The Faun Light fled through the corn before Cade could slap its rump. Within seconds they had vanished, leaving Cade in darkness. He burbled prayers of thanks as his killers drew near. Exhaustion numbed him, though his brain buzzed unbearably. Cade heard the first of the Nothings approach from behind, its presence heightening that buzz to a razor whine. He fought through it. Without turning to look at it, he gauged its height, its position, waiting for it to move again. He closed his eyes and gripped the last of his axes.
The Nothing shifted behind him and Cade sprang from the ground, eyes still closed, twisting as he lashed out with the axe, intent on burying it in the creature’s skull. He felt the blade connect, shear through flesh. The Nothing recoiled, though it issued not even a whisper of pain. Cade enjoyed a bewildered instant of triumph before something hit him deep in the belly, robbing him of breath and dropping him to the dirt.
As he gasped on the ground, he saw the moon briefly unsheathed from the clouds, casting its pale green light upon the scene of his death. He was surrounded. As he rolled onto his belly, something struck his back, electrifying him. His limbs spasmed in the dirt and he spiralled into unconsciousness, dreaming of the last thing he had seen lying in the dirt beside him: his throwing axe, smeared with blood, pasted with a slice of human ear.
Cade felt a pinprick in his throat. A soothing warmth restored him to his body, culminating in a rush of strength that threw him shrieking and thrashing onto windswept hills. His heart thundered. Beside him knelt a bald young woman in glorious bronze armour. The filigree plates on her shoulders gleamed in the glowing dawn that was gathering to confront the sullen storm clouds.
‘You’re safe.’ She spoke in a voice lilting and sweet. ‘Take a moment to steady yourself. I’ve given you something for the pain.’
She had a foreign accent as grand as her armour. Her pale skin was flawlessly smooth, untouched by the sun, miraculously unblemished by scars or pockmarks. Cade felt he should have been mesmerised by this angel but there was something oddly repulsive about her placid green gaze. It was like staring at needles inching towards his eyes. He had to look away.
The cornfield had gone and he was alive, resting against a soft bank of moss. Bushes of pale grass hissed before him, whispering all the way to the distant glimmering sea.
‘The girl,’ she said. ‘We need you to find her.’
Cade felt drunk, struggling to wrangle his thoughts through a migraine fog. The Horned Throne had sent help. Abi had escaped. Now he himself had been saved from the Nothings by this strange young maiden.
His voice slurred as he spoke. ‘The Nothings. They had me. They were here. Where did they go?’
Someone grabbed him from behind and hauled him to his feet. He was wrenched around to face another armoured figure. She seemed to have appeared out of nowhere. The woman glared at him over a grille that covered her mouth and neck, her copper-eyed stare unbearable. On the right-hand side of her stubbled skull was a patch of bloody gauze where her ear had once been.
He squirmed in her grip, overwhelmed by an inexplicable repulsion, and she slapped him curtly across each cheek. Startled, he watched as she jabbed an accusatory finger at his face, then lifted her nose in a silent gesture of sniffing the air. She then pointed at the grass and traced an imaginary trail somewhere off into the distance. Her stare was like a blazing summer sun. He struggled to look away. The pain of it seared through whatever narcotic addled his senses. Before he could cry out in protest, she slapped him twice again then dropped him to the ground, kicking him up the backside with an armoured boot to hurry him along.
Cade scrambled out of reach, his body prickling with gooseflesh, shivering with disgust, as if he had just escaped the embrace of a flyblown corpse. Several more women stood behind her, spires of bronze, muzzled and cloaked, their shaven heads crested with a proud ponytail. They carried strange blocks of iron which Cade realised must be some form of rifle. These muskets were absurdly bulky, though the women hefted them as easily as if they were toys. Though their ponytails stirred in the mortal wind, the women did not seem part of this world. Their presence seemed to elude Cade’s senses, evading his comprehension. He thought himself deaf when their heavy armour betrayed no creak or clamour as they moved. He could not hear them breathing. They were like silent spectres projected from some netherworld, statues of living bronze, whose icy sheen repelled his eyes every time he tried to study it. All he could feel was their absence, holes in reality. Nothings.
