The Steerswoman's Road (55 page)

At last the noise disappeared, and she spread her hands to
communicate the fact, not presuming to decide for herself whether the danger
was over.

Bel drew and expelled a deep breath. “Close, but not too
close.” She rose, somewhat stiffly, her eyes still wide, her gaze flicking
about the landscape.

“What was it?” Rowan found that her jaw ached. She had been
sitting with teeth clenched for over two hours.

“A demon,” Bel said. She turned slowly in a complete circle,
making a careful study of the surroundings, listening and looking. Rowan
attempted to rise, stumbled as a cramp took her left leg. “They’re rare,” Bel
continued. “They make that noise, constantly. We’re lucky that your hearing is
so sharp. I might not have noticed in time.”

Rowan massaged her left calf awkwardly with her right hand
and followed Bel’s example in searching the horizon for she knew not what. The
land was empty, the grass near-silent in the stillness. “What would have
happened?” There were legends of demons in one part of the Inner Lands, but
legends only.

“It would have come for us, and killed us.” Bel looked at
the direction where the sound had vanished, and began to relax. “They’re
attracted by sound.”

“All sound? Do they chase goblins, tumblebugs? Tanglebrush?”

“I don’t know. But if one hears you, it comes. They’ve destroyed
entire tribes.” She began gathering their equipment, urgently. “Let’s leave.
Now.”

Rowan packed her pens, her ink stone, her book, her bedroll.
“Is there no way to defend against them?”

“If you stand in front of one and wave your sword, it sprays
you with a fluid that melts your flesh from the bones.”

Rowan grimaced. “And if you don’t wave your sword?”

“It does the same.”

“What do they look like?”

“No one I know has seen one.” Bel rolled her cloak, tied it
to her pack. “I know some tales, and one song where a demon appears. They’re
said to stand as tall as a man, colored silver or gray, and have arms like
slugsnakes. They have no head, and no face.”

Rowan attempted to envision it. “How do they see?”

“No one knows.”

Their camp dismantled, the women moved off quickly, in a direction
opposite from the demon’s last known position. The new route headed more to the
north than had been planned. Rowan made no complaint. She walked behind her
silent friend, listening to the Outskirts.

They did not hear the demon again, but began to sleep in
shifts, for fear of missing its approach. With less rest, they traveled harder
in the mornings, when they were freshest, paused more briefly for noon meal,
and stopped earlier in the evening. Soon, Bel was again searching for tribe
signs; Rowan dizzied herself by trying to do the same, scanning horizons that
daily became more obscured as the travelers approached and entered an area
with many small, high hills.

Bel paused on one crest, again signaling Rowan to a stop beside
her. The morning was windy, the grass raucous, roaring, and the contrasts of
color across its surface flaring, bright and alive, like fire. The sky above
was blue and white, motionless, frozen. Rowan felt trapped between the land and
sky, had a wild impression that she might suddenly fall up, away from the j
ittering, burning hills into the icy heights. The Outskirter gazed eastward,
and Rowan waited; with the slackening of her wearied concentration, the
landscape collapsed into visual chaos.

Eventually she realized that Bel was not examining the land
to the east, but only facing in that direction; her attention was elsewhere.
Rowan studied her: a clear and familiar shape against the writhing background.
Bel stood with a lazy nonchalance that to Rowan’s eyes communicated total
alertness. Rowan spoke, quietly and cautiously. “What?” Her thoughts
immediately went to the demon; above the grass noise, she could not hear any
hum.

Bel gestured at the landscape: a motion so elaborately communicative
that the steerswoman instantly recognized it as false, designed to deceive. “We’re
being followed. Look confused.”

Rowan gazed at the distance, slowing, forcing the view into
some semblance of true land, hills, rocks. She shook her head as if perplexed.
“Is it a person?” she asked.

“I don’t know. If it is a person, he’s very good. It might
be a wounded goblin, going along the ground, or a small goat.”

“Can you tell where it is?”

“Not exactly. Behind us. West.”

Rowan startled at a noise. “What was that?” A brief rattle,
not behind, but ahead.

