Sky took another step. Another. He knew something was wrong, but couldn't stop himself.
Something cawed off to his right and the woman suddenly reached out and snatched a Piebald from the air, shoving it in her mouth. In that instant Sky saw the Darkhorn in place of the beautiful woman, and he threw himself to the side as the Darkhorn's slavering maw plunged toward him, just missing.
Sky rolled to his feet, slammed his Jumpers and Foggers at the same time, and shot into the air. Putrid Fog rolled around him as the Darkhorn's teeth snapped shut behind him. He landed on a high tree branch and scampered along its length as she let out a hideous shriek.
The Darkhorn rocketed out of the Fog and felled the tree next to him.
At the end of the limb, Sky lunged forward and dropped to a new branch, hugging it as he landed. He pulled himself up and dashed toward the trunk. The Darkhorn rammed the tree, and Sky hit his Jumpers-a quick burst-and sailed into the next tree. He veered sharply toward a new branch and a new tree. Another burst.
The Darkhorn shot past, snapping branches.
Sky bounced free-form, without his Jumpers, from limb to limb and tree to tree, frantically trying to stay ahead. Branches and bark showered him.
He spun, changing direction again and again. One more burst and the Jumpers fizzled-out of juice.
Sky plummeted. He slapped his Shimmer and crashed into a branch, snapping it in two. He ricocheted down the tree, bouncing around, and then he smashed into the ground.
His Shimmer flickered out at the same time as his Fog and he rolled to his back, groaning.
Dense Fog coated the forest. The Darkhorn screeched, but she sounded far away, and getting farther. Sky's twists and turns within the Fog had thrown her from his trail. He was safe for now.
Rocks poked him in the back and a branch had worked its way into an awkward position, but he didn't care. Piebalds had died tonight because of his stupidity. He should've known better than to reach out for Fred like that with the Darkhorn and Bedlam nearby.· That reaching was part of edgewalking, part of Bedlam and the Darkhorn's domain, and they were infinitely better at it than him. If he'd thought it through, he would've realized: If he could reach out, they could reach back. Why did everything and everyone around him keep dying? The Piebalds, hundreds of hunters when he was young, including several of his friends' parents, and Phineas, Errand, Crystal, Andrew, Hands, T-Bone ... Sky stopped himself. Not them. Not the monster hunters. Not his friends. Nackles would get them out. He had to believe that, even if it was hard.
Something crunched nearby, and Sky stopped berating himself. He sat up hesitantly and looked around, but the Fog remained as impenetrable as ever.
More crunching, and then quiet.
Fearing that the Darkhorn had circled back, Sky climbed to his feet and stepped around the tree. On the other side, he found a scruffy man with a scraggly beard wearing a dingy blue jump suit. The man sat casually on a tree stump, holding a torn picture in one hand and eating from a bag of Doritos with the other.
Sky glanced around nervously, wondering if the Darkhorn was messing with him-if she'd pulled him into a nightmare without him knowing. And then he realized that he recognized the man.
"Mister . .." Sky didn't know the man's last name. "Mister Janitor, are 'you okay?"
Crunch, crunch, crunch. Orange cheese and bits of tortilla chip lived in the mangy beard like squirrels nestling down for winter.
Sky stepped closer. The poor man had mental problems, he knew. Last year the janitor had helped him out of a bind with Crenshaw, and then he'd made the strangest comment about urinal cakes.
"Forest saltines taste like urinal cakes," the janitor now muttered.
A comment very much like that, in fact.
Without taking his eyes from the picture, the janitor held out the bag of Doritos, not to Sky, but to the empty space slightly to the left of Sky.
Sky glanced over, afraid he might find someone there. No one was, but that made him more frightened, not less.
"Are you lost?" Sky asked hesitantly; he was beginning to think he might prefer the Darkhorn. "Do you need help finding your way back to Exile?"
The janitor ate another Dorito. A checkered picnic blanket was spread out in front of him.
Slowly, Sky stepped up behind him and looked down at the picture, which had been ripped from top to bottom so that half was missing. The picture showed a woman who looked somehow familiar. She wore jeans and a grungy T-shirt and her charcoal hair was long and pulled back in a ponytail. In the background, he saw one of the spires of Arkhon Academy. An arm clothed in a white dress shirt was wrapped around the woman's shoulder.
The more Sky stared at the woman, the more familiar she seemed.
"I know her ... ," Sky muttered, the memory nagging at him. The Dorito paused halfway to the janitor's mouth.
"We won't let anything hurt you," the janitor promised without turning, his voice gentle, as if he were talking to a small child.
Sky shied away, taking several steps back. "Excuse me?"
"Not monsters, not hunters, not the Arkhon himself, no matter how badly he wants you," the janitor continued. "You'll grow up with my son and the others."
"Your son?" Sky backed away, utterly creped out. "Who's your son?"
The janitor turned to look at him. "We'll teach you how a hunter should act. All of us, we'll start aga-"
The janitor suddenly stopped and stared at nothing.
