Shadow (39 page)

Southward he went just a little slower than before, trails of heat like whip lashes on the world behind him. Though his pain gradually subsided his confusion did not. Why had the man done such things to him?

The mechanics of the situation he grasped; he'd shadowed the man but had not been able to shadow the sword and the armour. The stranger's
wanting
to attack him, that was incomprehensible. He'd toyed with elementals, with Lesser Spirits and other dangerous things. Even the dragon had fled from him! Here a man, a normal soft-skinned man, had wanted to hurt him and had done so – worse than anything else ever had.

But ah, that glorious creature up on the castle balcony, embracing the sky. Was Vous one of the things with which to fill this emptiness? None of these people filled him! Not Eric, not the charm (which called him again, promising sweet balm for his pain). They had all left him unchanged.

What of Siel? He wanted to see her long hair in its twin braids, to watch how the braids swung, to hear her voice, whether it laughed or whether it quavered in fear. Either would sound sweet after this bitter, bitter pain. Where was she? He combed a vast distance in search of her, though he didn't yet know what he'd do if he found her.

INTO DANGER

1

The village Gorb had once called home was deserted, its stores plundered. There was no sign of where the locals had gone, nor why. Their tracks led off in all directions. Most of the cupboards were bare. They scavenged what little had been left.

The half-giant emerged from Bald's old workroom with a few of the Engineer's odds and ends, where Siel waited with Far Gaze in his wolf form. The Engineer Bald crouched in the dirt, picking things out to eat them. ‘I told him to stop that,' said Siel. ‘I don't think he trusts me.'

Gorb plucked Bald up and put him under one arm and they set out following the wolf, who chose their path by scent. He headed east, for the city of Tanton.

The night's quiet was tense and heavy, as if the gloom to either side of the road were filled with watchful eyes. Now and then Gorb held aloft a piece of lightstone Stranger had enchanted for him, which glowed brighter when he squeezed it. Its beams swept aside a veil of darkness to show roadside fields that had never been settled on, never farmed. Like every place a boot could fall on, blood had been shed here in war. Siel began to wonder if war was man's natural destiny, not an aberration at all but the sole purpose of life, for the entertainment of Valour or some other god.
Peace
was the aberration, she felt, nourishing man with its scant scraps throughout history so that he'd fight on, when the call came again.

The tollways, guard houses, roadside stores and booths they came across all sat empty. Even the message towers were abandoned. Rumour of war had spread and people here had seen so little of it that the thought scared them away. Indeed Far Gaze told Gorb before they left that he'd smelled it coming. A vast army of castle soldiers marched south, men who did not follow Valour's ideals of war. Occasional war-mage shrieks could be heard from the clouds, though the creatures could not yet be seen. There was no knowing if it was part of the large flock the dragon had decimated and scattered, or if they were new ones and part of the invading force.

Far Gaze trotted ahead of the others, his ghostly white coat gleaming. He sniffed the breeze and whined in fear. Bald, tucked under Gorb's arm, muttered nonsense. Siel now found the quiet stifling. ‘I wonder where they all went,' she said, thinking of the villagers and of the peaceful life she'd so recently envied. It was a melancholy relief to know it had never been on offer after all.

They could see an occasional redness to the southern sky, but the veil covering the barrier had not lifted. ‘Old Nightmare's still guarding the gate,' said Gorb. ‘Just saw him going west. He was moving fast. Keeping the stoneflesh from going over. That Pendulum stuff must be true. Don't understand it, myself.'

‘Each thing has in its
make-up
an ascribed
value,
you ninny!' snarled Bald, spittle flying. ‘Value, weight. Weight, mass. Mass, power value. Anything! A man's worth a million bugs!'

‘Bald—'

‘Now you will
listen!
I divulge
secrets!
Both halves being of
even
power value in total, a vacuum effect
occurs
if a power value's
traded
—'

‘Yeah well, you're smarter than me I guess,' said Gorb, shifting the spluttering Engineer to his other arm. ‘Shoosh now, that's why the wolf's growling. He's telling you to shut it.'

Far Gaze had halted, head turned to the south. His low growl grew fierce.

