Mr. Echo's Arc

Chapter 12 of 25

Ollie stood solid again in the grass. The warren guides watched the low stone at the glade's center. Mr. Echo crossed to it and knelt. He set the brass box against its face and opened the lid. The device should have caught the shape of what left this place, the direction the ancestors were driven, the notch their absence cut into the air. The dial did not move. The stone gave him nothing. It was not silent the way a quiet stone is silent. It was silent the way the door by the boulder had been silent. A closed thing. He tried the salt. He poured a thin line across the stone's top and listened for the grains. The grains landed and made no sound at all. The stone ate them. Mr. Echo pulled his hand back. Above the oaks the moon's pale face had drifted closer. Lady Moon had found the ring again. Her light pressed flat on the grass and did not reach the stone. "It won't speak to the box," Mr. Echo said. Kate came and crouched beside him. Ollie stayed at the ring's edge with the rabbits. "They sealed it when they left," Ollie said. "So nothing could follow them out." Kate put her hand on the stone. She spoke in her flat voice. "Which way did they go." It was not a question the way she said it. It was a fact she was waiting for. The stone did not answer her either. She did not ask again. Mr. Echo opened the box's second chamber. One dead Bunnyman voice remained inside, the older sound he had kept back. He held the box mouth to the stone and let the voice out. The recording rasped into the grass. The stone drank the first half and then, for one breath, gave something back. Not a direction. A shape. A hollow in the air pointing away from the ring at an angle Mr. Echo could feel in his teeth. West of north. Into the Fen. His dial jumped once and settled. He marked the angle in the dirt with his finger. The box went quiet. The last dead voice was spent. He closed the lid on an empty chamber and understood he had nothing left inside it to trade. Ollie watched him understand this and said nothing. A warren guide's ears turned. Beyond the oaks, somewhere on the trail they had come up, a woman's voice was calling a name. Kate's shoulders locked. It was Lily's voice, and it was not Lily. Marrow Fen's warning came back to Mr. Echo then, the notices she had pinned in town about things pulled from the north pass in burial patterns. The pale woman had learned a new mouth. Mr. Echo pointed at the angle in the dirt. "We go now," he said. The guides were already moving. The ring did not open behind them. It opened ahead, west of north, into the Fen.