by Rob Scott
Kantu chanted the spell. It wasn’t difficult to recall: he had used it thousands of times in the past five hundred Twinmoons. Just a few words, and the far portal would close and follow him – them – across the Fold. But not all of us. He closed his eyes and called it again just to be sure, steeling himself against the shrieking behind him. He couldn’t stand to hear it for another moment. The Larion leader couldn’t remember when he had started to cry; he was there now, crying, in the middle of the room. They had played with the baby here, reading her stories and watching her every move, as if nothing she might do or say in the entire span of her life was too insignificant to be missed by people who loved her that much. It was the room with the fireplace, but nothing burned in there now; it was too warm for a fire. Kantu wondered why there were still ashes in the fire grate. Why had they not cleaned those out last spring? Why keep a fireplace full of ashes all summer?
In front of him, the yellow and green flecks of Larion sorcery danced in the air above the portal. It was time. His stomach clenched into a knot at the thought of it, but it was time. Nerak would kill them – Reia too – if he knew Pikan had been pregnant, and they couldn’t take that risk. But he would be back for her. That morning he had taken her out into the meadow beside the house, sat in the dewy grass, and wept. She had grabbed a lock of his hair in her tiny fist and cooed at him in her own esoteric language. It was there that Kantu’s heart had finally broken, among the British wildflowers Pikan loved so much. How could so many colours grow in one place together?
He had promised Reia he would be back, soon, even if he had to kill Nerak himself.
Now, with Pikan wailing, Kantu called the spell a third time – unnecessary, but he needed something to do while Pikan said goodbye – and that would take time they didn’t have. He was packed and ready, his notes rolled into scrolls. The portal was open and behind him – he couldn’t look back – Pikan was crying, ‘I can’t leave her here! She’s too small. She needs me. Please, please don’t make me do this.’
There was nothing he could do to ease her pain. Kantu tossed their bag and his scrolls into the air above the portal. Both disappeared instantly. ‘Come,’ he said, firmly, trying not to sob himself, ‘it’s time.’ He turned, still not looking at the baby; he knew if he looked at her, he would take her back, whatever the consequences. ‘We’ll be back for her.’ He took Pikan by the shoulders, wrapped his arms around her and chanted the spell, avoiding her kicks.
He carried her to the far portal and she wept, ‘I can’t leave her! Don’t make me leave her! Reia! I love you, Reia! I’ll be back for you. Mama will be back!’ Pikan was raving, reaching for the baby, who cried and screamed in the arms of the silent surrogate mother who would raise her until the Larion couple’s return.
With a final glance at the cold, ash-filled fireplace, Kantu, carrying Pikan, stepped through the Fold and back into Eldarn.
Hoyt pulled at his horse’s reins and the animal dutifully followed along. They had spent most of the day moving north through the forest of ghosts. Although he had been thankfully free of memories or visions from his own past, overhearing his friends as they relived anguish and pain had pushed him nearly to the screaming point himself. During a short midday-aven pause, Hoyt had tied a length of cloth over his ears in an effort to filter out Hannah’s pleas, Churn’s screams and Alen’s curious chanting, but it hadn’t helped.
Two avens later, as the sun faded in the west, Hoyt decided to skip the evening meal and continue walking their party north, even if it took all night to get clear of the enchanted woods. He had seen other people during the day: disheartened figures, some wandering around, talking to themselves or ghosts of themselves, their parents, lovers, whomever. Others were sitting, jabbering at nothing while some lay silent, emaciated, dehydrated and dying in the wilderness. There were corpses, rotting and foetid; a wayward step had cost him his breakfast as his foot plunged through the chest cavity of a woman who had died beside a brambly stand of evergreen brush. She had been so covered with leaves that he hadn’t seen her there.
Several times Hoyt had tried to corral one of the other wanderers, but there had been no hope: none responded to his touch. They were all too far into madness to recognise or even care that someone might be attempting to lead them to safety. After a few aborted efforts, he had given up entirely.
