by Tim Lebbon
“And maybe it’ll kill us,” A’Meer countered. “None of us know anything about what’s happening here! I have to take this boy to Hess and let the Mystics figure it out. We go a few miles off track, that’s more chance that the Monks will trap and kill us. Perhaps we have the advantage right now—a head start, a few miles maybe—but what happens if we go off on some fool’s errand to see some mysterious ‘thing’? Remember what those mimics showed us? Monks. Closing in from the west. Trey’s seen the same! And you, Rafe … after all that, you still want to head that way?” She pointed south west with her drawn sword, and it whispered at the air.
“He’s the reason we’re all here,” Hope said, “and I’m for following him.”
“He’s led by something mindless!” A’Meer said. “Soulless.”
“But it cares for us all,” Rafe said. “It would not lead us into ambush. Most of all it cares for itself.”
A’Meer looked at Kosar, and for the first time since leaving Pavisse there was something of friendship in her eyes, an old knowledge, language without words. But why now, and why here? Because this was when she needed him most.
Kosar felt sick. “I’ll go with Rafe,” he said. “I believe it’s the right thing to do, A’Meer. Just a few miles, to see what’s so important. Then we can all finally decide what to do. And if Hess is still the best idea, I’m with you all the way.”
A’Meer cursed, shook her head and stormed off southward. She went a few dozen paces and then squatted down, the weapons at her belt scarring the ground. There was no pride, no dented perception of leadership, Kosar knew that. A’Meer simply wanted to do what she thought was right.
She turned around at last, stared back at them, and then past them. Her eyes grew wide and her jaw slackened. “Exactly how far is this place?” she hissed.
“I don’t know,” Rafe said, “but we can make it, and then I think it can get us away.”
Kosar turned his back on the Shantasi and looked back the way they had come. At the head of the shallow valley they had just emerged from, maybe two miles distant, several red specks were moving slowly down the heathered hillsides.
“Then lead the way!” A’Meer said, standing. “Hope, on the horse with Rafe! Trey, up with Alishia.”
“I can’t ride fast,” the miner protested.
“Learn!”
A’Meer came back to Kosar, panting, and he caught the tang of her sweat in the air. It was a familiar smell and it brought flashbacks, pleasant even in the circumstances.
“You make me hard dressed like that,” he muttered, and to his delight A’Meer laughed out loud.
“We never did get to dressing up, did we?” she asked. They stood side by side, staring at doom as it pursued them across the landscape.
“Never really needed to.”
“No.” She shook her head and leaned in to Kosar, kissing him on his neck. “I love you, you old thief.”
He answered with a smile.
“And now,” she said, “I suppose we see just how much Rafe knows about what he carries.”
Kosar heard the horses moving off behind them, and he and A’Meer turned and followed in their wake.
“How far away, do you think?” he said quietly.
“Maybe two miles. I saw at least a dozen of them in the valley alone. There may be more moving in from the west, heading to cut us off.”
“There’s no hope against that many, is there?”
A’Meer did not answer for a while, and there was only the horses’ hoof beats and their own footfalls as accompaniment to their desperate flight. “Well,” she said at last, “no hope unless Rafe is right. And in that case, who in the Black knows just what we’re about to see?”
Who indeed? thought Kosar. Perhaps no one.
Or perhaps only the Mages.
They ran. The horses, exhausted though they were, seemed to pick up on their fear, because they put on a burst of speed that took them way ahead of Kosar and A’Meer. A’Meer cursed and struggled to keep up, but Kosar urged her to slow, conserve her energy. They may have a long run ahead.
For a while they moved silently, A’Meer breathing fast but steady beside him, Kosar doing his best to regulate his breath, control his pace, rarely looking further than the next few steps. He did not know just how long he could do this. It was not something he wanted to dwell upon. He glanced up at the two horses, still way ahead even with their doubled cargoes. Hope and Rafe were in the lead, their grey dappled horse stepping confidently and calmly, while behind them Trey seemed to be letting his own mount follow the first, hanging on gamely to the reins, bouncing awkwardly, trying to hold Alishia upright between his arms whilst doing his best not to tumble from the saddle. He could fall, Kosar thought, he and Alishia could fall away and the horse will bolt. What then? Leave them? It was not an idea he wanted to entertain, but now the thought was there, in the background.
