The Butcher of Hollowmere: The Hounds Last Meal

The hound came back at dusk, and it was dragging something.

Maren saw it first from the sagging porch of the tollhouse, a shape threading between the alder trunks at the edge of the bone orchard. Cale moved low, shoulders hunched, one hand fisted in a wad of black cloth that snagged and tore on every stub of branch. Beside him, Skarrow trotted with her tongue lolling, nose working the air in short, eager snorts. The moor-hound had the soft, pink-streaked snout of an animal that had found something worth finding.

Cale stopped at the foot of the porch steps. Up close, the smell hit Maren before anything else: iron and stagnant water, the particular sweetness of old blood mixed with peat. She had smelled that perfume on too many men and women who had walked into the marsh and not come back. Her hand drifted to the hilt of the short sword she had not drawn in eleven years.

"Found this a half league east," Cale said. His voice rasped the way gravel rasped under a wagon wheel. "Caught on a snag in the reed-choked fork where the tributary splits off from Bone Orchard Road."

He held the cloak up. It had been good cloth once, charcoal grey, the kind of garment a merchant factor or a minor magistrate might wear to a provincial court. Now the hem was black with bog water, and a long tear ran from shoulder to waist. Something had used it. Something with claws or with the desperate fingers of a drowning person.

The lining, when Maren turned it in the failing light, was stiff with something darker than mud. She worked her thumb under the seam and found the stitches there, tight and deliberate. Not decoration. Cipher.

"Wren," she said, without raising her voice.

The young man appeared from the doorway of the tollhouse so quickly she suspected he had been hovering just inside. He had a lit rushlight in one hand and a half-eaten heel of bread in the other, and the look on his face was the particular one he always wore when Cale came back smelling of the deeper marsh: a tight, white-lipped mixture of fascination and revulsion.

"Set that down and bring me the kit," Maren said. "The small one, with the shears."

Wren vanished. Skarrow yawned, displaying every yellow tooth, and settled herself on the porch board with a groan that suggested she considered the day's work satisfactorily concluded.

Maren carried the cloak to the table where she had been sorting the day's tallies. The wood was scarred with old burns and older knife-marks, and a single tallow candle threw more shadow than light. She spread the cloak flat, lining up, and began to unpick the stitches with the point of her belt knife.

Cale remained where he was, one boot on the bottom step, his arms folded across his chest. The tracker watched her hands the way a man watches a snake-handler at a country fair: with respect, and a certain readiness to step back.

"You went too far east," Maren said, without looking up.

"The trail went too far east."

"The trail went where the trail went. You went after it."

"That's the arrangement."

Maren did not answer that. She picked another stitch and another, and the thread came away in short, oily lengths. Beneath the lining, pressed flat against the inner cloth, was a square of paper. She drew it out with two fingers, the way she would have drawn a splinter from under a nail, and unfolded it on the scarred table.

The paper was the kind sold in the scriptoria at Ardenside: heavy, slightly cream, sized with rabbit-skin glue. The ink was brown, the brown of oak gall, and it had been folded so many times the creases had nearly worn through.

Seven names.

She read them aloud, because Cale was owed that, and because hearing them aloud made them real in the way that reading them silently did not.

"Aulis Kerran. Pern Voss. Denna Bray. Tomas Edrel. Halice Mun. Anders Cole. Maren Voss."

The last name sat at the bottom of the list, isolated by a small space from the six above it. Maren read it twice. Pern Voss had been her sister's name, before Pern had become a thing that marsh-water and marsh-keepers had taken, six years ago, in the Year of Rotting Kings.

The other names she did not recognize. Aulis Kerran might have been the chandler from Upper Reed. Denna Bray might have been the schoolteacher's sister. The rest were nothing to her but syllables.

"You know any of these?" she asked.

Cale came up the steps then, slowly, the way a man climbs onto ice he does not entirely trust. He leaned over the table and read the names with his lips barely moving. His face did something complicated.

"Tomas Edrel," he said. "Ran a barge between here and the St. Swithun docks. Went missing last autumn."

