Blackveil: Book Four of Green Rider

by Kristen Britain

  “You are very quiet,” Yates said.

  “Sorry. Not much to say.”

  “I wish you’d tell a story or something to help pass the time.”

  She thought about the legends of Laurelyn and Castle Argenthyne because of where they were, and because her mother always sang and told her stories of Laurelyn to soothe her when she was little. She did not, however, even possess the energy to tell a story.

  The lethargy settled in, took on a dreamlike quality. She saw the figure again. It tumbled and leaped through the trees like an acrobat. She tried to stir, tried to speak to Yates, but could not seem to do either. Yates just sat there, gazing unseeing into the forest.

  The figure somersaulted right up to her and came to rest on bent knee. His face and head were encased in a looking mask just like the tumbler that had been at the king’s masquerade, but the mirror of this mask was tarnished and corroded. She could barely see her reflection in it.

  The tumbler then rose and backed away, and with a flourish pointed to others stepping out from behind trees, ladies and gentlemen in ragged finery, faded longcoats and yellowed lace. They wore masks of grotesque horned demons and ferocious creatures with gaping, toothy maws, the eyeholes empty sockets. They leered at her.

  Discordant music wafted through the woods and the ladies and gentlemen danced, their movements jerky, dead. A mockery of the king’s masquerade ball.

  This is not real, she thought. Just the bent, craggy trees with their crazy limbs seeming to drift in the fog. Just her own madness making her see things.

  She still could not move or speak, but this time when the tumbler knelt before her, she gazed at her wan reflection in his mask behind the tarnish—until it changed. A vision took hold. Blood splashed the looking mask like crimson rain on a window, then smeared away revealing a face. Not her own, but one she knew well. The king’s. She swallowed hard. His face was pallid, lifeless, the stained mask making it look diseased. The vision pulled back. He lay in bed and people in black surrounded him like mourners. And it was gone. The looking mask returned to its dull countenance.

  “No!” Karigan cried. “Tell me!”

  The tumbler leaped away.

  “Karigan?” Yates said anxiously.

  The dancers twirled away into the mist, and with each blink, the tumbler became more distant. Karigan staggered painfully to her feet with the aid of the bonewood and attempted to pursue him.

  “Karigan?” This time Yates’ voice was sharper, alarmed.

  She kept going, bent on seeing more in the looking mask. Tears of pain and grief washed across her cheeks. What was this vision of the king? What had become of him?

  But the tumbler was gone. She searched the shadows, breathing hard, her body shaking with exertion and pain.

  Several pairs of green glinting eyes stared back at her. The shadows came to life. Large, bristling shadows.

  Oh, gods, she thought.

  “Karigan?” Yates called, his voice quavering with fear.

  She glanced back, saw more pairs of eyes, dark forms snuffling near him. A pack of Blackveil’s creatures had scented them out, two helpless people, one blind and the other injured—easy prey.

  But they were not helpless. Karigan shook the bonewood to staff length. “Yates,” she called, “draw your sword and knife!”

  With another glance she saw he already had. She shifted her grip on her staff and stood ready to defend herself.

  SHADOW BEASTS

  The creatures circled around Karigan, wove in and out of the trees. They watched her with unblinking green eyes. Had these been her dancers? She could not see them fully, for their dusky hides blended in with the forest, but she caught glimpses of barrel-chested torsos and limber hindquarters. Gray, slavering tongues hung from bear-trap jaws. She thought them wolflike, but nothing was certain in Blackveil.

  They slunk around her, snuffling and snarling, sometimes closer, sometimes farther away, always out of range of her staff. She swung it at a couple that came closest and they leaped away growling. It was clear they did not like the bonewood.

  How long, she wondered, would it keep them away?

  With a glance back at Yates, she saw the creatures creep close, retreating halfheartedly when Yates swept his sword through the air. His face was taut with concentration as if he listened for the slightest pad of foot or exhalation.

  Karigan backed toward him. They must stand together. The beasts moved with her, and beyond, dancers swirled in the vapor, green glowing through the eyeholes of wolf masks.