He realised very quickly that A’Meer could use her Pace to leave him behind in the blink of an eye. Yet she stayed back with him. That shamed and pleased him in equal measures.
They followed a rough path through the heather for as long as they could. Evidence of wheel ruts hid beneath new growth, and though that made the going underfoot hazardous it was still easier than running through knee-high bracken. The horses seemed to keep their footing easily, but more than once Kosar stumbled and fell, rolling as well as he could to control the impact. A’Meer stopped to help him up, then ran on without a word. Kosar’s first few steps after these tumbles were tentative and slow, ready for the burning pain of a broken ankle.
What then? he thought. Leave me behind?
He realised then just how desperate the situation was. He glanced back but the hills they had just left were hidden by a fold in the land, the progress of the Red Monks out of sight. They could be closing quickly, or falling behind. Or perhaps they had not even seen them. But that was a vain hope, and one which they could not allow.
Trey shouted from up ahead. His saddle had slipped sideways and he clung on desperately to the horse’s mane, arms pressed around the unconscious girl as the land strove to pull them down. The horse stopped, reared, stamping its feet and flinging its head, doing its best to shake its two passengers free.
Kosar put on a burst of speed but A’Meer reached them first. By the time he caught up she had calmed the horse, tightened the saddle, muttered something to Trey and sent them on their way.
Hope and Rafe had not slowed down.
“What did you tell him?” Kosar asked as he and A’Meer ran together once more.
“I told him if he falls, we’ll leave him.”
The rough path they had been following faded away into the ground, displaying no final destination, no reason at all for being. Brackens grew up around their knees, sometimes reaching their thighs, and progress on foot was hampered, fronds whipping at their legs and tangling around their ankles.
The horses cantered on, their longs legs finding no hindrance.
“Hope is pulling ahead,” Kosar said.
“Yes.” A’Meer’s bare lower legs were already whipped from the plants, long bubbled lines of blood marking where the skin had been scored. She seemed not to notice.
“Perhaps we should call to her to slow down.”
“Don’t think she would.” She cursed as something shifted beneath one of her feet—a rock, a plant, a surprised creature—and went sprawling, outstretched hands fending off the worst of the impact.
Kosar stopped and went to her, holding her beneath the arms to help her up. Her elbows were bloodied and she had a cut across one eyebrow, blood dripping down across her pale skin.
From behind came a cry. Too loud for a human, too mad for an animal, too filled with rage to be anything other than a Monk. Kosar looked back up the gentle slope they had just run down. There was no movement, save the twitching of bracken in the gentle breeze. The sun was behind him, throwing his shadow back the way they had come and he had a brief, crazy image of the Monks catching it, twisting
it into their grasp and hauling him down, falling on him with swords drawn …
“I see nothing,” he said.
“They don’t call to each other without reason,” A’Meer said. “Come on. Hope and Rafe have gone.”
Kosar looked ahead in panic. A few hundred steps away a wood began. He saw Trey’s horse swallowed by shadows beneath the trees, and then he and A’Meer were alone in the landscape … and yet not. Behind them was the very real presence of the Red Monks, a huge weight bearing down in the sunlight. Unseen as yet, but obvious as a shadow on the sun.
The two ran on, raising their legs high with each step to try to clear the plants and prevent themselves from tripping.
There was another cry closer behind them, this one not muted by any folds in the land, but Kosar did not turn to look.
By the time they reached the woods, he was aware of the silence around them. The singing of birds, the rustle of creatures in the undergrowth, the breath of the breeze whispering its way across the land … it was only their sudden silences that made them obvious. The land held its breath as he and A’Meer passed from sunlight to shadow.
