Dawn of Swords (42 page)

At the center of the forest lies a bubbling hot spring. The heat creates gas that must escape, which it does through tiny gaps in the ground. When those gaps breathe, it sounds like moaning, or a steady, sinister whisper. But that is all there is. There is no such thing as ghosts, child, and if they once existed, they are as gone as the dragons are.

Crian slumped down cross-legged beneath his shoddily constructed lean-to and, reaching into his sack, removed the mirror he’d brought with him when fleeing Omnmount. He placed it in his lap and took a swig of stream water, which stung his throat with its odd, sulfurous tang. He stared at his reflection in the vibrant moonlight. Gently he touched at the silver strands of his hair, which were poking through more and more now that he lacked the means to hide them.

So be it
, he thought.
I’m never going back to Veldaren, and I will never sit at my father’s left hand again. When I take Nessa and Moira away from here, we’ll flee deep into the Paradise. I can grow old there.

He didn’t know if his plan would work, but he had heard that Ashhur was a loving and forgiving god, with an undying affection for the pathetic and downtrodden, and none were more pathetic and downtrodden than he. All he
did
know was that he could never return home again. Avila’s words were proof of that. If all of Haven were to be massacred, including his own excommunicated sister,
there was no mercy to be found in Karak’s lands. Crian’s own hand had signed his death warrant with a flourish of blood the moment he brutalized Avila. It was an act he regretted. He truly did love his sister, even though their relationship was contentious. But for her to do what she did, to come on to him like that and then taunt him with promises of Moira’s and Nessa’s deaths.…

That was in the past, a different problem for a different day. If he wanted to survive, he had to focus on the present, and right now his greatest dilemma was finding a way to cross Karak’s Bridge and escape into the delta. Hardly an easy task. The soldiers chasing him were his own, men he’d trained, men he’d considered his brothers. They knew he lurked in the forest, and constant patrols hemmed him inside. Always their bows were at the ready. Crian couldn’t even risk wandering deeper into the woods so that he could jump into the river and bypass the bridge entirely. Should they hear him or spot him swimming along, he’d have no safety from their arrows. His only saving grace was time—and their superstitions.

“It’s a shame you’re not with me, Nessa,” Crian said, sighing at his exhausted reflection. “We’d have all the privacy in the world in here.”

A high-pitched whistle suddenly bit at his eardrums and made him wince. He glanced all around him, but there was nothing there. The whistle sounded again, again coming from nowhere. Something tickled at the back of his mind, and as if by instinct he glanced down at the mirror that lay in his lap. His lips quivered, and his eyes nearly bulged from his head.

The mirror no longer showed his own reflection; instead, a vaporous apparition fogged over the reflective glass. He could make out the shape of a face, or perhaps a skull of some sort, along with a deep red outline that shimmered when the smoke inside the mirror billowed. He wiped at it with his sleeve despite his fright and the pain of the constant whistle in his ears. Nothing. No change, just the phantom leering out at him. A paralyzing tremor froze his limbs
and set the nerves behind his eyes to throbbing, as if invisible lightning had coursed through him.

Go.

The word entered his head much like the tip of an arrow, piercing the front of his brain and making him cry out in surprise. He collapsed to his side, the mirror sliding off his lap, now clear of smoke and haunting images. He rolled on the ground, over leaves and jutting roots, pain shooting through his entire being. Pressure built in his head, threatening to explode his skull, gradually becoming more and more awful until he let out a primal scream of terror. The pain began to dissolve, but that word kept repeating in his head, louder than before. This time he listened.

GO!

More screams, these not from his own mouth. He jerked his head up and looked around, but the forest was empty save for the chattering birds in the canopy overhead. He scurried to his feet, snatching his sword from its dry place beneath the lean-to, and stumbled down the path he had created. Branches tore at him, scratching at his face as he ran in the darkness. He made it to the path’s end, where he used to sit for hours, day and night, watching the soldiers safeguard the bridge. The screaming multiplied the closer to the forest’s edge he ran, and in his waking nightmare he imagined a parade of hideous monsters slipping out of the shadowed gaps of the world, lopping off heads and devouring entrails, turning the southern banks of the Rigon into a bloody form of the fiery underworld.

