Christmas 2023

I was looking forward to a holiday.  Perhaps not the holiday my compatriots had planned, with roast turkey and mistletoe.  Nonetheless, as I left the Senior Common Rom of the university, I was pleased to see a young man spinning sugar, blowing crystal shaped from it like a glass blower, selling the candied ornaments to passers-by; there was a woman selling chestnuts that smelled of spice and celebration; another with a basket of candied nuts, and this outside the gates of the University.  The train station was a riot of street sellers and holiday buyers and travellers.

I should say, I am a Tempomancer.  That is to say, I examine events in the past.  The art is much exaggerated in the press, and the reality is that for the few of us with the talent, wea re as dependent on our research assistants and prop managers as any academic or stage professional.  Often, my art required months of preparation only to find at the moment of casting that the bubble of temporal flux simply collapses.  Inevitably this means that some assumption of my preparation was so flawed that I cannot even see the moment of the past that I require.

Regardless, in the weeks before Solstice, I had been in the university library studying a particular event from the Dai-Shan Wars, or more particularly, an attempt to make peace in the midst of them, when it became obvious to me that I would need to view the actual ground; better yet, stand on it, to make my casting into the rivers of time. I had a small grant from the Khedive, and a cautious nod of government interest from the Colonial Office; after all, our borders in the Wyld were still based on the outcome of the Dai-Shan conflict, seventeen hundred years ago. I had two weeks at Solstice with no classes to teach; I had no lover to miss me, and I’d just been paid for my first successful investigation, a surprisingly complex problem involving the loss of a key to a vault in New Raedford.

But, I digress, as is too often the case.  My point is that I was at leisure and I knew that, to make any progress at all, I would need to travel up country to the Borders and hire a Guide.  Because my work was quasi-official, I asked a friend in the Colonial Office if she might recommend a Guide, and she spoke to a military officer who sent a runner to my apartments with a recommendation for a man with the somewhat outrageous name of Nes Revans in Ironworks. I paid a telepagrapher eight soldii to contact his friend in Crescent and get a message to this man, Revans, and then I was ready to leave a note for my landlady, pack a bag, choose my best winter boots, and head for the train. I’m not a complete novice to the Wyld; I wore stout wool breeches and vest, a good heavy coat, and I packed a blanket coat, a fur hat, and various pairs of mittens and gloves. I took the train up to the border country, struck, as I left the soot-stained grey of the city from the primal snow of the countryside, that I had scarcely noticed the onset of winter in my library.  I was about to experience winter in a way that I had never done before.

If you have never travelled upcountry from New Raedford to the borders, you probably don’t know, as I did not, that you have to change trains to the narrow gauge at Meglin; these days, one station allows easy access to both tracks, but back then, the two stations were located either side of the river, and while I enjoyed the mighty falls, I didn’t enjoy the freezing temperature, the lack of a cab and two warm horses to pull it, or the walk across the bridge. If I was of a more romantic persuasion, I might imagine that in crossing over the Cagshaw Falls, I left the civilized world for the Wyld. However, any such notions were driven from my head by the ugly spectacle of a coal yard on the far side, furnishing as it did all the coal for both of the narrow gauges into the mountains of the Border.

There followed six hours of the most unpleasant rail journey I think I’ve ever made.  I’d never been to Ironworks before; I’d never taken the narrow gauge into the Wyld.  The dark hemlock forests were beautiful in the deep snow; a silent, eerie beauty that suggested something waiting just outside the train.  No coal stoves were allowed onboard, for safety reasons, and the cars themselves were cold, and I was unprepared; most travelers had several heavy wool blankets to throw over their laps, as if we were farmers going to market on hay wagons, but my blanket coat was with my luggage, and I merely endured, drinking the hot coffee provided by a child vendor and smoking.

I shared my compartment with a dull fellow from the forestry service who annoyed me by finding it stounding that a woman was engaging to go into the Wyld in winter. He mentioned his mazement to me a little too often, and I picked up my haversack and went tot another compartment.

But at last, I made it to Ironworks, or, to be precise, Thendura, the end of the narrow gauge line and the foot of the chain of lakes that allows us to navigate the Border and the Wyld. Ironworks is a short boat ride up First Lake, and the steamer had already been docked for the winter, so I paid handsomely for a broad-shouldered girl to row me up to Ironworks and land me at Ginon’s Hotel.  I’ll note tht today, postcards insist of gilding the past with a wreath of ivy and a frosting of snow, and I suspect tourists imagine Old Ironworks as a beautiful place with neat buildings, a little frosted glass, and perhaps candles in every window.

My first impression was more of something from one of those novels whose entire purpose is to stir your anxieties at every page; a dilapidated building somewhere between a barn and a warehouse, vertical boards who had once born a coat of red paint and windows sporting only the remnants of their glass like a vampires teeth; a street more mud and animal dung than picturesque snow, and Ginons, a surprisingly small building, but whose neat white paint was touched up with soot, and which had shutters sagging on their hinges and painted a dusty and unbecoming black.  My boatwoman helped me with my luggage, asked no questions, and received a well-deserved tip.  I was a trifle surprised that my Guide did not meet me at my hotel, and I asked after him from the owner, Master Ginon, who was waiting for me in a civilized sitting room with an open hearth full of fire, a big table set for six guests and a Yule tree decorated in cranberries and popcorn.  The candles weren’t lit, but were laid by on a sideboard. This was more what I’d been hoping for in the Borders.

‘Nes Revans?’ Ginon asked with a Southcountry accent. ‘Likely in his cabin.’

‘Would you send for him?’ I asked.

Ginon smiled, showing bad teeth but good humour.  ‘Ma’am, I could send for him, but he wouldn’t come.  Not the cap’n’s way.  You’ll have to go up there yourself.’

‘I sent him a telepagraph!’ I said.

Ginon’s smile widened.  ‘Ma’am, I can find you another Guide in an hour.  But Cap’n Revans don’t guide for everyone, and he don’t come when called.’

Well; you may think me humourless, but I thought perhaps I understood. I’m not to the manor born myself; if not for my Talent, I’d be some shopkeeper’s housewife, and the only Tempomancy I’d see was predicting the times of the meals I was called on to provide.  I didn’t like being summoned or dismissed by the Eugenios; the well-born, the gentry, call them what you will. I could imagine that a specialist like Revans might resent such people.

‘I’ll go see him,’ I said.

‘Best thing.  Ere’s my girl to take you. You’ll want rackettes. And the main meal is at seven, sharp.’  He pointed to the table.

Ginon provided me with his daughter, a red-haired, sullen child of eleven, and a pair of rackettes, as they call them in the Borders; bent wood frames laced with rawhide, which you strap on to your boots so that you can walk atop the snow.

Half an hour’s walk out into the silent woods and my grumbling companion pointed at smoke rising from a stone chimney.  ‘Cap’n Revans,’ she said.  ‘Can find yer own way back?’

I chose not to mention that ours were the only tracks coming up the path to the cabin.  I merely smiled.  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Would a silver soldo cheer you up, child?’

She shrugged.  ‘Not a child, neither,’ she said.  ‘But aye.  An’ much appreciated.’

I handed over the coin and she tucked it inside her big beaver-hide mitten.  ‘Obliged,’ she managed, and then she was tearing away back south towards town, if six buildings, an abandoned barn, and a frozen dock can be called a town.

I knocked, and heard something inside which I took as permission, and opened the door.

Inside, I saw an old man bent over something on a table by the light of two coal-oil lamps.

‘Shut it,’ he said.  His voice was crisp. He was holding something in each hand.

‘Pardon?’ I asked.

‘Kindly shut the door,’ he said, enunciating each word as if I was slightly deaf, or perhaps a fool.

I stepped in and shut the heavy door.

I am not without perception; indeed, my art requires a sharp eye and a certain amount of reason.  The door was not just heavy.  The moment I shut it, a bar of wood came out of a small runnel and worked its way across until it locked into a hole on the far side; an arcane working. Perfectly legal but odd, as anyone might own a good iron lock, but an arcane bar?

