Ben Dover's Arc

Chapter 49 of 150

Ben led the group east along a cart track, empty-handed and moving fast. Joe kept pace on the shoulder. Anita and Amanda walked behind. Justin brought up the rear. The chest sat two miles back in a cold flue with a hungry man in front of it. The herbalist's scouts were still ringing that ground. Ben needed them looking somewhere else by morning, or Chris would sit alone when the men came knocking. "They need a trail," Ben said. "A loud one. Boot prints, dropped things, panic. Somewhere they'll believe I ran." "East to what?" Anita said. "The border road. If they think I'm running for the border with the chest, they'll strip every man off the west ring and chase." Amanda shook her head. "They'll smell a plant. No hum, no weight in the prints. They'll circle back inside a day." She was right. A false trail without the humming chest would read false. Ben stopped in the track. He needed something that sounded like the chest without being the chest. Joe pointed his chin down the slope. A crooked little stone house sat in a hollow of birches. Cracked walls. One yellow window. A carved face over the door with heavy eyes and a downturned mouth. Ben knew that face. He knew who lived behind it. Barb Dwyer opened the door before he knocked. Small, dark-haired, red eye flat as a coin. She looked at his empty hands. "No chest," she said. "Hidden." "Tears?" "None today. I need something else." She waited. "A carved box," Ben said. "Empty. Loud on the outside, hollow inside. I need it to sound wrong. Loose lid. Cracked seam. Something a tracker will hear from a ridge and follow." "That's not what I make." "I know. Make it anyway. I'll pay in tears next pass. Two jars." Her mouth tightened. "Three." "Three." She turned into the room and came back with a small keepsake box, drooping lid, a mournful face on the front. She pried the seams with a knife, loosened the pegs, and dropped a river pebble inside. She shook it. The pebble knocked with a hollow, wrong sound, close enough to a boxed hum for a scout at distance. "Two days," she said. "Then it falls apart." "Two days is all I need." Outside, Ben tied the box to Justin's belt with a loose cord so it swung and knocked as he walked. He handed Amanda a torn strip of his coat and a spent bootheel. "Drop these at the fork. Argue loud. Then split east on the border road and lose them past the gap. Meet at the west trade stop in three days." Justin grinned once and started east at a run, the box banging against his hip. Amanda and Anita followed. Ben watched them go. The knocking carried a long way in the still air. Behind him, west, the hearth stayed quiet.