Ben Dover's Arc

Chapter 104 of 150

Ben waited in the cellar until the house went quiet above him. Picabo tapped twice on the trap door. Ben lifted the wolf out of the split crate and set it on the floor. It stood, wobbled, and stayed standing. He opened the traveler's box and the small box-headed creature climbed out on its own. Ben climbed up into the kitchen. The tracker was gone. The purse of coin from Cage sat where he had left it, under a loose board by the stove. He lifted it. It was heavy. It clinked. That was the trouble. A purse that heavy was a purse a man remembered. Any innkeeper who saw it would tell the next rider who asked. Any trader would price him by it. Cage's men were riding every road down from the pass. If one of them heard about a stranger paying in fat coin, they would have him inside a day. Picabo watched him weigh the purse in his hand. "You can't spend that out here," the boy said. "Not a whole coin of it." "I know." Ben needed the coin small, and he needed it hidden. He needed it split into something that looked like nothing. He asked Picabo who lived closest that could be trusted with a piece of work and no questions. Picabo thought. Then he said a name Ben did not know. A man who walked the old forest and picked up what was left behind. Ben found him at the edge of the trees before dusk. A thin man in a gray suit, hair black and lank, eyes pale. He was crouched over a shed antler, cutting a small notch on its underside with a knife. "Tim Burr," Ben said. "Yes." Tim did not look up. "I need a purse hidden. Broken down. Sewn into things a man wouldn't check." Tim finished the notch. He stood. "How much." Ben showed him. Tim's pale eyes moved once over the coin and back to Ben's face. "I keep one in ten," Tim said. "For the work. (And I mark them.)" "Mark them how." "You won't find it." Ben thought about that. One in ten was steep. But a man who notched what he owned was a man who kept track, and a man who kept track would not lose the rest. He agreed. They worked in Tim's lean-to under an old stone tower at the edge of the forest, a weathered thing with narrow slit windows and vine grown over the door. Tim slit the lining of Ben's coat and sewed coins flat between the seams. He hollowed the heel of Ben's boot and set three inside. He put the rest in a battered tin box under a carved stone face Tim kept by his fire, an ugly thing with yellow eyes and a jagged mouth. "No one touches that," Tim said. He did not explain. Ben left the forest at dark with an empty purse in his hand and coin he could carry without being seen. He dropped the empty purse in a ditch a mile on. Then he heard hooves on the road behind him, coming fast from the pass.