Ben Dover's Arc

Chapter 48 of 150

Ben came out the back of the stow-house with the chest on his shoulder and the satchel bumping his hip. The kit inside had not called yet. Its mother would. The herbalist's men were half a day off. He had twelve verified pieces and no place to put them. Every road he knew was watched. Joe crouched at the corner of a shed. "North track is thin. Two men at the bend already." "West?" "Same. They're closing a ring." Amanda tugged Ben's sleeve. "You can't walk this chest in the open. One look and every runner in the valley moves on you." "I know." Ben's arms ached. The chest was too big to hide under a coat and too heavy to run with. He needed a hole in the ground and no one watching him find it. Anita pointed down the slope. A squat stone chimney stood in a clearing, its firebox carved into a wide grinning mouth. Teeth set into the arch. Eyes cut above the lintel. A hearth with no house around it. The fire inside was cold. "Old traveler's hearth," Anita said. "Nobody tends it. Flue drops straight down to an ash pit." Ben crossed to it. The mouth was wide enough for the chest. He knelt and reached up the flue. His hand met a stone ledge two feet inside, dry, out of sight from any angle. A scrape of boots on gravel. Ben turned. A man stood at the edge of the clearing in a brown coat, hair wild, eyes hollow. Chris P. Bacon. The same starving traveler Ben had sent east with a barking animal weeks ago, chasing a feast that did not exist. Chris looked at the hearth. Then at Ben. "You lied to me." "I did." "East was empty." "I know." Chris stepped closer. His hands were empty. "Feast is somewhere. Not east." Ben weighed it. Chris had no love for him, but no love for the herbalist either. He pulled a coin from his belt and held it out. "Sit at this hearth. Light the fire. If anyone asks, you're waiting on a meal. Don't open the flue." Chris took the coin. "How long." "Two days. I'll come back for what's inside." "Food?" "Bread in the satchel on the peg. Yours." Chris nodded once and sat on the hearthstone like he'd been waiting all his life for a chair. Ben lifted the chest into the mouth and set it on the ledge inside the flue. He pushed it back until his fingertips lost it. He drew his arm out clean. From the clearing the hearth looked like a hearth. A hungry stone face with a cold fire and a hungry man in front of it. He cut the satchel off his belt and set the kit down at the tree line, drawstring loose. It would find its mother by dark. "Move," Ben said. "We draw them east." The chest was hidden. He was empty-handed. For the first time in a month, no one chasing him would find what they wanted on his back.