Revans saw my interest and favoured me with a small smile.  ‘It responds to my voice,’ he said.  ‘Very useful when I have an armload of firewood.’ Then he paused, looked me over, and said, ‘Ah!  You are a tempomancer.’

I suspect I started.

‘You received my message then,’ I said.  I may have sounded a little short.  Please, don’t imagine I’m so used to being served.  What I’m used to is men ignoring me unless it suits their needs, which I admit has the tendency to annoy.

He was back to whatever he was doing with his hands on the table.  ‘Message? Ah, are you Doctor Trevelyan?’

I nodded, ‘I am.’

He chuckled.  ‘Not what I expected, I admit, but then, assumptions are the devil, eh?’  He got up, and I saw that he’d been hand-loading cartridges for a wheel-gun.

I’d heard of them, of course, but I’d never seen one up close; A single barrel like the weapons the gentry use for duels, but a turning drum with five slots for cartridges.  He had a vial of soulflake on the table, and I wrinkled my nose at the sulphur smell.

He threw a cloth over the process on the table.  ‘I don’t generally guide in winter,’ he said.

I had been afraid of that, or of an attempt to gouge a substantial fee on that basis.

He interpreted my look.  ‘People die this time of year, Miss.  That is, Doctor. The lakes aren’t frozen yet for ice travel, and if I roll a canoe,’ he shrugged.  ‘Maybe we make it to shore and I get a fire started, and maybe we just get sleepy and die.  There are a great many things out there that can kill ye.’

‘Captain Hoton said you were the man for this,’ I said.

‘Very kind of him.  He’s never been out in the wyld in the week a’fore solstice.’  He took a piece of paper from under one of the lamps.  ‘I read this and hoped ye wouldn’t come.  And Breakers is a fair way; eight lakes and six portages. We’d be out at least four days.’

He didn’t sound as if he was absolutely set on refusing me.  ‘Is it a matter of money?’ I asked.

‘I’m not dead-set against money,’ he said.  ‘But there’s not enough in the world to repay me for being dead; or the embarrassment of killing you.’

‘Embarrassment?’ I asked.

‘We Guides have our pride,’ he said.  ‘We really try to avoid killing clients.’

‘It’s very important to me,’ I said.  ‘It might be important to… well, to government.’

He nodded.  ‘Important how?’ he asked. He hooked a chair with his foot and pushed it to me, quite a graceful act as he was leaning against his work-table the whole time.  I sat gratefully; snow-shoeing used muscles I didn’t think I had.

‘I’m investigating something from the Dai-Shan wars,’ I said.

He nodded.

‘A Love Day.  A truce…’

He nodded again.  ‘Yes.  They weren’t uncommon in the early days of the war.’

‘You are an historian?’ I asked.

He shrugged and lifted a corner of the cloth covering his loading activities, as if the subject bored him.  Perhaps I bored him.  I’d rather expected someone else; a labourer, or the sort of person who is a master crafts person.

‘If you live in the Wyld, there are certain things it pays to know,’ he said.  ‘The unexpected consequences of two hundred years of sorcerous warfare are all around us in the Wyld.’

I should have thought that myself, and I was chagrinned.  ‘Even so,’ I began, and he raised a hand.

‘Someone’s coming,’ he said.

After a barely perceptible pause, there was a firm knock.

‘Cap’n?’ someone called.

‘Door,’ he said.

The bar flew across.  The door opened; snow blew in, and I had the urge to say ‘Shut it.’

It was the girl from the hotel.

‘Cap’n?’ she asked, standing in the doorway.

‘Bridey?’ he said.

‘There’s a Quare down in t’village,’ she said.  ‘My pater asks you come.’

Revans raised an eyebrow.  ‘How old? How dressed?’

‘Pater says male, not very old.  Good green clothes.  Saw ‘em myself.’

Revans relaxed.  ‘I’ll come directly.  Doctor, there is…’

‘An aboriginal,’ I said.

He glanced at me, amused at my academic name for the savages of the mountains.  ‘If you like,’ he said.  ‘I must go.  You’re welcome to make tea…’

‘I’ll come,’ I said.

Fifteen minutes saw us in front of Ginon’s Hotel. Revan was much faster on rackettes than I; I had to almost run to keep up, but I copied his gate and found the movement easier, casting my feet out a little like a woman seeking to make her hips sway.

There was a long figure standing in the slush and manure.  He was tall; taller than a man.  He had lean features, a broad nose like a cat’s, deep golden eyes, sightly pointed ears placed higher on his head than is our norm. He wore a long green mantle of good Home wool thrown casually over his left shoulder.  His right shoulder was bare. In the snow.

Of course, they have fur.  It was scarcely visible, as jet-black as the skin beneath. They are not all black or so I’m told, but this one was.

I had never seen one of the Mountain People alive and up close.  Stuffed, and in a museum, yes.  Not breathing great gusts of steam like a resting locomotive.

Revans strode up on his rackettes and extended an arm.  ‘Peace,’ he said, and opened his hand.

The dark creature said,  ‘Khursj,’ which I guessed to be its word for peace.

Revans spoke to it, and it responded. Pere Ginon came out of his hotel in a long coat and carrying a heavy crossbow.  The creature didn’t even spare him a glance.

‘What’s it want?’ Ginon called out.

‘He says that his people are missing a mother and a child,’ Revans said.

‘Good riddance,’ Ginon said.  ‘And they’re not here, are they?’ he added with heavy sarcasm. ‘stayin’ in my hotel.’

I listened to the next exchange.  The newspapers always referred to the speech of the Mountain People as guttural, whereas, in my opinion, it sounded fluid, almost birdlike. Finally, Revans nodded sharply.

The creature nodded amicably, a very human motion.  It’s golden eyes passed over me, stopped, and lingered. It spoke again.

Revans looked at me.  ‘He says, you are powerful.  He says, would you help find this mother and child. He says… a complicated thing about blood debt.’

What, this aboriginal creature could just look at me and see my Talent?

I didn’t like the press of its gaze on me.   I glance at Revans.

He was looking out over the dark lake.  ‘Doctor,’ he said.  ‘I will be going all the way to Breakers. That’s the last time this pair were seen; at the portage into Split Lake. If you’re willing to help me, I’ll set your down wherever you like.’

‘Help you?’ I asked.

‘I imagine a tempomancer might be quite useful in a search,’ he said.

The scent of the aboriginal reached me; a very slight musk, a catch at the back of my throat. I glanced at it under my lashes; it was staring at me with its golden eyes.

‘Pack,’ said Revans.  ‘I’ll be leaving from the dock in an hour.’

‘In the dark?’ Ginon asked.  ‘For a Quare?’

Revans didn’t even raise an eyebrow.  ‘Yes.’ He turned to me. ‘Doctor, it will be very dangerous.’

‘All I have is a bedroll,’ I said.

He nodded.  ‘Fetch it, then.’

#      #      #

He had a boat, a beauty, even at the edge of dark on one of the shortest days of the year.  The sun set red in the west, behind a long ridge that was not quite a mountain.  Revan’s boat was seventeen feet long, lightly built of cedar, and it looked to me like a canoe, except that it had row locks for oars and seemed wider, to me.

Revans rowed facing me, his back to our path of travel.  I sat in the stern with a paddle as a steering oar, and between us were four pack baskets, a buffalo robe rolled tight, and my sleeping roll. Revans wore clothes much like mine, if harder worn, and a broad brimmed back hat with an elaborate hatband that I took to be beaded leather. He wore knee-high leather boots with soft soles thick with grease.

He smiled from the bow.  ‘Ready?’ he asked.

I appreciated that he made no attempt to dissuade me.

‘Ready,’ I said.  We had made no financial arrangements.  Something about Ginon’s obvious respect for Revans suggested he was no cheat.

And as he pulled us hard across the lake at the very edge of night, I suspected that the monetary cost of the trip was the least of my concerns.