It had been slow going, with each of his friends determined at one time or another to kneel or even lie down as they wrestled their demons. They had drunk greedily as Hoyt offered them water, and Churn had eaten a few bits of dried meat, though neither Alen nor Hannah would take any food. They had soiled their leggings at least once during the day.
Now they trudged behind him like walking dead, their wrists looped securely through the reins, responding when he tugged on their arms or clucked their horses along. None of them appeared to have emerged from their daze, even momentarily, all day. He stepped over a rotting log and as he turned to make certain each of his travelling companions could manage, Hoyt considered how many days they would be able to survive in the forest – only another day or two, he thought. Much longer than that, he would have to find some way to get them to eat. Keeping them hydrated was challenge enough, but feeding them while they screamed, begged or chanted verged on impossible.
The noise really was the worst part: Hoyt didn’t mind that they had shat themselves or that they didn’t eat; he could bear walking all day with no one to chat to, but the incessant repetition of whatever the forest of ghosts had found in their past was really driving him mad. Not even Alen’s spell had done much good, though he was sure he has been saying it correctly. During the middlenight aven, he finally broke and shouted at them, ‘Shut up! Shut up! Shut up, for the love of all the gods of the Northern Forest!’
The only response came from Hoyt’s horse: startled at the sudden outburst, it nickered and pawed at the ground with one hoof.
‘What? Oh, you think it’s funny?’ he asked the tired mount. ‘Of course, you do. You don’t mind six avens of mindless babble, and Churn – for rutting sake, Churn, who I have never heard speak – has not stopped screaming since morning.’ Hoyt took a huge gulp from one of the wineskins and nibbled at a bit of stale bread. ‘You’d think he would have lost his voice for good after screaming all day.’
Now even his horse ignored him. Hoyt spat a few curses at the Pragan night and pushed on through the trees. The Eldarni moons gave a little light, but Hoyt began to grow tired, and worried that one of them – or worse, one of the horses – might miss a step and turn an ankle or take a tumble. He shivered as an eerie moan drifted from somewhere off to his left: the sound of a lost soul wandering in the darkness.
‘All right. One more hill, and then we’ll rest for a while,’ he said, giving a parting glance towards the voice, and tugged his horse’s reins. ‘Let’s go.’
When they crested the next rise, the light from the twin moons and a hundred thousand Eldarni stars illuminated a massive clearing, dotted here and there with boulders and a few scrubby pines growing low to the ground. To the east, the rise and fall of the foothills hardened into a craggy cliff face jutting up in the first of what he guessed was row upon row of eastern peaks. To the west, he could see mountains rising in the distance.
Before them, the ground fell away; less than a hundred paces north, the world ended in a chasm that fractured the very foundations of the earth. Hoyt had no idea how deep it was, or how steeply it sloped, but he would take no chances. First he would lash his friends to a sturdy tree, then build a small fire and to take what rest he could before facing the next stage of their journey.
He dropped his reins and patted his horse on the neck. ‘Good job today.’
‘Hoyt?’ someone called.
‘Rutting whores!’ he screeched, nearly tumbling down the slope.
‘Hoyt?’ The voice came again and for the first time since he stepped into the clearing, the Pragan realised his friends had fallen silent.
He scrambled to his feet and c
alled, ‘Yes. Who is that?’
‘It’s me, Alen – I’m pretty tired. Can we take a break here?’ He was already spreading his cloak on the ground, apparently oblivious to the fact that he had walked all day without sitting, that he had eaten nothing since the pre-dawn aven and had relieved himself as he walked.
‘Uh, yes, that’s what I was checking,’ Hoyt said. ‘This is a good spot. You sleep. I’ll make a fire.’
‘Good. Thanks.’ The old man was asleep beside Churn and Hannah almost before he’d stopped talking.
THE SALT MARSH
Brexan’s foot came down in thick black mud that stank of salt and decay and she cursed as she pulled her boot out. It was cold this morning, made worse by the wind off the water. She was glad she had changed from her skirt, for the weather felt as though it had finally shifted from autumn into winter. The salt marsh stretched east and north, swallowing the Falkan coastline in a plain of wetlands. Rushes, most of them naked stalks this late in the season, dominated the coarse cordgrass and bog sedges which carpeted the ground in thick tufts of green, resiliently holding the vestiges of their summer colour despite the encroaching winter.
