Rachel placed a hand against the side of Dill's inner jaw. She didn't even know if he could sense her touch or not. “Head for the settlement, Dill. Let's find someone who knows where we are.”
The village hugged one edge of a broad clearing in the forest. Several hectares of the nearby woodland had been cut to provide grazing land for animals, but it looked like most of the wood had been brought in from other places via the many smaller cart tracks that radiated out from the central sawmill. Wedge-shaped piles of fresh logs waited in the fog behind a row of shacks with tin chimneys. The shuttered inn stood at one end, but Rachel did not see any signs of life. The sawmill itself was a long low shed with an overgrown sod-and-grass roof. A belt ran through the shed wall to a bright red steam tractor positioned outside, but the machine was not currently operating.
The former assassin glanced at Mina. Hadn't she said that tractor was yellow? It seemed like an odd mistake to make, but hardly an important one. Perhaps Rachel had simply been mistaken.
“It's safe enough,” the thaumaturge said. “But don't take too long.”
Rachel slipped out between Dill's teeth and onto his hand, and he lowered her to the ground. His four-hundred-foot-high body crouched over her, his useless wings blurring into the sky above him. As soon as he became motionless, all vestige of life seemed to desert him. He was a mountain, or an ancient and hideous piece of sculpture, as much a part of the landscape as was the settlement. The smell of chemicals and grease appeared to ooze from the scratches and whorls in his impossible bones. He had kept his skull raised level while he stooped, and the dark caves of his eye sockets now stared ahead at nothing.
She hopped down from his palm onto a deeply pocked and rutted track showing signs that a large number of people had been this way recently. Beyond the road, the row of shacks waited in the mist, their glassless windows dark. A wall of conifers stood behind them, the boles stripped of lower branches and tinged broccoli green.
Rachel approached the dwellings cautiously.
She searched three of them in turn and found nothing. They were simple one-roomed huts with bunks for six workers in each. The bedding and mattresses were missing. In the fourth shack she found a freshly cut pile of firewood beside the potbelly stove, and four human skulls lying on the floor. She placed her hand on the iron cooking plate. It still felt warm.
The inn was a larger, two-story building, constructed from heavy interconnected logs and painted grey. A wooden sign hung above the door, bearing the words The Rusty Saw alongside a skillful carving of a bowed and serrated logging blade.
Rachel walked around the building's perimeter, trying both of the locked doors and many of the small shuttered windows. After she returned to the front she banged on the main entrance door. Nothing. She kicked the door in.
A broad saloon took up most of this floor. Shelves packed with whisky bottles occupied the wall behind the bar, framing an old mirror etched with the words Pandemerian Railroad Company.
Rachel walked amongst empty chairs and tables, the floorboards creaking under her boots. “Hello?” she called out. The room smelled of sawn wood, that bitter-fresh yet aged aroma of seasons past. She peered up the staircase rising at the rear of the room.
“Hello? Anybody up there?”
No answer.
The hairs on her neck tingled suddenly. She sensed a glimmer of movement at the edge of her vision, like a passing shadow, and wheeled round.
Nothing.
Her own reflection stared back from behind the scratches of the old mirror. The leather jerkin Cospinol's slaves had given her looked too bulky for her slender frame. Her hair appeared darker in this gloom, almost honey-coloured. She noted the hilt of her newly acquired Pandemerian sword protruding from its roughly woven scabbard. Unconsciously her hand had slipped down to grip the weapon.
A crack divided the mirror from top to bottom. It bisected her pale face, giving her mouth a crooked appearance. Had that fracture always been there? For some reason it unnerved her.
One of the two doors from the saloon brought her into a passage that offered a way out back leading to the well and the privy, but also to a small kitchen through a further door on the left. This room had a water tank and a pantry still stocked with tinned food, jars of preserves, and boxes of fresh vegetables. She returned to the saloon and opened the second door. This must have been the owner's office: a wardrobe, an overstuffed chair before a desk, papers crammed into cardboard file boxes, and a narrow camp bed set against the rear wall. A pendulum rocked back and forth beneath a clock on the wall. Just as she turned away, the clock gave two brassy chimes.
Rachel heard a footfall behind her and spun round to face the saloon once more.
Nobody there.
From her position here by the office door, it looked as if she possessed two distinctly separate reflections in the old mirror behind the bar. They stared back at her from either side of the fracture. The glass must have warped, for each image appeared to have a subtly different expression. The one on the left looked…
Crueller?
Rachel shook her gaze away. I must be going mad. First Rys, and now this. Had she really seen Rys's double appear in his own bastion moments before it fell? A growing number of recent strange events troubled her, lurking in the back of her mind.
She sighed. This creepy place had let her nerves take control of her imagination once more.
Nevertheless, the footfall had sounded real enough, and such a noise could easily have carried from the building's upper floor. To dismiss it too easily would be rash.
Slowly, Rachel walked up the stairs.
Four doors led from the upper landing: three open, one closed. Gripping the hilt of her sword, Rachel edged past the first open doorway. Musty furniture filled a small bedroom: a bed, chest of drawers, rug, small stove, and grey lace curtains backed by fog.
The second room was similarly furnished.
Then she came to the closed door. “I'm not going to hurt you,” she announced. “I just need some directions.” She waited and then tried the doorknob.
A slender young woman in a floral dress burst out of the doorway immediately to Rachel's left and flung herself at the assassin, screaming like a witch loosed from the pyre. She hefted an axe in her raised fist. Her staring eyes and hollow, painted cheeks formed a mask of utter terror. She swung wildly, so completely wide of Rachel's shoulder that the assassin barely had to move an inch to let her attacker simply bull past. And then the woman was sobbing, visibly shaking, and turning on the landing to deliver a second blow.
Rachel could see instantly that this opponent was no warrior. “Wait!” she yelled, and held out her hand mere inches in front of the other woman's face. “What do you think you're doing?” she demanded. “You almost hurt me.”
The slim woman halted, uncertain, her axe still quivering. Her lips seemed as thin as a red wire in that powdered white face. Sweat stained her dress under the armpits and across her chest. Strands of orange hair were spilling out of the loop of ribbon she'd used to restrain them, yet underneath the hideous makeup she might have been attractive. She looked at Rachel with a mixture of fear and desperation-and perhaps just a shade of hope.
“Put that down,” Rachel said.
The other woman immediately lowered the axe. “Abner made me do it,” she said. “It was his idea. He said since I was younger than him I'd be the best one to frighten you off. I never meant to hit you. Abner said I should…” She stopped herself and gave a small wince. “But I couldn't do that anyway. We were just trying to scare you away.” Her throat bobbed. She glanced down at the axe on the floor. “Please don't kill us. There are four hundred copper marks hidden in the well. You can have them all.”