“I made it.”
“So you reckon we should call Sammael back and give him that cloak, so he can get up to Chromos again?” Danny couldn’t believe she was even hinting at it. Had all this fighting really been for nothing?
But that wasn’t what Cath was saying. What she was saying was even worse.
“We’ve got to go there ourselves. We need to get his boots back and give them to him. He’s the world’s imagination, Danny. The world needs him. Don’t you get it yet?”
And Danny’s heart sank to the russet sands at his feet. He knew that she was right. Sammael had been the most frightening thing in his life for too long now. But without fear, he would still have been in his house, waiting for his parents to come home. He would never have met Cath, or Isbjin al-Orr, or had any of the adventures that had come his way. He would never even have learned Shimny’s name.
Sammael’s heart favored neither pain nor happiness: both were equal to him. He spread fear and chaos, but he also spread the infinite colors of novelty and hope. They were all scary when you faced them at first and saw how powerless you were to control them. But sometimes fear wasn’t altogether the enemy.
Cath was right. The only solution was to restore Sammael’s chaos to the world. Cath and Barshin would regain their color and their lives. Tom would properly die. And Danny would disappear.
For a moment, Danny felt an agony so terrible, it seemed to burst his stomach. But when he looked down, nothing had changed. His stomach was intact and full, and he was fine. The pain came from nothing more than regret, and there was no way around that now. He had signed Sammael’s book.
I wonder if … he caught himself thinking, and then he closed the thought firmly down.
“Chromos, then,” he said. “For the last time.”
There was no trouble in Chromos. There were no shadows. They traveled up smoothly on Shimny’s crowded back, Danny, Cath, dog, hare, and a new addition: the paper-light corpse of Tom. Wisps of darkness floated around the corpse, as if Chromos had something a little nasty to say about the sand-body it couldn’t yet touch, but none of the darkness came near Danny. The world was great and green, and the sky was wide. It was exactly as Danny had seen it the time he’d fled home on Zadoc after leaving Cath behind on the beach.
Then he’d been full of hope for the future. And even though his head knew now that all the hope was gone, his heart felt the tug of it and opened up, wide and shining. What more was there to want? This—this was freedom, pure and simple.
Chromos was being kind to him. And one day soon, he would die and have to leave it all.
At this thought, he expected the great plain to darken and boil. But it stayed calm, emerald and glorious and wild, and he realized that he didn’t fear dying anymore. One day, Chromos promised him, one day soon, you’ll join me. And his heart was full of joy at the promise.
Not so his head. His head raged on. It was impossible—to die and leave everything so unresolved. His parents would never know what had happened to him. He hoped he’d been nice enough to them. And Cath wouldn’t forget him. She’d managed to remember Tom. Danny was sure she would do the same for him.
He felt an urge to be nice to her, so that he could be sure of leaving at least one good account of himself on Earth.
“Where do you think we’ll find the boots?” he asked her. “Shall we imagine up the sun chariot again?”
They had destroyed the boots by throwing them off the back of Apollo’s chariot into the burning sun. Perhaps Cath had other ideas, though. Danny braced himself for her scorn.
But Cath was gentle, her tone soft. “Let’s not go back to old stories,” she said. “Let’s at least make something new this time.”
Danny was wary of that. Hadn’t he already tried, with the Book of Shadows? Fat lot of good that had done.
Still, there was no point in being fainthearted. Not anymore.
“Sure,” he said. “Let’s make our own boots. Let’s imagine up Xur and kill him ourselves and make them out of his hide.”
“Maybe not even Xur,” said Cath.
“But he’s the one whose skin has the special power, isn’t he?”
Cath nodded. “So do other things now, though. My cloak. Zadoc.”
“Zadoc! What if we made them out of Zadoc?” said Danny, feeling the strong hoofbeats of the ghost horse come drifting in a memory across the plain, way out to his right. “Except Zadoc’s gone.”
