Dusk (41 page)

She hurried off at a right angle to their path, turning and twisting between trees, hand trailing behind her as she let out a length of almost invisible wire. Kosar did as she had instructed, passing the wooden ball once around the tree and pulling. The wire attached to it—thin, sharp, deadly—bit into the bark with a soft hiss. The wooden ball looked like a knotted wound in the tree. When the wire had played out A’Meer secured her end and then signaled for them to continue.

“They’ll smell our trail,” she said as they ran together once more. “The horses’ breath, the blood from our scrapes. They’ll be running fast. It won’t stop them, but it may slow down one or two.”

“How many more tricks have you got?” Kosar asked.

“Not many.”

Another cry rose up behind them and the tree canopy came to life as birds took flight, fleeing in silent panic as if keen to keep their presence a secret.

“If only we could fly,” A’Meer said.

Kosar took the lead. Spiderwebs wrapped themselves across his face and tangled in his hair, and now and then he felt the harder impact as a spider came along for the ride. He wiped them frantically away, remembering the slayer spider that Hope had left in her rooms for the Monks. There was no telling what unknown species this wood might harbor. Trees reached for him too, small branches only becoming apparent as they drew lines of blood into his cheek or clawed for his eyes.

Shadows moved to their left and right. Things following their progress, perhaps. Or maybe tricks of the light.

“I don’t know where we are,” Kosar said. “I’ve never traveled these woods. I’ve been south of here to the borders of Kang Kang, but I never came this way. There’s no way of telling how far these woods continue.”

“Far enough,” A’Meer said. “Long enough for us to have to face the Red Monks in here. The forest is many miles deep—I was here years ago, just after my training was finished and I went out of New Shanti—and there were things here even then. Now . . . more time has passed. The land has changed even more, and old maps no longer hold true. Maybe they’re all gone.”

“What things?” Kosar asked. “Why didn’t you say?”

“I never saw them properly, not even back then. And I can’t say they were a danger. But they gave me bad dreams.”

As if on cue the two of them stopped running, squatted down, listened to the noises around them. From ahead they could hear the horses crashing onward, not far distant. Behind them, the way they had come, all was quiet; the forest silenced by their own passage, perhaps, or because of what followed.

Something whispered.

“What
is
that?” Kosar said, but A’Meer did not answer. She glanced at him and then looked away, eyes downcast as if ashamed of something terrible and secret. He reached out to touch her, fingers stretched, blood on his fingertips . . . and then he stopped.

They gave me bad dreams,
A’Meer had said.

And the whispers made themselves known to Kosar.

Never said sorry, never told Father why I did it, killed his sheebok, cut out its heart to take away to the woods with my friends, never admitted my guilt even though there was blood beneath my fingernails and the stink of death about me, rot in the creases of my skin, pain and guilt in my eyes when I woke up . . . afraid of him, frightened of his big hands and his angry shouts, but there was worse than Father’s rage, frightened of my friends, of the things they did in the woods, the things they did with that girl and that sheebok’s heart and those knives, those knives . . . frightened but compliant, watching them empty the heart over her breasts and cut her there, the blood mingling, watching from the trees, hard, young and hard . . . and when they came into her and she screamed they didn’t hear my own petty cries of pleasure and shame . . . but they knew I watched . . . they
always
knew I watched . . .

“Fuck,” Kosar shouted. “Fuck!”

A’Meer held him and whispered in his ear, trying to calm him. “It’s all right, don’t shout, let it come, accept it and let it come and it’ll flow away, it’ll hide again. Truth is only what you want to make it. They’ll leave you alone soon, Kosar . . .”

Always regretted leaving him behind, that broken boy cowering in the pits of the Poison Forests, waiting to die . . . but his leg was broken, and I’d never really wanted him along anyway, just too afraid to say no, didn’t want to hurt his feelings . . . I’d saved his life after all, and he thought he owed me, wanted to repay me for saving him from those tumblers in the Widow’s Peaks . . . so he came along and I slipped and he fell too, and I never should have left him . . . said I was going for help, going to find someone to help me pull him out of there, but I knew he’d be dead by nightfall, no way a boy like that could fight off the poisonous things that live there, those birds those bats those spiders . . . left him to die, and not because I was scared and not because I couldn’t have gone back . . . simply because I didn’t want him with me anymore . . .

