The Lost Steersman (Steerswoman Series) (38 page)

He held her hard and steady as he could, and he spoke right into her ear. “It’s demons, far off. We’re hearing them in our sleep. And so’s that dog— he’s hearing them better.” He couldn’t hear that hum they made, but he heard something, something like a push on his ears. Part of him remembered that, from the first time. When he stood so close to it. When this noise was a part of that other noise, the part that got under your skin.

His whole mouth and throat went dry; and he swallowed hard, swallowing nothing, and it hurt. “I think there are a lot of them.” The dog got itself a good deep breath and started up again.

Then Steffie was getting into his trousers, and he tried to put on his shirt; but Gwen had the other end and she wouldn’t let go. “Get dressed,” he told her, pulling at it, wrapping it around his hand to tug it hard. “Get dressed and get out.”

“No!” A whisper, but with just enough voice in it to make it sound strange and sort of half there. She was hanging on to that shirt like she was in the water and it was a rope. “Stay here. Stay here.”

“What? Stay? What do you mean, stay?” Then he knew what she meant.

He could hide. They both could. Until it was all over. It would be easy.

“No.” Maybe he was the first to hear, the first one to know, and he had to warn everybody. He pulled harder.

“Don’t go.” She got louder, and he couldn’t see her face under her hair, but he could hear tears in her voice. And then she said, “please,” which was a thing she never, ever said.

“Got to.” He gave up on the shirt and went for his shoes.

“
Why?
”

“There’s Corey to tell.” And Janus, he knew about demons. “There’s a whole town to wake up.” And then get something— like a pike or a pitchfork, or a stick or some stones, or something, anything.

“Someone else can tell them. Someone else will hear soon. If you go, you won’t just tell and stay back. You’ll get into it.”

“Too right.” He got both shoes on. Maybe if some people got on a roof, if the demons came down a street, and maybe dropped things on them—

“
No!
” She yelled it, and it made the dog shut up. “Let someone else! How come it’s
you
got to go after monsters? How come
you
have to do it?”

He took a breath to answer, but before he even finished, he suddenly saw that he couldn’t answer her— because the question just made no sense to him, no sense at all.

How come
he
had to do it?

He couldn’t find a way to grab hold of that question, somehow. It was like it was just noises, or empty air, or water, or nothing having anything to do with anything. He
wanted
to understand it, he wanted to answer, he really did; but it seemed like
there
was nothing there for him to understand and no way to make there be an answer.

So he figured he’d say nothing; but instead, when he took the rest of that breath, and even with his head empty, words came out all by themselves.

They were: “How come you
don’t?
”

He shouted it. It surprised them both. Steffie never shouted at her.

Gwen was pulled back against the branches, with the blanket hugged against her, and all her hair a-tangle. He couldn’t see her eyes, just shadows with flicks of light in. She looked like a stranger; she looked stranger than a stranger, because he couldn’t guess what she was thinking— and then he could. She was thinking that it was his question that made no sense at all.

They both crouched there, under the leaves, in the dim, looking at each other’s shadows; and it was just like they were a couple of animals with no words between them at all, because nothing either one of them said could make any sense to the other.

The dog stopped moaning. Steffie heard something like bad music in the distance, all different notes, all at once.

The demons were closer.

“Stay, then,” he said to Gwen; and then he was down the little leafy tunnel, out, and standing up.

He could get to Corey’s faster if he cut up the hill through the brush. He could get to Janus faster going straight down.

Then he was moving fast, not running so much as stopping himself from falling down, just. So fast that when he got to the bottom of the hill, he had to grab hold of a tree trunk so he could spin onto the road or he would have gone straight into the water. Then down the road, pounding, past the good end of the harbor, toward the shabby end, right at the cooper’s, into the backyard, up the steps.

Then he was slamming his fist on Janus’s door and trying the latch, which wouldn’t open, and he was yelling, “Wake up, you bloody stupid bastard, get yourself ready to do whatever it was you did the last time, because they’re back again, except there’s more of them, so you’ve got to do it again, so
get up
!”

He heard a voice inside, and someone moving; but Steffie didn’t wait. “Get up to Corey’s place!” he yelled, and then he was back down the stairs, back down the road, and up New High Street. Behind him more voices were calling: the people who’d heard him, yelling it all to the people who hadn’t.

By the time he got up to Corey’s door, the word wasn’t far behind him. He could hear it moving up the street, door to door, and he knew it was going out to other streets, too, people waking their neighbors to tell, all down the line.

Corey didn’t have a house, just a room at the side of Karin’s, with its own door. Steffie banged it, and then tried it. It wasn’t locked, but Corey was there already when Steffie opened it.

“More,” Steffie got out, between two gasps.

“Them demons?”

“Right,” between two more gasps.

“Where?”

“South. Not up to old Galer’s yet. Heard ’em. Didn’t see ’em. A bunch. All together.” Steffie put his back against the doorway, and coughed and gasped.

“Right.” The dark room swallowed Corey, then spit him up again with a bucket in his hand. “Take this.” He pointed up across the street. “Hit that.” Corey went back in the dark, and Steffie could hear him grabbing things.

The bucket had rocks in it. Steffie took a good-sized one and hurled it at the shutters of the upstairs window across the street. Then another, two good bangs. He was already flinging the third when the street door opened, and Nola came out. She was pulling on a heavy leather vest over her shirt, and she had her spear in one hand and a short sword he’d never seen her with before strapped on. She bolted off, already knowing what to do and where to go.

