A Meeting at Corvallis (49 page)

“
Find
them for me, Sheriff. I don't like sitting here with my thumb up my ass and a blindfold on.”

“Will do, boss,” Bauer said cheerfully, and left in his turn.

Renfrew stood for long moments looking at his map, and then traced a thick finger down from Mount Angel, through the Waldo Hills and over the Santiam, past the ruins of Lebanon and down to Sutterdown and past it to the Mackenzie clachan at Dun Juniper. Somewhere out there the First Levy of Clan Mackenzie were hovering. Somehow he didn't think they were just waiting to react to what
he
did. Which meant they were planning something themselves, the dirty dogs…

“Not thinking of going farther south, my lord?” Sir Buzz Akers asked him, handing him a blue plastic plate heaped from the buffet. “Heading for Dun Juniper, on the hope that they'd come out and fight us if we attacked their holy place?”

Renfrew started slightly. “With an open left flank all the way from Molalla to here, sixty miles as the crow flies and half again as much on foot?
Christ
, no!” he said.

Then he smiled unwillingly as he realized his younger vassal was teasing him out of his brooding mood, took the plate, ate a spring roll and forked up a mouthful of potato salad. When he'd swallowed, he said: “We should be back up around Mount Angel, doing one thing at a time. It'd take a while, but we could do it, nice and safe, and our good Pope Leo could send the wicked abbot to the stake, he does love a nice cheerful blaze at an auto-da-fé. Then we could move on the Mackenzies with Mount Angel as a base of operations, not a hoe handle stuck up our collective assholes.”

Sir Buzz looked at him oddly. “Do you think this campaign is in danger of failure, my lord?” he asked.

“Hmm? Oh, no, we'll
win
all right, there's not much doubt of that. We outnumber them so heavily we can afford to make mistakes, and they can't. I just don't want it to cost us more than it has to. That's why we should have taken Mount Angel first. Then I'd have four thousand men here, and we'd be able to leave plenty west of the river to make sure the Bearkillers didn't interfere, as well. Alexi uses his brains instead of just his balls and his fists like that idiot son of his, but I'd be happier if
he
had more troops, too.”

He pointed his white plastic fork at the symbol on the map that represented Dun Juniper, less than a day's march away to the southeast, even going around the spurs of hill which thrust out into the flat valley; that would be even nastier to take than Sutterdown, although not as bad as Mount Angel. From the descriptions the terrain would be a nightmare for a large force, and ideal for the sort of sneaking-through-the-trees business the kilties delighted in.

“Besides,” he went on thoughtfully, prodding at the map, “I don't think Juniper Mackenzie is home right now.”

Near Dun Juniper, Willamette Valley, Oregon
March 5th, 2008/Change Year 9

Dennis Martin Mackenzie stopped with a wheezing groan and shouldered his way through the circle of watchers, his long war ax in his hand. The three-mile run from Dun Juniper had left him purple-faced; he was a heavy-built man, and his usual trades of brewing and carpentry and leatherworking didn't do much for his cross-country ability. But that wasn't what made him feel as if his heart was squeezing itself up through his lungs. He recognized the smell of blood—a great deal of it, like iron and salt and copper, and the other unpleasant scents of death. Two horses down, and—

“Oh, Hell,” he said, falling into old habits. Then: “Lords of the Watchtowers of the West.”

Aoife lay with her head on Liath's chest; from the blood trail, she'd crawled there, though it was hard to imagine anyone having the strength to do so, with those wounds. A man lay not far away with his face cut open, and another with a spear standing up from his chest. The pale features of the dead looked very white in the dusk, but the blood was nearly black.

Poor kids. Too damn young—
He'd seen a world die in the Change and its aftermath, but this was far too personal—he'd watched these two grow from childhood. A rising babble of talk cut across his thoughts.

“Quiet!” he said. “In fact, why don't the rest of you folks get back to the Dun? We're going to need some space here and we don't want the traces all trampled over. Jack, Burach, stay up at the edge of the woods and turn people back, would you? And send for a cart.”

