by Leo Hunt
“Keep close to me,” he says, and then strides off into the fog again. I follow as best I can. He and Ham scramble down earthen banks, ford through the stagnant pools of dark water that collect around the bases of the trees. At one point we pass a single fallen leaf, dead and gray, which I swear is larger than a racing yacht’s sail. I feel as though we’ve been shrunk down to mouse-size, and that at any moment a silent white owl, grim and immense, could come soaring down from the treetops and carry us back to its nest. From what I’ve seen of Deadside this far, it isn’t even that unlikely.
As I’m scrambling under a gnarled loop of tree root, I see a flash of white off to the left of us. It’s a human figure, I’m sure of it, and from the pale clothing, it could be Ash. I freeze, trying to determine if she saw me. The fog is thick and dark, almost like smoke. I can’t see anything anymore. I can see the ground beneath my feet, and that’s about it. I realize I’ve lost the Shepherd and Ham.
“Hey!” I hiss. “Guys! I saw something!”
No response.
Maybe the Ahlgrens were waiting for us? This is an ideal ambush spot.
I silently press on, following the trail I know they were walking on. As I’m coming down a steep bank of earth, still afraid to shout too loudly in case Ash and the Widow are nearby, the fog lifts a little, like a breeze ruffled a curtain, and I see more clearly where I am. This is a hollow of sorts, a depression between two of the gargantuan trees, and to one side there’s a cave that’s formed where earth has collapsed away between two of the trees’ roots. A figure is standing outside the cave, with its back to me.
It’s Elza.
What’s happening?
It’s unmistakably Elza, just as I last saw her. How can it be her? Is this where she ended up? Her hair is long and wet and black, falling down her back, just like it was when she died. She’s dressed in her leather jacket, black jeans. She’s pulling at a strand of her hair, just like Elza used to when she was stressed.
“Elza?” I call.
She stands still.
“Is that you?”
“Luke?” she calls back. It’s her voice. She sounds afraid.
“Elza! I’m coming to get you! It’s OK.”
She doesn’t turn around. I make my way across the hollow toward her.
What is she doing out here? I have a sudden rush of love, an urge to hold her and comfort her. She must be scared, terrified. . . .
“Where are you?” she asks.
She still hasn’t turned around.
“I’m here, Elza! I’m here! It’s OK!”
I’m nearly touching her. I can see the strands of her hair; her fingernails, painted black; the silver beads she wore around her left wrist.
“Do you love me?” she asks.
“I’ll always love you,” I’m saying, reaching my hand out to her, “always, forever. . . .”
Elza turns around. Where her face ought to be, there’s just a mouth. It’s a wide, ravenous mouth, toothless and tongueless, occupying her face from chin to hairline.
“Do you love me?” the monster asks, still using her voice.
There’s no time to scream. The Elza thing jumps at me, clawing at me, knocking me to the earth. The being, whatever it is, is strong, and it tries to pin me to the ground so it can lower its mouth to my face. I’m looking into blackness, hungry blackness, and —
There’s a blast of green light, and the mouth is screaming. The thing leaps off me and rears up to face this new threat. I hear Ham barking and the Shepherd yelling something unintelligible. The Elza monster roars, no longer sounding remotely human, and I see beneath the clinging layer of green fire that there’s something else standing there, not Elza at all, something like a thin and faceless woman with impossibly long arms. She seems to be covered with fur.
The monster shrieks and leaps like a monkey up into the tangled roots overhead, scrambling away into the mist. The Shepherd and Ham are standing over me. I never imagined I’d be glad to see the black-eyed ghost. One of his hands still crackles with the green fire; the other cradles the Book. Ham licks my face.
“What . . . ?” I ask.
“A hungry spirit,” the Shepherd snarls. “A ghoul. Shifting forms like the mist itself. Such is the fate of those who dwell in these deep woods too long. It nearly had you, Luke.”
“I thought it was Ash,” I say, ashamed. “And then it looked like Elza.”
