The Crow

by Alison Croggon

  Furtively Hem traced his path to the fence: perhaps if he covered himself with a glimveil he might make it there, and be able to scramble over it. But he didn't like his chances, with a thousand snouts and the Spider baying after him. He tried to control his panic and to focus on what the Spider was saying.

  "Before we leave for Dagra, we will deal with this recreant scum," said the Hull. "Bring the traitor forward!"

  Hem tensed for flight, expecting to be grabbed: but then he realized that a shackled figure was already being dragged into the training ground. With an overwhelming astonishment, he saw it was a Hull. The snouts were as dumbstruck as he was: the bloodthirsty growl that had risen when the Spider announced the discovery of the spy died away into blank silence. There would be no cur kill today: Hulls could not be killed by any ordinary means.

  It could not be a scapegoat if it was a Hull, Hem thought hurriedly. It must be a real spy. Was it one of Hared's allies? With his mouth open, he watched as the Hull was thrown to its knees in front of the Spider. It stayed perfectly still, its head cowled by its black cloak. With a gesture of contempt, the Spider ripped off the cloak. For the briefest moment, Hem recognized the Hull he had seen on his first night, the glimmer­spelled image of a beautiful woman. Then there was a gasp from the snouts, and Hem knew the glimmerspell had been destroyed. For the first time, the snouts were seeing the true horror of a Hull.

  "See what a traitor is, my little curs?" said the Hull, with a bitter edge to its voice. "Dry skin on dry bones, no more. Yea, even as they live, they are dead. This one sneaks to another master and even as our Master stretches out his glorious hand in conquest, plots to ride our power and wrest it from us. She spies for Imank, the Black Captain, who even now proves his disloyalty. And this cannot be borne!"

  The final words rose to a thin scream that scorched Hem's ears, making him wince with pain. But now he was bewildered: what did the Spider mean? What did it mean by treachery? It did not seem to be speaking of the Light at all.

  "I say again, this cannot be borne! And so this one will be cast into the Abyss that awaits her, where her shriveled soul shall await the judgment of a crueler master than ours. And she will never return!"

  For the first time the kneeling Hull moved. It cowered away, covering its eyes. Despite everything, Hem felt a tremor of pity. That small gesture was so human – the futile wish to cover one's eyes against a terrible fate. The Spider lifted its hands, and there was a flash of light, unbearably bright in the dim daylight, and a dreadful shriek that echoed through Hem's very bones. He blinked, half blinded. When the after-shadows cleared from his sight, he saw that before the Spider was no longer anything resembling a human figure: just a pile of dry bones, with the black cloak settling down over them.

  "All traitors here, highborn or cur, will suffer so," said the Spider softly. "Remember that, my little insects. We have many enemies, and all our enemies will be flung into the pit of end­less torment." The Hull spat viciously on the pile of bones and, gathering its cloak around it, turned and strode swiftly back to the Prime Hut.

  Shaking, Hem returned to Blood Block Two with the other snouts, who were very subdued. So, the Hulls hadn't been look­ing for him at all, but some other spy. He was still baffled by the Spider's words. Did the Light have other allies he didn't know about?

  He suddenly remembered a conversation in Nal-Ak-Burat about the growing rivalry between Imank, the captain who had led the Black Army against Turbansk, and the Nameless One. Sharma owes Imank much, and I doubt that Imank would be slow to remind him of it, the Den Raven Bard Til-Naga had said. It is possible that Sharma fears Imank more than he fears any captain of Annar.

  Not for the first time, Hem felt frustrated by how little he knew of what was going on in the wider world. Maybe this Hull had been spying for Imank. It made sense that Imank might be plotting to overthrow the Nameless One: Imank was, by all reports, a very powerful sorcerer. And if it were true that the child armies were an important part of the Nameless One's strategy, Imank would be as interested in them as the Light was. It would explain why there had been no snouts at Turbansk, though: the Nameless One would not like them to be under Imank's authority.

  Were the curs, then, to be used against Imank? And how was Imank proving disloyal? By declaring an open rebellion against the Nameless One? Or was something else going on? Had Imank simply become too powerful, and had the Nameless One decided to curb the sorcerer while he could?

