The Crow

by Alison Croggon

  The Spider put up its hand and spoke. Although it hadn't lifted its voice, by some sorcery Hem could hear it perfectly, as if it spoke next to his ear.

  "Here is one who has broken the rules of the pack," the Spider said. There was a growl from the snouts, and the boy whimpered. A dark stain spread over the ground where he was standing: he had wet himself. Hem had never seen anybody so afraid.

  "What happens to traitors?" hissed the Spider.

  "Kill!" The word rumbled over the square, and then silence fell again. The Hull walked, with a painful slowness, back to the Prime Hut. The boy stood in the center – a small, broken figure, utterly alone. Even from this distance, Hem could see him shaking.

  When the Spider reached the Prime Hut, it hit a gong. It was the signal for sudden madness; the crowd of children started yelling and running to the center of the training ground. Hem yelled and ran with them, sick with fear. Very slightly he hung back, not enough to be noticed, but just enough so that he would not be among the first to reach the boy. As he neared him, he had a brief glimpse of the boy's face, his mouth stretched in a scream that no one could hear, and then he was overwhelmed by a surge of punching, biting, kicking figures, transformed into fren­zied demons. Someone elbowed Hem aside, almost knocking him over, in their frantic desire to get their blow in.

  It was over very quickly. The snouts, their bloodlust sated as quickly as it had been summoned, began to walk toward the mess hall, joking and laughing. Many were splattered with blood; some were even wiping blood from their mouths. A late­comer kicked the pathetic remains of what had been, only a few short moments before, a human being. It was scarcely recogniz­able, a broken carcass on the ground, still pathetically shackled. Hem's belly roiled with disgust and terror and pity: he had never seen anything so horrible and grotesque. He forced him­self to grin as Reaver came up to him, his eyes shining with a glazed ecstasy.

  "Whoo! About time we had one of those!" said Reaver, clapping his hands together in a horrible parody of glee. "Did you see how he wet himself? And look!" He held up a shred of flesh. "I got his ear!"

  Hem gave a coarse laugh, and followed Reaver into the mess hall.

  That night, Hem seriously considered escaping. He didn't think he could bear it. He thought about the mob, slavering and glassy-eyed in its lethal frenzy. He couldn't forget the look on the boy's face, his abject despair and terror, as the maddened children ran toward him.

  Perhaps Zelika had been cur-killed? Hem dismissed the thought at once; it was too unbearable to think of. He refused to believe she was dead; and in any case, even if there were only the smallest chance that Zelika was alive, he would continue until he found her. He was going to rescue her, and that was that.

  He wondered who the snouts had been before they were captured into brutalizing slavery, what families they had been torn from. Very occasionally he had seen flickerings of those former lives in vagrant expressions that chased across their faces: ghosts of gentler feelings, which were always followed by a brief dazed puzzlement, the same expression he had seen on Nisrah's face when Zelika had pleaded with him to escape. Who would the snouts be, if they survived the camp? How could they live with what they had been?

  Hem was no innocent: he knew what children could do to each other. He had thought himself prepared for anything he might encounter. Now he realized that he had been wrong. The forces in the camp were much more toxic than the mindless, vicious pettiness of damaged children: the violence was con­trolled, focused, and deadly. It was intelligent.

  It made him deeply afraid.

  But underneath Hem's fear lay a horrified pity. Murderer or murdered, every snout was a victim.

  Hem had not thought about Maerad for a long time. His sister had slipped to the back of his mind, an anxiety and grief that lay among many others: his fears for Saliman and Soron; his sorrow at being forced to leave Oslar and his vocation for heal­ing; his mourning for the destruction of the great city of Turbansk, a destruction he still could not fully imagine or com­prehend. But this night her face sprang vividly into his mind, as if she had called him across the dark, empty leagues that separated them. He realized with a pang of guilt how long it had been since he had thought of her, and his longing for her broke open inside him like a fresh wound. He missed her so badly. He had missed her all his life.

