Page 51 of This Orc’s Got Rizz

"No," he says. Fast. Sleeves.

Nothing turns.

"Second question. Is the bad mark the one at the creek fork?"

His hand comes out of the sleeve. The clipboard turns ten degrees. He looks down.

"No," he says.

"Third question." I take my hands out of my pockets. "Is the bad mark the one at the head of the north drainage?"

Hand out. Clipboard turn. Look down.

"No," he says.

"Thank you very much."

We are eighty yards off the Flat before Ghorlan says, "He said no three times."

"He did."

"There are only three marks."

"There are."

"So he lied on one of them, and the one he lied on is the one that"

"Is the scree," I say. "Which is the one you'd already got, off the ground, in about nine seconds, with nothing but an understanding of what a slope is. He burned his lie on the first question because he had it in his hand and I asked it early and cheap, and after that he had to tell me the truth twice, and the truth twice is the same as the truth three times when there are only three doors."

Ghorlan stops on the trail.

"You made him spend it."

"I made him spend it on something we already had."

He stands there in the dark with a headlamp on and a chart in his hand.

"That is a build," he says.

The rest is legs, and legs are his.

Head of the north drainage, an hour up and forty minutes back, and he takes both packs on the return because I have gone through the bottom of what I have got. Creek fork, forty minutes, and the cache is under a rock ledge and it is fifty pounds and he carries it the entire way out with the strap across his shoulders and my hand on the back of his pack strap the way his was on mine in the bog on Day Two.

Scree, third, in the dark, and there is nothing there, because there was never anything there, and we go straight past it to the false mark's twin two hundred yards east where a bag hangs from a hemlock at head height with a reflective tab on it, because a challenge with a wrong mark on it always has a right one somewhere and Ghorlan walked a line off the wrong one on the assumption that the person who drew it was working off something real.

Three caches on the table at nine fifty-one in the evening.

The next team in is the Arbogasts, at ten seventeen.

Twenty-six minutes.

Bristow Cade calls it out and the plywood makes a sound and Ghorlan sets fifty pounds of cache on a folding table so gently that it does not rock.

"Ostvek and Halloran," Cade says, "take it outright."

CHAPTER 20

GHORLAN