No! I won’t be a sacrifice. I’ve got to find the Selsons!
His foot hit a broken oak bough on the ground, and he tumbled face forward, flinging his sword out before him. A flash of silver flame hit his eye – the Lashki’s first kesmalic attack? – and he was falling, falling, undoubtedly dead.
*
The Lashki shot through the Woods, quick as lightning, his footfalls a rapid pulse on the ground. Exploding through screens of leaves so fast that he could not feel them, leaping over logs, dodging stones and tree boles, he clutched the copper rod to his heart. He viewed the speed of his body as something separate from himself. There was no sensual pleasure in it; it was mere convenience, one of the many things there to serve his will. Within, he was cool and collected, thinking over what he had to do.
The silence and fragrance of the Woods formed the atmosphere he remembered from his childhood. He had chosen to pass this way not because it was faster, but because he felt it would give him a hint as to the whereabouts of his other quarry. He had seen his servants, his collection of idle scum, earlier upon his recent return to Siana, and he had given them all instructions. They never failed to lose standard in his absence.
Not long ago, he had declared himself Siana’s king, because he was certain of his eventual triumph. Yet Robert Selson still evaded him.
Nazt’s roaring around him erased everything from his mind. Though his own desires had carried him here, Nazt’s desires carried him on. The rod twitched within his hands, and he hated its restlessness.
No, he told himself. Do not hate.
He was far above love and hate. He was supreme purpose. Hate signified doubt, desperation, and he, the Lashki Mirah, neither doubted nor was desperate.
His path had led him to the river, and he continued the tireless run along the bank, knowing he would never stop until he had a good reason. And then the stop would be seamless: one moment running, the next moment still, with no in between, no panting, no gasping, no lurching, his body perfectly under his control.
The water churned to his left, and his eyes flicked to it. He delighted in water. It was the closest element to himself, and all his kesmal was derived from it. He joyed to be in it, to drink it. The Lashki never ate; he had no need of food because he was not mortal. However, he still drank water. He didn’t need it to live. Rather he drank it for sheer pleasure, as much as he wanted. When he had first created this body for himself, he had drunk a mountain stream dry.
“Rafen!”
Alakil froze. Had it been from the rod?
“Rafen, come back!”
The smile spread across his gray, rotting features. No, it was real.
Attaining his previous speed in a second, he leapt through the trees bordering the river and ran through branches and shrubs toward the place where the call had come from. For the first time, he was not satisfied with his own speed. It took him thirty seconds to reach the clearing from which the cry had issued. He passed outside the trees that ringed it, glimpsing the short peasant man in its center. The peasant’s eyes widened when he saw the flash of gray, and the Lashki could have killed him then and there if he had pointed the rod in the right direction.
However, he pursued Rafen. Rafen. The rod jerked wildly in his hand, and it would break from him any moment if he failed to go in the correct direction and do the correct thing. His black eyes processed the sections of ground that his sprint ate away beneath him. All that mattered were the footprints of a fourteen-year-old boy.
Ahead of him, a crash sounded amid the trees. He had fallen!
Clasping the rod with both hands, he burst through the branches that shielded the boy from his sight, swinging the ignited tip around toward where he had heard the fall.
Nothing.
Nazt was screaming at him. Yet the ground was bare apart from moss, shrubbery, and a large branch that had dropped down from a tree.
The footsteps abruptly ended in a short skid mark that signaled where Rafen had tripped. A wolf’s paw prints confused the dirt a little. He moved closer on sticky feet, glaring at the area before the branch. The faintest flicker of silver kesmal vanished into the air.
It did not look like Rafen’s kesmal.
He cursed loudly and ground his teeth. He had hunted for Rafen in Zal Ricio ’el Nria and Renegald, thinking that Robert would have left the boy somewhere before returning to Siana, to put him off his trail. He had been wrong. Then he had thought Rafen would be in Sarient, perhaps sheltering with a lord. He had never expected Rafen to be here. The boy would not be clever enough to survive in the Woods alone – not as he himself had done when he was fourteen. Rafen was not that kind of child. He was not that different.
