Goodman Dunn found the first sheep on a grey morning at the end of summer, and by noon the whole village had come to look at it.
It lay in the high pasture below Ashwood, where the Dunn flock grazed the slope that ran up to the trees. It was a ewe - a good one, Dunn said, over and over, a good breeder, three lambs in two years - and it lay on its side in the wet grass with its legs stretched out stiff, and it was the wrong color.
Not the color of death. Adrian had seen dead sheep. Everyone in Harrowfield had. They went yellowish and bloated, and the crows came.
The crows had not come to this one. There were a dozen of them sitting in the trees at the edge of Ashwood, black and silent, and not one of them would come down.
The ewe was grey. Its fleece was grey, which was not so strange, but under the fleece its skin was grey too - a dull, ashy, dusty grey, like the inside of a cold hearth. Its eyes were open and filmed over white. There was no blood anywhere. Not on the grass, not on the wool. There were two small, neat punctures in its throat, and around them, spreading out across the skin like cracks in ice, ran a web of thin black veins.
And it was shrunken. That was the worst part. It looked as though something had reached inside it and taken out everything that made it a sheep, and left the skin behind, like an empty sack.
"Luminant preserve us," someone whispered, and a dozen hands made the sign of the circle over a dozen hearts.
Adrian stood at the back of the crowd with his father and did not make the sign. He was looking at the black veins.
His hands were cold. Not with Dissonance - his number had been zero for three days now - but with something else. A kind of recognition. He looked at the web of black cracks on the ewe's grey throat, and the part of him that saw seams in scythes saw something there too, faint and wrong, like a thread that had been pulled out of a cloth and left a pucker behind.
The grey window flickered open at the edge of his sight. It wrote nothing at all. But it did not close either.
"Hollowbeast," said Jory Keel.
❖ ❖ ❖
Jory Keel was the village hunter, and he was the oldest man Adrian knew who still walked like a young one.
He was lean and brown as a strip of leather, with a white beard cut short and eyes so pale they were almost colorless. His Trait was [Hawk's Eye], Uncommon, and it was said that he could count the feathers on a pheasant at two hundred paces. He lived alone in a hut at the edge of Ashwood, sold rabbits and venison to the Plough, and spoke perhaps forty words a week, most of them to his dogs.
He had forty words today. He crouched beside the ewe for a long time without saying any of them. Then he stood up, wiped his hands on his leather trousers, and looked at the trees.
"Wolf," he said. "Big. Came down from the wood in the night. Took this one quiet. Didn't eat. Didn't need to." He spat. "They don't eat meat. Not once they're Hollowed. They eat the other thing."
"What other thing?" said Goodman Dunn.
Jory looked at him with his pale, empty eyes. "Whatever it is that makes a sheep get up in the morning."
The crowd shifted. Someone's child began to cry and was hushed.
"It's the Abyss," said Goodwife Marsh, in a high, strained voice. "It's in the land. I said. I said it after the Fenwick girl, and I said it after the mirror, and nobody listened-"
"Hush, Bet."
"I won't hush! First Lise Fenwick, and then the mirror goes black, and now this, all in the same year - there's something rotten in this valley, and we all know what it is, and we all know who-"
She did not finish. But her eyes went across the crowd, and they did not go to Adrian - Goodwife Marsh was not a cruel woman, and she caught herself - but they went very close. They went to the space just beside him. And a dozen other pairs of eyes followed them there, and then, one by one, moved the last few inches.
Adrian felt them land on him like hands.
His father's arm came around his shoulders. It was heavy and solid and it did not squeeze, and Tomas Vale did not say a single word. He simply looked at Goodwife Marsh, and kept looking, until she flushed and turned away.
"A Hollowbeast doesn't come from a boy," said a quiet, clear voice. "It comes from a Hollow."
The crowd parted.
High Examiner Crane walked up the slope through the wet grass with Brother Odo hurrying behind him, and four squires of the Grey Watch behind Odo. Rowan was the last of them. His eyes found Adrian and flicked away.
Crane knelt beside the ewe. He did not seem to care about his robe. He looked at the punctures and the black web of veins for a long, careful moment, and then he took a small glass vial from his sleeve, unstoppered it, and let a single drop of clear liquid fall onto the grey skin.
It hissed. A thin thread of black smoke curled up from the wool.
"Consecrated water," Crane said, to no one in particular. "It reacts to Abyssal residue. As you see." He stoppered the vial and stood. "This is a Hollowbeast kill, and a fresh one. Somewhere within twenty miles of this valley there is a Hollow - a rift, a tear, perhaps no bigger than a rabbit hole - and an animal has passed too close to it." He turned to the crowd. "That is where the Abyss comes from, friends. Not from your neighbors. Not from your children. From the dark places of the world. And the Temple will find this one, and close it."
