Page 86 of Into the West

What? she thought, with a sudden feeling of dread. This was not helped when Kordas came running as fast as he could, accompanied by Rose, as the once-attentive crowd backed away from Pebble in alarm.

Pebble emitted a high whine, as if it was struggling with speech; Kordas placed both hands on its “head” end, but he couldn’t seem to calm the Elemental enough to get it to speak properly. And now the entire creature trembled, as if with its own internal earthquake.

Finally, words came out of it again. “Bad thing!” it cried. “Bad, bad thing coming! Big bad thing!”

Kordas did not hesitate a second. “Rose, get all the herders to bring their stock in from the fields and get them behind the wall. Tell my Guard and all the mages to man the wall—” He paused. “Pebble, where? Where is the bad thing coming from?”

“Riverrrrrrrr!” Pebble whined. “Riverrrrrrrr!”

River? Where Pebble made the bridges earlier?

“Lift me up high, Pebble! Show me the direction!”

Pebble grew legs again, and an extra two at its “face” end. Kordas stepped in toward Pebble, and those two legs formed into stony platforms backed by broad, crude “thumbs.” Pebble “sat up” and raised Kordas above its head. It was noticeably calmer with Kordas there, physically touching it. Kordas braced himself against Pebble’s thumbs and covered his eyes. He knew there was a risk of being scorched by his own mage-sight, but he hoped he’d get lucky by invoking it while he was being lifted, looking downward and opening his eyes slowly. Easing into it, he couldn’t see much of anything except the blizzard, but mage-sight showed him some strange things. Strangely vague things. Normally, when Kordas focused his attention on something, using mage-sight, it enhanced its detail. Mage-sight itself was something like a hyperfocus: seeing something so well you see past its physical form and into its energy traits. This time, though, gazing in the direction Pebble turned him, a “glow” marking a large life sign was an uneven, but moving, cloud, many furlongs away but closing. It matched the contours of the land, and flares and spits of energy discharges were in its wake, occasionally exploding as far as he could See. When he refined his mage-sight back onto the nearing cloud, though, it didn’t appear to be a cloud at all. Its collective aura broke into thousands of moving vertical ‘sticks,’ like toothpicks, whose energy peaked at either end, flowing over the landscape like a—

Like a swarm. The mage-sight is right—it isn’t a cloud, it’s thousands of individuals traveling like one, alongside the water.

Water—swarm—the—the knife-water-spiders? He pushed that thought aside. Right now, I do not need that in my life. From spending time with my boys directly into a swarm of giant death-spiders? Just the thought of it angered him.

“Man the wall on the river side!” he shouted from his impromptu command tower. “Incoming danger! Guards and Auxiliaries, all hands, all muster! Report to wall stations! Gunners, to revetments! Dolls, support the Guard! But get everyone inside the wall, now! If stock has to be left behind, so be it, but I want every person inside this wall now!”

Delia didn’t wait for instructions; her Fetching Gift could well be useful, so she ran for the wall on the river side and sped up the steps to peer through the thick curtain of snow toward the largely invisible river. If she was needed somewhere else, well, they had plenty of ways of contacting her.

More and more people, most of them inadequately armored, but armed to the teeth, came running up to join her on the wall. She moved as much out of the way as she could while still being able to look toward the river, but the jostling of the Guard made her want to hit back at them. It irked her maybe more than it should, but—and then she felt it.

Hate. Waves of rage and hate, coming from where the riverside should be. And just for a moment, the skeins of snow parted, and she got a glimpse of a red blur. A disheartening ululation, like momentary shrieks spreading outward through a crowd, made everyone stop what they were doing. Most arrayed on station just stopped their preparations and stared unhappily into the blizzard. Two Guard auxiliaries stumbled against each other, and the first of them smacked the second right across the mouth.

Her heart plummeted, her mouth dried, and her throat closed. No . . . no, it can’t be.

The snow swirled as if a curtain had descended. But the feelings didn’t go away; and as she glanced around her at the Guards and mages clustered up here on the wall, with the Veil streaming water a scant arm’s-length away, she saw from the looks on their faces that they felt it too. And they recognized it. The damnable ululation sounded again, only much, much closer.

Then the snow parted again, and what had been a red blur became something she had never expected to see again. A red glow, disturbingly wide, diffused through the snow. The ground rumbled, and Delia noted that the rumble made wave patterns, and significant softening, in the mud below. She heard people yelling and livestock leaning toward panic—and possibly, stampede. Dogs barked at the previous ululation, but this time, they stopped barking entirely.

