The clatter of the iron spoon against the baked-clay bowl rang out across the frame stand table like a cracked bell.
Senn blinked, his mouth leftover open on the unfinished syllable of his question about Kilnstep’s lime workings. He glanced toward the end of the bench. There, Paxa Sel sat with her broad shoulders braced, her grey wool sleeves pushed back to reveal forearms corded with muscle and crisscrossed with faded acid scars from her apothecary jars.
“Tell me, Master Senn,” Paxa began, her voice ringing with the calm, terrifying enthusiasm of a village barber who has spotted an interesting abscess. “In your trade—dealing with refined wire and assay weights across the bitter salt flats—do you draw your water from the communal water tanks at the lower Saltglass waystations?”
The pale-haired trader looked taken aback. His smooth, practiced smile faltered for a split second, his grey eyes darting between Paxa’s severe face and Kezra’s half-eaten bowl of greasy mutton.
“I... Well, naturally, traveler,” Senn said, recovering himself with an easy chuckle and a slight tilt of his head. “One drinks where the horses drink, so long as the keeper has boiled the kettle. A commercial traveler can’t afford to be fastidious about well-buckets.”
“A fatal attitude,” Paxa declared. She leaned forward until her nose was barely a foot from his mulled cider mug. “Utterly total for the mesenteric blood-vessel bed. You have the complexion of a man whose liver is currently hosting three separate ages of Cestoda subularis—the common white thread-fluke of the bitter salt pans.”
Senn’s smile froze solid, the corners of his lips trembling against his teeth.
“I assure you, healer, my health is—”
“Deceptive,” Paxa interrupted flatly, her dark eyes pinning him to the pine bench. “The early stages are entirely asymptomatic, save for a slight, waxy pallor around the nostril wings and a tendency to sweat after eating roasted barley. You display both markers. The parasite enters through water that has sat in unglazed limestone water tanks where migratory water-fowl have fouled the gravel. The cyst-larva is tiny, shaped like a barbed grain of rye. It passes straight through the gastric acid unhindered, attaches itself to the mucosal lining of the upper gut with four hard-shelled hooks, and begins its segmented growth.”
Beside Kezra, Fellis Dain froze with a crust of dry bread halfway to his mouth. His jaw dropped, his chest heaving as he fought a sudden, violent burst of suppressed laughter. He ducked his head down toward his knees. His shoulders shook so wildly that his rigging frame rattled against the floorboards.
Senn cleared his throat, shifting his hips back along the bench away from Paxa’s intense scrutiny.
“A fascinating branch of natural philosophy, madam,” he said, his tone stiffening as he tried to steer his gaze back toward Kezra’s map case. “However, I was inquiring about the earth-measuring balance of the upland limestone—”
“Which is intimately connected to the water table!” Paxa snapped, cutting him off with the razor-sharp care of an amputating saw. “Where do you think the flukes breed, man? In the underground fissures! The limestone around Kilnstep and Saltglass is riddled with stale drainage pools. When the fluke reaches maturity, it sheds segments every forty-eight hours. Each segment is packed with three hundred thousand hardened eggs, which migrate directly into the common bile duct.”
She reached into the pocket of her leather apron, produced two lengths of greasy butcher’s twine, and laid them directly onto the table, right beside Senn’s polished pewter pitcher.
With swift, practiced fingers, she tied six tight knots into the hemp, spacing them half an inch apart.
“This is the adult worm,” she announced. She held the knotted twine up to the animal fat candle so that the greasy fibers glistened. “Three feet in length when fully engorged on liver stored energy. It has no stomach tract of its own. It absorbs your nourishment directly through its cuticle, leaving the host irritable, feverish, and prone to asking repetitive, intrusive questions in crowded rooms.”
Fellis let out a muffled snort, buried his face entirely in his homespun smock. Then he began coughing in a painful try to disguise a roar of laughter. Kezra reached down under the table and pinched the boy’s knee with enough force to bruise. That kept her own face carved out of solid, expressionless granite.
Senn stared at the knotted twine. The color had begun to drain from his neat, pale cheeks. That left his skin looking remarkably like the underbelly of a dead trout.
“Madam,” the trader stammered, raising a palm in defensive protest. “I assure you, I have no interest in—”
“You’ll have an intense interest when the bile duct becomes occluded,” Paxa said with grave, unrelenting certainty. “The symptoms of acute biliary blockage are clear. First comes the grey tongue. Then the white of the eye of the eyes turn the color of rancid butter. Within three days, the bowels cease their natural peristalsis entirely, discharging only a thin, foul, clay-colored mucus that smells remarkably like boiled horse hooves.”
She leaned in closer still. Her voice dropped into a harsh, conspiratorial whisper that carried clearly to the three drovers sitting at the next table, who instantly stopped chewing their beef.
“At my last three field clinics in the lower valley,” Paxa said, her dark eyes boring into Senn’s widening pupils, “I had to boil four kettles of packed lime-water every morning just to sterilize the bed-pans. When you open the lower belly to drain the hepatic abscess, the stench alone will peel the varnish off an oak door. The pus is thick, green, and studded with chalky white nodules that pop like very thirsty peas when you press them between two tiles.”
She picked up her iron spoon again, turned it over in her fingers. Then she tapped the bowl against the table directly between his clean hands.
Clink.
