Bree again and the Pony’s back room again and Hob Tunnelly was waiting at the door with the air of a hobbit who had been saving up information like a miser saving coin and was now ready to spend it.
“Master Grim,” Hob said, as Fenn ducked through the low doorway into the warm, beer-scented dark.
“I was beginning to think you had got yourself killed, which would have been a shame because you owe me for the willow-bark and I do not like being owed by dead men.
Dead men are very poor payers.
Sit.
Drink.
I have been counting things and the count is getting interesting.”
Fenn sat.
He did not drink.
He didn’t look at the star burning at the edge of his sight or let his shoulders drop from the Ranger stillness that the Pony’s common-room didn’t deserve but that the world outside Bree’s walls very much did.
“I am here for medicine.
The same as last time.
And whatever news you have been counting.”
“The medicine I have.
The news will cost you.” Hob settled into the chair opposite with the same cheerful mercantile energy he had brought to their first meeting and the cheerfulness was, Fenn was learning, a mask that concealed a mind as sharp as any in the North.
“The pale fellow I told you about.
The one who does not laugh.
He has been asking his questions all over Bree-land — the Pony, the Gate, the stables, the market.
He is very patient and very thorough and he has been asking after a new light in the North for a solid week now, and the week has been very productive for him and very worrying for me.”
“Productive how.”
“He has been walking backward along the songs.” Hob’s voice dropped the comic register again and the drop was quicker this time, as if the mask was getting harder to keep up.
“That is the phrase I heard, from a drover who talked to a carter who talked to a tinker who talked to my cousin’s wife’s second nephew.
The pale fellow does not want to find the light.
He wants to know where the songs about it start, and walk from there.
He has been asking about the Weather Hills specifically, the last three days.
He has a map.
He has a ledger.
He has been marking down every story anyone tells him about strange lights and strange colds and Rangers doing things Rangers ought not to be able to do.” Hob’s bright eyes found Fenn’s in the dim of the back room.
“You lot have been doing things Rangers ought not to be able to do, have you not.”
It was not a question.
Hob Tunnelly didn’t ask questions when he already knew the answers.
Hob Tunnelly filed information and traded it and the information he was trading now was the most dangerous thing Fenn had heard since the star woke.
“How much of this can you prove?” Fenn kept his voice flat and didn’t let the chill of the news reach his face.
“The ledger.
The map.
“He keeps the ledger on him.
The map I have not seen.
The stories — ” Hob shrugged, a quick rolling motion that was half-apology and half-warning.
“The stories are loose.
They are not his yet.
But they will be.
A man who walks backward along the songs eventually reaches the singer.
And the singer, Master Grim, is not as hidden as he thinks he is.”
Fenn was silent for a moment.
The planner’s register was running the arithmetic on what Hob had told him and the arithmetic was ugly.
The pale traveller wasn’t a manhunter in the ordinary sense.
He was a collector of patterns, a mapper of songs, and his method was patient and professional and directed at exactly the vulnerability Fenn’s system had built into him.
Every Verse earned was a song sung.
Every song sung became a story the collector could hear.
Every story led the collector one step closer to the man who had kindled the first line.
The noose was not a metaphor.
The noose was a ledger in a pale traveller’s coat and it was filling with entries.
“The pale fellow,” Fenn said slowly.
“Has he gone north?”
“He left Bree three days ago.
Took the Greenway toward the Hills.
He had a horse — a good horse, too good for a traveller — and he was riding alone and he was not in a hurry.” Hob leaned forward and the cheerfulness was entirely gone from his face.
“I have been in Bree thirty years and I have counted every traveller who passed through the gate in that time and I have never seen a man less in a hurry than that one.
A man who is not in a hurry, Master Grim, is a man who knows he will get where he is going.
The only question is whether the people he is going toward know he is coming.”
“Do they?”
“One of them does now.” Hob sat back and the mask came down again and the cheerfulness was a little more strained than it had been.
“I am telling you this because you pay in coin and you pay for the medicine and you do not treat me like a piece of furniture the way most long-shanks do.
Also because — ” He hesitated, and the hesitation was the first time Fenn had seen him genuinely uncertain about whether to speak.
“— because I do not like the look of the man.
I told you that the first time and I am telling you again.
He is not right.
He is not natural. Get faster updates on g.com.
And he is not the only one.”
“The only one what.”
“The only one asking.” Hob lowered his voice until it was barely audible over the common-room’s distant noise.
“There is another one.
Not the pale fellow.
Someone else, someone closer, someone who has been asking the same questions in a different way.
I heard it from a carter who heard it from a herder who had met a Ranger — a worn-looking Ranger, courteous and sad, asking whether anyone had seen anything strange in the Hills lately.
Anything bright.
Anything that looked like a new star.”
Corvane.
Fenn didn’t let the name show on his face but the planner’s register had already filed it.
Two collectors, uncoordinated, working the same problem from different angles.
The pale stranger walking backward along the songs from Bree.
Corvane walking forward through the patrol from inside the camp.
They would meet, eventually, or their information would, and the meeting would close the noose around Fenn’s neck in a way that would be very hard to survive.
“Pay the hobbit,” Fenn said aloud, to himself, the way he always named the cost.
He put coin on the table, more than the medicine was worth and less than the news, and stood.
“The medicine you promised.
And anything else you hear about the pale fellow or the worn-looking Ranger, I want to know.
Write it down.
Send it north with the next carter who owes you a favour.
I will pay.”
“You always pay,” Hob said thoughtfully.
“That is what worries me.
A man who always pays for bad news is a man who expects the news to get worse.
Is it going to get worse, Master Grim?”
Fenn did not answer.
He took the medicine and the news and walked out of the Pony into the Bree street and the pale stranger was three days north on the Greenway and Corvane was sleeping at the patrol’s fireside and the hunt was closing from two directions and neither direction was one he could fight with a blade.
He had been made, as the hobbit said, to walk backward along the songs.
The songs were spreading faster than he was.
The collector was coming.
The only question was whether the collector would reach the singer before the singer had grown bright enough to matter.
He rode north with the medicine and the intel and the certain knowledge that every bright deed he had done since the slope was a footprint the hunter was already following home.