Squinting northeast past the plateau, he glimpsed cliffs petering down into foothills that merged with the first suggestion of the Mist Forest’s scrub. His scar twinged at the sight of the forest, like a warning, but he turned toward it anyway. Perhaps this flat expanse of rock had saved his life, or perhaps Varaku’s evil spirits had decided to spare him; either way, he no longer felt safe here. He was ready to take his chances with the wraiths.
It looked far. He hoped he could make it.
The sun sapped his strength as he pressed on. He dared not keep to the shadows lest they grab him, and soon the inside of his mouth felt like it would crack apart from thirst. Once free of the dust, he pulled the bandana up to cover his scalp again, but he could have done with a larger cloth to cover his neck; sunburn sank in despite his tan and the naturally-dark complexion beneath it, and sweat dripped off his crooked nose in runnels until there was no more to be shed. The baking silence rang in his ears; after the cacophony of the rockslide, he could not tell if he had been deafened or the world had truly gone quiet.
Time passed. Thoughts disjointed. Soon he found it difficult to concentrate on walking at the same time that he planned his course. More than once he halted half-over a rock ledge, unsure what had made him want to climb down it—unsure that it had not been some dark seed inside, urging him over the edge.
He daydreamed about Kerrindryr. The icy cliffs of the Thundercloaks, the snow, the glacier-melt streams. His home village of Risholnis nestled in its tiny thumbprint valley, always in danger of an avalanche, the rope bridge across the gorge its only connection to the rest of the world. The icy pools that gathered in rocky crevices in the heights, where he and Lerien had splashed around like mad things when they did not have to mind the goats…
Shuff. Thump.
He twitched from his shambling daze and raised his head, staring across the sun-scorched rock. Ahead, in a sandy depression, lay a darkish object.
A canteen.
He stared at it. Blinked. Rubbed dry eyes.
Still there.
He looked side-to-side suspiciously. Nothing marked this arid stretch of ground but bristly bushes, cracked boulders and a lizard that skittered off as he stepped cautiously forward. Crouching with the care of an old man, he eyed the canteen. It bore the familiar red hooks of the Crimson Claw insignia emblazoned on its canvas sling. He poked it.
It was real.
No footprints marred the sand around it.
“Hoi?” he croaked to the empty landscape. Nothing answered; even the wind was still.
He prodded it again. It rocked heavily under his finger and sloshed.
That was enough. He grabbed the canteen up, fumbled the cap off and chugged the water with desperation as much as thirst. Lukewarm, it still felt blessedly cool down his parched throat, and it was all he could do to not pour it over his head or spill half of it down his front. Gasping, he lowered the canteen and forced himself to recap it, then slung the strap across his body.
And felt something sticky on it.
He peeled his hand away, not wanting to look—not wanting to know—but grimly aware that he must. Gut churning, he let his gaze fall to his palm, then the strap.
Red stains.
“Pikes,” he swore.
Standing, he stared around but nothing had changed. A defiant part of him wanted to pitch the canteen into the dirt and spit up what he had just guzzled, but he knew it was pointless. This might be some kind of Dark lure, but he would die without it.
“I won’t thank you,” he rasped to the sandy cliffs.
All was silent.
Weary and disheartened, Cob shook his head and moved on.
*****
By the time he started passing actual trees, the shadows had grown long. Bare branches stood out skeletally against a sunset-bloodied sky, but though they looked dead, he had the sense that they were just waiting for rain.
The entire transition from Varaku’s heights to the Mist Forest’s wrinkled hills seemed that way. He had clambered down several of the cracked cliffs that marked the red rocks’ terminus, then limped through shallow ravines that fed into dead floodplains and across broken slopes dotted with scrub-brush. Now the undergrowth thickened as he continued to descend, its furze transforming the rocky prominences into islands in a spreading sea of foliage. Small animals skittered away from the sound of his steps, and insects chirred in the brush.