And then he reached the carnage at the edge of the forest. Soldiers, those still alive anyway, fled in all directions. Chasing them, almost lazily, was a formless mass of smoke that shimmered black and silver in the moonlight. It surrounded the men, gray tendrils whipping from its swirling center, knocking them aside as they shrieked in unimaginable terror, and then disappeared into the tall grass in a spray of red. The smoke was gradually moving away from
him, progressing toward the opposite side of the Gods’ Road. Crian watched, his feet made of lead, his mind locking tight. What he saw—it just couldn’t be. Jacob couldn’t have been this wrong about the forest.

Again that voice, this time softer, more serene, yet oddly more urgent than ever.

Go.

The spirits of the Ghostwood were real. They had watched over him, lurking in his thoughts, stealing into his dreams. Had they felt his love for Nessa? Did they sense his frustration and anger toward the soldiers who chased him? This shapeless creation before him—was that its normal form, or could it shift and change, perhaps even becoming human?

He didn’t know. He wasn’t sure he even
wanted
to know. Before him was an opening, and he would not dare refuse the spirits’ command. Crian burst from the line of trees, running at a full sprint through the open space. All that separated him from the bridge was a couple hundred feet of green grass. He didn’t dare take his eyes off his goal, didn’t want to even acknowledge the misty cloud that slowly receded away, leaving trails of body parts strewn about the grass. As he ran through its lingering presence, a chill seeped into the very depths of his bones. He held his breath, waiting for it to take him, to crush him like any other mortal, mocking his hopes.

It never did. His feet churned up bits of grass and chunks of dirt and rock, and his ears still rang with the echoes of the soldiers’ piercing screams. By the time his boots fell hard on the steel-reinforced granite surface of Karak’s Bridge, he felt like sobbing.

It took much less time to cross the bridge, and once he was on the other side, he spied a large structure of some sort in the near distance, situated at the base of the mountain that rose behind it—the Temple of the Flesh, he assumed—and then he was flying alongside the river, keeping up a constant speed, no matter how dicey the
footing became. Integrity swung useless in his hand. A part of him wanted to stop, to rest his burning chest, but he didn’t dare. His footfalls would not slow until the Ghostwood was banished from his sight. Besides, there was still the chance he was lost in a delusion or a dream, that Avila’s men,
his
men would come storming into the delta. These lands were considered neutral no longer. It was enemy territory now, and according to his sister, it was full of enemies to be crushed.

The terrain became marshy and damp, and finally Crian’s mind returned to him. He collapsed to his knees, gasping in air. He couldn’t run further. He just couldn’t. A glance behind him showed Karak’s Bridge in the distance, and beyond that.…

He looked away. The Ghostwood terrified him, and a deep part of him wanted to never, ever think about it again. When his breathing grew more controlled, Crian rose back to his feet. He had to be careful now. With things as they were, there was no guarantee he would be treated as a guest rather than a threat. Sticking to the cover of the twisting wetland mothertrees and swampy vegetation, he struggled through the quagmire, his boots constantly getting sucked beneath the mud or ensnared in vines. He heard recognizable animal sounds: the repetitive bleats of the whippoorwills, the throaty exclamations of whooping cranes, and the ominous
splash
of large, hidden bodies dropping into the bog. He kept his wits about him, remembering the lessons Moira had taught him about staying alive when trapped in the delta swamp.
Head down, keep moving, don’t turn around for anything.
This wasn’t his first venture into the wilds, after all. Hopefully it wouldn’t be his last.

It was morning by the time he found the landmark he was seeking—a vast garden of blood roses and orchids that exploded in red and white brilliance from the drab greens and browns of the swamp. The sound of the ocean rumbled in his ears, not very far away. He immediately climbed the bank, yelping as he narrowly
avoiding the snapping fangs of a frightened bogsnake. Keeping close to the spiky vines of the roses, he worked his way through a tightly woven copse of trees. When he emerged on the other side, he breathed a sigh of relief, almost falling to his knees and crying his thanks to the sky. A small, brown-rooted courtyard led to the rear of a simple log cottage with a hay-lined roof. Moira’s cottage. He was here at last.