Siel slipped her bow from her shoulder and peered into the incline on the road's right-hand side. She could see and hear nothing in the darkness. ‘What is it?' she asked the wolf. ‘You growl to scare something off, but you may just draw something toward us! Hush now.'

Far Gaze whined, looking from her to the road ahead, undecided.

‘If you scent a path less dangerous, take it,' she said, patting the wolf's side, not knowing how much of her talk Far Gaze could understand. ‘We'll follow. If there's danger in all directions, that's our fate and we'll meet it like warriors.'

The wolf heaved a sigh but trotted forward at a quicker pace, almost too quick for them to keep up.

‘What's worried him?' said Gorb.

‘Choose from a dozen threats or more,' she said. ‘My bow has never felt so useless.'

‘If it's that dragon again, I can't do much about a dragon. Even a little one,' said Gorb.

If it's that dragon, it's probably not very interested in any of you, Siel thought with a shudder.

‘What's that sound, anyway?' said Gorb. ‘Maybe that's what got the wolf stirred up.'

‘I can't hear anything but our footsteps. Can you describe it?'

‘Sounds the way wood sounds when you bend it. Creaks and cracks and groans of wood, that's what it sounds like.'

‘I don't hear it.'

‘The wolf does. And he doesn't like it.'

2

Gorb had put away the piece of enchanted lightstone since they did not want its light being seen from afar by other things. The road was true enough, and just enough light leaked through the gloom to see their way when it bent and wound. Siel's legs began to tire from the pace they'd kept over the past hour. She still heard nothing but the scuffle and tap of their boots on the road, and Bald's occasional muttering. The wolf whimpered constantly, bounding ahead and turning back to glare at them for their slow pace.

The plains to either side were flat as a dinner plate. Now and then campfires could be seen across the flats, caravans pouring from outcast country and making their way to High Cliffs or Tanton, the last two cities to resist their certain fall. The sight of caravans was heartening somehow, camped in rings for safety from bandits. The wind carried smells of smoke. How tempting to head to one of those campfires and beg a night's sleep under their watch.

‘That fire's too big,' Gorb muttered just as Far Gaze halted ahead of them again and growled. ‘Look! Whole wagons are burning.'

Shouting voices faintly reached them across the plain. It was as though a battle were underway somewhere in the gloom. The hairs on Far Gaze's back stood on end. He crouched low, his growl fierce.

Siel peered into the darkness. At the very furthest reach of her vision it looked like a wagon was indeed burning. She notched an arrow, wondering who she would be shooting at. Had the castle army reached this country already? Or were Blain's men attacking?

Gorb took the piece of lightstone from his pack with a grunt as though he'd forgotten he possessed it. He squeezed it. It spat out its glow, pushing darkness away from the road around them.

They all recoiled. Standing horribly close to the road was what Siel would have taken for an instant to be a burned tree, if she had not seen Tormentors before. Its obsidian skin glistened in the lightstone's light; its rock-lump eyes stared down from double her height. Its mane, a thick fan of spiked needles, rattled.

Far Gaze ran behind it, growled and yelped as though to draw the thing's attention to himself. With exaggerated sweeping movement its head swung around to peer at him, the stiff limbs of its body creaking. Siel's arrow struck its chest and bounced off broken – she might as well have fired at a wall of stone. Forgetting the wolf, it turned to her. She froze in its gaze, paralysed with horror.

It seemed later, when looking back on this memory, that she stood there staring into its eyes for a moment that stretched out forever. While the thing regarded her, she searched its face, looking for something to understand. A hungry animal that wished to eat her, she'd have understood; a bandit wanting to rape her, a war mage doing its mindless duty for its lords, an enemy soldier raising his weapon:
those
she'd have understood. But not this creature. Something burned in its heart, but whatever it was was utterly foreign.

It seemed in that long-drawn stretch of time, as she tried to comprehend this alien horror, that
all
her understanding broke down, that nothing at all was real, she herself least of all. She was nothing, abstract. That it would now draw her to itself and with its spikes and blades unmake her body, for no reason she had a hope of discerning, all dwindled to irrelevance.

