48. Granite #2
The corner of his vision lit up.
「Warning: Anomalous Mana Concentration Detected.」
「Source: Unknown.」
「Distance: Approximately 1.2 Miles.」
Kain read the notification. He read it again.
The system had never told him a thing in this register and had never told him anything about mana. The other notifications had been about him. This one was about the country.
He dismissed it.
The map went flat on the front of his saddle. A small spike got drawn at the place the system said the thing was. The map folded back into his coat.
Roan turned on his own when Kain shifted his weight.
Ghost was already turning.
Going forward, the country had gone the wrong way. Going back, it turned ordinary again.
Kain didn't need to see the rest to know the rest. He knew enough.
Piece by piece the wrongness thinned out of the country as they went.
The slope went back to being a slope a man could put a horse up. The torn-open lines of grey stone stopped appearing in the ground. The spikes stopped jutting through the canopy.
The dying trees stopped being there. The leaves on the trees ahead were green at the edges and not brown.
Past a stretch a man had to be looking for to see as ordinary, the land settled back into the country Kain had ridden through that morning.
Hackberry. Scrub. Blueberry and raspberry. The country he'd been farming in since he came to Tillamore.
Poison ivy too. He could have done without that. A familiar kind of trouble was its own small comfort.
Ghost broke off at the crossroads outside town and turned for the farm. The wolf had given Kain everything it had to give for the day. Kain didn't blame it for going home.
The main street was as it usually was in midafternoon. A few folks on the steps of the stores, two carts being unloaded behind the dry-goods place, a woman with a basket of laundry on her hip walking up from the well.
Will Martinson was on the boardwalk in front of Sam's store with one hand on the wood rail and the other in the pocket of his coat. He looked up at the sound of Roan's hooves coming up the street.
"Kain."
"Mr. Martinson."
Kain swung down and hitched Roan to the rail. He turned to the older man and met his eye.
"Good day."
"It is." Will took the hand out of the pocket and laid it on the rail. "A good day to be working a man's own farm, I'd have said."
"And here I am, not at mine."
"Here you are."
Will gave him the look of a man who'd spent a working life reading other men. The eyes had stopped on Kain's boots.
"You've been in the woods."
"I have."
"You've been in the woods for a long stretch of the morning, by the look of those boots and that cloak and the thorn in the corner of your tunic."
Kain looked down. A thorn was hooked there, almost the length of his thumbnail, through the weave of the cloth.
He hadn't noticed it. It came loose between his fingers and lay in his palm.
It was the hard dark grey of a thing that had grown out of the wrong dirt.
The thorn went into his coat pocket.
"You have me."
"The gryphon is dead."
"It is."
"And yet you've been in the woods."
"Yes."
Will looked at him a beat longer. He had the kind of face a working man's face went into when the working man was deciding what to do with a piece of trouble he hadn't invited and couldn't get out of.
"I'm going in to talk to Sam. If you'd like to be there for the talking, you can."
Will didn't answer right away. He looked at the thorn-pocket and at the boots and at Kain's eyes, and then he nodded once, slow.
"I would."
Sam looked up from the counter when the bell over the door went. He saw Kain and his face moved a piece. He saw Will Martinson behind Kain and his face moved another piece.
"Trouble."
"Of a sort," Kain said. "Back room."
Sam looked at Will. Will held his eye. Sam came back to Kain.
"He comes."
"He comes."
Sam wiped his hands on the cloth at his belt and led them through the curtain at the back of the store. A fresh shipment of crates was stacked against the far wall.
Kain went to one and laid the map flat on the top of it and unfolded it. Sam turned up the wick of the lamp on the shelf above the crate.
Kain put his finger on Jeremiah's farm on the map. Then to the Marge place. Then past the cedar row to the small spike-mark he'd drawn at the granite-zone that afternoon.
"Jeremiah came at me over the chess board the night before last. His goats have been at the north fence since first thaw of the spring. He'd thought it was the gryphon. We killed the gryphon, and the goats kept staring."
"John Marge," Sam said.
"First light this morning. His sheep have been doing the same thing, looking northeast. The goats look due north. The two lines meet here." His finger went to the spike-mark. "I rode out to look."
"You rode in," Sam said. He'd gone quiet.
"I rode close. I didn't go all the way in. The wolf wouldn't let me, and the system wouldn't let me."
"Talk."
Kain talked.
The granite first. Plates of hard dark grey stone in limestone country. Stones come up under existing animal trails.
A stone in a blackberry thicket with the cut-end branches dead around it. The slope going wrong. Trees tilted by a thing that had moved the ground after they had grown.
