Legacy - Lois McMaster Bujold [77]
“Just one, I think.”
“It’s up there, then. That’s where we’re headed. Pass the word.”
She nodded and silently withdrew.
Now they had to get next to that tower without being spotted. So near—across a trampled field and up a wooded hillside—so far. Dag guessed that the bulk of the malice’s mud-men and mind-slaves were camped on the ridge’s far side, probably along a stream. Smoke from hidden campfires rose in thin gray wisps into a high haze, confirming his speculation. There was almost no wind, and he regretted the absence of covering rustles from the branches overhead, but what faint breeze there was moved the haze toward him. He hardly needed his eyes now; he could smell the enemy: smoke, manure, piss, the cooking of he-dared-not-guess-what meats.
Dag pushed through clutching blackberry brambles, setting his teeth against the gouge and scrape of sturdy thorns, and crouched by a fieldstone wall lining the high side of the wheatfield. He half crawled forward along its shadowed western side until he reached brambles again, then risked a look back. The moon emerged from a cloud, but the tight shapes of the patrollers following him did not once edge into the thin light. Good, you folks are so good. Half the distance down. He slid through more dying brambles into the black shade of the woods at the base of the ridge, the patrol too spreading out to ease from shadow to shadow.
To his horror, a muffled grunt and some thumps sounded from his left. He made his way hastily toward the sound. Codo and Hann were crouching over something half-concealed in a crackling deadfall. Hann had drawn his war knife, but glanced up and froze when Dag’s hand fell on his arm.
Codo squatted across the chest of a grizzled man—farmer-slave, guard?—both his hands tight around the struggling fellow’s throat. “Hann, hurry!” Codo hissed.
Dag touched Codo’s shoulder, eased in, and studied their threat-and-victim. Farmer-slave, yes, clothes ragged, eyes wild and mad. Maybe from this farm, or else picked up along the way to add to the malice’s straggling, growing army. He wasn’t a big man, or young; he reminded Dag uncomfortably of Sorrel Bluefield. Dag took aim and landed several hard blows to the man’s head, until his eyes rolled back and he stopped bucking. The meaty thumps sounded as loud as drumbeats in Dag’s ears.
“Blight it, throat slitting’s quieter,” muttered Codo, cautiously rising. “Surer.”
Dag shook his head and pointed uphill. This was no place for an argument, and the pair did not give him one, but turned to continue the silent climb. Dag could roll the issues over in his head without need of words—Hann’s glare, burning through the dark, was enough to make the point. A throat-slit guard couldn’t claw his way back to consciousness in a few minutes and raise the alarm.
I hate fighting humans. Of all the vileness in this long struggle, the malices’ mind-theft of people who should be the Lakewalkers’ friends and allies was the worst. Even when the patrollers won, they lost, in clashes that left farmer corpses in their wake. We all lose. Dag shook out his throbbing hand. That might have been Sorrel. Somebody’s husband, father, father-in-law, friend.
I hate fighting. Oh, Fawn, I’m so tired of this.
The farmer’s mad eyes were sign enough of his enslaved state, with no need for Dag’s groundsense to trace the malice’s grip in his mind. Even though they hadn’t slit his throat, his brief alarm could have given little warning, surely? Indeed, Dag decided, the malice would be more likely to notice the shock of a death in its growing web of slaves than what might be mistaken for a sort of sleep. Much depended on how many individuals this malice controlled, at what distance, attempting what tasks. Please, let it be stretched to its limits. Whatever it was now doing at the top of that tower, ground was flowing toward it in a great sucking drain; Dag could feel the mortal throb of it passing under his boot