The Cold Eye (The Devil's West #2)(14)

“You are welcome” was all the older woman said, then turned away without introducing the others, who had hung back a few paces. Isobel was surprised, but Gabriel didn’t seem offended, instead turning to her, hat still in his hand.

“Let me get the animals settled, and then you can tell me what’s going on, hmmm?”

The gelding and mule were quickly unpacked and picketed to graze with Uvnee, who seemed to have forgotten entirely about the ground moving beneath her hooves. Steady, once he was assured of a picket next to the mare, settled down as well, but the mule remained uneasy, pushing its muzzle back into Isobel’s hand before finally lowering it to graze.

“How did you find me?”

Gabriel hesitated, then dusted the brim of his hat against his thigh. “I had a visitor to camp,” he said. “Lean, dusty fellow.”

Isobel raised her gaze to the sky, seeing only pale blue overhead. “The Jack.”

“He may have mentioned where he saw you last and under what conditions.”

“And you raced out to rescue me?”

“I broke camp to come support you, as is my right and my obligation. So tell me, Isobel Devil’s Hand, what brings us to these forsaken, shaken hills, and what mischief have you found?

Isobel opened her mouth, then shook her head and fetched a low wooden stool from her campment and settled on it, cautiously, half-expecting it to roll out from under her without warning.

Gabriel paced back and forth slowly as she spoke, beginning with the discovery of the buffalo corpses.

Gabriel held a hand to pause her. “Arrows or bullets?”

“Bullets.” She hadn’t thought of it then. “Settlers?”

“Mayhap, may not. Natives’ve been trading for guns since they first caught sight of ’em, same as horses. Stealing ’em, too. And there’re fools on all sides. Did you clean the site?”

“Best I could, yes. But I made a promise to them.”

“To the . . . Iz.” He let the rebuke die unspoken. “Did that promise say you were going to do something right away?”

“. . . No.”

“The dead have time to be patient. Tell me the rest.”

She did, through to the quake they’d felt just as he’d ridden up. He listened without further interruption, although his eyebrows lifted when she told him of the whisper that had woken her, and then again when she spoke of the sensation of being rejected when she tried to reach the Road.

“It’s odd,” he said when she finally ran out of things to say, lapsing into an exhausted silence. “After the past few months, I’d have sworn I’d never utter those words again, but that is . . . indisputably odd. Then again, the hotlands have a reputation that reaches all the way to the Mudwater.”

“The whatlands?” Isobel was certain she’d never heard that name before.

“I told you that past here, the land’s riddled with hot springs?”

She frowned, then nodded, remembering.

“They’re not like the springs we saw down south, where you can dip a toe in, maybe even bathe. These are nasty things: you don’t always know they’re there, until suddenly the skin’s boiled off your bones.” He shoved his hand through his hair, pushing it away from his face, and grinned briefly, without humor. “Or so stories say. I never had cause to ride up there. I don’t know the peoples up there, and the tribes’ve no need of me.”

His services as an advocate, he meant. Gabriel had trained for the law back East, had been riding circuit when they met, doing small services for people as needed ’em, although she’d never quite understood what those things were. Here, if there was an argument that couldn’t be settled, the marshals got involved, and if someone got hurt, or you needed to formalize a thing, then you went before a judge, like she did with her contract. Not so much need for an advocate, but Gabriel didn’t seem to lack for folk to visit everywhere they’d gone.

“You think it’s connected? The quakes, and the . . . the quietness, up that way?”

“Don’t know.” He sat down opposite her, wincing a little as he leaned against his pack, stretching his legs out in front of him. “Might be nothing, might be you just being tired, might be something. But if we’re going up thataway, which it seems we are, we’ll find out ourselves, won’t we?”

She narrowed her eyes at him, the memory of the ground shaking still too near for joking. “You needn’t look so pleased about it,” she muttered. “The ground moved.” The ground moved and the Road was silent, and something had scraped the power from this valley, and who knows how far beyond. And he was looking pleased.

“There’s a story,” Gabriel said, pulling his legs up so he could rest his arms on his knees, what she’d come to think of as his storytelling pose. “There’s a story that comes from before we were here, before the devil claimed dominion from the Mudwater to the Knife, back when there was only the one People, with skins the color of clay and eyes like an autumn storm.”

She snorted at that, and he glared at her until she cast her eyes down in apology so he’d go on.

“Back then, the story says, the land was flat, just rolling plains, and you could see from one end to another. But then one day, a child found a hollow log and started to hit it with a stick, and the sound was so pleasing to the spirits that they began to dance. And as they danced the land shook, and as the land shook, it rose, until hills formed, and then mountains. And that’s why the land isn’t flat anymore.”