But nothing was really gone in Chromos. Everything could be brought back, in some kind of a way. So he opened his mouth and added, “Though maybe we could bring him back?”
And they were on a parched, rocky landscape, with thorny acacia trees and tough scrubby bushes, following a thin trickle of water that ran between boulders, down toward a cavern. In front of the cavern, Zadoc grazed, with a handful of cream-colored mares at his side. As they approached, Shimny stepped her way neatly around the rocks and scrub, her golden hooves crunching against dry twigs.
Zadoc threw up his head and whinnied to her, and Shimny answered back. The horses stared at each other, testing the air for scent, but Shimny kept walking as she sniffed, her ribs drawing sharply in and out.
It was that easy, then. Danny just had to think of Zadoc and another task was complete, and he was another step closer to his own death. Too easy. But he had given up hoping for delays. Obstacles only stood in the way when you didn’t want them there. Everything, including Chromos, it seemed, wanted to smooth his path into Sammael’s hands.
They were almost close enough to touch Zadoc when Danny noticed the figure in the mouth of the cavern, half hidden in its shadow.
An old man. Older than any person Danny had ever seen, with a yellowish, wispy beard and a maze of discontented wrinkles spread over his face. His eyes were hard and blue.
And Danny knew him.
He had died a year and a half ago, in front of Danny’s own face. More than died. He had taken hold of the taro and been eaten up by white fire.
Abel Korsakof.
For a long time, Danny had seen his face in nightmares. But Abel Korsakof had belonged to Sammael. He should have been in Sammael’s shadow army. What was he doing here?
Shimny halted, and Danny looked down at the old man.
“Why are you here?” he asked. “I didn’t imagine you up. I wasn’t even thinking about you.”
“I chose to die,” said Abel Korsakof. “I took hold of the power of the storm. I knew at the end that I belonged not to Sammael but to the storm. And I chose the storm. You know this. You saw it happen.”
And then Abel Korsakof vanished, as quickly as he had appeared.
To Danny, the words felt like the last piece in a huge puzzle. But the puzzle itself was so vast that he couldn’t stand back far enough to see the whole of it. He needed to raise himself high above the world and look at it from a great distance; only then would he be able to understand what all these things meant.
I’ll get the chance soon enough, he thought. Soon, it will all be over for me. There’ll be nothing more to add.
He felt Cath’s hand tugging at his waist.
“What shall we do?” she asked him. “I don’t want to kill Zadoc.”
Danny looked at the great brown-gray horse. He didn’t want to kill Zadoc either. He didn’t really want anything to ever have to die again, least of all himself.
“Let’s talk to him,” he said. “He was our friend. We should tell him what we want.”
Zadoc, unbidden, left his mares and came stepping toward them, covering the small distance in only a couple of his giant strides.
“We thought you’d dissolved,” said Danny. “You were a ghost last time I saw you.”
“I am a ghost,” replied the great horse. “Chromos has no guardian anymore. I am here only because you see me here.”
A horrible thought occurred to Danny. “If we take you out of Chromos, will you just disappear, like Kalia?” he asked.
But at that, the horse dipped his head. “You wis
h to restore Sammael’s boots to him. You destroyed them in Chromos, so you can remake them in here. If you take me out, I shall surely disappear. But if you can take the boots out—they will last beyond eternity. They will be made of your desire and your hope.”
“Won’t they be the same boots as before?”
“No. Nothing can be the same forever. Nothing can be the same for even a very short time. Everything changes, always.”
“So we should make the new boots out of you?”
Zadoc moved his great head close to Danny’s face. For the first time, Danny became aware of the heavy scent of horse: sweat and herbs and hair.
“Do you think you can?”
Danny nodded, without needing to hesitate.
“Why are you so sure?” asked the horse.
