‘We have to warn them,’ gasped Cade. ‘The village. They need to know what’s coming. What we’ve done. Even if they kill us for it.’
Abi lowered her head and nodded, sobs punctuating each gasping breath.
He took her hand and they slid together down a high bank of dirt and roots. Cade relished the reckless speed of their descent, thankful for the distance it put between him and whatever drifted after them through the pines above. They rolled onto a grassy bank in a cloud of dirt.
The meadow lay empty before them, the stream a glittering path, merry with faun lights. They had a clear run, but men carrying torches and muskets were already lumbering up the rocks to their left. Cade went to hide Abi in the plunging stream, but Barrion had already seen them. By the time the others were aware of their quarry, the master hunter had an arrow aimed at the chest of his former apprentice.
Cade froze, covering Abi, though he knew the shaft would go straight through him at such close range. The arrow’s tip did not tremble and Cade caught himself marvelling at the unfamiliar clarity with which he could see Barrion’s blue eyes piercing the darkness, stark and merciless.
‘Did she cross the boundary?’ asked Barrion, his voice cold.
Cade knew the truth would earn him instant death. ‘Hear me, all of you,’ he said. ‘Something’s coming.’
‘Did an orphan leave the Cradle?’ Barrion said.
Haylan the smith growled beside him, his face wolfish with rage. ‘Why else would the boundary stones have fallen, Barrion? The Father’s wrath is upon us. Killing that witch now might at least curb our sorrows.’
Abi snarled back at him. ‘Don’t think I wouldn’t meet death in glad payment for the ruin I’ve caused, Haylan. But you need to listen. Something followed us through those trees. Something that means to kill us all.’
Another man cried out. ‘The village!’
Everyone turned to look. Smoke was streaming from the distant thatched roofs. Cade staggered back at the sound of ghostly screams carried on the breeze. Abi seized him and thrust her head into his chest.
‘I’m sorry,’ she sobbed, repeating the words until they choked her. He hadn’t the strength to catch her as she dropped to her knees and vomited at his feet. The men ignored them, bellowing in outrage, most of them now fleeing back across the meadow. Cade reeled at the thought that there might be yet more pursuing spirits, that the destruction of the boundary stones may have permitted some kind of invasion. Abi caught his shoulder as she hauled herself upright, her eyes dazed, jaw slack and dripping.
‘I know a place,’ she croaked, then raised her voice to shout after the fleeing mob. ‘Upstream,’ she cried. ‘Come with us! There’s a fissure in the rock beneath the Tor. Within there are tunnels through which we could escape.’
But the men had already fled. Only Barrion remained, staggering on the spot, staring at the ground as if it might disclose a solution to this madness.
Cade caught her. ‘What tunnels?’
‘The Iron Caves,’ said Abi. ‘The scrolls say they were explored by our forebears.’ She called to Barrion, imploring. ‘There are passages within, passages that could lead us to the Lands Beyond.’
Barrion looked up at her. Cade knew that ravenous glare. It was the last thing seen by countless beasts the instant before an arrow entered their eye.
Barrion’s arrow whispered past Cade’s ear as he threw Abi into the tumbling stream. She disappeared into the rushing waters and Cade leaped after her. A vortex of freezing water enveloped him, seconds before disgorging them both a short distance below.
Abi went to climb onto the bank, but Cade pulled her back into the bubbling waters, behind a cloud of faun lights. They were in a brook at the foot of the Tor with no hard cover between them and the master bowman positioned high above. Abi shivered beside him as he waited for the arrow that would kill one of them. Seconds passed. Barrion was clever. He knew how to tempt his prey out of hiding.
Cade pictured his mentor’s piercing blue eyes awash with tears as he scoured the dark for a sign of his former apprentice. This was a good man driven to murderous madness by fear, by betrayal. For a moment Cade welcomed the thought of that arrow piercing his treacherous heart.
The thatched roofs of the village were now ablaze, weaving a veil of smoke over the moon that carried to where they crouched in the water. The rest of the mob had disappeared to join the conflagration. The cold of the water was intense, stiffening Cade’s muscles. His head ached. He thought he heard something above the rattle of water. Shouts nearby, a scream, a clash of blades.
