No Light in August: Tales From Carcosa & the Borderland (Digital Horror Fiction Author Collection) (13 page)

Feeling
she would get nothing more from him, Mora patted his shoulder and left his side.
The elders watched her, and a glance passed between them as she left the hut.

The first
followed her. “You have been to the forest?” “I have,” Mora said without
turning.

“There
will be a sign and a price.”

Mora
stopped and faced the old woman. “What are you talking about?”

“The
whites have gone somewhere they should not have, that was bad enough.” She
raised an old, withered hand and pointed over Mora’s shoulder. “Look.”

Lights
danced in the sky above the red forest. Seen from so far, they looked the glow
of fireflies, which meant they must be big. They joined with each other, making
blobs and bigger shapes, before separating again. Mora stood transfixed, as did
several of the villagers still awake at this hour. Before long, most of them
were watching.

“What does
it mean?”

“Nothing
good,” the elder said. “Nothing good at all.” “The fifth village.”

“Do not
speak its name,” the elder said as she cupped a hand to her mouth. “They can
hear, even from so far.”

“I do not
care,” Mora lied. “We need to speak of it.”

The elder
looked around at the faces of the crowd; most were turned up to the lights
still dancing in the sky.

“Come with
me.”

Lighting
more bowls of burning herbs, the elder wafted them around the room. They were
in her own hut, because she said it was safer to talk there.

“The last
time this happened, I was a girl and your grandfather hadn’t yet been born.”
She crossed to the small fire pit and hung a kettle over it; filled with water,
it would boil slowly over the embers.

“In that
time, we still went to the fifth village. There were still people there.” “My
grandfather never spoke of it.”

“None of
us do. We’ve forgotten, or tried to,” the elder said. She stirred the water in
the kettle, dropping in a handful of mixed leaves. “They were different, the
folk who lived there. They kept to older ways than the rest of us.” She managed
to smile. “Calling it the fifth village is wrong. It was the first in the
delta.”

“Everyone’s
village is the first.”

“This one
was the true first, the original. All the others were built later. Much, much
later, in fact.”

“You said
they were different. How?”

The elder
ladled tea into two cups, taking one for herself and handing the other to Mora.

They drank
at more or less the same time, and Mora was surprised at the bitter taste of
the brew as the elder gulped hers down.

“Differences
in skin color…only small ones, mind. Clusters of pigment around their eyes and
on their arms. Looked like paint.”

“They were
born that way?”

The elder
nodded. “We always called them the Marked, but that was rude and our parents
told us not to.”

“How else
were they different?”

“They kept
other gods, not the spirits or the Mother. I never knew their names…and even if
I did, I wouldn’t speak them,” she replied, then drank more of her tea.
“Sometimes they would use words in a language I never heard before. Maybe they
were names, I don’t know.”

“What
happened?”

The elder
looked around, then wafted more of the smoke around the hut. Only when she was
satisfied with its thickness did she continue.

“A child
went missing, then another. We thought it might have been a cat or something,
but it wasn’t. The Marked brought them back to us later, but they were changed.
Not the same, even though they looked no different. I never met any children
from their village, not in all those years.”

“They
harmed the children?”

“No…not
exactly. But they could speak some words in the strange language and spoke
about things they couldn’t have known about. They knew secrets about people it
was impossible to know.”

Mora let
her tea sit and grow cold.

“After the
third child was taken, my father and some men went to the village. They weren’t
looking for a fight, but they were ready for one all the same.”

The elder
looked into the fire, the kettle still steaming gently over it and fitfully
puffing out steam.

“They were
gone a day and a night, and that was when the lights first appeared. Eight men

went with
my father and only two came back, without the child. My father said the village
was a dead place now, but he offered nothing more.”

“You never
saw the lights again?”

“Only
sometimes, but only then if you went too close to the forest, like they were
trying to guide you.”

She could
sense what the elder was going to say next.

“The white
or a child, probably a child. They will give one or the other to the village.”

Mora stood
and left the hut.

Ligmon was
in their hut and the children were with him. He looked anxious.

“Seta is
moving the white here. You and he need to watch him,” she told him. “Why?”

She looked
at the small ones gathered around him. “I bore your children, that’s all you
need to know.”

He pursed
his lips, but finally nodded. “What about you?”

Before she
could answer, Seta brought the white inside. The man looked better, but was
still drawn and pale.

“Mora,”
Seta said, laying down his burden. “They’ve taken a child, one of Jesa’s
twins.” Mora gripped the handle of her sword. “Stay here, both of you.”

She caught
the group as they were leaving the village: two men and the second elder. One
of the men held the little boy; he was crying for his mother, but they paid him
no mind.

Mora
stepped in front of them.

“It is the
only way,” the second elder began. “No.”

One of the
young men stepped forward, hand reaching for his dagger. Mora drew her sword
and had the point pressed against his neck before he could move again.

“I will
go. I went into the forest. I will go in this one’s place,” she said, nodding
to the still- crying child.

