Ashes of the Earth (37 page)

"You
mean the head of the millers' guild."

Jori
nodded. "He made a speech praising the governor for his bold
action in recapturing the assassin. This miller no one knows even
suggested canceling the next election as a distraction in this time
of public disorder."

"They're
calling Nelly an assassin now?"

"Everyone
is waiting for her to be brought back and executed. With the size of
the bounty, it will be any day now." Jori bit her lip. "He
won't stop until she is dead, Hadrian."

It
took him
nearly
half a day to find Dax, and he succeeded only because he gave up
searching for the boy and followed the bait. It was midafternoon when
the boy entered the back of Mette's cafe. Dax had been hiding in
plain sight, trimming his hair, wearing the dark clothes prescribed
for students. But he could not hide his craving for Mette's maple
sugar pastries. Hadrian waited by her backyard stable until he
reappeared several minutes later, watching as Dax stopped to pet a
cat.

Off-balance
already, he had no time to react as Hadrian darted out of the shadows
and grabbed him by the belt. But as Hadrian pulled him toward a bench
the boy slammed a knee into his groin.

"Hello
to you too," he gasped, staggering backward.

The
boy's expression changed from fear to shame as he recognized his
assailant. "Stone the crows!" he exclaimed. "I didn't
know you was ... you could have just..."
His
words trailed away as he helped Hadrian to the bench. "I'm
cheered you ain't dead."

"I
have to stay in the shadows," Hadrian explained. "Which
means I had to find you in the shadows. You've gone back to school
after all."

The
boy brushed off his pastry, which had fallen in the dirt, then broke
it in half. He shrugged as he gave one piece to Hadrian. "Three
squares and a warm bed."

Hadrian
nodded thanks. "You didn't tell me about your present for
Jonah," he said.

Dax
studied Hadrian warily.

"Ducks
taking off at dawn. He would have liked it."

His
listener's eyes gave nothing away.

"Some
of the jackals broke your friend Nash's foot trying to find out where
that painting is. Why?"

"Ain't
seen Nash, not for weeks."

"He's
on their farm with his mother. Staying out of the way. You were his
budge, the one who climbs inside and waits until it's safe to unlock
doors. Why would the jackals be interested in that painting? Was it
stolen from Fletcher?"

"Never
in life!" Dax exclaimed. "He'd drop me in the fish chopper
if he caught me. It was just some house. White clapboard, white
fence, big stone chimney. Sometimes the owner works nights."

"Where's
the painting, Dax? You never gave it to Jonah."

"He
told me his birthday was next month. I was waiting for that. It's at
the mill. Mergansers. He liked mergansers, the ones with the big
green crests. Once we watched some take off, running like clowns on
the water, and he laughed and laughed. Second floor," Dax added.
"An old feed bin filled with empty burlap sacks. Except the
bottom sack ain't empty." He bit into his sugary cake.

He
watched the boy eat. "What was it like the first time you went
to the camps?" Hadrian asked.

"I
was scared. Jonah had given me a note to explain I was helping him.
But we always heard about the monsters and mutants who lived there.
You know, two heads, with skin like snakes."

"But
you went anyway."

"Mr.
Jonah gave me a note," he repeated. Dax looked up as if
remembering something. "Kenton asked for you. When he first
found me last month he put me in jail for a night to help me remember
where you were, no food or water for twenty-four hours. I said I
thought you were dead."

"Good
idea."

"I
mean I really thought you were dead. I saw that piece of wood in your
back, then saw the waves crashing over you."

"It
was a close thing." Hadrian finished his piece of pastry and
licked his fingers. "What I don't understand, Dax, is how you
had the time to travel so often to the camps."

"Weren't
just me. We split it. Jonah let me pick two others, from the
orphans."

"Who?
Where are they now?"

"Told
you. They got taken to iron salvage."

Hadrian
gazed at the boy, trying to unlock the mystery of his words. "The
two Kenton took for salvage runners? He couldn't have known."

"Bad
luck is all. They were with me when he came that night. He knew they
were my friends. Worse for them."

"Who
has the words for the camps now, Dax?"

"There's
always families trying to get notes out. But nothing for that Nelly
and her friends."

"But
what about messages from the jackals to Kinzler?"

The
boy looked with worry into the stable's deeper shadows as if suddenly
frightened of something. "We should go," he said.

"When
did the jackals start sending messages to the camps?" Hadrian
pressed.

"Last
fall. Nelly had given me one of those carved ironwood knives they use
in the camps, with a turtle shell handle. I was outside the fish
plant, opening clamshells with it when one of the jackals grabbed me.
He asked who I stole it from. I said no one around here. Two days
later they found me, took me to the jackals' place, that white house
by the docks. One-eyed Fletcher was waiting for me. He asked me
questions to see if I knew my way around the camps."

"They
thought you went there to steal things."

Dax
nodded. "Captain Fletcher took off his eye patch and looked at
me with his dead eye, the zombie eye, and told me if I ever told
anyone about our talk that eye would see me."

"That's
when they said you could become a jackal."

Hadrian
watched him cast another nervous glance into the shadows. "We
should go," he said again.

"Is
that when?" Hadrian pressed.

The
boy grimaced. "No, not then." He stood, made a gesture
toward the alley.

Hadrian
silently studied him. "Not then," he ventured, "because
the promise to make you a jackal came when you stole the book from
Hamada for them."

Dax
went very still. "You don't know that."

