Ben Dover's Arc

Chapter 94 of 150

Ben followed the drag mark east with the twelve small creatures under the chest. The trail bent through a stand of birch and stopped at a shed with a sagging roof. Smoke came from a tin pipe. He heard a man cough inside. He knelt in the ferns and counted boots at the door. Two pairs. The other four had gone back to the mill road with Chilly Willy. He had one chance to reach Cage with a set, and the set was short by one. He opened the chest at the tree line and looked at the eleven boxes. Eleven was dead to Cage the way it was dead to the woman who had taken the cup. She had told him plain. A gap in a dozen calls out. Cage would feel it the moment she lifted the lid. He needed a twelfth piece that would pass a quick look, long enough to close the deal and get Chilly Willy out. He looked at the crate the small creatures had come in. Twelve black lines on the side. Straw inside. He tipped it and a string of matching beads spilled from under the straw. Twelve of them, polished, drilled through, each one different in color but sized the same. He turned one in his fingers. It was the weight of a walnut. It would ride in a carved box and hum of nothing at all. He wrapped the beads in a strip of felt from his coat and set the bundle in the empty slot in the chest. He closed the lid. The gray creature watched him do it and did not move. He did not know if the beads were meant for him or for something else, but they were twelve, and twelve was what he needed. He left the animals with the chest in the ferns and walked to the shed door with his hands open. The two guards looked up from a pot of stew. He said he had come to trade for the big man. He said the buyer was waiting and the price was the set. One of them stood and looked past him at the trees. Chilly Willy sat against the back wall with his hands tied and a cut over one eye. He saw Ben and did not speak. The guard who had stood walked out to check the tree line. He came back with the chest carried between two of the small creatures and the rest walking behind. He set it down and lifted the lid and looked at twelve boxes in a row. He closed it again. "Cage sent word," he said. "We take it to her. You come too." Ben cut the rope on Chilly Willy's wrists. The set was whole to the eye. It would hold until Cage opened a box. He had bought himself the walk to the mill, and nothing past it.