Centuria Books · The Dog at Bone Orchard
The Dog at Bone Orchard — Read the First Chapter
A swordsman from another world. A vampire with a live bounty. A dog who knows which promises bite.
Chapter One: A Sky With No Constellations
The gate had always sounded like rain in another room.
Merrit Vale learned that when he was twelve, standing barefoot in his father’s forge while the old man held a bent horseshoe against the anvil and told him not to be afraid of strange noises. Every road had a sound, his father said. A dry road clicked. A flooded road swallowed its feet. A road between worlds sounded like rain where there was no roof.
Now it sounded above him, below him, inside his teeth.
Then the road broke.
He came down hard enough to forget his own name.
For a little while there was mud, water, and a white light pressing through his closed eyelids. Something struck his shoulder. Something else struck the back of his head. The sword at his hip punched him in the kidney with the intimate disloyalty of a tool that had survived too many bad days with him.
When the world settled, he was face-down in a wash that had no business being a river and every intention of becoming one.
He rolled before the next surge could bury him. Brown water tore past, full of mesquite branches, a broken wagon wheel, and one dead goat that looked no more pleased by the arrangement than Merrit felt. He clawed his way toward a bank of red dirt. The soil gave under his fingers. The third try held.
He lay there coughing with his cheek against the ground until he could tell the difference between thunder and cannon fire.
Neither was encouraging.
The water had cost him time he could not afford to lose count of. A flash flood in a wash is not a river; it is an ambush. It comes down from a storm a man cannot see, in a country he does not know, and it takes the low ground it has always taken, and the only warning is a sound like the whole world clearing its throat. He had survived it the way he survived most things — by being stubborn slightly longer than the thing trying to kill him — but it had taught him, in its first thirty seconds, the lesson the whole country would spend a month driving home: that here, the ground itself kept score, and it did not grade a stranger on his intentions.
The sky above him was enormous. It was the first thing he understood clearly. It had gone the color of bruised iron from horizon to horizon, torn now and then by pale lightning. No moons. No green braid of the Warden’s Path. No cluster of saints over the east ridge to tell a traveler where he had sinned and which way to walk about it.
Just a sky. Vast, hard, and empty of everything that had ever promised him a way home.
Merrit pushed himself upright.
His coat was ruined. His left sleeve was dark with blood, though the cut beneath it felt shallow. His sword remained in its scabbard. The little iron charm his sister had hung from the hilt was gone.
That hurt more than the cut.
He had carried that charm through four winters of border duty and a siege that took the skin off two of his fingers. Ada had bent it herself out of a horseshoe nail the night before he took the Warden’s oath, and she had told him, with the terrible seriousness of a girl who has decided to be brave for someone else, that iron remembered the road home even when the man wearing it forgot. He had believed her. He had gone on believing her for years, the way a man believes a thing that costs him nothing to keep.
The gate had charged for it after all.
“All right,” he said to the storm.
The storm declined to answer.
A pale pane trembled into being at the edge of his sight.
WAYMARK: FRACTURED Bearing: unavailable Wardcraft: diminished Debt: unresolved You have crossed without leave.
“I noticed.”
The pane vanished, offended by his tone.
He tried to stand and discovered his right boot was full of water. He poured it out, checked the horizon, and found a line of dark posts against the rain. They were too straight for trees. Another flash of lightning showed wire strung between them, taut and humming faintly where the wind found it.
Someone had built a road here. Or at least they had built the beginning of one.
That was enough to start with. A road meant people, and people meant food, shelter, and the particular kind of trouble a man could at least name. In Orm, Merrit had learned to read a country by what it had bothered to defend. Wire strung between posts said this land was worth fencing and that somebody meant to keep somebody else off it. He filed the fact away with the small, cold competence that had kept him alive when better men around him had stopped needing to eat.
Merrit reached for the saddlebag over his shoulder.
It was gone.
For a moment he simply stared at the empty strap. The bag had carried dried meat, salt, his spare shirt, his whetstone, three letters he had read often enough to know by crease and tear, and a small packet of tea his mother had insisted would make every bad road less bad.
The gate had taken all of it.
“Fine,” he said.
His voice sounded smaller now.
He took stock the way he had taught boys half his age to take stock, because the ritual was steadier than he was. One sword, edge intact. One coat, ruined. One body, bruised and bleeding but obedient. A shallow cut, a full boot, and no supper. He had begun campaigns with less and finished them with worse. The trouble was that a campaign came with a map, an enemy he understood, and a direction that meant home. He had none of those. He had a strange sky and a fence going nowhere he could see.
Something moved behind him.
Merrit turned with his hand on his sword.
The animal watching him from beneath a thornbush was a dog. At least, it had the general arrangement of one: four legs, ears, fur, eyes too bright to trust. It was lean with hunger and caked in the same red mud as the wash. Blue-gray speckles marked its shoulders. One ear stood up. The other had been folded down at some point in the past and had stayed there out of spite.
The dog had Merrit’s strip of dried venison in its mouth.
He had not even felt the theft.
“That was my supper.”
The dog chewed.
Merrit looked at the distant posts. Then at the dog. Then at the sky that had just stolen his world and, apparently, his supper.
“You know what?” he said. “Keep it.”
The dog paused.
That had been the wrong answer. Merrit could see it immediately. The creature had prepared for an argument, perhaps a chase. Generosity was either suspicious or beneath its professional notice. Its eyes went to Merrit’s hands, then to his boots, then back to his face, cataloguing him the way a sentry counts a stranger’s weapons before deciding how afraid to be.
Merrit knew that look. He had worn it himself, at gates and border crossings, sizing a traveler for the trouble he might bring. It was strange to be on the receiving end of it from an animal, and stranger still to find that he passed. Whatever the dog read in a man who gave away his last supper without a fight, it was not danger, and it was not, quite, prey. It was something the creature had not decided about yet, and Merrit had the odd sense that being undecided-about was, in this country, a better standing than he had any right to expect.
It backed away three steps, still chewing, then stopped because a rifle cracked from somewhere beyond the rise.
The shot was not like an arrow. An arrow gave the ear a chance. This was a flat tear in the world followed by the hard slap of something breaking close by.
Mud burst beside Merrit’s knee.
The dog vanished into the thornbush.
Merrit went flat.