by Bobby Adair
They would’ve died at the river.
William stood several feet away, watching her. She caught a glimpse of his eyes in the torch’s glow. She could still see the fright in them, but there was something else, too. It looked like he was in shock.
There was no time to worry over it. She turned her attention back to the bag and eased it off Bray’s shoulders, then slung it onto her arm. She’d take the whole thing. He wouldn’t need it now, anyway.
When she’d finished, she scavenged the dead soldiers. None of them had any silver, but they had some food and water. She laid claim to all of it and stuck it in her bag. Then she picked up one of the soldier’s swords.
She’d never used one before. She hefted it in the air, examining the sword by the firelight. If she wanted to survive, she’d better learn how. She pried a sheath from one of the dead soldiers and put it on.
The torches flickered. After a few seconds, one of them went out, pitching the hillside into semi-darkness.
“Where are we going to go, Mom?” William asked, breaking the silence.
“I’m not sure.”
Ella hadn’t thought that far ahead. With her adrenaline flowing, all she’d thought to do was to reclaim her possessions. She glanced down the mountainside. The forest was thick and menacing, as if it hosted a single mass of living things. They couldn’t go out there. Not tonight.
“Let’s go back to the cave,” she said.
“Okay,” William said, but she could sense his fear.
She wasn’t keen on the idea, but at the moment, she couldn’t think of a better plan. It was still dark, after all, and the forest wasn’t safe. They walked back up the incline. They’d only taken a few steps when a groan whispered out over the rocks from behind them. Ella paused, her heart skipping a beat.
She swiveled. The three bodies near them remained motionless. Rodrigo was out of sight, but she was sure he was dead. Her eyes flitted between the soldiers and Bray. She waited for what felt like an eternity, thinking she was imagining things, but she couldn’t be: William had heard it, too. He was stock-still, listening as intently as she was.
Somewhere in the distance, an animal cried, but the moan didn’t repeat. She’d been certain the men were dead. She contemplated pulling the sword, but clutched her knife instead. After a minute of silence, she took a step toward the nearest dead soldier. In the absence of one of the torches, his face hung in shadow, but she could see the outline of his features. Nothing seemed to have changed.
The groan came again. This time she pinpointed the source.
It was coming from Bray.
“Wait here,” she hissed at William.
She stepped closer to the fallen man, maneuvering until she could see his face. The Warden’s eyes had opened.
“Bray?”
He parted his lips, letting out another moan. A stripe of blood ran from his temple to his chin. Ella remained in place for a moment, unsure of what to do, when she heard a crackle from down the mountainside.
“What was that?” William asked, his eyes darting down the slope.
Ella followed his gaze. Something was making its way through the forest. Not just one thing, but multiple things. The forest came alive with crunches—sticks and brush being trampled by footsteps. Demons. Ella backed up a step, glancing back at the cave.
“Are we going to leave him?” William asked, incredulous.
“No,” she answered. “We can’t do that. We need to move him. Help me!”
Ella grabbed Bray under the armpit, then directed William to take his other arm. The man seemed semi-conscious. They were fifteen feet from the opening of the cave—a short distance, without a body to pull. Ella tugged and strained, but could barely move him.
“Pull harder!” she urged William.
William strained. The noises from down the mountain were getting closer. It sounded like they’d transitioned from the forest to the rocky part of the slope. The Warden slid a few inches, moving toward the cave, but they were fighting against the incline and the weight of his body. Bray groaned softly. Ella wasn’t sure how injured he was, but one thing was clear: if they didn’t get to the cave soon, they’d all be eaten alive.
“Hold on,” she whispered. Ella gritted her teeth, bracing herself on the mountain, and instructed William to pull again.
This time they were able to move the man, and they began dragging him over rocks and stone.
The footsteps hastened. The demons were gaining ground.
Ella tugged with all her might, ignoring the aches and pains of her battered body, sliding the Warden up the slope. Before she knew it, they’d reached the mouth of the cave. She heard inhuman grunts wafting up the mountain, the rattle of loose stones.
Bray moaned louder, as if to spur them on. Ella and William slid him into the cave. There was barely enough room for Ella and William to fit next to each other, but somehow they managed. When they’d gotten inside, Ella stared nervously at the entrance.
The remaining torch outside was still lit. What if the light exposed the cave’s opening? What if the demons looked inside? She had the sudden, frantic thought that she needed to douse it.
“Wait here!” she whispered.
She crawled on hands and knees to the entrance and burst into the open. Her dress blew behind her. When she reached the torch, she began rolling it on the rocks and stone, but the flames continued to burn. The noises on the mountainside were closer—a march of the damned coming to take her. She changed tactics, stamping the torch with her boots. If she couldn’t put the damn thing out, she’d have to leave it burning.
The things were getting closer.
Finally the torch went out, releasing a cloud of smoke, and Ella darted back to the cave. She scampered through the opening and toward William, positioning herself next to Bray’s motionless figure. She could hear the boy’s unsteady breath.
