That was one crop ruined. And the tales of the first Long Darkness claimed it had lasted three full months—more than a hundred days. From Sycinel to Yearthaw, through Llycanmont and the Festival of Flowers, to the end of Theramel…
All of spring, eaten up by darkness.
In the city, in the swamp, she hadn't had the luxury of looking forward. Now she almost wished she'd stayed in that primal survival state. Her mind spun projections of the agricultural damage, the desperate farmers, the starving city-dwellers…
There were civil and Shadow stockpiles of course, and all farmers kept winter reserves. But no one had expected a second Long Darkness.
First problems first, Lark. Then you can tackle the troubles of the world.
“To Fort Krol, then Cantorin,” she said. “As soon as possible, however possible. And after that, just stick with me. I'll get us where we need to go.”
Around her, the men nodded—even Vyslin after a moment's pause. None looked optimistic, but there had been no sobbing yet, and very little screaming.
As long as they had work to do, they would survive.
Chapter 17 – White Hawk, Black Tree, Red Thorn
Charcoal slithered through his fingers and turned to smoke, obliterated by the scathing light. He tried to look sidelong at the figures around him, but they were disintegrating too—fragments flaking off beneath the press of the wind, limbs whittled down to twigs then to nubs, faces lost to the scour.
His eyes stung, too dry for tears but leaking all the same. He couldn't remember why, couldn't place these shapes, his fellow sufferers. Burned black and featureless, they might have been anything, even wildfire-killed trees once their defensive arms fell away.
Before his face, his hand thinned. His fingers became skeletal, the reek of roasting flesh thick in his nostrils. There was no pain, not really—just a pressure, a tightness like sunburn across the whole of his arm and creeping over his brow, his cheeks. The light glared through: furious, relentless, cleansing.
He wanted that. Wanted to stop resisting.
Wanted—
“Don't,” said a voice at his back. Soft, small. “Turn around, Cob.”
He shook his head. This was what he had sought, what he'd fought for. Even when cloaked in darkness, he'd reached out to it, desperate, terrified, ashamed…
“Turn around.”
A sharper voice. Older yet somehow the same, commanding with familiar force, familiar venom.
The breath hitched in his throat. His head turned, mouth forming an abortive first syllable: “Da—“
A pale figure stood in his shadow, shaking his head. Not a child, not quite a man, with darkness at the roots of his blond hair and a hard glint in his murkwater eyes. Though he wore classic High Country Kerrindrixi garb, from heavy hide pullover to knit scarf to bone-and-tin protective charms, he was not Kerrindrixi in the slightest.
“Lerien,” Cob corrected himself in a surprised gust. “You're still here.”
“I'll always be here,” said his imaginary friend seriously. He wasn't tall, maybe chin-height, but Cob had shot up over the past few months due to the Guardian's tampering. Without it, they might have seen eye-to-eye. “This is my home, now that my parent is gone.”
Cob grimaced at the reminder of Darilan's loss. Lerien was his splinter—his son, in a way—so it had to be even worse for him. “You're older,” he noted.
“We both have to move on.”
“I don't—“
“Listen,” Lerien interjected. “For once in your life. I'm the inheritor—the person Darilan wished he could have been, and I know what he was thinking when he made me. He wanted us to be strong, free, happy—even if he couldn't personally be a part of it. But you can't reach his goal by leaping into the scour of the Light. I need you to follow me.”
“Where?” said Cob, casting a look around. His shadow stretched long and dark past Lerien, drawing a single line across a landscape of white nothing. They were the entirety of the world—they and the Light at his back.
Then even that started to fade, and in the cessation of its intense glare, other shadows formed: abstract smatterings of grey and black, dark brown, midnight blue—then paler colors, drawing highlights across invisible shapes until everything clarified in a snap. The snow-clad slopes, the icy boulders, the path, the winter-white sky.
He looked around, expecting to see the waterfall and the cleft in the glacier, the stand of silver-barked trees. But they weren't there. Instead, the rocky path rose toward a scrub-covered hill, carved into the sharper slopes by some long-ago avalanche and playing host now to good summer grazing land, a frozen lake—and a single tree, black limbs threaded with silver.
