“That thing I did to you at the gate, sir. For which I apologize, but I had to… anyway. What did you make it out to be? ”
Arkady, reminded, touched the back of his hand, now scabbed, and frowned at Dag. “A projection for groundsetting, applied too powerfully and damaging the overlying tissue. Deliberately, I take it. Although there are occasions when such tearing is a valuable tool-used rather more precisely, I must say.”
“Used vastly more powerfully and not at all precisely, it’s the same as the ground-ripping a malice does,” said Dag.
Arkady’s brows flew up. “Surely not.” His eyes flicked toward Fawn’s throat.
“Surely is,” said Dag. “I’ve seen it coming and going, and there’s no mistake-I can show you the old malice scars on my legs, later. Like that glass bowl, the first time I did it I was pretty upset-we had closed on the malice, and it was trying to ground-rip one of my patrollers. I just reached out…” Dag drew breath. “Free advice, boys, bought at the usual cost. Don’t ever try to ground-rip a malice. Its ground sticks to yours, and is deadly poisonous. That’s how I got these scars…” He gestured to his left side generally. He wasn’t pointing to his body, Fawn realized, but to its ground.
“Oh,” said Arkady, in an odd voice. “I couldn’t imagine what had caused those dark ripples.”
Dag hesitated. “You’ve never seen a malice, have you, sir? ”
Arkady shook his head.
“Ever patrolled at all? ”
“When I was a boy, they had me out a few times with the others my age. But I showed for a maker very young.”
“Ah, the camping trips with the kiddies,” muttered Barr. “I hate those.” The riveted Remo poked him to silence.
“So you’ve never seen a live mud-man,” sighed Dag.
“Ah… no.” Arkady added after a moment, “The medicine maker who trained me at Moss River Camp had a dead one that he kept on display. Dried, though, which made it hard to make out any distinguishing details. It fell apart after a short while. Pity, I thought.”
“And you’ve never seen a mud-man nursery, either. That’s going to make what came next hard to explain.”
Arkady paused for a long moment with a peculiar look on his face, swallowed some first response, and said instead, “Try.”
“All right. We found all this out bit by bit, mind. The malice, before we did for it, had taken a place called Bonemarsh Camp. Most of the Lakewalkers got away”-Dag’s swift glance around Arkady’s house whispered sessile again to Fawn-“but it captured half a dozen makers. It ground-locked them together-”
Arkady gave a little flinching hiss.
“Oh, there’s worse to come. It anchored this huge, complicated involution in their grounds to slave them to make up a batch of about fifty mud-men, which the malice had growing from local animals. A half-formed mud- man is about the most gut-wrenching thing you’ve ever seen, by the way. You want to kill it quick just for the pity of it. When my company got back to Bonemarsh, we found the groundlock still holding, the makers seeming unconscious. I’d thought the lock would break when the malice died, y’see, but I was wrong. Worse, when anyone opened their grounds to try to reach in and break the lock, they were sucked into the array as well. Lost three patrollers finding that out.”
“That’s… astonishing,” said Arkady. Fawn’s first fear, that Arkady would toss them out before they got their tale half told, eased. Beneath his quelling reserve, she thought he was growing quite engrossed. He likes the parts about groundwork.
Dag nodded shortly. “This was a very advanced malice, the most fully developed I’ve ever seen.”
“And ah… how many have you seen? ”
Dag shrugged. “I lost count years back. That I’ve slain with a knife in my own hand, twenty-six or so. That’s counting the sessiles, which I do. Anyway, back at Bonemarsh-I stupidly tried to match grounds to steady the heartbeat of a dying maker in the array. And I got sucked in, too. Which is how I found out about the involution-I saw it from the inside. And after that the story has to go to Fawn, because the next few days were all a gray fog for me.”
Fawn decided on a simplified version. “I came to Bonemarsh with Hoharie, because Dag had sent back for her help with this horrible groundlock thing. None of the Lakewalkers seemed to know what to do about it, which made me about half crazy, watching and waiting. Then Hoharie tried some experiment-I never did find out what, though I think she suspected about the involution.”
“She did.” Dag nodded.
“Anyhow, then she was drawn in, and Mari, who was in charge by then, said, no more experiments. But that night, I thought of one more. If an involution is a cut-off piece of a maker or a malice, which it seems to be, maybe this leftover piece of malice just needed a separate dose of mortality in order to destroy it. So I took my sharing knife”-she gulped in memory-“and stuck it in Dag’s leg. Because when I slew the malice back in Glassforge, he’d said I could stick it in anywhere.”
Dag smiled, and murmured, “Sharp end first.” Fawn smiled back.
“I think it worked to give it into Dag’s ghost hand, the way his arm jerked up, but he’ll have to tell that part,” Fawn concluded.
Dag frowned and scratched his head. “Strangest experience I ever did have. We all know what it feels like to have a body and no ground, from being youngsters before our groundsense comes in, or in veiling. While I was slaved in the malice’s groundlock, it seemed like I was my ground-but not my body. I felt the knife come into me, and I knew it at once-it had been bonded to me, and still had affinity with my blood. But Fawn’s child’s ground lacked affinity with the malice-very strange and pure, it was-so there was no resonance, no, no… calling, to break open the knife’s involution and release the dying ground.
So I broke open the involution myself, and added some affinity from my ghost hand. It was like unmaking a knife, all backward. It tore up my ghost hand something fierce, but it destroyed the malice’s groundwork, and cleaned out those poison spatters as well. Fawn’s sacrifice-well, with that little extra groundwork from me-got all ten of us out of the lock alive.” He blinked at Arkady, who was staring with his hand before his parted lips as if to stifle an exclamation, and added apologetically, “It wasn’t like I saw it, and figured it out, and did it. It was more like I saw it, and did it, and figured it all out much later.”
Remo said, in downright peeved tones, “You never told me about all that, Dag! You only told me about Greenspring!”
“Greenspring was the important part, seemed to me.”
Fawn shivered in memory; Dag, grimacing, reached across the table to briefly grip her shoulder as he might console a young patroller.
Arkady took his hand from his mouth and said, “So what was Greenspring?”
Dag sighed. “When I’d recovered enough to ride, we all went home by way of the blighted farmer village that malice had emerged under. When we arrived, we found some folks had come back and were having a mass burial of those who hadn’t got out. Which was about half, of a thousand people. That first feast was the secret of how that malice had grown so quick, so strong.”
He shared a look of understanding with Fawn, who picked up the thread: “They’d finished planting the grown-ups, mostly women and old folks, and were just starting on the children.” She took a breath, measured Arkady, and dared to say, “I’m told New Moon Camp lost a youngster a couple of months back. There were-how many children, in the row in front of that trench, Dag?” Laid out all stiff and wan, there had seemed no end to them.
“One hundred sixty-two,” Dag said flatly.
“The ground-ripping had kept them from rotting in the heat,” explained Fawn, and swallowed hard. Pale ice- children. “It didn’t help as much as you’d think.”
Arkady shut his ground just then, Fawn thought; he went something more than expressionless, at any rate.
“It took me some thinking, after,” said Dag. “How Greenspring was let to happen, and what could keep it from happening again. It’s an Oleana problem; in the south there’s nearly no malices, and in the far north there’s nearly no farmers. Where there’s both…” He held up hand and hook, but was frustrated in a gesture of interlacing
