(Shadowmarch #1) Shadowmarch (54 page)

 

At first he thought it merely a continuation of the strange dreams that had seeped into his increasingly desperate attempts to stay awake. It was not full night-dark—he sensed it would never be fully dark because the mists were shot through with the glow of the moon, which had at last appeared in the sky above the trees, round and pale as the top of a polished skull—but it was definitely the dog-end of night. He should have woken Dyer hours ago. He had fallen asleep, a dangerous thing to do in such a strange place, leaving the camp unguarded. Or was he asleep still? It seemed so, because even the wind seemed to be quietly singing, a wordless chant, rising and falling.

Something was moving in the trees along the edge of the clearing.

His breath caught. Vansen fumbled for his sword, reached out with his other hand to wake Collum Dyer, but his companion was gone from the spot where he had lain sleeping only a short while earlier. Vansen had only a few heartbeats to absorb the terror of that discovery, then the movement at the clearing’s rim became a white-shrouded, hooded figure, as strangely translucent as a distillation of mists. It seemed to be a woman, or at least it had a woman’s shape, and for a moment he was filled with the unlikely hope that the girl Willow had gone sleep-wandering from the guards’ camp, that the rest of the company were somewhere nearby after all and Dyer had been right. But the hairs rising on the back of his neck proved it was a lie even before he saw that the figure’s feet did not touch the earth below her faintly shimmering gown.

“Mortal man.”
The voice was in his head, behind his eyes, not in his ears. He could not say whether it was old or young or even male or female.
“You do not belong here.”
He tried to speak but couldn’t. He could see little more of her face than pallid light and faint shadows, as though it were hidden behind many veils of glimmering fabric. All that was truly visible were her eyes, huge and black and not at all human.
“The old laws are ended,”
the specter told him. The world seemed to have collapsed into a single dark tunnel with the luminous, vague face at the other end.
“There are no riddles left to solve. There are no tasks by which favors can be won. All is moving toward an ending. The shadow-voices that once cried against it have gone silent in the House of the People.”

The figure moved nearer. Vansen could feel his heart thundering in his breast, beating so hard that it seemed it must shake him to pieces, but yet he could not by choice move a single muscle. A gauzy hand reached out, touched his hair, almost seemed to pass through him, cool and yet prickly along his cheek like sparks from a campfire settling on damp skin.

“I knew one like you once.”
Some tone was in the voice that he almost recognized, but in the end the emotion was too strange to grasp.
“Long he stayed with me until his own sun had worn away. In the end he could not remain.”
As the face loomed closer it seemed charged with moonlight. Vansen wanted to close his eyes but could not. For a brief instant he thought he could see her clearly, although what or who he was seeing he couldn’t entirely understand—a beauty like the edge of a knife, black eyes that were somehow full of light like the night sky full of stars, an infinitely sad smile—yet during that moment it also felt as though a chilly hand had tightened on his heart, squeezing it into an awkward shape from which it would never completely recover. He was gripped as though by death itself . . . but death was fair, so very fair. Ferras Vansen’s soul leaped toward the dark eyes, toward the stars of her gaze, like a salmon climbing a mountain rill, not caring whether death was at the end of it.

“Do not look for the sun, mortal.”
He thought there was something like pity in the words and he was dashed. He didn’t want pity—he wanted to be loved. He wanted only to die being loved by this creature of vapor and moonlight.
“The sun will not come to you here. Neither can the shadows be trusted to tell you anything but lies. Look instead to the moss on the trees. The roots of the trees are in the earth, and they know where the sun is, always, even in this land where his brother is the only lord.”

And then she was gone and the clearing was empty except for the quiet hiss of wind in the leaves. Vansen sat up gasping, heart still stuttering. Had it been a dream? If so, part of it had proved true, anyway—there was no sign of Dyer. Vansen looked around, dazed at first, but with increasing fear. The fire was all but out, little glowing worms of red writhing in the blackness inside the stone circle.

Something crackled behind him and he leaped up, fumbling at the hilt of his sword. A figure staggered into the clearing.

“Dyer!” Vansen lowered his blade.