He froze at the sight of it, every inch of his skin prickling. “Guardian thing,” he hissed.
“It's not the Guardian's, you idiot, it's you.” A hand cinched on his wrist and he went grudgingly with its pull, the tree holding his gaze as if magnetic.
It had been dying before—or that's what Lerien had said, when he'd been the white hawk perched among the branches. But as they drew close, it didn't look dead: it looked petrified, the dark wood burnished to a sheen beneath the peeling bark, the roots as rigid and unyielding as the stone they gripped. Native silver twisted through it like worms or maybe veins, weirdly natural.
“You're still alive,” said Lerien, drawing him closer. “Not for long though, if you stay like this. I know you're afraid to change, but you need it. You can't just careen blindly along.”
Cob tried to plant his feet, but felt them become split hooves and stumbled in trying to shake them back to normal. “No, I don't want any of this,” he rasped. “I'm not involved anymore. Replace the Seals then find Fiora, find my kid...”
“Then what?” Lerien searched his face, pale features tight—not so pale though, now that Cob looked. Sun-touched, just lighter-seeming because of the dark brown frame of his roots.
“Be free, like y'said. Happy. So let me go!”
He shook his head. “No. You might want to walk away but there's no guarantee the powers will leave you alone. And the Dark—”
“That is the Dark!” Cob cried, fighting his grip. The tree loomed close enough to touch, but he refused. It led into the earth and the water below, the swallowing midnight of the world. He couldn't go down there again.
“You're not even real!” he raged on. “Y'never were! And Darilan is gone—my real friend—because I got tangled up in all this shit! I don't want t'fight, I don't want any power, I jus' wanna finish this and go away. Leave me alone, Lerien!”
“You can't do this if you're weak,” the splinter growled. “You can't be free if you're dead! Cob, you stone-headed idiot, stop—“
Something snapped in his arm with a sound like green wood. His braced feet propelled him away before he quite registered the pain, or the shock and fear on Lerien's face, or the empty air beneath him.
Then he was dropping like a stone through veils of fog, a white bird screaming in the sky above, his outstretched arm unraveling into bark and wire, char and smoke—
*****
Something held him tight. He struggled against it instinctively, winning only his right arm free to tear at what felt like fabric, flesh, self…
“Cob,” said a rough voice, low and close. A clawed hand pressed against his brow. He swiped for it but felt only a gelling of the air, a heaviness beneath his palm that tasted of snow and fir and cold water, hot blood, carrion—
Two hands clasped his shoulders and shook him. Pain lanced up his right arm, and he gasped and bucked instinctively in his cocoon, eyes flaring open. Firelight painted shadows on stone and etched the darkness above him in narrow lines, letting him see a slice of jaw, a gleam of eye.
“Arik?” he rasped through a throat as dry as dust.
“Yes,” answered the wolfman, relaxing his grip. Through the cloak or blanket, Cob felt bare stone beneath his back, and the fire showed smooth but irregular walls and a low ragged ceiling. Some sort of cave, probably
water-cut. Unfamiliar.
He couldn't remember how they'd gotten to Kerrindryr. Outside was the hill of scree and brush, the lake, the tree…
No. No, this place didn't smell like Kerrindryr. There was too much smoke even for the fire crackling by their feet, and his breath came too easy, too damp. Back home, the air was dry enough to burn.
Where were they? What had happened?
“What?” he managed to mumble, the rest of his questions getting stuck behind his teeth. Arik's hands left his shoulders, then started pulling at his wrap; he tried to help with his free hand but couldn't get a good grip. His fingers felt aflame, pins-and-needles running all the way up to his elbow; no doubt he'd slept on it.
“Stop squirming,” Arik rumbled, and after a moment's bleary defiance, he did. The fabric parted to let a wisp of warm air tickle his bare chest, then Arik tugged his left arm free and adjusted the blanket more firmly across his right shoulder.
“What're you doin'?” Cob mumbled, annoyed.