First Lake was quite long; perhaps two leagues.  For two leagues, icy water passed within inches of my hands, and the shore passed on either hand, closer on my left, further on my right, and huge hemlocks and white pines towered into the star-strewn heavens.  There was no wind, and we seemed to move as fast as a carriage on a good road.  The stars were reflected perfectly in the lake until our bow wave cut them; the silence was broken only by the popping noises the dark trees made as the temperature fell.

It was like traveling in a dream.

My guide seemed tireless, which was the more surprising as he was quite old; fifty at least. His stroke with the oars was unfailing, neatly timed, and he only paused once, as we turned up the last bay, to point at the landing.  It was quite invisible to me in the dark; he pointed until I used the paddle to point us more or less correctly, and he used the time to light his pipe.

‘Cold?’ he asked.

‘No, sir,’ I said.

He smiled, and we were off again.

Another hour’s rowing, and we coasted in to gently grate the bow against the gravel of the landing beach.  He turned, rose and stepped over the side into the freeing water, gave a heave and pulled the boat half its length up the little forest beach.

‘We’re lucky it isn’t cold,’ he said.

I tried not to think about what ‘cold’ might be to this man.

He put a pack basket on his back, put the boat on his head and started to walk. Then he paused.

‘There’s a lantern on my pack.  If you’d be kind enough o light it and walk ahead of me, I could go faster.’ He was just a shape in the darkness of starlight.

I found his lantern, stripped off a heavy mitten, lit a match and got the coal-oil burning on the wick. The lantern was very bright in the darkness, and I held it up for a bit, and then fund it easier by my waist.  But I’m not weak, and I took one of the pack baskets.

‘No need to do that, Doctor,’ he said, but after this token protest he let me carry a basket and my own blanket roll.

A portage, in the old Border, was a well-traveled trail between two lakes; as broad as a road, maintained by the Guides. Even by starlight, I could see that he might have managed, but with a lantern, we could see the long roots reaching out to snare a tow, and the fallen branches looking to catch an ankle, and the tiny rills of icewater running across the trail to wet a moccasin.

We moved fast across the portage, left the boat, and went back for the last two baskets. Revans didn’t thank me, exactly, but he did give me a smile as we loaded the boat for the second lake.

‘Making good time, doctor,’ he said, and sat at his oars.  This time, with no dock, I had to push us off.  My good, and expensive, New Raedford boots were worthy of their maker; not a drop of icewater penetrated to my socks. Then I was back in my seat, and Revans was pulling across Second Lake.  His pull was steady; as far as I could see his wake was straight as a ruler.

‘Where are we going?’ I asked.

‘Breakers,’ he said.  ‘Do you know it?’

I shook my head.  ‘No, sir,’ I said.  ‘Except as a name in books.’

He pulled a few times.  ‘Dai-Shan had a castle there, sixteen hundred years ago,’ he said.  ‘It’s a nexus for powers.  And a crossroads, too.’ He smiled.  ‘Cross rivers and lakes, more like.  No roads here.’

He continued to pull his oars across the lake.  It very quickly became difficult to believe that there was any danger, in fact, I drifted off to a nap somewhere on second lake, despite the fact that we were two hundred paces from shore and if we rolled to boat we were dead.

I was awakened by our arrival on another strand.  I was embarrassed that I hadn’t even steered us in, but we landed, Revans hopped out in ankle deep water and pulled us up, and I leapt out to help and got a leg in the water.  My boot filled and suddenly I was very cold.

Revans didn’t remonstrate with me.  He told me to walk up and down, and he vanished over the portage for a little.  He hadn’t taken the boat so I knew he wasn’t gone.

He returned quickly with an armload of wood, and in minutes he had a good little fire going.

‘Strip the stocking and change it,’ he said. ‘I’ll warm your boot.  You’ll be fine.’

In fact, he filled of foot of my boot with rice from his stores.  I changed my heavy wool stocking at the fire, sitting on my blanket roll, and looked up to find the boat, the lantern and two pack baskets missing.

If there is one thing that I hate above all others, it is to be made to feel weak and useless.

On the other hand, I had stepped out of the boat in an effort to help, which had put me in this position; leaping up to don my wet boot and start carrying things…  without my Guide or the lantern… seemed the height of folly.

I waited.  My reward was that Revans returned, nodded to me, and checked my boot.  Then he carefully poured the rice back into a cloth bag, which I found a trifle disquieting.

He grinned.  ‘Dinner tonight.  Bit o’ damp won’t ruin rice, doctor.’

And then we were off.  My damp boot was cold, but not unmanageable, and we made good time over the portage.  Before the stars could turn about us in the heavens, we were back on the water and a tiny sickle of the Red Moon rose in the east. The Green Moon was still somewhere under the northern horizon or lost in the trees.  The air remained still, and cold, and the snow-covered trees by night were magnificent, as were the stars high above us.

Third Lake.  On my map, these lakes were small, almost insignificant. Here in cold reality, they were leagues long, wide enough to drown a woman in freezing water, with rocky sides rising to ridges topped with forest giants of birch and spruce, hemlock and beech.

Well up Third Lake was a ‘Lodge,’ as the Borderers called them.  They were like medieval inns, or taverns, and they were placed there for travelers across the Wyld in summer and autumn, when the embassies and the trade ran back and forth across the lakes from our side to the Vorlands. No one was foolish enough to cross the Borders in winter, except hunters and trappers and the occasional naturalist. So the Third Lake Lodge was shuttered and no smoke came from its two great stone chimneys.  Despite which, there was a woman standing in the cold on the Lodge dock.

‘Lees?’ Revans called out when we were close.

‘That is you, Nes?’

‘Big as life,’ Revans said.

‘Twice as ugly,’ the woman said. She wore a blanket coat and no hat; she wasn’t tall, and otherwise she was a pale blur on a dark night. ‘I got a message for you.’

I was curious what this woman was doing out in the Wyld on a dark Solstice-week night, but it was clear that she and Revans knew one another too well to bother with such stuff.

‘Very kind of you to take it,’ Revans said.

‘I heard about the other witch and her kit,’ the woman said.  ‘Did ye’ doubt I’d want to help?’

Revans rested on his oars and the woman handed him a piece of paper. ‘Much obliged,’ he said.

‘You want me to come along?’ she asked hopefully.

‘Sorry, Lees.  I have a passenger.  I’m away, now.’

‘Fair winds, Nes,’ the woman called as we pulled away.

Revans didn’t read the note until we had landed at the next portage and lit the lantern.  He read it, grunted, and lit his pipe.  Then he glanced at me.  ‘I’d like to ask a favour, doctor,’ he said.

I was eager to make up for putting a leg in the water.  ‘How can I help?’

‘Can you get two of these baskets on ye?’ e asked.  ‘One in front, one behind.  Here, like this.’  He held them up for me, and I got them on; two heavy baskets.  Then he did the same for himself, picked up the boat and, when I led the way, he followed.  We crossed the portage in no time, a very short one, and we had done it in one trip.

‘I need to make better time,’ he said.

He insisted on loading the boat.

‘Am I allowed to know what the message says?’ I asked.

He glanced at me.  ‘Is it any of your concern?’ he asked, his tone polite.

But well out on the lake, he relented.  ‘I was ordered to find the missing mother and child,’ he said.

He rowed in silence for a while, then lit his pipe.  ‘Bit of a dog-leg coming,’ he said.  ‘I’d be grateful if you’d pilot us through.’

‘Wel,’ I said, aiming for humour, ‘I suppose, but only this once.’

He smiled around his pipe stem.

‘Ordered?’ I asked.  I was aware that the Guides were a quasi-government group; in the Mountains, they guided people across the mountains, but they were usually also the law, in as much as the very thin human population of the mountains needed law.

‘You are full of questions, aren’t ye, Doctor.’ He sounded annoyed, for the first time.  I let him smoke in peace.

But at the next portage, when the lantern was lit, he handed me the slip of paper without a word.

SAVE THE CHILD. GG

I got my first basket on my own back, thank you.  He did help me with the second, across my chest.

‘GG,’ I said.  ‘Is that… Gravesgate?’

He nodded.  ‘So, you know the name.’

