"Those look like rosary beads," Valentine said as she drank.
"My favorite juju." She smiled, handing him the water. "They were blessed by the pope himself, in the long-ago, my mother told me. She got them from her mother."
"I thought you practiced voudou."
"Voudou's a bit of everything, child. Even the pope did it-he just didn't know he was."
Valentine emptied his gun and looked down the barrel. "Captain Boul's men take good care of their weapons."
"He dotes on that sort of thing. Every gun represents some piece of trading he did. He's just protecting his investment."
Valentine dried his chest with his shirt, eyes stinging with sweat. Even the thin cotton of his pants seemed to suffocate his skin.
"It's hot here. You'd think the shade would help." He bit into some kind of rice-flour bun from the sack of provisions.
"It is worse farther inland. The cool night is soon. Your name, Valent-Valenter?"
"Valentine."
"Oh, like the saint. And your first name?"
"David."
"Dav-eed," she said. "The king who danced. Your name is strong with magic."
"The only dancing I'll be doing is at the end of a rope, if we don't find the guerrillas." He looked east, where a long string of mountain feet ran down to the ocean. "Are you up to it?"
"There is a road along the coast. They will catch up soon on horses using it, once they know what direction we go. But perhaps they will not come this far. No man can run as you. This is a race for a story."
"Where is the finish line?"
"I cannot say for sure. They move. There are guerrillas to the west is all I know. Not many kilometers, I think. Their area begins at a place of good magic, and we are near it."
"So close to Captain Boul?"
"They have... an understanding, perhaps you would say. You do not know Haiti, David. The Kurian on this part of the island, he is more concerned with appearances than results."
"The one in the Citadel?"
"Yes."
"Do his..."-Valentine searched for a phrase- "'drinkers of death' visit Cape Haitian often, or use the road?"
"Monks of death? You mean the Whisperers? He does not use them much. Again, appearances."
Valentine thought for a moment, wondering if he was losing something between his barely adequate French and her Haitian Creole. A Kurian who did not use his Reapers much?
"I don't understand."
"Knowing that is the first step on the path to wisdom."
"Hope the path isn't as steep as this damn hill," Valentine said. He picked her up, retied his shirt, and carried her onward.
The next day, after a long mix of jogging and walking the rugged mountains of the coast, Valentine heard the sound of a hound's cry. It brought back memories from five years ago.
He was tired, hungry despite emptying Narcisse's store of food, and still sore from the beating in the Cape Haitian jail. Evening was well on its way; the sun had disappeared behind the mountainside. Picking a path through the tangled growth would become a blind, exhausting flight for a normal man. Valentine's gift of night vision would help, but he needed a modicum of light, and without some moonlight penetrating the clouds that gathered above the canopy, they were as good as lost among the lianas and creeping vines.
"We're being tracked."