by Stacey Berg
That was why, despite the urgency coiling in her chest, she had taken a long way round to the camp when they went in search of the children, laying down any number of false routes and detours so that Loro would not be able to return to the spot without her. Knowing at once from the empty smell and cold silence that the children were not there, had not been there for days at least, she gave only a cursory glance inside the remains of the shelter. She spent the rest of that dead day peering into other cracks and crevices, never hinting to Loro that the search was long since over. She told herself that the children had learned well from her, had moved on as a precaution once she left them, too clever to leave a sign, were out there somewhere unharmed, maybe even watching, warmed to see that she had returned for them after all. Just in case, she scuffed a squiggle in the dust outside the shelter, the field mark she’d taught them for safe. They would recognize that, and her familiar bootprints.
Beyond that there was nothing she could do for them.
Lia was out again this evening, and the clinic felt intolerably airless. Hunter stood, shoving her chair back with a squeal. Justan, dozing on one of the beds like a curly-haired canid on a sunny ledge, leapt up at the noise. She brushed by him, strode through the empty anteroom, and yanked the outside door open to face the two startled clinic guards. “I’m going for a walk,” she said politely.
They eyed her, uncertain they had the authority to let her go alone. Any number of options to fix that presented themselves, but most of them would have involved exposing more of her skills than she was ready to do. Instead she stood waiting until Justan caught up, then turned to him with what she hoped was the right amount of contained desperation for the trader she was still playing and said, “I just need to stretch my legs.” Which was true; and if one of them went along, he might feel like talking. She could at least put the dull hour before Lia got back to some good use.
“How ’bout I go with you?” Justan asked.
“I’d welcome that,” she said, wishing with a twinge that it had been one of the guards she knew less well, who now resumed their stations with the satisfaction of men who had done their jobs. She knew they were trying. Like Lia’s patients, the guards talked, enough that she had learned there was a tension running through the city, something making the men worried and ill at ease. It seemed to do with the nun tithe, coming up as the harvest neared. And they weren’t lying to her about watching the clinic: even here, inside the Warder’s stronghold, they checked before they opened inner doors, and if young men, strangers to the clave, came to the clinic, they sometimes searched them before admitting them to Lia’s presence. Their efforts would be insufficient, Hunter thought, fingering the small blade she had purloined from Lia’s tools, if there were a serious threat, but they could not know that.
They are not hunters, she reminded herself. And, with a little chill: they have done all this without any hunter’s help.
The street was empty. She craned her neck, studying the darkening sky. The lightstrings washed it out; she could only see a few of the brightest stars. Justan said, “Best time of year to see them. I could stand out here a long time watching.”
They resumed their walk. “Want some of this?” He offered her dried meat from a packet he’d secreted somewhere. She shook her head. He took a generous portion for himself. “Sure?” She shook her head again. The meat had been smoked; the smell tickled high in the back of her throat. He passed her his water holder.
“Noticed you don’t talk too much,” he said.
She considered. “I do when I have something to say.”
“Good way to do it. Most people aren’t so sensible, I suppose. Some cityens, they talk all day long, never take a breath.”
She thought of the nuns. “What do they talk about?”
“Most everything, I guess. Day’s a pretty long time. Figure you can fit pretty much most things in it.”
“What do you fit in, Justan? When you’re not guarding me, I mean?”
He chewed thoughtfully for a moment. “Well, I’m pretty sure you noticed I try to get my meals.” He patted his belly, which in fact protruded a little way over his belt. He must have been miserable through the winter’s shortages.
“What about your work?”
“Oh, Loro keeps me busy. This and that. Ward’s pretty spread out these days. Always somewhere needs a little help. Sometimes even the Bend. Pretty much only place we don’t go’s into North.”
That was an interesting tidbit. “Not friendly to the Warder?”
“Not friendly to anybody. Got too much they’re trying to keep. Don’t want to hear too much about sharing.”
“They share with the Church, don’t they? Pay the tithe?”
“That’s different. Nobody’s going to argue with the Church. Those hunters see to that. You’d have to be a crazy fool.”
Hunter scanned the sky, but the stars were still hidden. “What would happen?”
The frown marred the boyish features. “Can’t say for sure. Seems like they’d make examples, though. So no one would try the same thing again.”
I’d set fire to the building, Gem had said, and force them back inside.
“I don’t think they’d do that,” Hunter told him.
Justan stopped walking. They were almost all the way around the block. He smiled. “You’re nicer than most traders, Echo. I’ve been thinking. Maybe we could—”
She whirled away.
“Wait, I didn’t mean to—” Then Justan heard it too: a shout, and feet pounding hard across the pavestones. A running figure appeared at the end of the street, moving fast. “Quick, back to the clinic,” Justan said, everything else forgotten.
But the runner had already seen them and changed course. Hunter kicked a stone aside, making sure of her footing. Justan put himself between the approaching man and her. Saints. Protecting me. She closed her hand around the little knife in her pocket. The runner slowed. “Justan, is that you?”
