Stricken silent, Daenek gazed back into the other’s face. An appalling, sick feeling drifted in his gut, as if the mertzer had laid a finger on his most secret knot of organs. It’s true, he thought, the Dark Seed exists. Eats. I can feel it.
Stepke’s broad shoulders heaved as he sucked a great, ragged breath into his lungs. He looked away from Daenek and again towards the village. “What can be done?” he murmured. “It’s in our very hearts. There’s no knife fine enough . . .” His voice broke off, and after a moment, one of his massive hands squeezed Daenek’s shoulder. “You’ll see me, OK?” he boomed, the cheerfulness in his voice forced and artificial. “On the days off at the quarry, I’ll come up here, and we’ll swap books— OK? The one I gave you for one you haven’t read. All right?”
Daenek nodded.
The mertzer pulled his pack higher upon his shoulders and started down the steepest part of the path. “OK?” he called back, when he was well down the hillside. “In a week or so. I’ll be back.”
It was less than that. Three days later, the mertzer returned.
Daenek laid the book down on the surface of the boulder and watched, with a sick, hollow certainty growing in him, three burly stone-cutters struggling up the hillside. They carried a bundle wrapped in a dirty white cloth, awkwardly shaped and heavy—the size of a man.
Daenek followed the group’s progress for a moment, until his eyes ached from the sun’s glare. He slid from atop the rock and slowly started to push his way through the weeds and down to the house.
The white bundle was lying on the house’s doorstep. The stone-cutters, their faces shiny with sweat, tried to conceal their smirking expressions as they stood over it. Framed in the doorway, the Lady Marche waited, her face pale but expressionless. Daenek stood a few yards away at the edge of the field and watched.
“It was an accident,” said one of the men. He put his hands on his hips and tilted his head in a little mockery of a bow. “A little rockslide in the quarry, and him in the way of it . . .”
“And no one bore him any ill will,” the Lady Marche spoke softly, looking down at the shrouded figure.
“He fought us,” said one of the other men, looking sullen. “He shouldn’t have tried to stick around, he should’ve just gone away. But now he got—”
“Shut up,” said the first one who toad spoken. He turned back to the Lady Marche. “It was an accident and you can’t prove otherways.”
She nodded. “You did right to bring him here. Now go away.”
“Here’s his stuff.” One of the men held out the mertzer’s pack, hastily jammed together and tied.
Taking it in both hands, she turned and disappeared into the bouse.
The men stood for a moment, looking at each other and the mute object they had carried up the hill. As they started away from the house and towards the path, one of them caught sight of Daenek, still standing motionless at the edge of the field.
“There’s your friend,” called the stone-cutter. He pointed to the white bundle and smiled. “Someday . . .” He turned and trotted after his companions.
The Lady Marche went down to the village and hired the carpenter to build a narrow box, and, for a little more money, to dig a hole slightly larger in the fields above the house.
Daenek took the mertzer’s pack up to his room and placed it carefully in the center of his bed. He copied the name written on the flyleaves onto a scrap of paper and took it out to the carpenter.
The man shrugged, pocketed another coin, and carved the six letters onto the little board driven into the ground at one end of the hole.
Chapter IV
Around the time he turned fifteen, Daenek began exploring the hill range in earnest. Partly from boredom, but also from a restlessness that seemed to swell up from his loneliness, he wandered farther and farther away from the house and the village. With the food the Lady Marche had prepared tucked in the leather pack that had belonged to Stepke, he tracked over the hills. At night he would lie on his back in the unrolled blankets, and open one of the books he had brought. They had also been the mertzer’s. One of the moons’ light was enough for him to make out the words he had already memorized.
Sometimes the books helped, but at other times he put them away in the pack, and dreamed—almost involuntarily—about meeting a girl in the hills. One from another village, who didn’t recognize him, and was prettier than the laughing, sneering ones in the stone-cutters’ village. There were small noises, of insects and wind-stirred trees, and he’d fall asleep, half-hearing them.
One morning he lifted his head from the ground—a fine mist in the air was gradually thickening into rain. He rolled the blankets and pack together, then set off for home, with the first light of the sun barely piercing the clouds’ grey.
At the foot of the hill he found the broad roadway that the caravans used. If he followed it he would pass between the village and the quarry before he reached the little trail that wound back up through the hills to the house and the Lady Marche. No one will see me, he thought. He had avoided the village almost completely for the last couple of years. His boots pressed into the muddy surface of the road. They’re probably still all asleep.
As he neared the village, though, he began to hear a ragged chorus of shouts. Voices, male and female, tinged with an unusual excited timbre. Something—another voice beneath the others but different, disturbing—made Daenek hesitate before he hurried towards the noise. The skin on his arms tightened from more than just the coldness of the rain.
The villagers, a crowd of a hundred or more, were standing in a mass at the entrance to the quarry. The ones at the back of the crowd were shouting the loudest, dancing on tiptoe and clawing at the others’ shoulders as they strained to see what was happening inside the quarry’s gates. A few glanced quickly at Daenek as he approached, but didn’t recognize him in the obscuring rain. “What’s going on?” he asked the nearest ones.
“It’s the bad priest!” shrilled a hatchet-faced woman. She tugged nervously at the corners of her soaking wet shawl.
“They’ve got him trapped in a corner!”
“The what?” said Daenek.
“Where’ve you been?” growled one man suspiciously. “The damn thing’s murdered two people in the last two nights.”
“Tore out their throats, it did, right in their own beds!” The woman’s eyes rolled giddily at the thought.
Daenek edged away from the crowd. He could see nothing from here. Looking up, he noted a pair of sociologists, the rain falling through their faintly luminous bodies as they floated high over the quarry and pointed their cameras downward. Maybe from above, thought Daenek.
Scrambling up the rocky slope to one side of the quarry’s bottleneck entrance, he came to a flat outcropping where he could see the entire scene inside the quarry, and where he was hidden as well from the other onlookers.
Below him, the bad priest thrashed in the net of ropes that formed its trap. The ropes were wet and glistened like butchered animal sinews. Only a few shreds of the bad priest’s robe still hung on its tubular limbs. Its metal body gleamed under the rain, the jointed arms and legs pulling and twisting at the taut lines.