It came again and again, the voice of his sickly conscience, the mad mutterings of guilt, the secret shadows of rejected experience admitting culpability for things he had long ago shut away, driven down, buried deep in denial, clothed in ambiguous memory and turned into tales once heard, not created himself.

. . . should have put it back, never should have taken it . . .

“Kosar, breathe, let it come, they’ll lose interest soon.”

. . . meant so much but I never told her, and look what happened, look what
happened
to her!

“Oh Mage shit,” A’Meer whispered, tortured by whatever guilty secrets plagued her own mind. Her grip on Kosar never eased.

Forgot again, always forget, never found it in myself to remember just that one special day for my mother, always let it slip away and then fooled myself that look in her eyes was a calm acceptance when I apologized, not disappointment, not sadness . . .

Kosar vomited, the sickness and rot of hidden memories and mistakes flooding his mind and purging his body. A’Meer still held him, groaning and cursing, fighting whatever foul thoughts had been dredged in her own mind. He heaved again and bent double, watching vomit speckle the pine-needle carpet, a big beetle scurrying away with its back coated in his stomach juices. All his bad thoughts crowded in and buzzed him like moths to a flame, some of them battering against his skull and knocking themselves away, others remaining there to fly in again and again, reminding him of all those bad things.

The whispering began to fade away at last. It did not vanish completely—it never would—but reduced in volume until it was a hush in his ears, and then a feeling deeper down, and then nothing, not disappearing, simply becoming too quiet and deep for him to want to hear.

“Why didn’t you warn me?” he said, spitting the foul taste from his mouth.

“How could I?”

Kosar looked up at A’Meer and saw that she had been suffering as well, face pale, eyes moist. He wondered what secret shame she had been facing only seconds ago; he did not wish to ask. He turned and looked in the direction the horses had taken. “The others?”

“If the things in these woods get them too, I’m hoping that the horses will go on while they’re remembering.”

“Bad things. All bad things for you?”

A’Meer nodded, looked away, turned and scanned the woods behind them.

“Why?
Why?
”

“Perhaps it’s how they feed,” she said. “There are plenty of strange things we know about—skull ravens, tumblers—and some, like the mimics, that are little more than myth. There must be many more that are still hidden to us. Especially since the Cataclysmic War. It’s not just the landscape that’s suffered since then, changed.”

Kosar shook his head to rid himself of those rancid images and guilts. It only served to mix them up some more. “I can’t stand this,” he said, moaning and holding his head.

“Kosar, they’re here!”

A’Meer drew on her bow, let an arrow fly. Something screeched from between the trees, and Kosar saw a red flash behind some shrubs, twisting and wavering in the dappled forest light.

“Come on,” A’Meer said. “We have to catch the others!” She ran past him, grabbing his elbow and spinning him so that he was facing the right way. “Now!”

He followed her, imagining that he could leave those foul thoughts of his behind, stewing away into this weird forest floor along with his puddle of vomit.

What manner of things . . . ?
he thought. And then the idea came that they would prey on the Monks as well . . . and that, maybe, they would slow them down.

HOPE WAS SCREAMING.
Not aloud, not through her mouth, because the slew of recollections was drowning any physical response. She was screaming inside.

And still the whispers made themselves known.

I slid the stiletto in too late, waited until he came, and maybe I enjoyed it? Maybe I wanted to feel him flooding into me, wanted to see the rapture in his face before his eyes sprang open at the pain, the realization of what I’d done to him? I could have done it sooner, but he was pounding into me, hard, harder, and then when he grunted I raised my hand and slid the blade into his back, pushed hard, so hard that it cut from his chest and pricked my neck . . . and his eyes opened, and I had killed him, he knew that already, could feel it, the blood bursting inside and stilling his heart, and even as I met his gaze I felt sick with what I had done. Not his fault. He hadn’t made me do anything. I had invited him in. And in his final exhalation, that last grumbling breath from his slack mouth, there hid none of the truths I believed would be there . . .