“Teller? What in the Saint’s—” In the lightstring’s glow, the arm of Teller’s shirt was dark and wet.
“Benders,” Teller gasped, clutching the arm. “I need Lia.”
Justan nodded, grabbing Teller’s other arm. “Anybody following you?” The man shook his head. “All right. Voren”—this to one of the clinic guards who had come running at the noise—“you stay out here. Keep an eye.”
They were inside the clinic a minute later. Lia hadn’t returned yet; Hunter got out the necessary supplies while Teller told his story, a towel clamped over the jagged cut the length of his forearm. “We were just out making checks. Heard about something happening on the edge of Bend and North, so we swung up to see. There was—”
A signal knock sounded on the door, and Loro flew in. “Teller! I heard. What happened?”
“I was just saying. There was a bunch of Benders, blocked off the end of an alley. Some hunters were headed that way. Don’t know what they wanted, but Benders got the idea they’d try to keep them out. We had to take care of that quick.”
Hunter’s hand froze on the pack she was unrolling. “You got this in a fight with hunters?”
Teller snorted in exasperation. “Course not. Benders. Had to get that barricade down, didn’t we? Hunters got there after. They thanked us.” He laughed shortly. “Even offered to escort us back, like we’d need it in the Ward.”
Hunter busied herself with the instruments so the men couldn’t see her face. They could have come here. Hunters could have come here. Her chest ached at the thought. “Did they say their names?” she asked, trying to sound merely curious.
“Think we’d ask? Hardly tell one from the other anyway, they’re all the same to look at, aren’t they? We just thanked ’em and got the Benders out of there before they could make more trouble. Last thing we need is hunters thinking cityens are getting in their way. Don’t want no confrontations.”
>
“Not yet,” Loro said.
CHAPTER 16
Occasional reports of hunters trickled in after that, but from what Hunter could glean their activities remained routine. They patrolled the stads south of the Ward, protecting the grain that was nearly ready for harvest; they escorted medical priests to the parts of the city that had no access to a med. Once, to Teller’s dour satisfaction, they took away a Bender whom they’d caught stealing crop powder, even though he could have had it free for his crops if he’d just asked. The relative quiet was advantageous; Hunter needed as much time as she could get to understand the situation in the Ward. It seemed more complex than the Patri’s information had led him to believe. When Hunter reported back to him—if she ever did—she had to have the details right.
Yet against all sense, a thread of disappointment wove through her relief.
Meanwhile the need to play the cityen role wore at her. Over and over, the guards made mistakes she would not have tolerated in young hunters she was teaching, missed potential threats that even the children—no, don’t think about that—would have recognized. Saints, they even trusted her now alone with Lia, leaving her to sleep unguarded in the clinic, separated from the med only by a door whose primitive lock would not stop her for a dozen heartbeats if she meant to get past it. . . .
She fretted all the while they let Lia wander the streets, accompanied only by a guard or two, or even just Milse; if the Warder had calculated that Hunter was too valuable to lose, there was no equation at all that justified risking their med. And Hunter suspected that the visits Lia made were to those too ill to be moved, for whom there was nothing she could do anyway; she almost always came back downcast, and said little about where she had been.
After those visits Lia spent much time searching through the prints, studying page after page under the lightstring’s harsh glare until she finally retreated to her room, in the back of the clinic, defeated. One such evening when the guards had left and she sat sorting through random sheets while Hunter repaired a broken chair, Lia looked up suddenly, eyes red-rimmed, and asked, “Can you read?”
“Yes,” Hunter answered, startled, the hammer dangling from her hand.
“Would you be willing to help me with these prints? The pages are so random, just bits and pieces gathered from wherever people found them. . . . Jonesen knew them better, but he had just begun to show me. It’s so frustrating. Sometimes I see someone sick and I know the thing to do is in here somewhere, if I could only find it. . . .” She broke off, passing a hand across her eyes.
“You can’t expect to help them all,” Hunter said. “Even the Saint can’t do that.”
“Can she really heal?” Lia asked wistfully.
There had been the nun whose blood the Saint had cleansed, and others from time to time. But Ela, Tana . . . “Sometimes. If the sickness is temporary, and the body is strong enough. Not someone like that old man with the heart,” she added. For some reason it seemed important that Lia not blame herself for him.
The med riffled the corners of the stacked prints. “Maybe not,” she said with a sigh. “But there’s plenty in here to help others. I thought if I could mark them somehow, make a list of what there is, I would at least have a place to start. It would go faster, if you could help me.”
“I can do that,” Hunter said, pulling the chair to the desk.
Lia touched a fingertip to the back of Hunter’s hand as she reached for the first print. “Thank you, Echo.”