“Slugsnake in a tanglebrush,” Bel said indifferently. Slugsnakes
were harmless.

Bel threw up her arms as if the lay of the terrain had
defeated her, and slipped out of her pack. “Pull out your maps, and settle down
as if you’re checking our route. I’ll go ahead, like I’m scouting, and try to
double back and catch him.”

Rowan began to comply, vainly trying to sense the follower
without looking in his direction, attempting to use a combination of hearing,
peripheral vision, even smell. Her skin tingled, as if, with her other senses
useless, she might manage to locate him by some extension of touch.

She understood Bel’s strategy. “I’m bait,” she muttered, uncapping
her map case.

“You have to be. It’s too late to hide, and you can’t move
without being seen. I can. If he tries to come near you, I may spot his motion.
Keep your sword handy.”

Bel wandered off to the east, and Rowan seated herself on
the Outskirter’s pack, holding the map before her. The slugsnake rattled its
tanglebrush.

The wind faltered, faded to silence, then rose again,
slowly. At first quietly, then more loudly, the grass began again its tapping,
hissing, until it became a sound so constant as to hold no meaning whatsoever.

A person who followed in hiding could mean no good; there
was danger, and Rowan was alone.

And suddenly, under the impetus of that danger, Rowan accepted
the sound of the Outskirts, without conscious thought; she accepted it and
dismissed it. It was expected, it was background. It held no information; with
her eyes on her charts, she waited for other sounds, for something unexpected.

Unexpectedly, the tanglebrush had not rattled in the wind. Under
the guise of comparing chart to landscape, Rowan rose and looked in that
direction. Bel was there, crouched to the ground, her body blocking the tanglebrush
from view. Rowan looked away. But Bel’s body could not have blocked the sound.

Rowan looked again. Bel was not there, but her cloak
was—draped over the brush in perfect semblance of a cloaked Outskirter crouched
among the redgrass.

As if absently, the steerswoman moved closer to her pack and
sword. Turning in a slow circle, she alternated outward glances with longer
gazes at her map. The chart covered territory left far behind, days ago; she
did not truly see it, but tried to study the images she gained from each
outward glance, tried to absorb them, to hold them clearly in her mind.

To the east: hills, slowly ranging lower in the twisting
distance, and the decoy cloak in the foreground. South: small hills of writhing
red-grass, then longer hills, rising to a false horizon.

West, where the follower was hidden: lower land, flatter,
with occasional stands of tanglebrush, merging eventually into hazy distance.
In the wild sweeps of motion, no recognizable sign of a person, nor of an
animal. North: a peppering of single conical hills that rose above the grass
and at the limit of sight, where red and brown merged to a dull brick red, a
gray meandering line of what she guessed to be lichen-towers.

East, and she had finished her circle: the decoy, and no
sign of Bel. Rowan was alone.

Her heart beating hard, she stared blindly at the chart in
her hands; and suddenly, of itself, her mind added the quartered images
together, completing the circle of her sight. The world came to her, entire
and whole, all senses simultaneous, shockingly clear:

She stood on the rocky crest of a conical hill, part of a
series that swept from the north, joining into wild ridges in the south, with
flatland to one side, hills and dales to the other; grass covered the earth, a
deep carpet, waist-high everywhere but the stony hilltops. The sky was a blue
dome, arcing, perfect, clouds crowding in from the south; she felt the shape of
those clouds as surely as if she were touching them.

To the eyes, sky and horizon met, but she knew that sky and
land continued beyond sight: skies she had seen, land she had crossed herself,
and farther lands beyond those. All touched each other: a continuum sweeping
from the mountains west of Wulfshaven, across two great rivers, through green
forest to red veldt to the place where she stood, and past her to the east, and
the north, and the south.

She stood with stone beneath one foot, bare earth beneath
the other; redgrass began below her position.

—Alone, on top of a bare hill. She made a perfect target.

She sat. Outskirters carried no bows. (Why not? No wood but
tangleroot—too stiff? Too short?) A knife could be thrown. A tangleroot knife
would be too thick to fly well, too dull to do damage at distance. She noted
the distance of a thrown metal knife, mentally marking a safe circle around
herself.

