The Cold Eye (The Devil's West #2)(61)
Gabriel had waited while she mounted Uvnee, not offering help, and then swung into his own saddle with only a hint of stiffness.
“We’re a pair, we two,” she said without thinking, not meaning to admit her own aches nor comment on his own. Thankfully, he merely grinned at her, teeth showing briefly before he tugged his hat lower over his forehead and told Steady to get a move on.
It would be all right once they left this place. She hoped.
The sky had clouded over since dawn, low-hanging white streamers now obscuring the mountains, turning the sun’s light into a warm, hazy glow. It felt peaceful, restful, save the silence made it ominous. The world was not meant to be so quiet, reminding her that every living thing save them had fled, that the ground below them was neither solid nor safe, that the furious, rage-and sorrow-mad presence still lingered, trapped not by any warding but something far greater, far crueler.
Part of her ached to go back, the sensation of a chore left undone. The other part longed to flee, to never look back.
At that thought, Isobel looked into the clouds, almost expecting to see the Reaper hawk soaring overhead, but the sky was empty. Behind them, the great deer was nowhere in sight. She resisted the urge to look down; no snake would be lurking under Uvnee’s hooves, no trail visible in the low grass. Once spirit-animals had their say, they did not linger.
Alone save for each other, they picked their way across the meadow, Gabriel leading them not south the way they’d come but east, where the hills rose up in jagged, reddish-dun slopes, the green patchwork against bare stone, sharp arrows of white-barked pine stretching into the sky. It looked inhospitable, as though to set a single hoof or boot would cause the slope to crumble, but when they came to the edge of the meadow, she saw a narrow trail leading up and out.
“How did you know it was here?”
Gabriel rubbed the back of his neck with one hand, gave her a half-shoulder shrug as his only answer. There were still things her mentor knew that she didn’t.
Isobel reined Uvnee in and stared at the head of the trail as though it would apologize. Instead, all she felt was the scrabble of hard claws prickling in her skin, the restless flutter of something attempting to plant itself within her. . . .
Gabriel paused as well, watching quietly as she slipped out of Uvnee’s saddle and drew the salt stick from her pack. There was barely a palm’s length remaining, cool and moist against her skin.
Isobel bit her lip, rubbing one thumb along the stick, feeling grains of salt scrape loose, sticking to her skin. Whatever lingered within her, she could contain. But she carried only a memory, a shade. The greater threat remained.
There was no warding she could add, no way to hide this meadow the way she had done for Widder Creek. It was too vast, too much power contained within. One unwary traveler, one foolhardy magician drawn by the scent of power, curious about the rumbling of the earth . . .
Isobel did not know what might happen but thought it would not be pleasant.
With that in mind, she slipped the knife from its sheath at her side and used it to cut across her palm, sliding the edge across the sigil marked there. The blood welled up without any pain, and she closed her palm around the stick of salt, letting it stain the white.
“Iz.” Gabriel’s voice, nearby. Not a question, merely telling her he was there, if she needed him.
She nodded, then used the bloodied salt to draw the devil’s sigil once, twice, three times on largish rocks several paces apart. Salt, for protection. Blood, the blood that had been sealed to contract with the Master of the Territory, to bind it to the stone and hold it there.
Bad hunting, the sigil would tell hunters, thinking to find game here. Angry spirits, the sigil would tell wanderers unwarned. Danger, the sigil would tell the unwary. Stay out.
When she was finished, she placed the remaining stick back into her pack and looked at her palm. The cut had healed, the sigil quiet in her hand. Isobel felt nothing but cold.
“I should mark the other entrance,” she said faintly. “Someone might come. . . .”
“The wapiti guards that entrance,” Gabriel reminded her. “If the spirits are so concerned, let them do a share of the work.”
“But . . .”
“Isobel.” His voice had gone hard, shoulders tense, the battered brim of his hat pushed back so she could see his face. “Back on your damned horse before I throw you on and tie you there.”
Her eyes wide, she remounted and followed him onto the trail, the mule grumbling behind them.
The path Gabriel had found led up into the ridges, hardscrabble trail and bare rock covered by low brush. The footing was unsteady, dirt barely covering fist-sized rocks, occasionally winding along steep cliffs, and Gabriel couldn’t stop his thoughts from contemplating what might happen if another quake hit while they were here, imagining the way the ground might ripple and fold, shaking them off the way a horse might flies, and with as little concern.
Telling himself that the cause of the quakes was contained, that they were fewer and further between, did not ease him, not when Isobel kept glancing around her as though expecting something to rise up or fall down on them, how careful she was to not look back the way they’d come, as though the haint she’d riled might be coming after them.
It would not. He was mostly certain of that, as he was mostly certain the ground would not shake under them now.
Steady picked his way along the trail, living up to his name, and Gabriel distracted himself by studying the ground itself, the way the peaks stuttered to jagged stops, the runnels where water had flowed. He wondered if the local people had a story to tell of that, about why the peaks were flattened like tabletops, why the water deep within the bones tended to explode upwards with heat rather than flowing calmly into springs or pools. He wondered who might live here, with the dry air and the poor soil where nothing could grow, and the only thing to hunt would be sure-hooved sheep that would laugh at a stumble-footed mortal on two legs.