“Thegan! Thegan!” his men shouted. The enchanter faltered as he saw them, then he grabbed his knife and gabbled some words, holding the knife over his palm.
Leof ran up the slope at full pelt, but he was too late. The enchanter drew the knife down as Leof grabbed for it, scattering blood over the bones around him. He spun around, showering as many bones as he could before Leof grabbed him and pressed his hand against his own jacket to stop the bleeding. But it was too late. Around them, a circle of ghosts was forming. The first one, a short man with hair in beaded plaits, was the leader. The ghost aimed a sword at Leof’s head. Leof let go of the enchanter and brought up his own sword in defense. He was stunned by the strength of the blow. For the first time, he understood to his marrow how dangerous the ghosts were.
The enchanter was backing away, terrified, protected by a phalanx of ghosts. The ground shook as Thegan’s men charged the hill, horns blowing the attack. Leof’s men had reached the hill just as the ghosts appeared and were now engaging them as they had been taught.
“Aim for the arms!” he heard Alston shout, and the men shouted acknowledgment.
Leof was fighting bitterly. The ghost wasn’t a warrior, that was clear, but it didn’t have to be when it didn’t have to guard against death. It attacked furiously but without trying to defend, so that for a moment Leof had to put all his energies into protecting himself. The strangest thing was that the ghost was not breathing. Leof had often fought at close quarters, and he knew the interplay of gasp and breath and grunt as each man gave or took blows. This time only he breathed and gasped; it was disconcerting; strangely impersonal. Yet the hatred in the ghost’s eyes was very personal. After a flurry of blows he maneuvered the ghost around until he could take the blow he wanted. As he raised his sword for the cut, he was aware of Thegan’s horse arriving, of the riders bringing axes down on ghost after ghost, targeting the shoulders and arms and legs, as they had been instructed.
He grinned and brought his sword down on the shoulder of the ghost’s sword arm. He had done this before, to one of the Ice King’s men. He knew how much effort was needed to actually cut someone’s arm off. But he did it. The ghost’s arm fell to the ground. Astonished, the ghost looked down at it and Leof used the moment to bring his sword around and up for a backstroke that cut off its head. The head tumbled to the ground.
The ghost itself did not fall. The body swayed and then, sickeningly, the head and arm disappeared from the ground, and reappeared on the ghost’s body. Complete with sword in hand. Leof stood watching in shock, his mind racing, his hands trembling. He and his men were all going to die. The Domains were going to die. There was no way to fight this — none at all.
The ghost twisted its head slightly, as if testing the surety of its neck, then looked down at its sword hand. It looked slowly up at Leof and smiled mockingly, then raised its sword again and struck. Leof blocked it but it drove him to his knees.
“Regroup!” Thegan shouted. “Withdraw!” He spurred his horse closer to the hill and reached down to hoist Leof up behind him just in time to avoid the ghost’s killing blow. Thegan wheeled the horse and hacked with his own sword at a group of ghosts, giving his men time to get away. Leof spun from side to side, guarding their backs.
All around them, men were screaming and running as they realized that the ghosts were not being harmed by even their worst strokes. The horns sounded the retreat, a pattern of notes Leof had only ever heard in training. Thegan had never retreated before.
“Abandon it!” Thegan yelled to the remaining men. “Barricade yourselves in the houses.” He pulled his horse away.
A few of the men were down, lying dead or dying, and as the horns rang out the wind wraiths appeared as though summoned by them. They descended toward the battlefield with shrieks of joy, like enormous ravens. The ghosts stopped still to watch them, their faces distorted by fear.
“Feed us!” the wraiths shouted. Thegan checked his horse as the wraiths hovered over the enchanter, safe in his circle of ghosts.
“You may feed,” the enchanter cried and the wraiths dived on the dying. The men screamed, long bubbling screams that made Leof’s gorge rise. The ghosts backed away, except for those around the enchanter, and then turned and ran, streaming down the hill, heading for the village and beyond. Leof blanched at the likely outcome; he hoped the inn had stout doors and a good strong bar. If the past pattern stayed true, they had all day before them. Sunset seemed a very long way away.
The ghost Leof had fought stood beside the enchanter now, and it raised its sword and shook it threateningly, grinning with satisfied malice.
“Archers!” Thegan shouted. A rain of arrows left the trees, where archers had been concealed, all aimed at the enchanter, who was just within bowshot. But as the shafts hissed through the air they were overtaken by the wind wraiths, who snatched them up in mid-flight and cast them down to the ground, shrieking with glee.
Thegan tensed and leaned forward, staring at the enchanter, clearly considering whether he could reach him and drag him out, or perhaps rescue some of the men.
“Don’t do it, my lord,” Leof said. He put a hand on Thegan’s rein, and dragged his horse’s head around, heading him back to Sendat. “It’s useless. No army alive could stand against them.”
Bramble
FURSEY LED THEM. He needed no lantern, finding his way with uncanny ease up and down and up again, past walls through which they could hear the rushing of water. The sound reminded Bramble too vividly of the many times water had seemed to sweep her out of Acton’s life and back into it again. It was only an hour or so since she had seen him, vividly alive. She smiled despite herself as she remembered that sideways smile, the promise and admiration it had held, the energy of every movement he made. She was going to miss that energy.
