Chapter 65: Ground Nobody Marked
Tavik’s camp looked smaller after four days away from it, or Nyra had simply grown used to measuring distance in ridgelines and defiles instead of tents and cookfires, the cookfire smoke rising thinner than she remembered it from four days back.
Ossa spotted her first, dropping the sorting tray she’d been carrying and crossing the yard fast enough that two of the older band members turned to watch. "You’re alone."
"Vhar’s fine. He’s mapping a ridge two days east that’s already tried to kill him once." Nyra let her pack drop from her shoulder for the first time since morning. "I need something from your custody line, and I need it before I sleep."
Tavik arrived at that, wiping his hands on a work cloth that had clearly been used for something less clean than the gesture suggested. "That’s not the greeting I expected after four days of silence."
"I sent word with the guide the moment I crossed back into contract ground. It should have reached you an hour ahead of me."
"It did. I’m still allowed to be surprised by the order you’ve put your priorities in." He studied her face a moment longer, the particular attention of someone reading tiredness against urgency and deciding which one to address first. "Eat something before you ask me anything else. Whatever’s waiting in the holding line will still be there in the time it takes you to finish a bowl."
Nyra had not eaten a real meal in days. Bread in her hands and the band’s warm fire steadied her.
TAP! TAP!
A child struck the splice board with the cord mallet two seats away while a woman corrected the angle of his wrist. Someone argued about the eastern snares behind the tents. For one meal, Nyra let the ridge wait.
Ossa settled beside her with her own bowl, close enough to speak quietly without the rest of the fire overhearing. "Is it bad, where you’ve been?"
"It is dangerous ground." Nyra turned the bread once. "The animal has hurt people. Vhar and I do not know how to stop it yet. It is feeding and moving through land it did not use before."
"That sounds worse." Ossa turned her scent-slits toward the eastern dark. "A cruel person gives you someone to blame. An animal driven from its valley gives you a problem to stop."
"That’s most of what I’ve learned doing this kind of work." Nyra finished the bread in silence after that, grateful Ossa hadn’t pressed for more than the truth could comfortably give her tonight.
"Now," Tavik said, once she’d finished. "What do you need from the holding line."
"The courier. The one who carried the ledger’s twin copy."
"He’s told you everything he knows about the buyer already. You were there for that conversation."
"I’m not asking about the buyer this time." Nyra stood, brushing crumbs from her coat. "I’m asking about ground. Where the crew actually worked, not who they sold to."
The young man looked older than he had on the goat path, whatever remained of his fear worn down into something closer to resignation. He recognized her before she’d finished crossing the holding line, and his shoulders dropped half an inch at the sight of a familiar face rather than a new one.
"You again."
"Me again." Nyra crouched to his level. "You already told me you did not know the buyer’s name. I believe you. I need the place where your crew dug before the quarry and before they reached Salvage-Kin ground."
He hesitated. "There is a cut valley two ridgelines past the quarry. The crew left after the vein failed. They blasted half the hillside looking for more ore."
"How long ago."
"Most of a season before the quarry job started." He shifted against his restraints. "The crew did not hide the valley. Other bands had no reason to visit a worked-out cut, so nobody reported it."
"Who ran that operation."
"Same crew, earlier arrangement. Different foreman before the one you already killed." He said it without flinching, the particular flatness of a man reporting facts about people he’d never expected to have to answer for. "He moved us on once the vein stopped paying, same as anyone would. Nobody asked what we’d have to leave behind to do it."
"Did anyone notice anything wrong with the ground while you were working it? Before you moved on?"
"Some of the older hands complained about noise at night toward the end. Heavy feet moved through the scree past the blast site, closer each week. We figured scavengers were coming for the noise and left it at that." He shook his head slowly. "Nobody wanted to spend more time in that valley than the work required."
Nyra’s fingers tightened around her bowl. "What did the blasting do to the ground around it?"
"The blasts opened half the hillside. Rubble filled two ravines that people used to cross. I do not know what lived in the valley before the crew arrived. After the blasting, we stopped hearing animals there."
"Show me the valley on the ground," Nyra said.
The courier shifted until his tied hands faced the dirt. Tavik loosened the rope enough for him to use two fingers, then stood over him while he drew. A ridge with a split crown. The failed ore cut below it. The two ravines he said the blasts had filled. He marked the old work camp with a cross, then drew a narrow water channel disappearing under the rubble.
"The water ran through there before the first charge," he said. "Afterward it came out lower down, black for days. The foreman told us not to drink it."
"Where did the heavy tracks start?" Nyra asked.
He tapped the far side of the rubble. "There. We found broken brush every morning. One of the drill teams said something had clawed at the stone. The foreman told them to finish the wall and stop making noise about animals."
Ossa had come to the fence without Nyra hearing her. She looked down at the dirt map, scent-slits flaring once. "You buried its water and broke the valley into separate pieces."
"We were told to open the ore," the courier said. "I did not choose where the charges went."
"You still lit them," Tavik said.
The courier lowered his eyes. "Yes."
Nyra copied the map onto parchment before anyone could scuff the dirt. When she finished, Tavik retied the courier’s hands and led him back under the lean-to, not cruelly, but without allowing him to disappear inside the camp’s ordinary work.
The charcoal map showed no clean route through the old valley. The water channel, the buried ravines, and the fresh animal sign all met at the same broken slope. Nyra folded the parchment once and put it inside the oilcloth sleeve with the ledger pages. A copied map could be lost. The ground it described could not.
She now had the ridge, the blast site, and the men who had opened it before dawn.
Nyra stood. A season of blasting had buried the valley two ridgelines from the Quarrymaw’s hunting ground. Within months, a Tier IV animal had left its own range and entered ground it had never needed before. The Quarrymaw’s death had opened hunting space, while the blast valley had driven another predator out of its shelter.
"Thank you," she told him, meaning it plainly despite everything he’d helped cause. "Whatever happens with the buyer, this part goes into the report as your own account, not an anonymous line."
"Doesn’t change what I did."
"No. But it’s still worth more than staying silent would have been." She turned back toward the fire, where Tavik waited with a question already forming on his face.
"Well?" he asked, once she’d rejoined him.
"A cut valley two ridgelines past the quarry. Blasted open most of a season ago, badly enough that whatever used to live there stopped living there around the same time." Nyra looked east, toward ground she couldn’t see from here but could already picture too clearly. "Vhar’s tracking something that’s been displaced from exactly that kind of wound. We didn’t cause what’s hunting that frontier now. Your crew’s own greed did, long before any of us walked through that gate."
Tavik’s hand closed slowly into a fist at his side, the particular anger of a man learning his people’s suffering had a traceable cause rather than simple bad luck. "I want that valley’s location written down before you leave again. My own people deserve to know exactly what ground to avoid, and exactly whose fault it is that they need to."
"You’ll have it before I sleep."
"And the Wildblood Desolation needs to hear this too, not just my own band. If that valley’s the source of it, the boundary reclassification everyone’s been waiting on has to account for a wound, not just a moved marker." Tavik’s mouth thinned, weighing something he clearly didn’t like the shape of. "A predator displaced by human greed doesn’t respect contract lines any better than one that was always wild here. Whoever’s ground it reaches next won’t care whose fault the wound was."
"Wildblood handlers and the Academy must reclassify that valley." Nyra met his eyes. "You are right to warn every band before someone walks into the blast site."
"I’ll make sure it’s said plainly. That much I can promise you."
Nyra pulled a scrap of parchment toward her and sketched the valley from the worker’s directions. Four days east, Vhar was mapping the ridge beyond it. She would carry him the valley’s location and the reason the Tier IV animal had entered the frontier.