All Good Things Come to Moss

The thing about Ughill is that it gets dark early. Earlier than everywhere else, I mean. You'd think that's just the hills cutting the light off before the rest of the valley loses it, and maybe that's part of it, but it's more than that. There's a quality to the dark up there. It arrives with an attitude. The murk at Ughill is older than the murk in the city — thicker, less managed, the kind that hasn't been through the organic network's filtration and still carries what it picked up in the ground. You feel it in your teeth.

By the time you're heading back down Bradfield Dale toward the Loxley valley, the murk is already sitting at shoulder height and everything behind you has gone the colour of an old bruise.

I had no business being out that late. That's always how these things start, isn't it. Someone has something they need moved quietly — not across the city, not involving the gruizers, nothing official — just a quiet handoff between here and Outibridge. My contact at Ughill Hall had been pleasant enough, the tea was good, and I'd walked away with a sealed envelope and the instruction not to open it, which naturally I'd been thinking about ever since.

You have to understand what that stretch of lane is like after murkfall. The Bradfield Dale road has no lights. There are fields on either side, rough pasture, nothing moving in them as a rule, and the only sounds are the ones you bring with you and whatever the murkneet decides to contribute. On a quiet murkneet it's just your own footsteps and the distant sound of the Loxley running somewhere below. On a less quiet murkneet — well. That's what I'm getting at.

The first time I saw the redfront I thought nothing of it. It perched on the top strand of a dry stone wall to my left, regarding me with that expression redfronts have, which is to say: deeply unimpressed. They're not unusual. You see them at murkfall. They're the last flits up at murkfall, the first flits out at murkrise, and they have a reputation in The Dark Peak as informants — blinkers, Van used to call them, though he never entirely explained what they were blinking at or to whom. I saw it, registered it, and moved on.

I saw it again thirty seconds later. Same flit, or a flit that looked exactly the same, now perched on the wall about twenty yards ahead of me. Which is not how flits work. I know how flits work. I slowed down, watched it, and it watched me back with the patient attention of something that had somewhere to be and wanted me to understand that I was making it late. A thought occurred to me, which I pushed away immediately: that something in the organic network had marked the location, and the redfront was how it marked me in return. I pushed it away because thinking about the organic network on an unlit road at murkneet tends to go nowhere useful.

I kept walking. The redfront vanished.

Then I came around the bend in the road and there was someone on the lane ahead of me.

They had their back to me, walking at a steady pace, and from a distance they looked entirely ordinary. A person, on a lane, in the murkneet. Coat, boots, carrying something — a bag or a bundle, slung over one shoulder. Entirely ordinary. I almost called out. This was a public lane, there was nothing wrong with calling out to someone on a public lane. I nearly did.

I didn't, though. I'm not sure why. Some version of instinct, maybe. The same thing that makes you not quite knock on a door even though your hand is raised. I just kept my distance and kept walking, and the gap between us stayed roughly the same, because they were walking at roughly my pace.

I got closer, gradually, and as I got closer I started to notice things.

The first thing I noticed was the hands. They were holding the bundle with both hands in front of them now, and even in that light I could see that their hands were marked. The dermglyph. Patterned into the skin, not tattooed, not drawn on, but arranged the way bone arranges itself in a hand: deliberately, from the inside out. Geometric. Old, and made for a purpose I couldn't read.

I know what that means. And I knew it then. I kept walking anyway.

They were a clown. One of the Hatherans. There's no polite word for them, that's just what everyone calls them, it's not a slur, it's a description — they were the original rulers of The Dark Peak before the plague that came after the clown-xin wars took most of them, and the ones that remain have arranged themselves into a mercenary network running intelligence back and forth between the settlement at Hathersage and various interested parties in Hellsborough. They don't advertise what they are. Most of the time you'd never know. But the dermglyph gives them away, and the neck, if the light catches it right — all those deliberate patterns inherited from the insect line, faded now over generations but still there, like a watermark.

The question, which I was now very actively thinking about, was what exactly was in the bundle and who had sent them and whether I was supposed to be on this lane at the same time as them. Because that's the other thing about the Hatherans: when they're carrying, they prefer not to be seen. And if they think they've been seen, the outcomes vary, but they don't generally favour the person doing the seeing.

I slowed down. Considered stopping altogether. Considered turning around and finding a different route back, which would have added forty minutes to the walk and taken me across Worrall Moor in the murkneet, which has its own set of problems. I was still running through options when the redfront appeared again.