“Next time, raise your sigil. That ring commands some authority over the unbound dead here. You are lucky we came back to find you.”
“I will.” I start to get up.
“I want you to remember,” the Shepherd says quietly, “your oath to me. What you promised. I said I would help you wholeheartedly, and I have. I could easily have left you.”
“I know,” I say.
“Keep close to us!” the Shepherd says.
I don’t need telling again.
The monstrous forest stretches much farther, and I take utmost care to stay within touching distance of the Shepherd and Ham. We follow an arduous path over and around roots, through a system of caves, around the edge of a large chasm that seems to drop into nothingness. There’s no more contact with the beings that live in this forest, although sometimes when the fog shifts, I catch sight of furtive human shapes ducking behind roots or vanishing into tunnels. The forest is clearly inhabited. Whether they’re scared of the Shepherd, or me, or perhaps just the sigil I carry, I don’t know.
As suddenly as it began, the forest vanishes. We’re walking through heather. The fog is thinner, more like mist. I don’t have to stay within arm’s reach of the Shepherd. We tramp along in single file. For hours we don’t speak a word, don’t see a soul. I wonder what it’s like for Ash, moving through this gray silent world with the Widow. Did they bring Ilana? The idea of chaperoning that cheerful, strange girl through Deadside sends shudders through me.
We pass a hilltop where a black tower stands, its doorway empty and open, with no windows in its stone walls. None of us have even the slightest urge to look inside. We walk across a wide gray desert where boulders lie at disorderly angles, with trails in the dust behind them indicating that, at some point, they’ve been moved around. We walk through meadows and forests that could be England. We climb a mountain, which would be beautiful if the slopes weren’t gray and the view obscured by fog.
While crossing a plain of dull, volcanic-looking rock, we come to our first proper river. I have to call it a river, because that’s how the Shepherd refers to it, but you wouldn’t immediately think river if you saw it. The river is a wound in the rock, a chasm, and at the bottom of this chasm is a slow-flowing stream of red fire. The flames are red in the way fresh blood is red, a clamoring crimson, with none of the yellow or orange tones you see in normal fire. There’s heat coming off the river, and the redness is an astonishing contrast to the monochrome landscape we’ve been traveling through. Ham stays well away from the edge.
“The Phlegethon,” the Shepherd says.
“The flegga-what?”
“Phlegethon, the ancients named it. There are eight rivers, boy, that flow through the underworld. Eight rivers of shadow and flame. The greatest of them is the Styx, River of Oaths, backbone of the underworld. The lesser rivers number seven: Lethe, Acheron, Phlegethon, Cocytus, Apelpsion, Algos, and golden Elys. We stand before the Phlegethon, the River of Rage. It flows into the heart of the darkness, Tartarus.”
“It doesn’t sound like we want to follow this river,” I say.
“No,” the Shepherd agrees. “This river does not lead anywhere we want to go, and we cannot travel upon it.”
I don’t have anything to say to that. We walk in silence alongside the chasm, the bloodred river below us, and eventually, as the Shepherd knew we would, we come to a bridge. It’s roughly carved from the same volcanic stone, and fortunately seems to be unguarded. We cross, and when we reach the other bank I look back and the Phlegethon has vanished. We’re in a barren gray field instead.
Th
ings get bad again maybe hours or days later; without nights or the sun or even meals to judge time by, your perception swiftly stops having any meaning at all. My legs don’t get tired, because, like the Shepherd said, you don’t have muscles here. It’s about will and wisdom. I’m feeling pretty short of the latter.
We’re descending a barren slope, heading toward who-knows-what, when the fog lifts again the way it does sometimes in this place, and I find I can see farther down the slope into a stony valley dotted with fir trees. There are figures, only specks, moving toward the tree line. Two of them are bright white, the third wearing gray.
“Is that . . . ?” I ask.
“Having never laid eyes upon them, I could not say,” the Shepherd replies.
The specks have vanished into the trees. They must’ve been miles away. The fog thickens again, almost as though the landscape itself were taunting us. It was Ash and Ilana and the Widow, I’m sure of it.
