‘A potion?’ Hannah couldn’t believe she was discussing magical potions while lying face-down in the dirt hoping some zombie warrior wouldn’t discover her while he was busy slaughtering innocent – okay, maybe not innocent, exactly – trees.
‘Something like that, yes,’ Alen said, ‘but we don’t call them potions.’
‘They didn’t seem to notice us – or anything. Are these Seron dangerous? They seemed like—’ she stopped, not sure if the word meant anything here, then continued, ‘well, they seemed like zombies to me.’
‘Zombies,’ Alen said. ‘Interesting word.’
‘It means— well, I guess it means the living dead, or the walking dead.’
Well then, Seron are not zombies,’ Alen said, ‘they are very much alive; Nerak has never given them the chance to die – although I believe most of them would welcome death.’
‘But are these Seron dangerous? They don’t seem to be.’
Alen looked at her and Hannah could see fear mixed with amusement in his face. ‘If they were to capture us tonight, Hannah, they would tear our bodies apart, most likely celebrate with a macabre ritual – using pieces of us – and then eat what was left over. Yes. They are extremely dangerous, and we will be exceedingly careful to avoid them.’
Hannah listened to the Seron working among the trees. ‘Why doesn’t the forest take over their minds like it did ours?’
‘I am afraid that just being a Seron warrior is more terrifying than anything the forest of ghosts could show them: those men and women are constantly tortured by glimpses of who they once were, long ago. It must be tragic.’
‘But you said Nerak breeds them.’ Hannah was curious. ‘What have they got to remember if they come from parents who have already lost their souls?’
‘Seron produce human children, Hannah, because despite their appearance, they remain human. It is just that once a child is born to a Seron woman, it is—’ He paused, searching for the right words.
‘They are immediately expendable?’
‘And once they have grown enough to perform basic survival needs, Nerak strips them of their sense of themselves, leaving a shell to fill with whatever values or ideas he likes. He has been known to experiment, filling Seron children with animal urges – dog and grettan senses… hideous.’ Alen shuddered.
‘How do you know so much about them when you said there haven’t been any in over five hundred Twinmoons?’ Hannah sounded sceptical.
The lines in Alen’s face seemed to deepen. ‘Because, Hannah, I was with him when he learned the process.’ He stopped talking as Hoyt and Churn materialised out of the darkness. The horses’ hooves were wrapped in torn cloth to deaden the sound.
Still moving close to the ground, Hoyt beckoned to the others and whispered, ‘Let’s go.’
Rising as silently as she could, Hannah felt the stiffness in her legs and promised herself a steaming hot bath, an icy-cold gin and tonic, and at least an hour with the Denver Post at the first decent hotel they passed. She struggled to get astride the saddle and felt Churn reach over and haul her onto it; he patted her on the back, slipped across to his own mount and waited for Hoyt to motion them forward.
Hannah reined in the horse to a slow but steady walk and tried not to think about the Seron children. It was the most appalling thing she had ever imagined, building an army over a generation of abuse, and focused cruelty. As the sounds of the Seron, chopping, sawing and stripping enchanted trees from the forest of ghosts, filled the night, Hannah swallowed hard: she had no idea that anything so terrible could exist – in any world.
As she followed Hoyt north along the path the wagons had taken earlier that day, she tried not to think what might be waiting for them as they moved closer to the Malakasian border and Welstar Palace.
THE FALKAN PLAIN
‘That’s it,’ Garec said. ‘Whittle it down, but don’t cut it too deeply, or you’ll leave weak spots – trust me, the last thing you want is to have an old bow shatter at full draw just because you chipped away too much at one area.’
‘How do I know if it’s too thin?’ Mark stopped shaving the freshly cut branch and waited for clarification.
‘You’ve got plenty of wood left right now,’ Garec said. ‘Keep going and when you’ve cleared some of the outer layers, use mine as a model. Gods know I don’t want it any more.’
‘But yours is wrapped. What is that? Leather? Hide?’