Rafen had been here, however. And now he had somehow transported himself somewhere through kesmal, something Alakil had not thought him capable of.
Where had he gone?
Never question, he told himself. It showed doubt. He felt no doubt. All he felt was Nazt, screaming within his head so loudly that he could scarcely see, scarcely think, scarcely move. He sank to his knees, clutching his shrunken temples, the pain so bad that he thought he might black out as he had when he was mortal. For the first time since immortality, he felt the nausea that all the other scum beneath him felt at some point in their lives. The copper rod bucked against his grasp, and he held onto it with shaking fingers.
In his mind’s eye, he saw the stocky peasant in the clearing.
Chapter Eight
Sherwin
The world around Rafen was a long black tube, speckled with dancing silver dots. A strong force sucked him down, tearing the breath out of him. Rafen’s lungs were going to pop. The scintillating pinpricks in the air were replaced with deepening black. He was going to see the select Selsons who had not survived, wherever they were…
His body slammed into the ground. Pain vibrated through him, and he breathed in shuddering gasps. He tried rolling onto his back, to see where the final blow would come from, and found he didn’t have the strength.
A warm tongue ran over Rafen’s cheek and he groaned. He managed to heave himself onto his knees, his fingers still curled around his sword. Slowly, like someone who had been hit on the head with a large hammer, he looked around him.
The Lashki wasn’t there.
“Zion, thank you,” he said aloud.
At his left shoulder, Ahain panted. He must have been lurking in the trees during Rafen’s argument with Erasmus, and followed him here.
Though the world was still shadowed, a faint aurora of light appeared over the horizon behind him. Rafen was in an unfenced field. The grass was hard and yellowed. To his right, a road of unyielding black snaked northward. It was crazily warm for winter: late spring or early summer weather, certainly.
Rafen rose and sheathed his sword, ruffling Ahain’s furry head. He wandered to the road, still gazing around in dazed surprise. There was no cover for him to follow, so he would be forced to travel in the open. The air smelled pungent, foreign. Reaching the road, Rafen discovered it was of extremely hard material. He had never felt such a deliberately made road; most roads in Siana were tracks of packed dirt.
He walked along the road for some time, wondering where the Woods had gone. Somehow, someway, he had been transported somewhere else through kesmal. The sky above lightened with the coming day. Singing of the morning, birds pecked at the ground or clustered in the odd bush or tree.
Behind Rafen, a steady roar was building. Ahain whined and slinked onto the grass beside the road. Rafen glanced over his shoulder. A horn sounded. Something like a heavy metal carriage shot past him, narrowly missing him. Fumes added to the pungent smell, and Rafen was coughing. For three minutes, he was doubled over, his shoulders shaking. Ahain anxiously licked his hand.
When Rafen caught his breath again, his throat was dry and rough. Still shaking, he continued on his way, nervously looking behind himself for another metal carriage. Was this a new form of kesmal? He thought he was dreaming; he passed a hand over his eyes.
He had been trudging along for fifteen minutes when another dull roar met his ears. It crescendoed from behind. Rafen leapt off the road and crouched down in the grass, clapping his hands over his mouth and nose. The metal carriage flew past, and despite his precautions, Rafen was again seized with a long coughing fit.
He rose and stumbled forward. Who was sending those metal carriages? Everything was telling him he was not at home – perhaps in a completely different area of Siana.
Over the next half-hour, Rafen encountered three more metal carriages (two dull browns and one brilliant red). In disgust, he meandered off the road into a grove. Drowsily, he sat amid the trees, which he couldn’t identify. He was hot; this definitely didn’t feel like the first half of winter. He pulled off his old, oversized coat Erasmus had given him.
It reminded him painfully of his argument with Erasmus. How in the world was he going to find the Selsons now? He wondered how Erasmus had been going to finish that last sentence Rafen had interrupted, the one about him being the Fledgling and the Sianian Wolf.
