Chapter 77: SEARCH
Aiden waited until nightfall.
South of the ditch the ground opened into a dry gully. It ran a hundred paces south and bent behind a stand of burned trees. The floor was grit and broken charcoal, deep enough to swallow a bootstep.
He put the boy in front of him and kept a hand on his collar. The cat went ahead. Miasma rode the kit bag on his shoulder. Nyx hid inside of it.
They went down to the bend. From inside, Aiden could see the stake row, the cut path, and the mouth of the den. From the stake row nobody could see the bend.
He set the kit bag against the gully wall.
The boy sat down and immediately started digging something out of his boot.
"Charcoal," the boy said. "It’s been in there since the ditch."
"Take the boot off."
"If I take it off, I have to put it back on."
"That’s how boots work."
The boy took the boot off. He turned it over and shook it.
A black flake fell out, the size of a fingernail. He looked at it with real hatred. Then he put the boot back on. He lay down with his coat over him and was asleep in under a minute.
Aiden stayed awake.
Grit worked into his collar and under his nails. Above the bend, forty burned trees stood with their branches gone and the bark cooked off them.
Nothing grew in it. Nothing crossed it. Three days on this ground and he had counted one beetle and one wolf.
And the beetle was a gift.
Miasma came off the kit bag and walked the length of the bend twice, nose down. She stopped near his boot and lay down.
"That’s the coldest patch in the whole gully."
She did not move.
"You picked it on purpose."
She put her chin down on her forefeet.
He slept in pieces. Every time he woke, the burn was the same. Black ground. No wind. The smell of old fire in his coat, his hair, and the water in his flask.
At first grey, the boy was already awake, sitting up with his arms around his knees, watching the stake row.
"They’ll come back," the boy said.
"They will."
"For the hound."
"For the hound."
The boy chewed the inside of his cheek. "My master used to say charter men don’t lose things. They misplace them, and then they write down who misplaced them."
"Your master had a lot of sayings."
"He had one for everything. He had one for rain." The boy scratched at the ash on his sleeve. "It wasn’t a good one."
The crew came back at second bell.
Four men, up the road from the east, same as the morning before. They turned onto the cut path and stopped at the tall stake at the row’s east end.
No hound this time. The fourth man carried a pole with a hook on its end.
So they know it’s dead. You don’t bring a hook for a hound that’s coming back.
The fourth man went first. He walked the line the hound had run the day before. From the stake into the square, twenty paces north. He stopped where the hound had stopped.
He crouched.
He stayed down a long time. He pushed two fingers into the ash and looked at what came up on them.
Then he stood and followed the hound’s steps south, and he took his time.
The fourth man reached the row. He did not stop. He stepped over the stakes and walked down the open slope to the edge of the ditch.
Aiden put his face into the grit.
Beside him, the boy stopped breathing.
"Breathe," Aiden said, into the dirt. "Slow. He can’t hear you. He can see you if you jerk."
The boy breathed.
The fourth man climbed down into the ditch.
He was in there a long time. Aiden watched the top of his head move. It stopped once. It stopped again, longer.
He’s counting the days from our traces.
The head stopped a third time and did not move.
That’s the loose dirt. That’s the hound.
The fourth man came up out of the ditch. He stood at the edge. He looked back at the stake row. Then he walked up the slope, stepped over the stakes, and called out from the inside of the trail.
"Bring the iron."
The second man came up the path.
"It’s off charter," the fourth man said. "Twenty paces off. I’m not digging it."
"Digging what."
"There’s a ditch down there. One man sat in it three days and watched the den. Working boots, hammered at the heel. No fire ring. He ate cold."
"And the hound."
"The hound’s trail goes over the stakes and down into that ditch. It doesn’t come out." The fourth man wiped his fingers on his coat. "There’s loose dirt at the north end. About the length of a hound."
The second man looked south a while.
"You’re sure."
"Sure enough that I’m not putting a spade in it without a seal on paper."
