Chapter 590 - 589: Underfoot

Chapter 590: Chapter 589: Underfoot

Location:The Millford Road — The Halbrook Holding; The Stone Barn

Date/Time:TC1858.02.14 – TC1858.02.15

The third night at the barn door smelled of frost and cattle and nothing else, and then, sometime past the fifth hour, it smelled of spring.

Bett Mowbray noticed it the way you notice a word spelled wrong on a page you’ve read twice. Cold air didn’t carry much. The cows in the byre across the yard, a thread of woodsmoke from the house chimney where Nissa had banked the fire before she went into the barn, her own breath going stale in her scarf. That was the night, and it had been the night for six hours.

This was wet clay. Opened ground. The smell a field gave up when the plow first went into it after the thaw, cold and sour and alive.

She turned her head, slowly, along the wall, and smelled it again. It wasn’t coming from anywhere. It was just there, under the frost, as if the yard had breathed out.

"Bram."

He was two places along from her, his bad arm tucked against him, his eyes on the yard. He didn’t look around. "What."

"Can you smell earth?"

He was quiet for a moment. She heard him breathe in through his nose.

"Ground’s frozen a hand deep," he answered.

"I know it is."

"Where’s it coming from?"

"I can’t tell." She hated that. She hated saying it. "Everywhere. Nowhere. It wasn’t there an hour ago."

Bram turned his head the other way, toward the east end where Innes Garrow stood with his long hands around his spear and his face to the dark along the wall.

"East," Bram said, not loud.

"Nothing," Innes called back.

"West."

From the far end, past the door and the other five, Ivo Selby’s voice came back. "Nothing. Wall, road, snow."

Bett stood with her back to the stone and the smell in her nose and looked at the yard. Forty paces across, rutted and frozen hard, the woodpile black in the middle of it, the byre beyond, the house beyond that with its one banked window. All of it white-edged under the stars and perfectly still.

Nothing was crossing it. There was nothing to cross.

***

The sound came through the door behind her.

It was low and steady, and she felt it in the boards at her back before she heard it, a growl with no break in it, the noise a big dog makes when it’s too frightened to bark. Sedge. She had never heard it from him.

Then Nissa’s voice, through the planks, very close and very level.

"There’s something under the floor."

Bett’s whole body went cold from the neck down.

She’d walked this barn. Every pace of the outside of it with her hand on the stone, all the way around, looking up. She’d found the owl hole and boarded it and stood back admiring it with her hands bleeding. She’d looked at the roof and the eaves and the corners. She had not looked down. What was under a barn had never crossed her mind, because a barn was walls and a door and a roof, and the floor was just the floor, the place you stood. Packed earth, swept, a bit of straw. Nothing anybody would ever have called a measure.

At the grain store at Millford, the floor was flagged.

She put that away. There’d be time for it, or there wouldn’t.

"Bram."

He was already moving. He came off the wall and stood square in front of the door with his good hand on the latch, and for one breath he didn’t do anything at all. She watched him not do it. Everything they’d agreed on had been about holding this door from out here. Nobody crosses. Nothing comes from behind. And the thing they were holding it for was on the other side of it, with something coming up under her feet.

He’d said he wouldn’t make a rule.

"East five, in," Bram said. "Innes, you’re last; you stand in the door, and you face out. West five, you hold the wall. Nobody follows us."

Nobody argued. He lifted the latch.

***

The lamp was on the ledge where Nissa had set it, and in its light the barn was a long low box of stone with hay at the far end, and the kindling pile Joss had been building heaped against the wall, and the floor was moving.

Not all of it. One place, in the far corner, beyond the hay. The packed earth there was lifting in a slow dome, like bread rising, and as Bett came through the door a crack ran across the top of it with a sound like the trough ice going, and the smell came up out of it so thick she could taste it.

Nissa stood between the corner and her son. She had the byre mallet in both hands. Joss was behind her on his blankets, curled on his side, asleep. Bett saw his face in the lamplight and saw that it was asleep, properly asleep, mouth a little open. Sedge was in front of them both, legs braced, the growl still running out of him.

"Back," Bram said. "Nissa. To the door. Take him."