‘What I’ve given you for the pain should also help you see a little clearer now,’ said the girl. ‘Should make our presence a little more tolerable.’
Realisation dawned, and with it came anger. He snarled at them all.
‘It was you all along. I thought ghosts had murdered my people, but it was you.’
He recalled the suffocating maze beneath the Tor, the deadly avalanche, the terror of the cornfield. Through it all, he had borne a delusion. The thought of such stupidity – of his peasant ignorance – pained him, stoked in him a fearless fury.
He closed his eyes and reached deep, deep into the earth. He sought lightning, a horned angel, anything to drive these women away. The girl tried to stop him, but it was too late. The resulting pain hit him like a chunk of rock and he almost blacked out. He shrugged her aside as she went to steady him.
‘I am Novice Maia,’ said the girl. ‘And these are Null Maidens of the Sisters of Silence. We are anathema to your kind. Just as the standing stones of your valley nullified your powers, so do we.’
Cade snorted. ‘You don’t sound very silent to me.’
‘Unlike my sisters, I have yet to take the sacred Vow of Tranquillity. For now, I act as their interpreter.’
Cade struggled to his feet. ‘You want me to find Abi for you? Well, interpret this.’
He hawked and spat on the ground at her feet.
The woman with one ear glowered at Cade. He recoiled as she advanced on him, soundless as a phantom, but the younger woman intervened. She did not speak, but instead made a series of gestures, her hands dancing, fingers fluttering as she spelled out her entreaty. One-Ear gestured back, harsh and abrupt. The younger woman signalled her reply, insistent and beseeching. The older woman turned away, exasperated.
‘We are not murderers,’ said Maia, turning to him, her voice tender. ‘We gathered your people for their own safety. Our comrades are tending them in the valley as we speak. They are all in our care. Safe from harm.’
Cade looked about him. Nothing but grassland. Nowhere to run.
‘Are you witchfinders? Sent from the city?’
Maia smiled. ‘Not from any city you could comprehend,’ she said. ‘And we have been sent to do nothing more than protect you.’
‘The Horned Throne protects us,’ he said. ‘He is soil and sky, root and branch.’ He half-hoped his words might conjure another Faun Light to spirit him away.
‘Then we serve the same master,’ said Maia. ‘What you know only as the Horned Throne is in fact part of a greater truth, a truth that spans the galaxy.’
‘What’s the galaxy?’
Maia’s look of sympathy rankled him.
‘A kingdom of worlds that you know only as glimmering stars,’ she said. ‘Each ruled by the Emperor of Mankind, on the Throne of Terra.’
The greater truth. Emperors of Mankind. How Abi would have been fascinated by all this.
‘His light shines upon pastures just like these,’ said Maia. ‘And you would have been hidden forever from that light if we hadn’t found you.’
Once again, he pictured the laurel-crowned figure on that ancient frieze beneath the Tor. Was that the god of which she spoke?
‘Enough,’ said Cade, dazed by thoughts of worlds, people, even gods beyond his own. He felt nauseous, sick with perplexity. The eerie presence of these women was pouring agony into his brain.
‘You are already conne
cted to a world wider than we will ever know,’ said Maia. ‘You are a witch, blessed with a connection to energies beyond anyone’s understanding. But with that gift comes great danger, which is why we must find your companion.’
One-Ear gestured impatiently. The novice stalled her.
‘I don’t know how she got away,’ said Cade. ‘We got separated. She just disappeared.’
One-Ear clenched her fists.
‘Things dwell in the immaterial realm from which your kind draw power,’ said Maia. ‘Things that would mean you harm.’
Cade swallowed at the thought of him helping Abi onto the Faun Light’s back, sending her off into the gloom atop that spectral beast.
Maia read his face and her expression hardened. ‘Have you seen such a thing?’
‘I have not.’
