Chapter 69: Company Town
The barrenland east of Ashmark gave Lewin farther sight than anything he had grown up reading about.
The slums had been a maze, and every threat came close, from doorways, from above, from the gap between two buildings at arm’s reach.
Out here, danger could be anywhere on the horizon, and the horizon was a long way off. He kept finding his eyes dropping to the ground when they should have been searching the flat distance where the rock mounds broke the view.
He corrected himself as they moved.
Three hours on the road and he had mostly stopped treating the wind through the scrub as a warning. His body had been thinking the absence of cook-fire smell was a sign of safety since they left Ashmark’s range. None of that meant anything in open country.
And to make matters worse, sky above the barrenland felt wrong today.
The Scar still cut across it the way it always did, that pale jagged line he had stared at every night from the slums since he was old enough to stare at anything. But the air around it was weird in a way he did not have a name for.
It was somewhere between a shimmer and the heat that rose from summer stone, except the stone was not warm and no sun touched it directly. He was not looking at it, and he found he did not want to. Orm had glanced up twice in the last hour without explaining why. That was enough to make it a problem.
They kept moving.
Hollow Hound tracks appeared in a patch of dry clay between two rock mounds, a pack that had passed through recently and headed northeast.
Lewin changed their course by thirty degrees without explaining it.
Ern matched him, and Orm followed behind.
The settlement appeared first as smoke, then as the buildings themselves, low against the land, with stone foundations and patched timber walls. The road into it was packed earth, firm and well kept.
Coss had built this road, which meant Coss had also kept it maintained.
A man at the settlement boundary watched them from beside the entrance post, where he had a clear view of the road in both directions. He did not challenge them.
"We are looking for work," Lewin said.
He kept his voice even, aimed at no one in particular, like a man stating a direction rather than asking permission. "Came down from the northern camp. Heard the merchant here was short-crews on the haul."
The man at the post said nothing. He let them through.
That was the first wrong signal.
A settlement in the Badlands had a kind of security culture that should have asked at least one question. Letting three strangers in without a word meant someone had already given the order.
Inside the settlement, the roads were narrow, the way mining camps grew when they grew instead of being planned. The workers who should have been moving at this hour were present in the right numbers, but they were idle.
Two men near a well doing nothing. A woman in a doorway watching the street instead of her household.
There was nothing to say to them.
Getting the document was the only question left.
The merchant house was the largest building in the settlement’s center, as it always was in Coss’s company towns. The sign on the front post showed a chain tool and a compass.
Lewin went in through the front door.
Ern stopped at the corner to the left. Orm took the alley mouth across the road, which gave him both the front entrance and the side passage.
Inside, the merchant house smelled of dried goods and iron fittings. A man behind the counter looked up.
Lewin stopped at the counter and kept his shoulders loose.
"I need to collect something from the back room," he said. "Wulfric’s orders."
He said it with the exact confidence of a man repeating instructions he had already been given. People who were responsible for this sort of work for a work this large did not challenge phrasing like that, because a challenge could cost his life.
The man behind the counter had a plain expression. He nodded once and stepped around the counter.
"You can wait in the back."
He was already moving toward the passage door.
The cache was exactly where Wulfric had described it.
Third shelf from the bottom, behind a locked storage box that took fifteen seconds and a thin iron tool from Lewin’s belt to open.
Inside was a flat document case wrapped in oilcloth and sealed with wax.
He broke the seal and checked the first page.
Financial accounts. Multiple merchant operation names. Figures ordered by settlement and date.
He did not need more than the first page to confirm what Wulfric had named. He closed the case and put it inside his coat.
He was already turning toward the front when the door opened inward and two men stepped through. They were not customers.
A bolt came through the side window above his left shoulder.
He jerked as it hit the joint of his shoulder and drove in, the impact arriving before the pain, leaving the arm with that sharp, foreign feeling of something embedded in it. He did not go down.
He forced himself through the front door with the arm pinned against his body and came out into the streets.
Fifteen men stood in the road, some with crossbows raised and some with swords drawn, spread across both directions without a gap that led anywhere except back through the building.
There were more behind the buildings. He stopped counting at seventeen.
Orm was against the far wall with two crossbows aimed at him.
He had his hands at his sides, and he was very stiff. His position was slightly better than Lewin’s. He was at the wall’s corner, and the side of the building behind him was not covered.
Ern was still inside the merchant house, somewhere.
Lewin stood in the road with a bolt in his shoulder and the document in his coat and seventeen men between him and the way out
Above the settlement, the air still had the shimmer he had been refusing to look at all day.
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