Nissa didn’t argue either. She dropped the mallet, got her arms under the boy, blankets and all, and came along the wall toward the door with him, and the dog came with her, backing every step.

The floor in the corner burst.

It came up head first. Bett had never seen the head first. On every sheet it was the limbs, the long folded limbs reaching, and the head somewhere behind and above, swinging back along the flank. This came up through the earth like a spade turned the wrong way, the head-plate flat and broad and shoveling, clods breaking off it and sliding down, and behind it the body came up after in one long pour. It was filthy. It was black to the joints with wet earth. It shook itself, once, the way a dog does, and dirt went across the hay in a spray.

Then it turned toward the door, where the boy was.

"Front," Bram said, and went.

Bett was front. It should have been her. She was a pace behind him, coming around the kindling, and he was the one in the middle of the floor when the limbs came out of their fold, and she saw the first one hit his shield and saw his left arm, the stiff arm, fold in at the elbow the wrong way under it. Not a sound out of him. He went down on one knee and got the shield back up anyway, braced against the floor with his shoulder.

"Head," the side man called, behind her. "Head’s coming over, your side—"

Bett left the head to him.

She came in low past Bram’s shoulder with her blade turned edge-down. The second limb was reaching across for him. She went under it. The plate was there, the joint behind it, exactly where it always was, and she put the point in and leaned.

It didn’t go.

It went a finger’s width and stopped, the way the old sheets said knives had stopped on the plated underside, and for one horrible moment she thought they’d closed this too. Then she understood. It was earth. The joint was packed full of wet earth from the climb, and her point was grinding in clay.

She dragged it out. Put it back in at a slant, under the clay. Leaned with everything.

It went.

The thing jerked through its whole length, and its head came around the long way, folding back toward her along its body, and stopped halfway, and sagged. The limbs went slack. It folded down onto the floor and onto Bram.

"Get it off him—"

The side man and the other one got their shoulders under it with her, and the three of them heaved, and it rolled half off him and lay against the kindling pile, scattering sticks.

Bram was on his back. The first limb had come through the shield and through his coat below the ribs on the left side, and the floor around him was already dark and getting darker, and the earth was drinking it.

Bett knelt beside him. She put her hand on the wound because that was what you did, and it went in further than her hand should have.

"Don’t."

"Bram—"

"There’s another." He was looking past her, very calm. "In the hole."

***

She turned.

In the corner, the hole was still open, a black, ragged mouth in the packed floor with the lamplight not reaching into it, and there was something in it. Halfway up. She could see the edge of a head-plate, filthy, and the curve of a body below it going down into the dark.

It wasn’t climbing.

It was looking. At the dead one on the floor, she thought. At Bram. At the three of them crouched around him with their blades out and the side man already on his feet. At the door, where Nissa stood flat against the wall with her son in her arms and the dog against her legs.

It looked at all of it for as long as it takes to count three. Then it went back down.

Not fell. Went. The plate slid down out of the light, and the earth at the lip of the hole crumbled in after it, a little, and then nothing moved down there at all.

Nobody went near the hole. Bett didn’t let anybody.

Behind her, out past the doorway, somebody shouted.

***

It was Innes.

He was where Bram had put him, standing square in the open door with his back to the barn and his face to the yard, the long spear held low and out. And out in the yard, coming across the frozen ruts toward the door, low and fast, were two of them.

She saw it all at once through the doorway, the way you see a whole room by lightning. The west five off the wall at last and closing on the first one from the side. The second one past them, past everything, making for the only gap in the stone there was. And Innes in the gap.

"Door," he called. "Door, door—"

He didn’t step back into the barn. The fifth doesn’t. He set the butt of the spear against the threshold stone and dropped the point, and it came at him low along the ground the way they came at everything now, and he put the point into it under the head-plate with both hands and all his long body behind it.

It went in. She saw it go in. She saw the thing check and shudder on the spear.

Then the limbs came out of the fold on either side of him at once, and closed.

Bett was off her knees and running before she knew it. She heard Nissa say something. She heard her own feet on the earth floor. She came into the doorway beside him with her blade up and the thing’s head swinging back toward her along its body, and Innes was still on his feet, still holding the spear, and the limbs had him from both sides.

