching into my coat, inside-out. I’m starved, slow, despairing –I’ve done half a hundred things, and there’s half a hundred more to go if I want to stay alive tonight.
But I’m not doing any of them. I’m sitting here on the floor, at the wall, staring up at the window that’s (at last) been boarded shut, and I’m thinking of the expression on Private Whelk’s face.
***
We were a small patrol on paper, but full strength by custom of the last few years – great-grandmother Gelmorre, calling her children home from strange Afar for her funeral, to bar the great door of the capital against the Silence of the Stone, to stand between Her Worshipped and.
Well.
There should be a score led by a voyageur; there usually were six; we numbered eight.
Me at the front, because I wasn’t a voyageur, but I’d been Afar longer than anyone else and still had all my limbs. Dig the best ditches, get given the biggest shovels.
Mush next, because he hadn’t been there quite as long but he had good reflexes, so if something happened to me he’d do something about it even if he didn’t quite know what.
Flint and Pepper in whatever order they happened in, because they’d sort that out themselves and sort out anything that threatened the other at equal efficiency.
Nelto in the middle, because her (big, brown, tragically decorative) eyes alone would’ve gotten her sent home a decade or two ago but she had a strong back and stronger spirits and SOMEONE had to carry the kitchen kit.
Sild behind Nelto, because someone had to listen to the kitchen kit rattle off her pack at every step and we’d all seen stones less patient.
Whelk, because he was new and small and nervous and flinched when you paid attention to him.
And then Mottle at the rear because she’d grown up as the oldest of nine and had eyes in the back of her head, which it turned out wasn’t quite what we needed.
***
It was a lousy patrol. A day going up a mountain, overnight in the cold and dark, half a day going down the mountain, all to tell everyone Yep, Still No Wyrmsign, like you and everyone else had since the camp arrived.
Wyrms don’t come this high – not on the slopes, not on the north coast. Never have. But what if, but what if, but what if, so once a week up we went. Nelto said she thought it’s to keep us in shape. I said it was to get us out of their hair. She laughed at that and called me a cynic in that big way that you couldn’t read as snide or stupid no matter how hard you tried.
The scream was louder. Shorter, too, but it drew the ear fast, and before it had finished we’d all exploded into action – down, cover, weapons out, eye the sky, scan the ground, mark the terrain, which direction?
The answer, it turned out (after I had a look, dusted myself off, gave the all-clear, then went and dug poor Whelk out of the crevice he’d wedged himself toes-first in, trembling) was ‘none.’ Nobody had screamed, nobody had seen anything. It had been a bird or something, some strange bird from Afar that liked to scream or copy people screaming or god knows what, whatever had happened had happened. A little mystery we’d never know the answer to, nothing we all (except Whelk) hadn’t lived through a dozen times.
Except that after two hours searching we still hadn’t found Sild.
***
The storm wouldn’t have been a problem. Shouldn’t have been a problem. We’d have hit the summit by now, taken the land’s measure, taken its temperature and its mood and its hate and jotted them down in neat little boxes on neat little sheets and started to fuck off, made it much lower than we stood right then and enjoyed the peace and quiet of the treeline as it pissed freezing sleet down our tents.
Instead, we were three-quarters up the mountain’s throat trying not to panic and we saw the black clouds coming at us at about the same moment as we felt the gale pick up. Instead, I had to come up with a new patrol route inside my head in less than a minute. Instead, we ran uphill, packs jangling.
Full-ass tilt-over-hurdle tit-over-turtle for the meteorologist’s cabin.
Most miserable march I’d ever suffered – beachsand in full kit; marsh without good boots; down the long hard dust of the parade ground carrying the disciplinary stonepack, none of them had ordered you to do it holding hands with the trooper next to you, put you at the head end of a flailing, aimless chain of bodies whipped by a south-bound gale’s flogging arm, blindfolded you, then told you to go as fast as you could or die standing upright without a single drop of unfrozen liquid in your body. Every tug a question: are we stuck? Did someone fall, or just stumble? Was that Sild? Is this the right way? Is my footing good, or was that the edge of the mountain and two thousand feet of empty air?
