get back what we lost. Ebnezzer is useless. Something is in him, but we might never extract it.' Loria gestured to the contents of the room. 'Find whatever is of value. Pack it up quickly. We must be on the road within the hour. I'll return to our rooms and get our valuables and some traveling clothes.' Loria rose to her feet and trotted to their quarters.
Tayva was alone with the madman. She already knew what she would take, but she walked slowly over to the oblivious sorcerer and laid her hand as if in benediction on the brow of her former mentor.
The cousins fled the city into a sudden thaw. The roads were mud, and their spirits fell even as a few of their victims recovered and roused the city behind them. Tayva and Loria fled north with the head of Ebnezzer rotting in a leather bag at the bottom of their luggage.
Loria cursed quietly and continually as she knelt in the mire of the lake edge looking for tubers. The lake was clear and sandy bottomed for most of its bank, but into one pocket at the edge glacial action had pushed topsoil. Similar pockets of dirt were deposited all over the country, but most were barren and gullied by spring rains. Plants had grown in this hollow during the late summer and fall. Changed by events that shook the world twenty years before, it had adapted to the inundation of spring. The dense roots and tubers were hard as seasoned wood, and when water came, they protected themselves from rot with the excretion of slime and a network of thin frothy rootlets.
Standing barelegged in the cold water, Loria was digging tubers that felt like stones and smelled like wet manure.
Tayva was visible in the distance as Loria stood erect to throw the roots up on the shore. The older woman was returning with the basket she had hauled to the coal pit. The walk was over broken gullies, but it had the advantage of warming limbs that would be numb with cold from standing in the water. Loria was cold and miserable and hated Tayva with the feeble ferocity that the miserable have. Tayva stumbled and dragged the basket through the dirt, caking the filthy cane-work with more gobs of crumbly mud.
'Keep it out of the dirt, Tayva.' Loria still had the energy to carp at her cousin. 'I'm not going to help or wait for you if you muck that up.'
Tayva's response was an obscene gesture that did more to show her lack of energy than her irritation with her cousin.
Loria stooped down and tried her best to wash her hands and legs clean. At best, she would get most of the muck off, but would soon replace it with dust from the path to the brewing site.
Tayva arrived and began filling the basket with the nodules. 'I'm getting tired of doing this,' she remarked and then hurled one root as hard as she could into the basket. The only result was a dull thud. Tayva knotted her fists and then opened them in exaggerated relaxation.
'We were both meant for better things, but what power we have is here,' Loria responded. She kicked the basket in resignation and sighed as it flopped over into the wet soil. She bent over and swore again as her back protested. Tayva tried to rest by levering her arms against her legs, but found no comfort. She watched her cousin pawing at the ground like a tired, ineffectual animal.
Loria stood up and saw Tayva's look of faint disgust. She also noticed a figure coming along the lakeside trail.
The cousins straightened and tried to assume a veneer of amity. It was a poor showing, but the quality of their approaching audience alleviated the need for a fine performance.
Winton was his name. He was hunter of waterfowl, who tramped though the network of lakes and streams that crisscrossed the raw landscape. He had an eager expression on his coarse, full features as he recognized the cousins. Tayva was older, grayer, and filthy in her dress of poorly cured hide. Loria was the better-looking of the pair and well groomed for someone working in the water and the mud. Winton knew them only as the authors of a brew made from the stinking nodules they were gathering, a brew known for its savage potency and almost lethal hangovers. His eagerness faded as he hit the fetid air from the raw roots.
'Quite a smell, neighbor,' he called. 'Hard to imagine you make your ambrosia from that refuse.' Winton kept his distance but tried to be as friendly as possible. He shifted on his feet, and the two small bolas strung through his belt clacked against each other.
The man hunted waterfowl for money. He was a dab hand with a sling, but his bolas were surer weapons in uncertain light. He cast them as the birds startled and then sold the ones he caught on the road the next day. The sling and stones at the back of his belt he used against rabbits and targets in trees. He was an old and eager customer for the cousins' brew.
'I wouldn't mind trading for a pot of comfort, ' he said, clasping a hand to the brightly dyed bolas, the stones red, blue, and green. 'Three birds or five rabbits, delivered to your door. '
Tayva drew a breath to bargain, but Loria preempted her. 'I hope that you will accept a pot as a gift,' she drawled and reached toward Winton with open hands. She tried to sound seductive, but her breathless delivery to one she considered a clod sounded silly to her cousin's ears. 'Bring a brace of whatever you have to our hut tonight, and we'll celebrate together. '
Winton looked puzzled. 'What holiday is this?' he asked. Living alone he often lost track of time.
'We are celebrating being alive,' Loria replied. She tried for a sultry air but achieved only petulance. Tayva coughed to cover a mean-spirited sneer.
But Winton saw everything through a veil of loneliness, and any indication of interest was enough to set the hook.
'I will return tonight, my dear, ' he said, as he turned and dramatically bounded a few steps before settling into his characteristic slouch. Loria motioned for silence until he was out of hearing. Tayva complied and then policed the area, gathering their rude tools.
'Cousin, you had better practice deception more often. You were painfully insincere,' Tayva chided. She hoisted the basket and motioned with her chin that Loria was to set it on her back.
'He's coming, isn't he? He'll be panting when he shows up, too.' Loria settled the straps to minimize the chance of blisters or welts.
'So what are we going to do with him?' asked Tayva.
'Aren't you feeling tired? We're going to kill him, of course.' And with that, Loria started out to the hills with her cousin matter-of-factly falling in behind her.
'Kill him. Yes. But where and how to use the death?' Tayva inquired, but she stumbled and caught her balance with difficulty, then continued, 'Destroy his mind and use him up here? Corrupt his spirit and send him out for revenge?'
The path was broader now and showed hard work on the part of someone. Rock steps had been built on a few of the steeper parts of the trail with bushes planted strategically to cover the improvements. The path dropped through a cut to screen walkers from observation.
The cousins arrived at the brewing pits, depressions backed to a hillside. Surrounded by brush, the place was distant from their hut but close to a seam of dirty brown coal that broke to the surface like a great whale. Tayva levered chunks and slabs into a basket. Then, with Loria at the other side, she walked it to the fire where rocks heaped in the coals served as heating stones.
Loria gestured around the site as Tayva threw more coal onto the fire. 'That tinker from the road, we got three weeks of labor out of him.'
The improvements on the path, the deeper pits that held the brewing equipment, had all been done by a traveler the pair had caught on the main road.
'We could use Winton to expand here. Maybe he could drive the well deeper. We had to bury the tinker too soon to do a decent job.'
Tayva was now moving more rocks into the pit to heat. The tinker's corpse lay buried under the fire pit and was baked by the flames above. Tayva used a great pair of tongs to lift rocks already heated into one of a trio of dug-out logs hauled a long distance from their felling place. The heat was boiling the collected roots to remove the watertight covering of slime. That covering, besides being unpalatable, was poisonous and would kill the customers too fast if allowed to remain. Loria went to the shallow well and drew a bucket of water. She dumped it into the log and watched the run-off of poison flow down a sandy ditch the tinker had dug.
Tayva had finished transferring the heated stones and stood leaning on the tongs. 'It would be nice to have someone else to do the scut work up here. Our energy is low, and there are my flocks of birds to sustain. Each bird
