She whipped around and ran back up the hill.
William looked at the teddy. It was old. The fabric had thinned down to threads in spots, and he could see the stuffing through the weave. It was the same one she had up in her tree.
He pulled his bag open and very carefully put the teddy bear in. “Come on.”
They walked down, away from the house, deeper into the swamp.
“ ‘ Where the fisherman waits,’ ” William quoted. “What does that mean to you?”
“It could be a lot of places. There is a whole bunch of Fisherman’s this and Fisherman’s that in the swamp.”
“Vernard wouldn’t know many places. This place has to be close. Some place your family would go often.”
Gaston frowned. “It might be the Drowned Dog Puddle. It’s a bad place. The thoas used to come there to die.”
“Tell me about it.”
“It’s a pond. There is a hill on the west side of it, and it kind of hugs the pond. The water is pitch-black because of all the peat. Nobody knows how deep it is. You can’t swim in it and nothing lives there except snakes. The hill and the pond open to some swampy ground, cypress, mud, little streams, and then the river eventually. The family goes there to pick the berries for the wine each year. They grow all around that hill.”
“What about the fisherman?”
“There is an old tree growing by the pond, leaning over it. People call it the Black Fisherman.”
“Sounds about right.” William looked around. Tall pines surrounded them. He couldn’t see the house. Far enough. He dug in his bag, taking care not to damage the bear. “How’s your handwriting?”
“Um. Okay, I guess.”
William got out a small notebook and a pen and handed them to Gaston. “Sit down.”
Gaston sat on the log. “Why do I need those?”
“Because Vernard’s journal is very long, and my handwriting is shit. I need to write it down because I don’t understand any of it, which means my brain will forget it soon.”
The kid blinked at him. “What?”
“Write,” William told him. “The art of medicine, as ancient as the human body itself. It began with the first primitive, who plagued by ache, stuck a handful of grass in his mouth, chewed, and found his pain lessened …”
TWENTY-EIGHT
WILLIAM crouched on the deck of the barge. Before him the shore loomed, black and green in the weak dawn light. Cerise stood next to him, her scent twisting and turning around him. Behind them the Mars waited.
“Are you sure?” Cerise asked.
“Yes. We go our separate ways here. If I take out Spider, the Hand will break.” But to get to Spider, he’d have to have a distraction and the Mars were it.
“Don’t die,” she whispered.
“I won’t.”
He pulled her to him and kissed her, her taste so sharp and vivid, it almost hurt. So this was it. He’d known it was too good to be true. He had her and now he would lose her.
The barge swung close to the shore. He leaped, clearing the twenty-foot stretch of water, and took off into the woods.
Twenty minutes later William went to ground on the crest of the hill behind the Drowned Dog Puddle. The sun had risen, but the day was gray and dark, the sky overcast. In the weak light the swirls of green, gray, and brown on his face blended with the dense brush cover of the berry bushes. He’d molded himself into the hill so deep, he tasted mud on his lips. He was all but invisible to Spider’s agents busy below.
The hill cradled the pond in a ragged crescent, dropping down in a sheer cliff, made soggy and slick with recent rain. Bushes and pines sheathed the hill, but nothing grew down by the pond, save for a lonely cypress. It rose above the water, a gnarled and grizzled veteran of countless storms. The cypress cast no reflection. The water of the pond beneath it was pitch-black.
The entire place emanated an odd menacing calm. The sloshing of the Hand’s agents did little to disturb it, no more than a grave digger would’ve disturbed the serenity of a graveyard.
William shifted slightly to keep the circulation flowing in his arms. He hid above the pond’s northern shore, far enough to be out of the agents’ plain sight, but close enough to miss little. The Mirror’s bag provided him with a distance lens, which he wore over his left eye like an eye patch. The lens brought the agents so close, he could count the pimples on their faces.
Three feet beyond him the ground ended abruptly, and the hill plunged twenty-six feet straight into the pitch-black water of the pond. Spider didn’t pay the hill a lot of attention, posting only two guards. They had gone to ground, too, the closest only fifteen yards from where William lay. Neither would be a problem when the time came. In Spider’s place William would’ve done the same—any attack coming from the east, over the hill, would’ve ended in the peat, and his instincts screamed at him to stay the hell away from that black water.
Most of Spider’s agents were concentrated around the pond. William focused on the shock of white hair. Karmash. The massive agent barked an order to a swarthy thick woman. She tossed her hair back and went to a chain lying in the mud. The muscles on her nude back bulged. Something shifted beneath her skin, like a coiled spring, and she picked up the chain roll and carried it without apparent strain to where other agents untangled ropes by cypress roots.
They were rigging a block and tackle, which they’d hang from the cypress to pull the Box free. Clever, Spider.
An agent exploded from the mud, all sinew and tentacle, dripping sludge, and flung a wriggling snake clear of the shore. It spun in the air away from the main body of agents. A woman lashed out from behind a stack of lumber. Her arm flashed and two halves of the snake fell twitching into the mud. And there was Veisan …
Spider came into the lens’s view, leaning on the stack of wood. The hair on the back of William’s neck rose. If he’d been covered in fur, his hackles would have been up and his mouth growling. Spider slouched. The lens picked up dark bags under his eyes. The bastard was tired. Tired was good.
A hissing dispute broke out between Karmash and the tentacled monstrosity William’s memory identified as Seth. Seth’s tentacles flailed through the tears in his black robe. Karmash was making short cutting motions with his shovel-sized hands. Spider pushed free of the wood stack. Noticing that he was being paid attention to, Seth stepped back. Karmash was a touch slower to catch on, but a breath later he, too, found some pressing business that made him walk away. Spider resumed his slouching.
One of the agents would have to dive into the peat to attach the chain. William smiled. That should be interesting to watch.
Once the Box came up, all hell would break lose.
He’d done the best he could, William decided. He’d explained the plan to Gaston and sent him to hide the copy of the journal and wait. If he didn’t make it through, the boy would take the journal to Zeke. He had done his job and gotten the Mirror what it wanted. The Mars would be safe from them.
Now he had to kill Spider. Piece of cake.
A lean sinuous woman stepped to the edge of the pond. Her robe whispered to her feet, leaving her nude. The head of every male agent turned. If it weren’t for the scales, she would be perfect.
The woman arched her back and then stretched, pushing her arms back. The gills on her neck snapped open in a frilly pink collar, bright against her pale green scales. She picked up the rope, slipped it around her waist, and with serpentine grace slid into the peat.
KALDAR maneuvered the barge around the bend and glanced at his uncle. “Almost there.”
Hugh stood up. Around him the dog pack rose, sitting on their haunches, staring at the big man with fanatical devotion. You’d never know the barge was full of dogs, Kaldar thought. With eighteen one-hundred-pound dogs on board, not a single bark or a growl. Like they were possessed or something.