A chill shot down Sky's spine. He'd heard these words before . . . last year while edgewalking through the memory of when he was a baby. They were the words spoken in the library the night the hunters captured Solomon Rose, whom they believed then, and believed still, to be the Arkhon.
A man had held Sky in his arms and spoken those very words to him, promising something he could never deliver, promising Sky safety. The man had cut down a ring of monsters around the pendulum before fighting the Shadow Man, the one who could slip through shadows, the one who'd turned Sky and Errand into Changelings that very night.
Sky's great protector had fallen while defending him. White light, like a physical thing, had whipped out of the Hunter's Mark during the Changing and plunged through the monocle, into his protector's eye.
Sky stared at the janitor and imagined him dean-shaven, with cropped hair, a long black trench coat covering slacks and a dress shirt, and a thick white monocle on his eye. His great protector, the one who'd given up so much for him, had been right in front of him the whole time, and Sky had never spared him a second look.
"You're Nikola," Sky said, bewildered, the puzzle pieces snapping into place. "You're the hunter who built the Arkhon's prison with Phineas. You protected me."
Nikola glanced back at Sky, looking past him rather than at him.
"They'll never find it that way," Nikola muttered, dumping out his Doritos and putting the bag over his head. 'The coffin is empty."
"What?" Sky glanced over his shoulder, but once again there was nothing there save Fog and forest.
Nikola dropped the picture and picked up his picnic blanket. ''Why do the good ones always die? You'd better hurry if you want to save her."
"Save who?" Sky asked.
Muttering to himself about nacho cheese, urinal cakes, and glowing saltines, Nikola spun and walked away, disappearing into the Fog. Sky picked up the picture and raced after him.
"Wait! Who is this? Who's your son?" Sky yelled.
But Nikola-the Genius, the Protector, the Mad Janitor of Exile-was gone.
Chapter 7: Grove of the Fallen
The wind dragged the Fog through the forest, thinning it and spreading it out for miles around. From the growth of moss on the trees, Sky knew he was heading north. He'd contemplated circling back to follow the trail of wax and feathers and, presumably, the shooter, Fred, and the Marrowick, but he'd given up the idea, fearing that the Darkhorn might have the same thought.
Besides, an injured hunter hid somewhere to the north, judging by the trail of blood. This hun
ter and the other- the shooter-hadn't tried to kill him or they'd both be at Arkhon Academy right now getting treated for Bolger venom. They'd defied Morton's orders. That meant one or both might be potential allies against Morton, should Sky's plan fail, and against Bedlam. Or, they might just kill him while trying to kill each other. Either way, they were up here for some reason, and he meant to find out why and how Fred and the Marrowick were tied up in all this.
Still troubled by Nikola but not sure what to do about it, Sky closed himself off completely to the Piebalds to prevent the Darkhorn and Bedlam from tracking him so easily. He left the swamps behind, moving deeper into the unknown. Without the Piebalds guiding him, he felt exposed and traveled more slowly than he liked, fearing what he'd encounter. Here, the forest thinned and the ancient trees grew taller and broader and somehow more disturbing-the angles wrong, bent and twisted.
Following the trail of blood, he circled around a massive hole that seemed to go down forever. He passed a row of barrows-dark burial hills-and black trees that sent shivers through him. As he continued on, the land, if possible, became even more wretched than the swamps. The numerous crags became pitted and charred and jutted from the earth like a long-forgotten palace or the remains of a swallowed city. Dozens of black streams raced between the rocks, some continuing southwest to join the rivers and swamps, others disappearing into the cracks and gaping holes, great waterfalls of darkness falling into nothing.
Ancient trees grew tall and few, their black branches long and spread out, wrapped together like fingers high above him.
He had never had the time, nor the inclination, to explore this dark and dangerous wasteland. He didn't want to explore it now, but instinct and a certain morbid curiosity were driving him on. Who were these two hunters and why were they here in the Sleeping Lands? And why now? Once again, he thought the timing wasn't a coincidence. Bedlam's army was on its way to destroy Exile, the foreign hunters were here to stop Bedlam, and these two hunters were somehow involved. Everything seemed to revolve around Bedlam, and Sky suspected that Bedlam's arrival was somehow driving these two hunters as well.
Of course, the real question was: Why had Bedlam come to Exile in the first place?
Sky had read about Solomon and Alexander's heroic capture of the terrible monster Bedlam at the beginning of The Edge of Oblivion. He remembered reading about how Bedlam was plotting to destroy the hunters, and how Solomon and Alexander pleaded with him to change his ways. Bedlam had refused and sworn that he would reclaim his father's throne and wipe the hunters from the face of the earth before making all people bow to him. Then, he'd attacked Solomon and Alexander on the spot. They defended themselves with their shimmering blades, while begging Bedlam to give up his mad quest. Finally, with no other options, Solomon and Alexander had wrapped Bedlam in threads of light and trapped him in an unbreakable shell-the Chrysalis. They promised him that one day, when his heart was pure and filled with love, he would emerge like a butterfly.
