Bastion

the snow—more than once when I was walking around in the valley getting some air. And one night before the snow came, I could have sworn I saw someone off across the valley when I went out for a good look at the moon to reckon the phase. But I figured it was just a trick of the shadows. It was night, it was dark, and it was over near one of those little groves.”
    Jakyr sighed. For a moment, Mags was dead certain he was going to scoff at all of them. “Much as I hate to add my name to the company of the haunted, I’ve been getting the same skin-crawling, someone-is-watching feeling myself. Only when alone. And just about every time I have been alone, whether it was in the caves or in the valley. Jermayan says he can’t sense anything and hasn’t smelled anything, and never have I wished so much for a good hound in my life.”
    :I have nothing for you,: said Dallen. :I have noticed you get that sensation when you are alone. You are never somewhere I can come. Perhaps it is a spirit.:
    “Dallen says the same,” he reported. “I dunno what to say. Except the last time I got the feeling watched feeling without any nastiness attached, remember, I ended up getting kidnapped.”
    Jakyr chewed that over. “I fail to see what anyone would want with all six of us, nor how they would manage to hold us without an army, nor how they would get us out of a snowbound valley at all, but I’ll take that under advisement,” he replied. “So everyone be cautious.” He glanced at Mags. “I’d like to ask you not to go to that treasure cave, but that doesn’t seem fair, and it isn’t as if Dallen couldn’t get to you in a heartbeat if something happened.”
    “The time I got kidnapped, though,” Mags added, “The feeling was always in the same place. Like there was some kinda invisible eye over me. An’ this—it’s all over, like I said. And it ain’t just me.”
    “Forewarned is forearmed,” Jakyr said. “And speaking of which—until this goes away or we figure out what it is, everyone go armed.”
    Mags had no argument with that. “Yessir,” he said, as the others nodded.
    •   •   •
    As if talking about it had dispelled the watcher, the next morning Mags went out to the “treasury” cave and felt absolutely nothing, even though he had the talisman—if that was what it was—in his pocket.
    He went back to sifting through the dirt, wondering if there really was a watcher, and now it was gone, if it had understood it was being talked about and decided to withdraw, if it was some sort of haunt and only needed to be acknowledged—
    —or if it had never existed in the first place, and was the product of people with a great deal of imagination and nerves on edge from being confined so closely together.
    On the other hand, maybe the point had been for him to find that talisman in the first place. It might have been the spirit of one or another of his parents, wanting him to find this little piece of his heritage. Why not? Spirits never lingered unless they wanted something. Maybe as long as the bit of stone had remained lost, they couldn’t rest, but now that he had it, they were ready to go on to whatever reward they were bound for.
    And maybe I can come up with about a hundred stories if I keep thinking about it, he admitted to himself. That was the danger of having too good an imagination. He could all too easily remember all the horror stories he had told himself about devils and monsters in the mine, ready to take him away. Even now, those memories made him shiver.
    And that was when a blast of frigid air from the cave mouth nearly blew out the fire and knocked him off balance.
    He jumped to his feet, but that was no inimical spirit that was screaming around the mouth of the cave. That was a very real and very bitter wind, and it was driving ice and snow right in here, past the turning of the tunnel and deep into the cave.
    His first thought was to fight his way back to the living cave. But Dallen stopped him in his tracks before he got more than two paces toward the door.
    :Don’t. This is worse than the last storm; this time the hills aren’t protecting the valley. Jakyr just went to the mouth of our cave with Jermayan; the wind nearly bowled him over, and it’s completely white out there. You can’t see a thing. You’d be lost in a moment.:
    As if to underscore that, another blast of icy air slammed into the treasury cave, bringing with it a thick skein of snow.
    :All right. I’m