He followed the windings of a dry streambed, its gentle decline the easiest walk for his tired body. On the banks above, the scrub quickly became so dense as to be impassible. It made him feel herded.
Still, he was glad to leave Varaku. The mournful song on the wind was gone, as were the whispers and the stark, grasping shadows—if they had ever been there. Water had revived his senses somewhat, and he could no longer be sure.
At first, trees simply punctuated the grey-green bushes on the banks, but as daylight waned, they threw increasingly broad stripes over the riverbed. By nightfall the way had narrowed and the trees had laced their fingers into a tight canopy, the stars glinting among them like bejeweled rings. The child moon made no more than a bright smudge above the Rift, its mother dark behind her monthly mourning veil.
Though every inch of him ached, Cob dared not stop; he had no desire to sleep in the nighttime forest, and he thought perhaps he could keep going until morning. Exhaustion gnawed at his muscles. Now and then a bird burst from the undergrowth in a rush of wings and shoved his heart into his throat, and his mind sketched dangers into the darkness: scorpions and snakes, wildcats and wolves.
And nastier things. Shapeless things. Black, staring things.
The arrowhead grew colder under his tunic. He fished it out and pressed it to his forehead as if it could draw the sunburnt tension from his skin, trying to pretend that this was normal.
He walked on.
Eventually the streambed shrank to a shallow trench and the trees closed ranks around him. As the child moon rose fully, shafts of golden light slid through the interwoven branches to dapple the gravel path.
—and the mist filtered through the trees, ground-clinging, its first tendrils coiling in strange filigrees—
Cob stopped short, heart hammering, but the path was as barren as ever.
“Dreaming,” he mumbled as his hackles settled. His voice sounded wrong: hoarse, old. He took a swig from the canteen but his throat still felt parched. The remainder of the water sloshed within the container, almost gone.
Ahead, the dark tunnel constricted even further. Motes of dust glittered in the moonlight. The air was cooling, the ground giving up its heat in a long silent exhale. He rubbed at his eyes.
—a smudge of bright silver streaking from the fog—
He jerked his head up and braced his feet as his sense of balance pitched. The world wavered at the edges, then steadied.
“Can’t sleep,” he rasped. “Not tired, not tired, not tired not tired not—“
—the shock of cold through his side, like a spear of ice—
“—tired. Curse it.”
It was so hard to walk again, to push himself into that black tunnel of trees. Part of him said go back, go back, and he could not tell if it was fear or sanity. To the south, he saw only Varaku rising in ragged steps, bleak under the dim moonlight; the Crimson camp should be situated just west of it, but the hills and trees hid it completely. Even if he wanted to, he could not return.
Perhaps, when the wraiths descended upon him, they would see the arrowhead and know they had already killed him once. They could leave him alone this time.
The earth dragged at his heels with every step, beckoning, coaxing him down. Each blink seemed to last an eternity, and afterward it was as if the moonlight had danced ahead and rearranged the shadows before him. His scar ached with cold fire, eclipsing all else until he could not even remember that he was moving. All he saw was mist.
Only when his foot sank into the shockingly cold brook did he snap awake, suddenly aware of its glassy trickle
and the moss under his other boot, the trees crowded close around him. He lurched back and sat down hard in his tracks, too tired to think.
His eyes closed. Opened.
A hooded figure regarded him from the opposite bank.
At first he just stared up at it, wondering where the fear had gone. Always, in these wraith-nightmares, the mist would choke him with dread until the first glimpse of a falling arrow or a wraith paralyzed him like a fist around his heart, the way it had on the logging field.
But then this one was not moving, not approaching. And it did not look like the wraiths in his dreams. In the weak moonlight it was simply grey, so hooded and shrouded that he could make out no features. The wraiths of his memory were wild things; they shone in the mist like vicious stars, their movement so swift that they left banded afterimages on his eyes.
This…
It could be a person.
