Chapter 65: The Road to Greyhaven
Chapter 65: The Road to Greyhaven
At some point, the lamp went out on its own. I stayed where I was until the window turned grey.
Then I sat up and looked at the room—the bed, the lamp, the door that locked, all of it earned and none of it useful—and understood that I had run out of reasons to remain here.
There’s nothing in Fenwick that answers a single question I have.
I started packing before the sun was properly up.
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I left quietly and I left square, because those turn out to be the same thing.
The room got swept. The blanket got folded, which was pointless and which I did anyway. I settled the last of my account at the trade shed and paid a woman four rounds of ammunition for a jug I’d broken on my second day and never mentioned, which produced a longer silence than the transaction warranted.
Everything went into the ring except what I’d want in my hands: rifle, both knives, one water bladder, the map in my coat.
Halloran was at the gate at seven, which I don’t believe was a coincidence.
"You’ve got the map."
"I’ve got the map."
"Bridge at Callow Ford’s gone. It’s marked as standing. It isn’t."
"Somebody already told me."
He looked at me for a second and decided not to ask which somebody.
"Right," he said. "Then that’s the lot. If you’re back through this way, we’ll trade. You’d get a fair price, and I’d not ask you a single question, and there’s a bed if there’s a bed free." He put his hand out. "That’s the whole offer. There’s nothing under it."
I shook it.
That was the entire farewell, and I have been grateful for it ever since. He didn’t ask me to stay, or to come back, or to leave a way of contacting me, or to consider what Fenwick might do if the next Panther arrived. He’d worked out weeks ago what I was and what I wasn’t, and he’d stopped trying to make it be something else, and that is a rarer quality than courage.
I went north-east through the plantation and out onto the reservoir road with the sun coming up on my right.
The journey took four days and I did it properly, and I’d like to record what "properly" now means, because six weeks ago I’d have found it unrecognisable.
I read the ground before I walked on it. Every morning I’d get up somewhere with a view and spend twenty minutes with the map, and I’d pick not just the route but the two places I’d fall back to if the route went wrong. I stayed off the crests. I crossed open ground at the narrowest point available even when it added a kilometre. I stopped at midday, not because I was tired, but because midday light makes everything visible at distance and I wanted to be somewhere still while I looked at it.
On the second day I found a bridge that wasn’t there, exactly as advertised, and went four hours upstream to a place where a fallen pylon made a crossing, and I did not once resent the four hours.
I used the Veil constantly, and never once to be clever.
There was a Ridge-Ox herd on the second afternoon — six of them, Level 9 or so, blocking a cutting. Two months ago I’d have hunted one, because it was six against one and the one was me and I was hungry. This time I walked through the middle of them at the pace of a man in a museum, three metres from a flank, and came out the other side, and the whole thing took eleven minutes and cost nothing.
Twice more after that. Something in a culvert I never saw properly. A pack of low grey things around a kill on the third morning, which I went round rather than through, because the Veil dies the instant anything touches you and a pack is a great many opportunities for something to touch you.
And every single time, before I moved, I asked the question.
Where am I standing when it looks at me?
That’s the whole of what Liora gave me in that bramble patch and it changed how I walk. Not can I get there — anyone can get anywhere, slowly. What is the second thing I do. I picked my exit before my approach every time, and twice I abandoned a route entirely because the answer was "nowhere good," and I have no idea whether either of those decisions saved my life and I intend to keep making them.
I saw people once, on the third evening: four of them with a handcart, a kilometre off, moving south on the road I’d deliberately not been using. I lay in a hedge with the Veil on and watched them for forty minutes until they were gone, and I never found out whether they were dangerous, and that was the correct outcome.
I fired the rifle zero times in four days.
I circulated every morning, before food, on cold ground, and it hurt every morning the way it always does, and the grain of rice behind my navel was a very slightly larger grain of rice by the time I got there. Nothing dramatic. That’s not what it does.
Greyhaven announced itself two hours before I saw it.
First the road got better — actually maintained, potholes filled with rubble, the verges cut back thirty metres on both sides so nothing could lie up close. Then the traffic. Two carts, then a group of six armed people walking with the unhurried confidence of a patrol, then a wagon with an ox and a driver who nodded at me.
Then the outer checkpoint, and I stopped on the rise above it and just looked for a while.
It was a system. That’s the only way to describe it. A double barricade of poured concrete and welded plate stretching four hundred metres across the valley neck, with guard platforms at intervals and actual overlapping fields of fire. Two entry lanes, one for foot and one for vehicles, funnelled through chicanes so nothing could take a run at them. A registration station under a roof with a queue of maybe fifteen people. Beyond it, a search area with tables.
And guards who moved like guards. Not men with guns; people who had been trained, standing where they’d been told to stand, watching the approaches rather than each other.
Every single one of them had a coloured badge on the shoulder.
Right, I thought, joining the back of the queue with my heart going. So this is what organised looks like.
The queue took forty minutes. The man in front of me was a trader who talked the entire time and told me, without my asking anything, that Greyhaven had eleven thousand people in it, three surgeons, and a mercenary hall.
Then I was at the table.
The guard was a woman about my age with a green badge and a clipboard, and she was polite, and unhurried, and completely uninterested in me as a person.
"Name."
"Adrian Vale."
She wrote it. "Class."
I opened my mouth.
"Class grade, and your reason for entry," she added, not looking up.