Episodul 255 · Bull's Friend

Corvin came round the corner of the wheelhouse while Krista’s match was still burning.

He had the case under his arm. He stopped in the doorway and looked at the stone, the hole, the steps going down. Then, for a long moment, at the flour on them.

Krista shook the match out.

— I check the mill on Sundays, Corvin said. Nobody told you that.

— Nobody tells us anything, Maxim said.

Corvin set the case down on the flagstones.

— That’s my line out there on the shelf. Nobody goes down under this bank without me.

— You came up without us last time, Tesa said.

Her right hand was at her side. Corvin looked at it, at the whole of it, knuckles and all, and something moved in his face and was put away.

— Outside, he said to Soles. You and me. Then we’ll see who goes down where.

— He gave us ten minutes, Maxim said. The man on the crate.

— It won’t take ten.

Outside, the snow between the wheelhouse and the bank had been stamped flat by the cleaners’ boots and frozen again. Twelve paces of it. Behind it the wheel, locked white to the hub. In front, the edge of the bank, and three meters below, the shelf with the bolts and the ladder. Round the corner, the man on the crate sat with his back to all of them.

Bram stood in the doorway with a canvas bag against his chest. He had found his father’s things after all.

Corvin opened the case on the snow and took out two knives, short and plain-handled, the ones Soles had watched him clean along the flat and then the edge. He laid one halfway between them, handle toward Soles.

— He fought you with one of these.

— I know.

— Then pick it up.

Soles left it where it was.

— Then the other one, Corvin said. The black one. I want to see it.

He wants to see what it did to Bull.

Soles kept his hands open and the chain gathered short against the cuff.

— No.

Tesa had come out behind him. He felt her stop at his right shoulder, on the side where he heard nothing, and knew she had chosen it.

— Stay out of it, he said. This one’s mine.

— Then don’t lose it.

Krista had her notebook out. She was not writing.

— If you cut him, she said to Corvin, I’m writing down where.

Corvin almost smiled.

He came in low and patient, the knife laid along his forearm, and the first thing he did was walk to Soles’s right.

Soles turned with him. Corvin kept turning. Two steps, three, always to the right, and Soles understood a moment late what he was doing. On that side the snow made no sound. He could see the feet. He could not hear them.

The knife came from there.

He got his left arm across. The blade went over the old scar Bull had given him and opened a new one beside it, short and hot. Soles stepped back and felt the blood start inside his sleeve.

He tried to keep Corvin on his left. He stepped, and Corvin stepped wider, and the snow on the deaf side swallowed him again. Something struck the right side of his head, not the blade, the butt of it, short, from nowhere, and the world became one long note. He went down on a knee. The ringing that had lived on that side since the inn rose until it filled his skull, and through it he saw Corvin’s boots stop a pace away and wait.

Waiting. Not finishing. Corvin wanted him up.

He got up.

Three months on a bench, watching me. He knows the ear. He knows the left comes first.

So Soles stopped turning.

He let Corvin go round to the right and stayed where he was, facing the wheel, with the low sun at his back, and looked at the ice instead. Anything behind him on the deaf side threw its shadow forward across the bright ice. Corvin’s shadow came into the edge of his eye a heartbeat before Corvin could.

Corvin saw him see it. He stepped once to the left, where Soles could hear the snow take his weight, and feinted with the shoulder. Soles’s head turned to the sound, the way three months of turning had taught it to. In the same heartbeat, the shadow on the ice went right again.

He let the sound go and kept the shadow.

The shadow lifted its arm.

Soles turned into him, under the arm, outside the knife, and hit the arm across Corvin’s body. The knife did not fall. Corvin had held knives too long for that. But his weight went over his front foot, the ribs on that side came open, and Soles put a short left into them with everything his back could give.

The breath went out of Corvin in one white cloud.

He cut back across, blind and fast. Soles was already inside it. Right hand to the jaw. Left to the ribs again. It was the combination the trainer had made him lose a hundred times by stepping sideways. Corvin stepped sideways, and his heel found the ice where the cleaners had stamped it smooth, and went.

He came down on one knee with his back against the frozen wheel. The knife skidded out of his hand and stopped at the edge of the bank, above the shelf.

Soles was on him before the knee had settled.

His left hand closed on the back of Corvin’s neck.

It was the same grip. His fingers knew it before the rest of him did: the bones under the collar, the weight leaning forward into his palm, the head held where a blade would go. The chain slid loose against the cuff on his right wrist. All he had to do was let it. It would be quick. Nobody on this bank would walk to his right again.

Corvin did not fight the hand. He looked up at him from under it.

— Go on, he said. That’s how you did him.

Behind Soles nobody moved. Through the ringing he could hear Krista breathing. He could hear the river.

In a training hall far from here he had chosen every part of a few seconds, and he had carried each of them here. He could choose these too.

Soles opened his hand.

— Get up.

Corvin did not get up. He knelt against the wheel with an arm across his ribs, breathing short and white.

Soles picked up the other knife from the snow, put it back in the case, and closed the lid.

Krista pushed his sleeve up on the step of the wheelhouse and bound the forearm with her scarf. It was the same scarf she had used on Tesa’s hand. She had washed it.

Maxim held the case shut with both hands, as if it might open on its own. Corvin sat down in the snow with his back to the wheel and spoke to the river.

— There was an order.

Krista’s hands stopped on the knot. Then they went on.

— Make it go wrong. Nobody dies. Four people from the coast close what we couldn’t with a rope and a dog, and then what are we for? Bull would have said it out loud. Bull’s dead.

He breathed in carefully, around the ribs.

— It came down through the chief. My part was small. Come up first. Say you were right behind me.

— Who tied the splice? Tesa said.

— I don’t know whose hands. I didn’t ask.

He looked at her right hand. She closed it for him, all the way, and opened it.

— Nobody dies, he said again. That was the order.

He got up, went to the edge of the bank and picked up his knife. He wiped it on his sleeve, along the flat and then the edge, and put it away without looking at Soles.

Inside, the stairs under the stone were still breathing in.

Krista tied off the scarf, opened her notebook at the page headed Stage one., and under the third line she wrote a fourth.

Nothing through the chief.