  The nightmare that surrounded him was no phantom shadow of dream; nothing could take its stain off his soul. Yet right now, more than anything else in the world, Hem wanted Maerad's small, cool hands on his forehead to wipe away the bad dreams. He wanted the comfort of her breathing body next to him as he slept, the complex spice of the smell that was hers alone. A grieving love filled his body, a sweet, unassuagable ache that seeped through him from the marrow of his very bones. Maerad, my sister...

  When at last he slipped into an uneasy sleep, the dream of the silent wave came back and made him cry out, although he did not wake. In his dream, he realized the earth's slow, molten anger was part of the music the tree man had whispered to him – its violent bass notes.

  Even in his sleep, Hem found himself wondering what an Elidhu really was; such beings were so outside his ken they were almost unimaginable. They did not fear death, because they did not die. The implications of this seeped through Hem's dreams, infecting him with awe and horror. The music of the Elidhu was shot with darkness, which both deepened its mys­tery and beauty, and drew it far beyond Hem's grasp. The Elidhu were neither good nor evil; such words were invented by human beings to explain human actions. They did not apply to the Elementals. He could not understand them; yet some­how, since the tree man had spoken to him, that music had become part of him.

  The voice of his dream, the Elidhu's voice, sounded in his mind, and Hem's fear began to ebb away, leaving behind it, like a gentle residue, the peace he had felt a few nights earlier in the Elidhu's home. There is no healing here, the Elidhu had said. But also, giving Hem a mysterious sense of hope: It is not where, but when.

  XX

  THE BLIND HOUSE

  The longer Hem stayed at the camp, the more difficult he found his double life. He had secret tasks almost every night, so he was often short of sleep. On his fifth day there he had to renew his disguise, which required him to make a very strong mageshield and then perform the demanding spell, and the following day he could barely get through the training. The continuous fear that he might be exposed at any moment only added to his weariness.

  Perhaps the worst thing he felt was loneliness. He spoke to Ire as often as he could manage, but their mindtouchings were always hurried and brief. Ire told him that he had established a territory for himself, throwing out rival birds from an almond tree, and was foraging without too much difficulty; but he was bored and missed Hem. He had flown off to meet Hared on the day that Hem was supposed to return, taking the information Hem had passed on about the structures of the camp. He came back with a curt message: if Hem were caught, he was to kill himself at once.

  I know that already, Hem thought impatiently. For a moment he felt angry that Hared had not seen fit to praise him for what he was finding out about the child army; it was more than the Bards could have possibly known before. But, he realized resignedly, that was really asking too much: after all, he had expressly disobeyed Hared's orders. Still, he was sure that Hared would find his information very useful.

  * * * *

  After the exhausting business of renewing his disguise, Hem found that his weariness was beginning to be a real problem. He didn't have to pretend that he was as dull as Slasher: his mind was thick with exhaustion. The only thing that kept him alert was terror at the thought of being unmasked.

  The following night he decided to go out spying again, despite his tiredness; he felt that he didn't have much time, and that he had to discover as much as he could about Sjug'hakar Im and find Zelika. As he lay in bed, listening to the snores and muffled cries of the sleeping snouts, he wondered about his dream of the Elidhu – if it was a dream – three nights before.
He remembered that Saliman had taken his vision of the tree man in Nal-Ak-Burat very seriously, and had not dismissed it as the fancy of a disordered mind. So why shouldn't this vision also be real? Hem remembered that Saliman had given the tree man a name, and groped around in his mind before he recalled it: Nyanar. That was it.

  Who was this Nyanar? And what did he want with Hem? He seemed nothing like Maerad's descriptions of Ardina, who sounded almost human; this Elidhu, even when he took human form, did not seem human at all. And yet, despite his prickling awareness of the Elidhu's strangeness, an awareness that was only this side of fear, Hem felt an intimacy, as if the Elidhu plucked some deep chord of kinship inside him. Perhaps that odd feeling of familiarity was part of the music that Nyanar had breathed into him, which had opened his senses to a new, uncomfortable awakening.

