They planned to move Blake as soon as the researchers from the Miskatonic did their last set of visual-acuity tests. He'd have room to explore up there, in the moonless darkness under the trees. Cutcher said that keeping up with him would be good for his cardiovascular health.
It felt wrong to say good-bye in a basement. Good-byes were for front yards, garden gates, train platforms, and bus pick-up corners, not shuttered basements that smelled like soaking diapers.
"If you need more money...", Valentine said to Narcisse.
"Monsignor Cutcher has ample sources. We want for nothing".
"Except the sight of one of those big palms".
"Royal palms", Narcisse said, nodding. "I do miss them, and the smell of morning wind off the sea".
"I want to thank you again for..."
She poked him in his good thigh. "Daveed, please. I am old, and have learned the difference between needed and used. Here I am needed. Here I talk long through the nights with our fine priest as we watch. A deep, kind man with the magic of the right hand. I have known only two or three others like him".
"I wish I'd had time to find Blake some blocks. And some early-reader books".
"I will find or paint some Scrabble pieces. Like the ratbits had. He will learn ABC's when he is ready. He learns, but his mind has not yet caught up to his body".
Valentine regretted the lost mah-jongg pieces. Blake would probably enjoy the colors and intricate designs. Valentine's last reminder of the good days with Malia Carrasca were in some prison warehouse deep in the Nut, probably.
Narcisse gave him a bag of dried-meat sticks, a bag of glazed biscuits, and some nuts mixed with oats and corn-bread crumbs - the Grog version of trail mix. He rolled one of the cheroot-sized tubes of meat and sniffed the greasy, peppery coating. Narcisse could make even the spongiest legworm flesh taste like tenderloin medallions in a sauce, but he suspected this was pork.
"You must not leave yet", she said. "I must press one last hug on you.
He knelt down so she could hug him. Those mauled limbs that had first met around his neck on a sunbaked Haitian street pressed at either temple, pressed hard, as though trying to meet somewhere in his corpus callosum. She closed her eyes and spoke in her Creole, sliding the words together so fast and low he didn't have a hope of understanding with his mother's Quebecois French. It went on for some moments and his pressed skin began to tingle.
Finally she stopped.
"What was that all about?" he asked.
"I asked heem to put honeycombs in your path, so your journey is sweet. There is too much bitter in you, Daveed, and it finds its way out".
Narcisse had a talent for cryptic expression that sometimes rivaled that of the Lifeweavers. Valentine wondered if he'd been cross with Blake, or the Bloch brothers from the Miskatonic when he gave them their marching orders. "If only you could add a little molasses to me, the way you do to the spoon bread".
Narcisse pursed her lips, then poked him in the breastbone with her maimed arm. "You already look better. Go now, or I cry some. Maybe I cry some anyway, but I don't want you around for that".
Valentine made Nancy's north of Tulsa in three days of round-the-clock legworm travel, arriving on the eve of the promised rendezvous. He'd made a deal with a driver from the Rabbit's Foot clan whom he silently called "Tic-tac" because the Grog's back-hide scars looked like a couple of drunks had started playing tic-tac-toe on it with hot knives.
Which wasn't out of the realm of possibility. Captured Grogs were sometimes cruelly treated to put the "fear of Man" in them before they were released. Of course captured men were often eaten when not enslaved, so cruelty was a matter of perspective.
They took turns driving the beast through day and night, skirting the UFR. Valentine hoped that the unofficial truce of the Missouri brush that had settled in when he'd first become a Cat was still holding, and that no wide-ranging patrols would risk a flare-up by potting what looked like a human small trader and his driver.
Difficulty showed itself in a six-man patrol. Three challenged him, and three more waited, kneeling in the brush. Five kids and a senior NCO. The kids were too young and the NCO was grizzled right to the hair growing out of his ears.
Valentine felt for the oldster, riding herd on a bunch of downy cheeks too young to know how easily they could die. But the Missouri bushwhack country would lend itself to giving the kids some experience without the risks that went with the swamps around New Orleans, the open plains to the west, or the alley between Crowley's Ridge and Memphis.
Valentine watched the rifles and picked out an escape route through the brush. If things looked bad, he'd topple off the legworm and run like a rabbit, twisting and turning across the mud through first spring flowers of the blackberry bramble.
"Hey, Freebies", Valentine called. "You boys looking for a little joy juice to keep out the nightly chill?"
"Check out that chair. Quite a ride he has on that legworm", one of the kids in the brush remarked to his fellows.
The NCO's rifle dangled in its sling, but the officer kept his hand hooked casually in his ALICE belt, close to the butt of his sidearm. "Just a friendly warning, Wally", the NCO said, using the Missouri slang for a trader who bartered with the Grogs. Valentine had been called worse. "You're about ten miles out of a UFR settlement. They'll panic at the sight of a worm and open up on you".
"Like a bunch of potato diggers could hit a legworm if it were on top of them", one of the kids in the brush said. The two backing up the NCO knew better than to add comment, but one kept swinging his rifle muzzle back and forth, making little figure eights in the air.
"Where you bound for?" the NCO asked, looking at the packs and accoutrements dangling from both sides of the legworm.