He said it with such calm certainty that Adrian saw the crowd believe him. Their shoulders came down, the way they had in the chapel. Goodwife Marsh wiped her eyes.
"Brother Odo. A letter to the Westmarch chapter house. Today." Crane glanced at the treeline. "Request that they inform the Inquisition."
The word dropped into the crowd like a stone into a well, and the shoulders that had come down went up again.
The Inquisition. Adrian had never seen an Inquisitor. Nobody in Harrowfield had. They were stories. Hunters of the Hollowed, who wore black under their white and did not smile, and who rode into villages where the Abyss had come and did not always leave the villages standing when they rode out.
"Only as a precaution," said Crane gently, seeing the faces. "They'll send a single officer to examine the kill and track the beast. It will take a week, perhaps two, for her to arrive. In the meantime-" He looked at Jory Keel. "Goodman Keel. You're the hunter here?"
Jory gave him a long, colorless look, and nodded once.
"Could you find where it came from? Not kill it. I don't ask that. Just find its trail, and where it's denning. So the Inquisitor doesn't lose a week searching."
Jory was quiet for a long moment. Adrian could not tell what he thought of the High Examiner. Adrian was not sure Jory Keel thought anything of anybody.
"Aye," Jory said. "I'll need a boy."
"A boy?"
"To carry. And to run back, if it goes bad." Jory looked over the crowd. His pale eyes passed over Hollis Brandt, who stood up very straight, and over the Tull twins, and over Rowan in his white and grey, and stopped.
"That one," said Jory Keel, and pointed at Adrian.
❖ ❖ ❖
His father argued. His father argued the whole way back down the slope and into the Dunns' yard, in a low, furious voice, and Jory Keel stood there and let him, the way a rock lets a stream go past it.
"He's twelve."
"I was ten, my first."
"He's never tracked anything bigger than a hedgehog."
"Don't need him to track. Need him to carry and keep quiet." Jory glanced at Adrian. "He's quiet."
"There's a Hollowbeast in those woods!"
"There's a Hollowbeast in those woods whether he comes or not, Tomas. I'm not taking him to it. I'm taking him to where it's been." Jory's voice didn't rise. "In daylight. On the edge. We'll be back by dark."
"Why him?" said Tomas. "Take the Brandt boy. He's twice the size."
Jory Keel looked at Tomas Vale for a long moment.
"Heard at the Plough your boy watched you swing a blade for a morning and saw your knee catching," he said. "Man who can see that can see a bent blade of grass." He shrugged. "Brandt boy's got a strong back. Don't need a back. Need eyes."
And that, strangely, was what did it. Adrian saw it in his father's face: the pride fighting the fear. It had been Tomas who told the miller that story, grinning over his ale. It was the first thing about Adrian that his father had been able to brag about since the Sounding.
"Back by dark," said Tomas finally, hoarsely. "Or I come in after you both with a pitchfork."
"Bring two," said Jory.
❖ ❖ ❖
Ashwood was not a large wood. It was a long, narrow strip of old ash and oak and hazel that ran along the top of the northern hills, perhaps a mile deep at its widest, and beyond it was rough moorland that belonged to no one. Adrian had been into the edges of it a hundred times, gathering hazelnuts, looking for Elsie's lost goat.
He had never been in it with Jory Keel. It was like walking into a different wood.
Jory did not walk the way other people walked. That was the first thing Adrian saw, and he saw it before they had gone ten steps under the trees.
Most people walked heel first. Adrian had never thought about it before, but it was true: his father, the Brandts, Rowan in his boots, everyone set the heel down and rolled forward onto the toes, thump-roll, thump-roll. Jory put the outside edge of his foot down first. Softly, as if he were testing ice. Then he rolled his weight inward, slowly, and only when the whole foot was down did he shift onto it. He made no sound at all.
And his eyes never looked at where his feet were going.
They were always somewhere else. On the ground three paces ahead. On a low branch. On the moss on the north side of an oak. They moved in a slow, steady sweep, left to right and back, like a scythe blade - and every so often, they stopped.
When they stopped, Jory stopped.
"There," he'd murmur, and point with his chin, and Adrian would look, and see nothing - a patch of leaf litter, a bramble - and then, as he kept looking, see it. A leaf turned over, dark side up, when all the others were pale side up. A hazel twig snapped at the height of a big dog's shoulder. A strand of grey fur caught on a thorn.
