“Well, that ‘drink’ you polished off cost me some expensive favors. And it appears we didn’t even need it. So, the trail’s cold. Yes Patzer, it appears so. It appears we must visit the hills after all.” A sigh, then a firm tapping on her shoulder. “But I think you’ve had a little too much to drink, Terese. We’ve had quite the evening, indeed we have. Especially having spent all evening talking of quarry hunts, cadver fights and… oh, I don’t know, just general strategy. Of course, you’ve drunk too much to be able to recall any of the details. Remember that, though. We had quite the professional exchange of ideas and opinions.”
Yes. Strangely enough, they’d talked long into the night of the hazards of hunting things and people who wanted not to be found. That thought comforted Terese all the way down to a restful oblivion.
8
The dining house was too poorly lit for Terese to see the opposite end of the mud-brick structure. The table between her and Patzer was barely wide enough to keep their knees from touching. Terese tapped it to emphasize her point.
“Almost a month, and this is the largest monk hill community in the Territories, Patzer. You said that if the renegades had passed through anywhere, it would have been here. They have not. I’m the only person with an Armen accent these monks have ever… met.”
Terese’s last words were lost in a cough. She wished she had a spare cloth to wrap around her face to keep the oil lamps’ smoke from her lungs. The lamps created just enough light with their vegetable oil and thick cotton wicks to allow sight of blurred faces across the room, but little more than that.
Patzer reluctantly toyed with his meal of dried fruit, nuts and skinleaf while casting longing glances at their packs, where the dried meat strips were stored. Meat was forbidden this close to a monk hill, though alcohol was allowed. Back home, the sacred groves – the equivalent of Polis Sumad’s monk hills – allowed meat, but no alcohol.
“My sources were insistent,” Patzer said, not for the first time that night, or that month. “Not just one source, but many. They’re at a hill somewhere, Saarg.”
Patzer and his bloody ‘perfect’ sources!
“Look, it’s not surprising they’re not here”, she said. “If cadvers avoid monk hills, infected will too. Perhaps they changed their minds about hiding out at one after speaking to your informants.”
Patzer gave her a speculative look, then smoothed his face. Over the weeks they’d spent wandering the Refugee Territories, she’d wondered if Patzer even believed the renegades were infected. It wasn’t anything he’d said, so much as the hunting strategies he’d employed, which seemed very much typical bounty-hunter methods for finding ‘normal’ criminals and fugitives, not infected.
“Saarg, lass, the hills are still their destination. Perhaps they came at night when everyone slept, or perhaps they all put on accents.” He rolled his eyes. “Or maybe they wore dresses to pass as women. They could have gone to one of the hills maintained by the nuns.”
“Do you think you might be avoiding a simpler explanation, Patzer?” She spoke as diffidently as she could. The man had a temper and snapped when confronted with facts he disliked.
Days after they’d met, she’d watched him beat a confused and babbling powerhead who could neither understand Patzer’s questions about the renegades, nor so much as repeat their names back to him. Patzer had left the addict lying in a crumpled heap, barely breathing. He’d stormed off and snapped at her to follow, and she’d decided then and there not to argue with him.
“Listen lass, I’ve spent a lifetime developing my sources. Better than any in the entire bloody Territories. I’ll wager my life they’re at a monk hill.”
“Maybe, maybe. But it’s been weeks. The newest sightings are over three months old and have them at the border, trying to cross over. Is it time to…”—she changed what she was going to say—“… think differently?”
Patzer sucked fervently from his clay cup. “There’s something I’m not seeing. Something blindingly obvious. They’ll be at a monk hill, somewhere, somehow. Yes, Patzer, they will.”
She’d almost gotten used to him speaking to himself in the third person.
Who were these sources who’d somehow known where the renegades would be? How was he so convinced of this one stubborn fact?
“Perhaps just an ordinary hill? Not one the monks worship at.”
“No, Saarg!” He was growing testy, again. “They specifically wanted monk hills. Fat lot of good it’ll do them. They don’t let Cenephans up these stupid things. They think it offends the imaginary spirits singing campfire songs along with them.”
A few painted and loincloth-clad monks were scattered around the common room, softly chanting in time with one another. The few words she picked out of the chant suggested the monks wanted their prayers to bring the eyes of the Gods upon everyone in the common room, blessing their wishes and conversations—so long as the topics were pious in nature.
Patzer hated monk hills almost as much as he—inexplicably—hated the renegades he claimed he didn’t know. He’d even forbidden Terese going near the monk hills. The hills were harmless, in her opinion, as were their monks. They didn’t, or couldn’t, weave vibration energy, as weavers did. They instead stored the vibration energy they generated in the stones in the belts slung around their shoulders. The amount of vibration energy in those belts kept cadvers far from monk hills.
“So, what do we do now?” she said, trying to get him back on topic.
“The mission’s got a few days left. Perhaps someone here…”—he raised his cup to indicate everyone in the low-ceilinged common room—“… knows something we don’t. A detail inconsequential
