Now he declared, “We have to try something. Dag, you say you think these makers are still supporting the mud-men. If that’s so, doesn’t it make sense to cut off the load?”
“Obio and Griff said they tried that,” said Dag patiently. “The results were pretty alarming, I gathered.”
“But no one died. It could be like one of Hoharie’s cuttings, hurting to heal.”
It was a shrewd argument, and it attracted Dag more than the prospect of just sitting here watching while these people suffered and failed. My company. He wasn’t quite sure how these Raintree makers had become honorary members of it in his mind, but they had. His three unconscious patrollers were the least depleted, so far, but Dag could see that wasn’t going to last.
“I admit,” Dag said slowly, “I’d like to see what happens for myself.” Although how much telling detail he was likely to observe with his groundsense closed was a bitter question. “Maybe…do one. And then we’ll see.”
Saun gave him a quick nod of understanding and went to fetch his sword. It was the same weapon that had put Saun in harm’s way back at Glassforge; Dag had heroically refrained from pointing out how useless the deadweight had been to Saun on this trip, too. But for dispatching mud-men in their pots, it would do nearly as well as a spear, and better than a knife.
Sword over his shoulder, Saun trod determinedly back through the grove and out toward the boggy patch, his boots squelching in the mud from last night’s rain. He slowed, trying to pick his way more cleanly upon clumps of dead grasses, and peered down into the mud pots with a look of curious revulsion.
The unformed monsters therein were in a revolting enough state, distorted past any hope of returning to their animal lives, and equally far from transformation to their mock-human forms. Innocent but doomed. Dag’s brow furrowed. So—if their transformation could somehow be completed, with the malice dead would they switch their slavish allegiance to the Lakewalker makers? It was a disturbing idea, as if Dag’s brain didn’t teem with enough of those already. The more disturbing for being seductive. Powerful subhuman servants might be used for a multitude of desperately needed tasks. Had the mage-lords of old made something like them? All malices seemed to hatch with the knowledge, not to mention the compulsion, of such makings, which suggested it was an old, old skill. But the mud-slaves presumably would require a continuous supply of ground reinforcement to live, making them lethally expensive to maintain.
Dag was glad to give over this line of thought as Saun called, “Which should I start with? The biggest?”
Mari, her face screwed up in doubt as she stared down at the damp woman maker, said, “The smallest?”
“I’m not sure it matters,” Dag called back. “Just pick one.”
Saun stepped toward a mud pot, gripped his sword in both hands, braced his shoulders, squinted, and struck. Squalling and splashing rose from the hole, and flying mud; Saun grimaced, pulled back, and struck hastily again.
“What was it?” Mari called.
“Beaver. I think. Or maybe woodchuck.” Saun jumped back, looking sick, as the splashing died away.
Carro’s cry wrenched Dag’s attention around. The makers—all the groundlocked folk—were writhing and moaning in their bedrolls, as if in pain—deep, inarticulate animal sounds. The other two on-duty patrollers hurried to their sides, alarmed. The makers did not seem to be actually convulsing, so Dag stifled a wild look around for something to shove between teeth besides his hook, bad idea, or his fingers.
Artin’s breathing passed from labored to choked. Carro pulled down his blanket and pressed her ear to his chest. “Dag, this isn’t good.”
“No more, Saun!” Dag called urgently over his shoulder, and bent to Artin’s other side. The smith’s lips were turning a leaden hue, and his eyelids fluttered.
“His heartbeat’s going all wrong,” said Carro. “Sounds like partridge wings.”
Just before the archer shoots the bird out of the air? Dag continued the unspoken thought. His heart is failing. Blight it, blight it…
Saun hurried back; Dag raised his glance from Saun’s muddy boots to his suddenly drained face. Saun’s lips parted, but no sound came out. Dag needed no words to interpret that particular appalled look, of a heart going hollow with fear and guilt. You should not shoulder such a burden, boy. No one should. But someone had to.
Not today, blight it.
Help might be coming, if the makers could be kept alive till then. Somehow. He remembered, for some reason, his impulsive attack on the malice’s cave back in Glassforge. Any way that works, old patroller.
“I’m going to try a ground match,” Dag said abruptly, moving to get a better grip on Artin’s shuddering body. “Dance his heart back to the right beat, if I can.” As he had once done for Saun.
Mari’s voice called sharply, “Dag, no!”
He was already opening his ground. Finding his way into the other’s body through his ground. Pain on pain, clashing rhythms, but Dag’s dance was the stronger one. The true world rushed back into his awareness, blight and glory and all, and he became aware of how keenly he’d missed his groundsense, as if he’d been walking around for days with the best part of himself bloodily amputated. Dance with me, Artin.
Dag breathed satisfaction as he felt the smith’s heart and lungs take up a steadier, stronger cadence once more. Dag did not share in such shocking pain as Saun’s injuries, but he could feel the fragility in the maker’s ground, how close it was to the edge of another such fall into disorder and death. Were the others as weakened? Dag’s perceptions widened in increasing fascination.
All the Lakewalkers’ grounds were wound about and penetrated by a subtle gray structure like ten thousand tangled threads. The threads combined and darkened, running out like strands of smoke to the mud-men’s pots. The mud-men’s grounds were the strangest of all: turned black, strong, compellingly human in shape. The fleshly bodies of the animals labored in vain, straining to match that impulsion. Starving in their arrested growth.
The malice spatters on Dag’s ground seemed to be shivering in time with the complex ground structure imprisoning the makers, and Dag had a sudden terror that somehow the still-living malice bits lodged within him were what was keeping this thing intact. Would he have to die for it to be broken…? Ah. No. Affinity both had with each other, no question, but his spatters were as formless as a ground reinforcement, if an inverted one that was negative and destructive rather than positive and healing.
Dag struggled to understand what he was sensing. In normal persuasive making, the maker pushed and reinforced ground found within the object, striving to make things more themselves, as in Dag’s old arrowproof coat where the protection of skin became leather became a shield. In healing, ground was gifted freely, unformed, to be turned into the recipient’s ground without resistance. A ground match, such as he had just done for Artin, was a dance in time. The malices’ enslavement of farmer minds, Dag realized suddenly, must also be such a ground dance, if enormously powerful to work so compulsively and at such distances. But it had to be continuously maintained, as he had glimpsed from the inside during this last kill, and the match died when the malice did. It has a limited range, too, he realized, which was why the malice had been forced to move along with its army.
This groundwork, though…had a range of only a hundred paces, but it had most certainly survived its malice maker. Contained, powerful, horrific…familiar. Familiar? So where have I seen anything like this before? What groundwork both survived its maker’s death and retained the nature of its maker, not melding with its recipient, even after it had been released?