  There was no one Hem could ask. He would have to find out for himself.

  He shouldered his pack, which was heavy: all the snouts were expected to carry their own arms and supplies. The food, he had noted sadly, was mostly morralin-dosed pulses, cooked into solid biscuits and wrapped in dirty cloth. How was he to live on nothing? He didn't dare to make any raids on the gar­den, which had been stripped, in any case, of all its produce. Some meager strings of beans and a few turnips were not going to sustain him.

  He pushed the problem away to think about later, and stepped out with the other snouts. A slight drizzle made the camp look even more desolate than usual. With the dogsoldiers flanking them and Hulls at the front and back of the column, the snouts began to march to Den Raven.

  The trees that covered the Glandugir Hills thickened rapidly, but Hem saw, to his relief, that they were following a road – barely a track, really – which meant they would not have to hack their way through the vegetation as he had at first feared. They all marched in their blocks. The track was wide enough to permit four abreast at most, and the lines thinned out, making the snouts feel vulnerable; they all jostled for a place in the middle of the track, as far away from the trees as possible. Sometimes these arguments came to blows.

  It was the first time that Hem had seen the snouts so afraid, and it didn't make him feel any better. Ire was right: he had almost no chance of survival if he went to Dagra. And how would he return, with all of Den Raven and the Glandugir Hills to cross? For a wild few moments, he almost made a break for it into the trees; but he bit his lip, telling himself not to be a cow­ard. If Zelika was among the snouts, he would have more possibility of finding her on the road; and this was his chance to discover what was really happening with the snouts.

  He tried not to think about Ire. He had recklessly attempted to contact the crow again, in the dawn light before the snouts were called from their beds, but he had not answered.

  From his position, Hem could not see the beginning or the end of the line, and even the nearest dogsoldier was almost out of sight. He was glad of this; even the snouts found the dogsol­diers uncanny, and the sense of wrongness near them was so strong that Hem could barely avoid retching when one was only a few paces away. It was the same feeling that the deathcrows gave him: a sense of something vital irretrievably blighted. In the camp he had scarcely been aware of them; they guarded the walls, and lived in a hut in the far corner from the Blood Block, a few hundred paces from the Blind House. Now he was painfully aware of their presence.

  Earlier that morning, as they marched toward the Glandugir Hills, Hem had seen a dogsoldier close up for the first time. Although, after the past few days, he had thought he was now inured to shock, the sight had left him deeply disturbed.

  Dogsoldiers were a weird mixture of metal and flesh: it was hard to tell where their armor ended and their bodies began, and when Hem came close to them he could feel the heat they gave off, like braziers. They were heavily built, half again as tall as a big man, and moved with a deliberate, menacing slowness. In place of hands they had grasping instruments of articulated metal, with retractable claws of blue steel, and in the middle were black holes from which, at will, they could spit the liquid fire that caused such fearsome injuries. They did not carry any weapons: they didn't have to.

  But it wasn't their size, or that they so clearly existed only in order to kill and maim, that made him recoil. He had caught a glimpse of the face under a dogsoldier's iron helmet, a face disfigured by the monstrously fanged steel muzzles that pro­j
ected from its cheekbones, and he saw its eyes. Human eyes, with a human intelligence. In that moment, he realized with a shock that the dogsoldier was, or had once been, a human being.

  Had they been ordinary men and women who were, by some sorcery he could not understand, tormented into these figures of nightmare? Did dogsoldiers breed? Or did they all have to be formed, like snouts were formed? And if they were fashioned from ordinary people, what did they feel about what they had become?

  In that flash of empathy, Hem hoped passionately that the dogsoldiers felt nothing at all. If they did, then to be a dogsoldier must be ghastly beyond imagining. There was no clue in their distorted faces: their eyes were hard and expres­sionless, as pitiless as any Hull's. But perhaps, in the depths of those mutilated bodies, there still existed the ghosts of softer memories – even, perhaps, of love... The thought filled Hem with a bottomless horror, and he turned away, heaving. They were like the snouts, but worse. And he had not thought that there could be anything worse than the snouts.

