Chapter 33: The Strand Place

We went north a bit over a fortnight after first frost.

It wasn't heavy snow. Just enough to whiten the track and sit on top of the stone walls, lining the black edge of the Greywild, the thin film crunching under our boots. The sky was low and grey, and the air had that menacing, heavy feel it gets before a proper snowfall.

There were eight of us walking. Me in front, because the warband's pack ponies, which Brakka had bought off a drover in Thornfell for far too much, wouldn't go any closer to me than fifty paces. Then Wrenna, who walked beside me, because she had to. She could go a mile or two from Gristle, no further. Past that, she said, it felt like being pulled backwards by the hair. Then Miss Quill, on Lys's grey mare, which Lys had lent her, wrapped in two coats and a scarf to the eyes. Then Brakka and Grosh and three of the warband, with the ponies.

Wrenna had never seen snow before. She'd watched it fall from the barn roof the night before, for hours. Now she walked through it with her head down, watching it melt where her feet touched it, leaving little steaming footprints all the way along the track.

"It goes away," she said. "When I touch it. Why does it go away?"

"You're warm. Snow goes away from things that are warm."

"Everything up here goes away when I touch it." She said it, scowling a little. "Except you. You don't go away." Her face brightened when she turned to say that to me.

"No," I said. "I don't."

She grinned, and kicked a snowdrift into steam, and walked on.

* * *

About noon on the first day we met a shepherd coming down off the moor with his dogs and a few dozen ewes, bringing them in early ahead of the weather. The dogs saw me and went flat in the snow with their ears back and wouldn't move. The shepherd swore at them for a while, then gave up and walked over on his own.

He was an old man, bent nearly double from a life on the hill, with a face cured brown and creased as an old saddle, and a crook taller than he was. He looked at Wrenna, steaming in the snow. He looked at Brakka. He looked at me.

"You'll be the Marsh lad," he said. "From down Thornfell way. The one that carried the wall."

"That's right."

"Heard about you." He spat in the snow. "You going up the Strand place?"

"We are."

"Don't." He shifted his crook to his other hand. "There's lights up there at night, in the barn. Yellow. And a noise under the ground like a bull in a pit. My dogs won't go within a mile of it." He looked at the sky, east, over the Greywild. "And there was a thing flew over, a fortnight back. Big grey bastard with wings. Had a man on it. Went north, along the forest, low. Came back two days after, going south."

Miss Quill had her ledger out before he'd finished.

"North," she said. "Along the forest. Two days."

"That's what I said, missus."

He went off down the hill with his sheep. The dogs went past me in a wide curve, on their bellies, and then ran.

"Kell," said Miss Quill. "Checking his muzzles."

It was two days to the Strand place. We slept the night in a shepherd's hut on the moor with a fire on a flat stone and the warband snoring along one wall like a row of bullocks. Wrenna sat outside in the snow, glowing. Miss Quill sat by the fire with the brown ledger on her knee and Kell's map open beside it and didn't sleep much.

"A hundred and forty," she said, at about midnight, to nobody.

"What's a hundred and forty?"

"Cores. Kell said it took a hundred and forty to bind the Crane wyrm. There were only twelve crystals in the collar round its neck. So the rest went somewhere. Into the binding, I think. Burned up making it." She tapped the map. "If he's sealed the Strand lock the same way, with crystals instead of a key..." She tapped the map. "He'll have used a lot. And crystals run down. They're not a key. They're a battery. They go flat."

"How long?"

"I don't know. That's why I'm going." She shut the ledger. "I don't like not knowing."

* * *

The Strand place lay in a valley under the trees, at the end of a long track that nobody had cleared. There'd been a gate once. It was off its hinges, lying in the snow.

I knew it was wrong before we got to the house. You get a feel for a farm. Whether it's lived in, whether it's cared for, whether it's just between owners. This one was dead. The fences were down, not eaten like ours, but cut. The fields hadn't been ploughed. The house was a black shell with half a roof, burned out, with snow drifted in through the windows. Nobody had tried to put it out.