Most of the bystanders left. His eyes took in the scene and he stooped to examine the bodies; someone handed him a lantern, and he turned up the flame. That gave brighter light, but it made the space under the tall black walnut into a cave of light in a great, dim reach. Leaves rustled above him, turned ruddy by the flame.

The crossbow bolt that had killed Liath was pre-Change, the shaft made of some light metal; so was the one sunk behind the ear of Aoife's horse, lodged immovably in bone. There were three more bolts in the other horse's chest and throat, and another standing three inches deep in the dense hardwood of the walnut tree, at about head height. There was no sense in trying to get
that
out; instead he gripped one that was sunk in the horse's breast by the inch of wood still showing and withdrew it, the pinch of his powerful hand and thick-muscled arm pulling inexorably. It was modern, lathe-turned from dense ashwood, the head a simple four-sided steel pyramid designed to pierce armor, and the vanes cut from salvaged plastic—credit cards, Visa, to be precise.

“Protectorate issue,” he said, swallowing a curse.

So were the mail-lined camouflage jackets on the two dead men; that was what a forester wore in the Association's territory—foresters being a sort of rural police-cum-forest warden. These, however…

He picked up one of the dead men's hands, ignoring the unpleasant limpness, and the little chill that always ran up his neck at the thought that his own hands—those marvelously precise and responsive instruments—could be so easily rendered futile and lax, already blotched purple beneath the skin with settling blood no longer kept in motion by the heart. There was a thick curd of callus on the inner web of the man's right hand, extending up the inside of the index finger and thumb, and more on the heel of his hand. Swordsman's callus, exceptionally well developed. Scars showed white on the thick right forearm; there weren't any scars on the left arm, but it had another band of callus just inside the elbow, where the inner strap of a horseman's kite-shaped shield ran. The man was young, although the great slash across his face made it hard to be sure; he was broad in the shoulders and long in the legs, well fed but without an ounce of excess flesh, and his hair was cut longer at the front, cropped close behind the ears.

“Knight or man-at-arms,” Dennis said grimly. “Probably a knight.” He looked around. “OK, they took off with Rudi and the girl. We and the Dúnedain aren't the only people who can do commando raids. Laegh.”

A young man who'd stayed when the crowd left looked up from quartering around the trampled ground. His sister Devorgill had stayed as well. They were both noted hunters, only two years apart in age, tall and lean and with brown hair drawn back into a queue; the quickest way to tell them apart was by Laegh's mustaches.

“How many of them?” Dennis said.

“Six came here, Uncle Dennis. Four left—with eight horses, and the one the little princess was riding. First one came up here and climbed the tree—climbed it with irons on the feet, look, you can see where it scarred the bark. The others waited in the thickets lower down. Then they came up to wait in ambush, leaving the horses there with one to hold them, and I think the first, the scout who called them, was a woman. A large woman, or a boy nearly grown. Walking light, not digging her heels in like the others. She watched the Dun for hours from a high branch; it wouldn't carry
my
weight well. Then she slid down quickly—when she saw the riders headed this way, I guess. First the princess came, galloping fast, and on her heels the Chief's son—he fell from his horse—and then Aoife and Liath. After the fight the strangers went down the north slope, riding hard, taking both children with them.”

“How long ago?”

“Half an hour or a bit less. The trails there are good. They could be ten miles away by now if they headed west into the Valley.”

Devorgill touched the blood and smeared it between the fingers of her left hand, sniffing it and then offering him the evidence. “Twenty minutes or a little more,” she said.

Laegh's sister was the one who'd ridden out to find what was delaying the children and their escorts; right now she was gripping her horse's reins right under the bit to control its rolling-eyed fear as it pivoted its rear end about that fixed point with nervous side steps, and she was looking pretty spooked herself. Dennis glanced up at the sky and cursed to himself; the sun was already on the western horizon, and it was a wonder even a tracker of Laegh's skill had been able to see anything with the gloom growing beneath the trees.

“Laegh, can you follow them in the dark?”

