A mile swept by. From a hilltop, well inland, two shepherds gazed at him in wonder, surrounded by their milling flock. Then came a stone wall. Then a meadow, and a patch of wild sage.
‘Smell that!’ said Taliktrum. ‘You should stop and roll!’ But the prince shook his head.
‘Not strong enough to hide my scent. Worse, it would give them two scents to follow, once they guessed what I’d done.’
Another ridge, another breathless climb. At the top he surprised a hermit poking a fire by the trailside. The man fled with a squeal, leaving behind his water jug. Olik drank deeply from it, then tossed the jug over the cliff. Better that way. The dogs might harm the old man if anything he owned smelled of the prince.
‘Heridom, I could have used a sip myself,’ said Taliktrum. ‘Never mind, keep moving; you’re too visible here, and — skies of fire, Olik, what is that?’
Something whirled overhead, dark and viciously fast. Olik turned, chasing it with his eyes as he groped for his sword. But what he saw was so appalling that for a moment he could only stare.
It was a smoke cloud, or a swarm of insects, or a nightmare fusion of both. It was miles above them, probably, and fast as a shooting star. Jet black, opaque, and yet writhing as it flew like a nest of maggots. To his horror the thing slowed momentarily, as if pulled in two directions at once. Then it resumed its westward course, and soon dwindled to a speck.
‘Blood of devils,’ said the prince. ‘Did you see it? Do you know what that was?’
The dogs were whimpering. The prince himself felt ill. ‘I don’t know,’ cried Taliktrum, shaken. ‘How could I know? Tell me!’
‘That was the Swarm of Night. That was the doom foreseen by the spider-tellers, the doom that travelled with your ship.’
‘There was no such monstrosity aboard the Chathrand!’
‘No, but there was the Nilstone, and a sorcerer itching to use it. Well, he has used it, my lord. He has brought the Swarm back to Alifros, to kill and to feed.’
A sudden howl. Olik started. Four or five miles back along the trail, upon a knob he’d crossed thirty minutes ago, stood an athymar. It was looking straight at him — but its eyes were not the equal of its nostrils, and Olik reflected that there was some chance at least that it did not yet know what it saw. He might be just another shepherd, another hermit.
Even as the prince watched, more dogs came up behind the first. Some of them lay down upon the hilltop.
‘They must be winded,’ said Taliktrum. ‘They started out in the wrong direction, after all, and had to double back when the first ones caught your scent. They may have run twice as far as those you killed.’
‘They are not tired enough,’ said the prince. ‘Jathod, look at them all.’
The dogs kept coming: ten, now fifteen. ‘Very well,’ said Olik, ‘we are going to start off walking. No, better yet — hobbling. Old. I think I can imitate a bent old hermit. And then, if they let me hobble around that curve in the trail there, we shall fly. Watch them, Taliktrum, and tell me if they start to move.’
He bent his knees, and his back. The performance was harder than he’d imagined. For the first time since his departure from Masalym, the prince felt afraid. It was this slowness, this charade. It made him aware of the trembling of his skin.
Halfway to the curve. The dogs remained still. ‘I count nineteen,’ said Taliktrum.
‘My lord,’ said the prince, ‘do you know what the nuhzat is?’
‘I heard you speak of it, that night on the derelict boat.’
The night Taliktrum had saved him, striking down his assassins with a poisoned blade. ‘The last man to fall,’ said Olik, ‘the one Sandor Ott kicked to death. He was in nuhzat. That is why he began to fight so well.’
‘What of it, Prince?’
‘I will be in nuhzat soon; I can feel its onset already.’
‘Ah!’ said Taliktrum. ‘Is that good luck or bad?’
Before Olik could answer the pack behind them erupted in howls. ‘They’re coming, they’re coming like fiends!’ cried Taliktrum. Olik burst into a run, his dogs flowing beside him, and this was it, no more resting, no more tricks. Only speed. He swept around the bend, clawing at the rocks for purchase, gravel scraping under his heels. The path was narrow; there were sheer falls on his right. He flew headlong, screaming at his dogs to keep their distance: one stumble and the athymars would have them.
His throat was raw. This was a long descent — but was it the descent, the start of the river valley? No, damn it all, there was a plateau before him yet. And structures. Many structures. Could he possibly be approaching a town?
