Ben Dover's Arc

Chapter 41 of 150

Ben spread Anita's paper on the workbench. Engine noise hammered the stone walls. The paper gave one line: a name he did not know, and a place. Root cellar under the old cider press, north end of the ridge road. No mark for a guard. No mark for a trap. "That's what worries me," Ben said. "Every other site had a warning. This one doesn't." Anita leaned over the paper. "She wrote what she knew." "Then she didn't know enough." Amber Green tapped the paper twice. "The herbalist keeps guards on anything she means to take. If she left this one bare, she's using it as bait." Ben looked at the chest. Eleven boxes sealed in wax. One relic to go. Walk in blind and he lost the piece that finished the set. Ollie stood in the doorway. "I have a scout runner. Fast on four legs. She goes ahead, sees the ground, comes back before you commit." "Cost?" "Two silver. And you don't ride her. She works alone." Ben paid. Ollie whistled once. The animal came in low along the wall, gray flank, orange forelegs, harness worn smooth at the buckles. She stopped at Ben's boot and waited. "Ridge road," Ollie said to her. "Cider press. Cellar door. Look, don't touch. Come back." She was gone before he finished the last word. They waited in the stall. Justin sat with his back to the timber. Amanda checked the wax seams on the chest with a fingernail. Joe watched the yard through the crack in the door. The engines kept knocking. The scout returned in under an hour. She dropped something at Ben's feet: a small wooden container the size of a fist, face carved into the front, mouth open, eyes wide. It looked like a smaller cousin of the sad-face boxes, but the expression was wrong. Nervous. Alert. "Where did she get that?" Anita said. Ollie crouched. There was a scrap of oiled paper wedged in the lid. He unfolded it. Two lines in the same hand as Anita's paper. "'Guard sleeps in the box. Wake it and it screams for a mile.'" Amber swore softly. Ben turned the small box in his hand. It weighed almost nothing. He set it on the bench and did not open it. "Cellar's clear otherwise," Ollie said. "She saw the press, the trap, the door. No men. The trap is this." Ben looked at the little face. A scream for a mile would bring the herbalist, the blue-scaled creature, and every competitor still in the woods. But he knew the shape of the problem now. The guard was a noise, and noise was the one thing he had spent forty chapters learning to handle. "We take a travel crate," Ben said. "Line it with the felt. We lift the small box into it without opening the lid. It sleeps the whole way to the cellar and back." Ollie nodded at a sturdy plank crate stacked by the wall. "Take it," he said. "On credit." Ben lifted the crate. The obstacle had a name now. He could walk in.