Salt and Silver
‘Of personal Wards, few are comfortable to carry at all times. It is best to remain in the safety of a Warded structure. Should travel be necessary, travelers must be equipped, at the very least, with the following items: salt to line all resting places, bread to placate, silver to negate, and an iron knife if all else fails.’
I shut the book and reached for another, but Ancuţa grabbed my hand.
“You can’t expect to learn two dozen years’ worth of knowledge in one night!”
“But I won’t be much use unless I learn, will I?”
She gaped at me, looking for any angle of attack. She was a fierce debater. “Anna, nobody is much use against the Whispers at first!”
I was even fiercer. “Ancuţa, that doesn’t mean I can’t do better.”
“You infuriating woman. It’s like you’re trying to be the most quietly stubborn person that has ever entered the Warren.”
“Only because you’ve already got loudly stubborn covered.”
As soon as it was fully dark, we’d lit candles and oil lamps all across the room. Their amber light danced around and warmed our spirits. A knock on the door interrupted our banter.
“Food!” Ancuţa rushed down and returned with parcels wrapped neatly in oiled paper. “I have these delivered from Miss Crosman every evening. The Wardens don’t have time to cook.”
I raised my eyebrow at the two hefty parcels. Clearly, the maestress didn’t miss a beat and knew I’d be there.
We laid a yellowed tablecloth on the floor and sat, as if to a picnic, among the intricate dark green convolutions of the carpet. There were cheese-and-pickle sandwiches in the packets, as well as slices of carrot and radish to nibble on. I realized I hadn’t eaten since the day before and dug in.
“We get few, but delicious, privileges as Wardens. We belong to the town, as do the Walkers and Praedictors, so the town takes care of our basic needs, usually by way of Miss Crosman collecting the money from the fountain on our behalf. Food, shelter, almost anything really. It does also mean that we can’t overtly go against the mayor’s wishes. We try to keep things peaceful. Unlike the Praedictors.”
“I met one of them.”
“Artjom, at the—” A gray, damp silence fell over us. Ancuţa inhaled half a sandwich in one swallow.
“What happened, Ancuţa?”
“Hmm?” She stared intently into her lap.
“With Paul.”
“I only meant to warn him, but he gets – got – so defensive. Saying I never wanted to let him go inside now, after the fact, feels like cowardice. I should have tried harder to stop him.”
“Do you know why he died?”
“Only in broad terms. He died because he, like many others, treated something like a guarantee even though it never is. Despite what we say to keep ourselves sane.”
“What do you mean?”
“Most of the townsfolk think what we do is infallible. Or, rather, they want to believe so because it’s better than nothing. You know that poppy-seed Ward at the door?” She took my shudder as affirmation. “It works just as often as it doesn’t work. Sometimes, the more dangerous the intruder, the more likely it is to fail.”
“Why do you even use it, then?”
“Because if we don’t use it, then it’ll never work, will it? Most of our Wards are like that. They will sometimes reduce the risk of death. Not always. But they’re all we’ve got, so we shield ourselves with them as though they’re as reliable as the laws by which water falls down. Here, let me show you.”
She pulled on a little drawer and brought out a couple of satchels. Indelicately swiping books and documents to one side of the table, she upended a mound of salt and a heavy silver-plated chain onto the wooden boards, forming them into two lines. Then, she handed me a tuft of pale fur.
“Try blowing this across the salt.”
“What is it?”
“The fur of one of those forest Vâlva, caught on a branch by the arch. Go for it.”
I did, and the fur gently rolled across the salt without a problem.
“Do the same over the silver.”
This time, the tuft stalled long before crossing the silver chain. I tried again, harder, just to be sure I hadn’t somehow gotten it wrong. It reached the chain, then flipped over as though in a whirlwind current and fluttered right back toward me.
“Now, try both of those with this feather.”
Pristine-white and shiny, the feather felt immaterial between my fingers. My first attempt shot it clear across the room, and neither silver nor salt seemed to stand in its way. On my second, it seemed to hover for too long over the salt.
“So, Vâlve can cross salt, but not silver?”
She nodded. “Salt, and almost anything else.”
“And whatever creature lost the feather wouldn’t be stopped by either?”
“And it might even be drawn to salt. Thankfully, that’s not a predator. It’s an Om Bird feather. They’re good luck, and supposedly grant wishes.”
“You apply scientific methods to figuring out what works and what doesn’t.”
“We do. Except, here’s the rub – that’s just a piece of fur, and just a feather. Whatever dropped that piece of fur might still be able to pass over the silver, depending on what shape it’d shifted into, or what time of night it was, or what deals you’d made with it. The point is, we know only a little. And that’s sometimes worse than knowing nothing at all.”
“Do you know what creature killed Paul?”
“Not really. I know he’d found this entry in an old Whisper cookbook. It talked about an offering of ‘game and parsley with pepper laced, favorable to any tastes’ and he wanted to use it as a peace offering. Except there’s no wild game here, so he used dried jerky. I told him that even if he’d had game, ‘favorable to any tastes’ was a metaphor, a Warding way of saying it was quite good and might possibly work, but he swore it must mean no creature would reject it.”
“But they did.”
