Then came the sight of the midstream island they were expecting and a hush fell, broken only by the scrape of a pole as it fended them off a mudbank below the waterline. The only movement on board suddenly was Kula playing with the otters. She had made some little balls out of knotted rag and gleaned some dried fish from the supplies and they were racing about in pursuit of one or the other at a great rate, oblivious to the interests of the adults on board. Lysandra was nearby, sitting quietly, and it felt to Bukham like they were cruising to the end of the world. He wiped his sweaty hands down his clothes, feeling how dirty they were, how tired he was, how frightened he was feeling for no reason other than that they were approaching the hunt of a monster and there was something off about everything, like a tilt that would see them all sliding helplessly into an abyss…
The quiet was broken by the hunting splash of a fishermartin plunging down from one of the trees overhanging the river near them and vanishing into the frog-rich depths. Then quiet again. They drew alongside the first island.
The soft plash of the poles, the ripples of the water, the breaking slurp of wavelet on shingle—no animal sounds at all. They slid past its mud shore, ferns trailing in the water like tiny green fingers feathering the current. Beside them, black feathers.
Half hidden by the deep grass the ‘dragon’ lay in a motionless lump, its true size clear in the bleak grey light. Skinny claws and awkward joints were piled like discarded wood. Its head, long and ugly by any standard, lay with the wide, toothy beak half open, sifting the water without tasting. The eyes were blank and dry. It was quite unmistakably dead.
The ferry was brought to a halt, grounded and two Shelliac sent to investigate. Morosely the others gathered at the railside to look down on the proceedings. They prodded the beast with poles until its stiffened carcass rocked. At the edge of the group Lysandra and Kula looked on, their faces impassive. Bukham saw Heno watching them both with all his attention. Lysandra sighed but all the anger and menace of the previous evening was nowhere to be seen. Heno nudged Celestaine and she turned to look at them too. Words were exchanged too low for Bukham to hear. He watched the tall, blonde warrior scratch her head and then she was calling for them to go. For the Shelliac’s part it seemed they were satisfied with the outcome. They forayed into the island interior and there was some sound of crushing—eggs were broken, a nest trampled it turned out—before they returned to loot the corpse for feathers and claws, bone and teeth. Then they were back aboard and casting off, all the talk about what could have happened—had it died of old age or was it too far from home, all that kind of speculation that could never be answered and left a lingering unease in its wake.
Later, as they sat and played a game of chase and fetch with the otters, Bukham saw Kula quietly stroking a small black feather as though consoling a little animal. He didn’t interrupt her but she looked up directly into his face and smiled a small, sad smile before putting the feather away in her vest pocket. Lysandra helped the Shelliac with their food preparations and later took a pole to learn how to angle the boat at the right points to take advantage of the current. There was a new kind of purpose to her, he thought, something keen and sharp as a knife point that hadn’t existed before. Where she had passively followed and peacefully accepted whatever happened, now she was alert. She didn’t speak or attempt to initiate anything. She just paid attention and as the day passed she wove herself silently and seamlessly into whatever went on around her.
He was sitting with Horse, weaving a basket to pass the time, when he overheard Heno and Celestaine talking. They must have been outside on the gunwales.
“You’re sure it was Lysandra?”
“I saw the girl at the front of the boat. The mother was away in the night,” Heno said, barely audible as more than a low grumble.
Horse was also listening, her tall ears twitching.
“And you saw magic?”
“I felt it,” he said.
They moved along out of earshot. Lysandra and Kula had killed the dragon after all they had said? He didn’t understand. And how could they have done it? What did it mean?
A holler a few moments later put them within sight of the Freeport.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
AN OLDER MAN, tall, with a blue-grey stubble of a beard and a sharp, intellectual eye, watched the boat turn towards the
Ilkand Locks. He had a staff by his side which he leaned on, resting in the shade. After the barge had gone he straightened up and turned. There was a brief glow from the staff in his hand and he took a purposeful step towards the river.
The step ended with Dr Fisher standing on the muddy bank beside the ravaged body of the dead river dragon. He set the Staff of Striding aside and took out a large, beautifully polished magnifying glass from his dainty leather satchel. Crouching down, he used a twig to poke about among the few remaining feathers and the large, unpleasant pile of innards. After a time he got up and eased his back, leaving the flies and beetles to get back to business on rendering it all down.
“Natural causes, Catty,” he murmured, as if his companion were at his side and in conversation with him. “Looted and left.” There was a pause as he considered. “Yes, I agree, I should get to Tzarkona Gate. But why would it drop dead so conveniently? Well, all right all right, don’t get your earwax rattled, I’m going.” He took up his staff and turned his nose up to the wind, sniffing and changing the direction of his nose until something told him that was the right way, then strode off and vanished from the scene.
