Darkwood (7 page)

He was carrying a torch and a rifle and smiling. “It's touching, really, how you all count the rungs. But you're gutsier than most, little”—he squinted up at her—“what are you now? A girl? You're gutsier than most, to try it in the real dark.”

Then casually, almost lazily, he kicked the ladder. It tipped away from the wall and stood on its own for a moment, then fell backward with a
whoosh
. Annie let out a hiccup of pain as the weight of her body dragged against her arm.

“Now climb back down here at once, young lady!” The man scolded in a schoolmistress voice, then laughed. “Oh, if you insist. It's been weeks since I had any good target practice.”

He fired before Annie could speak, or even think. The bullet whizzed past her hip and embedded itself in the side of the
barn with a splintering sound. To her astonishment, she did not let go of the window frame.

“Oh, come now. I won't let you break your little bones.” Another bullet hit the barn wall, a few inches above her head this time. Annie held on.

When he spoke again all the humor had left his voice.

“I can part your hair with one of these. Do you want a scar like mine?” Another bullet, so close to her face she could feel its trail of heat. “Do you?”

She let go.

He caught her. It was worse than hitting the ground. His arms were harder than wood, and he smelled bad—not of sweat and manure, as she'd expected, but of a ripe, almost rotten sweetness. Annie started to struggle and kick. He dropped her, no, he tossed her, to the ground. By the time she had scrambled upright he had the nose of the rifle pressed into her spine.

“This way.”

His torch cast enough light that she could walk without stumbling, but Annie dragged her feet. This would be her one chance to get away, before they got to wherever they were going. If she could just find something to distract him … oh, where were the cats?

“I wouldn't waste the thought, gal. There's nothing but forest to the north of us, and miles to town. But don't worry, you'll be snug as a bug where you're headed, snug as—” He stopped. “What is …?”

The kinderstalk had started to howl again, but the sound
had a different quality from what Annie had heard in the chicken coop. Those howls had sounded like questions, she realized now, questions and answers. These were fierce, urgent. And closing in.

“Move!” The scarred man grabbed her arm and started to run, half carrying her across the yard. He stopped at a wooden door in the ground with a ring in the center.

“Lift it up.”

He watched her struggle for a few seconds, then reached down and pulled the door free with one hand. A ragged circle opened in the earth.

“In.”

“No.”

He looked at her in real surprise. “You don't hear them? You think you're better off out here?”

“I won't. You'll have to shoot me first.”

Behind them, a kinderstalk snarled. The man whirled around, firing his rifle wildly into the dark. Then, quick as a snake, he turned and struck Annie behind the knees with the barrel.

“No good to us dead,” he hissed.

She pitched forward, the black mouth of the pit opening wide to swallow her.

A beetle inched past Annie's nose. Dirtcarver, or maybe a mudmopper. Gregor would have known. She poked the beetle and it melted into the darkness. Her head hurt, and her shoulder, and her hip. She eased herself into a sitting position and did a quick inventory of limbs. Nothing broken, but she'd taken quite a knock. Her eyesight kept shifting between clear and blurry, and the light had a queer brown tone to it. She held her hand in front of her face: five fingers, just as usual. She straightened her arm and the hand disappeared into the dark. Bent her elbow, the hand came back. She supposed she should blow out the lantern. It was a wonder the candle had lasted as long as this.

The lantern lay on its side a few feet away. Reluctantly, she reached for it.

Annie snatched back her hand as if stung.

The handle of the lantern was cool. The glass windows of the lantern were dull and cold. The candle had burned to nothing. And yet she could see the bit of string that tied the
end of her braid, and the matted hair above it. She could see the coarse gray fabric of her dress spread out across her lap, down to the pucker in the cloth where Page had darned it. She could see the dotted lines of dried blood on the backs of her hands where bracka bushes had scratched her. Annie squeezed her eyes shut and the world went dark. She opened them and there were her hands still in her lap, gripping the fabric of her dress tightly now. She picked up the lantern and examined every inch of it, but there was no denying that it was not lit and had not been for some time.

The light must be coming from overhead, or behind her, or … Annie scrambled around the confines of the pit, objects coming into view as she got nearer to them, sinking back into darkness as she moved away.

The dirt walls formed a rough circle that narrowed toward the top, with the underside of the wooden door forming the roof. The floor was about as wide across as she was tall. To one side was a bucket, to the other a filthy blanket full of holes and a heap of moldy vegetable rinds. Neither the door, nor the walls, nor the blanket, nor the bucket emitted any light. Desperately, Annie kicked the vegetable rinds, but they were just vegetable rinds.