Hunter would have expected to find the work dull as she had always imagined the priests’ to be. For hours in the evenings after visits, she sat across the worktable from Lia, sorting through sheets trying to match like-sized pages or similar lettering styles. It turned out to be not so different from the times she spent in the desert, studying some prey in minute detail, lying motionless as a stone while she absorbed every facet of her surroundings. Surprisingly, she began to look forward to the task. The pages, yellow with age and brittle as old bones, some of them partially burned or with bits torn away, made a puzzle she could concentrate on, keeping her mind from other, darker thoughts. There were a few captures, images preserved astoundingly lifelike, with some tech that had long been lost. Mostly, though, the prints contained unadorned text, page after dense page, as if someone had tried to cram the most information into the smallest possible space.
Most of the content was meaningless to her, and probably would be to the med as well. It was not that she could not read the words; rather, the world before the Fall was so far removed that prescience alone had been insufficient to preserve their sense across the chasm. She imagined the forefathers in the last spasms of the catastrophe they knew was upon them, scrambling to leave a legacy, trying to prevent their accumulated knowledge from hemorrhaging away into the dark. They must have known the hopelessness of the attempt even as they made it. She admired their doggedness, little good though it had done.
Yet every now and then she came across a fragment of unmistakable value, a bit on the diagnosis of disease or treatment of an injury. Those always won a smile from Lia. It was its own form of pleasure too to watch the med transcribe her notes in a tiny, precise hand from the random scraps they found into orderly columns on the sheets of blank print Milse brought her. “Exey sends his love,” Milse said one day, flitting in with a small stack of the material.
“He’s amazing,” Lia said, holding a sheet up to the light. It was fine textured, not quite white, and thin enough for the light to shine through it. “He takes the old prints that are too damaged to read, finds some way to soak them and roll them out, and dries them back into sheets.” She waggled the delicate stylus she used to write. “It’s a big improvement. On the old ones the ink bled so much I could hardly fit anything onto a sheet.”
“He always brags about being the best fabricator in the city,” Milse said. “Course, all the Benders brag, but in Exey’s case it’s actually true, not that I think anyone should tell him so. The best thing is, he’s helping the millers get another windwheel working. Once it’s fixed it’ll only take a few minutes to get a whole sack of grain ground, fine as you could want. It’ll take an hour off my day. And wait until you taste the bread.” His eyes widened in exaggerated appreciation, then narrowed dramatically. “We’ll have to fight off Justan to let anyone else get a share.”
Lia laughed. “That’s hard enough already.”
“Speaking of, where’s Justan been? Used to hang around here all the time. Now I never see him anymore.”
“He traded off with Teller, I don’t know why. I’ve lost track of the days, Milse,” Lia added ruefully. “When’s market again?”
“You work too hard,” Milse reproved her. “We’re halfway through the seven. You should take better care of yourself.”
“I’m fine,” Lia protested.
“You’re not! Look at you. You see people all day in the clinic, then you sit up half the night like this. Saint’s sake, take some time for yourself. Sleep, go to market. Get out of these rooms for a little while, for something other than some awful bloody mess. And you,” he added, jabbing an accusatory finger at Hunter. “Just because you never need to rest doesn’t mean she doesn’t.”
“Don’t go on at her,” Lia murmured, setting the writing tool aside with a sigh. “She just does what I ask.”
“Well, I think she looks like someone who knows her own mind,” Milse grumbled. “I know the Warder gives out that you’re some crazy woman from North, but I don’t believe it. I know what you really are.”
“Leave her alone, Milse,” Lia said with a laugh, but Hunter heard the sudden tension in her voice.
“No, go ahead, I’m curious.” She was more than curious: if people knew she was a hunter, she hadn’t picked up any sign of it. Nonetheless, she casually uncrossed her legs and let her feet rest lightly on the floor, just in case he reached for anything in the pockets of his overshirt
. “You really know?” she asked.
Milse crossed his arms emphatically. “I do. You’re really a perfectly sane woman from North. You’ve just realized there’s something better to do than spend all your time piling up your own chits, like try to make things a little better for everyone else.” He broke into a broad smile. “The Warder’s message is getting around at long last; take care of each other, don’t wait for someone else to do it. One of these days, everyone will listen. I’m glad you did. Our Lia needed the help, more than I could give, for certain. I just wish that you’d give her a few orders for once. She’d listen to you. Try telling her to eat and sleep, for starters.” With that, he bounced triumphantly out the door.
“Well,” Lia said, after a bemused pause. “That wasn’t quite what I expected him to say.”
“Maybe he’s right,” Hunter told her.
“About what?”
“Listening to me.” She felt a strange lightness in her heart. “Go and get some sleep.”
It was one of the captured images fished out of a stack of prints that brought Hunter up short, fingers pressing hard to the table to keep her motionless while her vision blurred and her throat tightened around a hard lump. She forced her face to stillness, but Lia noticed anyway, forehead creasing with concern as she reached across the table to slide the page out from under Hunter’s nerveless fingers. Her lips pursed in a soundless ooh of dismay. “I’m so sorry, Echo. I wish you could have found them.”
