Episode 35 · Knots

— IV —

The first man Venom killed had eaten raw flour.

He lay on his side beside the cache, knees drawn to his chest, hands white to the wrists. He had eaten from the sack by the fistful, without kneading it, without baking it, the way people eat when they no longer wait for anything. He was young. Not much older than Venom. His cheeks were hollow and his lips split from the cold, exactly like Dace’s, exactly like all seven who remained from the original eleven.

The cities on the plain had burned two years earlier. Smoke had filled the sky, then refugees the roads. Now even the roads were empty.

That autumn, Dace had found him in the grain cellar beside two dead rats, shaking, his long limbs folded under him and a boy’s pale face stretched thin over sharp cheekbones. Venom had tasted the paste from the black root before putting it into the bait, so he would know how bitter it was.

He had trembled for two days. On the third, Dace had called him Venom and the whole group had laughed, even Hollis, a little. Venom had not been offended. In those two days he had learned that half a fingernail of paste numbed his tongue, and a whole fingernail numbed his hands.

He had put more than that into the sack left open beside the cache.

He turned and vomited beside a tree trunk. Nothing came up but water. When he straightened, Hollis was beside him. She took out a length of cord, cut it with her teeth, and wrapped it twice around his left wrist. She tied one knot tight, then pulled another over it.

— You don’t tie them for animals, she said. Animals you eat.

She looked toward the man in the snow.

— These, you carry.

That evening, Dace put the best cut from the deer they had caught the day before into his hand.

— Eat, Venom.

The name was the same. The tone was not.

He stayed awake that night, tightening the knot with his teeth. The ruins on the eastern hill stood black against the sky: stones too large and smooth for any hands in the region. No one went there.

This winter, someone else would die. Not him.

Twenty winters later, the cord at his wrist could no longer be seen.

The knots had crowded against one another until they had thickened like an old root wrapped around a stone. He knew their number without counting, as he knew every path to his caches.

On the roads, people knew almost nothing about him, which was why they talked so much. Some called him Venom, for the wells no one drank from afterward and the camps found in the morning asleep and cold. Others called him Phantom, because no one saw him coming and very few lived long enough to see him leave.

Somewhere between the two, in an inn, in the mouth of someone who had heard both names and mixed them together, the third had been born. Phenom. Neither poison nor ghost. Something that happened.

That name stayed.

The governor of the city on the plain did not say it aloud. He only pushed the paper across the table, keeping his fingers away from it as if something might pass from Phenom through the page. The rebuilt cities were smaller and uglier. Their governors needed people found.

The paper held a name, a village, and a sum.

— Merek ran with a whole winter’s military pay, the governor said. He’s barricaded himself in a farm with two men and a dog. We want proof.

Phenom read the sum. He did not negotiate. He never negotiated. The people who came looking for him knew the price.

Two men stood by the door in black-dyed cloaks with no insignia. Young, straight-backed, their hands where they belonged. Phenom had seen them come in and immediately recognized the way they moved, because he moved the same way. Cords showed at their wrists. Clean, with two or three knots each. Evenly spaced.

— Dace’s men, the governor said, following his gaze. There’s room for you too. We pay well, winter after winter. Not only per head.

— I don’t work with others.

The governor did not press. He wrote something in a ledger, and Phenom left without looking at the two by the door again.

He spent three days above the farm, in a ravine choked with brambles, and did nothing but watch.

The dog was old and slept often. The two guards were brothers, judging by their faces, and argued at every change of watch.

Before dawn, Merek went to the privy behind the barn along the same path, carrying a lantern. He felt safe there because he walked it every day. Phenom had once made that mistake himself.

On the fourth night, the dog received a piece of meat and lay down beside the gate. It did not rise again.

On the path behind the barn, beneath fresh snow, Phenom stretched a wire snare tied to a bent apple branch beside the fence.

Between the privy and the barn, the beaten path bent along the fence. A man running straight toward the privy would cut across the snow inside that bend. There Phenom buried a board full of nails, points upward. Then he settled beside the fence, on the far side of the barn’s corner, and waited. The cold had not bothered him in many years.

Merek came out holding the lantern, still half asleep. The snare caught his ankles and the branch sprang free with the crack of a whip. The man flew upside down, the lantern shattering in the snow, and began to scream.

The first brother ran out barefoot with an axe. He cut straight across the snow toward the screaming instead of following the bend by the fence. The nails drove through his sole to the bone. He fell and no longer knew what to hold first.

The second came out more carefully, spear in hand, keeping close to the wall. Phenom let him pass the corner of the barn, then left the fence and came up behind him. He caught the man’s hair and cut his throat in one motion, holding him until there was no longer any need.

Then he went back to the one with nails through his foot. The man saw him coming and tried to crawl. Phenom did not give him time even for that.

Merek hung upside down, his face swollen with blood, and looked at him without being able to say anything Phenom had not heard before. The money. The hiding place. The children. A brother in the city who could pay more than the governor.

Phenom listened to the end. He owed that to everyone. Then he cut off Merek’s right hand, the ring still on it, for the governor, and the rest because he never left anything behind that could come back after him.

On the road, he tied three new knots, tightening them with his teeth, side by side in the root around his wrist.