Hide strips,’ Garec nodded. ‘I tan them from deerskin and use them to strengthen the bow. It’s a tedious process, but if you dip them in salt water then wrap them across each other, they dry up and tighten into a tough but still pliable layer.’
‘I want to do that too,’ Mark said.
‘Well,’ Garec said, amused, ‘first you’ve got to kill a deer.’
‘That’s fine. I’ll shoot the next one I see.’ Mark had never been a hunter. Apart from his attempt at fishing with Versen’s bow and a few wild shots at flocks of ducks unfortunate enough to be flying over Port Jefferson one autumn many years earlier – none of the ducks were ever in any real danger – he had never fired a weapon of any kind.
‘You’ll have to find one,’ Garec said. ‘Then you’ll have to hit it with an arrow – and forgive me for bringing it up, because I wasn’t there, but didn’t you struggle some with a bow the last time you tried this?’
Mark looked over at his Ronan friend; Garec could see the bruises where the Seron had punched him in the face. ‘That was fishing, Garec. This is killing.’
Garec flashed back to the way Mark had used his superior swimming ability as a lethal weapon. He had no doubt Mark would use his new bow as often as he could. ‘Trust me,’ he said, ‘you don’t want to get so adept at killing that it begins to feel like fishing.’
‘I think I know the difference.’ Mark didn’t look up from his work.
‘For now, yes, but after a while, the lines begin to blur. It gets easier – too easy.’
Mark stopped whittling and looked at Garec. ‘I don’t need you to worry about my soul. If God exists – and I still believe He does – but He certainly hasn’t been around this neighbourhood in a while. He and I can settle our accounts another day.’
Garec hesitated a moment, then, unnerved, asked, ‘So your God doesn’t permit killing?’
‘Oh, He permits plenty of it, but He— He disapproves.’
‘How does he feel about fishing then?’ Garec forced a smile.
Mark laughed for the first time in days. ‘I understand He was quite a fisherman himself, Garec! You just teach me to shoot this thing and I’ll take care of the rest.’ He held the branch aloft. ‘How’s this?’
Once, while exploring at Riverend Palace, Garec had come across a room that looked as if it had been an art room, maybe a classroom, filled with half-finished sculptures, figures struggling to emerge from otherwise nondescript sections of red oak or marble. The fire that destroyed the palace more than a thousand Twinmoons earlier had missed the chamber. Garec had been unsettled by his discovery – as though he had come upon something he shouldn’t be seeing: two adulterers locked in a tryst, perhaps. The sculptures all evolved into something terrifying; not a flower emerging from a walnut log or a woman’s face slipping free from marble bonds, but malformed, half-finished things – souls trapped between who they had been and who they might become. There were birds flying gracefully with one wing, trapped in the wood by the other, and an enormous red oak log in the centre of the room, taller than him, that halfway up changed into a man. Garec figured it was Prince Markon, but all his efforts to superimpose a kingly face and noble demeanour on the carving failed; the man had a desperate look in his eyes, and looked as if he was struggling to escape.
In all his time at Riverend Palace, Garec had never returned to the room. There was something wrong with those sculptures, a thousand Twinmoons old and still trapped. As he watched Mark whittle away at the length of green wood, Garec felt the same sense of unease; he was watching a killer being born wi
th a few strokes of a hunting knife along a branch. He looked down at the foreigner’s boots, nearly buried in a pile of shavings: would his feet disappear entirely before Mark was finished sculpting his bow?
‘What’s that?’ Mark said.
‘What?’ Garec stammered, ‘nothing— well, it’s just that I wish you would reconsider this decision.’
‘Sorry.’
‘It doesn’t make anything better. You realise that.’ This last was a statement.
‘I have to learn my own lessons, Garec – I always have. I don’t want you to feel badly for me. We’re friends, and I appreciate you helping, but this is something I have to do.’
Garec couldn’t stand it any longer; he needed Mark to move, to see the shavings piled around Mark’s ankles were not going to solidify and drink him bodily back into some wooden womb.
He blurted out the first thing that came to mind: ‘Why don’t you set that aside for now and we’ll go and find a deer?’