She studied her hands again, holding her right wrist with her left hand to keep it from shaking. If she kept her hand close to her face, she could see every detail: the sworl of prints on each fingertip, the branching lines on the palm that Grandmother Hoop claimed she could read to foretell a person's future. When she moved her hand away, its outlines grew
softer, the surrounding light deeper and deeper brown, as though she were submerging her hand in murky water. Each time she repeated the experiment she thought she could see her hand a little longer before it disappeared. Something like fascination crept into Annie's chest alongside the fear, but she squashed it.

I hit my head. This won't last. It's … it's
… She struggled for the words Page would use, words from her books that made things sound exotic but comfortingly remote, easy to shut up and put away, like the books themselves.
It's a conundrum. It's an oddity. It's an aberration
.

If a cow wanders into the yard, be quick to shut the gate
.

Not Page, but Aunt Prim, reading aloud from
The Book of Household Virtues
. For the first time in Annie's life the saying meant something.

A second inspection of the pit convinced her that the only way out was through the opening at the top. Standing, her head just grazed the wooden door. She pressed her palms flat against it and shoved as hard as she could. It didn't budge. So this was why the scarred man had wasted those precious seconds watching her struggle with the door, to be sure it was too heavy for her. She yelped in a sudden rush of anger and panic and pushed again with all her strength. Then she felt it, a slight vibration against her palms, the
strick, strick
of nails against wood.

Annie shrank back. The kinderstalk. Even here, they could smell her.

More scratching, then silence, and then a different sound, almost too faint to hear.

A meow.

“Izzy! Prue!”

The cats meowed again.

Annie sagged against the wall, then let herself slide down it until she was half sitting, half lying on the floor. All that long night, whenever she called out, they answered.

The ax, or whatever the weapon had been, had split his head into two globes. A dense ridge of scar tissue ran between them, bumpy and faintly blue like thick ice. At first she had tried not to look—he couldn't help it, after all—but after a while she realized he
liked
the scar, the suggestion of violence it carried. When he spoke he dipped his head toward her, as if to ask, what do you suppose happened to the man holding the ax?

She'd had plenty of time to study him since he hauled her from the pit at daybreak and marched her back to the barn. He pushed her into a wagon and bound her ankles together, then looped a stout rope several times around her waist and tied the ends to one of a dozen metal rings fastened to the inside of the wagon bed. He fit the rain cover over the top and sides of the wagon.

Her hands he left free. Breakfast consisted of a wedge of bread, a blackened fish head, and a couple of knobby potatoes with bits of earth still clinging to them. Annie ate it all. And she drank from the bucket of water he'd given her, drank until her stomach swelled like a gourd. The water tasted of tin and damp wood and something else, something faintly sweet. She tipped the bucket nearly vertical to drain it.

“Oy!” The scarred man knocked the bucket away. “Easy now.”

Annie was glad he'd tied her facing away from him because she was crying. She'd tried. She'd really tried very hard to avoid this, and it had come to nothing. Annie covered her face. Tears slid down her wrists into the sleeves of her dress. Worse than being bound like an animal, worse than what waited for her, was the fact of her own stupidity. She should have listened to Grandmother Hoop.

“You cry, if it makes you feel better,” the scarred man said cheerfully. “After today, you won't have the energy to spare.”

They drove west past Gorgetown, covering the very ground she had covered the day before. When they reached the cliffs they turned south, and the landmarks Annie recognized from her games with Gregor—the black rock jutting over the gorge like a giant anvil, the cluster of stones ringed with tonsure moss where they had buried the body of a bird—gave way to a flat, unchanging landscape of yellow dirt and scrub brush.

The first sound she heard was familiar, though out of place: the
thud, swing, thud
of ax against wood. There was a high, whirring noise she couldn't place, and a soft
tink, tink
that sounded like breaking ice. Then men's voices, and the unmistakable
gong!
of a dropped iron pot. The wagon rolled past a cluster of tents, then past a cooking area cluttered with dirty
pots and pans and water buckets, then on past a group of men repairing baskets made from birch bark. The last thing they passed was a long, low building without windows, set somewhat apart from the rest of the camp. Thick smoke hung over the building, though Annie could see no chimney.

The wagon shifted as the scarred man got down from his seat. And then he was facing her, smiling.

“Welcome to the Drop.”