The Spring Between Us

Chapter 35: The Quarry Ledger

I did not wait for morning.

I put Berik in the hall with a fresh bandage on his head and four warriors around him, and I put Mira in her hut with the door barred and Cal on the step, and I took Sten and two others and went out the back way through the wash and down the long slope to the creek bed. The moon was down and the canyon was black, and we went quietly and we did not use a lantern until we were below the rim.

We found the rider's horse at the bottom of the mesa road with its reins trailing and its saddle empty. Sten caught it. The rider himself was gone.

At the powder path above the quarry I stopped and looked down. The pump house was dark. The sheds were dark. The company office at the bottom of the road had one light in the window and that was all.

Then the wolf came out of the rocks.

He came out slow and low with his head down and his tail straight, and I had my hand on Sten's arm before I had made sense of the shape of him, and then the moonlight caught him and I saw the black fur with the warm cast and the amber eyes.

Hank shifted. He came up out of the wolf and stood in the rocks with his shirt open and his boots in his hand, and he said, "You are late."

"You are supposed to be on your side of the border."

"I was on my side. Then my scout came back at midnight and told me there was a dead woman on your south track and a Council rider on the mesa road with his head half caved in by a gatepost." He got his boots on. "Derya. I told you I would not come near you until the inquiry. I lied. There is a limit to what a wolf can do and I have reached it."

"Hank."

"What is the matter with your arm?" He came closer and looked at my wrist. The mark was bare and the ring was on my thumb and the paste was gone. "It is bright."

"It is the fourth stage. It will not go further." I pulled my sleeve down. "Why are you here?"

"Because of the rider." Hank crouched by the rocks and pulled a bundle out from under them. It was a saddlebag, and he opened it and turned it over and a handful of papers fell out onto the rock. "I caught him on the road below the quarry. He was riding hard and he had this in his bag and he did not want to give it to me, and then he did."

I picked up the papers. They were Council forms and letters and one of them was a page torn out of a ledger, and the ledger page had names on it.

"What is this?" I said.

"That is the quarry ledger. The one the company keeps, not the one in the chamber. Owen told me about it. It is in the company office at the bottom of the road and it has every payment the company has made in this canyon for nineteen years." Hank turned the page toward the moonlight. "Look at the last two years."

I looked. There were names and dates and sums, and the sums were large and the names were the names of wolves. Then I came to a line and my breath stopped.

"Ruth," I said.

"Ruth," Hank said. "Two hundred dollars in June of last year. Three hundred in September. Three hundred in November. And this year, in the spring, a payment of a thousand dollars the month the cistern went dry." He looked at me. "She has been taking company money for two years. Not from Silas. From the company. Owen signs these and he told me he did not know what they were for. He signs the payroll and the ore and the fuel and he does not ask questions about the rest."

I stood on the powder path with the page in my hand and the ring on my thumb and my wolf awake behind my mark.

"She told me she did not know about the wagon," I said. "She told me she did not ask for the seat. She told me she was trying to keep the pack alive."

"She was." Hank said it flatly. "She has been taking money to keep the pack alive and the man who paid her has been selling the water out from under it. That is not the same as being his creature. But it is not nothing either." He took the page back and put it with the rest. "There is one more thing. I did not catch the rider for this. I caught him because he had a letter in his coat and the letter was addressed to you and it had your mother's hand on the outside."

He put it in my hand.

It was a small envelope gone yellow at the edges and the address on the front was in my mother's handwriting and it said, To my daughter, on the event of my death. It had been opened. It had been opened and read and put back in the envelope and carried around the canyon in a Council rider's coat for four weeks.

"Read it," Hank said.

I opened it. There was one page inside and it was in her hand and it was short.

Derya. If you are reading this then the Council has my letter and I did not get to the hall in time. The list is in Mira's keeping and the ring is in the bundle with it and you will need both. Do not take them to the Council alone. Take them to the packs. The Council is not the law in this canyon. The packs are. The old pact says so and the old pact is older than the Council and the Council knows it. Find the second ring. The first pair wore two and they were buried with them and the Council took one and I have never found the other. If you find it, put the two of them together in front of both packs and read the pact aloud and the Council cannot touch you. Do not trust the Beta. She is frightened and frightened wolves sell what they love. I am sorry I did not tell you sooner. I thought I had more time.

I read it twice. Then I folded it and put it inside my jacket.

"The second ring," I said.

"What?"

"She says there were two. The first pair wore two and the Council took one and she never found the other." I held up my thumb. "I have one. It was in Mira's bundle. The second is somewhere in this canyon and she did not find it in nineteen years."

Hank was quiet. Then he said, "My mother has a ring. She wears it on a chain around her neck and she has worn it since I was a boy. She told me it was my father's and that I was not to ask about it."

I looked at him.

"Nora," I said.

"Nora." Hank picked up the saddlebag. "The company office. The ledger. We are not going to get a better night than this one. The rider is gone and the office has one light in it and the clerk on the night desk is a man who plays cards with Owen and who does not like the Council." He looked at me. "We take the ledger out of that office tonight and we put it in front of both packs at the inquiry tomorrow, and then we go and see my mother about a ring."

I looked down at the office at the bottom of the road. The one light was still in the window.

"Sten," I said. "Go back up the mesa road and tell Cal to bring the horses down to the old wash. Tell him to bring four warriors and to bring the ledger from the pump house chamber if he can get it without being seen."

Sten went. Hank and I went down the powder path to the bottom of the road with the saddlebag over his shoulder and the letter inside my jacket and the ring on my thumb, and the quarry was silver and empty and the office door was unlocked.

The clerk was asleep at his desk with a bottle beside him. Hank took the keys off the hook and found the ledger shelf and the ledger was there, a thick book bound in green cloth with the company mark on the spine, and I put it under my arm and we went out and shut the door behind us.

We were halfway up the road when the light in the office window went out behind us.

Hank stopped. I stopped.

"That was not the clerk," he said.

We turned and looked back. The office was dark and the sheds were dark and the pump house was dark, and then from the direction of the pump house there was a sound, a small metallic sound, like a hatch being closed.

"Somebody was in the pump house," I said.

"Somebody was in the pump house." Hank put his hand on my arm and drew me back against the rock. "Derya. The chamber. If Silas has taken the chamber, the ledger in the pump house is gone and the map is gone and the second pump is gone."

"He cannot take a whole chamber in one night."

"He can take the table and the map and the ledger and the pump." Hank's voice had gone flat. "And he can put something else down there. Something that will be found at the inquiry. Something with your name on it."

Up on the rim above the quarry a lantern swung. Then another. Then a voice I knew came down the road, calm and pleasant and carrying.

"Luna," Silas called. "Is that you on the road at this hour? I have been looking for you. There is a thing in the pump house that I think you should see."