Catrin answered every question, but she admitted she didn’t know much more than what she had already told. “I’ll say one thing though. If you’re wildered as to how Koli Woodsmith broke into a locked room, the answer is he didn’t do it on his own. Ursala-from-Elsewhere was in this with him. You seen, most of you, how Koli fell in with her these past weeks. She took him into her tent, and nobody knows what they talked of there. It’s likely she set him on to steal our tech, purposing to sell it on in other villages. Half-Ax is ever hungry for such things, and they’re not the only ones. It was a plot against us, deep laid and long in the making.”
There was a great deal of muttering at this, and some crying out aloud. Ursala had gone from the village more than a week before. How could she have come back in without being seen? Besides, she had done much good in Mythen Rood. Everyone in that room owed her something, for the mending of a broken limb, the cooling of a fever, the easing of a pain. Many were only drawing breath at all because of her.
And there was one thing more that struck many of us at that meeting the wrong way. It seemed strange, after what Catrin said about not mistaking our enemies, to find out so suddenly that we had a new one.
The meeting broke up at last, with not very much decided. Search parties would be sent out again, this time to look for Mardew as well as Koli. They would be licensed to go further and even to overnight outside the fence. More might be learned if Koli was put to question, and finding Rampart Knife was an urgent thing. Nobody said it, but while the loss of Mardew could be borne, the loss of the cutter would be a calamity.
Calamity was in the air that year. It hung over Mythen Rood like a cloud. Two nights after the Count and Seal met, Seven Frostfend took to her bed with a stomach ache and a touch of fever. She was but a little sick, she said. She’d sleep it off and be up betimes.
But the next morning she could not rise. The fever was high now, and raw red welts had sprung up on her skin in the night. It looked like disease of some kind. In fact, it looked like the red death that had all but ended Mythen Rood twenty years before I was born.
Koli
12
We kept on walking through the whole day without a stop. Ursala wanted to cover as much distance as we could in case the Half-Ax fighters picked up our trail again and was minded to follow it.
Monono asked me if I wanted to listen to some music while we walked, but I said no. I felt, right then, like I needed to keep my wits about me. Even after so many days, being outside in the world and the wild was still not a thing that come easy to me. At home, when we went out to hunt, we done it like we was walking into a trap, and the whole time we was outside the fence we was looking every way, listening every way, fearing what might come and wanting to be ready for it. I could not get used to the outside as a place where people could live. I knowed Ursala had done it, but Ursala had the drudge – and now I seen full well that even with the drudge we was not nowhere near being safe.
The hills we had been walking through ever since Calder was less and less to be seen now. We was still somewhat high up, Ursala said, but you could not easily tell it for the ground was flat all around. This was good in one way, for there was less climbing to be done, but it was bad in another. The trees now was taller than they was before and there was more of them, packed close together so it was hard to get around them and harder still to go through. Ever and again, Ursala sent up her drone so she could spy what was up ahead of us and decide which way was best to go. Somehow, all that stopping and starting felt more wearisome to me than a steady march.
Every few miles, we would find ourselves walking through a place that had been a village. They was not like Ludden, the dead village I had found on my first day of being in exile. In Ludden the houses was still standing, though they was empty and weeds was starting to climb all over them. What we was seeing now was villages of the old times that nobody had lived in since before I was born. They was swallowed up into the ground almost, so you would not guess they had ever been there until you was right in the middle of them. Then you might find your way blocked by a wall that was leaning over like it was drunk, or a pile of half-buried bricks and slate that was left from a house. In among the stones at our feet there was sheets of rust-bit metal and nuggets of wind-scoured glass. Oftentimes the bricks and the metal shards had marks on them that was old-time messages. Writing, I mean, though I didn’t know that word back then. I would see marks that looked like this:
NO EXIT
NEWSAG
TOWN CENTRE AND ALL R
Only I would not know what they said, or even that they was saying anything at all.
Monono knowed them marks well, and she told me what they was for. She even spelled some of them out for me. It was a strange moment when she done that. I stood where I was for a few seconds, looking all around. I don’t know how to say how I felt. It was kind of like there was a crowd of people all around me and they was shouting. But they was dead people, gone into the ground a long time before, and their voices did not carry. Only the marks was left, like voices that had froze and fell to the ground.
“Koli,” Ursala said from up ahead of me. “Come along. We can’t afford to rest just yet.”
Resting in that place was the last thing I was thinking of. I hurried after her, and stayed close. The dead villages was both too quiet and too loud for me.
That night, the two of us come upon a hunter’s hide. It was like a stockade of logs, about seven steps on a side, with branches tied over it for a roof. It seemed to be all dark inside, and I almost went in without checking. At the last moment, I seen the bones lying all round the door, some of them still with little bits of meat on them. I stepped back, and that was all that saved me when the darkness in the hut rose up and come at me. It was something fierce, with thick black hair all over it. It didn’t so much run as roll over the ground, and it didn’t make no sound as it come. Its long, skinny limbs licked out at me like whips, as if they didn’t have no bones in them at all. I swung my machete round in a big half-circle, not even aiming, and by luck alone took the end off of one of them limbs. The beast reared back, and the drudge stepped in between us. There was a moment when the two of them pushed and heaved, each against other, and then the beast up and run from us, deciding the drudge was too tough to chew.
We didn’t feel like going inside the hide after that, figuring that it was probably full of the beast’s droppings. We didn’t set a fire either, in case the Half-Ax fighters, if they was still tracking us, might see the smoke. Or if not them then Cup, still set on revenging. So we just creeped under our blankets in the lee of the hut’s wall and tried our best to sleep in spite of the cold.
I had kept on hoping through the day that Cup would find us again. I didn’t feel no guilt at all about what happened to Senlas, but if Cup died way out here in a place she never would of willingly gone to, her dying would be on me and I would feel it heavy. But we didn’t see her. I thought she must of turned around and headed back the way we come, towards Calder. I hoped she would find it and get there without taking no hurt.
When Ursala had gone to sleep, I asked Monono about them marks again. In Mythen Rood we had tallies for counting things, like how many sacks of potatoes there was in the Underhold, or how many days a cord of timber had steeped in my mother’s storeroom. There was even ways you could carry them tallies with you, like if you made the marks on a stick and then broke the stick in two pieces – then the two parties to the bargain would know the count was right by the way the two halves matched up. But the marks we seen on the signs in the old villages was not like that. They could say words, not just numbers, and they was still saying them after all the long, long years since the people that made them died or went away.