Thirty: The Face Beneath The Hood

It took Berry and I a couple of weeks, as I said, to finish going through the records from the Skeega ruinmen. Every couple of days we found something or other that mentioned the White River Transport Facility, but it wasn’t until we’d read most of what was at Troy Tower that we got the records from the seasons when the Skeega ruinmen worked on it.

It was late in the afternoon, and I’d spent nearly the whole day reading the dullest kind of report a ruinman can file with the guild: here’s where it was, here’s when we worked on it, and all we found was concrete we cracked to get the iron bars inside. That’s what you find more often than not in the ruins of small towns and suburbs, because a lot of people kept living in those straight through the end of the old world; the small towns stayed small towns and bits and pieces of the suburbs turned into small towns themselves, and the people who lived there stripped old buildings for anything they could use long before ruinmen got around to the job. So that’s what I’d been reading, one report after another from the small towns near Skeega, and then I pulled out another stack and nearly dropped it, because it said WHITE RIVER TRANSPORT FACILITY right across the top.

That was the most exciting thing about that stack of paper, though. The place was a truck depot in the years before the Second Civil War, when there were lots of little rebellions catching fire here and there across the middle of the country and there weren’t enough soldiers or fuel to stamp on all of them. That’s all it was: lots of trucks, big round fuel tanks to keep them fed, and a bunch of long low bulletproof buildings for the clerks who managed the trucks and the soldiers who guarded the fuel. Most of it burned toward the end of the Second Civil War, and it was abandoned and used by squatters afterwards, so the papers that might have sent us on our way were long gone. The ruinmen who dug the place up found a whole mess of buried pipes, and made a lot of money selling the metal, but that didn’t do Berry and me any good.

After we’d finished reading all of it, we sat there for a little while, and neither one of us said a thing. “Okay,” I said finally. “I guess we go to Memfis, then.”

Berry grinned. “I was hoping.”

I thought about routes for a bit, and added up the money I had. It would be a long walk, unless—

“You know,” I said then, “if we go from here to Cago, we could do part of it a lot faster by boat.”

His eyebrows went up. “And from Cago?”

“Across to the Misipi, and down by riverboat from there.”

That got me an open mouth, and then another grin. “I always wanted to ride a riverboat someday.”

“Get ready,” I told him. “We can get out of here tomorrow, and get to the Misipi in a couple of weeks.”

That’s pretty much what we did, too. We said our goodbyes to the old ruinmen who lived at Troy Tower at dinner that night, shared another glass of Gendan whiskey with Tashel Ban that night, got up before the sun did and headed west down the Skeega road.

We weren’t quite alone on the road, but it seemed close to that sometimes. The lake schooners go around the north end of Mishga from Troy to Cago, and when the winds are good it’s at least as fast as walking there and a lot more comfortable; all the cargo goes by boat, too, because it’s that much cheaper and safer than loading it on a wagon and hoping for the best. So most of what you get on the Mishga roads are farmers heading to and from market, with the occasional player or elwus going from town to town just to add a bit of color to it all. That made for less trouble finding places to stay the night, and it was also the reason we figured out that we were being followed.

That happened just west of Isselannee. We took the wrong fork of the road there, and got most of the way to Anarba before we had the chance to ask a local farmer for directions and found out that we’d made a mistake. That meant a couple of hours on rough farm roads going south, but we finally made it back to the straight road to Cago and got to a little town, a place called Leen, just before sunset. Leen has all of one place where travelers can spend the night, a big farmhouse that’s probably going to give it up and become an inn in a few more years. It’s already got a big sign out front, and the front room and dining room have been knocked together into a space big enough to feed a pretty large party; it’s just a matter of time before the tavern goes in and the fields get sold or leased to somebody else.

I hired Berry and I a room there, we got the road dust off us, and then we went down to the big room out front and saw about some dinner. The place was still enough of a farmhouse to cook up a meal that would make a fieldhand comfortable after a long harvest day, and so the two of us were sitting back and feeling very full when the door banged open and a man came in: just a plain traveler in dusty clothes, with the kind of bland ordinary face you’d have a hard time remembering from one day to the next. The woman who ran the place went over to him, and I could hear about every third word as he hired a room and got a meal ordered. All the while he was talking to her, though, he kept looking past her, across the room, at Berry and me.

That’s when I realized that I’d seen his face before, though I couldn’t remember where. He might have noticed that I was watching him, because he stopped looking at me, and then a minute or two later he was on his way up the stairs to his room. The woman who ran the farmhouse went back to the kitchen. I turned to Berry, and his face had that blank look he gets when he doesn’t want anyone to know that he’s noticed something.

“Sir and Mister,” he said very quietly. By that time, as I think I mentioned earlier, he only used my title for other people’s benefit, or for a joke, or when he wanted to say something important.

I figured I knew this time which it was. “The man who just came in.”

A quick nod. “He’s following us. We passed him on the road to Anarba today.”

I considered that for a long moment, and coukdn’t think of any good reason why somebody else would make the same double-back we did, and end up at the same place. I nodded and said, “We can talk in a bit,” and he nodded back and put his attention into finishing up the last of his dinner.

Once we got up to our room and the door was locked, Berry said, “I don’t think he was following us before Troy, but I can’t say for sure.”

“The roads from Melumi were pretty crowded, but I don’t think I saw him,” I said.

