Legacy - Lois McMaster Bujold [95]
He sat for several shaken minutes in the silent dark, then peeked again. No change. It seemed he was not dissolving into gray dust on the spot. Which meant he was doomed to wake up to his responsibilities in the morning all the same. So. He’d had a reason for coming out here. What was it…?
He inhaled and, very cautiously, extended his groundsense outward once more. The lingering blight all around nibbled at him, but it was ignorable. He found the dead trees in the grove, the trapped mud-men beyond, the live patrollers on night watch. He steered away from the groundlocked makers, barely letting his senses graze them. Before, he had found a gradient of ground moving through the soil, sucked into the making of the mud-man nursery. Did such a draw sustain it still?
No. The death of the malice had done that much good, at least.
Or…maybe not. The mud-men were still alive, even if they’d stopped growing. Therefore, they must still be drawing ground, if slowly. The only source of ground in the system was the locked makers and, now, the three fresh patrollers. And he did not think their depleted bodies could produce new ground fast enough to keep up. What must be the end of it, if this accursed lock could not be broken?
The weakest makers would likely die first. With them gone, increased stress would be thrown onto the survivors, who would not last long, Dag suspected. Death would cascade; the remainder must die very quickly. At which point the mud-men would also die. Would that be the end of it, the problem collapsing into itself and gone? Or were there other elements, hidden elements at work inside the lock?
No one could find out without opening their ground to the lock. No one could open their ground to the lock without being sucked into it, it seemed. Impasse.
My head hurts. My ground hurts. But no such collapse was happening now. Dag clutched the thought to himself as if it were hope. Perhaps the morning would bring better counsel, or even better counselors than one battered old patroller so frighteningly out of his depth. Dag sighed, levered himself up, and stumbled back to his bedroll.
What the morning brought was distractions, mainly. A pair of scouts returned from the south to report much the sort of chaos Dag expected—farmer and Lakewalker refugees scattered all over, improvised defenses in disarray—but also encouraging signs of people beginning to sort themselves out with the news of the death of the malice. About midday, some two dozen Bonemarsh exiles cautiously approached. Dag assigned his patrol of cleanup volunteers the initial task of helping them to identify and bury their dead, including the woman maker, and scavenge the village for still-usable supplies that might be carried off to the other north Raintree camps that would be taking in the nearly two thousand homeless. The Raintree Lakewalkers were likely in for a straitened winter, coming up. Bonemarsh casualties, he was glad to learn, had been relatively low. No one seemed to know yet if the same had been the case for that farmer town the malice had taken first.
Three of the Bonemarsh folks agreed to stay and help nurse their groundlocked makers and the hapless would-be rescuers. The makers all had names, now, and life stories that the returned refugees had determinedly pressed on Dag. He wasn’t sure if that helped. In any case, he sent the first batch of locals off with a patroller escort and an earnest request to send him back any spare medicine makers or other experts who might be able to get a grip on his lethal puzzle. But he didn’t expect much help from that quarter, as every medicine maker in Raintree had to be up to the