Passage - Lois McMaster Bujold [5]
Dag said, “There was a real malice. We first heard about it when the Raintree Lakewalkers, who were being overwhelmed, sent a courier to Hickory Lake Camp for help. My company was dispatched. We circled, managed to come up on the malice from behind while it was driving its mind-slaves and mud-men south to attack Farmer’s Flats. One of my patrol got a sharing knife into it—killed it. I saw it”—he held out his left arm—“that close. It was very advanced, very, um…advanced.” He paused, glanced around, and tried, “Strong, smart. Almost human-looking.”
Leaving out how the malice had nearly slain him, or that he’d been captain of that company and source of its successful plan…Fawn bit her lip in impatience.
“Here’s the thing, the important thing. No…back up a step, Dag.” He pinched the bridge of his nose. “I’m sorry. There’s too much all at once, and I’m explaining this all backwards, I’m sorry. Try this. Malices have groundsense too, only very much stronger than any human’s. They’re made of ground. They consume ground, to live, to make their—their magery, their mud-men, their own bodies, everything they do. They’re quite mad, in their way.” His face looked suddenly drawn in some memory Fawn did not share and could not guess at. “But that’s what blight is. It’s where some emergent malice has drawn all the ground out of the world, leaving, well, blight. It’s very distinctive.”
“Well, what does it look like?” asked Whit reasonably.
“It doesn’t look like anything else,” said Dag, which netted him some pretty dry looks from around the table.
Fawn pitched in: “It’s not like burnt fields, or rust, or rot, or a killing frost, though it reminds you of all those things. It has a funny gray tinge, like all the color has been sucked out of things. First things die, if they’re alive, and then they fall apart at the seams, and then they dissolve all through. Once you’ve seen that drained-out gray, you can’t ever mistake it. It looks even worse to someone with groundsense, I gather.”
“Yes,” said Dag gratefully.
Mama said faintly, “You’ve seen it, then, Fawn?”
“Yes, twice. Once at that malice’s lair near Glassforge, when Dag and I first met, and once in Raintree. I rode over, after. Dag was hurt on his patrol, which part he didn’t tell you, I notice.” She glowered at him in reproof. “He’d still be on sick leave if we were back at Hickory Lake.”
“You got to go to Raintree?” said Whit, sounding indignantly envious.
Fawn tossed her head. “I saw all that country the malice had torn through. I saw where it got started.” She glanced back to Dag, to check if he was ready to go on.
He nodded at her and picked up his tangled thread again. “Here’s the thing. For the past twenty or thirty years, farmers have been breaking land in Raintree north of the old cleared line—that is, north of where the local Lakewalkers had deemed it safe. Or less unsafe, leastways. Lakewalker patrol records show malice emergences get thicker—more frequent—north toward the Dead Lake, see, and thinner south and away. South of the Grace River, they’re very rare. Although unfortunately not all gone, so we can’t stop patrolling those regions. It was at a north Raintree squatter town named Greenspring that this latest malice emerged. Practically under it.”
Fawn nodded. “It hatched out down in a ravine in the town woodlot, by the signs.”
Dag went on, “See, there was a lot of bad blood between the local Lakewalkers and the Greenspring settlers, on account of the arguments about the old cleared line. So when the malice started, none of the squatters knew how to recognize the early signs, or to pick up and run, or how or where to ride for help. Or they’d been told but didn’t believe. Not that they wouldn’t have needed to be lucky as well, because by the time a farmer can see the blight near a lair, there’s a good chance he’s just about to be ground-ripped or mind-slaved anyway. Like stumbling into a spider web. But with that many folks, if they’d all known, someone