Wind shifted from east to north, and the tone of the
chattering grass altered. To her mind, the sound was no sound, it was identical
to silence; she ignored it. True sound in this world was patterned sound: a man
walking, an insect hunting. She heard nothing.

Colored waves of turning and twisting redgrass—movement
caused by wind, by its force and direction. The motion had a source and a
reason; she did not try to hold the colors, or to watch them, but let them
sweep unimpeded across her sight. And it came to her that she could use that
motion, that what she sought was motion at odds with that patterned sweep, and
that, if it were there, it would show clearly.

And then it came, suddenly and quickly, in the corner of her
eye, a flicker of contrast so sharp that it seemed to burn: color out of pattern,
diagonal movement against parallel—and sound: three crunches, as feet abandoned
stealth. She found her sword and spun.

A thump, a wild rattle. Bel’s cloak was on the ground. Grass
hissing, leaves twisting, bright color showing the departing motion, as clear
as a shout, as clear as a finger indicating: There!

The attacker was fleeing, crouched beneath the grass tops,
the disturbance of his motion drawing a contrasting line within the sweeping
colors. He had discovered Bel’s ruse, had seen Rowan spin, sword in her hand,
had lost his advantage.

Rowan heard Bel approach from behind, recognizing her steps
as easily as if she walked among silence. “He fooled me. He went for me instead
of you.”

The angle of the motion changed abruptly and vanished; the
person was moving south, artfully using the grass’s motion as cover for his
own. But he could only move at the same pace as the windy patterns; if he tried
to move faster, then

Brown where there should have been red, red instead of
brown. “There!” She found that she had shouted it.

“He’s very good,” Bel commented.

The statement made no sense—Rowan could
see
him! “Can we catch him?” She wanted to,
desperately, furiously.

“Too late.”

He vanished again; he was far enough away that the wind’s
pace was safe. Rowan did not know his position.

No, she did: she knew his speed and his direction. She calculated,
her eyes tracing the only possible invisible path. “Which way around that hill,
do you think?” He could not climb it without being seen.

“It depends. He might be running to someplace in particular.”

The hill would make eddies of the patterns, like water
around a rock, hard to predict. If he passed on the near side, he would give
himself away. “The far side,” Rowan said.

“If he hasn’t lost his head.”

A brief splash of brown against red, an instant before it
disappeared behind the hill. “There.” And he was gone. The women were alone
under the windy sky, above the chattering grass.

“He might have been a scout,” Bel ventured.

“Would a scout attack as a matter of course?” Rowan asked,
turning to Bel—

—and clarity of perception vanished as suddenly as a snapped
twig. Its loss broke the steerswoman’s heart. “Oh, no ..”

“What?” Bel stood before her, solid and familiar—under a sky
too wide, too blue, above a roiling meaningless mass of brown and red ... The
Outskirter turned to see if something behind her had prompted Rowan’s reaction.

The steerswoman looked around: rising and falling slopes of
color, spots of black, the horizon too near, nearer than she knew it to be. She
sank to a seat on Bel’s pack, hand limp around her sword hilt, and cursed,
weakly and repetitively.

“What’s the matter?”

I’m on a hill, Rowan told herself, and the rocky hilltop did
become real; but it seemed to exist alone, as if floating unmoored on an ocean
of red-and-brown waves. “I could see ...”

“See what?”

See as a steerswoman saw: completely. No frantic, piecemeal
stitching-together of sight and sound and scent; see entirely, feel herself in
the world, reason what she could not perceive, and know it all as true.

“See everything,” she said.

Closing her eyes, she sensed the hill below her as suddenly
as if it had just risen up from the ground. She matched its shape with her
memory, pictured the pattern of terrain it had inhabited so sensibly,
considered the wise redgrass that had told her so much, so easily, and tried to
add all those ideas to her inner vision of the world.

Experimentally, she opened her eyes again. Bel was crouched
close in front of her, brows knit. Behind her were the hills that Rowan expected:
but too flat, like ranked landscape cutouts in a traveling pantomime theater.