Cade led Abi in a sprint from the stream, directing her towards a sheltered goat track that he knew wound up the side of the Tor. Again, he almost yearned for Barrion’s arrow to find his back; its absence would mean the master hunter had been claimed by the Nothings.
When he and Abi reached the trail, the two of them battled their way up the foot of the Tor for several minutes without looking back. Urging Abi ahead of him, Cade risked a single glance over his shoulder, though he already knew they were being followed. He knew from the pain burrowing into his temples, and from the way his vision wavered upon several figures making their way up the foot of the track behind him.
Cade ran his hand along the cavern wall. Beneath a crust of lichen, it was unnaturally flat. He kicked it.
‘It’s metal,’ he said.
‘The Iron Caves,’ said Abi, dreamy with exhaustion.
Cade swept his crackling torch about the narrow walls of the passage ahead, revealing lines of rivets, a vaulted ceiling, a floor black with dirt, arrow-straight into the waiting darkness.
Abi’s memory had served them well. With his help, she had found the trail she was looking for. It wound like a fading scar up the east face of the Tor, ending behind a waterfall. A ledge had once existed behind that sheet of water, but it had long been destroyed, no doubt to thwart the curious. But the intervening centuries had grafted a network of vines in its place, strong enough to allow him and Abi to climb across and through a gaping fissure in the rock beyond. Casting nervous glances into the night behind them, they lit the last two of Cade’s torches and scrambled into the darkness.
‘This is no cave,’ said Cade. ‘Yet we’re inside the Tor. How can this be?’
He began brushing aside a curtain of moss, gradually revealing a corroded frieze. It depicted a human monarch seated atop a mountainous throne. Cade inspected it fearfully and saw the figure wore a wreath of laurel that curled upon his head like a crown of horns.
‘What blasphemy is this?’ he said.
Abi had wandered ahead. ‘It was a heretic who discovered this place,’ she said. ‘She was an orphan, sent to the Cradle as a babe, just like us. She believed a race of demigods from beyond the stars had built this place beneath the mountains, but abandoned it aeons before she was born.’
‘But the Horned Throne is real,’ said Cade, shaking his head. ‘He is soil and sky, root and branch.’
‘That He is,’ said Abi. ‘Throne forgive me, but I see that now. Yet what we know of Him may be an echo of something else, something greater, a truth that exists still among the stars.’
She ran her fingers over a fearsome crest stamped upon one wall: a bird of prey, double-headed, wings flared in defiance.
‘We must hurry,’ said Cade, trying not to look at it. ‘This passage heads north, towards the other side of the mountain. Following it gives us our best chance of escape, does it not?’
Abi shrugged. ‘If such a chance even exists.’
Cade took her arm as they hurried down the seemingly endless passageway, slowing only to scramble over mounds of earth that had spilled through the walls long ago. They ignored the empty corridors branching left and right, past doors and stairs so immense that this place must surely have been populated by a race of giants. They scurried through halls so vast their torchlight couldn’t find the wall
s and ceiling, and it felt like they were running on the spot.
Cade murmured to himself. ‘Uncanny, this place. Is it not exactly what you spoke of, Abi? Is this not the truth you sought?’
She didn’t answer.
Cade let his thoughts gather pace, eager to distract from his fears as they hurried down another dark and level passage.
‘You’re right. You must be, Abi. The Father, the Cradle, the Nothings. They must all be part of it. We ourselves could have a place in some wider world we’ve yet to discover. ’Tis a marvellous thought.’
‘Aye,’ said Abi, grimly. ‘Though others have paid dearly for this revelation.’
Her pace was sluggish. Cade had to hurry her again. He hadn’t had time to cover their tracks, so the Nothings would likely have found the fissure. If so, they must have entered the tunnels by now. He glanced behind him but saw nothing. The smell of stale earth sickened him, reminding him that the rain and sky could not reach him through the immensity of dirt piled above. The only moisture in the air down here stank of rot and rust. Dead roots sprawled through fissures in the iron walls, clutching at his arms as he hastened past.