"Any relation to the magistrate in Upper Reed?"

"Cousin, maybe. I only knew him by sight."

Wren came back out with the kit under his arm and the rushlight guttering in his other hand. He set the kit down and stood at Maren's shoulder, reading upside down, his breath sour with bread.

"That's you," he said, pointing with a finger that had a black nail. "Bottom of the list."

"I can see that."

"Why you?"

"If I knew that, lad, I'd be a richer woman than I am."

Cale's hand came down flat on the table, hard enough to make the candle jump.

"There's writing on the other side," he said.

Maren turned the paper over. On the back, in a different hand, smaller and more hurried, were three words in the old marsh script. She had not seen that script since her childhood, when her grandmother had sung songs in it and stitched samplers with its angular letters.

The words translated roughly as: the cartographer's tongue.

She set the paper down and looked at the cloak. The lining had more stitching, lower down, around the hem. She picked at it, slower now, and Cale squatted on his heels beside the table, watching her fingers the way a man watches the cards at a game he has already lost.

"There are more lists," he said. "I only brought what I could carry without the hound deciding to chew on it."

"Where are the rest?"

"Dry-stacked under a sheet of bark in the old eel-trapper's hut at the fork. Three more cloaks. Same lining. Same stitch."

"Did you touch them?"

"I dragged this one out by the collar. The others I left. Anything else I touched, Skarrow touched first."

The moor-hound, as if recognizing it was being discussed, raised her enormous head and thumped her tail once against the porch.

"Wren," Maren said. "Go and find Sera Quill. Tell her what we have, and tell her to bring every scrap of paper she has in her satchel. She'll want to copy this before the damp gets to it."

Wren nodded and was off the porch and down the steps before she had finished the sentence. He ran the way he always ran: shoulders forward, feet barely leaving the ground, a boy who had learned young that staying still was a worse danger than moving fast.

Maren sat down on the bench across from Cale. The tracker had the look of a man who had carried something heavy a long way and was waiting to be told where to set it down.

"Whoever owned this cloak," she said, "was keeping a list. People who had gone into the marsh and not come back. And whoever wrote the other side was marking them out for something. The cartographer's tongue."

"Never heard of it."

"Neither have I. That doesn't mean it isn't real."

Cale's eyes went to the tallow candle. The flame bent in a draft from somewhere he could not see, and the shadows on the wall leaned with it.

"There's something else," he said. "On the inside of the collar."

He reached across the table and turned the cloak so the collar faced her. Sewn into the band, in tiny cross-stitch, was a sigil: a circle bisected by a vertical line, with three dots above the line and three below. Maren had seen that sigil before. She had seen it branded onto the flank of a horse that had been brought to her as evidence in a case three winters past. She had seen it pinned to the lapel of a man who had come to the tollhouse asking questions about land grants in the upper marsh.

"Same mark was on a man who came through here in the autumn," she said. "Asked about surveyors' records. Asked whether anyone had been marking the changes in the waterways."

"What did you tell him?"

"I told him I had no records. Which was true at the time."

"And now?"

"Now I have a cloak with seven names stitched into its lining, three more cloaks drying in an eel-trapper's hut, and a hound who is going to get the marrow bone I owe her, because she has earned it."

She folded the paper carefully, twice, and slipped it inside her belt, against the small of her back, where the leather was warmest and the sweat of her body would keep the ink from cracking.

"Sit down," she said to Cale. "Eat. I'll want you sharp when the cartographer gets here, because she is going to ask questions I cannot answer, and I would rather you answer them."

Cale sat. He drew the bone-handled knife from his belt and began to cut himself a wedge of the bread Wren had abandoned. Skarrow put her chin on his boot and sighed.

Outside, the marsh breathed in and out the way it always did, a low, wet sound like a sleeping animal's flanks. Somewhere to the east, where the tributary forked off Bone Orchard Road, a heron screamed once and then fell silent.

Maren sat very still and listened to the silence, and thought about her sister's name on a dead man's list.