‘Hear me, boy.’ Her voice suddenly rang like steel. ‘They know your thoughts. They will assume the shape of that which you trust. If you have seen any such thing, you will tell us this instant. You cannot conceive the dangers involved.’
She was right. He could not. To him, all she said was just a morass of fear and bafflement. He thought of Abi, how she had stood by him, dragged him from danger time and again. It was the only thing that still seemed real.
‘If I help you find her,’ he said, ‘what will you do with her?’
One-Ear exchanged amused looks with her Sisters. She made a curt gesture.
Maia looked grim. ‘She says perhaps you should ask what will happen to her if you don’t find her.’
The Faun Light had been moving as fast as a stallion. Its prints were grouped tightly, its forked hooves tearing up sprays of dirt in its wake. It had galloped through this lonely wood perhaps an hour or so ago, hammering out a trail that wove through the gnarled trees. In the dawn sunlight sprinkled through the murk of leaves above, Cade could see the creature’s bulk had pressed its hooves deep into the ground, its weight squeezing moisture from the soil. The beast seemed much larger than he remembered.
He jumped, startled yet again to find one of the Sisters lurking behind him as he waded through the waist-high ferns. These armoured women seemed to vanish from sight every time he looked away. They were holding back, giving him room to interpret the trail, though Maia was never far from his side and he could feel One-Ear keeping a baleful watch upon him.
Cade still could not comprehend these women, let alone trust them. What they were, where they came from. Their appearance had kicked the world out from under him. The Horned Throne had been an indisputable presence in his life, as real as the earth upon which he walked. Now it seemed He was merely a primal echo of some greater cosmic truth, just as Abi had said. The concept defeated him, and he was glad of it. The possibility that Abi was in danger was all that mattered now, the only truth Cade cared to understand.
One-Ear gestured angrily.
‘You need to move faster,’ Maia told him.
‘Tell her ladyship, I’m moving as fast as I can.’
‘She can hear you perfectly well,’ said Maia. ‘So please be aware that you are addressing an honoured Oblivion Knight of the Silent Sisterhood.’
Not so high and bloody mighty that she could stop me from shaving an ear off her, thought Cade with a smirk, then paused to wonder fearfully whether One-Ear and her Sisters could read minds as well as cloud them. He quickly resumed brushing aside the ferns, picking out hoofprints, moving as swiftly as he could without losing the trail. He considered the sprawl of woods ahead. A thousand hiding places beckoned. Dense trees, dark hollows, green hillocks, everything drowning in thick ferns.
The path to Abi was known only to him. Without his guidance, these imperious gargoyles stalking behind him would be lost. Though he didn’t like to think what one of those enormous guns might do to him if they caught him trying to slip away.
Damn these bald hags, he thought, sizzling with resentment. He and his fellow orphans had been happy in the Cradle. They never wanted for protection. Why were these wretched Sisters of Silence even here?
One of them was carrying some kind of small metal utensil. It clicked and whirred in her hand as she scanned their surroundings, probing the undergrowth like she was dowsing for running water. The woman gestured at Maia, frustrated, her mysterious tool ineffectual.
‘We need human eyes out here, a hunter’s eyes,’ Maia told him. ‘If you see anything unusual, you must tell us immediately.’
Cade ignored her, absorbed in the trail, which now was staggering sideways and back, the hoofprints seeming to balloon in size with every step.
‘What is it?’ said Maia.
He motioned she be silent and immediately heard the jostle of guns made ready.
He could find no trace of Abi, no threads of hair or fabric, no streaks of blood, though judging by these tracks his quarry was now large enough to have swallowed her whole. He brushed aside another fern and trembled at the sight of what he found there. Hoofprints now bigger than those of a carthorse had resumed their progress north-east. But that was not all that had sent a shimmer of fear down his back.
Whatever beast he and Abi had summoned into that cornfield, it walked now upon two legs.
The bracken ahead of him was undisturbed, though the thing that had moved through it must have stood twice the height of a bear. It had moved with stealth, aware of its pursuers.
