Page 19

I've suspected it since the shrine. Confirmation takes four days and costs me nothing except my opinion of my own patience.

The mercenaries reached that basin inside six hours of our arrival, in weather that grounds aircraft, across water no crew navigates blind. That requires a departure time, a heading, and a purpose, and on the morning we left, four people on Castus had all three.

So I run it properly. I tell Tilda we're going north to the weir line. I tell Joren we're going east to the sunken ferry. I tell Elder Moss we're going nowhere and I want two days of maintenance on the boats. Then I sit in a reed bank with a scope for thirty hours and watch which of three empty destinations gets visitors.

None of them do.

Which is worse, because it means the leak isn't a villager guessing. It's somebody with access to the actual route, and the actual route lives in two places: Clara's head, and Clara's satchel.

“Or Rell Crossing,” she says, when I lay it out on the table at midnight.

“Explain.”

“I filed an estate transfer at the frontier office when I landed. Property, coordinates, the lot. And every time we've resupplied, Tilda's ordered parts through the Crossing depot.” She's already pulling paper toward herself. “If you wanted to know when somebody in Mountmend was mounting an expedition, you wouldn't watch Mountmend. You'd watch what Mountmend buys.”

I stand there and take that apart looking for the flaw in it, and I don't find one.

“That's good,” I say.

“I know.”

The registry takes longer. Frontier salvage law requires an intent-to-survey filing for any archaeological work on a settled world, which nobody honors, but the honest ones file and the funded ones always file, because funding wants paperwork.

Eleven surveys have been filed for the Mountmend basin in the last twelve years.

Four of them never filed a return.

I bring the list to Clara and she does something with it inside forty minutes that would have taken me a month. She lays the four disappearances against her uncle's journals by date, and the pattern rises off the paper like a bruise.

Each vanished survey filed its intent within nine weeks of Garrick Marlow opening a new cache.

“He wasn't leading them anywhere,” she says. “Look at the dates. He digs, he seals it back up, he writes it down. Then, weeks later, some funded expedition suddenly wants to survey exactly that quadrant. And then they're gone.”

“Somebody was watching him work and selling the location on.”

“And then removing whoever bought it.” She sits back. “That's not a treasure hunt. That's inventory control.”

Four crews. Somewhere between twelve and thirty people, depending on how they staffed, gone into this water over a decade because a man with money decided the marsh was his and everyone else was a leak.

I have worked for people I disliked. I have never before wanted to meet a client's rival this badly.

The seventh site lies nine kilometers into the deep marsh. Marlow's note on it runs four lines longer than any other, which is how I know, well ahead of arrival, that it's going to be a problem.

It's a well.

Precursor, sunk into a mudbank, four meters across, dry to a depth I can't light the bottom of. Set into the wall, at intervals of roughly a meter and a half all the way down, are the same notched circles that open every seal in this marsh.

Twenty-two of them.

“He wrote a warning glyph on this one,” Clara says. “And then he wrote it again. Twice, in the margin, with the stroke he uses for emphasis.”

“Does he say what it does?”

“He says, and I want to be precise here, count before you are clever.”

I go down first on a line with the lamp. At six meters the shaft opens into a chamber, and the cache sits at the centre of the floor in plain view on a raised plinth, which after nineteen years of this profession makes the skin between my spines contract.

There are marks on the walls. Grooves, horizontal, at the height of a standing man, running the full circumference and disappearing into slots.