To her left, muddy flats sloped for several hundred paces to the lapping waters of the Ravenian Sea. The uniform expanse of low-tide mud was a monochromatic painting of the ocean floor and Brexan wondered if all the vast seas of the world were as boring beneath the surface. Far to the north she could just make out a stream meandering its way across the flats and into the sea.
As she scraped a clinging lump of mud from her boots, hundreds of tiny seeds exploded from the reeds and caught on her clothes and in her hair; Brexan imagined she looked frightful, splattered knee-deep in mud and decorated head and shoulders in marsh spores. She pressed on regardless, shouldering her way through the rushes using the patches of cordgrass as stepping stones to navigate a relatively dry path through the estuary.
It had been eight days since Sallax and Jacrys, locked in grim battle, had fallen into invisibility at the end of the alley behind the alehouse. She had spent every day since searching for Sallax, while checking in what she hoped were unpredictable intervals over her shoulder for the spy. Her daily explorations had been carefully planned; moving in concentric circles out from the alehouse, Brexan had searched, backtracked and searched again.
She had first seen Sallax in the woods south of the city, but when she found no sign of him there, she decided to search the salt marsh north of the city. The Ronan freedom fighter could find numerous places in which to hide in this beautiful – if inhospitable – territory. Brexan had seen no one out here all morning; it didn’t look like the Orindale inhabitants made a habit of visiting the estuary during the winter.
‘Or during the summer, for that matter,’ she said. ‘The rutting bugs and snakes would be thick on the ground – I suppose this is the best time to be slopping around in this muck.’ She kicked at the discarded bones of a dead seabird, once a hearty meal for a marsh fox or perhaps a wildcat.
As a child, Brexan had been enthralled and terrified in equal part by the horror stories her father told her on cold winter evenings. There was nowhere in the Eastlands where the weather was quite as bitter as it was in Malakasia, and to pass the time, especially those interminable dark spells that blanketed most of her homeland in mid-winter, her father would make up stories of lunatic madmen on killing rampages, and demonic, one-eyed beasts hunting the Northern Forest for wayward children. From the adjacent room, her mother would invariably bark unheeded warnings to her father: ‘She’s not old enough for such tales,’ and ‘you can be the one to sit up with her all night, you great buffoon.’ But Brexan hadn’t cared; sleepless nights were never her concern. She would squeal with delight every time an unsuspecting villager wandered too far into the forest or when one of their wagons broke down, losing a wheel or ripping a leather bridle when they were too far into uncharted lands ever to make it home alive. And at the moment when the one-eyed ogre reached a muscular paw out from behind a stand of evergreens or a pack of rabid rodents gnawed through the leather slats holding the barn door closed to overwhelm the hero in a flurry of tiny teeth and poisoned claws, Brexan would dive beneath the blanket her father had been using to keep the chill off his legs and shiver and cry, frightened to within a hair’s breadth of collapse – but still begging for just one more.
Later, when she had grown and enlisted in the Malakasian Army, Brexan had periodically run up against one of her father’s old stories. Sleeping alone in a foreign inn, walking back from guard duty in the overnight avens or visiting the facilities after twilight, she would sometimes catch a chill scent or detect an imagined whisper caressing the nape of her neck. She would turn quickly on her heel, shouting, ‘Who’s there?’ to the empty space. No one was ever behind her, no rabid rodents hunting her down; no ogres reaching out hungrily. Brexan couldn’t escape those stories; scores of Twinmoons later, her father could scare her witless, even from the other side of Eldarn.
He had been with her this morning; on more than one occasion she had checked the cordgrass with a stick, half expecting to find a marsh adder coiled up and waiting for a taste of human blood or a pack of wild dogs crouching in the rushes, eager to hamstring her and rip mouthfuls of flesh from her defenceless body. As she tromped through the mud Brexan had tried to shut out her father’s tales: it was a long walk back to the safety and anonymity of Orindale and she couldn’t conduct a thorough search for Sallax with her father’s ghosts leaping out from behind every clump of grass.
