by Glen L. Hall
As the pain returned to him and the numbness flooded back into his body, he thought he saw a winged shadow take to the air, but he was already sinking to the ground, helpless as a wave washed over him and the current drew him back into the centre of the Dead Water.
* * * * * *
He awoke to guttural sounds and the splashing of water as the creatures hunted for his body. He was floating helpless in the darkness. The croaks were growing closer. Any moment now it would be all over and he would have failed all those dear to him. He should have never come here. It was a fool’s errand and he had learned nothing of the enemy.
He felt iron-like talons grab hold of him and heard the sounds reach a crescendo as he was dragged to the beach. A jeering crowd had gathered at the water’s edge. Fear ran through his helpless body as they hauled him into a sitting position. What did they mean to do to him?
His ears popped as the air pressure suddenly dropped. What was happening? There was a new noise blending with the jeering, an oncoming roar.
The wall of water came out of the darkness and crashed onto the shore in a deafening explosion. Some of the creatures were crushed by the water’s terrible force, whilst others found boulders raining down on them. Those who had survived the first onslaught were seized by twisting currents and quickly dragged, lifeless, out into the churning Dead Water.
Brennus Hood remained sitting, untouched, on the beach, unable to comprehend what had just happened or how he was still alive. All around him the waters were returning to the lake and soon the beach was again empty, save for an old man sitting at the water’s edge.
THE GHOSTLY COMPANY
He had left High Green and moved quickly north through Elishaw. The storm had hit as he had been approaching Featherwood waterfall and he had taken refuge under the overhanging rock. Now he was sitting huddled against the wall, listening to the waterfall’s flow resonating against the black rocks below.
Suddenly a shape rose out of the spray and mist. He flattened himself against the wall without thinking, glad he had chosen to dress in black.
The figure stopped just beyond the falling water. If this was the Shadow, what could he possibly do?
His mouth had gone dry and he found himself swallowing, trying to keep his breathing slow and even. Whatever it was, he had to deliver Brennus’s message to Braden. The Forest Reivers needed to know the seriousness of the situation. He didn’t want to think about the Shadow arriving in Warkworth with only Eagan between it and Sam.
The figure was bent over, scouring the floor. Fortunately, the strong winds were driving the rain in long sheets, so Jarl hoped any signs of his passing had been washed away.
A second and then third figure joined the first and within seconds a number of ghostly figures were passing over the falls, departing as quickly as they had appeared.
Jarl now had a fresh problem. They could simply be waiting for him to make a move. Even if they weren’t, somewhere in the hills he would have to overtake them without being seen.
Waiting in the dark with the storm howling just beyond the falls, he thought of Brennus and Drust. Sitting here wasn’t helping them. He could wait no longer – time was moving against him.
By the sound of things, the storm was intensifying. He slowly walked to the edge of the waterfall and passed through a small opening. Coming back out into the seething night, he flinched as the winds lashed the rain into his face. Climbing the short rock face was almost impossible. He was also aware that he could be walking into a trap, but there was no alternative.
Slowly he made his way up the stone steps that had been carved into the side of the valley by ancient hands now long forgotten. He had passed two hundred steps when they finally came to an end and he made his way through a thick wall of ivy that was wrapping its sinewy body around the surrounding trees, slowly choking them into submission. The smell of rotting wood filled the air as the ivy gave way to him.
It took him a while to find his way out into the open atop the broken path. He had to lean into the wind, for it was sweeping through the narrow valley, bellowing and tormenting him with cold rain. In places the path was missing and he would slip and fall to one knee before heaving himself up again. The roar of the wind through the valley was deafening and still the road took him further into the hills.
In his need to remain hidden, he was heading for the Foulmire. Poisonous gases could bubble up there without warning and kill instantly, but the scent of a traveller would be sucked into the earth within seconds and there would be no trace of their passing.
His mood fluttered with the changing vista, growing darker as he trekked further into the oozing quagmire. In places his feet seemed to dissolve into the ground and he became bogged down. Now and then he stopped to catch a glimpse of his compass.
It was the slight sound of leathered foot against moss that froze him to the spot. He dropped to the ground, lying almost face down in the thick mud. His keen senses pinpointed the noise in the darkness. People were moving no more than two hundred yards to his left. If they were humans, then they were moving almost without sound, their feet barely making contact with the watery bog.
Jarl held his breath and became one with the night. Then something whistled in the darkness and a single arrow fell only feet away from his head. Still he did not move. Whoever they were, they had sharp senses. That arrow had been meant to flush him out, but he knew better than to make any sudden movement.
Now covered in sludge, he could feel his feet beginning to grow numb. He couldn’t wait too long. But if he moved too soon, he would receive an arrow for his troubles.
He waited a few minutes longer. All seemed quiet. The ghostly company had gone. Stealing north, he moved deeper into the Foulmire.
* * * * * *
The night crept on and he continued his wearisome trek through the traitorous fen, listening and watching for anything trying to sneak up from the darkness whilst avoiding the odd hidden gully and sinking mud that could suck travellers waist-deep. He grunted up a mile-long hill that rose sharply from the quagmire, coarse grass thick along its edges, and reached the plateau. There he paused. Through the whistling wind there came a cawing sound, far away but growing closer.