Even down here, in the insistent darkness, Cade was aware that he could feel his surroundings more acutely somehow. He was familiar with the excitement of the hunt, how it invigorated his senses until the world around him sang. But this was something more. When he had crossed the boundary in pursuit of Abi, when the stones surrounding the valley had collapsed, he had heard that strange chime inside his skull. More than that, he had felt it, comprehended it with something beyond his physical senses. And he felt it still, an echo that sank quivering needles into his brain.
The passage eventually hit a wall of earth, the ceiling ahead of them having long ago surrendered under its titanic burden. Cade’s sharp eyes picked out a column of iron rungs fixed to one wall. He quickly led Abi up through a twisted hatch in the ceiling, beyond which lay another corridor. Trusting to instinct, he headed left. Abi followed, almost reluctantly.
The metal walls now cramped his shoulders. The flames of his torch tickled the ceiling, stinging his eyes with smoke as he squinted down the tunnel ahead.
‘Do you know where you’re going?’ said Abi. ‘Because I don’t.’
‘I have a sense,’ said Cade, knowing he had none. With no sun or stars by which to maintain his bearings, he knew he could be leading them away from the other side of the mountain and instead deeper into this unfathomable maze. He fancied no faun lights would find him down here and guide his way to safety.
‘We need to keep going,’ he said, expecting each step to bring him within sight of another unyielding wall. If they had to double back, he knew they would become lost. He thought of the Horned Father brooding in His seat somewhere above him. What better way for a heretic to perish than buried alive beneath the shrine of his former deity?
He and Abi both turned with a gasp as something hissed in the passage behind them. It sounded like the rattle of dirt, or perhaps the crunch of an approaching footstep. They stared into the darkness, paralysed. Cade could feel Abi shuddering beside him as the heat of the flames neared his thumb. Soon the warmth and light of his rapidly shrinking torch would abandon them, releasing them into that waiting blackness. They would be left clawing blindly at the walls for an escape they would never find, and that which hunted them would then find them.
Cade heard no advancing footsteps, but then considered whether the Nothings even trod upon solid ground. Perhaps walls of earth could not impede them. Perhaps reality was to them like water to a fish. Even now, he thought, they could be swimming through iron and bedrock towards them. He imagined a thin hand reaching up through the dirt to grasp his ankle.
The thought was too much. It spurred him to a panting run, dragging Abi behind him. She had fallen unnervingly quiet, her pace slowing until she shambled after him like a dead thing.
Cade dashed past another passageway and felt a chill wash over one side of his sweating face. He drew back, probing the darkness with his torch. The flames brightened momentarily, engorged by a nearby breeze. Abi stumbled behind him, dropping to her knees, gasping as her torch rolled away from her.
She was struggling to breathe, eyes wild and imploring in the torchlight, strangled by her own terror.
‘Look at me,’ Cade said, gripping Abi’s shoulder as he drew a long slow breath. She stared back at him, every intake of air a convulsion. ‘We are almost free of this place. Just a little further. I promise.’
She gulped for air.
‘Dead.’ She strained the word through gritted teeth. ‘All dead. Mother Alder. Mother Malin. Ilda. Girtrid. All they did for me. All they gave me, taught me. All their love. All gone. All dead.’ Tears glimmered down her cheeks.
‘You don’t know that,’ said Cade, unsure what he was even saying. ‘Just breathe, Abi. Like this.’
She ignored him and her torch expired in the dirt beside them, the darkness now barely held at bay by Cade’s own sputtering light.
‘All this,’ she snarled. ‘This is all because of me. This is my fault. Mine. Mine!’ She repeated the word over and over, pounding at her skull. He went to stop her, but she shoved him away. ‘They can have me,’ she moaned. ‘They deserve me. For what I’ve done.’
‘You don’t mean that, Abi.’
‘I’m nothing, Cade,’ she said. ‘Nothing worth saving.’
‘They would have hanged you if you stayed, Abi. What choice did they give you? Kick a bear up the arse and you can’t blame it for biting you.’
