The mud of the lower basin didn’t splash. It pulled.
Every step was a negotiation between the leather welt of the boot and the heavy, gray clay that had settled across the valley floor for forty years. The suction made a wet, sucking gasp each time Tomas lifted his heel, the strain pulling at his hamstrings and the muscles across the small of his back.
Nessa walked with a steady, steady beat. Her iron-shod staff struck the underwater clay two paces ahead of her boots. When the wood gave a sharp, clean clack, she stepped forward. It sank silently into the soft ooze. Then, she veered left or right, tracing the buried foundation of an ancient stone boundary wall that ran beneath the flooded orchard.
Tomas kept his eyes on her footsteps. His pack, with the cedar box bound tightly inside the hemp harness, sat well. But his left boot, with its birch thin wedge, slipped twice on the slimy willow roots that crisscrossed the underwater path. He braced himself with his ash staff. His knuckles turned white as he checked his balance before committing his full deadweight.
“Two miles to the Willow Weir,” Nessa called back. She turned her head so the wind didn’t carry her words away. “The levee holds here, but the ditch road is covered by eighteen inches of brown backwater. Mind the iron stakes. The farmers used to drive five-foot iron pins into the clay to anchor their hay drying racks before the flood. If you catch your boot on one, it will take your hide down to the bone.”
Tomas nodded, though she couldn’t hear his answer. He watched the water. Beneath the yellow scum of floating pollen and decayed duckweed, dark, jagged shapes were visible. Rotted fence palings, broken stone gateposts, and rusted iron wire that had trapped driftwood until it formed tiny dams across the road.
At four in the afternoon, the rain began again. It fell in cold, slanting grey sheets that stung their faces and drummed like lead shot on their oilcloth cloaks. The light faded quickly, the sun drowning behind the low, flat clouds of the marsh horizon.
They reached the ruins of the Willow Weir road-station as the twilight turned black.
The station had once been a solid two-story town tollhouse built of dressed granite blocks, where travelers on the King’s Road paid bridge dues and watered their draft beasts. Now, only the ground floor remained intact, half-buried under thirty years of drifted river sand. The upper timber story had burned during the flood riots of forty-four. That left blackened oak beams that arched over the stone walls like the ribs of an overturned barge.
A rough door of split pine planks, hung on leather hinges and secured with a wooden latch. It closed the entrance to the old common room.
Nessa tapped the door with her staff, waited five seconds, and pushed it open.
Inside, the air smelled of woodsmoke, wet wool, and old grease. In the center of the stone-flagged room, a small fire of dried willow driftwood burned in an iron fire bowl. Its smoke curled up through a hole in the rotted floorboards overhead.
On a pile of dry reed straw roof in the corner sat a man.
He was sixty-five years old, with thin, greasy white hair that fell around his ears and a face so lined and weathered it looked like dry river clay that had baked in the summer sun. He wore a patched frieze coat with frayed hems. Then he pinned to the inner lapel—deliberately hidden from casual view—was a tarnished brass oval: the fifth-tier courier badge of the Bellwether Municipal Post.
His boots were wrapped in burlap sacking bound with hemp twine, their soles worn through to the skin. In his lap was a tin bowl of thin barley broth. It he was stirring with a carved wooden spoon.
The old man looked up as the door creaked. His pale, watery eyes moved from Nessa’s land-mapper’s staff to the canvas-wrapped bundle on Tomas’s back.
The wooden spoon stopped in the broth.
“You’re carrying it,” the old man whispered. His voice was cracked, like two dry shingles rubbing together in the wind. “Gods above. Another one.”
Tomas closed the door behind them, dropped the heavy oak latch into its iron hasp. Then he slipped his arms free of the harness. He set the cedar box down on a dry granite bench near the fire bowl.
“Pell Anker?” Tomas asked quietly.
The old courier let out a long, ragged cough that shook his thin ribs. He set the tin bowl on the floor, wiped his mouth with his sleeve. Then he stared at the cedar box.
“I haven’t been called that name in nineteen years,” he said. “In the city, they call me the beggar at the ferry. The clerks throw me stale crusts when I sweep the horse dung from the toll house steps.”
Tomas knelt by the fire bowl, unbuttoned his coat, and warmed his numb hands over the willow embers. “Your name is on the bronze plate, Pell. Notch number eight. Year four hundred and fifty-five.”
