第16章 Zeydan's Camp

The Zeydan Consortium had made its camp in the lee of the ruined fortress at Zerabet, in a place that Zeyla could not see from the ridge until she was almost on top of it, because the camp had been sited in the one fold of ground that was invisible from every approach. She lay on the ridge for an hour and counted. Three tents. Two trucks. Five men on rotation. A generator. A tented table where a man in a clean shirt sat reading under a lamp. Sermet Zeydan was not hiding. He had built the camp the way he did everything, without hurry, in the belief that the end of the road was a negotiation rather than a race. Zeyla went down after dark, on the side where the ridge fell into a dry gutter, and she went down empty-handed and with a plan that depended on a single fact: the consortium had stolen her notebook, and the notebook was the only object in the camp that anyone would be guarding, and a guarded object is a place where nobody looks for anything else. The camp's perimeter was a rope strung with tin cans, which was the kind of security that a company uses when it has never been raided. She stepped over it at a post where the ground was hard, and flattened herself under the first truck, and waited while a man walked past within a meter of her boots and stopped to light a cigarette, and then went on. Then she crossed to the second truck, and then to the tent where the lamps were, and then she stood outside that tent for a full minute, listening. Two voices. Zeydan, calm, unhurried. And a voice she had heard in a shepherd hut above the Kavil river, which meant that Kulin had come to the camp before her, and had come willingly, and had walked straight into the tent where the man he had betrayed for four years was sitting with a map. "—the numbers are hours of shadow," Kulin was saying. "I have told you this. The surveyor measured in time, not distance. If you send the men to the coordinate in kilometers, you will be digging in the wrong place by the length of a day." "And you know this because of the girl," Zeydan said. "I know it because the bridge is eleven kilometers from Tavras and eleven hours by shadow, and I checked it. Ask your own man. He will confirm the shadow length. The arithmetic is not in dispute." There was a pause. Zeyla heard the map being folded. She moved along the tent's back wall, toward the place where the tent ropes crossed an equipment case, and found the case, and found the notebook inside it, wrapped in a clean cloth, exactly where a careful man would put an object he intended to return to an archive one day. She had it in her hand when the tent flap opened at the front and Zeydan stepped out into the lamplight and looked, without surprise, at the woman standing in the shadow of the equipment case with his stolen property against her chest. "You have been very quiet," he said. "I have been expecting you since the well. Sundur called me from Kavil. He wanted to sell me the notebook, and I told him I would rather wait, because I knew you would come to collect it." He folded his arms. "And I know why. You are not here for the notebook. You are here for the camp's map, because Kulin has told you that I hold five of the nine, and you need to know their numbers." "I do not need their numbers," Zeyla said. "I have already solved them." Zeydan's expression did not change, but something behind it did, the way the surface of water changes when the bottom moves. "You cannot have solved them. You have read three stones and one forgery." "I have read three stones, one decoy, one forgery, and a survey datum set in the bottom of a dry well," Zeyla said. "And I have a grandmother who spent forty years learning how a road tries to forget itself. Nine observations of one shadow, Sarpel wrote. He did not need me to find his nine stones. He needed me to find his shadow. And I have." For the first time since Sarnem, Zeydan looked at her as if she might be the thing he had hired Kulin to be. Then he looked past her, at the ridge, where a light had appeared and was moving down the dry gutter at speed, and his face closed like a door. "Sundur," he said, and reached for the case. What happened in the next four minutes was, afterward, hard for Zeyla to reconstruct, because the camp at Zerabet filled with light and noise in a way that erased sequence. The first truck's headlights came on and swept the tents. A shot went into the generator, and the generator stopped, and the lamps in the tent went out, and the camp became a set of moving shadows crossed by two beams. Men ran between the trucks and shouted at each other in two languages. Kulin came around the side of the tent and took Zeyla's arm and pulled her down behind the equipment case, and above them a canvas wall tore open along a line of holes. Sundur's people were not shooting to kill. That was the only thing that made it survivable, and Zeyla understood the reason within a few seconds: Sundur wanted the camp intact, because the camp held the five stones, and a bullet that killed Zeydan would cost him the only person who knew where they were packed. So the attackers drove the defenders toward the trucks, and the defenders fired over the attackers' heads, and the two groups performed a siege on each other across twenty meters of gravel, and in the middle of it a woman with a notebook under her coat crawled to the map table and took the map. The map was not the prize. Zeyla knew that as she folded it. But it was Zeydan's picture of the road, with his own surveyors' notes in the margin, and it would tell her which of the nine he had already broken out of their packing and which he was still moving blind. She put it inside her shirt, against the notebook, and then she and Kulin went over the back wall of the tent and into the darkness on the fortress side, where the trucks could not follow, because the ground there was broken into the dry cellars of the old garrison. They ran. Behind them the firing thinned, and then stopped, and then a single voice, Zeydan's, carried across the camp with the flat calm of a man who has already begun to plan the next move rather than the last one. "The well!" he called. "They are going to the well!" Which was, Zeyla thought, as she climbed the rubble with her lungs burning and her hands full of paper, exactly the kind of lie she would have told, in his place, to a man who was listening. ---