When he reached the bank, Steven scanned both sides of the street, hoping to spot Howard and Myrna; he looked up to find his old boss standing on the roof of Owen’s Pub. ‘Figures,’ Steven said with a smile. ‘Probably enjoying a beer with the show.’ He shook his head wryly and peeked through the lobby window for some sign of Myrna Kessler. She wasn’t in her usual perch behind the teller window and Steven waited a couple of minutes to ensure she wasn’t going to emerge from one of the rear offices.
It wasn’t like Howard to leave the bank unattended, even on those periodic occasions when everyone would file into the street to chart the progress of a smaller fire somewhere in the hills above town. But this was different; it was January and the fire burning along the canyon wall was an anomaly, a potentially deadly anomaly. Perhaps Howard had asked Myrna to work the window and answer the phones. Instead she’d stepped out to watch from the front step.
Steven leaned back and peered through the front windows to see if she was standing outside, but instead of Myrna, he saw, crisscrossing the bank’s front door, a crooked row of crosses made of yellow police tape.
Alarm bells ringing, Steven turned the corner, ducked beneath the bottom cross and pushed open the front door. He spotted an Idaho Springs police detective standing on the hood of a rusty old Chevrolet Caprice Classic, the town’s answer to an unmarked vehicle, parked across the street – Steven had met the young cop once at the pub and remembered him as a witty guy with a penchant for pistachio nuts and Irish jokes. Like the rest of the city, the officer had fallen prey to the overwhelming urge to watch as the fire, no longer falling down the hillside with unnatural speed, but inching its way ever closer with grim certainty.
The lump had been invisible from the street, but inside it was obviously a large body, probably a man, draped with a white sheet – awaiting the arrival of the Clear Creek County coroner, Steven guessed. He stepped over the corpse, reached through Myrna’s window for her bag and as soon as his fingers closed around her car keys he quickly moved towards the side exit, away from the detective who was still gazing towards Chicago Creek Road.
His hand on the doorknob, Steven hesitated, looked back into the lobby and sighed. He had to know.
He peeked out the glass door: the detective was swapping between hand-held radio and cell phone, apparently unconcerned that he had left a dead body lying on the floor of the town bank while he watched a forest fire consume a high school car park. Steven considered snaking his way across the lobby on his belly, then shrugged. No one was interested in the bank right now. He walked across the floor and crouched beside the corpse. He didn’t recognise the man beneath the sheet – death changed facial features – he did recognise the uniform. This man, D. Mantegna, from his breast plate, must have been one of the officers working at Charleston Airport three days earlier. Steven turned away from D. Mantegna’s sallow, sunken visage and looked down at the man’s left wrist. There, a black circle that looked like a third-degree burn, was Nerak’s calling card, the same entry wound the young mother must have been hiding when she boarded the plane with the baby held in the crook of her arm like a football.
The Idaho Springs Police were not waiting for the county coroner. With a dead body in a Charleston International Airport security uniform turning up in a bank eighteen hundred miles from the scene of an apparent terrorist attack, the detective outside would be waiting for the FBI.
Steven stood up and hurried out the side entrance towards Myrna Kessler’s car.
Twilight fell as the four riders carefully navigated the dirt road between vast fields of potatoes, greenroot, onions, carrots and pepper weed. Hannah tried to make out individual smells, but the onion and pepper weed were too flamboyantly aromatic to separate. She slouched in the saddle, resting her back, and waited for Alen to halt them for the dinner aven.
Pacing them were a brigade of horse and mule-drawn flatbed and slat-sided farm carts, dozens of them, stretching from either side of the road. Teams of harvesters, farmhands and children alike, trudged slowly behind the carts, tossing in vegetables in slow rhythm. The scene looked to Hannah like a sweeping Hollywood epic where, as the sun fades to red, the camera pulls back from one toiling child to capture the masses, stretched out to the horizon…
When the wind died for a moment, she could hear their cries: Potato… ho! Carrot and pea… hee! Onion or greenroot… come harvest with me! At first, she thought the cries were filled with sorrow, suffering, as if these people had been enslaved by some heavy-handed plantation owner with a team of whip-wielding overseers, but after several stanzas, Hannah realised the calls and responses were changing, the words moving through a variety of activities: leisure time, cool beer, sex, the coming winter. After a particularly flirtatious verse about women and men, Hannah heard laughter, scattered giggling at the crudity of the text. It was improvisation; they were making it up, keeping the rhythm steady to match the slow gait of their horses. Leaning in the saddle, she tried to make out another verse, but the breeze returned and drowned them in a swirl of onion and pepper weed. Stillness fell over the fields once again; the riders had moved on ahead. Hannah turned to watch the harvesters until they faded from view.
Churn had been doing relatively well most of the day. His first moments in the saddle had been difficult; Hoyt was nursing a painfully bruised shoulder and a ringing ear, the price for keeping the bigger man aloft long enough for him to experiment with Hannah’s sapling strategy. At first, Churn had gripped his friend hard, as if clinging onto life itself, until Hoyt had shrieked for mercy.
Finally Alen and Hannah calmed Churn enough to try the cane idea, and Churn had released Hoyt only when he had the stick in one muscular paw and the pommel grasped with the other. Wide-eyed with terror, the mute had only released the saddle-horn long enough to berate his companions with economic but vituperative insults.
‘Would you look at that?’ Hoyt teased. ‘Which one is the horse?’
With inhuman quickness, Churn cupped his hand for maximum pain and boxed one side of the smaller man’s head, landing a direct hit over Hoyt’s ear and sending his friend reeling to the ground.
Hoyt rolled over in the dirt and shouted, ‘I told you not too hard, you slack-jawed oaf!’
It took a good three avens, but eventually Churn started to relax in the saddle. He was not yet a horseman, but he had not yet fallen either. He jabbed at the ground with Hannah’s cane, and clung hard to both pommel and bridle. They didn’t make particularly good time, but if it took Churn several days to feel comfortable in the saddle, then that’s what it took. Riding was still quicker than walking.
By the dinner aven, Churn had mastered a three-step survival technique. Feeling the rhythm of his horse’s gait, he would use his powerful legs to lift himself in the saddle, step one. Next, he would await the appropriate moment and release his not inconsiderable bulk back into the saddle, step two. Finally, in the beat between sitting and rising again, he would lift and plant his sapling cane, preserving a tenuous connection with the dusty Pragan road, step three.
It wasn’t pretty, but it worked. With darkness closing in about them, Alen quickened the pace slightly in hopes of reaching the edge of the current vegetable farm and finding a grove of trees or perhaps a forest where they could camp. He didn’t relish the notion of sleeping in one of the fields – though he hadn’t detected Malagon’s magicians in three days, the idea of being so vulnerable, especially at night, was too unsettling.