He flattened himself against the ground, hoping he would remain unnoticed in the darkness. It wasn’t long before a giant murder of crows spilt out of the air on all sides of the hillock. The night sky became a thousand moving pieces of darkness cawing and snapping as they flew east.
Shaking with fear and exhaustion, Jarl watched until the last of the stragglers had disappeared. His limbs were already heavy, but he moved now with added urgency. Thoughts of Eagan, speculations about the nature of the unknown humans and worries about the crows all became blurred behind his desire to arrive at the King’s Seat before dawn.
The path through the Foulmire now began to grow firmer with every footstep. Its sickly stench started to thin as a light wind blew from the north, and finally he left the bog and its tortuous route. With his keen eyesight, he could make out the Cheviots standing like monstrous gates between two worlds, west and east, with the unfolding panorama hidden by the dark distances of the borderland.
He could no longer figure out how long he’d been walking; all he knew was that below him the Foulmire had fallen away and he’d reached the spinal ridge of the borderland. Sky and landscape were a now a vast blanket of shifting shades of black and he felt small and exposed to the elements.
The only way to traverse the steep burns and fells running to the east was to pick up a Roman road and follow it north until he found the path running from south of Swanlaws to Windy Gyle in the east. It would be a ferocious walk in such winds, but would avoid the dark passes of the Blind and Barrow burns. If the Forest Reivers were right, these places were best avoided.
He had been fighting the storm for several hours without respite and was now walking into the wind on the bare rock of M
ozie Law. There was nothing to shelter him and every now and then he would totter before regaining his balance and setting off again.
The storm reached its crescendo as he approached the summit of Windy Gyle. A faint path led below its summit. On all sides the burns and fells rose and dipped in giant waves, and for a moment he thought he could have been looking out to sea.
A cruel wind raced across the top of the hills like a herd of wild horses, knocking him back and then throwing him to the ground. He lay just below the summit, covering his face with his hands, utterly drained from the long climb to the top of the borderland, but he knew that if Sam and Emily had gone to Warkworth, then Eagan would be in the firing line. He had to keep going.
He gradually regained his feet, braced himself against the storm surge and placed one foot after the other down the east side of the hill, his head reeling from the force of the rain.
He finally felt the path beginning to descend towards the Usway Valley and the wood bordering Davidson’s Linn waterfall. He would rest once he was in the valley and out of the storm. Though his pace had slowed, he still expected to arrive at the King’s Seat in the early morning hours.
The Usway Valley was a place of waterfalls and stifling conifer woods. Though he could not see it in the stormy night, he knew Shillhope Law would be rising up on his left. The walls on either side of the valley were steep and started to offer him protection from the incessant winds. He was grateful when he picked up a narrow muddy path running parallel to the fast-flowing Usway Burn.
With the storm abating, his senses began to sharpen and he could tell the valley was deepening the further he walked. He was glad he had come down from the hills, where the storm still raged; he wasn’t sure how much more he could have taken of the bruising winds before finding shelter. He was limping badly now. It had been a long march since leaving Brennus and Drust.
As the path followed the contours of the winding river, Jarl forced himself to quicken his pace. The burn took a sharp turn, and as he rounded the corner, he was thinking ahead to meeting the Forest Reivers when an arrow whizzed past his ear and a second and third flew over his head.
He threw himself forward as more arrows went whistling by and felt for his long hunting knife. In the darkness there was movement all around him.
‘Go!’
A pale slender woman appeared momentarily at his side. Her was silver, her eyes almost grey, and she had had an unfamiliar accent. In a single fluid movement, she released a flurry of white-feathered arrows from a bow that seemed to curve round her arm.
‘Run!’
A dozen shapes were taking up positions in a thin line across the path he was taking and waves of arrows were dancing through the night.
At first Jarl thought the archers were firing indiscriminately, but he quickly noticed the arrows were converging on a point that was slowly moving closer to their line. He felt it before he saw it – a murderous hate that swam through the night, splintering the arrows into a thousand shards.
Whoever these people were, they could not stop the darkness that was taking shape. If he stood and fought with them, there would be no one to deliver the message to Braden.
He glanced at the woman, but she was no longer looking his way. Instead she was focusing on the dozens of arrows raining down on that single dark spot.
He fled north with questions crashing through his mind. Was that the Shadow from Oxford? Why was it following him and not Drust or Brennus? It must have been following him up the burn, and with the noise of the storm, he hadn’t heard it coming, or felt its presence. How it had followed him across the Foulmire was anyone’s guess. Was there really more than one Shadow or – and this thought was almost unthinkable – had it already caught up with Brennus and Drust?
He ran into a wood of thick conifers clinging to the side of Castle Hill. In the darkness the clawing branches lacerated his face and arms, and his blood mingled with his sweat as he thought of what had just happened. What would happen to those people when their arrows ran dry? Did they know what they were facing? Did they understand the futility of their defence? Did they know they had saved his life?
