Racing the Dark (31 page)

Despite herself, Lana's heart started pounding.

"Take care," it said softly. "I could tire of this game."

"I still have the flute," she said, gripping it so tightly her palm started to sweat.

The death drifted downwards, back toward the other branch. "That's true," it said.

Lana stared at it for another moment and then began to eat the fruit.

She didn't quite know why, but over the next few days she began collecting the seeds from all the fruit she ate. It weighed down her bag considerably, and she felt the death's stare every time she did so, but she felt just a little safer with them there. The seed she'd thrown at it was the only thing she had ever known to disturb the death's equanimity.

For lack of any other destination, she had been picking her way across the barely recognizable path to the wind temple. She occasionally came across the signs of another recent human presencethe remains of a campfire, or a brief warning carved in bark of a tree about a particular fruit-but she walked alone. She bound the death with silly little geas-nursery rhymes, really-that it took its time breaking, mocking her with every word. She filled the forest with her melancholy tunes that sometimes even edged into happiness. Every so often she talked to the death, just so the sound of her own voice could cover the often vicious natural cacophony in the forest. Occasionally, it responded. When she thought about it, it frightened her how comfortable she felt-alone this way with the death.

She had stopped to pick some fruit for lunch when the death suddenly appeared before her, the corners of its mask-mouth turned up.

"A ship," it said. "A dead thing that carries the living is a ship."

Lana felt the geas dissolve around her. She groped frantically for the flute even as she stumbled away from the death. It wasn't in her pocket. She tripped on an upraised root and landed on her butt in the loamy earth. The death's empty eye sockets seemed to be glowing from some inner depth, and for a brief moment Lana thought she saw within them the image of a ship slowly sinking into a pool of flames. She couldn't breathe.

"You've run out," it said. "You lost the game."

Where the hell was the flute? Then she remembered that she had dropped it with her bag on the other side of the path before she went to climb the fruit tree. How could she have been so careless? Lana cursed herself silently and scrambled away, crawling on her back like a crab toward her pack. The death watched her progress silently for a moment and then flew forward.

It entered her.

She felt immovably cold, like fine old ash iced inside one of the glaciers that spread across the inner islands. Her very thoughts seemed crystallized, jagged, as though they had frozen in place. And the spot they had frozen allowed her only three words. The most important words.

Find the flute.

With whatever small part of her mind she had left, she fought the death. Though she couldn't see or hear or smell anything, she could touch, and so she inched her hands along the dirt, fighting to remember where her pack must be and where the flute must be resting on it.

She felt her breath grow so shallow in her lungs she knew she was barely breathing, but she forced herself to move. She thought of her mother.

"You can't save her," the death said, its androgynous voice crackling like fire in her head. "You can't save yourself. Give up."

She must be within reaching distance of the pack now. She bit her lip hard, taking reassurance from the pain and the metallic taste of blood. So long as she was alive, there was hope. But the cold was seeping into her bones and she knew that if she didn't move now she wouldn't be able to move at all. With a desperate lunge and a prayer to whoever saw fit to listen, she groped for her pack. She felt the worn canvas, but no flute. Had it rolled off? Panic set her lungs on fire, but she reached further.

Instead of meeting wet, vine-covered soil, her hand found the familiar shaft of whittled bone. She brought it to her lips and played a single note-one that she couldn't even hear-with as much force as she could muster. She felt the death struggle to stay inside her body before she forced it out with the terrified strength of her sound.

The first sense that returned to her was her hearing, and she had never thought such a high-pitched, scratchy sound could be so beautiful. A few monkeys in the tree above her were screeching down, as though with indignation, and she relished in that sound as well. She was alive.

When her vision cleared, she saw the death a few yards away from her, sitting cross-legged. The ground beneath its translucent body was a veritable battleground of maimed and malformed insects. Lana tried not to look. Instead she forced her shaky fingers into a song while she tried to think of yet another way to bind the death.

She had been too confident before, almost comfortable with its silent, terse companionship. Over the past few weeks she had, improbably, lost her fear of death. It had returned with a vengeance in the past few minutes, however. She had to remember that she needed to stay alive-not for herself, but for her mother. Instead of jokingly binding it with children's riddles, she needed to think of something that would keep her safer longer. She thought about it for a long time, periodically losing her train of thought in the cadences of the music and then dragging it back again. Nearly half an hour later, the corner of her eye caught on her worn canvas bag. Some of its contents had spilled when she had groped at it before, including the more than a dozen seeds that she had spent the past few days collecting.

Her fingers nearly skipped a note.

The seeds. There had to be a way to use them to bind the death. In the first few weeks of the death's chase, the thought of making up her own geas had terrified her, but soon she had realized that it would be her only means of survival. She thought about the phrasing for a few more minutes and then let the melody she was playing peter out, its final soft note ringing in her ears. This would have to work.

"Life is no more anathema to death than light is anathema to dark. They both require each other to exist. Yet, death only holds the key. It doesn't know-"

Lana broke off abruptly at the sudden shift in the death's attitude. It had gone from merely watchful to anticipatory. The grubs beneath its translucent body grew still and the banked light in its eyeholes made it look almost ... wary. She swallowed nervously and continued.

"It doesn't understand the essence of life-the only lives it can take are those that have already started living. The seed is death's paradox: death cannot take it-a mere seed can't go past the gatebut within the seed is the ultimate potential for living. A seed is the life that denies death."

The death settled back into its sitting position. Its wooden mouth began angling up into its customary mocking expression. Could it be relieved? "What do you want?" it asked.

"A day for each seed," Lana said. "A day for each life you can't yet touch."

After a moment, it nodded. "That's fifteen days."