In the darkness it was easier, somehow, to think about all the people she had come to know through Baluch’s eyes, and Ragni’s, and Piper’s — all dead and gone. She remembered her mother telling her about a man whose whole family had been killed in a fire. “Never really got over being left alive,” she had said. “Hung himself on the first anniversary.” At the time, she hadn’t understood how anyone could regret being alive. She didn’t, she didn’t regret it. Maryrose had told her to live, and she would live, as long as she had to. But she understood, for the first time, how lonely that man must have been, when everyone he loved was gone and he was left to carry on. She thought that, after all this was over, she would find her parents and maybe stay with them for a while.
After that she would find a song-maker, and tell him or her the truth about Acton and the past, and set the record straight. Damn Asgarn’s name for eternity. The thought made her slightly more cheerful.
Then Fursey turned a corner and suddenly she was in a passage she recognized, one Dotta had led her down. Her heart beat faster. Not far now. She recited the turns in her head as Fursey took them — yes, he did know the way. Finally, they made the turn into the cave, and Medric raised his lantern high, looking at the walls in amazement. The painted animals seemed to leap and buck, as though they were still alive. Fursey stood for a moment with bowed head, as if praying.
The lantern candle was almost burnt out. Medric took another from his pocket and replaced it. The new candle burned with a whiter light, allowing Bramble to examine the corners of the cave. She searched thoroughly, but there were no bones, not even animal bones. In the furthest corner, however, was a shaft, and the smell from it was dry. No murmur of waters, no sense of damp. If the bones were in there, they might be retrievable.
“The bones must be down there,” she said. “We’ll have to bring tackle and try to fish them out.”
“No.” Fursey’s voice was adamant. “That is a place sacred to the stone-eaters. We can’t go there. We can’t fish there.”
“We need the bones,” Bramble said, equally adamant. They stood, glaring at each other.
Medric cleared his throat. “Um… can we ask the delvers?”
&
nbsp; “No one can summon them!” Fursey said indignantly.
He was wrong. Of course, Dotta had known. Bramble realized with shame that Dotta had warned her about this, and she had forgotten. She remembered another thing Dotta had told her: “The prey must be called with love, though, or it does not come. Remember that.”
Were the delvers her prey, or was she theirs? It didn’t matter. She was moving once again in a bizarre world where the impossible was necessary. She touched the images of the earth spirits which someone had painted thousands of years ago and sent out the call, as the hunter had taught her, as the hunter had done, with love. Come to me, she said silently, as she had been silent in the Forest when the deer came and nuzzled her before their deaths; as she had been silent when the hunter had his knife to her throat; as she had been silent when Red had brought the knife up. Prey or hunter, it was the same thing. Come to me, for I have need of you.
Medric’s gasp alerted her. She turned to see Fursey kneeling, separated from her and Medric by a river of dark rocks. They were slow moving but inexorable, filling the cave not from the outer cave or through fissures but from out of the walls themselves, sliding through the rock as easily as she moved through snow, but leaving no trace of their passage behind. They were half her height, and glinted in the light from the lantern as polished granite glints, but they were rough, not smooth.
They were far more strange than water sprites or wind wraiths; dangerous and alien. Bramble grinned at them in the darkness, feeling the familiar lift of excitement, and moved forward, slowly, giving them time to get out of her way. They made an aisle for her and she reached the shaft at the edge of the cave easily — but now she was alone, in a little island surrounded by earth spirits.
“There were bones,” she said clearly, “thrown here a thousand years ago. The bones of a man. I need them. I am sent by the gods to recover them.”
She had no idea if they would understand her, and when they spoke to her in grating rock-sliding-on-rock voices she knew that they hadn’t. She looked at Fursey.
He lifted his shoulders. “I don’t understand them, either,” he said.
The delvers edged forward, pushing Bramble closer to the shaft. Medric sprang forward too, shouting, “No!” but he was too late. They pushed suddenly, hard and impossible to resist, and she felt herself falling. The sensation was like the waters sweeping her away once again and she forced herself to relax, as she had then, to let the current take her where it willed.
She landed with a thump that knocked breath and thought from her body and lay for a while in darkness so complete that her eyes made light for her, peopling the cave with specks and fireballs, with colors and sparks.
There was something sharp under her. She moved with difficulty and edged it out. If Acton’s bones had broken her fall — she laughed silently. That would be rich. She drifted off into semi-consciousness.
“Bramble! Bramble!” Medric’s voice roused her.
“Mmm,” she said. “I’m all right.” That was a lie. She hurt all over.
“The delvers have gone,” he shouted. “I’m sending down a candle. Do you have a tinderbox?”
No, of course she didn’t have a tinderbox. What a stupid question.
“No,” she managed to say.
She dragged herself up and sat with head hanging. A moment later a thin cord with tinderbox and candle came snaking down through the shaft and hit her on the head.
“Oh, dung and pissmire!” she said. The box had bounced off her head and fallen somewhere nearby. She felt for it cautiously. The rock beneath her was covered with bones. Whether they were Acton’s or animals’, she didn’t know.
