Again, Annev was surprised by the merchant’s perceptiveness. ‘Yes.’
‘To fight … and to kill?’
Annev was ready for the question. He answered without pausing, though he had a firm grip on his rock and kept Crag’s staff in sight.
‘Yes.’
‘Good.’
Annev quirked an eyebrow, puzzled by Crag’s emphatic response. Does he really want me to attack him? Is he waiting for it? Without the element of surprise, things would become messy. He stacked his rock atop the pile then quickly grabbed another.
‘We don’t just train to fight,’ Annev continued. ‘The ancients and masters also train us to steal things. Magical things.’
‘Magic, eh?’ Crag leaned his staff against a tree. With his eyes on Annev, he took out a pipe and a wad of rack root. ‘I find that awful curious,’ Crag said, filling the pipe bowl. ‘I mean, if you never leave your village, how can you know someone has something magical? No, no – don’t spoil it for me. Let me think on it.’ A striker and charcloth appeared in Crag’s hand. He lit the latter over the bowl, sucked tentatively on the smoker, and pocketed the rest.
‘You’d need to have contacts in the cities,’ Crag said between puffs. ‘Banok. Luq’ra. Quiri. Ain’t no way around that. But how would you communicate with them?’
Annev shrugged, less because he didn’t know and more because he didn’t grasp the merchant’s game.
‘Do you have a rookery?’ Crag pressed. ‘A place for keeping birds?’
Annev thought on it. ‘Yes. The quartermaster keeps some doves and a few pigeons, even a hunting hawk.’
‘So. Use the birds to send messages back and forth. Still …’ Crag shook his head, his grey-streaked locks swinging about his chin. ‘Seems a daft thing to do. I mean, artifacts are rare enough, I suppose, but if you’re not going to sell what you steal then what’s the point? There’s no profit in it. And it’s obvious you don’t have anything of value or somebody would have hunted you down by now and stolen it back.’ Crag sucked on his pipe stem till the embers in the bowl glowed orange.
Annev shook his head, stacking another stone. ‘When an artifact goes into the Vault of Damnation, no one—’
‘Ahhh,’ Crag interrupted. He gave a long low sigh, exhaling a mouthful of smoke. ‘And now the pieces fit together.’
‘What fits together?’
Crag took another long drag on his pipe, exhaled, and pushed himself up from the ground with his staff. ‘Ancients. Vault of Damnation. Avatars of Judgement. It all sounds familiar. Like an old story I couldn’t quite remember.’ Crag smiled, a dangerous glint still in his eyes. ‘But now I do.’ He walked away from the altar, through the half-frozen mud and into the shaded depths of the wood.
‘Crag?’ Annev dropped his stone. ‘Where are you going? What do you remember?’
‘I’m going to find whoever killed me mule. As to the story,’ Crag called over his shoulder, ‘come with me if you want to hear it.’ He was moving swiftly away from the clearing now, marching towards the forest gloom.
Annev hesitated. ‘But the path out of the Brake … you’re going the wrong way!’
Crag stopped, turning to face Annev. ‘There are two trails here, lad. One you know and one you don’t. If you want to learn somethin’ worth knowin’, which do you think you should follow?’ The merchant spun on his heel, heading back towards the darkness.
Annev took a step and then stopped. ‘Wait, your cart! You’re just going to leave it? What if the people who killed Cenif come back?’
Crag didn’t answer. He’d reached the edge of the clearing and disappeared into the shadowed trees. With a muttered curse, Annev dashed after him.
Chapter Thirty-Six
Neither Sodar’s lessons nor the Academy’s training had covered tracking in the forest, but it wasn’t hard here. Annev saw plenty of signs of passage – footprints in the mud, broken twigs, overturned rocks – and if these weren’t enough, the trail of blood was easy to follow. Every few feet he found the drops of dried crimson clinging to bushes, brush and stone.
‘Crag,’ Annev said, trying to get the merchant to slow his pace. ‘Crag, the mule was brought to that altar. Whoever killed it probably didn’t come back this way.’
‘You assume the killers think like men who’ve committed a crime,’ Crag said around his pipe. ‘But I saw that clearing, same as you. Men might have killed Cenif, but what they did was savage, more like a wild animal—’
‘—and an animal has a den,’ Annev finished.
Crag nodded. ‘There’s a story at the end of this trail, and I intend to find it.’
Annev had no reply. As they walked on he reminded himself of his pledge to kill the pedlar. That hadn’t changed, but this wasn’t the moment. There was something dangerous in the wood, and Annev wanted to know what it was. He even dared to hope that whatever had killed Cenif would also kill Crag. If Annev survived and the pedlar did not, he could still take the man’s ears back to Tosan. He felt a tiny flash of guilt at the thought – he had promised not to circumvent the rules of their deal – but the greater part of Annev’s soul rejoiced in thinking there might be another way. He supposed that meant he was still the ring-snake Tosan had accused him of being, and he wondered what that meant for his future.
‘What will you do when you find the people who killed your mule?’
Crag swished the pipe to the side of his mouth and spat into the trees. ‘I’ll repay them in kind.’ He swung his quarterstaff at an offending shrub, scything its leaves from its body.
‘But they could be dangerous.’
‘I can be dangerous, too, lad.’
An hour ago, Annev would have found that boast absurd, but he’d since caught a glimpse of the harder man hiding beneath the merchant’s jokes and jolly paunch, and he wouldn’t underestimate Crag a second time.
The trail led them to the edge of a frozen rill, then snaked across the half-broken ice to the opposite bank, just a few feet away. Annev cautiously made his way across, the ice cracking and crunching beneath his feet, then he stopped and waited for Crag.
The fat man wasn’t far behind. With his quarterstaff supporting him, Crag stepped onto the ice, his feet gliding in such a way that they didn’t even crack the surface of the frozen water. Annev’s brow furrowed as he adjusted his assessment of the pedlar once again.
They moved on through the brush, the light growing dimmer as the day grew older. Annev tallied the hours since he’d left Chaenbalu and then his remaining time. A full day – more than enough time to accomplish his task – only Annev had expected it to be done by now, and the fact that it wasn’t left him feeling uneasy.
‘Do you have any family, Crag?’
The pedlar shrugged. ‘Had a wife and son, but I outlived them both. Had a grandson, too, but fate took him from me as well. I s’pose I’ve accepted it, in my own way.’
‘What way is that?’