  He wondered why he had felt so at home in a wild place he had never seen before. This seemed an even deeper mystery. What did Nyanar mean by home, after all? Hem had not had a home since he could remember; almost his entire life he had been alone and ophaned, abandoned in a cruel world. Turbansk had been a home for him, almost – especially when he had found that he was a healer, when he had found work that he could do. But Turbansk was gone. And when he imagined a home for himself, a real home, Maerad was always there. This was a different feeling, and he didn't understand it at all.

  He was too tired to think further. Whether it was true or not, he could do with some of that enchanted sleep; his whole body ached, remembering the sheer luxury of that rest. His longing for sleep was so intense it overshadowed even his need for food. He battled to stay awake, but his eyelids kept shutting of their own accord, and at last he gave up the struggle and drifted into the blank sleep of utter exhaustion...

  ...and woke, after an unmeasurable, dreamless time, under the high tree, in a clear, unstained landscape.

  Again it was just after dawn, and the beams of the rising sun stretched over the trembling grasses, turning individual drops of dew into prisms of unbearable brightness. Hem blinked and stared, his belly taut with a sudden anticipation: would Nyanar step into the air again and speak with him? He sat up and waited for what seemed like a long time, trembling with a strange, inexpressible delight, but no one appeared. Oddly, it didn't disappoint him, and the sweet tautness seemed to gather and grow stronger inside him, until he thought he might burst.

  I am here, said a voice into his mind. I am all that is here. There is no here that is not me.

  It was almost as if Hem were thinking these words himself, and yet he knew they did not come from his own mind. They fell into his hearing as gently as petals falling onto a stream. Hem nodded, suddenly understanding, and relaxed. Yes, Nyanar was this place; he was not in this place. He did not need to make a home here; he was that home. Hem breathed out slowly. He thought he could begin to understand what an Elidhu was.

  The sun lifted itself over the tree-darkened hills, pouring its warmth onto his back, and Hem's shoulders relaxed as he remembered his weariness. He had longed to be in this place, he had longed to lie down on this soft grass, to restore himself. Unquestioningly, like a small baby nestling into the arms of its mother, he curled up and fell asleep.

  Over the next few days, Hem kept alert for any scraps of infor­mation, finding that Slasher's simplicity was a useful mask. Because the snouts thought Slasher was stupid, their talk around him was often unguarded; it was as if he were invisible. On the other hand, his food supplies were becoming his major difficulty: his raids on the vegetable garden were more and more risky.

  On his final raid, Hem almost ran into a dogsoldier on guard in the darkness. He retreated in confusion, his heart hammering, but he had been so hungry he had overcome his fear and stolen into the garden anyway. He realized that his thefts must have been noticed, and it was only a matter of time before he was caught. When a snout was sentenced to the spike for stealing vegetables a couple of days later, Hem was stricken by guilt. It was, as Reaver had told him with such macabre relish, a particularly horrible way to die; and the child was being pun­ished for Hem's crime.

  He joined a small group of snouts who had the lowest status in their blocks, and who sometimes didn't get enough to sate their ravenous appetites. They lingered by the kitchen after meals, begging for more to eat, until they were chased away to their blocks. Sometimes, for the amusement of the cooks, the snouts were thrown scraps, for which they would fight like starving dogs.

  These gatherings were always chaotic, but Hem used his Bard hearing and eavesdropped on the cooks' casual conversa­tions. He was very cautious in his listening, as the cooking was done by low-ranking Hulls and he feared they might sense him. Once he thought he had betrayed himself when two Hulls looked up and swept their blank eyes toward the snouts. But in this way he discovered how the children were ensorcelled.

  It was, as he had suspected, something that was put in the food: a drug the cooks called morralin, made of the crushed shells of snails and the powdered root of some plant that Hem didn't know. There were three kinds, of differing strengths: one for the morning meal and one for the night, and another – a more potent mixture, Hem assumed – that was given before battle.