“If you value your intestines, Master Senn, you’ll not drink another drop of that cider until you have taken two drams of dried wormwood boiled in vinegar, followed by a violent purge of bitter salts. Would you like me to inspect your tongue? The light here is poor. But if you step over to the hearth and open your throat, I can usually spot the yellowing of the soft palate before the delirium sets in.”
Senn pushed himself backward off the pine bench with such sudden, clumsy haste that his heel caught the leg of the table, slopping three ounces of mulled cider across the grease-stained wood.
“That... That won’t be necessary, healer,” he gasped, his friendly composure entirely shattered. He pulled his tailored cloak around his shoulders, his pale eyes darting toward the common room door with genuine revulsion. “I have... Business with the freight master regarding the morning wagons. Forgive me. Good evening to you all.”
He turned on his heel and strode briskly across the common room toward the iron stove, his cider pitcher left untouched on the table behind him.
His grey cloak vanished into the crowd of wagon drivers around the hearth. Then, Fellis collapsed forward across his empty bowl, his forehead resting on the greasy pine. He shook with breathless, weeping laughter.
“Pus... Like very thirsty peas,” Fellis wheezed, pounding his fist softly on his thigh. “By the five peaks, Paxa, he looked like he was going to empty his stomach right into his cider cup!”
“It was an accurate sick description,” Paxa replied with clean dignity, picking up her bread and taking a slow, thoughtful bite. “Though the thread-fluke rarely exceeds eighteen inches in living hosts. Three feet is an exaggeration reserved for horses and particularly dishonest merchants.”
Kezra let out a quiet breath, feeling the tension ease out of her neck muscles. She looked at the healer with dry warmth.
“Thank you, Paxa.”
“Don’t thank me,” Paxa said, chewing step by step. “The man is an oily nuisance, but he’s not an amateur. He wasn’t asking about Kilnstep because he wanted to buy pottery jars.”
At the far end of the bench, Yseld had not laughed. She hadn’t even smiled.
Her work knife was back in its sheath, and her hooked staff was gripped tight in both hands. Her gaze followed the pale-haired trader as he wove through the crowd toward the hostel entrance.
“Look at his hands,” Yseld whispered, her voice cold and level as mountain ice.
Kezra turned her head slightly, keeping her profile low. Across the crowded room, Senn was pausing by the timber doorposts near the front entrance. There, two of the leather-coated outriders they had seen that morning were still standing guard.
“What about them?” Kezra asked. “His fingers were clean. No ink, no calluses from hauling ropes.”
“Look at the base of his right thumb,” Yseld said. “And the lateral pad of his right forefinger. A wire merchant gets cross-hatched scars across his palms from handling the spools, and copper dust leaves green stains in the cuticle that take three months of foam-stone to scour out. That man had no wire marks. What he had was a thick, yellow ridge of hard horn on the inside of his first knuckle. A flat callus across the pad of his thumb.”
Kezra searched her memory, picturing the way Senn had unfastened the silk cord of his token pouch.
“A bow-draw callus,” Kezra realized, a cold prickle running down her spine.
“A sixty-pound recurve bow,” Yseld confirmed. “Drawn with a three-finger release and an iron thumb ring. And the dark stain on his left wrist wasn’t walnut dye. It was the grey lead smudge you get from wiping an army tally-slate with your sleeve every evening.”
As they watched through the smoky haze, Senn reached the front door. He didn’t speak to the two armed men in boiled leather. He didn’t even look at their faces.
Instead, as he walked past the doorpost, his right hand dropped naturally to his waist. With two fingers of his right hand, he tapped the iron tongue of his belt buckle twice.
Tap. Tap.
It was a motion so casual, so fully unremarkable, that anyone watching from three paces away would have assumed he was merely adjusting his breeches against the draft.
Yet the moment the sound cleared the doorway, the two outriders shifted their weight. One of them spat his mouthful of willow bark onto the cobbles, straightened his stance. Then they turned his eyes directly toward the corner nook where Kezra’s packs were stowed.
“He gave the signal,” Yseld said, her voice dropping to a grim, fatal certainty. “Two taps. Target identified, location confirmed.”
“He knows we have a map,” Fellis said, all humor gone from his face as he sat upright on the bench. “He saw the dividers.”
“He knows more than that,” Kezra said quietly, her hand resting against her ribs where the true bonded notebook pulsed with steady warmth. “He knows the name of Kilnstep. And he knows I’m carrying paper that points toward home.”
She rose from the bench, taking her ash sounding rod in her right hand.
“I’m going outside to check the weather,” Kezra said.
“Take your staff,” Yseld told her. “Keep to the wall. Don’t go near the wagons.”
Kezra nodded. She walked through the crowded room. That kept her eyes down and her stride steady, until she reached the heavy timber front entrance. She pushed the iron latch and stepped out onto the wide stone threshold of Splitflint Hostel.
The night air hit her face like a bucket of iced well-water, sharp with frost and the bitter smell of burning peat. Overhead, the sky above the notch was black as coal, the jagged dark shape of the dark rock cliffs cutting off the stars.
She swung her shuttered horn lantern forward to light up the step, checking her footing against the frost that was already forming on the damp river cobbles.
The pale yellow beam slid across the massive flat stone slab beneath her boots.
Kezra stopped.
Right at her feet, gouged deep into the surface of the dark stone threshold, was a pattern of fresh, jagged lines that had not been made by iron-shod wagon wheels.
The scratches were clean and bright, white with crushed stone dust, scored into the living rock within the last three days.
It was a grid. Four paces square, divided into quarters, with a crude three-line mark scratched outside its northeastern corner.