Ben Dover's Arc

Chapter 67 of 150

The pines thickened. Ben led with the front of the crate braced on his hip. Eileen walked backward at the heavy end, watching the way they had come. The horn had gone quiet a mile back. That was worse than hearing it. A silent hunter meant one who had stopped chasing the wrong thing. "We can't wander," Ben said. "By dawn they'll fan out. Every trail we cross, they cross too." "Then we don't cross trails." Eileen shifted her grip. Her knuckles were white on the wood. "We pick one line and hold it." "To where?" "North face. There's a hall in the rocks. Old garrison post. Empty since the last border war." Ben stopped. "You know it?" "I bled in it." She said it the way she said everything. Flat. No apology. Ben remembered the letter their mother had sent him six years ago, the one he'd burned unread. He looked at the scar on his sister's cheek and understood a little of what had been in it. The lynx padded out of the brush ahead of them, tail low. Eileen clicked her tongue once. The cat turned and moved off at an angle, sweeping the flank. "She'll cut a false line for us," Eileen said. "Drag scent east. Buy us an hour." "An hour gets us where?" "The hall. Stone walls thick as a man. No windows on the road side. One door. We hold there until light and I read the ground." "Hunters find doors." "They find doors they know about. This one they don't." Ben started walking again. The crate hummed once under the sap and stopped. He counted his breaths against his steps, the way he had counted since the shrine, since the mask, since the first day of all this. They climbed for an hour. The pines opened onto a shelf of broken rock. Eileen crouched at a slab that looked like all the others and pushed. The slab gave. Behind it a low doorway showed black. "Inside," she said. Ben went first, dragging the crate. Eileen followed and pulled the slab back. The dark smelled of cold iron and old smoke. She struck a flint. A short candle showed a stone room with a bench, a rusted rack, and a shield hung crooked on the far wall. Crossed axes, a fist at the center. A garrison mark. Ben set the crate down. His hands would not stop shaking. He pressed them flat against the wood until they did. "Safe till morning," Eileen said. She sat with her back to the door and drew her knife across her thigh, cleaning it. "Then we move at first light with the sun in their eyes." "And after?" "After, you tell me the last name on your list." Ben looked at the shield. Twelve pieces in the crate. One name he had not spoken aloud in nine years. He nodded. "After," he said.