Sir Fenri Gravesgate was commander of the Frontier Army.  He frequently dabbled in the politics of New Raedford. He was reputed to be a very subtle man. Nothing I had heard of him at the university suggested that he would care one whit about an aboriginal woman and its child.

‘How did that message reach you, then?’ I asked.

‘You are the very queen of questions,’ he said.  ‘I think it must be yer line of work.’  But he flashed me a smile and picked up the boat.  I got my bedroll on one shoulder and held up the lantern and we were away.

‘Gravesgate’s worried about an incident.’  Revans made the word ‘incident’ sound indecent. ‘He’s afraid of anything that happens up here.  I’m surprised he let you come here, doctor.’

I shook my head.  ‘I don’t work for General Gravesgate,’ I said. ‘I didn’t ask for a license.’

He nodded.  ‘Sure,’ he said.  ‘You’re looking into the past of the border treaties.  But Gravesgate has nothing to do with it.’ He raised both eyebrows at once.

I shook my head, and he pulled at his oars, and we shot across fifth lake.  The night was getting on; before we landed at the head of fifth lake, where we had to break the ice on a little bay to land, the sky was more grey than black.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘You’ve seen something few have; the Wyld at night in winter.  Safe enough in a boat.’  He glanced at me.  ‘This one is a long portage.’

And it was.  But we got across in one trip to find dawn waiting on the other side, and very small lake. We crossed it in minutes and had yet another carry into sixth lake.

We were just going to land when he back water and I stopped paddling.

‘Something on the landing,’ he said. He brought us in very gently and slipped out of the boat, and stood ankle deep in black water to look at the ground at the landing.

He looked back at me.  ‘Another boat,’ he said.  ‘A day ago.’ He shook his head and I saw a flash of deep green paint on a submerged rock.  He pulled us up and we unloaded; after a night with him, I knew my duties, and we unloaded the boat, packed up and walked off in ten minutes.

‘Another boat?’ I asked.

‘Which Love Day,’ he asked suddenly. ‘Which one are you here to look at?’

‘Seventh War, second truce.  I believe that we’re looking at the winter of 431 of the old calendar.’

He looked at me. ‘The Quare have names for every war and every truce and every Love Day.’

I was aware of this.  ‘Oral history names,’ I said.  ‘Doctor Silbrig has just published a paper on the likelihood of accurate transmission…’

He rowed.  ‘There’s Quare still alive who were there,’ he said.

‘Oh, really,’ I said.

Revans was a hard man to doubt.  Especially as he made no move to convince me, but just pulled his oars.  As the daylight grew and the sun rose, I saw him more clearly; a small, older man with long grey hair in a ponytail.

‘Mister Revans, do you honestly expect me to believe that there are creatures in the mountains that are fifteen hundred years old?’

‘Aye,’ he said  ‘An’ some of them would freeze yer blood.  Not Old Harry, though.  He’s just an old Quare.  But I guess he was at your Love Day; he was a big war chief then. He’ll probably be at Breakers, is all I’m saying.’

Well.  Mister Revans clearly believed what he was saying.

I had heard the myth of Quare longevity refuted by those who dissected them.  But I had also heard little suggestions from the Senior Commons that… some things were not to be studied too closely. I’d heard such things because I’d heard suggestions about my own research.  Tempomancers were very tightly controlled by Government.

What if there were living memories of the distant past?

I pondered that while I considered the one Quare I’d met, who seemed very much more than a beast, for all that I ‘d been told repeatedly that they were little more than animals.

‘You speak their tongue?’ I said.

‘One of them,’ he said.  ‘And a few words of their Ancient Tongue, which they call the ‘Tongue of Heroes.’  He smiled.  ‘When I try to recite their poetry, they all laugh.’

I pondered the many meanings of this.

#      #      #

At Eighth Lake we faced a long carry, almost four leagues.  I was tired, the sun was high in the sky; noon, I gathered.

I’d been to the Wyld before; we’d eaten a lot of bacon and the men talked about how tough they were.  We’d all carried weapons.  It had been a field exercise to visit one of the important battlefields of the last war; we’d dressed like Imperial troopers, camped on the battlefield, pooled our Talents and watched almost eight seconds of the Battle of Wispen. That was four years ago; I’d been seventeen, and my Tutor had attempted to climb into my blankets and I’d screamed and hit him, which proved to be more embarrassing for me than him, in the long run. Not a pleasant memory.

This all came back to me because the head of Eighth Lake held a set of stone walls that were part of Adoba’s siege lines, or so I recalled.  Thousands of humans had died here, Dai and Shan, and I could feel the past pressing through the veil of time, their angry young deaths threatening the Temporal River.

Revan gave me a handful of dried blueberries, a drink of cold coffee, and a sizeable chunk of maple sugar. I took them all gratefully.  The maple sugar was better than the coca leaves so popular with students when I was an undergraduate; I felt warmer and smarter in seconds.

‘We have to keep going,’ Revans said.

I won’t say that I enjoyed the trek across the portage.  I will say that I made it with two baskets, my sleeping roll, and both oars.

‘Split Lake,’ Revans said. ‘That headland is the Breakers.  The name is deceptive; it’s just our translation for the old Dai name of the castle.  Army Breaker.’

I could see the ruins, which were so big that they looked like natural cliffs reflected in the mirror like lake against the blue sky.  It was growing colder.

We landed on sand, and Revans almost immediately began to make us a camp.  He cut a pair of hemlocks and trimmed them to make a shelter, showed me who he wanted the fireplace built, and vanished.

I wasn’t clever with an axe but I liked his little wooden folding saw and I used it to gather more limbs.  I built the back of the ‘fireplace’ as he requested, and walked down to the lake to find rocks to protect the front of it.  I was carrying my second load back to camp when I discovered that…

…the quare…

…was standing…

…in our camp.

It was definitely the same one I’d seen back at Gison’s.  I was beyond startled.

Basic courtesy saved me.  ‘Hello there,’ I said.

Gravely, with immense dignity, it nodded its head.

‘Friend,’ I said, my voice shaken.  It’s difficult to fully explain just how alien the creature was.   It’s resemblance to a human being made the alien all the more real.  It wasn’t clean the way a person would be clean; and yet it was neat enough, although the mantle it wore was made of some animal skin, and looked filthy to me.

Incongruously, it had a Luss and Sons working knife thrust through its belt.  I could read the bold letters clearly. The knife had no sheath, and the belt was woven.

I was staring.  I tore my eyes away.

‘Start fire?’ it asked.

I had none of the appurtenances for fire starting, except my Talent, and we were very strongly discouraged about using Talent for such things.

‘I…’ I shook my head in frustration.

‘Ugh,’ the creature grunted.  It knelt with beautiful fluidity, and toyed with the branches and bark I’d chosen, singing a little.

Revans came back along the shore.  He’d been gone more than an hour and he didn’t spare the savage creature by our fire so much as a glance.

‘I found their tracks,’ he said.

The creature stood.  It extended a hand with two taloned fingers splayed in a way that few humans could have managed, and spoke. ‘Grua’ it said, or something like.

The fire roared to light.  It didn’t kindle slowly, the way cold, damp wood gives u its head with a grumble and a lot fo hesitant smoke.  It leaped to do his bidding.  It was instantly fire.

I pride myself on my observational skills. I observed several things.  One was that the laws of nature were obeyed; the moment the fire exploded into life, the wood showed all the signs of having burned for some time. Another was that the creature glanced at me – challenge? Amusement? – I had no experience on which to draw. But this display was certainly meant for me.

And the third was that Revans grinned.

But he didn’t change tack.  ‘I found their tracks,’ he said again.

‘Are we going to follow them?’ I asked.

He looked at me, his deep-set green eyes giving nothing away, and then he looked back at the creature, who was warming itself at our fire. ‘Ethura les itha noch Ben Ibsa?’ Revans asked.  I may not have the speech exactly right; but the creature grunted, stirred the fire with a stick, and then held up the lit stick to Revans, who used it to light his pipe.

‘Can you find the child?’ I asked.