Behind the house, under an old pear tree, there were four mounds in the snow.

I went and looked at them. They'd been dug in a hurry, by somebody who didn't care much. Shallow and crooked, with the earth thrown back on anyhow, and the wooden markers already falling over. Three of the markers had names burned into them with a hot iron. Martha Strand. Jem Strand. Will Strand. The fourth just said HAND.

Somebody's hired man. Nobody had known his name, or cared to find out.

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I stood there a while.

"Brakka," I said. "Can your lot dig, in frozen ground?"

"Orcs can dig anywhere," said Brakka. She looked at the graves. Her face went still. "These are bad graves."

"They are."

"We will do them again," said Brakka. "Properly. Square. Like you did for the guards in the forest."

She went and got the others.

* * *

The barn was still standing. It was bigger than ours, stone at the bottom and timber above, with a good slate roof. The doors were chained shut. I broke the chain.

Inside, it was cold. Much colder than outside. Cold the way a cellar is cold, coming up out of the ground.

In the middle of the barn floor, there was a round black glassy patch, like ours.

Only it wasn't like ours. Ours was smooth as a pond. This one was cracked. Fine cracks, like a plate that's been dropped and not quite broken, running out from the middle in every direction. And all round it, bolted into the stone floor with great iron pins, there was a cage of chains. Iron chains, crossing back and forth over the black glass, dozens of them, tight as fiddle strings. And at every place where two chains crossed, there was a crystal, set in an iron clamp.

They were glowing. Most of them. A dirty yellow, like the collars. But some had gone dim. And some had gone grey, and cracked, and the chains round them had gone slack.

Miss Quill got down on her knees at the edge of it with a lamp and started counting.

Wrenna didn't come in. She stood in the barn doorway with her arms wrapped round herself, and for the first time since I'd known her, she looked frightened.

"That's not a lock," she said. "That's a muzzle."

"What's the difference?"

"A lock is a door shut properly. With a key. Turned. A muzzle is a dog with a rope round its mouth." She hadn't come one step further in. "And the dog's still in there, Tobin. I can hear it. It's pushing."

"What is it?"

"One of the big ones." She hugged herself tighter. "Bigger than me. Much bigger. It used to try at your door too, years ago, when you were small, and you sent back everything it pushed through, and after a while it stopped trying. It came here instead. Where there was nobody to send things back." She looked at the four graves under the pear tree, out past the barn door. "And then there was nobody here at all."

I listened. At first I couldn't hear anything but the wind outside, and Miss Quill's lips moving as she counted.

Then I could.

Under the floor. Under the black glass and the cracks and the cage of chains. A sound like something very large breathing, slowly, through its teeth.

* * *

"Thirty-six," said Miss Quill, at last. She sat back on her heels and blew on her fingers, which had gone white at the tips from the cold of the glass. "Thirty-six crystals. Nine already dead. Four more nearly." She looked at the cracks in the glass, and then at her ledger, and her pen went down the page very fast. "If they've lasted since Kell's people turned this, which by the D and V ledger was eleven months ago..."

"How long?" I said.

"Three weeks." She closed the ledger. "Perhaps four. Then enough of them go dark that the chains can't hold, and then..."

She didn't finish.

Three weeks. The thaw was a hundred and five days off. This would go long before.

And if this went, Kell's other five might go the same way, about the same time. All of them muzzled, none of them locked. All along the Greywild, one after another, like a row of fence posts going over in a flood.

* * *

At the edge of the black glass, by the north wall, there was a notch.

Like ours. Cut into the stone at the lip of where the hole had been. But not the shape of a cleaver. It was long and curved, a thin crescent, with a short straight handle at one end.

A sickle.

Two short lines were cut beside it. The same as ours. Stamp twice.

"Their key," I said.