Who are you? he thought, and only after a long silence realized that he had not managed to speak. It seemed like so much effort to make his mouth move. Dimly he wondered if he was too tired to feel the fear. “Who are you?” he finally mumbled.
The grey wraith—if it was a wraith--did not answer.
“What d’you want?”
The hood tilted slightly, as if considering. Then the grey creature sank low to the ground, its shroud puddling and mingling with the seeping mist Cob just now noticed around it. He tried to brace himself, having the vague sense that it planned to lunge, but instead it extended a long slim arm from the folds of its garment. Fine grey scales coated it, tapering to sharp points at the end of each slender finger.
He focused on those. They did not look like claws, not really, and there was something stiff about them. Awkward. Nothing like the fluid, wrathful shapes that had torn apart his old team.
“You must be somethin’ else,” he mumbled. “And if you’re somethin’ else, ‘m not gonna worry. I got enough to worry about.”
The creature placed something small on the pebbled bank, then remained still for a moment, watching him. He imagined he could see eyes within the hood. Faint pricks of light. Then it stood and nodded slightly, and moved back—not stepping but smoothly gliding. The further it went, the more it faded into the mist, until between one blink and the next, it was gone. The mist separated into fine coils, sank, and dissipated.
Cob squinted into the empty woods, then down at the object the creature had left. It looked dark against the pebbles, squarish, perhaps hand-sized, and he knew he should investigate but the very thought of getting up made him tired. Instead he lay back on the moss and stared up through the twisted branches, empty of all thought.
*****
Ice. Rock. Lerien’s pallid face. The waterfall far ahead, with the stand of white trees growing from the notch in the glacier, the warm glow of the firebird radiating from beyond. Their quest, their destination.
The wind, howling, whispering. The stir of mist in the void-like gorge beside them. Small hands in mittens gripping ancient handholds, small feet traversing a path chiseled out for them by long-forgotten ancestors…
Voices—low like grinding stones. Black gauntlets, not metal but granite, slick with icemelt. Grappling, fighting, falling…
Flying…
*****
Sunlight knifed between his eyelids, and he elbowed up with a groan. It was too dry for dew—fortunate, because his foot in the still-wet boot felt half-frozen even while the rest of him was baked and peeling. When he moved, the contents of his skull grated together like shards of glass, making the world swim with a kaleidoscope of nauseating colors.
The brook still trickled past his feet invitingly, linked to a shallow pool at the right with a tiny rivulet running down the rocks from above. The trees—tall thorn-barked things he could not name—rose pillar-like to hold up their meshwork ceiling, leaves restricting the sun to narrow beams.
Across the brook, the small dark object still lay on the rocks.
Cob contemplated it blearily. He barely remembered the encounter, and wished the thing would just vanish into dreamland along with the rest of this horrid experience. But his aches and pains and his freezing left foot told him this was real, and the creature had been real, and he was still completely piked.
Not very motivating.
He considered going back to sleep, waiting out the headache, but the dry chalkiness of his mouth told him it was not weariness but dehydration. Sun-ailments had laid slaves and soldiers low by the hundreds during the long march south, and even in the well-organized Crimson camp they still took their victims. Nevertheless, months of being shouted-at by officers to mind their water and salt rations and be vigilant of overwork had made their impact--though slaves who spoke up about ‘overwork’ tended to get whipped rather than heeded. The General’s intentions were well and good, but his subordinates had their own methods of interpretation.
So Cob swilled down what remained of the water in his canteen, then crawled to the brook and stuck his head in. The cold shocked every nerve to life, every ebbing bruise and scratch and pulled muscle suddenly screaming, but at least he knew he was alive.
He drank as much as he could before his mouth went numb, then filled the canteen again and sat back. His stomach gurgled; water alone would not save him. Even the grating-glass feeling in his skull and spine seemed unaffected, though after a little while he felt more alert, more himself.