Sera Quill arrived before the sun had fully committed to the morning, a lean figure in a damp riding coat with the collar turned up against the gnats that were already rising off the marsh in pale, slow columns. She carried a satchel bulging at the seams, and a leather tube slung across her back that held what Maren suspected were more maps than any living person needed to walk from one end of the tollhouse to the other.

"You are the magistrate," Sera said. It was not a question. Her eyes moved across the room, cataloguing Cale, the hound, Wren, the cleared table, the folded paper against Maren's back. "You are the cartographer," Maren said.

"Apprentice. My master is dead."

"So I heard."

"You heard wrong, then. He is dead, but not the way you heard. He did not fall from a cart. He did not take a fever." Sera set the leather tube against the wall and shrugged the satchel off her shoulder with the careful, deliberate motions of someone who has not slept properly in a long while. "He drowned. On dry land. In a village called Hollowmere, in a pond that, according to his own survey from the year before, was not there."

Wren made a small sound. Maren did not look at him.

"Sit down," she said.

Sera sat. She pulled the satchel into her lap and did not open it.

"You have maps," Maren said.

"I have maps. Three of them drawn by my master over seven years. They do not match each other. They do not match the land. The waterways in the second survey are in the wrong place by half a league. In the third, they are not there at all, and there are roads I have never seen anyone walk, and a structure marked that is not on any record of the Crown."

"What kind of structure?"

"A manor. Or a hall. It is drawn as a circle with a line through it. My master marked it in his own hand with a single word: Listening."

Maren let the word sit in the room. Cale's knife stopped moving. Skarrow's ears came up.

"Listening," Maren said.

"That is what he wrote."

"Was he a man who wrote nonsense?"

"He was a man who wrote precisely what he saw, and what he did not understand he marked with a question. He did not write Listening as a guess. He wrote it as a name. As though something had told him what to call it."

Maren reached into the leather tube without asking and drew out the topmost rolled map. It was heavy parchment, hand-prepared, the kind that held ink like skin held sweat. She unrolled it across the cleared space on the table, weighting the corners with the bread knife, the tin cup, the hound's bone, and Cale's broad palm.

The map was wrong. Maren was not a cartographer, but she had marched enough of the eastern marches to know the broad shape of the river, the place where it bent south past the old quarry, the fan of tributaries that bled into the marsh. The river was there, but fatter than she remembered, and one of its bends had been smoothed into something almost gentle, as though someone had taken a thumb to the wet clay of the world and eased out the elbow.

Sera watched her look.

"You see it," Sera said.

"I see something."

"The river," Sera said, "has moved."

"Rivers move."

"Not like this. Not in a single season. And not into the shape it has taken. Look at the curve here, where it passes the standing stones. In my master's first survey, the stones are on the south bank. In the second, the north. In the third, they are in the middle of the water. My master drew a small boat beside them, with a figure inside, and a note: 'No occupants of the boat could be made to look at.'"

Wren stood up so fast his chair scraped the stone. "I have seen that boat," he said. "I have seen it. It is there now, it is always there, the old men in the village say you are not to look at it or it will look back, but I thought that was only the drink in them."

"Sit down," Maren said, not sharply.

Wren sat.

Sera unrolled the second map, then the third, laying them out side by side so the river ran through all three like a spine through a corpse. The differences were small to the untrained eye, a thumbprint here, a faded line there, but to a magistrate who had spent four winters chasing a list of names stitched into cloaks, they were the differences between a country you could walk through and a country that had been, in some quiet and patient way, rearranged around you while you slept.

"Whoever is doing this," Maren said, "has been doing it for a while."

"Since before my master took the commission," Sera said. "Since before the man who asked the tollkeeper about land grants. Since before the list you are carrying against your back."

"How do you know about the list?"

"Because the first name on the list was my master's."

The room went very quiet. The marsh breathed. Skarrow's claws clicked once on the stone as she shifted her weight off Cale's boot and laid her chin on the floor, her eyes on the maps, her ears still up.