Collum Dyer shook his head. “Gone.” The soldier’s voice was mournful. “I could not catch up to . . .” Now he seemed to see Vansen truly for the first time and his face twisted into a mask of secrecy. For an instant Ferras Vansen thought he could read the other man’s clear thoughts, see him decide not to share his own vision.

“Are you well?” Vansen demanded. “Where were you?”

Dyer made his way slowly back to the fire. He would not meet his captain’s eye. “Well enough. Had . . . a dream, I suppose. Woke up wandering.” He eased himself down and covered himself with his cloak and wouldn’t talk anymore.

Vansen lay down, too. One of them should keep watch, he knew, but he felt as though he had been touched by something wild and strong, and was somehow certain that touch would keep other things of this place at bay . . . for this night anyway.

He was as tired as if he had run for miles. He fell asleep quickly beneath the trees and the strange stars.

 

Ferras Vansen woke to the same dim gray light—a little more milky, perhaps, but nothing like morning. The wind was still talking wordlessly. Collum Dyer had slept like a dead man, but he awakened like a sick child, full of moans and sullen looks.

The words of the midnight visitant, whether ghost or dream, were still in Vansen’s head. He allowed Dyer time only to empty his bladder, waiting impatiently in the saddle while the soldier did up the strings of his breeches.

“Can’t we even light a fire?” Dyer asked. “Just to warm my hands. It’s so bloody cold.”

“No. By time we make one, we will be tired again, and then we will sleep. We will never get away. We will stay here while this forest swirls around us like an ocean and drowns us.” He did not know exactly what he meant, but he felt it unquestionably to be true. “We must ride while we can, before the place sucks away all our resolve.”

Dyer looked at him strangely. “You sound as though you know a great deal about this country.”

“As much as I need to.” He didn’t like the accusing tone in the man’s voice, but didn’t want to be pulled into an argument. “Enough to know I do not wish to end up like that girl-child Willow, wandering mad in the woods.”

“And how will we find our way out again? We searched for hours. We’re lost.”

“I was raised on the edge of these woods, or at least something like them.” He suddenly wondered whether they were even in the world he knew, or wandering in a place more distant than the land of the gods. It was a harrowing thought. What had the phantom said?
“ . . . Even in this land where his brother is the only lord.”
Whose brother? The sun’s? But the moon was a goddess, surely—white-breasted Mesiya, great Perin’s sister . . .

It was too much to think about. Vansen forced himself back to what was before them now, the hope of escape. It was hard to think, though—the voice of the wind was ever-present and insinuating, urging sleep and surrender. “The moss will grow thickest on the southern side of the trees,” he said. “If we continue south long enough, surely we will find our way back into wholesome lands again.”

“Leaving this place behind,” Dyer said quietly, thoughtfully. It was strange, but to Vansen he sounded almost unwilling, a notion that sent a pulse of fear chasing up the guard captain’s backbone.

The morning, or at least the stretch of hours after waking, slid by quickly. There was moss everywhere, on almost every tree, deep woolly green patches. If it grew more thickly on one side than another, it was a minute difference; after a while, Vansen began to doubt his own ability to distinguish. Still, he had no other plan and he was growing increasingly frightened. They had lost the road in a thicket of black-leaved trees too thick to pass and they had not found it again. He had not seen a single thing that looked familiar. It was hard not to feel that the forest was continuing to grow around him, that its borders were stretching outward faster than he and Dyer could ride, and that not only wouldn’t they find their way out again, the shadow-forest would soon cover everything he had ever known, like wine from an upended jug spreading across a tabletop.

Dyer’s mood also worryed him. The bearded guardsman had grown increasingly more distant, even as their horses strode shoulder to shoulder; he hardly spoke to his captain, but talked much to himself and sang snatches of old songs that Vansen felt he should recognize but didn’t. Also, the man kept looking at him oddly, as though Dyer were harboring doubts of his own—as if he no longer quite recognized someone who had been his daily companion for years.