Then the dark grew an angle, the angle grew dimensions, the pelting from the sky gave way, Mush was scrabbling beside me, something wooden and tortured groaned, we poured inside like water into a dry-flower vase, and the fat sick creak of that dying door being slammed shut was as sweet as the sky-rotted air inside the cabin.
Let’s be honest, it was a shack. Three rooms: main, barely-a-bedroom, toilet (chair with a honey-bucket) separated from barely-a-bedroom with a curtain because outhouses weren’t survivable in the kind of weather this place could see (was seeing). But god, what a blessed shack it was.
“Flint and Pepper,” I said, which surprised me. My jaw felt like someone had fastened granite to my skull. “Fire, now. Nelto, get full soup on. No saving what we’ll have to carry down later. Mottle. Inventory. Mush –”
“Trailblazer.”
Mush. Good old Mush. So good at knowing what to do when I started doing something. Except here he was, trying to talk to me when I was already saying what I needed to, using the cutey not-a-voyageur voyageur title that I always told him was a crock of shit that put me in a bad mood every time I heard it. He’d never be dumb enough to talk to me like that.
“Yeah?” I said.
“The door wasn’t shut.”
I felt myself trying to think too fast. Tried to slow it down, ended up not thinking at all. Looked at him for more instead.
“Not all the way,” Mush explained. “Lock’s cracked open. Someone’s been here.”
“Rock bear,” I said, because I felt like I needed to say something, “a clever one,” and he did me the good grace of not listening to what had just come out of my mouth.
The fire was on already, turning us from curdled lumps in the dark to shadowed ghosts under a red lamp. We’d already started to huddle closer together around, mothlike.
My brain reengaged. My eyes turned on. “Mottle’s gone,” I said.
***
Whelk swore she’d held him tight all the way to the cabin door. Swore and cried and sweated until he shook.
“Stop looking at me,” he whispered, burrowing into his too-big coat. Mottle had given that to him, I remembered. Her own a size too small afterwards, but she hadn’t cared. Oldest of nine. Eight. “Please. Please.”
So we put him in the corner with the first cup of the soup and his shakes and he shriveled there as me and Mush did the inventory ourselves.
The windows were glass, but barred – and small besides.
The chimney was clear. We wouldn’t suffocate.
There was less firewood than regulation, but still enough. We shouldn’t freeze.
The door’s lock was cracked clean in half. Rock bear my inflamed asshole.
There were two chairs and one table. Light and shoddy.
One bedframe without a mattress. Heavier and shoddier.
There were two proper lamplights, but the fuel-tin was empty.
There was an empty drylocker. And no telling if that had been the case before the lock was cracked.
Flint and Pepper turned the table and the bedframe into a barricade against the door – still light, still shoddy, but a speedbump beat a welcome mat. I set up the watch schedule: two awake, no fewer. Nelto rationed out our fuel into the lamplights with a miser’s soul and forced soup into us with a mother’s kind and gentle hand and a grandmother’s implacability.
“We’ll wait it out,” I told them all as we laid down together, Flint mounting the chair by the door, Pepper setting its pair on the far side of the room. “We’re out of the storm and fed. It isn’t.”
I went to sleep with Mush’s arm on my shoulder. I woke up with Flint’s curse in my ear – sat up so fast I almost broke his nose.
“Watch?” I asked, heartbeat slowing down again.
“Mush,” said Pepper, across the way from me. Flat and grim.
I looked and looked and looked and shook and shook and there was no Mush.
***
Pepper and Flint each swore up and down the other hadn’t nodded off for a second, for an instant. What was worse, I believed them. Nelto swore she’d dozed off with her nose at his shoulderblades and woke up with it between mine and never so much as smelt the difference. Whelk fled from his corner, back to the walls, all the way into the toilet. Wrapped himself in the curtain, trembled and begged us, all of us, don’t look at him. Like a child that thought it’d keep the monster away.
He’d been warm at my back, then he was gone. But everything was warm. The fire was still crackling. The lamplights still gleamed.
Something had gone wrong. Something SHOULD be wrong.
The door, of course, was still barricaded. The windows, of course, remained intact. The floor was hard-packed dirt, unmarked by passage, thick and solid as the idiot fog in my head when you thumped at it. The walls sighed to the touch, but held together.
“The ceiling,” I said.