She went for the neck. Clean this time. No earth in it.

It died on the threshold with Innes’s spear still in it and Innes still in the limbs, and when it went down it took him down with it. They lay across the doorway together, the long body and the long careful hands, half in the barn and half out of it.

Out in the yard the west five had killed the other one at the woodpile. Ivo was standing off the end of them, looking out at the road, where he’d been told to stand, his lips moving.

"Road," he called. "One. On the road. By the gate."

Bett looked.

At the gate post, past the yard, where the rider had raised his hand to the post, something pale stood in the road. It didn’t come in. It stood there long enough for her to see it was looking at the doorway, at the two of them lying in it, and then it turned and went off up the road the way the reserve had gone at midwinter, without hurry.

Nobody went after it.

***

Bram was still alive when she got back to him. Nissa was kneeling on his other side with the lamp, and the boy was on his blankets by the wall, and the dog lay across the boy.

"Innes," Bram said.

"In the door."

He closed his eyes a moment. When he opened them, they went to Joss.

"Did he wake?"

Nissa looked at her son. "No."

"Three, then." He breathed out, and it took a long time, and the breath had a wet sound at the bottom of it that Bett had heard before and had never wanted to hear again. "That’s three in the column. Tell her I had a third thing after all. Tell her it was that."

"I’ll tell her," Nissa answered.

He looked up at Bett.

"You’ll write it," he said.

"I don’t—"

"You wanted a rule." He nearly laughed, and it hurt him, and he stopped. "Don’t give them one. Write the barn. Write the floor. Write what it did."

She said she would. She didn’t know if he heard her.

***

At first light Ivo found where they’d come in.

It wasn’t hard once you knew to look down. From the ditch along the road, past the gate, a line ran across the yard under the snow where the snow had sunk a hand’s depth into the ground beneath it, straight as a rule, to the foot of the woodpile. From under the woodpile it went on, the same sunken line, to the barn wall below the north gable, under the owl hole Bett had boarded, and stopped. The ground there had fallen in, a little, against the foot of the stone.

"Under the frost," Ivo said. He was crouched at the woodpile with his palm on the sunken snow. "The top hand’s frozen and the rest isn’t. They went under the frozen part. All night, while we stood on it." He looked up at her. His face was gray. "There wasn’t a crossing. So they made one."

Bett looked at the line in the snow. Forty paces. She’d stood beside it for six hours.

Then she went and looked at the barn floor in daylight. The hole in the corner. The dead one lying against the kindling. The dark patch where Bram had been, gone hard and brown in the cold. She walked the floor of that barn from wall to wall with her eyes on the ground the way she’d walked the outside with her hand on the stone, and found nothing else, and walked it again.

One of the west five sat against the byre wall with his sleeve cut away, holding his own forearm in his lap. The bite was small. The hand below it was already warm and wouldn’t close, and he looked at it as if it belonged to somebody else.

The cows in the byre hadn’t been touched. Not one of them. She stood in the byre door and counted them twice and felt something she didn’t have a name for.

***

They carried Bram and Innes out in the middle of the morning. The other Corps took one end of each, and Bett took Innes’s feet, because she was the one who’d been beside him in the door.

Nissa stood at the barn door as they came past. She said their names, once each, as they went through it. Bram Corliss. Innes Garrow. The same way she’d said them at dusk on the twelfth, going the other way.

Bett set down her end in the yard and went and found paper.

She sat on a feed crate by the byre wall and wrote it out the way Bram had told her. No rule. She wrote the night and the smell. The floor. The one that came up head first, and the joint packed with clay, and the one that looked and went back down. The door, and the fifth in it, facing out. The line in the snow from the road to the wall, a hand deep, under the frost. The cows, all of them, untouched.

At the top she wrote the two names.

Under them she wrote what Bram had said to write, and changed one word.

This barn. The Halbrook holding. The fourteenth.

She looked at it a long time. Then, because she had wanted a rule her whole life and had been given a barn instead, she added one more line underneath, and it wasn’t a rule either.

The floor was earth. Look down.