The red glow pulsed, from one center point, outward from horizon to horizon from Delia’s viewpoint. It pulsed again, brighter, but from two points of origin outward. Then three. Brighter each time. Closer.

Blizzard snow billowed as if pushed against the Veil by breath, backlit by a steadily pulsing red glow, and the third breath later, it appeared.

The Red Forest. Only now it was moving, and moving uncomfortably quickly, one gigantic living thing that filled the river valley. Even from this distance, all of the trees visibly seethed and writhed, and the thing was moving at a terrifying speed, like a flash flood, coming down the riverbank and heading straight for them, thousands of voices shrieking.

Now all that preparation, using Mindspeakers as well as the Dolls, paid off. Rose kept pace with Kordas as he raced for the nearest barge containing the Poomers and the Poomer ammunition. Six Dolls fell in behind them, keeping pace, while Rose kept a running update on what was happening elsewhere.

And just what it was that they were about to face.

That made him slow and then stop in his tracks. The Red Forest. The ‘Blood Forest.’ Hate and rage will hunt you forever, he thought, for no apparent reason. When he caught his breath back, his thoughts tasted of despair. Is it here because of the Empire? Is it their revenge against us? Would Poomers be of any use against that thing? Ball, maybe, if they gather up close . . . bolt bundle—useless, caltrop lines—useless, stinging gas—double useless. We’d only flavor them. Assuming attrition as a primary principle, reducing their numbers is most likely to succeed—because of course, they could have dead-switch reflexes or Final Strikes, the sort of end-game that ends the game for both sides. Chainshot could slow the thing down, but they’d have to aim very low to strike below the canopy. And chainshot’s heavy, so increased load times would impact the rate of fire, and the only deployed Poomers are all on the perimeter of the Vale. So the one thing we’ve got that’s sure to cause damage is too far away to use. Of course it is, because I wasn’t smart enough for this. I took time for myself, and my boys, and Isla, and now we’re all going to die, because I didn’t spend that time making better emergency plans. I could have spent that time saving them! I hate myself for that. I just assumed everything would be all right. Just because we reached the milestone of a settlement. I let my guard down at the last moment. The last moment of the expedition. Oh gods, can it really be that? I slowed down, I wasted time on myself, and I could have done without that time if I’d known it meant I was going to get people killed. People who trusted me.

“I do not believe that standard projectiles will be of much use, Baron,” Rose said, echoing his earlier thoughts. “But . . . perhaps the things that send the projectiles might be? The cartridges?”

“Yes, maybe we could make them explode, but how, without it being a suicide mission? Every one is locked against enchantment and force, and breaking that would take too much time—also, worth mentioning, they might explode. We didn’t steal any clockwork strikers or tread-on webs, or we could just throw them. Firing crossbow bolts at the cartridges is more likely to waste arrows than—”

People who trusted me. People who still trust me. People trust me. And if I can’t make everything all right like they trust me to, I can at least feel hope for longer. I can act like things are all right, and they won’t have as much fear. I know how to act. I’ll make the fiction create the reality. I can do that. If I know anything, it’s how to fake looking competent.

And then it occurred to him. “Delia! Where’s Delia?”

“On the wall facing the river, Kordas,” Rose replied.

Perfect. “Get me a floating barge and a fast heavy horse to pull it, and have them meet me at the storage barges.” Nobody believes a heavy horse can be fast until they’ve been shoulder-checked into the next county by one. He tried to pick up his pace, but now his path was blocked by herds of frantic sheep mingled with frightened horses, chased into dubious safety from outside the wall, to interfere now. I should have thought of that, he cursed, and tried to shove his way through—

And found himself picked up bodily by Rose, who threw him over her shoulder and somehow managed to shove her way through the livestock. He twisted around to something approximating sitting up like he meant to be there. What in all the Hells. I’ve learned to depend more and more of my rule upon others, and now I’m literally being carried by them? If it wasn’t so funny for its absurdity, I’d be offended at the thought. By then, he was only in a seated position as far as regally wrapping one arm entirely around Rose’s head while flailing the other. More terrified animals filled the spaces around all the storage barges, but the Doll leapt twice between wildlife-islands and closed ground that much more quickly. There were three more Dolls, and a Tow-Beast with an empty hay wagon, waiting for them when Rose put him down, twisting Kordas to face him the right way. Without needing to be told what to do, Rose calmed the Tow-Beast, who was taking his cues from the milling horses around him, and the three Dolls formed a chain, passing the Poomer cartridge loads out of the barge and into the wagon at an alarming rate.