Chapter 114: Smoke Beyond the Fence

Two days after she left, I wrote her down.

I keep a book — not a diary, a scout’s book, waterproofed cover, one page for each thing I would rather not relearn. Monster tells. Water sources. Which of Greyhaven’s gate captains can be talked to and which one counts arrows. That morning I turned to a clean page and put three lines on it, and the third took longer than the first two together.

Soul-sight: never permit. Not for information, not for curiosity, not for a demonstration.

Charisma 100 reads as food to some things. It is not a social stat.

The dream was real to me. That is not the same as it being mine.

Then I went out into the workshop and moved the arrival space two metres.

It had been sitting in the middle of the floor since I claimed the compound, because the middle of the floor is where there is room. That put anyone who arrived between me and both roller doors. I painted a new square nearer the north door with a scrap tin of white, so that in future whoever came through would have an exit at her back and I would have one at mine, and I moved the medical kit and the water to the bench on my side rather than hers, which felt ungenerous and which I did anyway.

The truth is that I had spent all my time since the Merge learning the mechanical rules of my class and about four minutes learning what it looked like from the other end. None of the twelve previous manifestations had reacted as though they could see what Nyssara saw. The thirteenth looked once and nearly emptied me onto the floor without intending to begin.

How many other things can see it, I thought. And how long have they been able to.

No answer came, obviously. There was no one to ask, and I had already searched Greyhaven’s restricted archive for anything resembling my class. It had given me conventional summoners, projected bodies, teleportation techniques, and nothing about what Charisma one hundred looked like to soul-sight.

So I did the work instead.

Four buildings, a workshop, two water tanks, a storage row and two gates: more than one man needs, and still not enough to be safe in without constant maintenance. I bled the tanks, cleared the roof gutter of six months of grit, patched the corrugate on the second store where the wind had lifted it, and spent a bad hour under the vehicle gate with a wire brush and my own welds, which were ugly when I made them and had not improved with age.

The quiet was useful. It had stopped being restful, which was new, and I decided not to look at that too closely.

❖ ❖ ❖

The following morning, the wind came round to the west and brought woodsmoke with it.

Feline Senses does not announce things. It just puts a fact in front of me the way a smell puts itself in front of anyone, only earlier and with a direction attached. Woodsmoke, west, low. Wet wood in it, and something under that — scorched fat, and the acrid note of burning painted timber, which is what you get when people feed a fire with whatever the building gave them.

Not wildfire. Wildfire in that country runs in the grass and gets big and stupid within an hour. This was one column, in one place, kept small.

Not a Greyhaven patrol either. Patrols burn charcoal blocks precisely so they don’t put a smoke signal over half a valley, and any sergeant who let his men burn painted board would have been on latrines for a fortnight.

The smoke came back at midday from the same place: the old service-water station about four kilometres beyond my western fence, a squat brick pump house with a walled yard that had been part of the district’s water plant before the Merge made all of that somebody’s ruin.

Somebody was living in it. That was as far as the evidence went.

I have been the harmless stranger by the road. I have also been walked into a debt yoke by people who fed me first, and I have watched a man named Garrick decide that whatever I had was worth the trouble of taking. Smoke means people, and people are the widest category of danger there is.

So I went to look, and I went the way you go when you don’t intend to be seen.

Rifle, two knives, the full medical kit, and one day of food — deliberately one. If they turned out to be twelve armed men with a hostage cellar, I didn’t want to be standing in front of them carrying a week’s rations and a reason.

Predator’s Veil settled over me at the fence line the way it always does, like a room going quiet. I took the drainage line west and then the old service road, and I was inside two hundred metres of the pump house before I heard a child laugh.

❖ ❖ ❖

That reorganised my expectations somewhat.

I lay in the ditch above the yard wall for forty minutes and counted, because counting is free.

Thirteen. Nine adults, four children, the youngest maybe six and the oldest twelve. A wagon in the yard with its rear axle broken clean and one wheel off, propped on a stack of bricks. Two fires, one under a grill and one banked small. Four water containers standing in the shade with lids on, and — this was the detail that changed how I read all the rest — a strip of clean cloth tied round the neck of each one, and a fifth container standing apart with no cloth on it at all.

Somebody in that yard was keeping treated water separate from untreated and marking which was which. Nobody does that by accident. Nobody does it at all after the second week unless somebody makes them.

They had two hunting rifles between them, a shotgun, and a lot of improvised polearms, which is what people carry when they have watched something they couldn’t reach. Nobody was standing a proper watch on the west side. One man sat with his boot off and his ankle up on a crate, swollen to about twice the size it should have been, and he was doing it with the specific stillness of a large man trying not to make a fuss.

I could have gone home. I want to be honest that I thought about it for longer than reflects well on me.

Then I stood up out of the ditch at forty metres, well inside their sightline, with the rifle slung across my back and both hands empty, and let the Veil break on its own.

The reaction was fast and reasonably competent. The shotgun came up. Two of the polearms got between me and the children before anybody said anything, which told me more about them than an hour of talking would have.

And a woman came out from behind the wagon with a wrench in her hand and put herself in front of the shotgun.

"That’s far enough," she said.

Mid-forties, maybe. Short and square-built, grey coming through dark hair that had been cut with something not designed for hair. Canvas coat, sleeves pushed up, forearms and hands marked with the small permanent scars you get from working on metal in bad light. She was tired in the way people are tired after weeks rather than days, and she looked at me with a flat professional suspicion that did not waver for so much as a second.

I’d like to record that my face did nothing. It never does nothing. I watched two of the adults behind her lose the thread of what they were doing, and one of the older children stare openly, and the woman with the wrench notice all of that and dislike it.

"I know," I said. "It’s a stupid face. Ignore it."

Something moved at the corner of her mouth. It was not a smile.

"Who are you?"

"Adrian Vale. C-grade scout out of Greyhaven. I hold the industrial compound four kilometres east — the fenced one with the water tanks." I kept my hands where they were. "I smelled your fire twice today and came to see who was making it. That’s the whole of it."

"And now you’ve seen."

"Now I’ve seen your axle’s gone at the housing, you’ve got a man who won’t walk on that ankle before the day after tomorrow, and you’re camped eighty metres off a service road that a herd of Stonebacks is crossing twice a day." I nodded at the containers. "And somebody here is keeping your water clean, which is the only reason I’m still standing in the open talking instead of walking home."

The wrench came down maybe five degrees.

"Mira Denholm," she said. "I ran the district pump station at Corrender for nineteen years. What do you know about the boars?"