Maren looked at the folded paper she had not yet opened. She thought about her sister's name. She thought about a cartographer who had drowned on dry land. She thought about a structure called Listening, drawn as a circle with a line through it, somewhere in the marsh she had marched through a dozen times and never seen.

"What do you want from me," Maren said.

"I want you to find them," Sera said. "I want you to find them before they finish what they are doing to the maps. I want you to find them because my master asked me to, and because I have walked this marsh for three months and I cannot find them, and I am good at finding things."

"You are an apprentice."

"I am the only one left."

Maren looked at Cale. Cale looked at the maps, and then at the hound, and then at Maren, and gave the smallest nod a man built like a doorframe could give.

"We go after the waystation at Blackstake," Maren said. "Tomorrow, at first light. The track goes through the collapsed tollbridge and then along the bank where the eel-trappers used to camp. There is a shepherds' hut at the fork that we can sleep in if we are not dead by then."

"Why Blackstake?" Sera said.

"Because the second name on the list is the tollkeeper who kept that waystation. And because I am tired of reading names in cold rooms."

She stood. She did not roll up the maps. She left them on the table under their weights of bone and cup and bread knife, as though they were a thing that needed to be looked at and not put away.

Wren cleared the rest of the meal without being asked. Sera ate a piece of bread and a heel of cheese and a slice of cold sausage and drank a cup of the tea Maren had boiled and said nothing about any of it. Cale sat with his knife across his knee and the hound at his feet and watched the door as if he expected something to come through it that had no business coming through any door.

Outside, the marsh breathed. Somewhere to the east a heron screamed again, longer this time, and did not fall silent.

Maren sat very still and listened, and thought about Listening.

They set out before the sun had cleared the tree line, when the marsh was still a wash of grey and the path was no more than a guess between tussocks. Maren walked first because she always walked first, and behind her Sera Quill with the maps in a leather tube strapped across her back, and then Cale the Hound with the moor-hound at his heel, and last Wren Holt, who had not spoken since he had risen from his bed of rushes and who walked with his hands in his pockets and his eyes on the ground.

The track to Blackstake was three miles of bad footing. It followed the edge of a drainage cut that had not been drained in living memory, then crossed a low saddle of firm ground where the reeds thinned, then dropped into a stand of alder whose roots made the surface treacherous as a frozen pond. Maren took it at the pace she always took difficult country, neither hurrying nor lingering, planting her boots in the places that looked dull and unpromising because those were the places the water had not learned to lie.

Behind her, Sera kept her counsel and watched the landmarks. Twice she stopped to check her maps against the lie of the land, and both times she closed the tube without comment and walked on. The third time she did not stop at all.

Cale said nothing. The moor-hound ranged in loose figure-eights through the reeds, its nose low, its ears folded back. It was a small, mean-looking animal, brindled and sharp-jawed, with a white blaze on its chest that looked like a scar. It did not bark. It did not need to. Cale read its body the way Maren read a witness, in the flinch of a muscle and the angle of a head.

Wren, at the rear, began to hum something tuneless and stopped.

By midmorning they came to the tollbridge. It lay where it had always lain, in a slow collapse across the cut, the timbers blackened by old weather, the posts leaning like men too tired to stand. Maren crossed first, testing each plank with the butt of her knife before she put her weight on it. The wood gave under her but did not break. She reached the far bank and waited.

Sera crossed like a woman crossing a street in a city she did not trust, light and quick and not looking down.

Cale crossed with the hound at his heel and did not look down either, but for a different reason.

Wren crossed last. Halfway across, a plank gave under him with a sound like a cough, and he threw himself forward onto his palms and scrambled the rest of the way on his belly, came up on the far side with mud to his elbows and a look on his face that he converted, with visible effort, into a grin.

"Right then," he said, to no one in particular.

Maren did not smile. She turned and walked on.

The bank of the cut was firmer than the ground they had left. Here, in summer, the eel-trappers would have set their woven pots in the slow water and lit their fires in the stone rings that still stood, black with old soot. In this season the rings were cold, and the pots were not there, and the only smoke was a thin grey line on the horizon to the south that might have been a farmstead or might have been nothing at all.

