Mr. Echo's Arc

Chapter 20 of 25

The pale woman's calling had faded off the stone an hour ago. Mr. Echo stayed with his back to the wall and counted his breath against the silence the cavern gave back. Kate sat cross-legged with the candle unlit in her lap. Clover Wanderpaw dozed against Longear's side. They had bought the hours Longear promised. Now Mr. Echo needed to know what shape the cavern was, and how far back it went, before they moved again. He took a pebble from the floor and dropped it. The sound went in and did not come out. Not the flat swallow of stone. Something further in was taking it. He sat up. He tapped his tin cup once with a fingernail. The tap went. Nothing returned. Then, faintly, from deeper in the dark, a soft shift, like cloth pulled across dirt. "Something's here," he said. Longear's ears came forward. "Down the throat. Two turns back. Breathing slow." She looked at him. "Not the pale one. Older smell. Warren smell." Clover Wanderpaw sat up. "How many." "Six. Maybe seven." Longear's voice did not change. "They know we came in. They have not decided yet." Mr. Echo understood then. If the cavern's keepers marked them intruders, they would push the group back out onto the reed, where the pale woman would be waiting on the noise of their expulsion. He could not speak his way past them. He had no shared tongue. He had a reel in his shirt pocket with Longear's voice on it, and Clover's market, and the route directions to the elders' camp. He set the reel on the floor between himself and the dark. Then he tapped his cup with the spoon: the pattern the Bunnyman had taught him weeks ago, the rhythm the warren used to mean at ease. He tapped it three times and stopped. For a long minute nothing came back. Then, from the dark, a tap. Not his rhythm. A slower one, four beats and a pause, four beats and a pause. Clover Wanderpaw's ears twitched. "That's a question," they said. "They're asking who." Mr. Echo lifted the reel and pressed its edge to Longear's paw. Longear leaned to the box and spoke her own name into it, and her mother's, and the name of the warren she had left. Mr. Echo played it back into the dark. The tapping stopped. Cloth moved on dirt again, closer now, and a lantern uncovered itself down the tunnel. Six rabbit folk came forward in worn cloaks and travel packs, ears back, eyes careful. The one at the front, gray at the muzzle, looked at Longear a long time. Then she said, in a voice like packed earth, "You are of the old line." She lowered her lantern. "Come in from the mouth. She listens at the mouth." Mr. Echo picked up the reel and followed her deeper, where the pale woman could not reach, and where, he understood now, the ancestors' road did not end at the Fen but had kept going, held by people who remembered.