Pell laughed—a dry, bitter sound that ended in another fit of coughing. “Year fifty-five. Aye. I had two good boots then, and a guild pony with a brass bridle. I thought I was going to be a chief courier before I was thirty. I took the box from Master Varis’s clerk. Three silver crowns advance, they gave me, and promised forty crowns more upon return of the signed receipt.”
“The guild daybook says you surrendered the claim,” Tomas said. He watched the old man’s face in the firelight. “The entry in Bay Nine says: Recipient attacked bearer. Mission abandoned due to hostile sorcery.”
Pell looked up, his watery eyes flashing with a sudden, sharp anger that stripped twenty years from his face.
“That’s a lie,” the old man spat. “A filthy clerk’s lie cut into parchment to save their own hides!”
Nessa sat down on a dry timber baulk, pulled her brass sound horn from her collar. Then she angled the flared bell toward Pell’s mouth. “Speak clearly, Pell. We have a legal ledger with us.”
Pell looked at the brass horn, then at Nessa’s hard, attentive eyes. He leaned closer to the fire.
“I never saw Mirelle Voss,” Pell said, his voice dropping into a harsh whisper. “I never got within five miles of her chapel house. I reached the marsh gate at the seventh milestone. Then, there was a calm distance of the city watch stationed across the levee. Not common town guards—soldiers in black boiled leather with the private badge of Captain Darven Holt. They had a barricade of sharpened stakes and two light giant crossbows mounted on a timber platform.”
“What did they tell you?” Tomas asked.
“They didn’t tell me anything,” Pell said. His hands shook as he reached toward the fire. “The sergeant took my pony by the bridle, pulled me out of the saddle, and threw me into the mud. He told me that anyone carrying comms to the lower fens was an enemy of the Council of Restoration. He said if I took another step toward the marsh, they’d pin me to the levee with an iron bolt and throw the box into the deep channel.”
“Why didn’t you report that to the registrar?” Tomas asked.
“I did report it!” Pell said, his voice rising in fury. “I walked twenty miles back to Bellwether with a broken knee, carrying that cedar curse under my arm. I went into Marr’s office. Marr wasn’t the senior registrar then—he was the chief clerk for the military supply board. He listened to me, he took the box, and then he called in two court guards. He told me that if I wrote in the ledger that the city watch had stopped a bonded courier on the King’s Road, he would have me whipped through the Fish Gate for spreading sedition during a town emergency.”
The old man reached inside his coat, pulled out a small, cracked horn snuff-box. Then he took a pinch of bitter dried sage to steady his breathing.
“Marr dipped his own pen in the ink,” Pell continued. “He said: You’ll sign that the necromancer attacked you with dead beasts, Pell. If you sign that, you keep your three crowns advance and we won’t revoke your badge. If you don’t sign it, you go to the salt pits for treason. I was twenty-six years old, Tomas. I had a wife who was spitting blood from the lung rot and two babies in a cellar tenement. What was I supposed to do? Die on a gallows for a box of dead tin?”
Tomas looked at the cedar box.
Tink. Tink. Clack.
He reached out and focused his vision on the eighth notch on the bronze plate.
Read the Record (1/3 leftover)
The bronze blurred into its strata. Layer Three opened beneath his mind’s eye. Beneath the scratched line of 455 A.D. Courier Pell Anker: ‘Refused’, the tiny physical evidence appeared: the original surface of the copper had been scraped down three thousandths of an inch with a three-sided steel scraper, removing three words—Turned by Watch—before the word Refused had been stamped over the erasure with a cold punch.
“You’re telling the truth, Pell,” Tomas said softly. “The ink was scraped. The original entry was turned by the watch.”
Pell stared at Tomas, his mouth opening in shock. “How do you know that? The clerk burned the paper slip in his animal fat lamp right in front of my face.”
“The metal remembers,” Tomas said.
Nessa pulled a fresh sheet of rag paper from her instrument case, dipped her reed pen into her travel inkpot, and laid the paper across her knee.
“Sign a statement, Pell,” she said. “Name the date. Name the sergeant if you remember him. Name Marr.”
Pell looked at the paper, then at the dark rain beating against the split-pine door. For a moment, the old fear flickered in his watery eyes. The fear that had kept him sweeping horse dung for nineteen years. Then he looked at Tomas’s patched coat, at his scarred porter hands, and at the steady, unbending set of the young man’s shoulders.
“His name was Sergeant Karr,” Pell said, his voice steadying. “He had a split lip and a scar across his left temple from a hooked pruning blade. Give me the pen, Land-mapper. My hand shakes, but I can still write my own name.”