It isn’t important. He thought that over and over as he lay down, Ahain beside him. After a time, he stirred again. By his drunken senses, he knew he had slept. He sat up, rubbing his eyes stupidly. His stomach grumbled. In the Cursed Woods, rabbits, along with roots and air potatoes, constituted his diet. Rafen hadn’t seen anything like that here so far.
He gritted his teeth. His mouth was parched, and while the air was substantially better than the air of the Tarhian mines, it was much worse than the clean Sianian air Rafen was used to. His throat ached from breathing it.
Rising slothfully, he gazed around, pulling Erasmus’ coat back on. The same road was to his right. The same fields were ahead and behind him. The strange, dingy-colored birds still chirped on the ground or in the trees.
Rafen stood there, his hand on his phoenix feather.
“Erasmus!” he shouted. “Erasmus!”
A dim echo returned to him. He was alone. His heart sinking, he decided he could only journey on until he found civilization. There, he could get food and water, for there didn’t seem to be much of either out here in the country. He decided to postpone looking for the silver flames so that he could go back to the Cursed Woods. Turning up while the Lashki was still there was foolish. He would wait a day.
After toiling along for twenty minutes, he heard raised voices with accents similar and yet different to the Sianians’. Ahain growled softly and slunk close to the ground beside him.
“Give that back!” someone shouted. His vowels were flattened and his consonants were often silent; “that” became “thah”, and “back” was “bahk”.
“Check his pockets!” another person shouted excitedly.
Scuffling ensued amid some churning bushes left of the road, and Rafen ran toward the sounds as if they were magnetic.
Three boys were attacking another pale, skinny boy with straw-colored hair that reached down to his chin. The skinny boy fought back furiously, yet two of his opponents were broad-shouldered and heavy. One sat on his chest, delving into his pockets. The other retrieved a handful of dirt from the ground. The third, a weedy fellow with light brown hair, had his hands tucked into his belt, smugly giving orders.
“I said check his Lucy lockets! Oh look, Sherwin, yer do have money. And yer said yer didn’t. That’s fifty dollars, isn’t it? That’ll buy us some decent bitter, won’t it, boys?”
The heavy boy on Sherwin had produced a roll of notes. He nodded at the weedy boy, licking his lips.
“Stop it, yer can’t take that, that’s my un—” Sherwin began desperately, but the second boy stooped, grabbed Sherwin’s chin, and shoved the dirt into his mouth. Sherwin choked, writhing.
Rafen felt himself become hot. Restraining the transformation, he surged forward and grabbed the second boy’s shoulders.
The weedy boy abruptly caught sight of him. “Hey, what do yer think yer doing? Blimey!”
This last exclamation was shrieked as Ahain leapt toward him, barking. The weedy boy turned and fled up the road, the wolf at his heels.
“Hey!” the boy who Rafen gripped yelped stupidly. He straightened, tearing free from Rafen’s grasp. A whole head taller than Rafen, he just had time to glory in his height before Rafen swung a heavy punch into his face. He stumbled backward into a bush and slumped to the ground. The boy with the notes leapt off Sherwin and started running after his weedy friend. Rafen shot after him, pulling back his fist and releasing it like a stone from a sling. The boy keeled forward, clutching the back of his head. Rafen kicked him hard in the back, and he pitched into the dirt. A little ways from him, Ahain was worrying a clean part of the weedy boy’s shirt. The boy himself had gotten away.
Turning back, Rafen glanced at Sherwin, who was on his knees coughing up dirt and blood. Wiping sweat from his forehead, Sherwin rose to shaky legs and reeled past Rafen and over to the boy who had his notes. He unwrapped the boy’s fingers, retrieved the pieces of paper, then stuffed them into his tattered pocket and turned to Rafen.
Sherwin’s pale face had faint freckles and a big, pointed nose, which was slightly red at the end. One sky blue eye was bruised and nearly closed. Grains of dirt still hung from his thin lips, and leaves clung to his straight though knotted yellow hair. Rafen stared at him, an odd twanging in his chest. He felt like he knew this person.