Again, Cade thought the Sisters had vanished, but there they were, aiming their guns into the trees. Maia had drawn a bulbous pistol. The surrounding leaves chuckled in the breeze, boughs creaking like rope. Cade could sense an unnatural stillness that spoke of something watching them from afar. He could sense it, the way a deer can sense the drawing of a bowstring. He scanned the distant undergrowth for an outline hunkered among the trees, some tell-tale movement that would betray the position of an adversary. But his vision throbbed with pain, disturbed by the Sisters’ unearthly presence. Cade felt panic brimming in his chest, then realised his mistake.
The trees were empty. Something had scared the birds from even the highest branches. Something was already here.
The attack erupted from behind before he could yell a warning.
He turned to see a black wave, like a hill tearing itself loose from behind the trees and crashing into the Sisters’ midst. He saw the woman with the dowsing device scooped off her feet by huge ribbed horns that smashed her through a tree, showering Cade in blood and tumbling leaves. He screamed in fright at what he thought at first to be a volley of thunderbolts. The Sisters’ guns were more like cannons, booming beasts that spat flashes of lightning, turning the woods into a flickering hell of noise and violence. They blasted bloody splashes across an immense muscled back before the giant disappeared into the trees.
The Sisters of Silence ceased fire, the air now a blizzard of tumbling leaves and wood dust. Cade felt a long arm enclose him. It was One-Ear, pulling him behind a tree. Cade squirmed in her grip; he felt like a mouse being dragged into a spider’s burrow. The others had cleaved to the larger trees, melting from his sight. One-Ear remained motionless, breathless as a dead thing. The stiffness of her embrace sent waves of maddening revulsion through his body. She was thumbing a large rivet built into her gauntlet, silently tapping out an order to the rest of the squad.
Minutes passed. The snow of leaves dwindled. Silence resumed. One-Ear finally stirred from cover.
‘Wait,’ said Cade. One-Ear hesitated and clicked the rivet in her gauntlet several times more.
By now the smaller predatory mammals – the bristlers and branch rats – should have emerged from their burrows. Yet Cade could hear no telltale rustling among the bracken. Even the ever-present moss midges had been dispelled from the air. The beast was still here, manoeuvring among the dense trees that cloaked its bulk, calculating its next devastating charge.
The limb of a tree lunged out from the swamp of ferns to his right, crashing aside a Sister who h
ad been protecting One-Ear’s flank. The branch was gripped in a huge dark fist. The air suddenly ripened with a steamy perfume of sweat and honey as a familiar figure tottered into view on cloven hooves.
Half-drunk on its musk, Cade felt his knees buckle, though whether out of terror or adoration he did not know. Though it looked like the Horned Father risen in outrage from his throne upon the Tor, Cade knew it was not He. It was something else, something that wore His image. He knew from its malicious smirk, long brown teeth leering from behind human lips. Yet some instinct of self-preservation screamed at him to believe it was indeed the Horned Father.
It is Him. It must be Him.
He lied to himself over and over, for to believe anything other than the lie was to suggest a universe gone mad, a reality that harboured horrors beyond his imagining. Merely to contemplate such a concept was to invite madness.
Cade stared helplessly as the beast thrust its club at him like a spear. His head jerked as a powerful hand shoved him away. He heard an explosion of splintering wood. The earth trembled as he scrambled behind cover. Peering out from behind a fallen log, he beheld a scene out of legend, a primordial monster locked in mortal combat with a champion of humanity.
One-Ear had drawn a fabulous silver sword from her back, carving the air in silent flashing swirls. Her long legs needled the ground as she swirled about the beast’s flanks, her blade guiding away every crash of its immense club, threading herself into a series of counter-strikes.
The other Sisters surrounded the monster, their guns at the ready, giving their leader room to express her artistry. Slashes of luminous sap drooled over the black fur that covered the beast’s crooked legs, its bulging loins. Its naked torso was nut-brown and slabbed with muscle, its huge arms veined with green. A gnarled star of horns stood erect at its brow, tearing at the branches of the trees as it fought. Its eyes were pinpricks of gold.
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