“You are hurt. You need to stay still.” There was something odd in the wolfman's expression—the set of his furry brows, the low backward cant of his ears—but Cob was bad at reading subtlety on a wolf-face, and too tired to wonder much. He tried to sit up, but his head nearly floated off his neck at the motion, queasy spangles reeling through his sight.
The wolfman made an aggravated sound. “Still means still!”
“M'fine.” But Cob obeyed, squinting against the wobbly stars and waiting for all his bits and pieces to decide where they belonged. He must have conked his head on something, or passed out from exertion. They'd been running…
The eruption. The meteor that had become a charred body.
“Enkhaelen?” he demanded, pushing himself up an inch. Again the world tried to swirl away from him, but he braced his left arm and closed his eyes, awaiting its stabilization.
“Here. Sleeping, I think. Hard to tell.”
The dizziness ebbed. He peeled his eyes open to find that Arik had moved, and was now rummaging around the fire-area with a cup in one big paw. To the left was another bundled body, the swathe of blankets pulled back to the knee so that both feet could be planted in the fire. At least Cob thought they were feet; coal-black, they looked almost claw-like, and the rest of the exposed legs were just as charred.
“Y'sure he's not dead?” Cob rasped as Arik poured something from their one small pot into the cup.
“He twitches sometimes. Seals are still there. Cave's not big enough to make a fire he fits in, plus not enough wood.” Settling near him again, Arik blew over the surface of the cup then offered it to Cob's lips.
Cob sipped at it—tea, near-scalding—then reached up to take it with his right hand.
Which wasn't there.
He blinked. He was moving it, free of the blanket wrapped across his shoulder, but for some reason he couldn't see it. Closing his eyes against the disorientation, he felt it clearly: the ache in his fingers and forearm, the hot cup against his palm, the snow-fir-blood tingle of Arik's hand—
The wolfman pulled away with a hiss. Cob opened his eyes again, frowning, and saw that Arik's ears had flattened to his skull.
“What?” he mumbled. “Danger?”
“Cob...”
Then the words dried up, the wolfman just staring at him with abnormally wide blue eyes.
He didn't understand. He hadn't done anything. “You all right?” he mumbled anyway.
Arik nodded, but his expression stayed the same.
Pushing up a bit more on his left elbow, Cob said, “What's wrong? I dun—“
The angle shifted his view, giving him a sudden look at the blanket that crossed his chest from right shoulder to left hip. It was undisturbed by his grab at the cup—unmarred by the presence of a right forearm. He could see his elbow down there, pressed into his side by the blanket's stricture, but it ended in a short knob where there should have been much more.
That was ridiculous. His fingers tingled with lively pain, the heat from the cup still lingering at their tips, and his palm ached, his wrist, the back of his forearm—normal, natural sensations. It was there, he just couldn't see it. It was there!
Forcing himself into a sitting position, he struggled with the blanket, pushing and pulling at it in frustration until finally it came off his shoulder and let him draw his right arm free.
Blood-red vines covered it, thickening as they descended until they reached the end two inches below his elbow. They knotted there like a tangle of roots, tough yet flexible enough to let him move the joint. Nothing extended beyond but air.
The cave closed in on him. Darkness everywhere, and pressure; no light but that which illuminated the loss, no sound but the ringing in his ears, no taste but copper. He felt it—he felt it there, clenching, spasming, but there was nothing, only the twitch of muscle in his upper arm, the ghost of movement in his mind.
When he closed his eyes, it was as real as life, but when he tried to touch it…
His left hand went through empty space. A heaviness passed through his phantom right.
“It's still there,” he mumbled. “It's still...”
“Cob,” said Arik carefully, “Cob, it's not. It was rotting. I smelled it. The woman, Mariss, stabbed your arm, and something happened—don't know what. But I know sepsis and...and amputation. I am sorry. Wish there had been another way.”
Cob shook his head, still staring at the absence. The vines shifted subtly; he touched them and felt a throb like a heartbeat, his heartbeat. “It's devouring me,” he mumbled. “Drinking my blood.”