‘I should have listened. Should have done as I was told.’
‘How can you do as you’re told when you were born with a brain the size of yours? Wanting the truth is not a crime, Abi. It’s who you are.’
He winced. The pain in his skull was returning, drowning that strange echo in his brain. Perhaps the Nothings could hear that echo too. Perhaps it was leading them straight to him, like wolves tracking the scent of wounded prey. He tried to shut out the discomfort, push it back, and as he did so, felt the passageway throb like a living thing. The pulse tightened his skull until he cried out.
‘Cade?’
‘Abi,’ he whispered, fighting back a mounting nausea. ‘When I crossed the boundary, I felt something. I felt it again when the stones collapsed. It was like a bell ringing inside my head. It left me feeling like I was seeing things clearly for the first time in my life.’
Abi’s look of fear was melting into one of astonishment.
‘You felt it too?’ she said.
Cade strained to see into the gloom behind her. The pain in his skull narrowed to an audible whine. No distant footsteps echoed towards them. Nothing breathed. And yet it seemed to Cade as though that very absence was itself a kind of presence, a blackness that seethed with vitality. He remembered how his eyes had refused to behold those terrible figures as they crossed the ruined boundary. Now he wondered if his ears might similarly refuse to detect their approach. If the Nothings could not be seen, perhaps they could not be heard.
The very thought of it made his brain boil, as if something were mauling it, trying to wrest the organ from his skull.
‘I can feel them coming, Abi,’ he groaned.
‘No,’ she said, her voice thick, slurred with dread and pain. ‘They’re already here.’
She snatched Cade’s torch and bolted down the passage, pulling Cade after her.
They tumbled into a huge antechamber where a pair of immense iron gates confronted them. The torch cast its dwindling glow upon a monstrous lock clamped above their heads. Cade could see a sliver of familiar green luminescence at the apex of the door-frame.
Abi thrust the torch into his hands as she reached to examine the lock. The velvet gloom seemed to tighten around him, absorbing everything in the room but the locked gates standing before them. Cade could sense it again, the emptiness a living thing cl
osing in on him, trapping his heart until he could feel it fidget like a rabbit in his chest. There was nothing there, nothing visible, nothing tangible. But it was there, a wound in reality, bleeding darkness into the world. Abi cursed and snatched Cade’s knife from his belt, though the lock appeared devoid of any keyhole.
He was being hunted by servants of a god. Things of the night, of fairy tale. Nightmares come to life. He was but human, as helpless as the deer he had once hunted in the Cradle, preyed upon by beings of a cunning unfathomable to his primitive instincts. The Nothings’ victory was inevitable. What hope had he? His eyes darted about him. Darkness everywhere. Distance was no obstacle to such as the Nothings, Cade now felt sure. They could be watching from a mile away. Or perhaps they waited in this very room. He imagined faces fishbelly-pale, blackened grins lined with a thousand crooked teeth, eyes smiling as they savoured the thunder of his heart, waiting for the darkness to drown him.
He yelped, dropping the torch as its dying flame nipped his hand.
His world went black and blindness sent him mad. Goaded by fearful imaginings, he became a caged animal battering at the iron gates. Terror strengthened his onslaught, but the barrier barely trembled.
He felt Abi pulling him back, trying to calm him. His elbow struck her face, but he was beyond caring. Nothing mattered but tearing his way through this metal wall and escaping that which hunted him in the dark. He scrabbled at the rough metal, tearing fingernails, wetting his hands with blood. The knot in his belly tightened to breaking point as the darkness deepened.
A flash of white suddenly drove it all away, blinding him again. He stumbled back, a flickering light now illuminating the chamber from its rubble-strewn floor to its high, vaulted ceiling. Abi stood nearby, blood streaming from her nose, shielding her eyes as she stared at him. It took two more heartbeats before he realised.
Each of his hands was enveloped in a dazzling bouquet of lightning.
Cade yelled in alarm, casting his arms about him, trying to fling away the crackling light that swarmed about his fingers.
Maledictions Page 27