  One nerve-racking night, Hem covered himself with several layers of glimveil and raided the kitchen. This was his most dangerous mission so far, as the kitchens were next to the Prime Hut and there was a real risk he might be sensed. Wrinkling his nose at the smell of rotting peelings and other refuse, he found the three clay pots where the morralin was kept. He stole a small spoonful of each, careful not to touch it with his naked skin, and bound them in scraps of cloth. He could feel the sor­cery in the drug even through the cloth, as if it burned his hand. When he got a chance, he would give the bundles to Ire to send to Hared.

  His eavesdropping also solved his pressing hunger. He dis­covered that the morralin was cooked only with the pulses that made up the major part of the snouts' meals. Hem thought that he could perhaps eat the other foods without harm, and tried some cautious experiments. He was dubious about the meat, remembering that it was hunted from the Glandugir Hills: what poisons might it hold? But sometimes the training left him so famished that he ate the meat anyway. He found his body was a good guide: he simply could not keep down anything tainted with morralin.

  He had been finding mealtimes increasingly difficult. When one of the Blood Block snouts made a derisive comment on his strange eating habits, he panicked. Even with the chaos at meal­times, when the snouts gobbled their food with an almost insane appetite, it was sometimes difficult to avoid eating with­out being noticed. He had developed an especially messy way of devouring his food that permitted him to spill much of it and scrape it off the table and into his sleeves with a bit of shielded illusion. At the worst, he would eat his meal and heave it up later, but he could not continue to vomit in the latrines without someone beginning to notice, and perhaps even reporting it to a Hull. Now he could eat at least some of the food he was given. Vile though the meals were, they were enough to stop him starving.

  With the edge taken off his hunger, Hem began seriously to search for Zelika. It was much more difficult than he had expected.

  Part of the problem was that the snouts, with their cropped hair and dull uniform dress, all looked the same from a dis­tance. In the long hours of the counting, Hem would scan all the other blocks, trying to discern her face, but it was hopeless. There was no communication between the different blocks: they kept to themselves, and ate always at the same tables. Every few days during training, one block might be assigned to fight another, and Hem took advantage of this to examine furtively the faces of the snouts; but he realized, with an increasing sense of despair, that there were some blocks he would never have a chance to see close up, and if he did not, he would never be sure if Zelika were there.

  After two days of increasing desperation, he decided to try to feel for her with his mind. If she were there, even if she were bewitched, surely he would know. This was magery even more difficult t
han the disguising spell, and much more dangerous: because he would be touching minds, there was a real risk that a Hull might become aware of him. He permitted himself an unbroken night's sleep before he attempted it.

  When the snouts were snoring quietly, he made his shield and then summoned the image of Zelika to his memory. Like everyone else, she had her own unique mental vibration: it was like a particular music, a particular smell, a particular glow. Even if she were bewitched, it would still be there, however blurred, and he knew he would recognize it if he felt it. Cautiously and delicately, Hem sent out his magesense into the camp, searching for any trace of her presence.

  He tried to work methodically. He started from the south end of the camp and moved in a spiral, sniffing each mind he encountered until he was sure it was not Zelika. But very soon he found himself getting confused; some dreams were louder than others, some minds more pungent, and his skills were not precise enough to be able to sort one clearly from another, or to keep track of his direction. The dreams of the snouts bled into his head, dreams of violence and terror, or vagrant memories of other lives that even the morralin could not erase entirely. There were too many. Once, his scalp tightening with fear, he almost touched a Hull.

  He knew that the vigilance by the hut was beginning to stir, and he hadn't finished. Desperately, he scouted over some dark places he had not been – not bothering with each individual mind, just searching for some sign, some scent. And just at the last minute, he thought he felt her. He touched a particularly bad knot of several minds tangled together, a jangle of night­marish emotions that made him flinch. But somewhere inside it there was surely something: a tiny, familiar glow in the teeming darknesses, a faint perfume that recalled Zelika, smeared and unclear, fogged by sorcery, darkened and twisted with terrible pain. Eagerly he reached forward, trying to get closer, to be absolutely sure; but the sense vanished, and he could feel the vigilance tensing, on the verge of triggering, and he had to withdraw. He lay on his thin, lumpy pallet, his heart pounding, utterly drained by what he had done. He felt the vigilance slowly relax, and breathed out with relief.