She peered at the entrance. With the torch extinguished, the opening revealed little of the world outside. But she could hear noises—grunts and growls that were no more than thirty feet away. The demons had reached the dead soldiers. She clutched onto William, fear ramming her chest like a stake. Although she couldn’t see the demons, she could envision them feeling their way around, exploring the scene outside. She held her breath, as if the mere exhalation of air would alert them. After a few moments, she heard the rabid tearing of flesh, then the sounds of slurping and gorging, sounds that were worse than any nightmare she’d had.
She covered her son’s ears and prayed. Though she wasn’t sure what God she believed in, anything was better than listening to this. No higher power could condone this savagery.
The feasting lasted for a nearly unbearable amount of time. Each crunch of teeth against bone made her skin prickle. It was as if the soldiers’ entrails were her own, their flesh, her flesh.
It was hard to fathom that the demons had once been human, too.
Bray let out a quiet moan, and Ella clamped her hand over his mouth, dampening the sound. The creatures paused in their feeding. After a few seconds of listening, they resumed.
When the last limb had been cracked and the final bones had been licked clean, the demons continued up the mountainside. She listened to their footsteps recede, her breaths still violent and uneven. Soon, the wind blew across the landscape again, as if the world itself had deemed it safe to exhale.
***
Ella didn’t remember falling asleep. When she awoke, there was a triangle of light on the cave floor and William was cradled in her arms. The boy was still clutching the knife she’d given him.
She studied her surroundings. Having arrived in the dark, she’d barely noticed the color of the walls and ceiling. The cave was comprised of a deep, dark stone, and she found herself thinking it was beautiful, unlike anything she’d ever seen. Her eyes wandered. She almost jumped when she found Bray staring at her. The Warden was leaning against the far wall, his face caked with blood. His features were barely recognizable. He was sipping a flask of wate
r, and he greeted her when she made eye contact.
“Good morning.”
He smiled nonchalantly, as if they’d awakened in a Brighton house instead of a dank hole in the earth. It looked like he’d been waiting for her to arise.
“How’re you feeling?” she asked, momentarily forgetting the anger of the night before.
“One of them did a number on my head.” He tilted his skull to prove it, displaying the gash in the side of his temple. “So I’ve been better.”
“I thought you were dead.”
“So did I. Considering I was up against three soldiers, I did pretty damn well,” he mused.
She scanned the rest of his body, expecting to find him wounded, but he was surprisingly intact. “Well, I’m glad you’re alive.”
“Are you sure? That’s not what you said last night.”
Ella ignored the statement and looked down at William, who was starting to stir. The boy’s eyes fluttered open. After a brief pause, he sat upright, his eyes roving the room.
“It’s all right, honey. The demons are gone,” Ella assured him.
The boy continued looking, as if he didn’t believe her, then sat up on his haunches and stared at the entrance.
“I wouldn’t go out there, if I were you,” Bray said. “It’s a mess. The demons are good at feeding, but they aren’t so good at cleaning up after themselves.”
Ella grabbed William’s shoulder, as if to reinforce the Warden’s words. “Stay here, William.”
William settled down.
“You must’ve had a hell of a time dragging me in here,” Bray said.
“We managed.”
“I owe you one.”
His eyes wandered to his bag, which was lying next to Ella. Ella recalled taking it from him the night before, and felt a surge of panic. Bray was staring at her intently. Before she could explain, he cut her off.
“It’s okay. You can keep what’s inside,” he said. “You saved my life. You deserve it.”
“Even the demon skins?” William asked.
“Even the demon skins.”
Ella unpacked Bray’s bag, taking the silver, skins and berries, and tossed the bag back to him. She started to collect her things. “Well, we’d better be on our way. I’m glad you survived.”
She slung her bag over her shoulder. With the knowledge that Bray had lived, some of the anger of the previous night returned, and she dismissed her guilt at accepting his things. She started making for the exit, retrieving her sword.
“Do you even know how to use that thing?” Bray asked, frowning.
“I’ll figure it out.”
“It’ll be heavy at first. You might want to take a few practice swings.”
Ella ignored him and kept crawling.
“I assume you know the way to Davenport?”
“We’ll follow the river.”
“That wouldn’t be wise, remember?” Bray called. “The river is the worst place to linger.”
“We’ll stick to the woods.”
“I know a safer way.”
Ella sighed. “Why don’t you just tell us where it is, then?”
Bray took a long sip from his flask. He smiled, relishing the knowledge he held over them. Ella’s anger mounted.
“Tell us which way to go, then,” she demanded.
“Why don’t I just take you there? I can get you there in half the time it’ll take you to find your way without me.”
“I’d rather go alone.”
“I have a few things to take care of in Davenport,” Bray said. “Besides, you won’t know any of the merchants, and they’ll cheat you on the scalps. Then they’ll turn a nice profit when they trade them in.”
Ella paused, torn between the man who’d helped them and the man who’d betrayed them. If they went with Bray, how could they trust him again? At the same time, heading off alone would be a huge gamble. Besides, they could use his connections with the merchants.
“You’ll take us to the fairest one?”
“The fairest, and the best looking.” Bray smirked.
Ella rolled her eyes. “Okay. Deal.”
