I could only make out the rear of the group, and I couldn’t help but notice the way the group moved. Slowing a bit, people changing direction. The Others were moving more to the sides of the group. Was something else attacking?
I slowed, and, unable to stick an arm out to stop Green eyes from crawling, stuck one foot out to touch her shoulder.
If we’d been moving, or focused on something else, I might have missed it. Someone rose to their feet as the last members of the group caught up to them, and fell in stride with the group. A man with a blond beard.
I caught the look he cast back over his shoulder as he noticed me noticing him. I felt his fear. Not as pronounced as some. He wasn’t as scared, and there was a reason.
“They’re getting away,” Green Eyes said.
“Move slow,” I told the others.
We did. Smaller steps.
I saw the spot where the guy had stopped.
Almost invisible, drawn in the snow and ice with thick lines of something blue, it had melted snow and ice down to pavement, and was consequently surrounded by a darker outline. A diagram. Not a circle, but something complicated. From my perspective, it looked like a distorted triangle , with complex geometric lines within, the flat side pointed toward us. The far end of the triangle crossed over, and formed what could have been described as supports for a smaller diagram.
“Huh,” Evan said. “What is it?”
“A trap,” I said.
“Does the trap have something to do with the box over there?”
“Box?” Green Eyes and I both asked, almost in sync.
“Yeah. Box. Far side. Squiggly bit, circle, zig-zag, then the forky bit, and there’s the circle on the far bit of the forky bit…”
The smaller diagram, supported by the larger triangle.
“Yeah,” I said.
“And in that circle…?” he asked.
“They’re getting away, don’t drag this out.”
“Hmph,” he grunted, which was a very small grunt coming from such a small body, “Wooden box, between the black chunks of frozen slush.”
Green Eyes reached over and grabbed my side for support, fingers encircling branches, to raise herself further off the ground. “Ah, yeah.”
“Okay, then, doing this carefully…”
I advanced for a closer look.
On the third step, the diagram reacted.
Smoke, as snow and ice evaporated. The diagram had changed, the supporting lines around the smaller diagram extending further, and to either side.
“Geez,” I said. I took another half-step closer, and watched as the smoke and lines extended further. “Reacts to proximity. Evan? Be careful.”
Evan flew out, turning immediately, then came back to land on my shoulder.
I saw more smoke rise, almost the sort of thing that could be mistaken as air from a storm drain or a sharp draft of wind that stirred the snow. The diagram had extended further.
It was duplicating. Four triangles forming a square, with the box presumably at the center.
It was, it seemed, sensitive enough to react to Evan.
“We should go around,” Green Eyes said.
“We’d lose too much time,” I said. “We’d lose them.”
I bent down, and grabbed a hunk of frozen slush. Ice black with accumulated grime, the sort that fell off the underside of a car. I tossed it, then caught it.
“Can you hit it?” Evan asked.
“I’m not sure I should,” I replied. “I’m looking at the diagram, and… look. Some diagrams keep things out. Some keep them in. You can look at the way that things point, and infer a lot from that. Triangles pointing in, triangles pointing out…”
“Point of the big triangle closest to us touches the box,” Evan said. “The ones that are further away do too.”
“Are you sure it wouldn’t be faster to go around?” Green Eyes asked. “I’m pretty sure I can keep up, if you don’t go quite as fast as you did before.”
“Smaller symbols seem to point inward, if I had to guess,” I said. “I don’t recognize the language. What’s the box like?”
“It’s… sort of like the box of books the priest tried to put me in. But wooden blocks. Like a child’s blocks. What’s that game where you build the tower and pull out pieces?”
“It collapses, then,” I said. “It’s built to break.”
“Yeah.”
I dropped the hunk of ice.
“We could be going around,” Green Eyes said, practically squirming in impatience. “Just saying.”
“As traps go, I don’t think we want whatever’s in that box to get out,” I said. “It could be a curse, an Other…”
“Or a distraction from chasing them,” Green Eyes said. “A mystical bit of mumbo jumbo to catch your attention and not let it go. Because that’s how those enchantresses work, right?”
“It’s not impossible,” I said. I walked around the diagram, keeping an even distance from it.
“Just like that,” Green Eyes cajoled. “Keep walking. Or run. Don’t focus on the box.”
But I stopped. The four triangles didn’t meet at the corner. There was a gap between the four sections of the symbol.
Nothing in or pointing to the gap. Nothing, as far as I could tell, that worked with or included the gap.
I positioned myself carefully, then walked down one of the four paths, between two of the triangles. It was only a foot and a half wide.
I reached the center of the diagram. I was careful not to breach the lines of the triangles, keeping my body angled to one side, my hands and arms within the lines. The only lines of the diagram I actually crossed were the lines of the circle encapsulating the box.
With the side of my thumb, I scratched out the blue stuff, distorting the smallest triangles within the innermost circle, the ones that pointed everything toward the box.
I angled my head one way, then the other, examining the box. It had been placed with two pieces of ice blocking the view of it from our direction.
Then I reached out and took hold of it.
“What are you doing?” Evan asked.
“Being very careful,” I said. “Which is a lot easier when people don’t speak very suddenly, right in my ear.”
“I bet. Screw those jerks.”
I was careful to keep pressure on the right spots of the box, holding its shape by keeping pressure on the edges.
As I drew it out of the circle, backing down the path, it started to shudder.
The box growled.
“I greet you, stranger,” I spoke.
It growled again.
“I bid you to name yourself,” I said.
“Inomenos,” the box answered. “Who are you, to bid anything of me?”
“Blake. The Thorburn bogeyman,” I said. “What are you?”
“You’re not worthy to ask the question, bottom-dweller.”
“Am I?” Evan asked.
“I am Inomenos. I am a wrong, made by man, released against men. I have earned a name for myself.”
A curse, given life, I thought.
“You’re bound by the Seal of Solomon?”
“Yes. You’re bound to truth, but you’re not bound to any seal.”