The ridge grew steeper. The earth sheared off in patches beneath his feet. It was like skiing at one of the Emperor’s mountain retreats, that freefall sensation, one’s balance miraculously restored again and again. He thought of his mother. You’ll know a world beyond me, Olik, a world I’ll never see. If there be peace in your lifetime perhaps you’ll be an artist, and paint the glories of this kingdom — I mean the beauty of it, not the deeds. If there be war, you’ll fight.
‘There are riders with them!’ cried Taliktrum. ‘Seven riders! Olik, you must go faster! On that plateau they’ll run you down!’
I’m not one for fighting, Mother; I’ve told you I can’t stand the blood.
‘Prince Olik!’ Taliktrum was shouting in his ear.
I know that about you, darling. That’s why you’ll matter, when the world looks back. Others will be bloody-minded; you’ll fight to bring us to our senses.’
If he had wings sewn to his arms he would spread them now, and lift like a falcon from this wounded earth. But instead there came a quietness, and a change in the light. The nuhzat had begun.
Thank you, Mother. Thank you for easing this pain.
For his raw throat, the burning in his chest, the ache of his bitten arm: gone. Nothing hurt any more, and yet his senses were rarefied and keen. And he was running faster, much faster. Already the buildings were flying by.
‘That’s it! Don’t stop!’
They were ruins. Not ancient, merely old. He was sprinting down the centre of a wide, dead street, his own dogs barely matching his pace. Then he remembered: Ved Oomin. Human Settlement. The words in pale red ink upon his map. This was a township, wiped out in the mind-plague and never settled again.
Sudden snarling behind him. He could not look back; he was a running spirit, an idea of speed. Taliktrum shouted that the first athymars were catching up with his pack. Olik clenched his teeth and ran faster. The village was ending. A ruined wall crossed his path. Olik cleared it in one bound.
Steel horseshoes on cobblestones. The riders were behind him. ‘They have bows,’ said Taliktrum. ‘Never mind, they’re not using them; it’s still the dogs you’ve got to outrun.’
Tombstones. Human graves lost in brambles and weeds. Names melting with the years, souls fallen like raindrops in this silent land.
Another wall, another leap. And now he was in forest, wet and tangled. He slashed through vines and cabbage palm and tall soaked ferns. Bad luck. The forest would slow him more than the dogs.
Then the ground began to drop, steeply. At last, he thought, the descent.
‘There’s the blessed river!’ cried Taliktrum, ‘but Prince, they’re too close! You must push one more time, a little faster, do you hear? Olik, you will not make it at this speed.’
Half a mile, less. Then came an explosion of canine fury. On his right, two dogs were rolling, a coil of fur, claws, teeth. Olik shouted to the rest of his pack: Go free, disband, leave the fight and turn home. But there was Nyrex, keeping pace with him, disobedient again. She caught his eye. So much trust in that creature, so much unwarranted faith.
Taliktrum was screaming: ‘Faster, faster! Herid aj, man, you’re almost there!’
A quarter mile. The final stretch looked terribly steep. An arrow flew past him, wildly off the mark. His pursuers were desperate; they could see the river too.
A last scramble before h
im. Maybe a leap from the high green banks. ‘Pitfire, you’re doing it!’ cried Taliktrum, almost laughing in his amazement. ‘You’re losing them, man, you’re the royal leopard incarnate!’
Of course he was; he was Bali Adro. There was no stopping his family. Given time they would conquer the sun.
Then an athymar caught his heel.
It was a nip, not a bone-crushing bite, and yet it was enough to send him sprawling. Any semblance of control was gone; the world spun madly. But the athymar had fallen, too. Nyrex had pounced on it, and the three of them and half a ton of loose jungle soil were rushing for the river; it was a landslide with heads and limbs, his boots fending off the athymar, its four fangs seeking him, Nyrex tearing at the larger dog’s hindquarters and-
Freefall.
The banks were high, all right. They plummeted in their squall of mud and debris, revolving helplessly, and then they struck and it was done.
Olik was in the water, and Nyrex surfaced beside him, paddling. The athymar, not five feet to his left, had struck a fallen tree projecting out into the river. Dead already, it hung before them, impaled on a jagged branch.