The darkness felt no safer.
There may be more moving in from the west, heading to cut us off, A’Meer had said. Perhaps they were here now, Monks hiding between trees and in hollows in the woodland floor, waiting to rise up in ambush as soon as they were all within their bloody red reach.
No cries from ahead, no sound of a fight.
There won’t be, Kosar thought. They’ll slaughter Rafe and Hope, Trey and Alishia without a sound. They’re not fighters. A’Meer is the only fighter here. Even I carry a sword only by default, not because I have much if an idea of how to use it.
“It’s hopeless,” he muttered, and as if in response there came more cries from behind, three or four Monks breaking the silence with their unnatural screams as they pelted downhill towards the woods.
“It’s all down to Rafe, now,” A’Meer said. “Maybe we should pull back, try to hold them off?”
“What?” The idea terrified Kosar. The thought of entering into battle with the Monks here, between the trees, while the others rode on ahead was awful. Suddenly faced with the prospect of self-sacrifice, he knew just how much he wanted to live. A’Meer may have stated her purpose and aim, but he had never promised to die to save anyone.
They ran between trees, jumping fallen boughs, skirting around rocky outcroppings, forging on almost blindly. To be cautious of what might may lay in wait ahead would only give the Monks time to catch up. They ran headlong into unknown dangers to escape the certain death on their tails.
“Perhaps not,” A’Meer said. “Let’s see where Rafe is taking us first.”
They splashed through a small stream, noticing the disturbed sediment where the horses had recently crossed. Pausing briefly, Kosar heard the sounds of the horses’ progress in the distance. He wanted to call out for them to slow down, but fear kept him silent.
There were old paths in here, worn over time until trees roots showed through and nothing grew anymore. Kosar wondered who had passed this way before, recently or in forgotten history, and whether any of them had been as desperately frightened as he was now. They followed one such trail that led deeper into the woods and deeper into shadow. Other tributaries led off, twisting away between trees and behind banks of giant ferns and other, more dense undergrowth. Their destinations remained hidden, never to be known. Kosar had once liked to tread such routes, enjoying the discovery around each bend, relishing new experience. And he had forged his own paths across the land, steered himself to follow many mysteries and tales, and routes such as these had once been his life. Now he wished only for familiarity and safety.
To his left, a narrow path faded away into shrubbery, plants touching across it now but the ground still worn down to the hard mud beneath. Rock was exposed, some of it sharpened by some crushing impact. Whose footfalls could have done that? Kosar wondered. Further along, the remnants of an old fence had rotted into the ground but a gate stood firm, an intricate iron construct forming a decorative entry into nothing, because only more forest stood behind. It would have looked the same from both direction. To keep in or keep out?
The trees grew suddenly denser as they entered an area of the woods given over to pine, and here the horses’ trail was easier to follow. A trail of fresh breakages—scars on trunks, snapped twigs and branches scattered across the ground—marked the route Hope and Trey had taken. The forest floor was churned up, fresh disturbances in the pine needles marked by the darker stains of dampness below, and the bewitching shifting as wood ants found themselves exposed to the light. They reminded Kosar of the mimics, so many parts to such a complex creature.
“Here,” A’Meer said. “Take this!” She handed him a small wooden ball from her belt. “Don’t touch the wire, it’ll take your fingers off. Wrap it once around that tree there, knee height, and pull hard. It’ll hold fast.”
She hurried off at a right angle to their path, turning and twisting between trees, hand trailing behind her as she let out a length of almost invisible wire. Kosar did as she had instructed, passing the wooden ball once around the tree and pulling. The wire attached to it—thin, sharp, deadly—bit into the bark with a soft hiss. The wooden ball looked like a knotted wound in the tree. When the wire had played out A’Meer secured her end and then signalled for them to continue.
“They’ll smell our trail,” she said as they ran together once more. “The horses’ breath, the blood from our scrapes. They’ll be running fast. It won’t stop them, but it may slow one or two down.”