The elder
seemed to consider it, perhaps weighing the chances his young companions had
against her. He nodded and Mora dropped her blade. The man stepped back, hands
raised in front of him.

“And if it
is not enough that you go?” “Then nothing will be.”

Even in
darkness, Mora found the spot easily enough. She listened for the calls of the
birds still feeding on the dead. They did not seem afraid to go so close to the
forest, but she did.

She could
feel something in the air, and when she got close enough, the lights overhead
stopped dancing and disappeared. They were simply extinguished as if they were
never there. If the forest was still in the daytime, it was dead at night. No
sounds reached her and even the buzzing of insects was absent.

She knew
the way, more or less; everyone knew where the fifth village was, whether they
would speak of it or not.

Mora felt
like she was being watched, but saw and heard no sign of who or what might be
doing so. Her sword felt heavier than she remembered; she wanted to set it
down, if only for a moment.

Lay it
down, just for a little while. You don’t need it
.

The
thought seemed strange in her head. It was not her own, she realized, and
jerked her head from side to side as if to flick water from her face.

You
will not need it,
the thought - no,
the voice - persisted. It almost sounded like her own, but it was different —
oily somehow, and slick. She thought if she tried to reach for it, her hands
might come away black with something.

A man
stood in the gap between the trees where before there was no one. Mora had not
heard him approach. He was tall, as the white said, and though he was standing
directly ahead of her, his body was smothered in shadow.

Or made
from it.

In the
space of a blink, he was gone. Turning, she saw him now on her left.

Blink,
gone. Now on her right. Nothing could move that fast, especially not without
making a sound.

When he
did not reappear, she carried on; her sword no longer felt quite so heavy.

The
elder’s description was apt. The village was a dead place, but the buildings
looked as if they were built only yesterday. Mora passed by black openings,
which to her now watched and seemed to promise something. She could not say
where this idea came from, but it felt as though they were trying to draw her
closer.

The
village felt cast out, as if it existed in another place; the forest acting as
its border.

Looking
up, she thought the stars overhead were different, but it was hard to be sure.
All of it could be in her head, but it felt too real for that.

The tall
man appeared before she came to the center of the village. Despite light from the
moon, he was still in shadow, but the light revealed drifting snakes of
blackness coming off his body.

He
was
made
of shadow.

Mora held
up her sword, but did not move. She wanted him to come to her. “I am not
afraid.”

Yes,
you are.

Blink; he
vanished, only to appear at her side, close enough to touch. She turned and cut
into him, but the blade passed through his body, leaving a brief trail that
closed behind itself.

You are
in the place where gods hunt.

Another
blink and he was gone. When he did not reappear, Mora kept walking until she
reached the center.

The
children peeled the skin from the white man. He was no longer able to scream,
but writhed on the ground where he was staked out. Mora recognized his dress as
that of the soldiers.

There were
three of them, two boys and a girl, and they crouched over the ruined man,
treating him as her own children might treat an ant mound. They stripped
another piece from his chest and looked at it curiously, as if they’d never
seen anything like it before.

It was the
girl, looking up from the bloody work in front of her, who noticed Mora. “Who
are you?”

The other
two turned around; all of their faces were marked. It was a kind of delicate-
looking pattern, not unlike the strange symbol Mora remembered from the stone
that the white had carried in his pocket.

“Mora.”

“Are you
from our village?” the first boy asked. “Yes.”

“Have you
come to take us back?” asked the second. “I’m not sure.”

“Some
other men came a few days ago, we didn’t want to go back with them,” the girl
said. “What happened to those men?”

The girl
pointed. Mora’s attention had been taken up by the children, so she’d not seen
the

totem in
the middle of the village.

It was
difficult to tell where one body ended and another began. “The tall man?”

“We helped,”
the first boy said, picking yet another piece of skin from the soldier. “It was
interesting,” the girl added. “You all break so easily.”

“You speak
like we’re not the same.”

The girl
looked down at the white and ran the back of her hand against his face. “Who
said we were?”

Mora’s
sword felt heavy once again. Could she kill these children, if indeed they were
children any longer?

“No, you
can’t,” the second boy told her. “The tall man said you wouldn’t.” “He said
that wasn’t why you were here,” said the girl.

“What did
he say?”

“He said
you would take us back. He said it was time.” Blink. The tall man was near the
children.

“Stay
back.”
Mother, help me.

She
cannot hear you. She is uncaring; I know her moods better than you.

Blink. He
was between her and the children.

But
they need a mother of their own. I can only give them so much.

Mora swung
her sword, aiming this time for his head. It might have been pointless, but it
was all she had.

You
will see such things,
he said before
the sword struck.

Ligmon
waited at the edge of the village with the elder. Seta remained with the white,
but the elder said she felt it was safe for him to wait with her.

“Will she
come back?” he asked. “Others have.”

It wasn’t
much of an answer. Dawn light was breaking over the horizon and both covered
their eyes against the growing glare.