And the words came, unthought, from Danny’s heart. “Because it’s not Chromos that needs you as a guardian: it’s our world. Every single creature on earth should have a Zadoc, so they can sit on his back and see the world the way they dream it could be. Sammael needs to keep feeding the colors down, so that the stars keep shining and the storms keep raging and we all keep knowing that things can change, if only we change what’s in our heads. Sammael will terrify us, and he’ll hurt us, and he won’t care. But we need to keep having new ideas and new dreams. I can make Sammael’s boots again because I know that the world needs him.”
He broke off, and knew that he had spoken from his heart, not his head. He was still very afraid of Sammael, and he still thought that Sammael lacked something very important, which was called kindness. But his heart stayed steady and strong. He couldn’t control the world anymore. He could only love it and want the best for it.
And Zadoc understood. “It won’t be messy,” he said. “You’ll know what to do.”
Danny knew. He watched it happen: the sky darkened, and Zadoc snorted in alarm, calling his mares to him with a high-pitched whinny. Together, the small band of horses cantered across the face of the cavern and up a rocky path along the cliff face, rising to the cliff above Danny’s head. But when they reached the cliff’s edge, instead of staying together, the mares raced away and Zadoc stopped, silhouetted against the dark orange sky.
The horse waited patiently as the clouds swam together above him. Thunder grumbled and belched, and small rocks fell from the cliff face, bouncing down to lie at Shimny’s feet. Danny was no longer afraid of storms: he sat upright like Cath behind him, one arm wrapped around Ori, the other on the cloak draped over their little band. Perhaps it was only the shelter of the cloak that had made him unafraid?
No. He would never be afraid of storms again. This one was coming from inside him. He, too, was a child of the storms.
Then the lightning came. His own lightning. He sent it down from the sky—there! There! He sent it cracking down into the rocks around Zadoc, and the horse did not flinch but stood patiently, waiting to be struck.
Danny threw the biggest bolt of lightning down onto Zadoc’s knobbly gray-brown head, and Zadoc fell to the ground with relief.
CHAPTER 23
THE BOOTS
They waited for the storm to roll away, then went up to find Zadoc, Shimny picking her way carefully up the narrow cliff path. The lightning had done its work: Zadoc was nothing more than a shriveled, dried-up hide, stained the jet-black of burned embers.
Danny reached down to pick up the hide. He needed no warnings about staining himself with the things he touched in Chromos. Zadoc was already a part of him.
He knew what to do with the hide. Cath had a knife, but it was scarcely needed: the pieces fell away from each other, as though the whole hide were just a template, ready-scored, for a pair of knee-high boots.
They used the sail needle from the boat shed. They made threads again with Cath’s hair. They put together thick pads of leather for the soles, and the needle went through as though holes had already been punched for it.
Danny and Cath made a boot each.
“I’ll do the left one,” said Cath, grinning. Danny let her do it. It felt good, working together for the same thing, knowing that there wasn’t any need to disagree or quarrel. Or even to speak much, except to pass the knife, needle, and thread between them.
At last the boots were made. They looked at each other, sitting on the red and gold of Shimny’s back.
For a brief second, each of them looked at the boot the other held, then back at each other.
“Nice job,” said Cath. “Well done.”
Danny nodded briefly, turning over the boot he held. It was strange to think of it existing long after he had gone. Probably long after even the soil and the worms had forgotten him, this boot would still be traveling the universe.
He felt another strong urge to stay alive, but he squashed it far down inside him. He knew the truth now—the boot would be all that was left of him, and it would belong to Sammael.
Danny made himself smile at Cath. At least she’ll be a bit happy, he thought. That’s something.
“Let’s take Tom home, then,” he said. “And find Death.”
As they touched down back at Sopper’s Edge, Danny slipped off Shimny, pulled down Ori and Tom’s corpse, and stood looking up at Cath.
“Will you go and give Sammael the boots?” he asked. “I don’t want to see his face when he knows I made one. I don’t want to see him looking smug.”
“He’ll know already,” said Cath. “Besides, I don’t reckon he’ll be smug. He does love the world in his own way, you know.”
Danny didn’t agree, but he didn’t want to argue. He wanted to say good-bye to Tom.