  He shook himself. He couldn't afford to think like this. Merely surviving was going to be hard enough.

  The Hulls set a blistering pace. Despite the track, it was hard going: up and down hills that were sometimes very steep, but climbing more than descending. It wasn't long before they were in a heavy forest, and the canopy above them twined thickly together, so it seemed always to be dusk. The snouts peered anxiously into the trees as they marched and Hem thought about the winged things that had attacked him and Zelika on the edges of the hills, and then tried not to think about it. The path twisted between the trees, churned by their feet to sucking mud, which was slippery and clung heavily to Hem's sandals. The farther they wound their way into the forest, the sicker Hem felt; his legs seemed to be made of stone, and there was a constant foul taste in his mouth. The air was thick and heavy, somehow hard to breathe.

  The first day was uneventful. They slept where they stopped, on the track; despite its dampness, none of the snouts dared to venture to the drier ground beneath the trees. The Hulls lit fires by sorcery, slashing wood from the trees nearby to feed them, and the snouts huddled around the heat, staring out fearfully into the night. It was full of strange noises: branches groaning in rhythms that sounded like a kind of language, sinister rustlings, the howls and barks of animals hunting, the shrieks of night birds.

  In the moments before sleep overtook him, Hem wished he could speak to Ire. He thought about how angry he had been when they had last spoken, how they had parted with hard words between them. The memory was so painful that he for­got altogether about his inner shield, and realized with a horrified start that, for the first time since he had entered Sjug'hakar Im, he had let it fail. Hastily he restored it, cursing himself. Despite his physical misery, Hem dropped asleep almost at once.

  When he opened his eyes, he was staring straight up at a pattern of leaves and sky far above his head, but something was different about it. He sat up and found that he was in a forest, but a very different place from the nightmare woods of the Glandugir Hills. He knew at once, by an echo of music that sounded in his mind, that he was again in Nyanar's home. By some instinct, he knew that this was one of the forested hills that he had seen in the distance from the base of the great tree. The now familiar sense of deep content rose inside him, like sap rising in a tree toward the spring sky.

  Again it was dawn, and birds called their morning challenges from every tree. Shafts of light sifted through the canopy high above him, illuminating a clump of toadstools here, green ferns there, and the smell of earth and rotting leaves rose up, rich and heavy. The trees were so old and high, and their canopies so thick, that the ground beneath them was only sparsely covered with vegetation, and he could see ahead for a long way, down a slope into a valley where a small brook gurgled under a lacing of greenery.

  Hem could see the damp shadows the sunlight could not pierce, gray with a heavy dew, but he felt no cold; rather, a delicious warmth stole through his body, as if he were sitting in front of a gentle hearth. And the dreadful sense of ill was gone from his body, the tormenting nausea that had been growing with each step he took deeper into the Glandugir Hills. This for­est was unhurt.

  Unwronged, said Nyanar's voice.

  Hem looked around, but could see nothing but the trees. Where am I? he asked.

  Where you have ever been, Nyanar answered. You are elsewhen.

  With a shock that went through his whole body, Hem finally understood. It is not where, but when. He was in the Glandugir Hills, but as they had been, before the Nameless One had poi­soned them, before they had been twisted awry by the sickness that afflicted this country.

  How... ? But Hem couldn't finish the question. An inarticu­late grief for the maiming of this beautiful place constricted his throat. He thought of the dread of the trees of Glandugir, the uncreatures that inhabited them, and found his sight blurred with sudden tears.

  You know how, said the Elidhu. The details do not matter. The Song was stolen and much was marred.

  Hem nodded sadly.

  Time is not as you know it, you mortal creatures, said the Elidhu. A new gentleness was in his voice, as if he knew what Hem was feeling. You think time springs forward, like a river, and you are ripples glinting on its surface, moving ever forward, never back. But to us it is a sea, and all times exist together. Nothing is truly gone... Do not be sad.

  Hem nodded, and felt his sorrow dissolve. It would come back, he knew, but now he was utterly content in the strange present he inhabited. But the Elidhu spoke again.