“That was them,” I say. “I know it was. We’re gaining on them.”
“We are still far from the Shrouded Lake,” the Shepherd says, examining the Book of Eight. “However, I see no reason why catching the Ahlgrens before they reach its shores would be to our disadvantage. Do you believe they saw us?”
“Who knows?”
“We shall assume that they did, and hope that they did not. Let us make haste.”
We break into a jog, Ham scampering downhill, sending small flurries of gray pebbles skittering around his paws. I’ve never seen the Shepherd run before, I realize, and it looks strange. In his three-piece suit and glasses, he’s dressed more for a long night at the library than running a marathon. When I went up against him, he never had to run anywhere — he always gave me the impression that he was three moves ahead, that I was turning up late to the places he already wanted me to go. As we pelt down the mountainside together, I’m wondering how great this plan of ours really is. Any scheme that involves an elderly master tactician hurtling downhill at a breakneck pace seems like it’s got a loose thread somewhere.
The three of us reach flatter ground, run on into the woods. This forest is normal-size, the trees lifeless grayer versions of the trees you’d see around Dunbarrow. We push our way through low bushes, strange black clumps of flowers. I’m peering into the mist, convinced that at any moment I’ll see Ash’s pale hair, the Widow’s white gown, perhaps hear a snatch of Ilana’s muddled twin-speak. I nearly walk right into the Shepherd, who’s crouched down like a hunter.
“What is it?” I whisper.
He shushes me, pointing at the forest floor. He’s looking at a small silver coin, not a sort that I recognize. It looks ancient, rough, and chipped. There’s a bird stamped into the metal.
Ham sniffs at it, then recoils as though it tried to bite him.
“It is a problem,” the Shepherd says quietly.
“Are we in danger?”
“Yes. But not from the Ahlgrens,” he says. He examines the Book of Eight, ripples and eddies of ink swimming across the double-page spread. He frowns, not liking what he sees. “No choice,” he says to himself. “Having found its mark, we cannot retreat. We have to go past it.”
“Go past what?” I ask.
“The less you know of such matters, the better,” he says, closing the Book. “It will really do you no good to understand. Do not speak to them. Whatever you do.”
“Speak to who?” I ask.
He leads off without another word, leaving me and Ham to skulk along in his wake. What on earth is happening? I notice more and more coins, all the same sort, silver with a bird stamped into them. I think it might be a raven or a crow, some kind of carrion bird. At first it looks like someone dropped a purse; and then, as the coins grow more numerous, like we might be walking through a grove of money trees that are dropping ripe fruit; and finally, when you can’t even see the ground anymore, I imagine a blizzard of silver pieces, blanketing the earth in money. Our feet slide in the coins, sending them jittering and jangling over one another. It’s impossible to walk quietly, and again I’m seized with the fear that Ash might be lying in wait for us.
Then I hear the voices, and a different kind of fear grabs at me.
They’re low, urgent voices, chanting like monks at prayer. They seem to be coming from all around us, echoing through the fog and the trees. I clink my way across the coin-strewn ground, the voices growing louder with every step, knowing that whatever we’re about to see, I desperately don’t want to see it. We move out of the forest, onto a great plain that shimmers with drifts of silver pieces, and I see the source of the noise.
The plain is covered with stakes — long, sharpened poles of wood, a little taller than I am. On each stake is a severed head, all facing the same direction, positioned at regular intervals across the plain, and they’re all chanting, or perhaps babbling; it’s hard to tell. The sight is so gruesome and strange that I barely know what to do. The Shepherd forges ahead, boots scattering the coins underfoot, and me and Ham follow him, afraid of this place but more afraid of being left behind. Ham’s tail is between his legs, and he refuses to look up from the silver-coated ground.
The heads are all human, and they’re mostly men. Some are bearded; some aren’t. There are men from every country and nation you can think of. As I pass, the heads see me, tilt downward to catch my eyes. Their lips move.