Periodically she stopped to stare out over the flats: if Sallax were on the marsh somewhere, she might catch a glimpse of him moving through the rushes or across the mud. Brexan figured he was still wearing the black cloak, but he should be easy to spot – even with the curious stooped position he’d adopted as part of his disguise as a beggar, he was still tall enough to stand out.
Sunlight gleamed off the stream; Brexan, certain she had spotted something out there, squinted into the blinding glare. There it was: a tiny indistinct hillock marring the perfection of the glass-flat stretch of mud. Brexan moved quickly, ignoring the marsh adders and rabid dogs, until she came to the edge of the cordgrass and started elbowing her way through the rushes once again. She groaned as she stepped back into the mud and began making her way towards the lump – it’s probably nothing, just a hunk of driftwood.
The hump was a little over a hundred paces out and she was almost on top of it before she realised it was a body. She stopped dead in her tracks, sinking until the wet mud was almost at the top of her boots, as the odour of rotting flesh hit her. Trying not to breathe it in, she turned slowly in a full circle, feeling alone and vulnerable. Fear gripped her, and she thought again of home. Curse you, father, did you have to visit me today?
Breathing through her mouth, Brexan kicked the body over, almost retching as waves of putrefaction washed over her. In a clatter of armoured joints, a dozen or so crabs sidled a safe distance away; others stayed put, reaching up at her with their claws as if daring her to try and steal their prize. One small crab the size of a silver coin scurried over what had been the face – Brexan still couldn’t tell if it had been a man or a woman – and into the open socket that had once held an eye. A translucent flap of seaweed covered the gaping mouth and with the sun directly overhead, Brexan could see straight through the empty skull. The face had been stripped of nearly all the exposed flesh, though a couple of lengths of striated muscle remained. That made things worse. Brexan looked away, unable to stand looking at it for another moment… this would be for ever waiting for her in the cordgrass, beside her father’s marsh adders and rabid dogs.
She couldn’t guess how long the body had been in the water; though the crabs and fish and who knew what other creatures had feasted on it, the torso and legs were pretty much intact, still wrapped in a tunic and homespun leggings. For the second time that morning, Brexan was glad winter was coming, because she couldn’t imagine how disgusting this discovery would have been at
the height of summer. She guessed this must have been someone killed during the last Twinmoon and dumped in the river or off the waterfront – there was a strong undertow round here and anything dropped in the water in Orindale would have been dragged along the bottom and deposited out here once the Eldarni moons broke off their relationship for another sixty days.
Confident the corpse had no link to Jacrys or Sallax, she turned to begin the long, sloppy trudge back to the relative comfort of the salt marsh. The sun had shifted just enough to ease the glare, but as she turned, something gleamed for a moment, just one flash – it blinded her for an instant and then was gone. She bent back over the body and this time spotted something shiny, a piece of jewellery, maybe, tucked just far enough up a sleeve for her to have overlooked it during her first cursory investigation.
‘What do you have up there?’ she asked, gripping the damp edge of the tunic sleeve with two fingers. Breathing quickly through her mouth, Brexan added a running commentary, hoping that would keep something dreadful from actually happening. ‘And this is right about when my father would leap out of the chair and scream something horrible in a shrieking voice – you know, the voice of the young girl being pursued through the forest by the man-wolf or the lion-dog-’ She tugged at the sleeve, but it was heavier than she’d expected and it slipped from her fingers. ‘Or this is when the very dead body wakes up and uses its unfathomable strength to grip the unsuspecting soldier by the wrist and pull her down into the mud where she chokes to death while listening to its terrifying song… right, Father? Isn’t that what happens about now, with the heroine exposed out here where no one can hear her scream-’ The sleeve finally yielded up its secret: a curious piece of jewellery the like of which Brexan had never seen before.