"Watch the ground ahead," Jory said. "Not your feet. Your feet'll find their own way."
Adrian watched the ground ahead. He did not watch his feet. And he tried very hard not to watch Jory.
It was no use. He could no more stop himself watching Jory than he could stop breathing. And somewhere around the third hour, with the light going green and slanted under the ash leaves, the thread came.
It was not like his father's. His father's seam had been one bright line, heel to blade, a single motion repeated. Jory's was a web. A thin silver net that ran from the edge of his foot up through his knees and hips - soft there, loose, like a rope with slack in it - and then up through his spine and neck, and into his eyes. And from his eyes it spread out ahead of him, over the ground, fine as spider's silk, touching every leaf and twig and stone in a slow arc.
The part in his eyes was brighter. Poured, not sewn. Adrian knew what that was now. [Hawk's Eye].
He looked away from that part. Deliberately. He fixed his attention on the feet, and the knees, and the slack in the rope.
[Observation: Tracking (Jory Keel)]
[Progress: 4%]
[Note: Portion of structure is Canon-written.]
[Observation of that portion will cause Dissonance on Replication.]
I know, Adrian thought. I'm not looking at it.
A pause.
[Good.]
❖ ❖ ❖
By late afternoon they were at the northern edge of Ashwood, where the trees thinned and the moorland began, and the tracks had become impossible to miss.
The wolf had not been careful here. Its prints were pressed deep into the soft black earth of a stream bank - four of them, then four more, big as Adrian's spread hand. Too big. Too deep. And around each one, the moss and grass had gone grey. Not dead. Grey, like the ewe's skin, like old ash.
Jory crouched beside the prints for a long time. He touched none of them.
"It's been through here five, six times," he said at last. "Back and forth. Den's out there." He pointed across the moor, to a low, black ridge of rocks about a mile away. "In the stones. Old badger sett, maybe. Or a cave." He squinted with his colorless eyes. "Aye. I can see where it's worn a path up."
"Are we going there?"
"No." Jory stood. "We've done what the priest asked. Know where it came from. Know where it sleeps." He looked at the sun. "And I said dark."
He turned to go back into the trees. Then he stopped.
Adrian almost walked into him. The old hunter had gone completely still, one foot half raised, his eyes fixed on the stream bank a few yards downstream. Adrian followed his gaze and saw nothing - more grey-edged wolf prints, some reeds, a flat stone.
Then, because he had been watching Jory's eyes all day, he saw what Jory saw.
Beside the wolf prints, in the soft black earth, were other prints.
They were not a wolf's. They were not an animal's at all. They were the long, narrow prints of boots. A man's boots, walking slowly along the stream bank beside the wolf's path, stopping, walking again. Stopping for a long while - the heel prints were deep there, a man standing still - facing the black ridge of rocks where the wolf had its den.
The boot prints were not grey at the edges. Whoever had made them had walked right beside the Abyss, and it had not touched him.
Jory crouched again, very slowly.
"Two days old," he murmured. "Maybe three." He touched the edge of one print with a fingertip, lightly. "Good boots. Not a farmer's. Not a hunter's, neither. Hunter'd never stand in the open that long, with a Hollowbeast upwind." His pale eyes narrowed. "Man stood right here. Watched that den for the best part of an hour, looks like. Watched it and walked away."
"Who?" Adrian whispered.
Jory Keel did not answer. He looked at the boot prints for a long time. Then he looked at the path they took, back toward the south - back through Ashwood, toward the valley, toward the village.
Then he stood up and, very deliberately, dragged his own foot through the soft earth, back and forth, until every boot print on the stream bank was a smear of black mud.
"We didn't see these," Jory said.
"But-"
"Boy." The old hunter turned his colorless eyes on Adrian, and for the first time that day, Adrian saw something in them. It looked a great deal like fear. "I've lived in this wood forty years. Man walks up to a Hollowbeast's den in good boots, watches it for an hour, and goes home and doesn't tell a soul?" He shook his head. "That's not a man who wants the beast gone. That's a man who wants to know where it is."
He turned and walked back into the trees, silent, weight on the outside of the foot.
Adrian stood by the stream a moment longer. He looked at the smeared mud, and at the grey-rimmed wolf prints beside it, and at the black ridge of rocks across the moor where something lay sleeping that ate whatever it was that made a sheep get up in the morning.
The grey window hung open in front of him.
[Observation: Tracking (Jory Keel) - 11%]
And beneath it, one more line.
[Some things are not hunted.]
[Some things are kept.]