There is something in the air here,
Vansen thought desperately.
Something in the shadows of these trees. This place is eating us.
It was a terrible idea, but once it lodged in his mind, he could not shift it. He had a dreamlike vision of himself and Dyer lying beside the lost road, dead and decaying like the woman he had once found in her cottage, yet it was not insects that would devour them but the forest itself—tendrils of green growing into their mouths and noses and ears, seeds sprouting out damp, dark vegetation from their bellies and skulls, filling the vaults of their rib cages.

Maybe it is a true vision,
he thought suddenly.
Perhaps we are already dead, or nearly so. Perhaps our bodies are already disappearing under the moss and we only dream we are riding on through this dark land beneath the endless, gods-cursed trees . . .

“I feel the fires,” Dyer said abruptly.

“What fires?” The horses had stopped; they stood weirdly still and silent. A forested valley leaned close above the two guardsmen on either side, as though they were in the mouth of some huge thing that in a moment would close its jaws and shut them away from the light forever.

“The forge fires,” the bearded guardsman replied in a distant voice. “The ones that burn under Silent Hill. They make weapons of war, Bright Fingers, Chant-Arrows, Wasps, Cruel Stones. The People are awake. They are awake.”

As he struggled to make sense of Dyer’s bizarre statement, Vansen felt a sharp but noiseless wind come hurrying down the canyon. The mists swirled upward, rising and parting, and for a brief instant he thought he could see an entire city at the top of the valley, a city that was also part of the forest, a mass of dark trees and darker walls, the two almost indistinguishable, with lights burning in a thousand windows. His horse reared and turned away from the vision, dashing back down the path they had followed. He heard Dyer’s horse’s hoofbeats close behind him, and another sound, too.

His companion was singing quietly but exuberantly in a language Vansen had never heard.

 

Dyer was still behind him, but silent now: he wouldn’t answer any of his captain’s questions, and Vansen had given up asking, simply grateful not to be alone. The twilight had grown thicker. The guard captain could no longer distinguish any difference in the thickness of the moss on the trees—could barely tell the trees from the darkness. The voices in the wind had crawled deep inside his head now, cajoling, whispering, weaving fragments of melody through his thoughts that tangled his ideas just as the thickening brambles tugged at their horses’ hooves, making them walk slower and slower.

“They are coming,” Dyer abruptly announced in the voice of a frightened dreamer. “They are marching.”

Ferras Vansen did not need to ask him what he meant: he could feel it, too, the tightening of the air around them, the deepening of the twilight gloom. He could hear the triumph in the wordless wind-voices, although he still couldn’t hear the voices themselves except where they echoed deep in the cavern of his skull.

His horse abruptly reared, whinnying. Caught by surprise, Vansen tumbled out of the saddle and crashed to the ground. The horse vanished into the forest, kicking and bounding through the undergrowth, grunting in terror. For a moment Vansen was too stunned to rise, but a hand clutched him and dragged him to his feet. It was Collum Dyer, his horse gone now, too. The guardsman’s face was alight with something that might have been joy, but also looked a little like the terror that Vansen himself was feeling, a pall of dread that made him want to throw himself back down on the ground and bury his head in the spongy grass.

“Now,” Dyer said.
“Now.”

And suddenly Ferras Vansen could see the road again, the road they had sought for hours without success. It was only a short distance away, winding through the trees—but he barely noticed it. The road was full of rolling mist, and in that mist he could see shapes. Some of the figures, unless the mist distorted them, were treetop-tall, and others impossibly wide, squat, and powerful. There were shadow-shapes that corresponded to no sane reality, and things less frightening but still astonishing, like human riders dimly seen but achingly beautiful, sitting high and straight on horses that stamped and blew and made the air steam. Many of the riders bore lances that glittered like ice. Pennants of silver and marshy green-gold waved at their tips.

An army was passing, hundreds and perhaps thousands of shapes riding, walking—some even flying, or so it seemed: teeming shadows fluttered and soared above the great host, catching the moonglow on their wings like a handful of fish scales flung glittering into the air. But although Vansen could feel the tread of all those hooves and feet and paws and claws in his very bones, the host made no sound as it marched. Only the voices on the wind rose in acclaim as the great troop passed.