“How many more tricks have you got?” Kosar asked.
“Not many.”
Another cry rose up behind them and the tree canopy came to life as birds took flight, fleeing in silent panic as if keen to keep their presence a secret.
“If only we could fly,” A’Meer said.
Kosar took the lead. Spider webs wrapped themselves across his face and tangled in his hair, and now and then he felt the harder impact as a spider came along for the ride. He wiped them frantically away, remembering the slayer spider that Hope had left in her rooms for the Monks. There was no telling what unknown species this wood may harbour. Trees reached for him, too, small branches only becoming apparent as they drew lines of blood into his cheek or clawed for his eyes.
Shadows moved to their left and right. Things following their progress, perhaps. Or maybe tricks of the light.
“I don’t know where we are,” Kosar said. “I’ve never travelled these woods. I’ve been south of here to the borders of Kang Kang, but I never came this way. There’s no way of telling how far these woods continue.”
“Far enough,” A’Meer said. “Long enough for us to have to face the Red Monks in here. The forest is many miles deep—I was here years ago, just after my training was finished and I went out of New Shanti—and there were things here even then. Now … more time has passed. The land had changed even more, and old maps no longer hold true. Maybe they’re all gone.”
“What things?” Kosar asked. “Why didn’t you say?”
“I never saw them properly, not even back them. And I can’t say they were a danger. But they gave me bad dreams.”
As if on cue the two of them stopped running, squatted down, listened to the noises around them. From ahead they could hear the horses crashing onward, not far distant. Behind them, the way they had come, all was quiet; the forest silenced by their own passage, perhaps, or because of what followed.
Something whispered.
“What is that?” Kosar said, but A’Meer did not answer. She glanced at him and then looked away, eyes downcast as if ashamed of something terrible and secret. He reached out to touch her, fingers stretched, blood on his fingertips … and then he stopped.
They gave me bad dreams, A’Meer had said.
And the whispers made themselves known to Kosar.
Never said sorry, never told Father why I did it, killed his sheebok, cut
out its heart to take away to the woods with my friends, never admitted my guilt even though there was blood beneath my fingernails and the stink of death about me, rot in the creases of my skin, pain and guilt in my eyes when I woke up … afraid of him, frightened of his big hands and his angry shouts, but there was worse than father’s rage, frightened of my friends, of the things they did in the woods, the things they did with that girl and that sheebok’s heart and those knives, those knives … frightened but compliant, watching them empty the heart over her breasts and cut her there, the blood mingling, watching from the trees, hard, young and hard … and when they came into her and she screamed they didn’t hear my own petty cries of pleasure and shame … but they knew I watched … they always knew I watched…
“Fuck,” Kosar shouted. “Fuck!”
A’Meer held him and whispered in his ear, trying to calm him. “It’s alright, don’t shout, let it come, accept it and let it come and it’ll flow away, it’ll hide again. Truth is only what you want to make it. They’ll leave you alone soon, Kosar …”
Always regretted leaving him behind, that broken boy cowering in the pits of the Poison Forests, waiting to die … but his leg was broken, and I’d never really wanted him along anyway, just too afraid to say no, didn’t want to hurt his feelings … I’d saved his life after all, and he thought he owed me, wanted to repay me for saving him from those tumblers in the Widow’s Peaks … so he came along and I slipped and he fell too, and I never should have left him … said I was going for help, going to find someone to help me pull him out of there, but I knew he’d be dead by night fall, no way a boy like that could fight off the poisonous things that live there, those birds those bats those spiders … left him to die, and not because I was scared and not because I couldn’t have gone back … simply because I didn’t want him with me any more …
It came again and again, the voice of his sickly conscience, the mad mutterings of guilt, the secret shadows of rejected experience admitting culpability for things he had long ago shut away, driven down, buried deep in denial, clothed in ambiguous memory and turned into tales once heard, not created himself.