Chapter 52 - 51 — The First Watch III
The light under the canopy started going grey around the seventh hour.
"We stop." Gideon said it without asking anybody. "Moving through unfamiliar forest in the dark is how people find the thing that has been avoiding them."
We took a rise between four broad trunks. Higher ground, no water within sight, no thick brush within twenty metres.
Gideon and Erik walked the perimeter twice.
Clara cleared wet leaf litter out to about three metres from where the fire would go, scraping it back with the flat of a blade until there was bare soil in a ring.
I stood at the edge of the light and watched the dark between the trunks while the others unpacked, because that is a job and it stopped me having to talk.
Then Erik Lind opened a storage ring and pulled out four kilos of meat.
Actual meat. Wrapped, cold, with the fat still white on it.
Clara stared at it with a slight grimace, "What is that?"
"That is dinner."
"Meridian gave us rations."
"Meridian gave us *these*." He held up a flat brown packet between two fingers with the expression of a man holding something out of a drain.
"I have eaten forty of these across my career. Do you know what they taste like? They taste like the *idea* of chicken."
"You bought meat."
"They told us to prepare for a multi-day operation.
Nobody knows how deep this place goes or how many layers it has, and I decided that if I am going to be trapped inside an Orange Gate for three days I am not spending them chewing brown paper."
He was already unrolling it.
"I paid for this myself. Nobody touches the second packet, that one is for tomorrow."
---
It got better.
Ewan Calder, who had said perhaps forty words all day, reached into his own storage and produced four bottles of beer.
The silence that followed was quite long.
"You brought beer," Gideon said. "Into Eastwick."
"I brought four."
"Into an Orange Gate."
"They are small." Ewan turned one so the label caught the light, as though the size of the bottle were the issue anybody had. "One each. There are six of us and four bottles, so it is not even one each. It is a gesture."
"That is worse," Clara said. "That is somehow worse."
"I have been in nine Gates. In one of them I sat in a flooded corridor for eleven hours waiting for a Mage to recover, and I would have given a year of my life for four hundred millilitres of anything."
He set them down on the soil in a row. "So I carry beer. Watch schedule first. Then one bottle, split."
Nobody argued after that. Not one of us.
---
The fat came off the meat and hit the coals with a hiss, and the smell went up.
That was the part I did not expect.
For seven hours everything in my nose had been wet soil and rot and my own dried sweat inside the collar of my armour. And then that smell arrived and my mouth filled and my stomach turned over hard enough to hurt.
The smoke got trapped under the canopy for a while and hung there in the firelight before finding a way up.
Orange light moved on all of it. On the flat of Clara’s blade laid across her knees. On the wet leaves at the edge of the cleared ring.
On Erik’s face while he turned the meat, and he was concentrating on it the way you concentrate on something you are proud of.
Past that circle, the forest was completely black. Not dark. Black, in a solid wall about eight metres out, so that the six of us were sitting in a lit bowl with nothing outside it.
We introduced ourselves properly, because the floor had turned twenty names on a roster into five people I was going to be sleeping beside.
Erik had eleven years and thirty-one clears, mostly Blue, two Orange. Clara had eight and worked almost exclusively as a flanker for a guild that had folded last spring.
Ewan had nine years and did not say the number of clears. Declan had come up through independent work and had never held a guild contract in his life, and said so with a certain amount of edge.
Gideon said Myrmidon, and Red, and nothing else, and none of them asked a second question.
Then it came round to me.
"So." Erik did not look up from the meat. "Nolan."
"Yes."
"Your father is Christopher Nolan."
"He is."
"And the two of you didn’t sit the selection."
There it was. It was without hostility . He asked it the way you ask about the weather in a place you are thinking of moving to.
"No. He telephoned Meridian and we were on the roster by the afternoon."
Clara’s eyebrows went up about a millimetre at me saying it out loud.
"Huh?" Erik said, and turned the meat over.
That was all of it.
Six hours ago it would not have been. I could feel the difference and I could name where it came from, and it was not anything I had said.
It was that they had watched me stand in the line Renard put me in and stay there, and then go through a gap and come back to it.
That did not buy the place. Nothing bought the place. It just meant five people were willing to eat with me.
---
The conversation went back round to the floor eventually, the way it had all day.
