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 cargo: 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.

On the planet that backdrops this excellent sequel to last year's Rider at the Gate, the native wildlife is dangerously telepathic, able to project its own emotions or to amplify human ones. Human settlements survive only in valleys protected by the riders of nighthorses, equine-like animals who have bonded with people. But sometimes nighthorses go rogue, the planet is rugged and its winters are lethal. The narrative tells of a young rider escorting two brothers and their sister, who has been driven mad by the rogue nighthorse that is following the little company as it races for shelter from winter storms. Nor is the nighthorse the only pursuer?something else is on their trail, hungry and apparently intelligent. The pacing is occasionally slow, but Cherryh tosses in plenty of well-handled action to compensate. The world-building is up to her highest level and, as a bonus, the story ends on a cliffhanger that indicates at least one more Rider novel to come.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Sequel to the mediocre Rider at the Gate (1995), set on a planet where human colonists have bonded with native telepathic, carnivorous, quadrupeds confusingly and lazily called ``horses.'' As winter deepens, young rider Danny Fisher and his horse, Cloud, attempt to escort three young people--the only survivors of the massacre at Tarmin--up the steep, slippery slop of Rogers Peak to the village Evergreen: smith Carlo (his guilty secret is that he killed his violent father); his younger brother Randy; and their younger sister, the comatose Brionne (her misapplied bond with the rogue horse caused all the trouble). At Evergreen, Danny, unsure of their reception, evades difficult questions; and he suspects that they were followed up the mountain by a riderless horse, another potential rogue. Indeed, certain villages prove hostile until they realize that Carlo will inherit several properties in Tarmin. Brionne, hating her brothers and still desperate to bond with a horse, slowly recovers physically if not psychologically. Danny and a local rider, Ridley, halfheartedly attempt to hunt the loose horse, but eventually the beast bonds with an astonished Carlo. Meanwhile, another, unknown, creature--a stalker with the terrifying ability to hide and misdirect telepathically, thus far kept at bay by Carlo's horse--enters the village, bonds with crazy Brionne and begins to slaughter the inhabitants. Only by heroic efforts will Danny and the other riders manage to drive it off. An overlong and underpowered entry that clearly needed a strategic regroup or a rethought approach; only in the last few pages does anything new or stimulating emerge. -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Two-time Hugo winner Cherryh (Inheritor, LJ 3/15/96) presents a new epic set in the universe she introduced in Rider at the Gate. Colonists, stranded on a distant planet deadly to humans, struggle to survive in small, isolated communities. The native nighthorses provide a telepathic buffer between the humans and the wildlife?which projects violent images, driving humans insane. Here, young Danny Fisher and his nighthorse, Cloud, face a threat from an unseen predator. Cherryh's vivid descriptions make the reader feel the extreme cold. Highly recommended for sf collections.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Danny Fisher and his telepathically linked horse, Cloud, are desperately struggling to conduct Carlo and Randy Goss and their stricken sister, Brionne, to safety or at least away from the ruins of their village, Tarmin. But a bad winter is beginning, and they are forced by a storm to take refuge in the isolated village of Evergreen. Besides the weather, on their track is a probably dangerously spooked horse as well as the truth about what happened in Tarmin. Danny must walk a careful path, alerting Evergreen to the dangers Brionne may be attracting to the village, helping the brothers avoid the perils of their orphaned state, and all the while gaining and keeping the respect of the Evergreen riders. Cherryh's storytelling is irresistible, and her characterizations make us care deeply about what happens to the story's finely delineated personae, both human and equine. Although this book is a sequel to Cherryh's popular Rider at the Gate , it is certainly strong enough to stand on its own. Dennis Winters