"You
were in and out of Takeo's barn for Jonah. But he'd never ask you to
steal a book. Listen to me. I need to know what it was," he said
more urgently. "What book was so important to the jackals?"

"A
di-rect-ory." The boy pronounced the unfamiliar word slowly.

"A
directory of what?"

Dax
took a step toward the light. The pain on his face was unmistakable.
"Businesses. Later, I saw it on Kinzler's table in that compound
of his. I'll get it back. I said that into the phone the day they put
Jonah in the ground. I kept seeing Jonah's face when I was going to
die in the icy water that night the boat blew up. When the waves
starting breaking over me and my hands were too cold to hold the
paddle, he kept calling to me, like he was on the shore waiting.
That's why I didn't pass out, why I stayed alive. He kept me alive
for a reason. I went to his grave as soon as I got back to
town—before I even found dry clothes. I promised him again I'd
get it back." Suddenly they were interrupted by a low groan from
the back of the stable, growing in volume to a howl. Dax ran.

Hadrian,
too, began moving quickly away. But then he paused as the howl became
a long sob. Mette seemed not to see him as she darted out of the cafe
carrying a small tin bucket. He ran into the shadows behind her,
halted six feet away as she unlocked a door and slipped inside what
appeared to be a workshop, leaving the door ajar.

Peering
inside, Hadrian could see chairs in various stages of repair, all of
which hung on the wall to make room for a low cot. Mette bent over a
limp figure on the bed, murmuring words of comfort in Norwegian,
sounding like a mother soothing a sick child. Her patient was a blond
man in his late twenties, and he wasn't confined to bed by a
sickness, he was bound to it by ropes across his elbows and knees.

The
man quieted under Mette's touch and she poured milk from her bucket
into a mug for him, then retrieved a vial of powder from inside her
apron and emptied it into the milk. As he drank the man's eyes seemed
to regain their focus, gazing gratefully at Mette before widening
with fear as he glimpsed Hadrian behind her.

The
Norger woman spun around with surprising speed and seemed about to
launch herself at him before she froze. "Hadrian!" she
gasped. Then she collected herself and extended her arms for an
embrace. "Hadrian, thank God!" she murmured warmly, folding
her arms around him with a sigh of relief.

She
quickly explained that the man on the cot, now sinking into
unconsciousness, was her nephew Arne, a shipwright who lived with his
parents near the waterfront. A quiet, steady worker, he had recently
begun acting peculiarly, borrowing money from his parents, shouting
out in the middle of the night, acting tipsy though he never touched
a bottle of spirits.

When
he sliced himself in the leg with a shipyard adze, his parents had
kept him at home under orders from the hospital. But he had soon
grown violent, repeatedly hobbling outside at night and reopening the
wound, then returning much calmer despite the blood running down his
leg. Next they discovered he'd been stealing his mother's jewelry.
But only when he had started howling like a wolf at all hours did
they ask Mette for help. Living in the commercial district, she had
few neighbors to complain of the disturbance.

"He
asked me to tie him
like
this," Mette explained as her patient drifted off to sleep. "He
has to face this sickness alone, he says. His medicine helps,"
she added, dabbing at the sweat beading her nephew's forehead.

"Mette,
I need to know where you get his medicine."

She
shook her head. "I don't really know. After the first couple
days a friend from the fishery showed up, saying he could get a
powerful medication that would help Arne. I don't mind paying."

A
chill crept down Hadrian's spine. "Do you know the name of his
friend?"

"He
won't say. He comes every evening. Says they miss my nephew at the
shipyard."

"Does
he wear dark glasses?"

"What
a strange question," she said distractedly as she lifted the mug
to Arne's lips again. "Yes, yes, he wears shaded glasses. It's
becoming quite a fad. Wears glasses and has a snake tattooed around
his wrist."

They
sat in silence, Hadrian wringing out the cloth as Mette washed her
nephew. "Jonah used to come almost every day, you said," he
observed as she finished. "Did he ever leave you anything to
hold for him, something secret?"

"Never.
I think he believed sharing too many secrets would endanger his
friends. Sometimes he borrowed things from my kitchen. Measures and
pots."

Hadrian
nodded, then pulled out his transcription of the code from the last
journal page, the one Jonah had tried to destroy. He spread it out on
the side of the bed. "Does this mean anything to you? It's
important. I think it's some sort of code."

She
lifted the paper for only a moment before reaching into her pinned-up
hair and extracting a pencil. "Not a code, Hadrian," she
said in a patient voice. She laid the paper on her knee and began
making marks between the clusters of letters and numbers. H2G, then
MAN4MG, SS3G, BC2CC. "Like this. You might want to ask Emily at
the hospital what the letters stand for—their lab has some
system for abbreviating ingredients they use."

"I
don't understand."

"It's
not a code, Hadrian, it's a recipe. I use the same shorthand in my
bakery. H two grams, MAN four milligrams, SS three grams, BC two
cc's."

Hadrian
looked at her in wonder. He had tortured himself trying to understand
it, trying to make something more complicated of it. Startled and
grateful, he stuffed the paper back into his shirt. The recipe would
be useless without the missing pieces, but an important part of the
puzzle had fallen into place.

As
he stepped toward the stable door Mette gestured him to stop. She
rose, removed the bright woolen scarf from around her neck. "I
just knitted it," she said, draping it over his neck. "You
need it more than me. Winter's come early."