Episodul 194 · Bait

He came out of the dark the way anyone would, walking.

That was the first thing that was wrong. Soles had spent a day imagining this, and in every version the man had appeared out of something: a wall, a shadow, the black water itself. Instead he walked across the far shelf of ice with his hands in his coat pockets, unhurried, a man crossing a frozen pond on his way home, and stepped over the narrow gap of open water in the middle as if it were a crack in a sidewalk.

Soles felt each step through the ice a moment before he heard it.

He had been standing still for forty minutes. His feet had stopped complaining about the cold and started reporting it as a fact, and he had let them, the way he had let the waiting happen to him: without fidgeting, without checking the bank behind him more than once. Someone in him had done this before, in snow, for three nights. Someone in him knew that the man who moves first while waiting is the man who gets found.

Good. That works. One thing works.

The man stopped five meters away. His face was what it had been in the kitchen, the kind that slid off your memory while you were looking straight at it. Soles did not try to hold it. He held the hands instead. The left bare, the right gloved.

— You chose well, the man said. No walls.

— You left me a line to follow.

— I left you a line to see if you’d follow it. You didn’t. You stopped at the stone and spoke to it. Nobody’s spoken to me through a wall in twenty years.

He looked around: the reeds, the rotten jetty post, the bank behind Soles, the long black river.

— And then you walked away from the place I’d picked and made me come to yours. Somebody taught you that.

Somebody did.

— Where’s the guard? Soles said.

— Somewhere with very good walls.

— Then why are you out here, and not behind them?

— Because you asked me to come. Nobody’s asked me to come anywhere in a long time.

— You brought me his keys.

— I brought you a reason to come. The keys are no use to anybody. They’ve already changed the locks.

The man took his bare hand out of his pocket and turned it palm up, the way he had in the kitchen.

— It hasn’t changed, he said. Give me the blade, and I’ll tell you where he is. I’ll even tell you how to get in.

— And then you’ll have the blade.

— And then I’ll have the blade.

— No.

The man nodded, as if Soles had confirmed a measurement.

— I thought not. I wanted to see how you’d say it now. You used to say it like a man who was frightened. Now you say it like a man who’s been handed more than he knows what to do with.

He tilted his head.

— Is that all you? he said softly. Still?

Soles did not answer. Under his boots, the ice told him the man’s weight had moved to the front foot.

He came.

He was fast. Not fast the way Tesa was fast, in threes and hitches, with a rhythm you could learn. He was fast the way a door is fast when the wind takes it. One moment five meters of ice between them, the next his bare hand was coming in low at Soles’s right side.

Under the ribs.

Soles had felt the weight shift a fraction before it went, and he was already moving, left foot first, small, the way he had stepped a thousand times in a gym that smelled of old leather. The hand went past his ribs by the width of a sleeve.

Low. He wants me turning away from the bank.

The Hunter recovered and came across him again. Soles stepped inside the reach instead of backing away. Close. Not romantic. His left palm met the forearm, and he turned with the attack, letting the man’s own speed carry him past.

The Hunter skidded two meters and caught himself on one hand. Soles stayed on his feet.

For a second, nobody moved.

Reorientation. In a real fight. On ice. With one hand.

Something in Soles wanted to laugh. He did not let it.

He’s better than me. Faster, older, he’s done this a hundred times and I’ve done it twice. Better at everything except the floor. The floor is mine. Keep him on the floor.

His body did not agree. His body wanted to run back to the steps, up the bank, home, to a kitchen where people would be angry with him in the morning. He let it want. He kept his feet where they were.

The man straightened slowly and looked at his own forearm, then at Soles, with the first expression Soles had been able to keep hold of: interest.

— Well, he said. That’s new.

He came again, and this time he did not come straight. He came in a curve, around Soles’s left side, making him turn, making him put his weight on the leg that had less ice under it than he liked. Soles turned with him. He felt the ice change pitch under his left boot, thinner here, closer to the edge of the shelf, the hum of it going higher.

The gloved hand came toward his face. Soles swung down to knock it aside, and the strength answered before he had judged how much he needed.

The Hunter pulled the glove back. Soles missed by a finger’s width; the force carried his shoulder after the fist and pitched him forward. He could not check it before his knuckles struck the ice.

A white star broke outward for three meters, and black water surged through it. His left boot plunged to the ankle. The cold stopped him feeling anything else. He dragged the foot out and retreated onto ice that still held, leaving blood from his knuckles beside the broken place. The cold went up from the foot into the shin like a second bone.

Ten minutes before that foot stops taking orders. Then it’s a post I’m standing on.

Brilliant. You told the whole river where you are. And Krista’s asleep and thinks you’re at the workshop pointing at things.

His knuckles were split, and the shelf under him had gone from humming to complaining, a long low creak that did not stop.