Arrows fell. On the banks fifty feet above them, the other athymars were massed and baying. They pulled away from the shore into the swifter current, the rushing chariot that would bear them away. A mad river, a beautiful thing, burrowing deep into the Peninsula and the wild lands that remained.
But before they gave themselves to the current, Olik made for a rock, and Nyrex came up beside him, and they waited there, struggling to be still. Olik watched the shore, murmuring the hope-chant that for the dlomu takes the place of prayer. But no winged shape flew to him out of the jungle, only arrows and sounds of rage. The athymars jostled along the banks, now and then looking back over their shoulders.
Olik knew that the riders would soon brave that last slope, and spy him, and that once they did they would never turn back. He made a small sound of grief. If there was a lonelier soul than Lord Taliktrum’s, he could not have said whose it might be.
The prince and his one companion swam away.
4
Fires in the Dark
12 Modobrin 941
241st day from Etherhorde
The raft did not inspire confidence. The party stood around it, staring; none of them could quite believe what they had built. ‘It looks like a pig’s stomach tied to a loom,’ said Neeps.
‘Your imagination does you credit,’ said Bolutu.
‘It is sturdy enough,’ said Hercol, ‘but I dare say it will be like no float any of us has ever taken.’
‘I don’t like it,’ said Dastu, probing the raft with his foot.
‘What would you like?’ Pazel asked him. ‘In case you haven’t noticed, we don’t have a highway to follow.’
‘Or wings to fly,’ said Ensyl, gazing upwards.
Thasha felt a stab of grief. It was about this time yesterday that Myett had been taken. Pazel had slept through the tragedy, but Thasha had seen Ensyl leap up as though stabbed, hearing what they could not: a fellow ixchel’s cry. Looking skyward, they had all seen the bird of prey, fighting in midair with something gripped in its talons, before beating a swift path to the south. They had raced up the stairs, crying Myett’s name. Ensyl had continued far up the ruined wall, her shouts and wails so eerily silent to human ears. She had come back stone-faced. ‘We are thirteen now,’ she’d said.
Of course Dastu had a point about the raft. It was a freakish thing. Its body was a huge bladder-mushroom, a tendril-fringed bag some fifteen feet in diameter. Half the party had ventured into the forest in search of such a fungus, Ramachni lighting the way, one last time, with fireflies. Thasha had joined the search: loath as she was to set foot in that hot, dripping hell, the thought of waiting for others to return from it was worse.
And light made all the difference. Beneath the bright canopy of insects the forest had mostly shrunk from them, closed its petals and pores. The flesh-eating trees withdrew their tentacles; the lamprey-mouthed fungi turned away. What could replace the fireflies, once the journey resumed?
It had taken hours to locate a bladder of the right size, and immense care to drain it from a single incision and cut it free of the ground. Even emptied, the thing was heavy, like a great rubbery hide. They slogged back to the clearing with it draped on their shoulders. When they arrived it was well past sundown. A fire burned in the clearing, with two geese roasting on spits, and when she tasted the sizzling meat Thasha groaned with pleasure.
‘I am telling you, no?’ said Neda, catching Thasha’s eye. ‘My master is best to kill with a stone. He is hitting anything, whatever you want.’
There were a handful of young pines in the clearing; those who had remained behind had felled and stripped them already. When dawn came, they had notched the soft wood with swords, tied them into a square frame with the vines that boiled at the forest’s edge, and woven a net of these same vines on which to rest the giant bladder. Then everyone had helped to stuff the bladder like a cushion, with anything that would float: dry grass, hollow reeds, a spongy moss that grew on the ruin’s north face. At last, using Ensyl’s sword like a sewing needle, they had stitched the incision shut as best they could.
‘It should carry us as far as the forest’s edge,’ said Hercol, ‘provided we keep that hole above the water line.’
The sun was by now almost straight overhead. They ate a hurried meal of cold goose. Then Ensyl brought something from among the stones, and Thasha felt the ache again, worse than before. It was a rough pine carving of a woman, standing straight, arms raised high like a child who expects to be lifted in its mother’s arms.