The bindings fell into place and pulled taut. After a moment to catch her breath, Lana stood up and walked on shaky legs back to the tree. Incredibly brave or dangerously hungry, whichever she was, she realized it made no difference. She picked a fruit and tore into its sweet flesh with her teeth.

On the twelfth day, she reached the wind shrine.

It was an ancient, dilapidated structure built in an even older tree at the top of a long-dead volcano. She caught a fish that morning, after spending nearly half an hour crouched as still as she could manage in the shallow, muddy banks of the river. She roasted the strange blue and orange striped creature over the fire, ate as much as she could get down, and then packed the rest of it away in her bag for later. She spent the rest of the day climbing to the base of the tree. Most of the path had been washed away, forcing her to cling and scramble from tree to vine just to haul herself up the side. The midday rains began while she was halfway up, and for several moments she was terrified that it would wash her right back down the hill with the mud. The warm, earthy smell of the steam rising from the mud and the innumerable calls of frogs, birds, insects, and monkeys piercing through the rain patter made her feel inexplicably nervous, even though these were the normal sounds of the forest. The wind temple had been an arbitrary destination-a place to go that she knew was far from human contact. But what would she find when she got there? The path had lost all signs of recent human habitation a few days ago, but was it possible a caretaker still lived up in that ancient tree? After all that had happened to her, she didn't like the idea of walking into the unknown. Her life was frightening enough already without losing the little bit of control over it she still had left.

Still, what was she supposed to do? Turn around?

She reached the base of the enormous tree a few hours later, just when the rains began to stop. She took the water skin out of her bag and drained half of it in nearly three gulps. She panted as she put it down and wiped her mouth. She wanted to drink the whole thing, but that wouldn't be smart this far away from the river. She had no guaranteed freshwater source up here.

"Are you going to visit the spirit?" The death was floating a few feet above her. It was the first time it had spoken to her in days.

Lana looked at it as she caught her breath. "No reason not to," she said finally. "Although I doubt that it will deign to reveal itself to me."

It didn't respond and Lana stood up. She walked around the base slowly, noting in amazement that it was more than fourteen feet in diameter. She had never seen a tree so big in her life. On the opposite end from the trail, Lana saw that a series of steps so steep as to form a virtual ladder spiraled up the tree and ended right at the rickety wooden platform of the temple. Lana sincerely hoped that someone had been here sometime in the past century. After the wind spirit had broken free five hundred years ago and wreaked its bloody revenge, most of the wind temples had been burned and the ashes pounded into the earth. This one's inhospitable location was probably the only thing that had saved it from the same fate. Carved in the bark just beside the first step was a symbol that Lana knew was supposed to represent a jagged knife edge, but she had always thought it looked more like a sideways lightning bolt.

She stared up the spiraling staircase again and felt her trepidation intensify. She had never been afraid of heights, but she knew that if she climbed this tree, falling would be a real possibility. Still, curiosity gripped her when she looked at the half-hidden temple. She wanted to find out what was there-to do something, finally, besides just run. Before she could rethink her decision, Lana approached the first step and began, gingerly, to climb to the top.

The wood was strong, but the steps had been carved unevenly and she lost her balance a few times before hauling herself over the platform. Even back when the wind spirit had first been bound, how could anyone have dared make the trip here? Perhaps people had been more devoted back then, more faithful. Although she hadn't seen it from the ground, the platform opened directly into the shrine itself. There were no walls to speak of-it was entirely open to the elements. The floorboards, she noticed as she gingerly walked inside, were still drying from the rain. Any item that might have indicated this place was something more than an empty shell of a tree house had been nailed down. With good reason, she thought, considering the strong wind that blew the smells of the forest below to her nostrils. The death floated outside the temple, beside the staircase that had led her here. Looking around, she saw no overt signs of habitation aside from an unnatural cleanness to the place. The nervousness that had plagued her during her trip up the tree began to fall away. This shrine felt oddly peaceful. She walked forward until she was nearly at the unguarded edge of the structure. At her feet she saw a broken blade nailed into the wood and she wondered how it remained unrusted after centuries of pelting rains.

An odd clicking noise behind her made the hairs rise on the back of her neck. She whirled around, only to come face to face with a massive bird-eating spider, nearly the size of her head. Though she knew it was impossible, something in the way it clicked its mandibles together made her feel as though it was grinning. Lana screamed and stepped backwards, only to scream again when she realized that she was toppling over the edge. She managed to grab at the planks of wood before she went down.

She hung there with sweaty fingers for several moments, mind bubbling with fear while she tried to figure out what to do. The boards themselves began to vibrate with the impact of someone moving slowly across them. Lana thought she heard a woman's voice muttering something. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw the death waiting below her. She cursed silently and hoped whatever was walking toward her was benign.

"Help!" she screamed. "I'm going to fall!"

The pace of the steps didn't increase. "Hold on, hold on," she heard a voice say. It sounded rough and quavering, like that of an old woman. Lana almost forgot her fear in disbelief. How could she have not noticed another person in this small temple?

"... get so few visitors, these days, I always forget to put out the security rope," the woman was muttering. Lana's fingers were beginning to weaken and she prayed silently that the woman would finish her slow trek across the temple floor. A few moments later, Lana saw a rope end fall to her right side and she grabbed it gratefully. She hauled herself up over the edge of the temple and lay on the still-damp floorboards, panting and shaking.

"My, my," said an old woman, leaning over her on a gnarled branch of a cane. "You should have called for help sooner. It wouldn't do to have all my visitors falling out of the tree, now would it?" She let out a highly inappropriate chuckle.

Lana forced herself to sit up and look at the woman. She was even older than Lana had suspected-her craggy face and wispy white hair made her look at least ninety. How could such an old woman survive in this kind of place?