It was the beginning of the Edgewalker Wars. The rest of the book detailed the brutal wars and how Solomon tracked down and killed every last Edgewalker.
Of course, Alexander and a few other chroniclers had written the book, and as Sky had learned last year and numerous times since, hunters lied. It was quite possible that nothing in the story was true, in which case Sky had little to go on to figure out why Bedlam had come to Exile. Clearly Bedlam hated the hunters and had every intention of destroying Exile; one didn't bring an army to make friends. At the same time, there were relatively few hunters in Exile. If Bedlam had just wanted to kill hunters, he could have gone anywhere, such as the Academy of Legend Chase had mentioned. Whatever and wherever the Academy of Legend was, it sounded like a good place to start. They had to have more hunters there, based on how many they'd sent to Exile.
But Bedlam had chosen to attack Exile first, and that meant he wanted something here, something more than just to kill hunters. If Bedlam somehow knew about Solomon taking the Arkhon's body-a secret known by almost no one-then he could, feasibly, have come for revenge. Bedlam would have to hate Solomon more than just about anyone, besides maybe Alexander, who had died centuries ago due to an unfortunate sword through the neck from an unknown assassin. But if Sky were trapped, the first thing he would do was free himself, especially if he had failed to take control of the one person-namely him-who could have given him an advantage.
But to free himself, Bedlam would have to escape an unbreakable Chrysalis, and to do that, he'd have to have a pure heart filled with love.
Sky laughed.
Even as a small boy, he had thought the idea was not only cheesy, but completely ridiculous: If Bedlam's mind and body were trapped, how could his heart ever change? But there had to be some way for Bedlam to free himself. It was the only reason for coming to Exile that made sense.
Sky could only hope that the hunter he was tracking knew more about it than he did.
As he came around an immense, sharp-edged crag, he found an inscription beside a narrow gap:
Grove of the Fallen,
Chosen of the First
No slowly seeping poison
taints their morbid thirst.
Disturb their slumber
- disregard this sign –
and join them six feet under,
with maggots in thy mind
Feeling anxious, Sky walked through the narrow gap and clown a steep path. Gray-and-black rock towered over him on both sides, growing taller the farther down he went until he was hundreds of feet below the highest point.
His Pounder hand-cannon was busted, his Jumpers empty, and he'd used up his last can of Fog. The protective Shimmer would recharge on its own eventually, but, at best, he had one or two zaps left. If this place lived up to its engraving, he was destined for brain maggots.
On the other side of the gap, he found himself standing in front of a strange grove. Sheer gray-and-black cliffs, spattered with waterfalls, surrounded the grove entirely, with a few gaps leading out. Lush white trees covered in sparkling leaves and twinkling blue fruit lit up the grove-its very beauty making Sky leery, and reminding him of why he hated botany: Things that looked that good were never that good.
The trail of blood he'd first noticed near the swamps had long since disappeared, but the injured hunter was in a hurry and sloppy, leaving Sky plenty of tracks to follow. He crept into the grove, staying as far away from the trees as he could. Fireflies of all colors darted here and there, and eerie green moss rustled on tree trunks and slunk across earth and obsidian like slugs. He passed odd, bright, bell-shaped flowers and silvery grass that hummed in the wind like an eerie choir. Golden reeds strummed together like cellos, and the trees swayed and whispered until the grove was filled with haunting music.
Sky felt his tension and anxiety slip away, little by little.
The air felt cleaner here, the night brighter, his heart more hopeful. Glancing down, he was surprised to find his Hunter's Mark warm and glowing, the light in the Mark mingling with the light in the grove. The light seemed to move through him, washing away aches and pains he didn't even know he had, and others he was all too aware of. He wanted to be wary-to watch for the traps that must be lying in wait-but for the first time in nearly a year, he felt something he'd almost forgotten....
In the ghostly melodies of this unnatural grove, he felt peaceful.
He pressed his fingernails into his Eye of Legend, the pain helping him focus. Now wasn't the time to get all peaceful; this place was dangerous. If he didn't pay attention, the only peace he would find would be the eternal kind.
In the center of the grove, Sky came upon a clearing and an enormous stone statue, easily a hundred feet tall, of a woman rising from the earth. Ivy shrouded the lower half of her body as it twirled out of the ground like a sickly gray beanstalk.
Her left arm and part of her face had sloughed off and Sky could see the remains strewn across the smaller monuments, statues, and graves that surrounded her, many of which had
been crushed to rubble. Her right hand was stretched out in front of her, hovering over the statue of a kneeling man. On her palm, Sky saw the Hunter's Mark.
He crept forward, feeling more and more confused. He'd seen a lot of things in the last year- man-eating pumpkin patches, aggressive pine trees, hardened desserts, even a half man, half manatee (a Humanatee) , not to mention a crazy janitor with a Doritos bag on his head-but he'd never dreamed of a place like this. Everything else was so horrible, so nightmarishly awful, but this ... this ... was wonderful-mindblowingly creepy, yet magical at the same time.
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