Chapter 8: Steel Nobody Sells

Anke was waiting for me in the study when I came up the hill.

She had the old prince's iron-bound chest open on the floor, and its papers were spread across the boards.

"The finders at the gate told me," she said. "The ban."

"News travels."

"Kranz's men shout it. They want me to hear." She didn't get up. "Look at these."

They were maps.

There were a dozen of them, drawn in brown ink on cheap paper, in the same small, neat hand as the list.

All of them showed the same thing.

The old salt road ran up from Velde to a cross at the foot of the mountains.

From there it climbed in switchbacks to a gap between two peaks.

Beyond the gap was a valley with a cluster of little squares drawn in it.

Some had notes beside them: "ice here after November", "rope", "rest at the overhang".

"He went up there," Anke said. "Himself. More than once. You don't write 'rope' about a road you've never walked."

Gerd had come to the doorway behind me.

"He took his horse out hunting," he said slowly. "Two or three nights at a time."

"He came back with nothing, and the town laughed at him for it."

"Hunting in the mountains with no bow?" Anke said.

Gerd didn't answer.

"What's in that valley?" I asked him.

"An old salt village. Nobody's lived there since my grandfather's time. The springs went bad, people said."

"And past it?"

"Nobody knows. Nobody goes."

"Salt-pit men," Anke said. "That's what the town says."

"They say he sold the nineteen to men who dig salt over the mountain, and they work them till they die."

"I've thought it," Gerd said. "God forgive me, I drove the cart."

Anke stood up.

"Take me up there. Now, before the snow."

"The cellar's empty," Gerd said. "I've nothing to drive up."

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