Mango Chiefton's Arc

Chapter 4 of 7

By midday the boar was picked bones. Mango stood in the parlor and counted his runes: eleven dark scars along his ribs and arms. Dozens more to go. The wolf would smell his wounds by dusk and come for the last fresh blood in the marsh. He needed bait that lasted, not one more corpse. Riko dumped the ink-paste bowl and shook his head. "No more boar out there. Nothing dead but us soon." Then a woman staggered through the broken door. She was young, curvy, mud to the knees, eyes wild. She'd run a long way. She held a metal jar tight to her chest, its lid sealed with wax. Inside sloshed something thick and brown. The smell hit Mango like a fist. Musk. Wild and rank, worse than any dead thing. "You're the ones carving," she said. Her voice came fast and clipped. "It's tracking blood. I know. It killed everyone in my house." She stopped herself. "Doesn't matter. This jar. It's how I lived three days." "Who are you?" Mango asked. "Valentina. Don't waste time." She thrust the jar out. "Beast musk. Smear it and it can't find your scent under it. That's how I hid." Mango took the jar. His hands shook. This was better than a rotting boar. Musk didn't rot. Musk could hide him for as long as it lasted, and he could spread it thin over many nights. But Valentina's arms were bare and shaking. If she gave the jar away, she had nothing left to hide behind. "This kept you alive," he said. "You're giving me your only cover." "I'm not staying in this swamp," she said. "You bind it, nobody needs to hide. Do it or don't." Mango pried the wax free. The stink boiled up. Riko gagged and stepped back. Mango dipped two fingers and dragged the musk over his wounds, over the fresh cuts, over the paste lines he still had to carve. The smell buried his blood completely. He waded to the shallows. Riko chewed poppy fast and pressed it to his skin, then lit the bone incense low. Mango smeared paste along a fresh line and gave his arm to the piranhas. Their teeth cut deep. No wall shook. No snout hunted him. The musk held. He carved all afternoon and into the dark. At dusk the wolf came close. Mango heard it snuffle the reeds beyond the wall. It circled, confused, snapping at empty air. It could not find him under the musk. It slunk off hungry. By dawn Mango had nineteen runes. The jar was near empty. He wiped the last smear from the bottom and knew it would not cover him tomorrow. But the wolf hadn't tasted his blood, and Valentina still sat by the door, arms bare, no cover left, watching the reeds where the beast had gone.