Maren held her course. The sky to the east was thickening with a weather that was not yet rain but had the intention of rain. The herons were quiet. She did not trust the quiet.

It was Cale who heard it first.

He stopped. The hound stopped. Maren, a pace ahead, felt the absence of his footfall and turned.

Cale was standing very still, his head cocked, his right hand on the hound's back. The hound's lips were drawn back from its teeth in a long, silent rictus that made the white blaze on its chest look like a mouth inside a mouth.

"What is it," Maren said. Not a question.

"Movement," Cale said. "In the reeds. To the left."

Maren drew her knife. Sera drew hers. Wren, who had no knife, picked up a length of rotten fence post and held it like a man who had held such things before.

The reeds did part.

What came out of them was not a thing Maren could have named. It was the height of a child and the breadth of a man crouched, and it moved on legs that bent the wrong way at the knees, and it had no face. It had no face at all. Where a face should have been there was a smoothness like the inside of an egg, and out of that smoothness, in a voice that was not a voice but a shape of sound, it said something that was almost a word.

The hound went mad. It threw itself forward, snarling, and Cale let it go because that was what the hound was for. The hound hit the faceless thing at the joint of its wrong knee and they went down together in a tangle of brindle and pale, wrong flesh.

Maren was moving before she had decided to move. She crossed the distance in four strides and put her knife into the thing's shoulder, where a shoulder would be on a man, and the blade went in up to the crossguard and the thing made a sound like a window opening in a house that had been locked for years.

Wren swung the post. It caught the thing across what should have been its neck, and the sound it made was wet, and the thing did not seem to mind.

Sera was at Maren's shoulder. She had her knife in her hand and her maps forgotten on her back and her educated southern voice very steady as she said, "There are more."

There were more. Three more came out of the reeds to the left, and two more out of the ditch to the right, and one more from somewhere ahead that Maren did not see until it was already within the reach of her arm. She stepped into it and felt her boot slide on the bank and went down on one knee, and the thing was on her before she could rise, and its weight was wrong, too heavy, too cold, and its faceless head came down toward her throat.

Cale's hand closed on the back of its neck and hauled it off her. She heard him grunt. She heard the hound snarl. She drove her knife upward into the thing's belly and felt something give that was not flesh and was not bone but was something between, and the thing folded around the blade like a wet coat.

Then Cale made a sound she had not heard from him before, a short, bitten-off word that was not a curse and was not a prayer, and when she looked up he was on his knees with his left hand pressed to his right wrist, and the wrist was leaking a black that was not blood.

"They bit me," he said, as if he were commenting on the weather. "The little one, while we were with the big. Bit me through the glove."

"Show me," Maren said.

He showed her. The glove was torn at the wrist. Under it, the skin was broken in two clean punctures, and around the punctures the flesh was already going the colour of a bruise that had been left to set for a week.

They had to get to the shepherds' hut. They had to get off the bank. They had to get the faceless things off them first.

Sera and Wren killed the last two. Sera killed one with a precision that surprised even her, driving the knife under the thing's jaw and twisting with a savagery that did not belong to her usual manner. Wren killed the other by accident, by tripping over it as he stepped back, and falling on it with the rotten post across its chest, and the thing made a sound like a bag of wet flour and did not move again.

Maren bound Cale's wrist with a strip torn from her own coat, tight, tighter than was comfortable, and the black did not spread while they watched but she did not trust it not to.

"Walk," she said. "Now. Do not run. Running spreads it faster."

Cale walked. The hound walked at his heel with its ears flat and its lips still drawn back, and it did not take its eyes off the reeds.

They made the shepherds' hut by mid-afternoon. It was a low stone place with a turf roof and a door that hung crooked on a single hinge, and inside it smelled of old sheep and older rain and nothing else, which was a mercy. Maren lit a fire in the small hearth with the last of the dry kindling Wren had thought to bring, and the smoke went up through a hole in the roof that had been a hole for longer than the hut had been a hut.