Then he felt the ground disappearing beneath his feet and he was falling down a shallow hill. Without the strength to stop himself, he tumbled in the darkness and then came to a stop, chilled to the bone, in the cutting arms of a thick bramble.
For long moments, it was enough just to catch his breath. The storm was still raging high above the valley, but here the trees muffled its sound. He sat up, straining his ears in the darkness and shuddering at how close the Shadow had been.
Who were the ghostly company? He guessed they had been the people who had passed him at the waterfall, but he couldn’t be sure. Whoever they were, he hoped they knew what they were up against.
The enormity of what they were all facing made him slowly regain his feet. With a grimace, he started clambering back the way he had fallen, exhausted but glad to be alive.
THE KING’S SEAT
Braden Bow was looking out over Cold Law, on his way to the King’s Seat. The sky was sea-blue, with slow clouds crossing the horizon. The sun hung low and made the whole landscape shimmer in the soft breeze. The first signs of leaf-fall were showing on the giant trees that lined Linhope Spout waterfall. Braden knew the uplands well, from Kershope Burn in the west to Berwick-on-Tweed in the east, as well as all the old roads through the valleys and hills and the secret ways through the woods and forests. Thick-set, with dark brown hair and eyes that were slow to anger, he was head of the Bow clan, one of the oldest remaining Reiver families.
The Forest Reivers had always been different from their border cousins and they had diminished down the ages. There were now just four clans – Bow, Raeshaw, Dun-Rig and Broadflow – roaming the woods. They ventured from their lands only rarely, breaking their isolation to bring news to the Fellowship of Druidae. In recent years, the Hoods had taken over its leadership and the loose coalition with the Reivers had fallen apart. Only Eagan Reign still met up with them regularly – he had spent months travelling with them from Hownam Law in the west to Holy Island in the east. But even Drust had not been seen for a year.
The autumn sun raised Braden’s spirits, but he couldn’t shake the feeling that the peace that had reigned for a generation was coming to an end. Things had changed when they’d lost Oscar and the Hoods had taken over, and keeping the Fellowship of Druidae going had become an impossible task.
It was winter when things had changed in the borderland. It had started with one of his rangers tracking something he couldn’t easily identify. The tracks had disappeared underground and the ranger hadn’t been able to follow them.
The first skirmish had taken them all by surprise. Reports had come back to their forest home of a coordinated attack against their posts across the borderland. There were sightings of crow-like creatures and even black wolves. There were rumours, too, of a new darkness, a cunning Shadow that had been tracked all the way to the Dead Water, but spirits were said to haunt the mountain passes and Braden’s rangers would not go into such unearthly lands.
The warm sun penetrated his dark thoughts. In the distance were the high hills and many-coloured dales of his homeland. He moved on.
He was fairly close to the King’s Seat when the bird of prey caught his eye, sweeping effortlessly through the heavens, a shadow across the sun, an elegant blur of speed and power. It was a giant red kite and it was acting just a little oddly. He watched it climb several hundred feet, turn gracefully and then plummet towards the ground and twist sharply before rising again.
He came to a complete standstill, uneasy now as he watched the streak of red and brown whistle through the clear sky. He found himself crouching down. Almost instantly, the bird of prey pulled up sharply and glided off in the direction he was going.
Where the kite had been swooping, men, or what appeared to be men, were standing. From
this distance he couldn’t see their faces. He sank further down into the coarse grass, watching intently. When they began to run, they ran unlike any men he had ever seen, hunched over with an awkward gait.
Braden couldn’t help thinking that each day brought with it a new and strange event. He stayed where he was a moment longer, scouring the high grass, unsure whether anything else remained hidden, then decided to follow them.
Almost an hour later, he was lying flat on his stomach in the long grass of a small hillock. Sipping from a leather flask, he kept his eyes narrowed on the horizon. The sunset threw the vast landscape into a smouldering haze of half-shadows and shimmering light, but he could still see the men. They had been joined by others and he now counted thirty, all moving with that strange twisted run. They had been avoiding farmsteads and travelling through coppices and hedgerows. Now they were moving quickly and disappearing into the trees of Threestoneburn Wood.
Braden now faced a dilemma. For all he knew, they could be watching his approach. It was open fields from where he lay to the edge of the trees – it could be a trap. But if he waited too long, they would be through the wood and lost. It would be dark soon and difficult to track them.
Without further ado, he took another sip of his water, felt the reassuring metal of his long knife and was up and running quickly down the hill and across the field, focusing on the mature trees of the wood rising up before him.
He broke through into the wood, sweating and breathing heavily, and dropped to one knee whilst his eyes adjusted to the murky light. The hair on the back of his neck was prickling and his senses tingling. In one fluid movement, he drew out the cold steel of his long knife. Blade raised, ready to defend himself, he made his way deeper into the wood.
He was just beginning to think the men had gone when the silence was shattered by muffled screams and high-pitched squawks. He flattened himself against the trunk of a tree, but knew that if they were coming his way, he would be seen.
