The Empty Walks

Ryder had not seen Hollis's face for two seasons. He had, in the second of those seasons, seen Ferrin's once, at a distance, on a road in the western edge of Shadowglade where Ferrin had been walking with the small unsteady gait of a man whose body was being used by a hand other than his own.

He had been tracking the empty for the past two seasons in this way.

He had been tracking them alone. The men under his lieutenant's commission did not yet know that he was tracking the empty.

Two of the older privates had, by the third week of the second season, stopped asking. They had served under him long enough to know that the privates who continued to ask questions about an officer's pauses on a ridge were the privates that an officer eventually ceased to take with him on the long patrols.

This morning he was on a ridge. The ridge was the second ridge east of Hartheld, and it gave the long flat view westward across the small low valley in which the village sat. The men of the patrol were a half-mile behind him at the small camp he had set in the lee of the second hill.

The older private who had been carrying his second tripod up the lee — a man named Casker, who had been with him since the western season — came up behind him at the third hour and stopped six paces back. Casker did not, on the stopping, speak. He had been with Ryder long enough not to.

Casker stayed. He stood at the six paces. He did not, in the next two hours, speak. He did not, in the next two hours, lift the second glass.

Ryder watched the two figures.

He saw them at the second hour after their first appearing.

He saw them not from the eastern road, where he had been measuring the eastern road for the kind of arrival the eastern road would, in his careful private estimation, eventually carry, but from the northern end of the valley. They came down the small path beside the river, two figures, walking at the same uneven pace, in the same unhurried slightly-too-still gait that men whose bodies were being used by hands other than their own walked at when the hands had not hurried them.

Ryder did not, on seeing them, change the angle of the glass.

The two figures were Hollis and Ferrin.

He recognized them by their walks. He had not seen Hollis's face for two seasons; he did not need to. He had served beside Hollis through three winters before Shadowglade, and the small uneven feature of Hollis's left foot — a small old injury from Hollis's third year of service — had been the small uneven feature he had identified Hollis by from a hundred yards in any of those winters. The feature was still there in the walk.

The two empty walked, at a measured even pace, down the path to Hartheld.

They did not speak, as far as Ryder could see at his glass's range. They did not, in the walking, look at each other, because they did not, on Ryder's slow careful reading, need to look at each other. They were walking the same instruction.

They reached the village at the third hour after midday.

The village did not, when they entered it, raise an alarm. The watch on the eastern wall of the village — a single elderly man with a long pole, who had been the watch on the eastern wall for as long as the village had been a village — saw them and did not raise his voice. The two empty walked past him without looking at him.

The two empty walked to the centre of the village. They stopped at the small stone well at the centre. They stood beside the well for a long count, side by side, without speaking. Then one of them — Ryder could not, at his range, tell which — turned his head, very slightly, and spoke a word.

Ryder did not hear the word at his glass's range. He saw the lips move. He saw the small careful shape of the word in the angle of the jaw and the brief small lift of the chin that the body was not, at any of its old habits, in the habit of performing in the giving of an order. The word, on his reading of the lips, was now.

The village changed.

It did not, in the changing, scream. It did not, in the changing, run. The blacksmith stopped striking. The schoolmaster left his small classroom. The priest came out of the small chapel. The watch on the eastern wall lowered his pole and walked toward the well. The women in the small open square set down their baskets. The children in the small open square continued, for a moment, in the small uneven habits of children, then began, in the same quiet way the adults had begun, to follow the adults toward the well.

The village gathered at the well.

The two empty stood at the centre. They did not raise their hands. They did not give a speech. The villagers gathered around them in a slow loose ring, and the ring stood for a long count without any of its members looking at any of the others, and the only sound that reached Ryder at his ridge was the small thin sound of the wind in the grasses.

Then the ring dispersed.

The villagers walked back to their work. The two empty remained at the well, side by side, in the same posture they had held since they had reached it.

Ryder watched the village resume. He watched it for the rest of the afternoon. The empty had been welcomed by being unnoticed.

That, Ryder understood at the small slow turn of the western light into evening, was the front line.

He turned, at the western hour, from the glass. He folded the small tripod. He went down the back of the ridge to the small camp where the patrol was waiting.

It was Casker who asked. The other men had not.

He did not tell the patrol what he had seen. He wrote his report at the third hour after dark, by the small lamp of the watch fire, in the small clean hand he had been keeping his reports in since his commission. He wrote that the empty had been seen at Hartheld. He wrote that the empty had walked west together. He wrote that the village had not reacted. He did not write the word front. He did not, in his report, allow himself any of the small private words his ridge had taught him. He sent the report to Raven by his fastest courier.

He did not, on the long ride back to Darklume, allow himself the small private satisfaction of having seen what he had been sent to see. The seeing was the small smaller half of the work. The larger half was the work he was about to ride into.

The empty had been moving in straight lines for one season. The straight lines, the chronicle observed in its higher register, had begun to converge. They had not yet converged on Darklume. They were converging on the country between the villages. The country between the villages was the country no army defended. It had not been the front, in any season of any war the kingdom had remembered. It was the front now.