measure.
“Mamamama,” Owlet blubbered.
“Sorry, the only mama-shaped person here doesn’t want to play. She’s just a youngin’, too, you know. I’m afraid you’re stuck with me.”
Come here.
“Mamama…” But Owlet stopped inching away.
Dag reached over and pulled the child into his lap. Owlet abruptly reversed his opinions, hiccupped, and buried his slimy face in Dag’s shirt, gripping like a baby ba-possum. Dag didn’t think it would do what was left of the garment a mite of harm.
“How did you do that? ” asked Tavia. Whispered, actually, perhaps influenced by the sudden end of the clamor.
“Cheated,” said Dag.
“Ah.” Tavia glanced fearfully upward, seeking black motion overhead.
“Don’t open your ground,” Dag warned.
“No, no. But can they see us in the dark? ”
“Not through trees. Rocks would be better. You and I can veil, but the tad here can’t. He’ll be a beacon.”
“Do those bat things have groundsense, do you think? ”
“Might.” A grim thought. Their maker malice must have taken a human or humans, or it wouldn’t have been able to gift its creations with speech. Had it yet taken a Lakewalker, stealing deeper powers?
“We’ll have moonrise in a while. While we can still see, better find us a ledge or cranny to hole up in. With water near.” The grown-ups could go without their dinners, but Dag was parched with his late panic, and Owlet likely was, too.
She looked at his ankle. “How is that? ”
“Not good.”
“I’ll scout, then.”
“Aye.”
Tavia slipped off in best patroller fashion; Dag waited, contemplating his new burden. Owlet now lay on his side, head pillowed on Dag’s knee, in a false calm. Hysteria still lurked beneath, like fish circling under a frozen lake.
Tavia returned fairly soon, thankfully, and they set off through the dusk along the steep hillside. Ledges and crevices there were in plenty.
Water was harder to come by at this height, but Tavia had found a mossy trickle that would doubtless become a stream farther down. It more seeped than flowed, but it did collect in a natural stone bowl before slipping away. They took turns putting their heads down and sucking it up.
Owlet was harder to persuade into this novel form of drinking, but he got the idea at last, then was inclined to play in the puddle, and then objected to being dragged away and tucked in the far back of the crevice.
Dag would have taken the outside position, but Tavia clearly wanted a spacer between her and the unhappy farmer child.
With an overhang at the back, the cleft was blocked from both vision and groundsense from five out of six directions. Dag was less certain that it would be blocked from invading mud-bats-they folded rather well when they weren’t tangled in trees. But the creatures’ clawed hands and feet, though dangerous in themselves, didn’t seem built to carry weapons-not that all of this malice’s scouts were necessarily of the same design.
Blocked perception unfortunately worked both ways. Dag wished they’d landed on the other side of this ridge, overlooking the Trace. If he were alone, he’d be up and over that ridgeline already, bad ankle or no.
“Where did those horrible bat-things come from? ” asked Tavia, peering nervously out past the narrow rock walls of their temporary refuge. In the slice of purple sky, Dag could see one lonely star.
“They were mud-men. A malice made them. Not the one we slew yesterday.”
“I could tell that.”
Dag squeezed his eyes shut and open a few times, trying for coherence.
“It’s been over thirty years since I exchanged in these parts, and that only for a season. But this whole region all the way north to the Grace River is limestone country in its bones, shot through with sinkholes and caves and caverns. And some of those caverns harbor bats.”
“Thousands of bats? ”
“Oh, no, not thousands.”
Her shoulders slumped in relief.
“Millions.”
Tavia’s mouth fell open. In a tone between hope and dismay, she said, “That’s a Bo story… isn’t it? ”
“No. The biggest bat caverns are amazingly dangerous. Besides the risk of rabies, which some bats seem to carry, when they gather in such numbers their droppings poison the air. People who’ve stumbled into one of the big caves have choked and died on the fumes. Though skunks and raccoons do go in to catch baby bats, in the dead dark-nobody quite knows how they do it.”
Tavia’s face screwed up in mounting horror.
“Now, the local patrols do search the caves, but only near the surface. It’s dangerous to go deeper, though they say there’s galleries and passageways running for miles underground. But no malices have ever emerged from the deep caves, either because they were never seeded down there, or because there’s no life for them to get started growing on. Except-I have a notion-that if a malice finally chanced to come up near or right in one of those big bat caves, it would have found a feast laid out for it from the get-go. Off to a very fast start, which could explain how it was missed between one patrol and the next. That’s my best guess, leastways.”
Tavia poked tentatively at her hurts. She could do with a stitch here or there-they all could, likely-but no one was doing more than oozing by now. Treatment would have to wait. She glanced up. “What has that child got in its mouth? ”
Dag looked around. Owlet was sitting up looking very scruffy and battered, with an appalled expression on his face, his jaw working and drool dribbling from his lips. “Peh,” he remarked. Dag went fishing with his little finger.
“Inchworm,” he remarked, holding up his green catch. “Actually, more of a two-inch worm.”
“Ugh!”
Dag smiled. It felt strange on his set face, like dry leather cracking.
But welcome for all of that. He dug down in his pocket and drew out a dark strip. “Here, tad. Chew on this.”
“What is that? ” asked Tavia, peering in the dimness.
“Dried plunkin. I always keep a few strips in my pockets. When they start to look good despite the lint and sand stuck to ’em, you know it’s time to eat ’em.”
Owlet regarded the plunkin with considerably more suspicion than he had the worm, but shortly broke down and began gnawing. His false calm was beginning to be replaced with real calm, Dag thought, for all that Dag had pulled the initial persuasion out of his own ear. When the child crawled back into Dag’s lap, it was as soothing as holding a purring cat. Moods were contagious in more than one direction, it seemed; which was why a leader should never break down in front of his patrollers.
He was grateful Tavia hadn’t found him any sooner.
His back to the warm stone, Dag felt strung tight between nerves and exhaustion. He decided to cultivate the nerves, because if the exhaustion overtook him he might not get up again for a week. And they had to move again soon. He felt his marriage cord for reassurance, still alive. But surely the malice would mount its forces for another attack- the Trace must seem a moving picnic to it. Unless the Laurel Gap patrollers were alerted and gathering, putting on pressure north of here.
There’s a hope. And not a fool’s hope, either, but-he contemplated the unsubtle difference between arrive eventually and arrive in time.
“We’ll have to work out some way to carry the tad,” he said to Tavia.
“He can’t climb these rocks, dark or moonlit. I’m thinking we could rig a sort of sling with my shirt and your vest, to tie over my shoulder.”
“What about your bad ankle? ”