This time it was right in the road, between me and the courier, just sitting there. The courier stopped. I stopped. We both stood there looking at this redfront in the middle of a country lane at half past dark, and for a moment everything was very still.

Then I heard the onetoe.

Not a sound you'd mistake for anything else — the particular quality of something very large moving through grass, the slow and deliberate weight of it. I turned. Behind me, on the other side of the wall, in the field I'd been walking alongside for the past five minutes, there was a onetoe. Or something that had most of the qualities of a onetoe: it was the right size, the right general shape, it was standing in the way onetoes stand. But it was also not doing what onetoes do. It was watching me. onetoes don't watch you like that. onetoes look through you, or past you, or at the general vicinity of something they find more interesting. This was watching me with an attention that felt personal.

The domesticated onetoe, they call it, which is the kind of name that tells you exactly what they want you to think and nothing about what it actually is. They're not domestic. They're lurkers. They follow things — people, usually, or other denizens — and they wait. Nobody agrees on what they're waiting for, including Van, who wrote three pages on the subject and crossed most of it out. What his notes do say, plainly: when an onetoe starts following you, something about you has triggered a classification in its behaviour. You've moved from irrelevant to interesting. The time between interesting and involved is not as long as you would hope.

This one had been following me for ten minutes. Or following the courier. Or following both of us. I couldn't tell.

The courier could, apparently. Because when I looked back to the road, they were already moving — not walking, not running exactly, but that controlled fast walk that people do when they're trying not to run because running makes you a target and they're trying to make a rational decision about the gap between now and the moment when running becomes the only option. They had glanced behind them, they had seen the onetoe, and they had made a decision.

I want to say I handled the next thirty seconds well. I moved off the road, into the gateway of the field entrance to my right, which put the dry stone wall between me and the onetoe and gave me something to stand behind and process what was happening. This was a reasonable decision. The onetoe was still in the field to my left. The courier was ahead of me and moving. The redfront was still on the road, apparently unbothered by everything, doing whatever it is redfronts do when they've delivered whatever message they were delivering.

The onetoe went over the wall. Not through a gate — over the wall. Which shouldn't be possible for something that size. The wall is four feet of dry stone and it cleared it with the casual ease of something that finds the idea of walls slightly academic. It landed on the lane and turned. Not toward me. Toward the courier.

The courier ran.

I pressed myself into the gateway and watched a Hatheran sprint down a country lane in the murkneet with something roughly onetoe-shaped loping after them at a pace that made the whole thing look like a disagreement about rhythm rather than a pursuit. The redfront sat on the wall next to me, watching the same thing I was watching, and I had the strong feeling that it had known this was going to happen and had been trying to tell me to get out of the road.

I don't know what happened to the courier. I heard them hit the bend in the road, I heard the particular sound of feet going from fast to faster, and then I heard nothing, because the murk muffled it and the distance did the rest. The onetoe didn't come back. After a while the redfront flew off without ceremony, like a flit that had finished its shift.

I stood in the gateway for what felt like a reasonable amount of time. Long enough for my heart rate to make an argument and my common sense to reply. Then I walked back to Hellsborough, very quickly, via the Loxley track, and I did not stop until I was inside the Mason's Arms with a drink in front of me.

I delivered the envelope the following morning. My contact did not ask what had taken me so long. I did not ask what was in the envelope. These are the understandings that keep things working.

The thing that stays with me — and I know how this sounds — is the redfront. Not the onetoe, not the courier sprinting into the murk, but that small flit sitting in the middle of the road. Blinkers don't show up for nothing. Something sent it. Something knew what was on that lane that murkneet, and wanted, if not to intervene, then at least to flag that I was standing in the middle of something I hadn't been invited to. Which is almost courteous, by the standards of The Dark Peak.

I've been back twice since. Ughill in the early murklight, down through the Dale before murkfall. I've seen redfronts both times. Whether they're the same one, I couldn't tell you. They all look the same, which I suspect is exactly the point.

I still have the route memorised. The gate, the wall, the bend in the road. The particular quality of the murk at that hour in that place. And somewhere out there, either a Hatheran who made it to Hathersage with their bundle intact, or a Hatheran who didn't.

I've never asked which. Some things you're better off not knowing.

Drink?

This story inspired Postcard from The Dark Peak 2: All Good Things Come to Moss.

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