Moving Targets and Other Tales of Valdemar

“Go ahead and set your trap, Rod,” she said firmly, cutting short any protests. “Alma, Laurel, we three will try to make enough sounds in here to make it seem as if all of us are in here.” She glanced out the open door. “If you’re going to get things set up, Rod, you’d better do so now, and then you’ll be in hiding well before sunset. I want all of you that are going to be setting up the trap to go in and out several times so that if anyone is watching us, they’ll likely lose count. Get water or wood, anything you think is a good excuse. Laurel, you and I will take care of the camp chores and make a lot of noise about it while Alma does her investigation.”

Laurel looked ready to burst with indignation, but she didn’t protest. Alma dove into the storage compartments and assembled a mortar and pestle, a couple of buckets of water, some dishes, and some other apparatus, and set to breaking up something in the mortar and pestle that made enough noise to cover just about anything.

Looking very unhappy, Arville and Ryu made several trips in and out of the doors carrying water and small amounts of wood, some odds and ends, before finally going out and not coming back again. The Companions made a more convincing job of it, bringing in quite a good deal of firewood before vanishing one by one. Elyn shut the door after them, lit all the lanterns, and, with Laurel’s sulky help, began making noisy supper preparations. At this point, Alma was doing something inscrutable with the dishes and the water; whatever it was, it was making some sound too, so Elyn left her to it.

She stretched out the preparations as long as she could; it wasn’t easy to tell in here whether the sun had set or not. Since it was a threshing building, it was as sealed against vermin as could be managed. The food was ready in what seemed to her to be far too short a time, but there was no point in wasting it. She and Laurel ate; Alma came and fetched herself a bowl of the thick soup Elyn had made, then went back to her buckets. Halfway through the meal, she had stopped messing about with the buckets and was pounding again, this time using the pestle as a hammer against a stone, pounding something she had wrapped in a bit of cloth.

She unfolded the cloth, peered at what was in there, and then did something with it. “Aha!” Elyn heard her say.

And that was when everything exploded outside.

The long, moaning howl began. Elyn heard Ryu yelp, Arville burst out with a terrified exclamation of “G-ghosts!” and Rod shout, “Got you!”

And that was the signal for what sounded like a battle royal.

She ran for the doors, but they were both bolted again. She and Alma and Laurel pounded on them fruitlessly for a while, while outside she could hear not only Rod shouting, but the sounds of fighting, of other men shouting, of Arville and Ryu howling, of angry whinnies and hoofbeats.

:Get back!: Mayar “shouted” in her mind.

She cleared Laurel and Alma away from the doors; there was a furious kick and a crash and the door burst open.

Through the now-open doors poured a tangled heap of people and nets, some free and fighting and some not, followed by all five Companions, relentlessly driving them all inside. Arville and Ryu were the most tangled up, but there were some strangers in there too, all of them masked and draped in tattered rags that smelled like mold and rotting wood.

Masked they might have been, but they were fighters; Elyn slashed Ryu and Arville free with her sword while Alma and Laurel joined in the fight. By now all the noise had brought the villagers out of their homes and up to the barn; several of the bravest grabbed pieces of firewood and waded into the affray while the Companions circled the outside of the mob and kept anyone from escaping—

—including one masked miscreant, who, alone among all of them, was not armed and not fighting. Mayar was the one who caught him by the scruff of the neck in his teeth as he tried to get away, and kept him dangling off the ground while the rest of the gang was subdued and trussed up.

With them was an assortment of noisemakers that had produced all the unearthly howls. There were bull-roarers, a set of several predator-calls strapped together so they could all be sounded at the same time, and a contraption with a rough piece of twine that could be pulled through something like a drum-head of rawhide, producing a truly uncanny moan.

“I told you it was just people!” Rod shouted in triumph, when the last of them—the fellow dangling from Mayar’s teeth—was firmly bound and set with the rest.

By now all of the village—most tellingly, all of the youngsters, including the ones that Rod had suspected—had crowded into the barn. “Well it might not have been spirits,” Laurel sniffed, examining first her improvised club, which she then cast aside, and then her nails. “But it wasn’t who you thought it was.”

And hanging in the air was the unspoken so there!