‘Farewell, sister, honour-keeper, brave daughter of the clan,’ she said, bending her voice so the others could hear her. Then, methodically, she broke the statue into twenty-seven pieces, and wrapped each one in a bit of cloth. Everyone but Dastu had contributed a scrap or two from their clothing. Ensyl gave the parcels to the stream one by one, and Thasha blinked back tears. If Myett had died among them, it would have been parts of her body in those little shrouds. Thasha had witnessed it before, this grisly rite, an assurance that no trace of the dead could ever be found by humans, and thus endanger the clan. Even funerals were part of the ixchels’ struggle to survive.
The ceremony over, Hercol brought out the sack containing the Nilstone (another sort of death-parcel), and tied it firmly near the centre of the raft. Ramachni circled it once, his black fur raised. Then he turned and looked at the others.
‘The sorcerer’s reek is still about the Nilstone,’ he said. ‘Stay as far from the sack as you can. If anyone should reach for it, we must assume his mind is under siege, and stop him by force.’
‘To do so would be simple mercy,’ said Hercol. ‘Four men on the Chathrand touched the Stone, and four men’s bodies withered like leaves in a fire. Come, it is time we left this place.’
Together they dragged the raft into the shallows. Hercol and Vispek held the frame as the others scrambled aboard. The raft heaved and shifted, but it bore their weight. They spun away from the clearing, pushing off with long poles, and Thasha felt the current gather them into its arms.
Big Skip laughed aloud. ‘We’re ridin’ a blary jellyfish,’ he said. ‘By the Tree, I hope I live just to hear what people say when we tell ’em.’
‘They’ll say we are liars,’ said Bolutu.
‘Be still, now,’ said Ramachni. ‘We are above the very spot where the River of Shadows roars up most powerfully into the Ansyndra. The blend of shadow and water is very thin here. If we do not sink in these first minutes we may have hope for the rest of the journey.’
They brushed the side of the tower where it jutted out into the stream. ‘We are sinking!’ cried Ensyl. And it was true that the raft was suddenly very low, ripples and wavelets lapping over the frame.
‘Spread out! Lie flat!’ Ramachni hissed, and they hurried to obey. The raft was teetering, one side and then another vanishing beneath the surface. Thas
ha lay on her stomach, half submerged, watching the river slosh around the crude surgical scar in the middle of the raft. She prayed, a reflex. The water black and chilling. They knocked along the tower wall, spinning like a leaf, then gyred out into the swifter current.
No one was laughing now. Thasha was dizzy and cold. She sensed a frightful nothingness below her, as though an endless black cavern waited for her there, lightless and roaring with wind; and this river surface, delicate as a soap bubble, was all that held them above its maw.
They sank lower still, clinging to the frame and to one another. The craft was all but submerged; the hole was like a pair of sealed lips just inches above the water. Helpless, Thasha watched the first surge of water pass over it. There were oaths. A second surge followed. Air bubbled around the wound.
And then, by the Blessed Tree, it stopped. The raft held steady, and — was she imagining it? — even began to rise. Thasha glanced at Ramachni, wondering if he had cast a spell after all. They rose higher, and picked up speed. ‘We’re out of it, aren’t we?’ said Pazel.
‘The worst of it, yes,’ said Ramachni. ‘Almost pure shadow lay beneath us for a moment. It was there that the Swarm of Night burst forth into Alifros, when our enemy called it yesterday. The further we drift from that spot, the thinner the darkness beneath us — but do not be deceived. The Ansyndra will go on mixing with the River of Shadows for hundreds of miles. We must try to avoid swimming — and never, ever dive.’
They were far from shore, now. Thasha looked back but could not see the campsite, the place where they had bled and triumphed, where she had killed a mage but failed to become one herself, where Ramachni had at last been free to tell her the truth of her birth. A strange truth, an awful truth. She had thought herself the child of Erithusme; now she knew that she was the great mage, one soul shared between them: Erithusme’s soul. The wizardess had sparked life in the sterile womb of Thasha’s mother, but not as an act of kindness. She had needed a hiding place, as her enemies closed in. She had bricked up her memories and magic behind a wall in the back of the unborn child’s mind. Out of everyone’s reach, even the girl herself. For seventeen years Thasha had lived in ignorance of that wall and the force behind it.
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