Throwing caution to the wind, he went straight for the front door. He didn’t care who saw him now—he had no secrets left to hide. He rapped lightly on the wood, a grin stretching across his face, and tapped his foot impatiently as he waited for Moira to answer.

She never did.

Gently he leaned his weight into the door. It rotated inward, unbarred. He stepped inside, hesitating just before he crossed the threshold. The windows were unshuttered, letting in the light of the rising sun as well as buzzing insects that circled the bowl of fruit sitting on Moira’s simple kitchen table. It was the same table they sat around whenever he visited, chatting about loved ones, the taste of the many luscious and exotic soups Moira would set to boil in her inglenook, the beauty of the sunrise over the vast eastern waterways—anything but the life of enforcement and violence he lived outside this peaceful delta.

Moira’s simple three-room cabin, filled lovingly with a lifetime’s worth of trinkets and curiosities, was his own sort of haven. For the first time in his thirty-eight years of life he appreciated the significance of the place’s name. Haven: a place of safety and shelter, a refuge for the unwanted, the outcasts…but this place would be none of those things once his father had his way.

Swatting at a large horsefly that was hovering in front of his face, Crian pivoted on his heels and left the cabin. If his sister wasn’t here, there was only one other place she could be. He strolled out the door, making sure to close it behind him, and veered left down
the dirt cart path that passed in front of the property. He walked casually, as if he hadn’t a care in the world. This far south, the delta was sparsely populated. Not twenty years ago it had been a disorganized harbor for miscreants and starving thieves who dwelled in the swamps and survived by assaulting passing wagons en route to the meager docks that bordered the Thulon Ocean. Deacon Coldmine had led the drive to clean the place up, aided by Rachida and Peytr Gemcroft. The scum had scattered in all directions. It was in the delta that Crian’s carriage had been attacked that fateful day he met Nessa and her malformed brother. Crian had given up his sword in thanks for their aid. The thought of the blade put a smile on his face. Winterbone, a beast of a thing he’d had difficulty carrying. Father had been none too pleased to learn he had “lost” it, but of course his reaction would have been far worse if he’d learned the arduous thing had been given to an offspring of Ashhur. Crian knew the mutant DuTaureau still had it, and that thought brought his mind back to Nessa.

Fifteen minutes later, the Gemcroft Estate loomed before him, rising above the surrounding mothertrees and apple blossoms like a mythical stone monster. What had started out as a simple log cottage had, over time, grown into a building whose immensity was only dwarfed by the amount of ardor that had gone into its construction. The stones making up its walls had been extracted from the Pebble Islands and were inlaid with traces of precious gems. The roof was made from the halved logs that had formed Peytr’s original cottage, painted with exotic dyes produced from the ink of a hundred thousand miniature squids farmed off the delta’s shores.

When he rapped on the door, a young servant girl named Una, whom he had met many times, answered it almost immediately. He asked to see the lady of the house, smiling as Una cast a disapproving glance at his muddy, unkempt appearance. She escorted him inside, passing through the vestibule that overlooked the pathway and down a long hall that opened up into the solarium.

There were several people in the room, but Crian saw only one—his beloved Nessa. She lit up with joy the moment he stepped inside, casting aside her knitting so that she could lunge at him. Crian dropped Integrity on the table beside him and wrapped his arms around her, accepting her kisses across his dirty face, letting the tiny pecks wash away all the lingering horror of the Ghostwood.

“You came!” she cried out between kisses. “Atria just arrived two days ago. I wasn’t expecting you for another week!”

“I’m early,” replied Crian, easily supporting her tiny frame.

“What happened to you?” she asked, pulling away. “You’re all a mess.”

“I had to…let me just say I walked here.”

“Are you all right?”

He nodded, not wanting to answer her fully, for he
was
all right now.

It was Moira’s turn to embrace him. Her blue eyes watered at the edges as she took in the sight of him, and she played nervously with her silver-white hair. Crian was able to pry Nessa off for a warm embrace, although his love still managed to attach herself to his side like a human barnacle.