Then at the same moment, her left hand touched the tinderbox and the right one found a smooth surface… rounded, with holes. Oh, gods, it was a skull. She grabbed the tinderbox but her hands were shaking too much to undo the knot. She put it on the rock next to her foot and reached out again for the skull. His skull. The bone was silk covered in dust. She rubbed it on her trousers to clean it and held it in both hands, leaned her head down until her forehead was on his.
He was dead. He had been alive, smiling at her, only a few hours ago. But he was dead. He had been dead all this time, lying here, flesh withering away to dust, to nothing but bone. He was dead and she would never see him again.
The grief rose in her overwhelmingly; worse than for the roan, or the hunter, or even for Maryrose. The strength of it burned her as it rose, choking her, stopping her breath so that she thought she would die, racking her with so much pain that her eyes could not fill with tears, and at last she recognized it for what it was. She had felt this grief before, when she was Piper, looking at the ghost of Salmon. This was the grief of love.
Alone in the dark, she cradled his skull to her and rocked backward and forward and remembered him, because all she would ever have was memory, and she would love no human never, because he was no longer human, because they had never been human together except for that one moment on the hillside, where he had smiled at her with such promise, such delight. She remembered him vividly, gold hair shining in the sunshine, flecks of gold glinting on his jaw from the new beard, blue eyes bright and mischievous, mouth curved with desire. For her. Her, not Wili or Freide or the girl on the mountain. He had smiled at her, only two hours ago.
And now he was dead, and his bones were as dry as her eyes.
Saker
INVINCIBLE. THEY WERE invincible. All day the warlord’s men fell before them, or ran before them. They cowered behind locked doors, they pleaded for mercy before the killing stroke came. Nothing could save them.
Saker himself was invulnerable — guarded not only by undying men, but by the wind wraiths as well. Safe against archers, safe against blades, safe against blows. Invincible.
He was buoyed by victory, elated and exalted and set free from all fear, at last. He had thought that the wraiths were a terror, but they had saved his life. The gods were truly with him, supporting him. They had sent the wind wraiths.
He left the cart behind on the hill and took only the casket of bones and the scrolls with him. Now that he had been discovered, he must hide until the next time. They would keep a lookout, to stop anyone digging for bones. This army was all he had, and probably all he could get, for now. It was enough.
Enough for Sendat. Enough to raze the warlord’s fort and kill everyone within. Enough to gather all the weapons they would need.
Then, Turvite. He would raise Alder, his father, to participate in that great fight.
As the day ended, he found an abandoned water mill whose course had run dry, and hid the bones and scroll under the decaying wheel before holing up himself in the mill loft. Owl went with him. They looked out the window slit across what seemed peaceful, prosperous country lying golden in the last light of the sun. Owl smiled ferociously and gestured wide, then began to fade, still smiling.
“Yes,” Saker confirmed as he disappeared. “Yes, we will have it all.”
He ignored his empty stomach and settled down, smiling, to plan for massacre and conquest.
THE CASTINGS TRILOGY CONCLUDES WITH:
FULL CIRCLE
Pamela Freeman
A ghost army that cannot be stopped must be stopped, before it destroys everything in the Domains. . . .
Bramble and Ash together try to raise the spirit of the only man in all time and space who has a chance of laying the ravaging army to rest… but is Acton’s ghost still there, or has he gone on to rebirth?
Thegan the warlord has his own solution, and it may mean the death of every living Traveller… unless his wife and his most faithful officer forget all their loyalties and betray him.
When they come together for the final confrontation on the cliffs of Turvite, the evil dead may triumph over the evil living. If we’re lucky.
Coming in September 2009
Available wherever good books are sold
extras
meet the author
PAMELA FREEMAN is an aw
ard-winning writer for young people. She has a doctorate of creative arts from the University of Technology, Sydney, Australia, where she has also lectured in creative writing. She lives in Sydney with her husband and young son. Visit the author’s official Web site at www.pamelafreemanbooks.com.
introducing
If you enjoyed
DEEP WATER,
look out for
BLACK SHIPS
by Jo Graham
“Are you afraid of the dark?” she asked.
“No,” I said.
“Good,” she said, and smothered the fire with ashes until only a few coals glowed. It was very dark within the cave. I had never been somewhere there was not even starlight. I heard her moving in the dark, the rustling of cloth.
“Sit here,” she said, and I felt her putting a cushion at my back. I sat up upon it. It raised me so that I sat, my legs crossed, leaning almost over the brazier. She put another cushion behind me so that I might lean back against the wall.
There was more rustling, and I smelled the acrid scent of herbs crumbled over the coals. Rosemary. Laurel. And something richer, like resin, like pine carpets beneath my feet. Something heady, like smoke.
“There,” Pythia said. “Look into the fire and tell me what you see.”
My eyes itched. It was hard to keep them open. They watered. The smoke wavered. The tiny glowing lines of coals blurred. I didn’t know what to say.
She was still talking, but I wasn’t really hearing her. I was looking at the darkness between the glowing lines. At the blackness in the heart of the fire.
Deep Water Page 53