He came back a moment later and picked up the little silk bag for the looking glass from where it had fallen on blood-soaked mud, tutted and then sighed and strode off again.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
YHEY TRAVELLED ALONG the hidden threads of the world, Ralas joined to Tricky by their hands, woven together at the fingers, matched at the palm where the lines of their lives surged and ran. It was nothing like his first experience of magic seizing him, through the splash in the water, using an element to translate instantly from one point to another. Although she warned him she was about to use another trick, showed him the spindle and the reel, talking him through the strange simplicity of casting the line, when she seized him the moment was as different from his previous life as stone from air. For one thing all the pain went away.
It was like he became music itself. The two of them were tiny complexities of constant themes and motifs, whirling in a living, dynamic throng, mastered by a single mighty composer into a symphony that was so vast it was beyond his understanding. They travelled on the melody of Tricky’s line, searching for its resolution at the one point in the universe where the cadence came to a natural close. All around them the whirling dance of the world paced itself to the beat of time, to the harmony and discord of its billion parts, and he was a part of it, a song of his own, brief but essential.
And he was once again standing on the kind support of the earth, his companion’s hand in his, the air full of dark smoke, tears pouring from his bruised and battered eyes. The pain was back. He hurt and they seemed to be facing a totem pole made up of half-rotted corpses. They stank to the heavens but they were beautiful, incredible. He could just hear the traces of their tale. He waited another second, another, as she turned to him, mouth opening to speak. He waited for the music to leave him and longing for it never to leave him. It left slowly and he felt his tears trying in the hot breeze.
“It’s music,” he mumbled to her, a gibbering fool. “Music!”
She smiled and nodded, tears on her face too. “Yes.” She pulled a silk kerchief out of her coat and dabbed his eyes and chin with it before scrubbing her own face dry. “And here we are in the dissonant chords, mate, on the trail of one who kept the score. So let’s be careful.”
The totem pole stank. It was swarmed black with flies. A whiff of it and a few cold little bodies battering around him soon had him back to his ordinary senses. “What’s this?”
“It’s a border marker of the Tzarkomen,”
Tricky said. “Beyond ye shall not go and all that. Means we’re in the right place. Come on.”
The right place was a thickly wooded grove in a land of rough rocky terrain, sandy soil and boulders. Rolling hills and steep scarps alternated with dips of forest. There was no such thing as a clear sightline or an unimpeded view in any direction. It would have been hard to drive any army through this land, but then, maybe they weren’t coming in at it from the same angle. In any case it was hard to walk on, even without the promise of a lingering and excruciating death.
Tricky took a bearing on their direction every few hundred yards and adjusted her path accordingly. They came across trails now and again—overgrown—but she avoided these. Every so often she paused for a long sniff at the breeze. The fetor of rotting flesh was here and there, and above them spirals of black birds circled in stacks, but lazily, as though merely keeping an eye on things they couldn’t be bothered to own. Ralas had spent only a little time at the undead front during the war. He expected an onslaught of the things he had seen there but aside from the odd twig snap that could be put down to something else there was no sound of anything on the move except themselves.
As the day grew older a gentle but insistent heat began to collect beneath the trees. They followed the course of a dry stream for a mile and then came to a rivulet that trickled through an acreage of mud that had been trampled into pocks and craters, then baked and cracked. Here were the footprints of many Yorughan, and the bones of Yorughan, with dry flesh baked on. A couple of vultures hopped about and flapped off as they approached, heavy, barely able to lift themselves off the ground. The breeze sighed through the dry leaves.
“This is the main trackway from the south,” Tricky said as they paused there. She turned around, her dark hair like smoke on the wind. Ralas eased his aching feet.
“If you have such strong magic, why can’t it get us closer to wherever we’re going?”
“Because I don’t know what I’m looking for. Exactly. I don’t know exactly. We come in quietly, we look around. And there are some charms and shiz stopping me doing that. They’re not known as the world’s greatest sorcerers for nothing.”
“But nothing’s happened. I mean. We saw a totem pole.”
“Fetish pole, but all right.”
“We saw a fetish pole.”
“And it saw us.”
“What?”
“The pole saw us, marked us, watched us all the way. It has eyes in the sky.”
Ralas squinted upwards. “Those are just vultures.”
“Vultures with eyes in their heads. They’ve watched us come in. We have made it to the place they want us to see.”
“I’m sorry. They want us to see what now? Who is they? There’s nobody here.” Ralas eased his back and fought for clarity against the tide of her apparently obvious statements.
“The Tzarkomen are dead,” she said. “But they are here, they are left in these things and their will is here, and they know what we have come for.”
“This Book thing?”
“Yes.”
“You think they’ll let you have it?”
“Well, we’ve got this far,” she said.
She led the way forwards across the mud, between tall rushes trying to regrow, through a field of yellow and white bone laid like old sticks in the grass. Ralas looked as closely as he could, minding his footing around the sharp, broken ends of the long bones where they’d been cracked open and the marrows looted. Here and there weapons stuck up through the wispy, dried remnants of last year’s seeding plants. A shield on its back provided a rainwater puddle that had dried almost to the last drop, heavy with a harvest of large red and black snails. The second wadi they reached held an entire torso, preserved by the black coat it was still wearing. Though the hands were missing and the ribcage had been thoroughly plundered, the neck and skull remained intact, the rest of the body mired in the dried earth. Ralas recognised the coat as being like Heno’s Heart Taker badge of office. This one had its arm outstretched as if reaching for them, or pushing them away. Both, he felt as they neared it and stepped around its summons.
