Chương 30: Chapter 27 — The Deeper Mark

They got back to the Aphid Barn just after lunch. It had been a quick hunt, but Fenwick was still a bit cautious about pushing Max and his new hunger bar. Fenwick told Max he had Order business and left him with Sindy. This was true. It simply wasn't the whole truth, and the difference felt thin enough to walk on as he crossed the compound toward the equipment room. He first needed to turn in the quest slip. Behind him, through the wall, he could hear Sindy beginning a new chapter.

Max's responses were still slow, but they were coming faster than they had three days ago. He collected a lantern from the supply shelf, checked the oil, and went to find people. He decided to grab the same people as his last party. They weren't easy to work with, but at least he knew what to expect. Alfred was coming out of the archive room with a scroll under each arm, covered in dust and wearing a look of righteous indignation. He had his staff. He always had his staff. Fenwick explained what he needed.

"The Barrow Farm cave," said Alfred.

"Cknolls are cleared."

"I want to document the site before I file the Guild report." Alfred was already turning back for his coat. Buttons came around the corner at speed, which was his natural pace. He was carrying the pond net again, or possibly still. Fenwick had never established whether Buttons returned borrowed equipment or kept it in rotation. He explained what he needed a second time.

"The cave," said Buttons. His eyes lit in a way that suggested the pond net was absolutely going to be relevant.

"You won't need the net." Buttons took the net anyway. Marvella was at the end of the corridor, heading somewhere with a notebook already open. She looked at Fenwick when he fell into step beside her. She looked at Alfred and Buttons behind him. She closed the notebook.

"The Barrow Farm cave," said Fenwick.

"All right," said Marvella. That was the whole conversation. Fenwick noted the entrance carefully as they came in, the gap in the rock face, the worn threshold, the way the ground just inside the entrance had been used enough to pack down hard. The cave itself looked different in the afternoon without adrenaline. Smaller, somehow, and more mundane, the lantern easily pierced the dark, revealing the aftermath of the battle. The cknoll blood was where the fight had been. The cknoll bodies were not.

Fenwick crouched down. He looked at the blood on the cave floor and then at the ground around it. Alfred came to stand beside him, squinting.

"Drag marks," said Alfred.

"Going in."

"I see them."

"Did you move them?"

"Of course not, we had the lamb."

"They aren't being taken out."

"I see that too." Alfred looked at the drag marks with the satisfaction of someone filing a correct observation.

"Something took them after you left. While they were still bleeding." He pointed at the marks with his staff.

"See how the blood thins as it goes deeper? They bled out during the move. Whatever took them didn't wait long, but it didn't rush either." Unauthorized use: this story is on Amazon without permission from the author. Report any sightings. Fenwick looked at the marks and said nothing for a moment. He had seen it. He had seen it the moment they walked in. But Alfred had said it first, and it was correct, so he nodded.

"Single file," said Alfred.

"Formation. I'll take point."

"I'll take point," said Fenwick.

"The correct approach in a narrow passage with limited light is—""Alfred."

"—to have the longest reach at the front, which, and I want to be clear about this, is not you." Fenwick looked at Alfred's staff. He looked at the passage. He looked at how the walls narrowed twelve feet in, and how anything coming from the right side would be invisible until it was already inside their light radius. He thought about sight lines.

"Fine," said Fenwick.

"You take point." Alfred took point. He was, in this specific instance, correct, and the knowledge settled over the group like a damp cloth. They went in. The passage widened thirty feet from the entrance. The drag marks continued — two sets of them now, parallel, consistent spacing. Something had made more than one trip. The blood dried as they went, still visible but older, the dark stain lightening to brown and then to the ghost of brown as the lantern passed over it.

This wasn't the first bleeding thing dragged here. Buttons had stopped narrating. This was the first sign that something had changed in the air of the cave. The second was the fire pits. Three of them, set back from the main passage in a natural alcove. Old ash, grey and dry. Stones arranged around each one, not thrown there by water or chance — placed. Fenwick crouched beside the nearest and looked at the stone arrangement without touching it.

"That's not cknoll work," said Alfred, from behind him.

"No," said Fenwick.

"Cknolls don't make fire. They don't arrange stones. This is deliberate construction." Alfred's voice had changed slightly. The lecturing quality had gone out of it.

"Old. But deliberate." Marvella was writing in her notebook. She had not said anything since the entrance. She wrote steadily, moving the lantern Buttons held to get the angle right, and said nothing. The passage continued. They followed it. The cleared pathways started twenty feet past the fire pits — the floor swept, debris pushed to the walls, the kind of maintenance that meant regular traffic over a long period of time. Whatever had used this cave had used it for years.

The cknolls had been the most recent tenants. They had not been the original ones. Fenwick registered a faint, familiar scent. The rest of the party pulled their robes up over their noses. Fenwick placed it a moment later — death, ambient, wafting up from somewhere below. He knew that smell. He had been living beside it for two months. The passage narrowed again past the fire pits before it opened into something wider. Fenwick kept the lantern low.

The cleared floor continued ahead of them, patient and deliberate; something was maintaining the cavern. He counted his steps without deciding to. Old habit from the archive work — distance mattered when you were filing location. Forty steps from the fire pits, the passage turned. Alfred stopped at the turn. He held his staff across the opening without comment. Everyone stopped. He listened. After a moment, he moved the staff and walked through. Nobody asked what he had been listening to.

The drag marks ended at a chamber. The cage was iron. It was sized for something large — a cow-person, or close to it, the bars rising to Fenwick's eye level, the base set into the cave floor with bolts that had been there long enough to rust at the edges. The door hung open. The manacles inside were iron too, four of them, attached to the rear wall by chains long enough for a person to stand but not reach the door. The blood inside the cage was recent. Not the drag-mark blood. Different. Darker.

A pool of it near the rear wall, dried but not old. Days, not weeks. Nobody said anything. Alfred opened his mouth. He closed it. He looked at the manacles for a long moment and said nothing. In all the time Fenwick had known Alfred, he had never seen him with nothing to say. Buttons was looking at the ceiling. His lips were moving, but nothing was coming out. Marvella wrote in her notebook. Her pen moved across the page with the same steadiness it always had. She did not look up.

When she finished writing, she looked up at Fenwick. She did not ask anything. Fenwick looked at the cage for exactly as long as he needed to. The manacles were set at adult height. The bolts had been engineered into the floor, planned well before the first use. He looked at the blood and kept his eyes on it. He turned around. He walked back toward the entrance. Behind him, without anyone suggesting it, the others followed. Back in daylight, they stood at the cave mouth for a moment.

The afternoon light felt louder than it should have.

"Thank you," said Fenwick.

"All of you. This stays with the group until I've had time to file correctly." Alfred nodded once, slowly, the scrolls still under his arm. Buttons looked at the ground and nodded slowly. Marvella met Fenwick's eyes the way she had in the pantry corridor. She didn't name it then either. She didn't name it.

"Let me know if you need anything else," she said. She walked back toward the compound. Fenwick stood at the cave entrance a moment longer. He looked at the dark inside. The dark looked like nothing, which was the correct thing for dark to look like, and he did not find it reassuring. He filed it. He went back to Max.