Alex Bledsoe - Burn Me Deadly

I knew it had to be. They’d taken us from the road to their lair, tortured Laura until she died, then carried us to the cliff, all sometime between midnight and dawn. These woods were thick and would be slow to travel, especially for three men carrying two bodies and leading a recalcitrant horse. They couldn’t have taken us very far.

Buddy led me down trails I never would have spotted on my own. His pony had a much easier time of it than my horse, and more than once I thought of insisting we continue on foot. My nag tossed her head and fought any nudge to her flank as we descended an easy but perilously thin ledge to the bottom of a gully, then followed the dried creek bed. Above us the walls grew higher and steeper, until the place almost qualified as a canyon. I got queasy when it also began to look familiar.

Suddenly my horse stopped and would not continue, no matter what names I called her. She pawed at the ground, her hooves clacking on the stones from the old riverbed. I was considering a good smack with the flat of my sword when the wind changed and I smelled what had halted her.

“It’s just up here,” Buddy said, his pony unaffected by the odor.

“I know,” I said, swung off my saddle and released the reins. The horse backed up a step as if tensing to bolt, but I glared at her and she stopped. She lowered her head and began munching on the grass sprouting between the smooth rocks.

I tried really hard to get a grip on myself. After all, I’d seen plenty of dead horses, plenty of dead people, in my life. This was just another crime scene I needed to check for clues. So why did it feel like I was about to see the corpse of my best friend? I parted my lips and breathed through my clenched teeth as I approached the big object lying on the ground just ahead.

The flies were doing their job, and the rest of the forest disposal crew were no slackers, either. But most of her was still there. Huge slashes across Lola’s flanks showed where she’d been cut with a knife or a sword, most likely to drive her off the cliff. She was far too smart to just jump on her own. In the patches of bare dirt between the stones I saw prints from coyotes, raccoons, possums and other varmints, as well as the wagon tracks from where Buddy had picked up Laura and me.

Buddy, leading his pony, stopped beside me. He held a cloth over his face. “The fall might not’ve killed her right away,” he said clinically. “Coulda just broke her ribs. Then she’d suffocate, or drown in her own blood if her lungs got poked.”

I clenched my fists. “Say anything else, Buddy, and I’ll open a fresh jug of Bella Lou on you.”

He grumbled petulantly, “Hey, it’s just a horse; it’s not like it’s a person or anything.”

“Buddy,” I said with supreme self-control, “why’d you pick us up? You don’t strike me as the help-out-your-fellow-man type.”

“Didn’t want anyone to come looking for you and find us,” he said to the ground.

I looked at the cliffs. The sky above them was blue, cloudless and magnificent. Where had those men been standing that night? “How was I laying when you found me?”

“Flat on the ground.”

“No, I mean, could you tell which side I’d been thrown off?”

He nodded and pointed. It was almost, but not quite, a straight vertical drop, and I saw the place where I’d hit the base and rolled the rest of the way to the bottom. That little bounce had been what saved me. “The dragon people live somewhere up there?”

Buddy made a noncommittal sound muffled by the scarf.

I yanked it away from his face. “Buddy, I got a bellyful of pissed-off and I’m looking for somewhere to throw it up. It could be on your head just as easily as anywhere, so don’t give me a hard time.”

He turned white, which could’ve been just from the stench, and snatched the scarf back. “About half a mile down, there’s a cut that leads to a trail. It comes back along the top of the cliff up there. If you follow it, it’ll take you to a little shack. Only seen it from a distance, but… it’s theirs.”

I dug a coin from my pocket and gave it to him. He stared at it. “What’s this for?”

I nodded at the tools on his pony. “You got a shovel with you?”

“Yeah.”

I indicated Lola’s carcass. “Bury her.”

“The horse?”

“ Yes, the horse! ” I yelled.

He quickly pocketed the money. “Okay, fine. Sure thing. I’ll get right on it.”

“I’ll be back to check,” I assured him as I turned to mount Lola’s completely inadequate replacement.

Buddy had told the truth: the cut hit the canyon at a right angle, provided an easy ascent and led to a trail that ran along the cliff top. Smooth as it was, the damn horse still balked at it, and I’d have made faster progress had I let the nag ride me. She picked her way up the cut like a barefoot spinster, then seemed determined to turn down the trail in the opposite direction from the one I wanted. After implying many things about her parentage under my breath, I got her pointed the right way, parallel with the edge of the cliff.

Eventually I reached the spot where I’d been tossed to my presumed death. Far below, Buddy dug lethargically at the grave. He looked up, saw me and waved, then returned to work. I had no delusions he’d do a good job.

The stony ground showed evidence of recent activity, but nothing more definite. I’d also crossed some sort of weather line, because up here the breeze was chilly on my sweat-damp skin. Out of nowhere the horse suddenly snorted and balked again, and a moment later the reason hit me: another out-of-place odor, this one very like lamp oil.

I looked around for the source. The hill rose above me to a forested crest, beyond which I glimpsed the top of higher hills. The soil here was rockier and less accommodating than it was even fifty feet below, and in many places bundles of boulders poked from the ground. I remembered what Bella Lou had told me, dismounted and knelt by the nearest one. The odor was incredibly strong, and when I put my hand down into a crevice-belatedly realizing that it might hold things like rattlesnakes, spiders or the odd displaced scorpion-I felt a slippery coating on the rocks down where the wind couldn’t dry them. My fingertips were damp when I pulled them out, and one sniff told me Bella Lou had been right. But why go around painting the insides of nooks and crannies with oil?

I wiped my hands on some leaves, climbed onto the horse and wrestled her back along the trail. She kept a ridiculous distance from the edge, ensuring the left side of my head was thwacked by every low-hanging branch. Eventually the trail turned away from the canyon and continued up the hillside through the forest.

I watched the sky for any sign of smoke. Here the trees were gnarled hawthorn, entwined with each other and studded with big spikes. There would be no traveling off the road in this neighborhood unless you were in armor. It occurred to me that perhaps Buddy had sent me after the mythical wild goose, which if true would earn him an ass-kicking not even Bella Lou could rival. But since I knew where he lived, it made no sense for him to trick me, unless he was sending me into a fatal trap. He seemed neither smart nor devious enough for that.

Then the damn horse began to fight me again. I perversely wished for some of the big, vicious cavalry spurs I’d used as a young man when I fought in the Trego marshes. The horse snorted and tried to turn, an almost impossible move on this narrow part of the trail. I ducked the spiked branches and cursed her to the best of my ex-soldier ability.

Finally I gave up, dismounted and threw the reins over a low branch. I drew my sword, once again resisted the urge to smack the animal and started up the trail. The horse let out a high, piercing whinny that must’ve carried for miles, and certainly alerted any of these mysterious dragon people that someone was coming.