A sound –
thwock!
– and the top part of the Tormentor's face flew away. Gorb had one of Bald's guns out, planted on his knee. He quickly stuffed another sharpened stone down the barrel.

The Tormentor's body turned toward him, arms flailing in the gestures of some surreal elegant dance. Siel watched it with her mouth hung open, still transfixed, until the half-giant scooped her up in his arm.

The wolf whined and ran. Gorb followed with Siel and Bald under his arms, his big strides keeping pace with the wolf, though his breathing was laboured. Siel watched the fields by the road, the whole world jolting heavily with Gorb's steps. Set against the odd distant fire dark shapes were silhouetted, though some were surely tricks of her eyes. She still saw that thing's face, staring, and wished desperately to know its mind. It had not hated her, whether it meant to kill her or not. She was sure of that much.

They ran on. As the first light of day bled through the gloom Gorb staggered, clearly exhausted. Still he kept pace with Far Gaze, who now veered off the road, past a farmstead where a family stood on their porch armed with crossbows and burning brands. They watched two Tormentors stalk across their land some way distant, hardly noticing the new trespassers.

Far Gaze yelped and tore across the sloping fields, faster than Siel had yet seen him run. Gorb stopped, bent double, huffing air. She climbed out of his grip. Over a rise in the ground came eight men on horseback, with almost as many vacant horses in tow. They wore Tanton's deep scarlet lashed with gold; High Cliff's colour, gold, taken after that city was conquered long ago, an insult never forgotten. She knew the figure leading them, one arm in a sling, was Tauk the Strong.

For the sight of his injury her heart rose with hope: here was a leader himself willing to fight and risk his precious flesh, to brave a journey such as this. Some of the Mayor's entourage saw them and gestured in signal language:
Approach if you are peaceful, flee in safety if you are not, we seek no needless fight with you and shall not pursue.
Siel gestured back:
We are friends; do not mind the wolf.

The men watched with interest as the huge white wolf approached them, whining only to point out it was not growling. A good distance from their alarmed horses Far Gaze lay down and began to shift form, writhing, twitching, convulsing, shedding hair, his bones breaking. By the time Siel and Gorb slowly crossed the rise and joined him, he was almost finished.

‘Now you keep quiet, Bald,' Gorb instructed. Bald obliged by falling asleep curled up in the grass.

‘This is a sight,' said Tauk, his voice cheerful, though his entourage looked tired and bore wounds. ‘A half-giant, a warrioress, an Engineer, and a very ill horse-sized wolf.'

‘This is Far Gaze, Mayor. Magician of the Mayors' Command,' said Siel.

‘Ah, I know the name. I have met him. No one told me he was a shape-shifter,' said Tauk. ‘I'm glad you've lived through the night. For us, it was a near thing. We were singing songs one moment, surrounded by horrors the next. Hail, Siel.'

She blinked in surprise – she'd just once met the Mayor, in a crowded briefing from the Mayors' Command on the night she'd asked to join them. She'd not known he'd noticed her then, let alone memorised her name and face. She bowed low.

Far Gaze had finished shifting and now stood, his body naked and starved. He swayed on his feet, bowed low before the Mayor – though Siel saw the sneer on his face – then noisily threw up.

Said the Mayor, ‘Far Gaze, it's good of you to have found me. You must know of the demon beasts that have come in the night. Is this what it appears: a planned invasion from beyond World's End? Or are they sent by more familiar enemies?'

Far Gaze pondered the question at length, then laughed long and loud. The men to either side of the Mayor looked askance at each other. Tauk himself bristled. ‘I have lost fine men tonight, personal friends among them. I find no humour. Where is the Pilgrim?'

Siel, mortified by Far Gaze's continuing laughter, quickly said, ‘The Pilgrim has left us, Mayor. Flown away on a drake, with Aziel, Vous's daughter.'

The Mayor's face went ashen. ‘Vous's
daughter
was in your possession? I see there is much to tell me. Where have they gone, and why?'

‘They did not linger to tell us,' she said.

‘Then they took our hope with them,' said a rider to Tauk's left. ‘And we rode through this foul night for naught.'