Revans glanced at me and went on lighting his pipe.  Then he handed the lit stick back to the creature.  I confess that by this time I was struggling with the term ‘creature.’  I am a scholar, it is my duty to record the truth.  The Quare gave every sign of high sapience; barbaric, perhaps, but in no way animal.  The interplay over the fire stick fo the pipe…a load of social courtesy, observation, and response.  Language.

Magic.  There was absolutely no denying that the creature… the Quare… had deliberately lit the fire so as to demonstrate the extent of its powers.

His powers.

All that in one flash of insight.  Or had it been creeping up on me?

Revans took a long pull on his pipe, blew a smoke ring, put a small copper pot full of water from his canteen on the fire, and then addressed himself to me.  ‘I can find the child,’ he said.  ‘But so can Erka, here.  That’s his name; Erka. There’s a lot more name, but let’s leave it there.’

The creature so addressed nodded firmly.  ‘Erka,’ he said softly. ‘Inga-Turac Erkalushimi.’

Revans looked amused, but then sobered.  ‘Erka can find the child.  So can any of the Quare hunters.  We’re not here to find them, although I’ll help.  We’re here to witness. Or so I read the signs.’

‘Can’t you just ask?’ I waved a hand at Erka.

Revans looked at the Quare.  ‘They ain’t like us, Doctor.  They talk, but it ain’t the same as our talk.  With Quare, actions are more important than words.  Always.’  He shrugged.  ‘And I’m not infallible either.  But here’s what I see.’

I couldn’t tell whether he was addressing the Quare, or me.

‘A mother and child.  Let’s not even ask why they are off on their own in the woods at this time o’ year.’  He puffed his pipe.  ‘But they’re here; maybe gathering dreams.  That’s a thing Quare do.  Maybe someone else had a dream and they’re fulfilling it?’

Erka looked up.  ‘Qai,’ he said.

Revans nodded.  ‘And then someone snatched them.’

I looked at him in horror.  ‘What?’

Revans was most definitely talking to the Quare, and not me.  ‘Back at sixth lake, I saw a sign that Ben Ibsa’s boat was ahead of us.’

I nodded.

‘I wouldn’t swear to the Law or the Moon Goddess, but I’d be willing to wager a straw against a pile of furs that Ben wasn’t in that boat.’

The Quare looked at him, his deep green eyes wide in his black-fur face.  Quizzical? Angry?’

‘Whoever was in that boat left a finger of paint on the landing rock,’ Revans said.  ‘Ben’s been a Guide twenty years.’ He shrugged.

It didn’t seem very damning to me.

‘About two hundred paces along the shore, right under the old walls, Ben’s boat landed empty and rowed away full. Snow is full o’ prints.  I followed the mother… carrying the child, I think?  Up the walls, to the old citadel.  She built a fire.’  He was watching the Quare, and I felt suddenly cold despite the blue sky and the fire. ‘I’m not telling this well.  That was two days back.  Then the boat came.  Erka wants us to see that a Human took the mother; maybe the child too. Wants me to deal with it.’

‘But he can find them?’ I asked.

‘Doctor, we’re in deep water here.  I can find them.  GG wants me to find them, and that sticks in my craw.  Someone has Ben Ibsa’s boat and that means he’s dead.’  He looked at me.  ‘Are you familiar with the term ‘The Great Game?’

I nodded.  The newspapers used it all the time to describe the efforts of our rival empires.

‘I don’t have much patience with it,’ he said.

‘You think Vorlanders are behind this?’ I asked.

He narrowed his eyes.  ‘I think someone rotten is behind it,’ he said.

‘Why are we waiting?’ I asked.

He took the boiling water off the fire, and made tea.  ‘I wonder if you’d do a working for us?’ he asked.

#      #      #

Tempomancy is a very delicate art.  It took me as much time to prepare at the site he requested as it did for the three of us to climb the ruins.

The site, the locality in academic terms, was a corner of an ancient stone tower.  Someone; the missing Quare female, I assumed, had built a fire here, using the standing walls of a corner as a sort of cimney and wind break.  The fire had been small, and somewhat esoteric, and a beautifully worked bag proved to contain compartments with wildflowers, dried in midsummer, and other little treasures; dried cranberries, dried blueberries, sprigs of willow and ash, maple leaves.

Whatever she was doing was too alien for me to decipher, but I could see that she’d burned some of these items on her little fire.  Revans found her bronze pot.

‘Surely there was a struggle,’ I said.

Revans shook his head.  ‘I think she responded quietly to overwhelming force,’ he said.  ‘Quare says he smells soulflake.’

‘So it was a Guide?’ I asked.

‘Or carrying Ben’s wheel gun.’  He shook his head.

Erka came up by me, a towering presence, and handed me a sort of necklace.  It was a thong of deerskin with a medallion.  I thought at first the medallion was just a bit of dried leaf until I realized that it was worked metal; gold and bronze and enamel.

‘Quare work,’ Revans said.  ‘It was hers, or so I guess.  Wear it.  He means to help.’

I thought it would help; I had too few links to the Quare female.  But I had rebuilt her fire, and I put a hand on her bag, held her medallion in my other hand, and dropped into my meditation.

It was surprisingly easy at first.

I should have been warned, and in fact, I’d felt he pressure of the past against me since touching the stones of the ancient walls, but as soon as I reached for contact, the past came at me like a freight train; war, conflict, butchery, horror, torture, massacre.  This place offered them all.

The problem wasn’t making contact with the past; it was holding off the power of the distant past and all its horrors to see something far more recent. I knew that my bubble of temporal shift would only endure for a few beats of my heart, and I struggled to keep my meditative state because I knew full well what happened to practitioners who lost their temporal bubbles.

I never received a pure vision, and I might well have failed an exam, but what I managed was a layered glimpse of seven or perhaps eight pasts, most of them involving Dai or Shan or both and some amount of blood.

But there, in the foreground, dim but fully perceptible, a Quare female bent over a fire, glanced up, stepped away from her fire and revealed…

Erka growled.  The hairs stood up on my neck.

Revans was looking at me.  ‘Well,’ he said.  ‘Doctor, you are a Power.’ He shook his head.  ‘Our kidnappers didn’t expect me to have a Power.’  He looked at the Quare, who looked back.

I sank down, exhausted.  ‘You know who did it?’

Revans nodded.  ‘I’m afraid so.’

‘A Vorlander?’ I asked.

‘It’s worse than that,’ he said.  He looked at the Quare, who nodded. ‘It was Ben Ibsa.’

#      #      #

I slept while the Quare and Revans cooked a meal of beans and rice and some meat.  I woke to find a second Quare male sharing a long, organically stemmed pipe with Erka.  Our little hemlock camp smelled delicious; I was ravenous, and it was late afternoon.

‘Old Harry,’ Revans said, nodding at the older Quare, who was consuming a bowl of rice with determination worthy of better food.  ‘I know somewhat o’ his name, but I won’t trouble you with it. Here, get yourself outside o’ this,’ he said, handing me a tin plate of food.  ‘We’ll be moving in an hour.’

‘We’re going to rescue the female and her child?’ I asked.

Revans grimaced.  ‘If they’re alive.  They have quite a lead.  On the other hand, we know where they’re going and why, and… well, there are circumstances in our favour. I want to tell you,’ he continued as I wolfed food down, ‘that you can stay here, and the Quare will protect you.  I am sure you’ll choose to come; I know you a little now.  But I want to remind you that originally you were paying me a stiff fee to bring you to this spot.  You are here.  We won’t be back until after Solstice.’

I tried to laugh and swallow food at the same time and ended up with a very unladylike coughing and spitting fit.

‘Mister Revans,’ I began, and then shook my head.  ‘My notion that I could penetrate to a particular Love Day in the Seventh Dai-Shan War was pure hubris.  Did you see what happened at that poor Quare’s fire?’