  I brought you here, so that you might rest, he said. But I cannot help you past this point. You are marching out of my ken, out of my home, into the dark center. Have a care, Songboy. Remember what is already spoken on the winds of time. I will await your return.

  Then, as suddenly as it had been there, the voice was gone. Hem set his back to the bole of the nearest tree, and stared down the slope before him. As always when he entered the realm of the Elidhu, he accepted what was there without question. He didn't think about what Nyanar had said. He didn't think any­thing at all; he just let the deep peace of the forest soak into him. A huge azure butterfly danced raggedly in a beam of light a few paces away, its iridescent colors flickering hypnotically in and out of shadow. Hem gazed at it, fascinated, and was not con­scious of the exact moment when he fell back into slumber.

  He was woken by a confused hubbub of screams. Automatically reaching for his sword he started up, bleared with sleep, looking wildly around him. It was black night. At first the darkness was so complete he might as well have been blindfolded: the fire near him had gone out. He could still feel its heat: it was as if it had been suddenly smothered. Then a Hull farther ahead flared lividly, as if its whole body were made of lightning, and a bolt of fire arced into the trees, throwing a confused wrack of light and thrashing shadow. Almost at the same time two dogsoldiers spat red flames farther away down the track.

  Hem drew a long shuddering breath and kept his ground, looking around and trying to assess what was happening. The snouts nearby were panicking, screaming and running in circles, striking out at each other. Then Hem felt something like a whiplash across his mind. He reeled, stunned, and watched, his eyes wide, as the snouts suddenly snapped into focus. Their eyes went blank, and they turned outward as one to face the dark­ness. They seemed to be following orders that he could not hear. Hem had enough presence of mind to copy their movements.

  A group of snouts from another block was attacking something that he couldn't see. A ghastly gobbling sound tore through the darkness, and then a childish scream, and Hem stood rooted to the ground, unable to move for fear. Then there was a crash of branches from another direction, closer to where Hem was standing, and the Blood Block turned to face it. A Hull running down the track toward them cast another bolt of lightning, and in its sharp illumination Hem, carried forward in the rush, had a brief glimpse of a huge, armor-plated creature like a giant scorpion, at least twice as big as a cow. It
scuttled with a terrifying rapidity, its tail tipped by a white sting dripping with venom, trembling evilly over its head. Even as Hem stared, the tail struck out like a flail, quicker than the eye could follow, and stung Slitter. She fell back with a high wail, writhing and frothing at the mouth. In the space of three heart­beats the child was still, her sword dropping from her nerveless hand.

  None of the other snouts took the slightest notice of Slitter's fate. They swarmed toward the monster, hacking at its eyes and tail with a furious savagery. They had no thought for their own safety. Hem was too close for comfort: his main instinct was to run away, but he feared, even in this chaos, that someone might notice. He made some stabs toward the creature, keeping as far away from its deadly tail and its merciless fangs and claws as possible.

  Then someone slashed off the sting, and the creature arced backward in agony, spewing black blood. Some splashed on two snouts, instantly bringing their skin up in welts. The others rushed forward, stabbing its eyes, and it coiled and uncoiled, lashing out with its claws. They slashed off its legs so it could not run, and then, although the creature was still twitching and gobbling, left it where it was.

  Hem felt a great band of pressure ease off his forehead. The will that had driven the snouts into such frenzy had let them go; they were no longer in its thrall. The snouts began to wipe their weapons on the grass, chattering excitedly to each other about the battle and complaining about the acrid stench of the blood. They ignored both the dying beast and their wounded or dead comrades. The first lot of snouts had dispatched the other monster already; its mutilated carcass lay twitching not far away. Hem counted six bodies scattered around the dying mon­sters. A Hull was relighting the fire with sorcery, and it blazed up into the branches above them.

  The snouts cheered at the flame, their eyes flashing with tri­umph. Now they were just normally ensorcelled, Hem thought; the morralin was not the whole of the binding. The Hulls con­trolled them as well, when it came to battle. He looked at the wounded snouts, resisting the urge to go and help them; noth­ing would expose him more quickly than any display of compassion. Hulls were moving toward them already; no doubt they had their own methods of healing.