Corey came out again. He had a lamp in one hand, not lit, and an old bow in the other. Steffie had never seen Corey use a bow. “We’ve got to fetch more than Nola, don’t we?” Steffie said.

“No. She tells two, then those two tell two, and it goes out to the militia like that. They’ll all come here.”

Steffie looked down the street. “Well, there’s more people coming than that,” he said. Because there were: a straggle of people coming up Karin’s road from New High. And one coming down Hill Path, as well; the news had run itself past Karin’s house already and was probably still going strong.

They gathered at Karin’s cutting shed. Big, empty space— but they all stood close at the front end. There was the green smell of new-cut leaves on the tables all around and the dusty smell of dead leaves on the floor, like spring and autumn jammed both together by someone mean, who wanted to hurry things.

“We need someone to go out and see where they are now, and how many, and then come back and tell us,” Corey said.

“That’d be me,” Steffie said; but Belinda said it, too, and faster, so she got it. Good enough. She ran better. She could run all night and not notice.

“What I want,” Corey went on— he was standing up on a table so people could see, “what I want is to get at them with nothing behind them, so we can shoot them. I want them where if we miss no one gets hurt, because the way I see it, whoever can hold a bow gets to use it. You don’t need to be good, you just need to keep shooting in the right direction.”

Someone bumped Steffie’s shoulder, and he turned. Arvin was there, with his own good bow and another one, older and smaller. He handed it to Steffie— but Steffie gave it right back. “Got to be someone here can use it better than me,” Steffie said. Arvin nodded, and sidled off through the crowd.

“If we can’t get the monsters while they’ve got nothing behind them,” Corey went on, “the thing to do is let them come into the streets. If we can get them into the smaller streets, we can stand off down the street from them and try to pick them off. It depends on how many they are, and if they split up, which way each one goes.”

One of the militia spoke up. “Then we need more runners, to spot ’em and come tell. So they can split, too.”

“Right. So I want about five people, willing to follow that noise the monsters make, and just sight them, and then come running to tell me.” And it was about five voices answering, but they were all the wrong ones. “No. You two girls, and you, boy, you go running ’round to all the streets now, and tell everyone who’s awake and wants to help that they should come here fast. Right? You, go north; you, northwest; you, southeast. If you hear any demons, just run the other way, as fast as you can. And, you two others, you go home now and hide under the beds— you’re too little.”

“I’ll be a runner, and that’s two when Belinda gets back.”

“Steffie, good. Who else?” No one spoke up. “I don’t want to use my fighters for this; my fighters will need to fight, and some of the rest of you will, too.” A couple more voices, not sounding happy about it.

Someone came up and stood just next to Steffie. He thought at first it was Gwen, but when he turned and looked it was Zenna.

“You can’t fight,” he told her.

“I know.”

“Right.” He turned back to watch Corey.

Karin had got one of those extra bows, and was looking pretty mean, holding it. She was standing beside the table, not watching Corey, but watching the other people. She was still a boss— but she wasn’t Corey’s boss, not for tonight.

Corey went on. “When Belinda gets back, we’ll have a better idea of where to set up. If the demons haven’t reached Harbor Road, I’m thinking we should swing ’round on them from the north, and there’ll be just marsh behind them . . .”

Steffie listened close, lining up all the bits in his head, trying to figure where he’d fit in. Plans were good, but you never knew when they’d fall apart . . .

Funny, he thought after a while. Seems he had a clearer view of Corey than before. A clearer view all around the room.

It was because some people had left. He hadn’t seen them going, but he saw them gone.

Some people who could help a lot were off and gone; while some people who couldn’t help at all, like Zenna, they’d come up here all the same.

All the people like Gwen were gone, or going; all the people like him were here and still coming.

Good. Good both ways.

Across the room, he saw that little boy from down the harbor— Ivy’s little boy, Tarlie. He hadn’t gone to bed like Corey told him; he was sitting in a corner, looking at the world through people’s legs. Couldn’t do a thing to help, but there he was.

Ivy’s boat was at the bad end of the harbor. Way past the cooper’s.

If a little boy from there could make it here by now, so could Janus.

Steffie looked all around. What he saw was no Janus anywhere.

Must’ve decided to be one of those other people. The ones who don’t do things. The ones like Gwen.

But someone who did what Janus did last time wouldn’t be like Gwen this time.

And where was Belinda?

“Something’s gone wrong. Because Belinda’s not back, and she should be.” He talked loud, right over Corey, and everyone turned around to look.

Corey didn’t like it. “Maybe she’s warning more people on the way back,” he said, and tried to go on.

“But she wouldn’t do that, because you said come right back here. And what about Janus, with him so eager last time? I told him already myself, but he’s not here yet.”

And all of a sudden it was everyone paying attention to Steffie— him in the middle of all these faces— and it didn’t feel natural to him at all. But he pushed on anyway. “So, it looks to me like any plans you’re thinking are already gone out the window. Maybe we should just get down there, all of us, and figure what to do, when we see.”

“No, I want to have some idea first— ”

“But something’s up, something’s up
right now
, and we don’t know a thing about it, so everything you’re figuring will be no good, because you don’t
know.
”

Corey thought a bit. It looked like it was just for show, but he made sense when he talked again. “Then I want you other runners out right now. Just listen for where the demons are, see ’em if you can, but back off. One runner— you, Kenno— you go down New High as far as Jilly’s. Wait by the corner there. You others report to him, and he’ll come tell me, if we’re not already there by then. We’ll regroup there as soon as I’m finished here.”

“I’ll take Harbor Road going east,” Steffie said straight off. He didn’t wait to hear about the other runners.