‘Quire,’ he said.  ‘When they choose child bearing, they’re Quire.  When they choose Hunting, they’re Quare.’ He raised an eyebrow.  ‘I saw that you reached into the past with almost no preparation and found my incident,’ he said.  He shrugged.  ‘I have a little power,’ he said.  ‘I use it differently.  But I could no more do what you did than you can start a fire in the rain.’  He handed me a cup of hot, sweet tea.

I drained it.  ‘I choose to come with you,’ I said.

He nodded.  ‘Never doubted it. It’s going to be hard, dangerous, and in the end, possibly horrible.’

‘Just like history,’ I said.

#      #      #

I thought we’d made good time before, but now we raced.  I can only assume that the two Quare paced us through the snow-covered woods on either hand; I never saw a tree so much as shake, although I did watch two deer leap from the shore into the water and swim.

But they were there as we came up the last of the lake, through a wicked shoal of rocks that required more careful steering than anything so far, and landed on a gravel shingle.  There was a single log building on the portage, closed and shuttered.  The two Quare simply stood, waiting, like statues.

We landed, they shared our packs, having none of their own.  And we ran across the portage.

‘I can row,’ I said. I was panting.

Revans nodded. ‘Cross handed?’ he asked.

I nodded again.

Two portages later, after a beautiful moonlit walk along a roaring river too dangerous for boating, we came to still black water under the two moons.  The Quare were with us; we loaded the boat and Revans let me row.  I banged my hands together a few times; my fingers were clumsy in the cold, but then I got a rhythm and pulled hard.

I expected coaching and received none.  We ran down a lake that appeared endless; I rowed until my waist and thighs and arms all burned.  It was odd that rowing, I seemed to see more of the magnificent shoreline, especially when the red and green moons were both up.  They were both new, but their combined light shone down on the trees full of snow; the stars burned like water spray on a sunny say, and we flew down the lake.

Eventually he steered us into a landing on a long point, and I had to stretch, rise, and get a leg into the shallow water to land us.  For the first time I saw how strong Revans must be, pulling that boat ashore, but I managed to get us up the little beach and dry.

‘Getting cold,’ Revans said.  ‘Lakes will start to freeze soon. Maybe even now.’

It was as if his words brought the reality home; the moment I stopped rowing, I was cold.  I had sweated through my shift, and now the cold reached into my clothes and touched me. I hopped about, trying to stay warm.

‘Can we catch this man?’ I asked.

Revans glanced at the trees just as Old Harry stepped out of a stand of ancient white pine, slipping through the big trunks without disturbing the snow. He looked back at me.  ‘He has a three day start,’ Revans said. ‘He’s trying to control two unwilling Quire and a boat he handles badly.’  He looked at the dark trail leading into the night-shadowed winter woods.  ‘I’m more concerned he’ll kill his passengers before we catch him.’

We didn’t rest on unload.  Old Harry looked at us, waved, and burrowed back into the tall trees.  Revans took the oars and we were off down the lake, chasing the moonlight as both moons settled toward the north western horizon.

Nothing moved but us.  It was as if we existed in a cold dream.

‘Icing up,’ Revans said. He had frost on his short beard and mustache, and he’d put a fur hat over his lank grey hair.  Despite his age, he seemed indomitable, rowing with an even stroke, not as hard as mine had been, but then…

…but then, he didn’t seem to tire, either.

That was a long lake.  The sun rose as we passed another Lodge, shuttered and empty, and we swept on into the dawn.  The sky grew lighter, then darker as the false dawn came and passed; the Saddle rose above the Twins on the eastern horizon, the bright blue of the ‘jewels’ on the Twins shining bright in the clear, cold air.

I had begun to feel that I’d lived forever in this boat, flying along this lake. I knew, at least by reputation, that fell creatures lived in the Borderlands, but I had seen none; at least, none but the Quare.

Early morning, and Revans continued to row north and west, smoking as he rowed.  The lake we were on had narrowed to the point that it was more like a river; the snow-covered branches of ancient trees overhung us, and dropped snow on the boat when the breeze came up.

‘Dry River,’ he said.

I misunderstood and he explained.  ‘It was the D’r’ai; the original border between the Dai and the Shan.’  He smiled.  ‘We’re the ones who corrupted the word to Dry.’

I laughed.  I don’t think I’d laughed in two days.

The Dry ran in long curves through a valley between two high ridges, but well along towards noon, he said, ‘Ready for a fast portage? The Quare won’t be with us here.’

We landed, and there was no trail and the snow was knee deep.  However, the whole portage was perhaps two hundred paces, up over a rocky ridge and down a switchback on the other side that frightened me.

‘Saves almost two hours,’ he said.  ‘A long loop in the river.  And one that Ben Ibsa would have known.’

Then we were off again, down a river that grew swifter.  We shot the ruins of a beaver damn, warned by the sound of the water; under Revan’s orders I helped him pull into the eddy behind the dam while he looked it over.

He didn’t find anything, and we were away.  Despite the current, he continued rowing, and we were now moving at such a pace that I was sure an underwater rock would be the end of our lightly built boat.

Such was not our fate.  I was now fully employed steering, although the boat was seldom in crisis; there were merely little turns, rocks, whole trees and other obstacles.  Revans rowed most of the time, and I couldn’t imagine that our Quare were keeping pace on the riverbank, as I thought we were going as fast as a galloping horse.

Early in the afternoon, he served a meal of hard tack and honey washed down with water, and I was grateful to have it, if slightly sticky afterwards.

Later in the afternoon, it began to snow, and we put in at a lean-to, a small, three sided cabin with a fireplace.  There are dozens of these throughout the Borderlands, for the use of travelers when there is no Lodge.

We found wood laid by; Guides often leave wood if they have time, and he used it unsparingly.  ‘Sleep,’ he said.

I awoke to full darkness and a meal of fish and rice and a rich brown sauce.

My Guide shrugged.  ‘It don’t hurt to learn to cook, in this line of work,’ he said.  The two Quare were with us again, and both ate Revans cooking with enthusiasm.

‘We’ll catch him tomorrow,’ Revans said.  ‘If we go all night.’

Old Harry nodded.

We left after dinner.  Revans had now gone, by my count, three days without sleep, and he looked exactly the same; old. The two Quare loped off into the frozen woods, and we cast off from the icy dock. I was rowing again.

Revans was barely visible in the stern, because the snow had brought clouds and now we had neither moonlight nor star light by which to navigate.  Revans steered for the next several hours, and I rowed when told to, sailing along in a dream of winter, my only knowledge of the passage of time the slight ‘ting’ of my repeater watch deep inside my wool, against my left hip.

‘Watch it,’ he called.  ‘Back your oars.’

I held us steady, reasoned that he meant me to balance against the current, and we stayed there, wherever there was, for almost a minute. He was looking at the bank.

Then we crept along for some distance, until he told me to land us, and I put a foot in the icy water…

Despite my excellent boots, my feet were cold, and repeated immersion was beginning to creep through the good leather and layers of oil. I had never been to cold or so tired, and yet…

We got the boat ashore, and Revans froze. ‘Blast my soul,’ he muttered.

I was behind him, holding the bow of the boat steady, balanced on a shallow rock.

‘Can you light the lantern?’ he asked quietly.

It was handy, in the peak of the bow; I ran the boat-rope around my waist, found my waterproof matches and got one alight in a reek of sulphur, and he swore again.  In a moment I had handed him the lantern.

He looked at something, leaning forward so far I thought he might fall in the snow, as my feet got colder and wetter. Then he stepped back towards me, took one of the oars, and thrust it into the dark.

There was a loud snap, and then something clattered into the trees.  Snow fell, and an owl gave an outraged screech; one of the first animal sounds I’d heard in three days.

‘Trap,’ Revans said.  ‘By my soul, I almost triggered it.’  He was shaken, but not for long.  Then he was angry; grimly, quietly angry. We brought the boat ashore cautiously, and he explored; before we could load, the Quare came. They found the little crossbow and the bolt it had shot, and handed them to Revans.  He looked at me.

‘Ever used one of these?’ he asked.