We looked up at it. Barely out of the reach of an arm, tar papered and stapled and shingled and left to face an entire mountain, sky and all.
No obvious exits. But whatever was claiming us wasn’t being obvious about it.
Nelto pled dizziness and poor eyesight. Flint’s leg was still sore from the sprint. And Whelk refused to leave the toilet. So me and Pepper stood on the table and stood on their shoulders and clambered up into the half-assed beam that stood for an entire spread of rafters (poorly) and creaked our way across the thin skin separating us from snow and ice and something else, feeling inch by inch, knocking to hear if the outside had been scraped clean, or was serving as a seat, waiting and wondering at the back of our skulls when we’d sink up to our elbow in the cold or be pulled up and out and away.
Nothing, nothing, nothing, a scream, a shriek. “TRAILBLAZER!”
Whelk. He didn’t know better yet.
I let go and dropped and rolled and came up smallarmed and ready and found him crammed under the chair by the door and Nelto standing in the middle of the room sweating and stammering.
“They were right there,” she said. “Right there. Pepper on you and me, and me on Flint and Pepper, and I looked up to Flint – over there, over the doorway – and when I looked down they were gone.”
Flint came down slower than I did, listening to this. They armed themselves careful, listening to this. And when they pulled their terramach up and aimed at Nelto they took a moment to be extra sure they had a bead on her heart, which is what let me grab their arm and pull it aside first so the red-hot metal sank sizzling through the wall next to her instead. The hiss as it hit ice sounded like the dying breath of a giant cockroach.
“No!” I told them. They wouldn’t let go, punched me in the face, stamped on my foot. “No!” Their free hand went to their belt. Canteen, quicklamp, knife.
Mine was still holding my smallarm.
It was a short race.
***
Me and Nelto put Flint in the bedroom together, like that’d help. Then we stood together by the last ashes of the fire.
“One watch,” I said. “All night. All ways. Back to back to back, weapons free. If you feel someone go slack, pinch them.”
“No,” muttered Whelk. He’d shifted to the chair farthest from the door, still wrapped in the curtain, peering from behind it like it were the one solid thing in all the world. “Please no.”
“Better a bad eye than none,” said Nelto. She smiled, almost unforced. “Mottle would kill me if I messed this up. Back to back to back…I’ll take the door if you’re alright with that, Private?”
Whelk shrank from her half-focused gaze like a worm from the bird.
“Whelk,” I said. I was sure there was something I could say that would make sense here, that would work here, if only Mush was still here to tell me and if only I wasn’t so aware that he never would be again. “Get up.”
Whelk didn’t get up.
He wasn’t shaking anymore, under our combined gaze. He was holding still, the kind of still you saw when a rabbit dangled from a fox’s mouth. Pale as a stilled pulse.
Nelto took a step, nice and polite. She made perfect contact with those big brown eyes. She reached out with that kind and gentle hand.
“Stop LOOKING AT ME!” he screamed and he stood and he swung, and the hand went one way and Nelto went the other and in the air there was red spray and the hurtling body of Private Whelk, bunched at the front and fully-extended at the rear, launching himself through a window big enough to fit a cat and not much more with a crash of glass so cold and clean that I barely felt the cut on my cheek when it struck me.
The sound of the storm was so loud that it filled my ears up to the point of quiet, like water. Nothing to distract, just me, Nelto, Nelto’s hand, the blood, the broken window, and the discarded cold-coat of Private Whelk, puddled on the floor and spilling out something like pale straw.
I looked closer at that straw, after I looked out the window and checked Nelto and did the quick-prayer over her and a few other things. Stopped for a moment to touch one. Bone splinters, still-damp but already gnawed to bluntness. Stippled with the marks of a thousand tiny teeth.
***
The storm’s getting quiet. Not sure if it’s my ears or the weather. The light from the window is getting fuzzy and stare and stare at it as I might I can’t tell you what’s done that either.
I can’t do any one of half a hundred things. I can’t remember if I’d ever had a chance to review my patrol’s papers. I can’t bring them back to life. I can’t apologize to Flint’s face. I can’t keep the memory of Mush calling me trailblazer out of my heart. I can’t force the fuel and the firewood to last longer. But I tell you this much I’ll manage.
If Whelk comes back, I’m going to make it look me in the eye.