The dark woods beckoned. He had only the dimmest idea of what to do now: go onward, northwest, until he came out of the forest somewhere beyond the Crimson camp’s reach. Then further northwest, across the grassland of Illane, toward the heights of Kerrindryr.
Home.
The thought felt strange. The Crimson Army had been his home for the past two years, and in its way was more so than Kerrindryr had ever been. Cob and his parents had lived an isolated life in a cliff-dwelling above an equally isolated village; being torn from there at age eight had broken his life neatly in two. Before the Treason, and After the Treason.
In the seven years that followed, he had lived as a slave in a Low Country quarry, which had never been home. Then, at fifteen, he had been conscripted along with the rest of the eligible youngsters and sent south to join the Army, leaving the quarry to the broken old men.
That was the way of the conquered west. Even though Kerrindryr had not been conquered but had submitted itself to the Empire for protection against its old enemy Jernizan and the dissidents in the High Country, it obeyed the same rules. All men of fighting age to the Army, whether free or in chains.
Most volunteers got to stay near home as Imperial militia, and gained instant citizenship. The conscripts and slaves served their time with the formal Army, but if released were granted citizens’ rights as well. Though the core of the free Army was easterners, a loyal westerner could still rise high in the ranks.
That had been Cob’s plan. Broken now.
Nine and a half years for naught.
Light, show me the way, he thought, but the Imperial Light was not one to answer prayers. Only the Dark did that: lurking at the fringes of everything, waiting for a cry of desperation, a hint of hollow need that it could flow into and grow. The Light gave nothing but its presence; it demanded no supplication, only action. If he wanted direction, he had to find it himself.
And that started with planning. He had more options now than yesterday, despite the awful circumstances of the canteen, and beside his fragile-feeling head he seemed to be all in one piece. Point-by-point inspection showed sand stuck under his skin at knees and elbows, scabs in other places, the dark patina of bruising almost everywhere—but nothing more deeply painful, and when he managed to gain his feet and go piss away from the brook, there was no blood. The world sustained a slow, ship-like wobble beneath him, but he could tolerate it.
He had no choice.
The ground was dry, so he pulled off his boots and massaged some feeling into his left foot, then left them off. He might have lost most of his calluses but he still appreciated
the feel of dirt under his toes. Crossing the brook took only a cautious stretch of the legs, then he was beside the weird object, which from close-up looked like a packet of leaves.
He picked it apart to find slices of forest mushroom and some unknown pale fruit. Caution dictated he leave it be, but he only remembered that after he had already eaten half the packet. Brows furrowed, still chewing, he tried to decide if he had been poisoned or if the pain in his skull was the same as ever, and when after a little while his stomach did not heave itself inside out, he decided it was fine. More difficult was the decision to wrap the other half back up for later.
“Um…thank you,” he told the trees, though he had no sense that the grey creature was near.
With nothing more to do and no idea what to think, he crammed the packet into the space between the canteen and its sling, hooked his boots over his shoulder by the laces and picked up a thorny stick. Just in case.
He still wanted to go back, because there was only darkness ahead: the shadows of the trees and the deeper ones of memory. History. Things he had been just as glad to leave behind. But though Fendil and Weshker and those soldiers weighed on his mind, he knew that returning would be worse.
He did not want anyone else to die. Not even Darilan.
“Jus’ follow the sun,” he told himself. “It can’t lead me astray.”
Or so he hoped.
*****
Six days later, he stood blinking in the brightness at the fringe of the forest, trying to understand where he was.
No sand, no cacti, just tall grass and weeds in three directions. Behind him, the Mist Forest hulked thicker and thornier than ever; it was almost a miracle that he had found his way out, as midway through the second day the trees had closed so tightly he could barely tell day from night, let alone directions. Only the Rift’s ever-present shadow had kept him from turning toward it and being lost in the depths forever.
The Light of Kerrindryr (The War of Memory Cycle Book 1) Page 5