I took it.  There were three bolts clipped to the stock by an Olean-rubber sheath.  I flipped it over and saw the latchet mechanism.  Like everyone in the Colony, I had had basic military training.  This was a Trylock/Wasserman cavalry latchet, a little lighter and smaller than what we’d trained on.  I worked the mechanism, cocked it, and clicked a bolt into the spring clip that held it to the flight groove.

Revans nodded.  ‘Very good, Doctor. I’d prefer if it weren’t loaded in my boat.’ He waved at the small building on our right.  ‘Upper Lake Lodge, in better times.’

‘Good point,’ I muttered, and no doubt flushed, but I took out the bolt and dry-fired it; bad for the bow, but it wasn’t really mine. I tied it to my bedroll and we started the portage. Upper Lake Lodge was a handsomer building than most we’d passed, built of logs, but with a long front porch and two huge sone chimneys, one at either end.

By the time we reached the other side of the portage, Revas was smiling grimly.  ‘He doubled back to make that trap,’ Revans said.  ‘Lost time.’

We started across the next lake into the first streaks of a red dawn.

‘Upper Lake,’ Revans said.  ‘There’s a hundred different lake systems on the Border, but this is the best known, and Upper is the top o’ the chain.  When the sun’s up you’ll see proper mountains.’

The two Quare set off into the woods.  Revans waited a few minutes, offered me a flask of harsh spirits, which I drank with pleasure, and then he took a pull and lit his pipe.

‘I could have tried a working, back there with the trap,’ I said carefully.

He shook his head.  ‘No need.  I know what we’re up against.  I mislike taking you into it.’

‘Mr. Revans,’ I began, annoyed that after three days of hard travel and more than a few adventures, he was going to treat me as weak.

He raised a hand.  ‘I mislike it because you are a Power.  An’ what we’re facing would love to take a power.’

‘Ben Ibsa?’ I asked.

By then, Revans had knocked out the dottle from his pipe and started launching the boat. He looked up.  ‘Ibsa’s dead,’ he said.  ‘We’re chasing a Steka.’

He began to row, and my feet began to thaw a bit in the bottom of the boat.  ‘Steka?’ I asked.

‘How’s your demonology?’ he asked.

‘Demons?’ I asked in alarm.  There were many theories about demons; one of the most acceptable said they were practitioners from other realms, other realities. Lost individuals whose motivations we couldn’t understand.

Or, possibly, malevolent entities from our own reality who sought to destroy mortals, usually by trickery.

Revans nodded.  ‘Quare believe they ride mortals; it’s a form of possession. Targeted.’

‘Glory be,’ I said. Then I finally understood what he was saying.  ‘You mean that Ibsa was killed and the demon is riding his corpse.’

Revans kept rowing.  ‘Ay.  That’s what I mean.  And if that’s the case, the Steka would like nothing more than to take you and your Talent.’

I felt something like a ball of lead in my stomach.  ‘Oh, dear.’

Revans nodded, grunted, and rowed on.

I looked up. ‘I’m trained to resist any kind of forceful possession,’ I said.

He nodded.  ‘Stands to reason,’ he said.  ‘But that eases my mind some.’ Then he smiled shyly.  ‘I’m not.  So I have to be faster than it is.’

‘It won’t surrender,’ I said.  ‘In fact…’ I began to look at this from an academic perspective.  ‘Someone summoned it, yes?’ I was watching the woods as the sun rose. ‘Infernal entities don’t usually just decide to take a person.’

‘Heavy snow coming.’ Revans said.  ‘May I be honest, doctor? I don’t usually deal with infernal entities.  I just know a thing or two; Ben Ibsa would never take a Quire and her kit, and that thing left a foul… aura.  In your temporal bubble.’

I’d smelled it too, although for me it was more like a taste.

‘If you corner it, it will offer you a deal to let it live.’ I said.  ‘Or so I’ve been told.  And they’re very difficult to kill.’

He kept rowing. Upper Lake was very large; not as long as some of the lakes, but with multiple bays. Revans asked me to take a compass bearing, and we followed a line into the rising day.

‘We need to get this done,’ he said, and the worry was obvious in his voice.  ‘Getting colder; lakes will freeze now, and it’s a long walk home.  And,’ he pointed at a dark line in the sky, ‘that’s weather.  Won’t be pretty.  No, I lie; it will be pretty at first.’  He smiled at this small joke.  ‘Heavy snow, maybe two days. If we don’t catch this thing soon…’

He set to pulling.

I looked at the distant shores with dismay.  The Quare were going to have a difficult time catching us up, as they’d be running along the shores of multiple bays.

Revans didn’t share any concerns he felt.  He just pulled along our compass line, which he bade me check from time to time.

A little before mid-day, the first snow squall hit us.  The ky grew dark, and we had a rush of snow, and then we were back in the clear.

‘Ah,’ Revans said.  He was looking over his shoulder.

I saw it too.  A boat pulled up on a snowy beach.

We coasted in. Revans motioned at the crossbow.  ‘Arm it,’ he said.

I found that cocking a latchet in a cockleshell of a cedar-built boat on the freezing cold black water of a Border lake was more of an adventure than I wanted just then, but I got it done.  Revans reversed the order of things by turning the boat and pushing on the oars so that he could see as he landed us, and we both studied the snowy verge.

There were tracks, softened by the recent snow. And the boat, abandoned.

He pushed my ed of the boat on the snow and sand, and I stepped ashore, dry-shod and tracking the movement of my eyes with the bolt on the latchet, but nothing moved except a grackle, which burst from a tree in a shower of new snow and took to the air.

Revans waited until I felt safe enough to put the crossbow on a snowy rock and pull the boat shore.  Then he stepped out.

‘Don’t you go near the other boat yet, Doctor,’ he said.

I opened the tin of pemmican and ate a slice while Revans walked cautiously up to the boat.  He shook his head, leaned, over, grunted, and shook his head.

‘They hit a rock,’ Revans said.  ‘Somewhere on the lake.  Or maybe yesterday; aye, that would explain how slow it moves.  Boat leaking, a scared Quire bailing, and that thing driving them along.’  He was grim.  He looked at me.  ‘We need to follow it.  Now. There’s no time to be wrong.  And once the snow hits, we won’t be able to see our hands in front of our faces.’

He pointed at the tin of pemmican.  ‘That, your blanket coat, and rackettes.  Fast as you can.’

I put the tin into my side bag and laced on my rackettes.

Revans reached into a pack basket and took out a belt wound around the holster of his wheel gun.  I’d forgotten he had it; Spirit Guns were as rare then as they are now.  Soul Flake is rare and hard to make; aye, and no one likes it, which is why so few people have guns.

‘Silver bullets?’ I asked.

He nodded.

‘Will it put down a demon?’ I asked.

‘I have no idea,’ he said.  ‘I’m a Guide, not a sorcerer.’

‘Who summoned this thing?’ I asked again.  We were already moving.

Revans stopped and turned.  ‘Doctor, you’re a smart one and no mistake.  An’ I’m confident you know more o’ demons an’ the like than I.  But we’re hunting this thing now an’ I need you to be silent. Because I think it’s huntin’ us, too.’

I nodded solemnly.

We set off.  Revans was tracking, and I simply followed him as he broke trail.  The Quire left distinctive, non-human tracks; a dew-claw and four toes. I had a long look at one; the child’s, I think.  It had claws that left deep holes like punctures in the snow.

Birds sang overhead.  I saw a black squirrel; the first, I think, that I’d ever seen.  And despite the animals, the birdsong, and the sunlight, I was near smothered in dread.  The light was odd, almost grey as the storm clouds pushed in; it was bitterly cold, and the first snow, when it came, was a powder.

We moved in near silence.  I say near, because our rackettes made noise as we crunched across the snow.  Anyone who has walked on really cold snow knows what I mean by the noise.

I wondered if our adversary had another crossbow.  It seemed absurd to doube back and set a trap with your only viable weapon, but then, I had been warned at University against expecting the infernal powers to think as I thought.

I remember Professor Maynard lecturing on the Infernal Powers, and my fellow undergraduates looking at each other, as if to say, ‘Are we supposed to believe this?’