  She shook her head. Not dancers, just more beasts, the play of dark and mist. Carefully she inched back toward Yates, the shadows watching her intently, eagerly.

  “Must hold it together,” she murmured to herself, but a battle raged in her mind and she was no longer sure of what was real.

  “Yates,” she said, “I’m coming back.”

  He did not reply, but she saw from the corner of her eye the gleam of his saber as he swept it at a fleet shadow.

  When finally she reached him, they stood back to back, the beasts swarming around them.

  “Are they real?” Karigan wondered aloud.

  Yates snorted. “I felt one breathe on my neck.”

  Karigan trembled with the effort to just stand. She’d eaten and drunk too little over the last couple days, and the lethargy pressed down on her shoulders like a mountain of granite. She’d no hope of fighting the creatures.

  Dancers, dancers careened around them; the flow of dresses, the spiraling motion, the seesawing music.

  She pressed her eyes shut and gripped her staff hard, recovering just in time to rap the skull of a beast that came close to tearing off Yates’ leg. It receded with a thunderous growl.

  Another charged them, but swerved away from Karigan’s staff. The beasts pressed hard to one side of them, but less so to the other. Karigan wondered why. When she glanced over her shoulder, there stood the tumbler. He beckoned her. Or maybe it was Lynx.

  “Lynx!” Karigan cried.

  “Lynx? Is it him?” Yates asked, his voice swelling with hope.

  “Yes, yes it is him.” Lynx was cloaked in the forest’s gloom, but it was him.

  “Hold onto my belt,” Karigan said. “We’re going to him.”

  Yates sheathed his long knife, but held onto his saber, and with Karigan’s guidance, clenched the back of her swordbelt. Leaving behind their lean-to shelter and supplies, Karigan started toward the beckoning Lynx, the shadow beasts parting before her, and rejoining the pack behind. They followed, a seething, stalking mass.

  “Lynx!” Karigan cried again. He was not any closer, and she speeded her steps causing Yates to stumble behind her.

  “Are we almost there?” he asked. “Are the others with him?”

  “Alone,” Karigan replied, pressing on. Why didn’t Lynx come to their aid? Where were the others?

  She jabbed her staff at a beast that edged around beside them. She totally missed it, but the creature returned whining back to the pack. Ahead, Lynx appeared ever farther away. He turned, striding into the distance.

  “Lynx!”

  Karigan strained against Yates’ weight. They were going to lose Lynx, just like before.

  “Karigan,” said Yates, “I can’t—”

  “Pick up your feet, just trust me!”

  She hastened her pace and Yates did his best to keep up. She ignored the pain of her leg, defied the wall of fatigue, and the shadow beasts rolled and crested like a wave pushing them ahead.

  The distance between them and Lynx widened more and more.

  “No, no, no,” Karigan muttered. “Not again!”

  She sprinted. Yates lost hold of her belt, and freed of his weight, she flew forward, flew forward until she was caught in midair by . . . nothing.

  She tried to shake her head, but could not move it, as if it was glued to the air. Her whole body was stuck.

  “Karigan?” Yates. He was not far behind.

  No, she wasn’t stuck in the ai
r. A net with sticky, mist-fine filaments held her. More precisely, a web. Strung between trees, it went for great length through the forest.

  “No,” she moaned.

  She tried to pry her limbs free, but could not. It was not the first time she’d been so caught and a powerful dread descended on her. She panicked for a time, struggling, trying to kick her legs free, Yates calling to her. She was quickly overcome by exhaustion and hung there like a discarded marionette, realizing that panic would not help free her. She searched for Lynx, but when she found him in the distance, his form evaporated. She’d been lured into a trap by illusion or a hallucination. They’d been herded by the shadow beasts. Down the length of the net were other prey, wound in web packets, some still quivering with life. The beasts sniffed at one, tore into it, while being careful not to get entangled themselves. She winced at the squealing that came from the trapped creature. The beasts cleverly stole prey from another predator, even drove the prey into the web for an easy meal.