"It isn't here," said Miss Quill. She'd already looked. She'd been all round the barn with the lamp while I was outside with the graves.

"Kell," I said.

"I'd think so."

I looked at the sickle-shaped notch for a long time. Then I took Gristle off my back.

"Tobin," said Wrenna, sharp, from the doorway. "Don't."

"I just want to see."

I put the blade of Gristle down into the notch. Gently. It didn't fit. Of course it didn't. It was the wrong shape, too wide and too straight. It sat across the crescent like a plank across a ditch.

The black glass shivered.

All the chains rang at once, like a harp being struck, and three of the crystals went dark in the same moment, pop pop pop. The breathing under the floor stopped. Then it started again, faster. Something pushed up against the glass from below, and a new crack ran across it from one side to the other, with a sound like ice on a pond in spring.

I took Gristle out. Fast.

Everything went quiet again. The breathing slowed. The chains stopped ringing.

Brakka, behind me in the barn, said something in her own tongue that made Grosh flinch. Then she said it again in ours. "Fuck. Fuck, husband. Don't do that again."

"I won't."

Miss Quill was sitting very still on her heels with her ledger clutched against her chest.

"Twelve," she said, very quietly. "Twelve dead now. Not nine." She swallowed. "That was about a week, Tobin."

"I know," I said. "Sorry."

* * *

We found the widow's book in the house.

Miss Quill found it, in the end. In the burned kitchen, under the fallen dresser, in a tin box that had kept the fire off. It was an account book, like Dad's, like hers, half its pages brown at the edges. Martha Strand had kept her farm's figures in it for thirty years. Seed and salt and the price of wool.

And in among the figures, every so often, in the margins, other things.

Sickle back on the hook. Stamped twice.

Agent from the city again. Offering. Told him no.

Agent again. More money. Told him where he could put it.

Rider brought the tax notice. Two hundred gold. Jem says we should sell. I said no. Your father didn't hold this hole forty years for us to sell it to a man with a tower on his ring.

Then, on the last page that wasn't burned, in a hand that had gone shaky:

They came in the night. They took the sickle off the hook. Jem tried to stop them.

That was all.

Miss Quill read it out by lamplight in the black shell of the kitchen, with the snow coming in through the windows. Then she shut the book and held it against her chest like she'd held the ledger in the barn, and didn't say anything for a while.

"Her husband held it forty years," she said at last. "And she held it after him. And they sent her a tax notice. Two hundred gold." Her voice broke on it. "The same. Exactly the same. And she said no."

"Same as Dad," I said.

"Same as you."

Outside, in the grey light, Brakka's lot had got the frozen ground open. You could hear their spades going, steady, in time. And Brakka singing under her breath, something slow, the one Rusk had said was for the dead. Not theirs. Anyone's. When each grave was done, the warband stood round it bareheaded, and Grosh said the name over it, carefully, the way it was written on the marker, in his deep slow voice. Martha Strand. Jem Strand. Will Strand. He said them like he'd known them.

I went out and helped them dig. Square and deep, the way Dad taught me. Four of them.

We did HAND's last. Miss Quill knelt in the snow with the widow's book and went through every page until she found him, in a column of wages from three summers ago. A silver a week, and his board. Davy Orme.

I burned his name into a new marker with a hot iron from the fire, and put it at his head.

* * *

The Countess came at dusk, out of the trees, the way she always did.

She stood in the barn doorway beside Wrenna and looked at the chains and the black glass and the crystals going dark, for a long time, without saying anything. Then she turned and looked at the four new graves under the pear tree, square and straight in the snow, with their new markers.

Then she looked at me.

"You buried them," she said.

"Somebody had to. Properly."

She was quiet. Then she pulled her cloak round her, and turned to face the dark under the Greywild, and stood there in the cold with her back to the barn door.

"Go and sleep, Mister Marsh," said the Countess. "All of you. I'll watch."