Chapter 54: What Remained
Chapter 54: What Remained
I returned to the print shop alone shortly after noon.
The room looked exactly as it had that morning: rifle cloth folded beside the wall, two bottles under the window, rolled coat at the head of the bed. Eight hours had passed for me. For Eira, none of them had happened anywhere except inside her own memory.
I unpacked in silence. Her share of the kills remained in the ring because there had been no sensible way to send a butchered Ridgeback back into whatever situation she had left. The spare bandage roll had returned with me too. Anything she had arrived wearing or carrying had remained tethered to her manifestation and returned with her, retaining whatever damage or changes it had suffered here. Anything I handed her from this world stayed behind.
The physical consequences of her presence remained. The dead Ridgeback stayed dead, its body stayed where we had left it, my healing remained, and every object we had moved kept its new position. Only an effect that existed solely because her manifestation energy was actively sustaining it would end when she returned.
Apparently interdimensional kidnapping had rules about property.
I sat on the floor and tried to circulate.
It went badly. Every time I settled into the pattern, I remembered her bow hitting the grass. When I forced that image away, I got two white ears springing upright beneath my hand instead, followed by a Desire increase large enough to make me feel as if I had accidentally discovered a cheat code I had no intention of using.
The numbers were true. They were not the whole of her.
Desire at fifty did not mean she trusted me. Trust at nineteen proved that rather clearly, and even that number could not tell me what waited for her after she returned. I couldn’t choose Eira on the next Call, couldn’t reach across dimensions to check on her, and couldn’t make eight decent hours outweigh the life that had taught her to kneel in a field.
You gave her eight hours without punishment, I told myself. Don’t turn it into more because you want to feel useful.
That thought finally let me finish circulating.
For the next three days, my life became quiet again. I hunted the southern route, traded two hides and most of the Ridgeback meat, and spent an entire afternoon fixing the print shop window so it stopped rattling whenever the wind changed. The trader offered me a better rate on ammunition without admitting he was doing it. A pair of children began following me from the water shed to the yard until their mother noticed and retrieved them with the expression of someone rescuing them from a live grenade.
Nobody asked about the white-eared woman who had left through the south gate with me and never returned through it. The watch had seen us leave together and me return alone, but Fenwick Junction did not keep a roll of every outsider who passed its walls. As far as anyone knew, my quiet companion had parted from me beyond the gate and gone somewhere else without troubling them.
That explanation was ordinary enough to survive.
The Blind Call cooldown counted down behind everything I did. I checked it once the first evening, once the next morning, and then made myself stop. A recovered charge did not create an obligation to use it the instant it appeared. More importantly, it did not promise Eira.
Three days after she vanished, an hour after dark, the north gate was still open and the eight-person hunting party that had gone out at dawn had not returned.
I did not volunteer to look for them.
There were people in the yard by nine that night who thought somebody should, and one of them said as much, loudly, twice — and I stood at the edge of the lamplight with my hands in my pockets and let the conversation happen without me.
Eight experienced hunters had not come back. Whatever had stopped eight armed people in daylight was not going to be improved by adding one Level 13 in the dark.
Nobody went out. In the morning the leaders sent a group of six with orders to stay together and not go past the reservoir road, and that group came back at noon having found nothing, which told me more than finding something would have.
I went out at first light on my own, because I still had to eat, and because I wanted to see the ground.
It was wrong within two kilometres.
The first thing was the quiet. Not the ordinary quiet of a dead district; the specific quiet of a place where the small things have decided to be somewhere else. I sat in the hedge line where Eira had heard the Ridgeback and I listened for twenty minutes and heard nothing that lived. No birds. No diggers in the ditch. The ditch had been a reliable ditch for a week and a half.
The second thing was the carcasses.
I found three in a half-kilometre. All Ridgebacks, all opened at the throat, and all of them half eaten and abandoned — the neck and shoulder taken, the rest left to spoil. Nothing that eats out of hunger does that. That is what something does when it is not eating to live.
The third thing settled it.
A pine at the corner of the plantation had been clawed at chest height, four parallel gouges going through the bark into the wood, and there was a smell on the trunk that made the back of my neck contract before I understood why. Two hundred metres on, another tree, same height, same four marks. Then another.
Boundary, I thought. That’s a boundary, and I am standing well inside it.
I backed out along my own footprints and went round the long way, and I found the hunting party’s trail on the far side of the plantation road, and I followed it for about six hundred metres before I stopped.
There was a shotgun in the bracken with the stock cracked. There were seven spent cases in a group of three and four, which meant someone had fired twice, in bursts, in two different directions. There was a lot of blood, most of a day old and gone black, in three separate places well apart from one another.
And there were drag marks. Two of them, heading north-west, into the plantation.
I did not follow the drag marks. I turned around and walked back to Fenwick Junction and I did not stop once.
The interface had given me nothing at any point that morning, because it never does. It doesn’t scan and it doesn’t warn. But I had seen the marks, and the abandoned kills, and the height, and I remembered the bestiary well enough from a life I’d wasted reading about a game I never played.
Feline. Territorial. Marks high. Kills far more than it eats when it’s establishing ground. Takes the throat.
Nightfang.