“Even so,” he said. “I’ve got stuff to do.”
Cath nodded and didn’t ask anything further. That was definitely one of the best things about Cath. She knew a lot.
“Where do you want to meet up?” she said, suddenly.
It was an unexpected question. Danny hadn’t been thinking any further than Tom, and what he was about to do. But he realized all at once that this was the end of the journey for him and Cath. They had no need of each other anymore. Once Sammael had his boots back, Cath would quickly regain her color along with Barshin and the rest of the world. And Danny would have all he had asked for.
He would never again sit in a boring geography lesson, stare out of the window, and catch himself thinking of the wild journey he had been on and the wild girl he had met. He would never dream of what might have happened to her or wonder if he would ever see her again. All those moments when her scorn had helped him to find courage were gone, forever.
This was it.
They were saying good-bye.
As he looked into her steady black eyes, he could do nothing more than shrug and wish he’d had a little bit more time to make friends with her. They’d never agreed on much.
But at least they’d been true to themselves. We had to fight with each other, thought Danny. Cath is brave and determined, and I am weak and scared. Why should she ever have liked me? Why did she even bother to help me?
And he knew that he could never figure out the answers to those questions now. He had run out of time.
Sun broke through the clouds. Danny forced himself to smile. He made his face as broad, as confident, as possible. It felt very unnatural.
“Oh, I don’t know where we’ll meet next,” he said. “I’m sure we’ll run into each other again. We always do, don’t we?”
Cath opened her mouth to reply, thought better of it, and shrugged.
“Okay, then. See you around.”
Danny couldn’t say any more. He stooped, picked up Tom’s fragile corpse, and turned away.
He headed straight up to the top of the hill toward the wood, with Ori bounding beside him. He didn’t want to risk running into Aunt Kathleen—he wasn’t ready to find out what had happened to her yet.
And he didn’t want to watch Shimny, Barshin, and Cath go.
At the far edge of Hangman’s Wood, Danny found a spot where he could see over the valley beyond and sat on a
fallen tree trunk at the edge of the wood. Ori sat quietly on the ground beside him, close enough for him to rest a hand on her golden coat.
The afternoon was drawing on into evening. Shadows stretched long across the land below, clawing away the daylight. Danny watched them growing, inching over the fields and houses. What a shame he’d never sat here and watched them before.
There’s so much of the world I’ll never know, thought Danny. I wish—
But he was sitting and waiting for Death to take his cousin, and another kind of death to take him, and wishes were pointless now.
Death came at sunset, just as the shadows had grown wide into a blanket of dusk. Her eyes were red, and her gray hair was tangled about her face, and she trod as wearily as a soldier trying to find the way home after battle.
Ori hid her face in Danny’s trousers, but Danny had no need to turn away. He watched Death’s eyes and her wrinkled old skin, and he found himself smiling at the patient sigh she gave as she came to stand in front of him.
“You,” she said.
Danny nodded. He didn’t fear her anymore. She was just a tired old woman. Besides which, she had come to free Tom.
Death looked down at Tom’s body and then at Danny.
“Should I ask what you gave up to get him?”
Danny shook his head.
“You humans,” she said. “Full of strange ideas about nobility. You look after others better than you look after yourselves. That’s your idea of a good human, isn’t it?”
Danny didn’t want to talk to her about that.
“What’ll you do with him?” he asked.
“Return him to the soil, of course. That’s what I do.”
“And people will remember him?”
“Of course.” Death nodded. “They’ll assume he died in some kind of accident, I’d think. Even if they’re not entirely sure, they’ll soon think of a story and convince themselves it’s true.”
“And he’ll be at peace?”
Death laughed. “He won’t be anything. There won’t be a Tom anymore. It’s you who needs peace, isn’t it? If it helps you to find it, then I’ll tell you that he will. He’ll be a part of all life. That’s the kind of peace he’ll have.”
The Book of Shadows Page 17