Legacy - Lois McMaster Bujold [74]
“There’s nothing alive for a mile—wait.” He hunkered down again. A few hundred paces beyond the village, in a boggy stretch along the shore, something swirled in his senses, a familiar concentration of distorted ground. Ground around the patch seemed to seep toward it, creeping through the soil like draining water. He narrowed his eyes, searched more carefully.
“I believe there’s a mud-man nursery planted beyond the camp. It doesn’t seem to have guards just now, though. But there’s something else.”
Mari’s brows twitched up, and her frown deepened. “You’d think it would be watched. If anything was.”
Dag considered the possibility of a cleverly baited trap. That would seem to credit this malice with an unlikely degree of foresight, however. He hand-signaled Mari, who passed the order silently, and the patrol took up its stealthy, painfully slow, veiled approach once more, skirting through the scant cover around the edge of this lakelike section of the larger marsh until it reached the abandoned village, or what was left of it.
Perhaps ninety or a hundred dwellings were strung along the lakeside or back from it in kin clusters, home till lately of a community of over a thousand Lakewalkers, with another thousand souls scattered more widely around Bonemarsh. A dozen tent-cabins were burned to the ground; the recent rain had extinguished all coals. Signs of hasty flight were all around, but aside from the burned tents there was only a little mindless destruction. Dag did not see or smell corpses, only partly reassuring, as ground-ripped bodies were sometimes very slow to rot. Still, he permitted himself the hope that most here had escaped, fleeing southward. Lakewalkers knew how to pick up and run. Then he wondered what that little farmer town the malice was supposed to have come up under looked like right now. What would Spark have done if…he cut off the wrenching thought.
He reached the log wall of the last tent standing and peered uncertainly toward the boggy patch a couple hundred paces off. Back from it, a thicket of scrubby trees—willow, slim green ash, vicious trithorned honey locust—shaded something dark about their boles that he could barely make out with his eye. He opened his groundsense again, flinched, then snapped it back.
“Mari. Codo. To me,” he said over his shoulder.
Mari was at his side at once; Codo, the oldest patroller here but for Mari, slid forward in a moment and joined them.
“There’s somebody under those trees,” Dag murmured. “Not mud-men, not farmer slaves. I think it’s some of us. Something’s very wrong.”
“Alive?” asked Mari, peering too. The half dozen figures didn’t move.
“Yes, but…extend your groundsenses. Carefully. Don’t get caught up. See if it’s anything you recognize.” Because I think I do.
Codo gave him a dry glance from under gray brows, silent commentary on Dag’s earlier repeated insistence that no one open their grounds without a direct order. Both he and Mari stared with eyes opened, then closed.
“Not seen anything like that before,” muttered Mari. “Unconscious?”
“Groundlocked…?” said Codo.
“Ah. Yes. That’s it,” said Mari. “But why are they…”
Dag re-counted—six with his eyes, five with his groundsense. Which suggested one was a corpse. “I think they’re tied to those trees.” He turned to Mari’s partner Dirla, hovering anxiously. “The rest of you stay back. Codo, Mari, come with me.”
There was no cover between here and the stand of scrub. Dag gave up the fraying pretense of stealth and walked openly forward, Codo and Mari right on his heels.
The Bonemarsh Lakewalkers were indeed bound to the thicker tree boles, slumped or half-hanging. They appeared unconscious. Three men and three women, older for the most part; they seemed makers, not patrollers, if Dag could