Beyond this was a meadow clearing and the burnt remains of what had once been a sizeable collection of huts. All the roofs were gone but the mud structures of the bases were still there, blackened and crumbling. There were no bodies here. As they stepped onto the ground of the village he felt the air change from a numb emptiness to something quite different and he stopped, automatically, looking up at Tricky who had ascended to the top of a few remaining steps at the side of one home to get a better view.
A kind of whisper floated past him, a voice heard from a great distance, blurred by wind and time. He felt his face brushed by a faint breeze that otherwise did not exist. He wanted badly to ask a question but dare not break the quiet with his voice in case he broke something else. Somewhere in another house a hollow object fell and rolled, clearly audible as it clattered against wooden boards. He saw a movement at the corner of his eye and when he looked the faintest outline of a figure was there at the broken-down doorway of a large structure, hesitant, crouched, as if hiding. Even as he looked it was already gone.
Another, sharper movement made him half whirl, off balance. Something small but distinctly dark, like a shadow, had darted between the buildings and the loose brush and trees of the edgewood.
“Soul hunters,” Tricky said, coming down and joining him to his relief. “We don’t have long. Well. I don’t. You’re probably good. Let’s find this thing.”
“What thing? What hunters?”
She began to lead him swiftly between the homes, taking an inventory of each as fast as she was able, looking intently for something. “Soul hunters are old demons, summoned by sorcerers to guard places or objects from interference by the living. They don’t have any mind, as such, and they don’t have any bodies. They are hungry for life itself, connected to the realm of the dead—it’s not the dead but let’s call it that. They will take anything they can get, but they’re bound here, so they can’t go outside the circle which I am guessing is set at the limit of the houses judging by the fact that…”
“Nothing in here is alive.” Ralas finished.
“Yes. Now they’re hunting us. Well, me. I don’t think they can do much with you but it’s worth finding out.”
Ralas wasn’t convinced. He looked up.
The dark shadow slipped through a window and behind a distant mound. A second one crossed its path, moving forwards and vanishing as he watched, seemingly evaporating into the sunlight between the walls. Again the voices came, blown on a wind in another plane, past his ears. Howling and crying, rage and despair—he might not know the words but the song of war was always the same.
“I’m looking for a ghost,” she said. “There…” and she pointed over two broken-down spars through the skeletal frame of a minor home, filled with a rubble of broken pottery and heaps of mouldering cloth.
The faintest shapes of a figure bending down to cover something, then looking up, hands clutched to its chest, then turning to flee—he saw it like a dream of shapes in smoke, a thing of light and shade that could easily be missed in the broken cloud lighting that swept across them as the afternoon weather began to turn. The figure was female, the head large with some kind of scarf on it, he thought. As it faded away, leaving the place, its shape took form again and repeated the whole sequence of movements exactly, rushing, hesitant with fear, determined—all this he could see simply by the way it moved, and then it was gone. And back. Again, it planted its secret, tamped it down, turned to scatter or throw something over, fled. And again.
Tricky showed none of the fear he felt. She rushed over to the spot, Ralas close behind her.
The ghost faded away as they reached the building and stepped through a gap in the wooden frame to stand where it had been. The space it had filled held only dust motes, agitated by their arrival. Where it had been closing something there was a trap door yawning open in the floor. In the thick dust,
not quite obliterated by their own footfalls, a set of child-sized footprints led out of the hole.
Tricky was fishing around in the pockets of her long coat. She fumbled and then pulled out a circle of glass, rimmed with bronze, and stuck it into Ralas’ hands, gripping his fingers for a moment. He found himself looking to her eyes and foolishly had a vision of the two of them standing at an altar, the glass a posy, the words of the missed and lied-about wedding waiting behind his lips.
“I gotta go,” she was saying. “You look through this and tell me who’s there. All right?”
At the end of the small room they were in, a darkness moved, swift, passing through a stool and table as if they weren’t there. It looked small, humanoid, but the head was too long, the fingers too long and too sharply ended, stretching out like needles—
The hands on the glass with his became soft and feathered. With a clapping frenzy a large crow darted upwards between the last rafters and flapped away heavily into the sky, leaving him alone with the shadow thing, the glass in his hands and a stupid look on his face as he realised she’d abandoned him. Left for dead, he thought, and just had time to see the dark shadow gather itself and pounce.
Five talons tore through him from left to right, large enough to cut him into six pieces, had they cut flesh; but they were jagged and caught and tore at something else. He felt it stretch and catch, his body ready to fall as it had fallen so often, all necessary powers taken from it—but then something even more peculiar happened. The talons snagged. The attack stopped. It would not go. His metaphysics defeated it.
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