Chapter 32: Ivory
At first light, Ivory came to a windswept lip of rock at the top edge of a near-vertical stone face. Somewhere in the past, half the mountain had splintered and fallen away, forming a thousand-foot cliff down to the ground that sloped gently for five or ten miles, to the edge of an endless blue ocean. Breathtakingly tall towers of the old city slowly rusted and rotted on that ground, on both sides of a river, on the small islands offshore, and stretching into the distant gray haze up and down the coast. Brighton was just a speck of a bumpkin village compared to that dead metropolis.
But just as the Ancients who used to live in the old city had disappeared, he knew eventually the remaining towers and smaller buildings would crumble into the forest until nothing remained. Whether it took months or years, decay was inevitable.
At one time, one of the towers had stood taller than the cliff on which Ivory now stood—a vertical living forest, home to a million birds and who could guess what else. Ivory had laid eyes on that building only once, on his first visit to the ancient city. His uncle had taken him there. Some time prior to their next visit, four months later, the tower had collapsed into a mound of debris, burying many of the nearby structures in the vague grid pattern around it.
From atop the cliff, the pile of that giant tower’s rubble seemed small, but in fact, it was enormous. Even after its inevitable destruction under the weight of its stones and steel, it stood taller than any building in any of the three towns, and its debris spread wide enough to cover a quarter of Brighton in broken stone. And that was just one of the ancient towers.
On Ivory’s previous trip, he’d asked his friend Jingo how many buildings the Ancients had abandoned when they left the old city. Jingo had laughed and asked Ivory to guess. And so Ivory had guessed. But Jingo never answered.
Ivory stood at the top of the cliff in the cold, clear air. It was always the cold days that gave the longest views. He sat on a big rock, close enough to the edge of the cliff that he was able to see most of the ancient city filling the land between the mountains and the shore, and started counting. He’d expected to find the task time-consuming and tedious. He’d also expected it to have an end.
As he counted his way across the grids and odd patterns, the task grew difficult. Some square patterns in the grid contained single structures, some contained multiples, and some seemed to have no pattern at all. There were whole swaths of the city he couldn’t see, blocked from view by the ancient towers. Peculiar mounds and hills dotted the old city’s patterns—whether crumbled buildings or overgrown forest hills, he couldn’t tell. The process of counting, it turned out, wasn’t a matter of ticking off units, but a matter of making judgments at each tick.
After several hours, he’d managed to count only a small portion of the buildings in the old city. It’d seemed like such a simple thing when he’d started. As he sat on his rock, staring into the distance, he felt defeated by the task and understood Jingo’s laughter. It was impossible to count all of the buildings and houses.
The city had to have been magnificent in those days before the fall, alive with more people that Ivory could imagine, full of inscrutable far-talking devices, flying machines, and terrible weapons of flame, like small bits of the sun brought down from heaven to incinerate the enemy.
Stories of Tech Magic, the secret of the Ancients. Could it have truly been that powerful? Every time Ivory looked at the old city and imagined what it had once been, he believed the old stories. But to believe those old stories was to accept despair. The Ancients had been eradicated by a brutish race of beasts and none of the Ancients’ wondrous devices and terrible weapons had saved them.
What did that say for Brighton, with its hovels of wood and stone, its bows and swords, its horses? When would the twisted men finally come to kill them all?
Chapter 33: Ella
Ella, William
, and Bray spilled back onto the mountain.
“Don’t look, William,” Ella warned.
She did her best to shield the boy from the dead soldiers, but she could sense him peering through her fingers. Even in the daylight, the bodies on the mountainside were barely recognizable—carcasses of bone and gnawed skin. Half-eaten limbs were strewn across the landscape, heads separated from spines. Ella shuddered at the knowledge that it’d almost been they who were the dismembered corpses.
Before leaving the cave, Bray warned them to keep quiet. The demons often returned to places where they’d found humans. Not just for days, he’d said, but often for weeks. With that knowledge, they navigated the slope with knives drawn and an eye on their swords. Traveling in the daylight gave Ella some measure of comfort, but it wasn’t enough to quell her fear. The demons weren’t limited to any particular time of the sun, as she’d learned.
They’d attack anytime.
Soon they’d left the gruesome scene behind. The sun had crested the mountain, and its fervent rays spat upon the landscape, serving as both a guide and hindrance. Ella walked at a brisk pace, trying to keep the sound of her footsteps subdued. William scampered beside her. She noticed Bray was leading them sideways, simultaneously descending the mountain and changing course.
William was scratching his neck. Ever since leaving the cave, he’d seemed distracted and withdrawn, and Ella had done her best to keep him on task. She could only imagine what he was thinking. They’d seen plenty of violence and bloodshed in town, but he’d never killed anyone himself. That must have had some effect on him.
In addition, he was probably afraid of what he was turning into.
The fact that the spores were taking hold of him must be terrifying. As a mother, it terrified her, and it shredded her heartstrings that she couldn’t help him. All Ella could do was to buy them some time. Sooner or later, William’s delusions would catch up to him, and from then on, his brain would deteriorate.
