The Wild Dead (The Bannerless Saga 2)

Details clarified: brown skin darkened and weathered, dark eyes narrowed in a constant squint and radiating crows’ feet, and a rough beard softening the jaw. Rangy limbs, homespun clothes hanging off him loose and comfortable. A machete and a crowbar knocked at his belt. The man seemed to be running for his life, but nothing chased him.

“Teeg, come on,” Enid said, and they took off at a jog, downhill to the mud, to meet him.

“What’s wrong?” she said when they got close.

The man pulled up, panting for breath, glancing back and forth between the investigators and something behind him.

“You, investigators? You’re investigators.”

“Yes, that’s right.”

“You’ve got to help. Please come!”

He reached out and clung to Enid’s sleeve. Hardly anyone ever got that close when she was wearing the uniform. Teeg stepped forward, his free hand at his pouch where he kept tranquilizer patches. But Kellan wasn’t belligerent. He was scared, upset, blinking with shock.

She held his hand, hoping to anchor him, comfort him. Get him to a point where he could explain. “What is it?”

He gaped a couple of times and then stammered, “There’s a body, a body. Someone’s washed up, she’s dead!”

Enid’s nerves fired, sharpened. A sense of alarm crashed over her, made her stomach clench. Teeg turned to her with a look of shock to match Kellan’s.

“Show us,” she said.

Chapter Two • the estuary

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Death on the Tide

Kellan led them past the bridge and down into the marsh. The tide had washed out, and brackish mud sucked at their feet as they plodded through it, water seeping into the footprints they left behind. Farther on, they had to navigate around debris—broken sections of chainlink and seaweed-covered rebar with chunks of fractured concrete clinging to them. The path became something of an obstacle course, and Enid couldn’t quite see where they were headed.

The wheeling gulls circled over one spot. Usually the birds appeared alone or in pairs, no more than a few at a time, individual cries distinct. This was a flock, a cacophony, rattling. Something had drawn them here.

Kellan led them to where a pale canvas bag, probably his own, slumped on the ground, dropped when he ran for help. Ten feet beyond that, another shape hunched on the mud. The slope of a back, a length of legs stretched out. Enid, with Teeg following, strode forward for a better look. Cackling gulls scattered.

It was a woman, arms tucked in as if she’d been holding something. She wore a long skirt and a tunic. A loosely knitted kerchief covered her brown hair, tied in a muddy braid, tangled and full of grime. Simple leather shoes on her feet. She was no more than twenty years old, if Enid guessed right.

The body was soaking wet, so she might have washed down the river to the side of the bank and gotten snagged in the mud and debris there. She didn’t seem beaten up enough to have washed in from the sea. It was possible she’d been lying here for days. Maybe drowned in the storm. No one in the settlement had said anything about someone missing, and that was the sort of thing people usually told investigators. So the dead woman was probably from somewhere else. But where? The next settlement, Everlast, was ten miles down the road and quite a ways inland. North of here was nothing. Far up the shore lurked the shadows of buildings, walls fallen in, roofs collapsed, steel bones rusting in place. Even a few hulls of steel ships had washed ashore. No one lived in that region. At least, not that Enid knew about.

Already Enid was making a list of what she would need to do: find out who this young woman was, where she had come from, how she’d ended up this way. At a moment like this, the number of things that needed doing was too long, almost overwhelming.

It was a whole new investigation.

Teeg caught his breath. “Oh no. What do you think happened to her?”

He stepped forward, but Enid held him back. “Take a look around. See if there’s anything else that might have washed in with her. Bag, clothing. Anything out of place, anything that might identify her or tell us how she got here.”

Kellan stood frozen, some dozen yards or so behind. Enid called to him. “Did you touch the body at all?”

He nodded quickly. “Just . . . just for a minute. Just to see . . . I thought she might have been alive. But she’s not. She’s not.” He was gasping, close to hyperventilating.

“Kellan, take a breath. A deep one.” She spoke calmly, slowly, to get him to match her rhythm. “Breathe slow. There you go. And another one.” His shoulders were bunched up to his ears and he shut his eyes tight. He wasn’t calming down. “Did you see anyone else? Anything strange?” She almost had to shout to be heard over the gulls, flocking close again.

“No, no . . . I don’

t think . . . I didn’t look . . .”

“That’s all right. Think about it a minute, tell me what you remember.”