been popular a hundred years before present day. Another was quite small, maybe a child, with rotten teeth and coarse attire that was so encrusted with dirt as to be indistinguishable from the remains themselves. The last corpse was a girl, Quin wagered, with golden hoops in her ears and a delicate gold necklace lying across what was left of her shirt and rib cage.
“Look,” Shinobu said, his voice a whisper because that felt only appropriate in the presence of death. He picked up a twig from the floor, and with it he moved the necklace from the folds of old clothing. Dangling from the chain was a small golden horse.
“A horse,” Quin said. “Could I have the flashlight?”
He handed it to her, and she trained it on the wall behind the bodies, where she’d seen some sort of pattern on the stones. In the beam of light was a horse head chiseled onto the back wall. Off to one side and nearer the ground, a series of letters and numbers had been etched into the stones:
P51
D21
S64
D44
S20
“This cave belonged to the house of the horse, then?” Quin said.
The figures on the wall looked as though they’d been sculpted by something extremely hot. Quin stepped gingerly around the bodies to examine them more closely.
“It’s like they were melted into the rock,” she told Shinobu as she ran her fingers along the stone.
He came up beside her and touched the lettering. “What could do that?” he asked. “Some sort of modern tool?”
Quin shook her head. “I really don’t know.”
“The numbers add up to two hundred,” he pointed out.
“They do,” she agreed. “Like in the journal. But two hundred what? What are P, D, and S?”
Shinobu regarded the wall for a while. “Pounds, dollars, shillings?” he suggested. “Or names? Pippa, Dougal, Sylvia?”
Quin laughed, though it felt blasphemous to make jokes next to the bodies in the cave. She drew a notebook from her pocket and jotted down the numbers and letters. She and Shinobu skirted the space, looking for other carvings on the wall or ceiling, but there were none.
“We should find out exactly where we are,” she said.
They retreated from the cave into the open air. Quin was surprised to find the cold gray morning in the forest to be just as they’d left it.
Shinobu unfolded their map against the side of the hillock, drew out the positioning device, and a few moments later had marked their exact location. They were some distance from the first site, still in the north of Scotland, still in the middle of nowhere. Quin’s finger traced the distance from their previous location to this, which looked to be about forty miles. According to the map, they were near another section of the same river, just as the journal entry had suggested. Quin held herself very still for a few moments and could faintly hear the river’s distant sounds.
“Are the numbers in the cave miles, do you think?” Shinobu asked.
“If they were carved a long time ago, couldn’t they be anything? Leagues, furlongs?”
“Feet,” Shinobu suggested. “Or something else entirely, like number of blows with a whipsword?”
“Or weight.”
“Or how many sandwiches to bring with you.”
She laughed at this. Then she said, seriously, “In the journal entry, the Middle Dread kills a member of the house of the horse and drags him out of sight. Did he bring him to this cave? Is the oldest body in there the Seeker who was mentioned in the journal?”
“The Old Dread apologized for what the Middle had done and said he wouldn’t do bad things again,” Shinobu mused. “So who killed the other dead people in the cave?”
They didn’t have an answer. Quin wasn’t sure she required an answer at the moment—she was still amazed they’d found anything at all. They spent the next hour walking around the outside of the hillock, then exploring the surrounding woods. But they found nothing else.
“How do you feel?” she asked Shinobu when they were seated back in the clearing, eating the meager lunch they’d brought with them.
He cocked an eyebrow at her. “You want to go to the location of the third journal entry, don’t you?”
She looked at him sheepishly; she was almost jittery with a sense of anticipation. They’d found nothing in the first location, something in the second location. What would the third location bring?
“Don’t worry about me,” he told her. “I feel unstoppable.”
Quin nodded. “I feel a little that way myself.”
They finished their food. Then Quin drew the athame from her waist.