“If he wasn’t—” He didn’t go on, but I knew what he was thinking. The roads in Meriga are about as safe these days as they’ve been since the end of the old world, but every so often you hear of someone with valuables being robbed or worse, and noticing that you’re being trailed by some member of a gang who simply makes sure you’re where they want you to be is supposed to be one of the few warnings you’re likely to get.

All of a sudden, I thought of the riders who had followed us north to Luwul—the Black Riders, we’d called them, after the characters in the stories about Freddy and Sam. I’d wondered when I was a child what kind of a face the Black Riders had beneath their hoods. I don’t think I ever thought back then that it might be a bland, forgettable face, but as I thought about it there in the farmhouse in Leen, the idea was hard to shake.

“Then we’ll dodge Black Riders again,” I said, and got a grin and a laugh from Berry.

We didn’t travel by night this time, though. The southern part of Mishga is too settled for that; it’s not like Tucki, where you’ve got plenty of forest between one farm and another and so plenty of places to hide during the day. Instead, we left the farmhouse early the next morning, without seeing our Black Rider, and got in among a bunch of farmers from the little towns nearby who were on their way to the market at another small town whose name I forget that was twenty kloms or so down the road. We stuck with them right to the market town, and didn’t leave the town the next morning until we’d found another group of travelers who were going the way we were.

That’s more or less how we traveled all the way to Cago. The first few days we didn’t see any trace of the man we’d spotted at Leen, and I’d just about begun to wonder whether the whole thing was a mistake, when Berry caught sight of him on the edge of the crowd at the market at Jonsul, and let me know where to look. He was turning away by the time I found him, but it was the same man, I was certain of that.

We caught sight of him again every two or three days from there to Cago. Once we got near the Inyana border, just to be sure, we veered off on a side road when we were sure no one was looking and crossed down to another road running the same way across the very northern edge of Inyana. Sure enough, by the time we got to Sowben, there he was again, looking down from a window as we got into town at the end of a long day walking alongside a wagonload of metal from an old airport outside of Elcart that the ruinmen there had sold to a local metal merchant.

By that time we were close enough to Cago that there wasn’t much point in making any more detours. Berry and I kept on the Inyana road, staying with the metal merchant’s wagon and talking shop with him and his prentices, partly because there’s safety in numbers and partly because they were good company and it was pleasant to spend time with people who knew most of the same things we did and shared in another part of the same work. Still, that meant that our Black Rider had no trouble at all keeping track of us. We spotted him a couple of times in the days that followed, never more than a glimpse here and there; to this day I don’t know if he hadn’t realized that we were onto him, or if he knew it, and showed himself to us now and then just to keep us on our toes. We kept waiting for a gang to show up, but none ever did.

Finally one morning we got to the edge of the Cago ruins, and the road veered south a bit to stay clear of them. Cago was a big city in the old world, the biggest still above water anwhere in Meriga, and even though ruinmen had been digging into the ruins there about as long as they’d been busy anywhere but Troy, there are still plenty of buildings and a few of the old towers standing there, following the curve of Lake Mishga for kloms and kloms. It’s the only place I know where you can get an idea of what the drowned cities of the coast must have been like before the seas rose, just ruin after ruin as far as your eyes will reach.

Most places in Meriga, the roads stay as far away from the ruins as they can, but east of Cago you don’t have much choice unless you want to go deep into Ilanoy farm country. The road there runs practically right up under the ruins, and Berry and I and the metal merchant and his prentices had a fine time talking about the buildings we passed and what the local ruinmen found the last season and all, while most of the other people on the road hurried along and gave the ruins nervous looks over their shoulders, as though they thought a robot or something was about to come lurching out from between two heaps of brick that used to be factories and butter all of us across the pavement.

We walked most of a day alongside those ruins, and weren’t to Cago yet by the time the sun went down. There was a town called Monster right alongside the road where we were when things started getting dark; the metal merchant had friends in the business a little further on and wanted to get to their place that night, but Berry and I were tired, and so we said our goodbyes and went to find a place to stay in Monster. There was only one, a big comfortable inn, and it still had rooms to hire, so I handed over some coins and we did the usual, upstairs to our room to wash off the road dust, downstairs to the big room to get a meal. The room was a cramped little place without a window and the food was not half so good as what we’d been getting in Inyana farmhouses along the road, but I didn’t mind; I was tired, and wouldn’t have minded a bit of bread and bean soup and a place to sleep on the ground.

We’d gotten there later than most, and the common room was mostly empty when we got there. We sat down and called for our dinners, and I was about halfway through mine when all at once Berry nudged me hard in the side with one of his elbows. I tried not to let anything show on my face, which wasn’t too easy, since Berry has sharp elbows; still, nobody seemed to have noticed when I looked up from my food and gave the room a lazy glance. I expected to see our Black Rider, and didn’t. It took a moment before I realized that the only face in the room that was turned toward me was one I recognized, and a good long moment after that before I could put a name to it.

By then he had seen me as well, and came over to the table where Berry and I were sitting: an old man, lean and stooped, with just a trace of white hair around his ears and eyeglasses as round as moons. “A very good evening to you both,” he said. “I hope you won’t mind if I join you?”

“Not at all,” I told him, and waved at a chair. “It’s a long way from the road to Luwul, Plummer.”

That got me a smile I couldn’t read at all. “True indeed,” he said, and sat down across the table from me. “A very long way.”