  “Are you all right?” she asked Yates.

  “They’re all around me,” he said, his voice desperate. “Can you help me?”

  “No, Yates, I can’t.” Beasts snuffled at her leg. She felt hot breaths against her trousers.

  Yates grunted and a beast yiped. “Think I got one!”

  Tears welled in Karigan’s eyes. A broad muzzle pushed into her wounded leg, nipping flesh, but another beast brushed against her and leaped on the first followed by vigorous snarling and flying fur. They bumped into the back of Karigan’s legs as they fought over her, their next meal.

  She could give in, give in to the lethargy that was quickly overtaking her once again. She thought of the funereal vision she’d seen in the looking mask of the mourners surrounding the king in his bed. He was gone. What did the rest matter?

  Yates called to her, his voice barely registering amid her despair. “I think they’re leaving!”

  “What?” She tried to look around, listen, but could not detect the presence of the shadow beasts. Why would they leave? As quickly as she’d fallen into her despair, her hopes began to rise once again, until she heard an immense something crashing through the woods.

  The shadow beasts had left them alone because something worse was on its way.

  CREATURES OF KANMORHAN VANE

  The creature whose web Karigan was trapped in hurtled through the woods, smashing trees aside with enormous claws as if they were nothing, the metallic gleam of its carapace a nightmare memory of the other time she’d been caught in such a web and fought the same kind of creature. Fought and survived, but not without help. She did not think that Soft Feather, the great gray eagle, would fly in to help her this time.

  She cried out in despair when she saw there wasn’t just one creature, but two, each like a giant crab, each scuttling forward on jointed legs, black orbs on the ends of mobile eyestalks and antennae feeling out the terrain. Tails with dagger-sized stingers arched over their backs.

  So this was really it, Karigan thought. The end.

  “What’s happening?” Yates demanded. “Tell me!”

  “It’s been . . .” Karigan began, and she meant to finish with: an honor to be your friend. And then she was going to tell him to leave, to find his way as best he could, to go somewhere he could wait for the others to locate him. But something—someone—else caught her eye even as the crab creatures trundled closer, a flash of movement, a man.

  This time it was Ard who appeared to her. She was sure of it. No mistaking him for Lynx or Grant, and certainly not the Eletians. He watched them from behind a tree.

  He was no more than illusion, she concluded, just like the masked tumbler, just like Lynx. She’d lost her grip on what was real.

  The Ard figure peered at the scene very carefully, and with a final glance toward the creatures, he backed away and ran into the woods. Karigan watched him go with regret.

  Perhaps the creatures were illusion, too, but no such luck, for Yates kept demanding for her to tell him what she saw. It was clear he could hear the monsters well enough. They’d halted several yards away from the web, swiveling to face each other. One was clearly larger and raised its claws and tail high as though to impress the other with its size. The other sidestepped away as if wanting to flee, but the bigger creature moved with it, blocking it. The smaller then jabbed its claws at the larger, and the larger caught and held them in its own pincers.

  Their movement became a sort of dance, the pair circling around and around, holding claws.

  If the creatures kept busy, Karigan thought she might still have a chance. The urgency of the situation cleared her mind of illusion and fear. Resolve surged within her.

  “Yates,” she called, “do you still have your sword?”

  “Yes.”

  “Carry it pointed ahead, toward my voice.”

  “Why? What—”

  “I am caught in a web. You hear that noise? The web belongs to one of those creatures making all the noise, and the last time I was caught in a web like this, I was supposed to be food for that creature’s offspring.” So far, with her limited range of vision, Karigan had not observed any eggs.

  “Oh,” Yates said, the lilt in his voice telling her he remembered her story about the creature of Kanmorhan Vane. He remained silent after and Karigan feared he’d frozen.

  “Yates! You all right? We haven’t time. . . !”

  “Yeah. I think I’m sometimes glad I can’t see.”