Sherwin’s one unharmed eye looked at Rafen. His head bowed, he said, “Thank yeh. What’s yer name?”
Rafen snapped his fingers in Ahain’s direction. With the tatters of a shirt still swinging from his mouth, Ahain trotted over to Rafen.
Rafen eyed Sherwin suspiciously. He still didn’t know where he was. He would have been afraid who Sherwin would speak to about this, except for one thing: he no longer thought he was in Siana. Sherwin and the two concussed bullies wore the strangest clothes – faded blue pants of a material Rafen had never seen, short-sleeved shirts printed with skulls or other disturbing images, and oddly patterned shoes with thick white laces. No one in Siana dressed like that.
“What’s yer name?” Sherwin asked again.
“What fields are these?”
“They’re near London,” Sherwin said naturally, as if people always asked him their whereabouts.
Rafen knew he’d sound stupid asking what something as obvious as London was, so he tried acting knowledgeable. “That’s the town?”
“The city,” Sherwin said with emphasis. Again, he wasn’t troubled at Rafen’s ignorance. He behaved as if he expected it.
“That’s what I meant,” Rafen said.
“Yeah.”
Sherwin didn’t sound convinced. Rafen took note of the way Sherwin spoke. He didn’t often hear the word “yeah” in Siana.
“Is London far from here?” Rafen asked.
“Yeah,” Sherwin said. “If yer foller the road, it takes about thirty minutes to get to the nearest suburb. Tha’s Southwark. Yer can come with me if yer like. I’m goin’ to school.”
Rafen raised his eyebrows. He had only ever heard of a school of fish. Not wanting to prolong this uncomfortable conversation with more questions, he stepped sideways and, with a word of encouragement, broke into a run with Ahain. They flashed past Sherwin, who protested, “Hey wait! I wanted to—”
Sherwin’s voice gave way to shocked silence as Rafen surrendered to his transformation and fell to the ground on wolf’s paws. He pelted along the tough black road to the mysterious suburb of Southwark, Ahain by his side.
He would find sustenance there.
Chapter Nine
The Alley
off Walworth
Sherwin lay on his creaky bed, his knees drawn up. He propped a dog-eared history textbook on them and tried to concentrate. It was impossible. For a start, one of his eyes wasn’t working too well. Secondly, he’d just seen a familiar face.
It had happened. The link between the worlds had appeared. The boy with the phoenix feather was in England, in Southwark of all places.
Sherwin had taken the country road to school. That was when his school tormentors Seamus, Timothy, and Gary – all farming boys – had discovered him and started their usual tricks. Then the boy with the phoenix feather had turned up.
It hadn’t felt at all as Sherwin had imagined it would. He was terrified – desperate to get out of here, but terrified. His dream world and his Walworth Street reality were quickly becoming joined. It made him feel nauseous, clammy. Sherwin wanted to find the boy and thus find himself. He had to prove that the recurring dream he had, the murderer side of it, was untrue, out of character. He wanted to bow to the boy and follow wherever he led. Above all, he needed to mean something, to matter, and to get to the only place where he could matter. And yet… he also desired to be left alone. Part of him appreciated the boy’s transformation into a wolf that morning.
What was his name? Sherwin tossed aside the history textbook as a hopeless case. It landed on the rubbish on his bedroom floor. He stared at the ceiling, muttering, “Reuben. Radcliffe. Raf. Radish. No, that’s a vegetable, stupid. Rufus. Reamus. No…”
It was as horrible as trying to remember the words of a once familiar song. He rolled over to face the wall as he thought.
“SHEER-win, WHERSH THE BOY?” someone yowled in the living room. A thump sounded against his wall.
Sherwin sat up. His uncle was already home. He glanced at his battered digital wristwatch: it was only eleven-thirty at night. Uncle Levi had obviously done badly at poker. Flinging open his window, Sherwin swung himself out of it as quietly as possible.
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