“He was a fool to go, and I to let him, and I can’t tell who was the greater. Here, keep the salt, and the silver chain. They’re rare and you’ll need them. Return the chain if you don’t need it anymore.”
“You have salt crystals in the wall around town, but Whispers still get through. I understand why, now.”
“The Tides reach farther than they used to each time, and the wall doesn’t actually extend that far out, so for the past year or so even salt-hating Whispers have been able to just travel along it far enough to go around it. That’s probably how we lost the reverend. I keep asking the mayor to extend the damned wall, but he thinks acknowledging it will just anger them more.”
“Could that be what happened this morning?”
“I doubt it. It seemed like whatever it was, it came in straight through the arch. Either someone tampered with the Wards or the Whispers have some sort of advantage we don’t know about. Anna, there is so much we don’t know, sometimes I feel no wiser than the grandmothers who claim to read your future in tea leaves.”
“But you are doing the best you can, and that’s better than anyone else has done.”
“I’m certainly going to try to keep you alive. That chain will help. Loop it around your waist.”
“I might have something else too.”
I reached into my apron pocket and took out the little ring on its own chain. Both ring and chain were silver-looking, sure, albeit dirty and dull, but I couldn’t be sure they were real silver.
“I found this in Perdy’s family home. I’m not entirely sure what it is—”
She snatched it from my hands and held it up to the light. “Interesting. Let’s see.”
On the table sat a large magnet we had used earlier to practice a Ward against a common Whisper. It had a viperlike body with metallic scales, and Ancuţa had explained that a strong magnet pull could disorient its movement.
She set the ring down and passed the magnet over it – with little to no reaction. I took that as a bad sign, but she seemed pleased. Then she made a paste out of white powder and water and scrubbed vigorously at both items. I left her to it and peered out the window at the slowly lightening horizon.
“Ancuţa, it’s almost dawn. Wasn’t Master Artjom saying we might get a Tide about now?”
“Hmm? Yes, yes. Don’t worry, you won’t even feel it. This whole building is Warded. Impregnable.”
She wasn’t paying me any real attention, and had slipped back into her ‘Wards always work’ routine, but by now I knew what she’d meant to say was that it would probably be fine, but maybe not. I was amazed at how well these people had learned to cope with things they couldn’t control.
She cleaned the last bits of paste off the trinkets with a cotton cloth and held them up to the light again. The metal shone beautifully and threw a bright sparkle of yellow light across the room.
“Silver, all right. You’re lucky. It’s good quality, and a lot of it.” She handed it back to me. “If you were any other townie, I’d ask you to share it with us, but a Walker’s gonna need every scrap.”
I joined the two silver chains together and looped them around my waist like a belt. “It must have belonged to a child. We found the skeleton in the pantry, surrounded by a salt circle, but with everything that happened, we never got a chance to properly ask anyone about it.”
“Were the bones clean and white?”
“Very much so, and crumbly.”
“It might date back years or decades. We’ve had a few missing children.”
“There was something else odd about it.”
“Oh?”
Her palpable interest encouraged me to tell her my suspicions. “Well, the teeth were that of an older person, and the skull itself had these regular bumps, almost like a ridge, going all the way front to back. I was wondering whether….”
“That’s so interesting. You’re thinking it might be the remains of a Whisper?”
“Yes! Except you said they didn’t exactly die, or so the reverend thought?”
She waved her hand. “He said they were like the ever-renewing cycles of nature. They kept coming back after death. But still, their bodies die, and leave remains.”
“So maybe that’s what the skeleton is.”
“In a salt circle? My goodness.”
We were both so clearly excited by the idea. “But judging by what I’ve seen, that’s not impossible, is it?”
“No, no, not at all. It just implies….”
“What?”
“Well, it implies it was trying to protect itself from other Whispers. Our theories suggested they were a solid unit. Like bees. Would you mind if I dropped by to take the remains? For research?”
I could tell she would have accepted a refusal, but very much wanted me to say yes.
“The door’s unlocked. It’s behind the back wall in the pantry.”
She thanked me and paced around, muttering to herself, deep in thought. I was pleased to have made her so happy.
Walking past the window, she came to a halt. “It’s Tide time.”
“How do you know?”
“Look.”
We stood side by side and peered into the gloom. Among the trees, not far from the arch, a long pale shape slithered, winding in and out of our vision. It neared the entrance, probing along the wall with a sneaky, sharp tongue coming out of what looked like the head of a fox.
Out of the woods a small gray shape appeared, rushing toward the arch. It looked like a very young forest Vâlva. Just as I thought it was out of reach of the lurking predator, there was a furious blur of movement. In a single muscular ripple of its body, the fox-faced serpent snatched its prey right up. The snap of its teeth closing shut was audible, and I felt it in my bones.
Ancuţa must have too, judging by her gasp. “I don’t know how you ever have the courage to step outdoors, especially on Tides.”
“What about actually going into the Unspoken? None of these books talks about how to do that.”
Her curious amber eyes darted to me, and she looked like she couldn’t understand a word I was saying. For the first time since that day at the trading post, I felt how she was able to drop coldness between herself and the people around her when she needed to. “I won’t let you be the next Paul, and anyway I couldn’t if I wanted to. Walking’s not something I can teach. Survival, on the other hand? Maybe. Back to work.”