The fort dated from the fifties, when the army still believed a wall could persuade a country to behave. It stood on a low rise above the Rio Sombra's south bend, square, of river stone and adobe, its northwest tower roofless. The gate hung whole and oiled: ruins do not keep their gates.
"Six riders brought him in," Willa said in the grass, her veil put back. "Count for me what the afternoon says."
"It says eight men, maybe nine," Jonas said. "Two on the walls, in turns. One at the gate, relieved at noon by a man who limps. A cook, by the smoke. The rest in the barracks row on the east wall, its roof patched with canvas and new shakes."
"Prisoners?"
"One, that the place admits to. At midday they took a man from the barracks to the well and back, under two rifles. Small man, gray at the temples, walking like his hands were bound. He drank with his whole head in the bucket. That's Renner, or a fine imitation of Marisol's account."
"The chained door," Willa said. "Tell me again."
On the west wall, away from the barracks and the gate, stood a low door of iron-banded oak. Twice a guard had gone to it, as a man performs a duty he expects to be checked on. Twice he had rattled its chain β padlocked, heavy as a ship's cable in miniature β and gone away satisfied. No one had gone in or come out. No food, no water, no light.
"They keep something behind that door they don't feed," Jonas said. "Papers don't eat. Neither does silver. A man doesn't either, if they mean him not to β but they'd not chain a starving man that heavy and check it twice daily."
"It is where they keep what the fort is for," Willa said. "Contract copies, or ledgers of what comes out of our cliff. Or Renner himself, on nights they are not walking him to the well like a dog." She was quiet a moment. "We can only go and look β Micah would say that, and grin, and already be over the wall."
"We go at full dark," Jonas said. "Not before. The guards change at dusk; there is a quarter hour when the new man's eyes still belong to the fire he came from. That is our door in, if we had a door."
Then Willa smiled, the crooked smile the scar gave her.
"When I was nine," she said, "Saba told me this fort's story every winter, because I asked for it β it had a drowned place in it, and I was a morbid child. The army did not haul its water from the river, Jonas. They dug a channel from the river, underground and stone-lined, in beneath the west wall to a cistern under the parade ground. Its mouth is in the bank, barred with iron, where the current runs deep against the bluff."
"An aqueduct," Jonas said.
Willa's eyes stayed on the west wall. "The mouth will be silted, the bars rusted to lace or to iron, nothing between. But the channel runs beneath the chained door's own wall. If it can be entered, it comes up inside, behind every guard posted to watch a road."
Jonas looked at the river below the ruin, deep and green in the failing light. He thought of Micah, who had trusted paper to a locket, and of Tobias Renner, perhaps behind that door, keeping copies of everything against his own hanging, waiting for the right man to ask rightly.
"Full dark," he said. "We water the horses and leave them at the seep, hobbled so they can slip free if we don't come back by morning. We go down without rifles β no use in a stone throat full of water. Knives, our hands, and one small light not struck until we are under the fort."
"And the veil?" she asked, with the dryness he was coming to love her for.
"Leave it with the horses. Where we're going, nobody alive will see your face." He stood, stiff from long watching, and offered his hand; she rose in one motion. "And if they do see it, Willa, the plan has changed into the other kind."
Below them the fort's cook fire came on, a small orange flower in the blue dusk. The guard changed; the man who limped took the gate. Inside the square a chain rattled once and settled. The river went on saying what it had said all afternoon: the way in, the way in, the way in.
They stood together on the ridge in the last of the light, husband and wife, with the whole held breath of the coming night before them, and neither spoke again until the dark was complete.
Chapter 16
: The Break-In