‘You’re going to help me kill a deer?’ Mark raised an eyebrow, his knife stilled in his lap.
‘Sure.’ Garec started to sweat, but he knew what had to be done. ‘Someone has to teach you, or gods rest us, we’ll all end up with arrows in our backsides.’
Mark stood up, his boots breaking free of the pile of wood off-cuts; Garec inwardly sighed in relief and gathered up his quivers.
Steven, sitting nearby mending a tear in his leggings, called after them, ‘I like mine medium-well, with onions, tomatoes, mayo and pickles.’
‘Pickles?’ Mark called back. ‘Yuk! Would you like fries with that, too?’
‘And a beer!’ Steven laughed and tossed a log on their fire as Mark and Garec disappeared into the trees. He looked around for Gilmour, who was making his way towards the camp; he’d been scouting ahead, trying to work out how far they’d travelled since leaving the fjord. Steven had a sense it was a good long way. Gilmour insisted that they ride at night. They had left the fjord the night Mark killed the Seron warriors – Steven thought of it as murder, but every time he tried to broach the topic, Mark shot him a withering glance that said, you have no idea how I have suffered or how I still suffer, so back off. And Steven had. While Mark slept, comforted by Gilmour’s spell, the others packed hastily, needing to be away before any other Seron arrived. Then they’d awakened Mark and climbed out of the fjord, an easier journey than Steven had expected, even in the darkness.
They needed horses, and luck or fate had provided: a farmer who had a small homestead nestled in the hills had directed the travellers to a much larger farm less than a day’s march away, where Garec bartered with a singularly disagreeable woman for four sturdy horses and saddlery. They paid too much, but with all of Central Falkan to cross, they were not in much of a position to complain.
At Gilmour’s insistence, they were back in the saddle after nightfall. The old man galloped in front of the others, his cloak billowing out behind, and as he passed, Steven felt the hickory staff’s magic, first as a faint prickle, then there in full force, wrapping him in a protective layer, as if it sensed something about to happen. But nothing attacked them, and Gilmour didn’t lead them headlong over a cliff or into a lurking rank of homicidal wraiths. Steven, ready to shout out a warning at any moment, waited, wondering why the magic had suddenly sparked into life—
Then he noticed the plain … There was nothing special about the ground beneath his horse’s hoofs, nor did they seem to be moving unnaturally fast, but out beyond his field of view, the earth and sky had melted into one to form a blurry black backdrop: the world was moving past them faster than Steven had at first realised. He was glad Gilmour had ordered the night ride across Falkan, for it was very disconcerting, but at least the trip to the border between Falkan and Gorsk wouldn’t take long.
He was disappointed they wouldn’t see more of the vast and fertile Falkan Plain, for this huge area of rich arable soil provided fruit and vegetables for most of the Eastlands, as well as fine grazing for a wide variety of livestock. Farms abounded, and every town, no matter how small, had its daily market filled with local farmers selling or trading the autumn harvest. Winter was on its way and everyone was busy storing food for the leaner times ahead.
Steven didn’t fool himself into thinking he had discovered a Utopian corner of Eldarn: it was plain the farmers here were not exactly revelling in lives of excess, any more than the dockers and townsfolk in Orindale. There was food as far as he could see, and the people of central Falkan ought to have looked much healthier, but most were thin, many to the point of gauntness, and clothes, though usually neat, were patched and mended. He didn’t have to ask Garec to confirm that much of what had been harvested was earmarked for Malagon’s occupation forces. This picturesque village, set amongst fertile fields and grassy meadows and heavy with the mouth-watering aromas of grilled meat, tecan and rich cheeses, was filled with sorrow and want.
These people needed someone to organise them: they needed to be educated about what could be possible if they only cut the head off the serpent – in this case, Nerak. Steven couldn’t believe they hadn’t already risen up together in defiance – everything here in Eldarn cried out for just that: revolution.