  Karigan kept talking, guiding him slowly toward her, trying to sound calm while panic reared up inside her once again, and the two enormous creatures continued their dance on the other side of the web. They appeared transfixed with one another, their tails arced high, stingers leaking poison, poised for battle. How long would they remain preoccupied? She hoped, when they knocked over another tree, that they would not knock one down on her and Yates.

  Finally she felt the pressure of Yates’ sword against the small of her back.

  “Stop!” she cried.

  “Whew. Didn’t want to run you through.”

  “I need you to cut me out of the web,” she said, and continued to give him painstaking instructions, guiding his sword with her words.

  He nearly cut off her hand, but he turned the blade just in time, slashing through the sticky, strong filaments of the web. When her arm was free, she was able to draw her long knife and cut herself out the rest of the way. She backed away from the web, pulling sticky strands off her face and hair and body. The broken filaments of the web floated after her, reaching for her.

  “Can we go now?” Yates asked.

  “Definitely.” Karigan collected her staff and glanced back at the creatures. And did a double take. Their dance had concluded, and now the larger was clambering onto the back of the smaller, which had lowered its tail submissively to the side, its stinger planted in the earth.

  A choked, half-hysterical laugh crept out of Karigan’s throat.

  “What is it?” Yates asked.

  “They weren’t fighting after all,” was all she said.

  “Oh.”

  She had no idea how long the mating of the creatures would take, so she hurriedly placed Yates’ hand on her shoulder and started leading him away as fast as her painful leg allowed. She did not have a plan or direction in mind, just to get as far away from the creatures and the web as she could.

  “By the way,” she said as she limped along, “if I say I’m seeing something, you make sure I’m really seeing it.”

  “Like Lynx earlier?”

  “Yeah.”

  “How do I do that?”

  “I don’t know. Pinch me, kick me. Question me. Do whatever it takes.”

  Yates sighed. “Life with you is not dull.”

  Karigan lost track of what direction they were headed in. For all she knew they were wandering in circles, but she kept stumbling on until night swooped down on them like the dark wings of one of Blackveil’s giant avians. When Karigan found a seemingly safe place beneath a lean
ing pine—any place away from the web and those creatures seeming to be safe—she collapsed on the spot. Her leg was screaming and oozing, and all she cared about was getting off it. Immediately the languor descended on her once again. Yates slid down beside her.

  “We lost our stuff,” he said.

  “I know.”

  “What about a shelter?”

  “I’ll make one.” But she could not imagine rising again. All her remaining strength bled from her and her mind felt gray, as gray as the fog of Blackveil. With the pain and exhaustion, she just wanted to rest.

  “We don’t have any food,” Yates said.

  Why must he state the obvious? “Eat some dirt,” she mumbled.

  “You want me to eat dirt?”

  “Thought I saw Ard.”

  “Just now?”

  “Earlier. When I was stuck in the web.”

  “One of your illusions?”

  “Uh-huh. If he saw us, he’d have brought the others to help us.”

  “I hope,” Yates said, “this problem you’re having is a temporary thing.”

  “Me, too,” she replied, leaning against his shoulder. She wished it were all temporary. Their chances of survival were dismal at best. They were without food or a reliable source of water. Alton had somehow survived for days in Blackveil under similar conditions, but he’d found the wall and Tower of the Heavens. Karigan and Yates were far away from the wall. For all Karigan knew, they’d passed into one hell or another, and the chances of finding their way out were growing less likely, especially with Yates blind and her own sight unreliable.

  At the moment, she didn’t care. She just needed a little rest. She’d rest then somehow make them a shelter. Before she fell asleep, she had the presence of mind to remove her moonstone from her pocket, its brightness raising her spirits for a moment, but even that light could not hold back the darkness of deep exhaustion, and she dropped off even as the rains came once again.

  THE ELETIANS’ TASK

  Darkness seeped into Karigan’s dreams, though she could not swear it was all dreams. She became aware of her head tucked against Yates’ chest, his arms wrapped around her, and his hand keeping hers clasped around the moonstone. Dozens of green eyes shone beyond the edge of the light. The shadow beasts had found them again. They nudged their noses at the light, but whined and backed into the dark as if it burned them.