Cale sat on the floor with his back to the wall and the hound across his lap. The binding on his wrist was soaked through already. Sera boiled water in the tin cup and brought it to him and he drank it without tasting it.

By nightfall his hand was black to the knuckles.

By the small hours, when the fire had burned down to a sullen red and the marsh outside was breathing its cold breath in through the door, it was black to the wrist.

By the time the grey of morning came through the hole in the roof, it was black to the elbow.

He sat up. The hound lifted its head and looked at him, and he looked at the hound, and then he looked at Maren, who had not slept and was sitting across the hut with her knife across her knee and her eyes on his arm.

"I can feel it climbing," he said. His voice was the same. That was the worst of it. His voice was the same. "Like cold water running up the inside of me. It will reach the heart by midday. Maybe sooner."

"Cale," Maren said.

"I know what needs doing," he said. "I have seen it before. In the western marches. A man bitten by a marsh-cat. We took the arm off above the black and he lived. The one we did not take the arm off did not live, and what he became did not live long either."

He looked at the hound. The hound looked at him.

"You will have to hold him," he said to Wren. "He will not let you near me while I am screaming."

Wren's face was the colour of the firelight. He nodded. He did not trust his voice.

Cale unbuckled his belt and folded it and put it between his teeth, and then he lay back against the wall and held his black arm out across a block of turf that Maren had dragged from the corner and set in the middle of the floor.

"Maren," he said, around the leather. "You have the steadiest hand of any of us. Do it clean."

Maren looked at him. She thought of a sister in a cold room. She thought of the weight of a name she could not put down.

"Sera," she said. "The fire. I need it hotter than this. Wren, hold the hound. Cale, do not move."

She set her knife in the flames. She waited until the blade was the colour of a winter sun. She took it out and laid it on a stone to cool for the count of ten, because a blade too hot would cauterise the wound before it was made and the cauterised flesh would tear and she would lose him to the bleeding instead of the black.

She knelt beside him. She put her left hand under his elbow and her right hand on the handle of the knife.

"Hold him," she said.

Wren held him. The hound struggled and Wren held that too, and the sound the hound made was the worst sound in the hut and the sound Cale made was the second worst and both of them went on for a long time.

When it was over, Cale lay still with his face gone the grey of old snow and his right arm ending in a black stump that Maren had cauterised with the flat of the hot blade until it smelled like burnt leather and the black had stopped its climb. Sera had the basin. Wren had let the hound go, and the hound had gone to Cale and put its head on his chest and was trembling in the way that dogs tremble when they have understood something they cannot bear.

Cale opened his eyes.

"Is it out," he said.

"It is out," Maren said. "The black is stopped. You will live, or you will not, but it will not be the black that takes you."

He closed his eyes again. The hound did not move.

Maren sat back on her heels. She looked at the stump. She looked at the black hand on the floor, where she had set it after the cut, and it was already curling in on itself like a leaf on a hot stone, and she did not know if that was the cauterising or the thing it had become.

She wrapped the stump in the last clean cloth she had. She gave Cale water from the tin cup. She sat against the opposite wall and put her knife across her knee and watched the door.

Outside, the marsh breathed. The herons were quiet. The sky to the east had the look of a thing that had made up its mind.

Sera Quill sat down beside her. She did not speak for a long time. Then she said, in her educated southern voice that had not lost its steadiness, "The maps end at Blackstake. Whatever is in this marsh, my master walked into it and did not walk out, and he was a better cartographer than I will ever be."

"I know," Maren said.

"What do we do now?"

Maren looked at Cale, who was sleeping with the hound on his chest. She looked at Wren, who was sitting with his hands on his knees and his eyes on the door and the look of a man who had held a screaming thing and a screaming man at the same time and had come out of it changed.

"We go on," Maren said. "We go to Blackstake. We see what is there. We do not stop reading names until there are no more names to read."

She did not roll up the maps, because the maps were still in their tube on Sera's back. She did not put away the knife. She sat with her back to the wall and her eyes on the door and listened to the marsh breathe, and thought about Listening, and waited for the light to come.