He started thinking about Garec’s vision – Garec was certain he had witnessed a last-moment attempt to carry on the Ronan line, a grim coupling of a servant girl and a madman. Was that what they were supposed to do? Find that offspring and ensure he or she ascended to power and restored peace and prosperity to Eldarn? The breadth of what needed to be done overwhelmed him and he threw up his hands in frustration.
‘First things first, Steven,’ he told himself firmly, ‘save the world now. Fix it later.’ He tried not to be disheartened by what he was seeing: rich, dark soil tilled by starving people who no longer cared, for their crops were going to the enemy.
As Gilmour approached through the trees, Steven wondered how the old man was planning to bring prosperity to Eldarn – always assuming they survived the coming battle with Nerak, of course.
‘You look deep in thought.’ Gilmour sat down.
‘There is so much to do.’
The old man chuckled. ‘Just realising that now, are you?’
‘You know what I mean,’ Steven said.
‘I do. I’ve been telling myself that for thousands of Twinmoons. I guess I know as well as anyone what has to happen for these lands to prosper.’
‘But we have to save them first.’ Steven fought an almost overwhelming feeling of despondency. He decided to change the subject. ‘I’m worried about Mark.’
‘Mark will be fine.’
‘He’s going to get himself killed.’
‘Mark needs time – perhaps more time than we can give him – but there’s nothing else that will ease his suffering right now. When you have lived as long and seen as much as I have, Steven, there are a few things you know, and one of them is that time can heal a wagonload of pain and suffering.’
Steven nodded. There was a long comfortable silence between them. Eventually, he gestured towards Gilmour’s hands, lean and strong now, no longer the gnarled, arthritic hands of the old fisherman. ‘You’ve made some improvements, I see.’
Gilmour turned his hands over and flexed his fingers. ‘You noticed. I tightened a few cords, improved some muscle tone and—’ he pointed two fingers at his eyes, ‘—sharpened my eyesight a notch or two.’
‘It’s amazing. I still can’t get used to the fact that you can work such wonders.’
‘You’ve done some wondrous things yourself, Steven,’ Gilmour countered. ‘You staved off an almor. No one has done that in thousands of Twinmoons. You fought a wraith army, saved Garec – twice – and saved the rest of us from the Seron that night in the foothills, and from what I understand you did quite a decent job of blowing up that bone-collector there in the cavern.’
‘But nothing like you can do,’ Steven said softly. ‘The way you pounded away at Nerak: I was terrified. I couldn’t have called up the staff’s powe
r that night; I just couldn’t keep my thoughts straight. And now – how much ground are we covering? Are we really travelling four or five times faster than normal?’
Gilmour nodded. ‘It’s an old trick – a fairly simple one, actually. Nerak taught it to me when we were hurrying to get from Gorsk to a harvest festival outside Capehill in the south.’ He broke off and sighed. ‘We were still friends at the time – we were going for the wine, the music, the food and the women. Nerak created the spell for that trip. The last time he used this spell that I know of was when he went to Port Denis.’
Steven sat up straight. ‘You mentioned Port Denis to him that night on the Prince Marek.’
‘That’s right. He rode there, ten or twelve days of hard riding, in a matter of avens.’ Now Gilmour sounded despondent. ‘His power is tremendous, and terrifying.’
‘What happened when he got there?’ Steven was still, almost frozen in place. He wasn’t sure he wanted to know the answer to his question.
‘Nerak wiped Port Denis clean of every living thing with a wave of one hand.’
‘Sonofabitch,’ Steven muttered, falling back into English. ‘Where did he learn all this? How did he get to be so powerful – and so singularly destructive?’
‘It probably helped that no one ever challenged him, especially early on. I certainly didn’t, not after my embarrassing débâcle that night at Sandcliff Palace. It was never in me. Kantu was always much more adept at magic and sorcery than I, but he was wrestling demons of his own at the time and when he was finally ready to take on Nerak, the Nerak we had known all our lives, that man was already gone and the demon servant of the great evil lying dormant in the Fold had taken over.’
‘How much did he get from that book? He was certain that was what we were after – have you read it? Will it teach you what you need to be ready for him?’
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