“Not quickly, Uncle,” he said, using the usual term to address someone a generation older. “My dogs can follow the trail if they don't break it in water, though. Worth trying, they'd get too far ahead if we just wait for dawn. And they might split up.”

“Devorgill,” he told the man's sister. “Get back to Dun Juniper,
fast.
Get the hounds, get four or five people, you pick them, the gear, weapons, spare horses and get back here
fast.
You—” He picked out another. “Get down to Dun Fairfax and tell them what's up and that we need another six who're good in the woods, and some more horses.”

The woman vaulted into the saddle, reined her restive, snorting horse around, and switched its rump with the long end of the reins. It neighed and reared and broke into a gallop; the messenger ran in its wake, his bow pumping back and forth in his left hand. Dennis grinned mirthlessly at Laegh's unspoken protest at waiting for a war party.

“Not much use finding them if you can't fight 'em when you do, eh?” he said. The young man hesitated. “And don't worry; I know I'm about as much use on a hunt as a hog at a handfasting. You're in charge.
I've
gotta stay here and see to things and figure out what to tell Juney.”

There was a rustle through the watchers, and Dennis felt his stomach clench again.
And I'm really not looking forward to that. Poor little kid…no, Rudi won't be scared, not Rudi. But he should be.

Someone else was coming down the trail, someone on a bicycle. Dennis swore again under his breath, feeling harassed; there were still five hundred people in Dun Juniper, and he didn't want any of them here right now. Then the bicycle came to a halt, and Judy Barstow let it fall and ran forward.

Oh, shit. Sanjay last year, Aoife this time. The dice are being really hard on her and Chuck. Thank Everyone that all my kids are still too young to fight.

She halted when she saw her foster-daughter's body. For a moment her strong-featured face was blank, and then she sank to her knees. There was no sound save the soughing of the evening wind in the trees, and the rustling flicker of the lantern flame.

“My little girl,” she whispered, touching the dead face, and then holding the eyelids closed and doing the same for her child's lover; tears dripped from her own eyes, runnels along the weathered olive skin of her cheeks. “My little red-haired girl. You were so brave and so scared that day on the bus when we found you, and I loved you then. You grew so fast—”

Her hand shook as she touched fingers to the blood and marked her cheeks and forehead, and then fumbled with the knot that held her hair. It fell loose around her face and shoulders, grizzled and black, as she raised her hands northward.

“I am the mother and I call the Mother's curse on you who did this, by the power of the blood of my child spilled on Her earth! I curse you with cold heart and hearth and loins and colder death! Curse you—”

Her voice broke into a low moan, then rose into a keening shriek—literally keening. Then it sank again, then rose; she rocked back and forth on knees and heels, her hands tearing at her hair as the wailing scream sounded long and lonely in the darkened woods. Dennis stood back from it, shivering slightly under the thick wool of his plaid; so did Laegh, looking more frightened still as his hand moved in a protective gesture—a High Priestess so lost to herself
was
frightening. Curses tended to spill over and bounce back.

Then the young hunter's sister rode up, a dozen others with her and each leading a spare horse; four big flop-eared hunting hounds trotted along with them, curious and alert but too well trained to break free. One of the riders tossed a spear to Laegh. He caught it with a smack of palm on ashwood, whistled the dogs in sharply, dipped spearhead and head and knee to Judy, and led his hunting-party into the darkness. Before the hooves had faded from hearing the belling of the hounds sounded, echoing through the nighted hills, a hunter's salute to the rising moon.

Others came up the pathway with a cart, and torches trailing sparks. Hands lifted the bodies of the Clan's warriors and laid them on the straw in the cart's bed, folding their hands over their breasts and pulling their plaids across their faces. Others helped Judy to her feet, supporting her as she stumbled blind with tears behind the slow pace of the oxen. Dennis sighed, shouldered his ax and fell in with the rest of the party. Her kin and friends would spend the night at the wake, talking of the dead and keening them…but he intended to break into his own brewer's stock-in-trade more privately, with his family, and then sleep as long as he could.