“I say, boy,” one says.
“Agua,” another says, wheezing. “Agua . . .”
Some of them wear helmets: bronze helmets, steel helmets, helmets made from dried bamboo padding. Some of them wear the full-faced helmets of medieval knights; others wear a wreath of leaves. I see one head wearing a gas mask, a housefly spliced with a morose elephant.
“You there, who are you?” a head asks me, in the tone of someone used to being obeyed. I walk on, ignore him. The Shepherd is just ahead of me, his hunched shape half-visible in the mist, silently winding his way through the stakes.
“If you could just loosen my bonds,” one sweating, sallow head pleads as we pass him.
“I’ll tell you where it’s buried,” a man with no teeth and a huge black beard promises.
“Please help us.”
“Boy!”
“Pardon me, sir . . .”
The heads harangue and plead, wheedle and beg; they mock and abuse us as we pass. I don’t speak to any of them. I put one foot in front of the other.
The Shepherd walks onward, occasionally checking to make sure me and Ham are still behind him, sometimes looking down at the Book of Eight. The stakes grow thicker and more numerous, the heads closer together, chanting and babbling, all facing the same direction. When the stakes are so thick that we’re knocking into them as we walk, the mist thins, and I see what stands at the center of the plain.
It’s a tree, I think, or something like a tree: a black spiky shape breaking through the earth, coins heaped in shimmering drifts around its trunk, and enormous swords, eight of them, stuck into the earth in a circle around its base. Every part of the tree seems to have a bird perched on it, more black birds than I’ve ever seen in one place before; the tree itself isn’t visible, I realize, only the birds sitting on it, ravens or crows or something, cawing and squabbling and flapping their wings as they jockey for position, sometimes taking flight and landing on another spot of the tree. It’s like on a nature documentary when you see ants swarming over a hapless bug — the birds are that dense, the kind of creepy repetition you don’t often see outside of a computer screen. The tree, if that’s what it is, is mesmerizing. The heads cry louder as the tree comes into view, although I still can’t understand most of what they’re saying.
I fix my eyes on the coins, the ground, and hurry onward. The stakes become less dense again, the chanting of the heads less fervent. And then I hear a voice I recognize:
“Boss.”
I look up at the stake right in front of me. It’s him.
“Seriously, boss, I’m glad to see you!”
Shaved head, scar down his left
cheek, a cross tattooed on his forehead. A flattened nose, gray eyes, snaggle teeth. Three gold rings punched through his right ear. And I’d know that voice anywhere.
“Please, boss,” the Judge says, “you gotta get me out of here.”
I swallow.
“You promised, boss,” he says, “remember? Said you wouldn’t send us to Hell. Well, look at me now. Help me out. Get me down off here.”
“Sorry,” I say under my breath.
The Judge’s head looks at me with openmouthed glee and begins to scream. It isn’t his voice anymore: it sounds like a bird, the cry of a vicious hawk with a baby rabbit in its claws. The other heads take up the bitter scream, their voices becoming an inhuman noise, beyond words.
The Shepherd is looking back at me, horror on his waxy white face.
“RUN!” he screams. “RUN, YOU STUPID BOY!”
I don’t need telling twice. The heads are screaming, and I hear the beating of wings. Me and Ham take off like rockets, dodging between the stakes, my feet slipping on the coins, convinced at every step that I’ll fall and whatever’s after us will have me —
The Shepherd’s moving faster than I thought possible, sprinting like a champion athlete across the terrible plain. Ham’s running flat out, whimpering, coins spraying around his paws like sea foam. I chance a look behind us as we run.
The black tree is exploding in slow motion, unraveling, birds flying from its branches and trunk into a whirling cloud that seems to cover the gray sky. As I take a second glance, I see them diving down at us.
I scramble up a bank, coins jangling and rolling, grabbing desperately at roots and stones beneath them.
We’re in the woods again. The heads are behind us. Ham yowls madly in the trees. I can’t see him. I can’t see the Shepherd, and I —
