54. Riders #2
Kain laid it out. Goats at Jeremiah's staring at a hillside they had no business staring at.
Sheep at John Marge's farm doing the same.
The line of the two pointing him at one piece of country northeast. He rode it.
What he saw he saw. The turn-back came at the point the country went past the point he meant to take a working horse and a one-eyed wolf past without backup.
Hale listened with her arms across her chest and didn't interrupt.
"Good work. Most folks would have missed the goats. Most who didn't miss the goats would have walked into the country and not come out."
"I had a wolf that wouldn't walk past a line and a horse that wouldn't walk past the wolf."
"Then you had a good wolf and a good horse and the sense to listen to them."
Hale tipped her head at the younger of the two men.
He came forward with a folded paper and laid it on the counter, and unfolded it.
A map. Tillamore at the south, Lathemtown to the north, Bellpass to the west, a strip of the Greyhaven road at the bottom edge.
The scale was a thirty-mile reach across the paper.
"Mark up the country you saw," Hale said.
The man slid a pencil across. Kain took it.
He marked the cedar barrier at John Marge's farm and the corner of the pasture at Jeremiah's.
The pencil drew the two arrows that had crossed in the back room at Sam's a stretch back.
The line he had ridden in on from Marge's came next.
A small spike at the end went down at the point the system had named.
"The disturbance starts a mile or so before I turned back.
Bigger stones come up out of the ground on the animal trails.
The ground itself goes wrong. Slope is the wrong slope.
Trees come up at angles they shouldn't come up at.
The leaves at the canopy edge die back along a line.
I marked where the line was at the closest. I didn't get a look past it.
The country was past where I was willing to take what I had with me. "
Hale read the marks and the trail and the spike.
"You had a system notification."
"I had a notification."
"It gave you the rank of the dungeon."
"It gave me a warning and a distance to source. It said the source was unknown. It didn't name a rank."
Hale looked at the younger man on her left. The man wrote a line in the small book he held.
"Did the lighting at the line have a color."
"It did. There was a glow at the far ridge past where I stopped. The glow was blue. Not the blue of a sky and not the blue of a flame. A flat blue."
"Natural."
"Natural."
"Three classes," Hale said. "A Natural dungeon spawns the monsters most folk think of when they hear the word dungeon.
Blue light. Floors and corridors that hold themselves through the work.
An Infernal dungeon is rarer and is the worst of them.
No monsters as such. Balls of fire that hold a will.
Cold spirits. Things that are an old hate and a new shape on the same body.
A Strange dungeon is a maze that doesn't hold still.
Walls move when a person looks away. Floors turn corridor when no one was watching the floor.
The treasure in a Strange is the best in any class and the way out of a Strange is the worst."
"Natural is what I saw."
"Natural is what we expected from the field signs." Hale nodded once. "Did you go inside."
"No."
"Why not."
"A door had not opened. The country had not finished going where the country was going. I was alone on a working farm horse with a one-eyed wolf and a sword that does men. I wasn't the man to take in what I was looking at. I marked it and I rode back and I sent the letter."
"Good answer."
Hale folded the map and tucked it into a sleeve at her belt.
"We'll be three days," Hale said to Sam. "A survey takes the readings it takes. We'll camp at the edge of the country we're working in. We'll be in to the store at the end of the third day with our marks made and the rank confirmed."
"I'll be here," Sam said.
"You're the local Guild contact."
"I'm the contact."
"As of the posting at Greyhaven last week, you're the head of the local chapter.
Forms will follow. The forms are not the work; the work is keeping the riders going through here pointed at the right country and the right inn and the right contract board.
We'll mark the contract board when the survey is done.
The forms will get to you on the same wagon that carries our report back to the regional office. "
"I will fill out the forms."
"I never said the forms wouldn't arrive in a stack."
Sam took that in with the face of a man who had taken in worse.
Hale tipped her head once at Kain. "Warrior Asheld."
Kain didn't correct her.
The three of them went out the door. The bell over the door rang once. Outside the rail, three war horses came untied and went up under three riders, and the three riders turned north out of Tillamore and gave the horses the road.
Sam and Kain stood at the window of the store and watched them go.
A plume of dust rose at the end of the lane and held a beat and settled. A row of eyes turned at the porches and the windows along the main street.
Sam ran a hand down his face. "We will need to say a thing to the village."
"We will."
"A notice at the green tonight. After supper. Mouth to mouth between now and then so the notice has its audience."
"You or me on the boards."
"Me. I'm better at the words than you are at the words."
"You are."
"I'll send Oren if I need you sooner."
Kain went to the rail and stood with a hand on Roan's neck a beat before he untied him.
The road north had a faint film of the dust still hanging on it.
Past the dust the road ran into the country he had ridden three weeks before, and past that into the country the surveyors had ridden into now, and past that into the country the surveyors didn't come back out of without their report.
The road north wouldn't be the same road by the end of the year.
The road north would carry a different traffic from the traffic it had carried in the years before this one.
Kain set the thought aside and swung up on Roan and rode out the south end of town the way he had ridden out the south end of town a hundred mornings before.
Carol came out of the alley between the Kettle and the cooper's shop and stepped up to his stirrup.
She wasn't in the kerchief; she had a clean one on her hair the color of a thing she had put on to come into town.
She wasn't scared. There was a thing in her eyes that wasn't scared and wasn't calm either.
"Walk with me to the back of the Kettle," she said.
Kain swung down. They walked the lane to the back porch of the Copper Kettle and sat on the bottom step.
"You were listening."
"I went into Sam's stockroom by the back door. I figured a thing I didn't have to ask after was a thing I knew firsthand. I heard the talking. I came out after the door shut on them."
"You didn't scare easy when I told you to stand off the bad weather."
"I didn't. I don't."
Carol set her hands on her knees.
"There's a dungeon."
"There is."
"It explains my horses. They've been on the north line of the paddock a stretch. I thought it was the weather. I thought it was the new oats from Sam's. I thought it was a piece of an animal mind I didn't have the read on. It was a dungeon."
"As were Jeremiah's goats. As were John Marge's sheep. As, apparently, is the country up there past the line."
Carol looked at her hands. "I get the not telling now. That sort of news comes for a person on its own legs soon enough."
"It does."
"There were three today."
"How many ride in next."
Kain looked down the lane toward the road north. The dust had settled. The road lay empty.
"More than three. Enough that the rail outside Sam's won't hold them all.
Enough that the rooms above the Kettle won't hold them all.
Enough that the country between here and Bellpass will be a road with a different kind of traffic on it.
They come for the dungeon. The dungeon is the business.
The village is the inn the business stops at on the way to the work. "
Carol took the breath of a woman who had been told a thing she had partly known and now knew the rest of.
"The village isn't ready for that."
"No. It isn't."
They sat on the step a beat with the back porch boards cool under them and the kitchen of the Kettle making the sound a kitchen made at the start of a busy afternoon.
"I'll be at your elbow," Carol said.
"I figured you would."
"Don't figure. Know."
"I know."
The bucket of catfish sat on the back porch beside them. Sasha hadn't yet come out to take it in.