"And if you’re wrong?"
"Then I’ve dug up a charter beast off charter ground, and the House pays a fine." The fourth man turned his back on the slope. "Write it. Let Lord Harken decide."
The second man took a square of waxed paper from his coat and unfolded it. He wrote with a stub of charcoal. He wrote longer than Aiden expected.
He folded the paper and held it out to the youngest of the four.
"House. Tonight."
"Tonight’s twelve miles."
"Then you’ll be tired."
The young man put the paper inside his coat and jogged down the cut path. He turned east onto the road, vanishing between burned trees.
The man with the saw picked up his tools. The second man said something short. Both of them went down the path.
The fourth man stayed.
He sat down at the base of the tall stake, on the inside of the line, and took a pipe out of his coat. He packed it and lit it off a steel flint. It caught on the second try. He settled back against the wood with the pipe in his teeth.
He faced south.
Smoke went up straight off the bowl. There was no wind to bend it.
He knows where it is. He can’t touch it until Harken says he can.
He’s going to sit there until somebody tells him not to.
Aiden lay in the grit.
A runner leaving at second bell was in the city by dark. Somebody read the paper in the morning. If Vane’s house cared, they sent a man by afternoon. If they cared a great deal, they sent a tracker.
Two days. Maybe less.
Then the warmth spread under his ribs.
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
[ DETOXIFICATION — STATUS CHANGE ]
Source: Trait — Toxin Filter (passive, continuous)
Stage: per-organ purge ongoing, ascending mass
Now isolating: next organ in sequence
Cleared: liver
Lifespan returned: +3.0 Years
[ CURRENT LIFESPAN: 18.0 Years ]
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
Eighteen.
He shifted his weight off his right side and nothing shifted with it.
For years there had been a weight under his lowest right rib. It was why he slept on his left.
He put his hand under his ribs and pressed. Nothing pressed back.
Eighteen years.
Eighteen years, and I’m face-down in a gully watching a man smoke a pipe. I should be the one smoking it.
Miasma lifted her head off her forefeet and looked at him.
"Liver."
She held his eyes.
"I know. You did it. I’m not arguing."
He rubbed her back, and she put her chin back down with a contented sigh.
The afternoon went slow.
The fourth man smoked three pipes. Twice he got up, walked the length of the stake row, and sat back down.
He did not go south of the line. Once, he stood a long time looking at the upper slope. Whatever he thought about it put him back down faster than he’d got up.
Everyone’s afraid of that ground. Even the men who put the stakes in.
The den stayed quiet. Twice Aiden caught movement at the mouth of the den.
The mother did not come out.
The boy woke up in the middle of the afternoon, looked at the stake row, saw the pipe smoke, and lay back down without a word.
Then, after a while, without sitting up: "He’ll send someone with a beast."
"Probably."
"Not another hound." The boy had his eyes on the sky. "My master said the House keeps a tracker. He never gave a name. He said the tracker doesn’t work charters. He works when the House loses something."
"And the House lost a hound."
"The House lost a hound on ground it put its own stakes in." The boy rolled onto his side. "That’s two things."
Aiden watched the red point of the pipe.
"Your master," Aiden said. "Did he ever go back for one?"
"For a beast?"
"For a beast in a box."
The boy thought about it longer than Aiden wanted him to.
"No," he said.
"Right."
The boy sat up. He picked at the ash on his knee. "He said the page burns whether you watch it or not, so you might as well not watch."
"And what do you say?"
The boy looked north, at the mouth of the den.
"I’ve watched it three times now," he said. "It doesn’t burn faster if you look away."
The light went out of the burn.
Across the slope, the mother’s ember patches came up at the mouth of the roots.
At the stake row, the pipe stayed lit.
Aiden lay in the grit and counted what he had. Two days. Three beasts. A boy. A knife. A dead hound under dirt a man has already stood on.
And a wolf who did not know she had been folded into a square of waxed paper and sent twelve miles east.