In the setting sun of a near-solstice day, it was easy to believe.

Darkness was coming.

Revans stopped moving forward.  In fact, he froze.

We’d long since left the portage; I didn’t have to be a Guide to know we were in the woods themselves, tracking this thing, far off a road or trail. We were in deep woods, big spruce standing like the spears of a gargantuan army, with a dusting of snow over thick pine needles down at ground level. The trees were forty feet apart or more with very little undergrowth.

Then Revans looked at me.  He didn’t point, but after a long look I saw them; two Guire, one very small, and a man leaning against a tree.  He had a wheel gun pointed at the Quire adult.

He looked bad.  He looked like a four-day old corpse with a demon inside; I can’t think of a better way to put it.

‘Cap’n,’ he said, as if he was still a man, and Revans was a friend.

Revans kept walking forward on his snow shoes.

‘Best stop, Cap’n,’ the dead man said.  I was still walking too, but I’d taken a different line, a line with less underbrush and no cover between me and the Steka. I had been convinced by Revans, but one look at the blue-grey skin of the corpse that had been Ben Ipsa made the situation plain.

Revans stopped, perhaps thirty feet from the Steka.

‘I can feel your power, Doctor,’ it said to me.  ‘I…’

‘Who summoned you, steka?’ Revans asked.

It leered.

The Quire female moaned.  It was a terrible sound.  She was cradling an arm, as if it was broken.  The child hid in her legs.

The steak said, ‘Wouldn’t you like to know, Cap’n?  Give me the Talent, I’ll tell you. This body is too gods-damned hard to ride.’ The steka sounded almost friendly, asking for me.  My soul.

Revans had stopped, and stood facing the steka.  It was watching the Quire and its child, but it spared a glance for me.  ‘So much power,’ it said.

I was thirty feet away.  When it glanced at Revans, I shot it.  Nor did I miss.  My bolt hit it high in the chest and knocked the corpse of Ben Ipsa flat.

The Quire broke into a low run, almost like a cat, on four legs.  The child ran with it, bound for bound.

The thing riding Ben Ipsa rolled ot its feet as if uninjured.  I’d already racked the crossbow, fear fueling my muscles so that I’d never cocked a crossbow so easily before.  One of the bolts came out of the Olean-rubber holder and fell into the snow; there I was in mittens…

The steka raised its wheel gun, but the Quire was canny, ducking and putting big trees between them.

I got the second bolt into the groove.  The wheel gun was pointing at me. I shot first, amazed at my steadiness; at this range, I was not going to miss, nor did I .  My bolt struck home and the thing twitched, dropped to one knee, gave an unnatural shudder, and tried to rise again.

I think it gave up on its mortal container. I have no other way of explaining what happened next.

From the dead man’s mouth came a billowing cloud of… nothing.  It formed like the molten sugar that the young man at the University gates had blowing into spheres to hang on solstice boughs. Instantly I felt it press against my thoughts; an ugliness like molestation, a penetration of all that makes you yourself.

I slammed my thoughts closed. I was dimly aware that our Quare were coming up from the right, both of them carrying spears, but I couldn’t spare any thought from my defences.

The cloud of transparent nothing ignored the charge of the Quare and probed at me.

Revans raised his wheel gun and fired.

What happened was beautiful and terrible.  The projectile, silver, probably cast by an alchemical hermeticist, struck the cloud of nothing and drove into it, and then the clod began to collapse into the projectile like a conjuror’s trick, rushing into, or perhaps out, through the hole in reality that the wheel gun’s projectile had made, until there was a sudden, horrible, despairing scream and then it was gone.

The awful pressure on my thoughts was gone.

The cloud of nothing was gone.  All that was left was the smell in the air from the soulflake in the wheel-gun’s cartridge; the terrible smell of incense and sulphur, the sense of sin and loss.

Revans glanced at me.  I wasn’t doing anything; the crossbow had fallen from my hands into the shallow snow, and I had made no move to pick it up.  Ipsa’s body was no longer animated, and lay like a pile of old clothes.

Erka had an arm around the Quire and another around the child.  Old Harry was watching the air where the cloud of nothing had vanished.

The tableau lasted perhaps three breaths, and then the world returned to normal.  The Quire child cried a thin, keening cry; the Quire tried to console it, the two Quare turned to it, and Revans slowly holstered his pistol.

‘Lot of snow coming,’ he said.  ‘We’d best get under cover.’

There followed a trip that was almost a rout.  Revans decided (as he later explained) that we would race the storm back across the lake to the last Lodge; he said as much in a few words ot Old Harry, and we were away, running, as best as my poor skills allowed, over the snow for our boat, and then he was at the oars and we were racing across upper lake, with the snow covered mountains all around us; Ninia, and Blue, and Thaska, and Wolf’s Head. But fate was with us; the wind and the storm were behind us and drove the boat faster, and we made the portage just as the snow began to fall in earnest.

Then we had to trek our gear across the portage.  It wasn’t long, but as Revans had promised, we could scarecely see a hand in front of our faces, and on this, the shortest day of the year, light was failing fast.

The snow blew at our backs, and swirled in the lantern light; I lost Revans, and he had to walk back and find me, and suddenly I was standing in the lee of a log wall. Revans shouted something, but the wind carried it away, and then he was gone.

I could feel the logs, and elected to stay put.  I thought we were at the lodge at the far end fo the Upper Lake carry, and it didn’t seem impossible that Revans knew a way in to the cold building.  I had a bad moment, as I imagined what it would have been like to meet the steka in this much snow; and my feet were losing feeling.

And then a black rectangle opened in the blank log wall above me, and the light of my lantern told me I’d misunderstood the whole structure; I was standing at the base of the steps up to the porch.  I clambered up, baskets and all, and passed through, to find Revans brushing snow off.

The rest is short to tell; we got a fire lit in one of the big fireplaces, and the Quare, and Quire came in out of the snow, and there was food, all canned or dried, and water from a well. Revans went back out into the snow for his boat, which was a mere hump of snow where he’d dropped it to unlock the door of the Lodge.  He brought his precious boat in, and then went out again and returned with a small spruce tree, just five feet high, which he proceeded to prop up near the fire.  The Quare brushed away the snow and we all set to decorating it while the wind howled outside like all the Infernal spirits bound together, but the fire was warm, and we had popcorn and dried cranberries and pemican and tinned beef as the snow raged.

That was solstice.  To this day, the Guides say the soul of the steka fueled the storm, the worst anyone could remember.  It was a week before we dug out, and then we had to walk, towing the boat like a sleigh, all the way down the chin of lakes, because they were frozen and ‘true winter’ had come. The Quare and the Quire came with us a good piece, all the way to Fifth Lake, where we parted. I’d scarcely exchanged a word with Old Harry, and yet been left with the impression that I was welcome to return. And I carried the child; eye, and fed it.  Sa called itself Sa.

We were all the way back to Ginon’s Hotel when I finally asked Revans my question.  We were easy with one another by then; we’d had two weeks to learn each others ways. But only when he brought me to the porch of the hotel did I ask.

‘Who do you think summoned the steka?’ I asked.

He looked down the lake for so long I thought he might not answer.  ‘I hope you come back, doctor,’ he said, after a long piece.  ‘I hope you come back in finer weather, so we can shoot a deer, perhaps catch some trout, mayhap explore some ruins.’

‘I would like that above all things,’ I agreed with passion.

‘Then,’ he said, and suddenly his bottle-green eyes were on mine, ‘Never ask that question aloud. The Borders are full of lies and liars, doctor.’

‘You think it was Government!’ I said, without thinking. ‘You think it was set up by…’

He frowned.  ‘I think you should attend to what I said.  Good evening, doctor.’

And with that, he walked away into the snow.

I’d be interested to hear what you, as readers, think of my Vaguely Victorian Adjacent Fantasy World (VVAFW).  It’s a new setting with new magics and new ideas.  We might see more of Revans and Doctor Trevelyan and the haunted woods and waters of the Border. In the meantime, Happy Holidays!

Miles Cameron, Toronto, December 2023

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