Cloud's rider

From a lethal mountain blizzard to a holocaust of madness and murder, the saga of Danny Fisher and the nighthorse Cloud continues, as Hugo Award-winner C. J. Cherryh returns to the universe she created in the Locus bestseller Rider at the Gate. Here a fragile human colony struggles in a world of telepathic predators and scavengers. Here illusions can destroy and emotions can kill. Here only the Riders, bonded to the alien nighthorses, can protect humanity from the horrors beyond its village walls. In a blizzard white-out on ice-covered, cliffside trails, Danny and Cloud feel the full force of the High Wild winter. They dare to journey to the mountaintop village of Evergreen with a precious, priceless three children. Carlo and Randy Goss and their comatose sister, Brionne, are the sole survivors of Tarmin, a village destroyed in a vermin swarm triggered by a rogue horse, and they desperately need help. In a land where nature is linked in the telepathic "ambient," no event ever ends. The horror of Tarmin's annihilation is echoing across the mountains, drawing riderless, feral nighthorses and unknown predators - one of which is following, desiring, the children. Worse, Evergreen greets Danny and the Goss kids not with sympathy but with greed. The swarm slaughtered Tarmin's population but left their property untouched, ready to be looted by Evergreen's miners and loggers. The property legally belongs to Carlo, Randy and Brionne ... if Danny can keep them alive through a long winter of threats and extortion. Only Evergreen's riders - Ridley, Callie and their eight-year-old daughter, Jennie - and the nighthorses Slip, Shimmer and Rain realize that Evergreen faces a worse menace than avarice, that Danny Fisher hasn't told them the whole story... Now something is coming from the Wild. Something powerful, intelligent and in love with madness wants the sleeping Brionne. And if she wakes, the secret in her subconscious, amplified by the human lust in snowbound Evergreen, could unleash a new flood of death.