Stone spikes punching up through the canopy, splitting trees as they came. The leaves on those trees brown at the edges.
Sam's hand had gone to his mouth.
"Then the wolf set itself in the trail and wouldn't move. Then the notification came."
"What did it say."
The bracket lines came back from Kain word for word.
Warning, anomalous mana concentration detected. Source, unknown. Distance, approximately one and one-fifth of a mile.
Sam's face went the color of paper.
Will Martinson said three words a Tillamore rancher didn't say in the company of women or men he respected. Kain looked at him until the words were finished. Will held up a hand.
"Apologies."
"No apology owed."
Sam set his hands flat on the crate. Will leaned with both elbows on the wood. None of the three of them said anything for the length of a long breath.
"A dungeon," Sam said. "Within a ride of Tillamore."
"I didn't go in. I didn't see a door. The thing is in there somewhere. The system says a little over a mile from where I turned."
"A dungeon doesn't need a door to be a dungeon," Sam said.
"A young one comes up out of the ground the way you described.
Granite first. Then the spikes. Then the country going wrong.
Then a door, when the dungeon is ready to be entered.
It isn't ready yet. The country tells you so.
The trees are dying. They haven't been dead a season. "
"How long."
"Weeks. Months. Less than a year. No one can say from the outside."
Sam pushed off the crate and started walking the back room.
"Dungeons pull at the country around them. That's what brought the gryphon. The country was pulling on a thing that ranges the cold hills two hundred miles north of here, and the gryphon was the kind of thing that came down a long road to a pull like that and didn't stop when it got here."
"That's what I'd been thinking."
"Other things come for other reasons. Monsters first; the kind that doesn't mind the wrong country, in for the food and the cover.
Adventurers second. Wherever there's a dungeon there's gold and stones and ingredients that grow nowhere else, and the kind of man who hunts those things will be on a road as soon as anyone knows there's a thing to be hunted. "
"Both at once," Will said.
He hadn't spoken since the apology.
"A village with no walls. A village with no constable. A village that tore down the old jail when I was a boy because the jail hadn't held a man in fifty years."
Sam stopped pacing.
"It won't stay the way it's been."
"No," Will said. "It won't."
"The Guild," Sam said. "There's a procedure. I write to the regional office. A survey team comes. They make a determination on the dungeon and on the danger of the country round it."
"How long."
"Two weeks on the fastest end. Three on the more likely."
"And if they don't come."
Sam shook his head. "They'll come. They like the cut of the proceeds. They send people for the smallest dungeons. They'll send people for this one."
"And if."
"If they don't, it falls to whatever local authority can hold the country."
He let it sit. Kain let it sit. Will let it sit.
None of the three of them said the words for the thing they were all thinking about the local authority. There was no constable. There was no marshal.
The old jail wasn't there to put a man in. There were three men in a back room with a map between them.
"Draft the letter today," Kain said.
"Today."
"I'll leave the map for the writing. Don't show it."
"I don't need to be told."
"I know you don't." He faced Will. "Will."
"I'll keep what I heard."
"Carol."
Will looked at him. Will Martinson's eyes were the eyes of a man who'd been told a thing the woman he loved would have to learn one of these days and had been told it before her.
"I'll keep what I heard," he said again.
"Thank you."
Out by the front of the store Kain found Roan still at the rail. Reins in hand, he walked the horse out of town.
Walking was the thing his head needed. Walking was a way of thinking when sitting wasn't.
The street took him past the long row of stores and then past the Kettle. Sasha was on the porch with the broom that lived by the front door. Matthew was bracing himself against the doorframe with his small fist on the wood, head turned to watch his mother.
Sasha lifted a hand. Kain lifted his without breaking stride.
He nodded toward the road home. She nodded back. The plate she had promised would keep until later.
Past the Kettle came the McGrath farm. Past the McGraths came the next two farms. Down the lane Kain came to his own gate.
Roan turned into the pasture without being asked. The saddle came off and went on the rail. The brush worked along the gelding's neck the long way he liked.
Ghost was in the garden, lying among the tomato plants in the late-afternoon light with its head down on its paws. The one good eye was open and looking at the road.
Kain went and sat on the porch step. He sat there a long time without thinking of any one thing in particular, and watched the wolf watch the road.
Tillamore had been Tillamore since he came up the road into it.
The gryphon had pushed the village sideways for a season. The kill had set the village back upright. The recovery had let the village settle back into itself.
The day's work, the evening's bread, the weekly market, the seasons in their turn.
The pattern had ebbed and the pattern had flowed and the pattern had come back round to itself.
Tillamore had looked the same since he had walked into it.
It wasn't going to look the same much longer.