“Not me!” Hope hissed. “Not me! I didn’t do it, not on purpose—not me, it was . . . everyone before me!”
Ancestors,
she thought.
They made me do it. Those real witches who mocked me by passing down their name to my pitiful, fraudulent self.

Her horse ran on, Rafe held her around the waist, and the opening up of the foulest corners of her mind continued.

He was a bad man anyway, he deserved what those things did to him, I could never have unlocked the door and forgiven myself if he escaped . . .

I like it, I like it, I can’t help that, I can’t help that they’re alive when I eat them . . .

He’d have still paid me, still screwed me, even if he had known . . . it wasn’t my fault . . . by then nothing would have stopped him, not even the knowledge of what I had . . .

Hope cried through eyes shut tight.

Behind her, Rafe said nothing.

HE FELT THE
things in the shadows probing him, finding his mind and then scampering away in alarm. They spun away between the trees, dug themselves back down beneath the leaves and needles where they slept for years on end. They were terrified. They had found him, but as those unknown things plunged their tendrils deep into his mind, they discovered something else entirely.

The magic, new and fresh, yet with a history older than they could understand or accept.

Their shock turned to terror when it unveiled itself to them. Its own history—its failings, its shame, its eternal guilt—was laid bare, just for an instant, but long enough to force the creatures away. Perhaps to drive them mad.

Rafe did his best not to see.

TREY RODE HARD,
Alishia slumped between his arms.
Mother!
he thought, wretched and alone.
Mother! Sonda!
He pulled a handful of the final fledge crumbs from his pocket, and though they were white and stale he swallowed them quickly, whimpering as forgotten deeds were laid out for him to view afresh.

“No!” he shouted, and the gone-off fledge plucked him from his mind and sent him hovering above the pounding horse. He looked down at himself, sitting upright and holding tightly on to Alishia, and he tried to lose himself in the void of her mind.
If I get in there,
he thought,
they won’t be able to get at me. They’ll never reach the heart of me. If I can get in there . . .

But inside, touching Alishia and listening to her screams of mental anguish—and then hearing what came next—he began to wish he had stayed put.

I never lived,
Alishia whimpered,
never saw, never went out to experience! And here and now I’m dying, that thing as good as killed me, I would have known what was happening if I’d relished life rather than locked myself away, those books, gone to black and no more, only in my head. And they were
only books!
And now—

Her voice paused, humbled by the sudden, massive presence that arrived in the tattered remnants of her mind. Trey shrank back. Alishia did not even know that he was there. And then she screamed, driving him spinning helplessly through the forest, past the Monks pursuing them, losing himself as the fight went on around them.

Trey’s physical body slumped on the horse, the saddle slipping sideways again. His eyes turned up in his head. And then Alishia screamed out loud, a wretched wail that spooked their horse and made the whole forest hold its breath for an instant.

Trey’s eyes sprang open. And as the horse twisted and turned between the trees, he began to cry.

A’MEER TURNED AGAIN,
knelt down as Kosar ran past her, fired an arrow. A Monk screamed as the shaft found its mark. She moved too fast for Kosar to see, pacing from tree to tree, loosing arrows and flitting across the ground like a shadow.

“Run hard!” A’Meer said. “Catch up. I’ll try to draw them off.”

“No, I—”

“Go!” She glared at him, then leaned forward and pushed him roughly away. “Just go, Kosar. If those mind-things got to Trey and Hope as well, they’ll need guiding. I’ll catch up with you. Life Moon be with you.” She slipped away between the trees, bent over. Her last few words had not sounded convincing.

Head still reeling from the onslaught of hidden memory, Kosar did as A’Meer asked. He watched her for a few seconds more—running from tree to tree, pausing, firing an arrow, making an intentional noise as she stumbled over a protruding root and rolled through a tangle of old twigs and branches—and then he forced himself to turn away, hurrying as fast as he could after the two horses.