“Not your blood. It drank water for you while you slept.” A big hand clamped on his shoulder, and he tried to shrug it off but couldn't focus, couldn't summon the obstinate strength. “I do not know what it wants, but it saved you. I know it is a shock, and there is no excuse—“
“It's still there. I feel it.”
“No. I cut it off so it could not poison you. What you feel is not flesh. It is soul remembering flesh. Had to do it. Could not lose you. ...Cob, look at me.”
He couldn't. His eyes were locked on the empty place where his palm should be, on the sensation of air-currents against his absent skin. It was there. It was there and this was a trick of some sort, an elaborate bullshit prank. Probably Enkhaelen's fault—
“Cob.”
Hands on both of his shoulders. Pain all along his right arm, from fingertips to neck. It felt like ice, like needles, like burning—all at once and then in sequence, back and forth, interspersing agony between the true sensations. It was there, it was there, it was there...
Furry arms enfolded him. He clutched at them, chest heaving, and realized that his face was wet—that he was crying, weak sounds coming from a mouth he hadn't even realized he'd opened. Awareness tightened the knot around his heart and clogged the sobs in his throat until he shook with the force of them. Thoughts fled like birds from an avalanche, scattering into nothingness.
And still he felt with that absent hand. Arik's fur was coarse under the fingers of his left, quills regrown enough to poke uncomfortably at his palm, but under the right was that sense-taste-scent of snow and blood and a strange heat, dense but permeable, that made the wolfman twitch when he contacted it. Like it was some place intimate, even though he knew he was just touching Arik's back.
It scared him, so he let his hand fall, even though the pain in his arm intensified when he did nothing. Face pressed to the wolfman's shoulder, he let the tears flow free until the ache in his chest was just from strain and the floodwaters finally dried. Snot-nosed and wrung-out, he lifted his head enough to mumble, “Not y'fault.”
Arik said nothing, just kept stroking his hair.
“What day's it? Where are we?”
“I don't know,” Arik murmured. “It's been two days, maybe three. I went as far as I could. Volcano's still erupting. Ash in the sky, hard to tell east from west. I think we draw near the Rift, though. Felt some shaking.”
“Riftquakes? Because of the
eruption?”
“Might be.”
Cob grimaced, then reached reflexively to brush stray fur from his lips only to feel his hand pass through his face. It wasn't like touching Arik; no weird synaesthesia, just a slight resistance and a sensation on his skin like a faint breeze.
Nausea rolled in his gut, but he suppressed it. He felt more sane now, if no less stricken. As long as he didn't look at that empty space, he thought he'd be all right.
The resolution didn't last more than a moment. That little stump coated in vines…
It's gone.
It's still there!
“I think...I should sleep more,” he tried, though he doubted he'd succeed. “Gimme the tea and...when I'm up again...we'll go. M'fine, I'll be fine, I jus' need to rest. I can get through this. Gotten through worse.”
The wolfman's brows drew down in doubt and dismay, but he nodded and reluctantly loosened his clasp. The cup of tea returned, tepid now, and he drank it awkwardly from his left hand, losing several rivulets down his front. It took an act of will to keep from raising his right hand to help.
After that, Arik made him eat a few slices of dried squash from their supply. He chewed obediently, regretting every moment still awake, then drank a cup of water and lay down against the wad of clothes that had been his pillow.
Firelight filled his eyes. For several long breaths, he was sure he'd never sleep—that the rest of his life would be one long waking nightmare.
Then exhaustion rolled in like a riptide, and his eyelids sagged shut.
*****
He woke to a touch on the shoulder, a weight bearing down over him. Whatever he had been dreaming wisped away to irretrievable nothing, overwritten by sudden darkness.
“What—“ he started, but a hand clamped over his mouth.
For a moment, all the world was fur and quills and a faint sickly scent his nerves identified as fear. Obstinacy told him to struggle, but some instinct had hooked into the base of his skull to keep him still, keep him listening.
The Drowning Dark (The War of Memory Cycle Book 4) Page 47