"Nothing in the brief," Clara said. "Nothing. I read every page twice."
"Meridian’s information is from two attempts that both turned back on the first layer," Ewan said. "They never reached that chamber. Nobody has ever reported the second layer because nobody has ever been on it."
"Except the ones who did." Erik had stopped turning the meat.
Everybody looked at him.
"The first two expeditions. Not Meridian’s. The ones before." He wiped his hands slowly. "They went in and the numbers went down and then there was nothing.
The Bureau watched it happen on the monitors from outside. Twenty-two life-signatures, then nineteen, then eleven, then none, over about nine hours."
The insects had come up again. I had stopped noticing them and now I could hear nothing else.
"Nobody came out to say how," he said. "So the report says monsters. Because what else is a report going to say?"
Declan turned a stick over in the fire.
"And now we’re split," Clara said.
"Now we’re split."
Nobody said the next part.
I watched Ewan’s hand go to his sword hilt, rest there, and come off it again.
Clara turned her head about twenty degrees toward the black and held it there for four or five seconds before turning back. Erik put another piece of wood on a fire that did not need it.
I sat with my forearms on my knees and looked into the coals and did the arithmetic that I could not say out loud.
Because it fits.
Cormac was not on those raids. Cormac was one week old to this place.
And a dungeon that quietly breaks an expedition into groups of six, in a forest that swallows shouting, does not need a murderer.
Not when there was something out there leaving a footprint the length of my forearm that had chosen not to come yet.
It might just be the Gate.
And he might just be a man taking advantage of it.
—
Someone made a joke about the rations again and it broke.
Erik told a story about a Blue Gate in the east where a Mage set fire to the party’s entire rope supply in the first hour, and Clara laughed so hard she had to put her drink down.
Then Ewan said one dry sentence at the end of it that made Gideon laugh out loud, which I had not heard him do.
The beer went round in a cup because nobody had brought cups.
It was warm and slightly awful and I have not enjoyed anything more in my life.
For about twenty minutes there were six people around a fire, and the meat was good, and Erik was smug about the meat being good.
I sat in the middle of it with my back against a root, and something in my chest came loose that had been wound tight since I woke up pressing my own ribs.
I wanted that written down before the rest of it.
---
The watch was Declan’s arrangement, and it was a sensible one.
Six people, three pairs, three hours each. Nine hours of camp. Six hours of sleep for everybody, which is more than most people get in a Gate.
First watch went to Ewan Calder and Erik Lind.
Second to Declan and Clara. Third to Gideon and me.
Nobody’s eyebrows moved. It was a rotation on a piece of dirt, drawn by a man who had spent all day making reasonable suggestions.
Ewan took the northern side of the ring. Erik took the southern, still chewing, and told Clara loudly that he would be waking her in exactly three hours and not one minute later.
The rest of us lay down near the fire.
Gideon settled about a metre from my left, arranged his coat, and said, "Sleep. Properly. Your father sent me to make sure you walk out of this place, and I intend to do it, and I cannot do it if you are useless tomorrow."
"Right."
"I mean it."
"I heard you."
Then he lay back, put an arm over his eyes, and was breathing evenly inside ninety seconds.
I lay in the leaf litter and looked at the man my father had specifically assigned to protect me, who was now unconscious, and thought about the mechanics of that arrangement for quite a long time.
---
I did not sleep.
The ground was cold through the back of my armour and got colder. The fire dropped and the heat went off my face by degrees until only one cheek was warm and the other had gone stiff.
The smell of the meat had faded out of the air completely, and what came back underneath it was wet soil again.
Every time I got near going under, I was back on the floor of the crystal chamber.
The blade under the ribs. Not the pain of it. The *feeling* of it, which was not pain at all at first, just something small and cold arriving somewhere it had no business being.
My eyes would open on their own.
I would lie there listening. A branch moving forty metres out. Insects. Something knocking somewhere so far away it might have been the trees themselves.
Once Erik came past on his circuit and I closed my eyes and made my breathing long and slow until he had gone by, because I did not want to explain why the eighteen-year-old was the only one awake.
The fire went to coals. My breath started showing.
And then I heard leaf litter compress about three metres away, close and deliberate and not from the perimeter.
I opened my eyes to a slit.
Declan O’Rourke was sitting up.