The Crow (45 page)

He couldn't open his eyes; he couldn't even cry.

Zelika was gone.

D
EN
R
AVEN

The river is dark and deep and wide

The shore is far away

And I must swim this heavy tide

Every night and every day

The lights are warm that beckon me

The shore is far away

And I know where I'd rather be

Every night and every day

The chains are heavy on my feet

The shore is far away

They give me dust and ash to eat

Every night and every day

One day I'll see my dead ones there

The shore is far away

And then I'll rest from work and care

Every night and every day

Den Raven slave song, Library of Turbansk

XVIII

D
ISGUISE

A red half-moon, rising through pestilential vapors. Blurred stars bleeding into a mottled sky. Earth a purple stain.

He is lying on the ground, and its sickness reaches into his body and makes him retch in his sleep. He can feel its wounds as if they are snagged in his own body The earth cries to him, a slow vibration of pain, cut, maimed, poisoned, gashed, marred.

Far below him, reaching up into his being, he feels a slow fire, a writhing of bright, liquid rock. He is possessed by a voice with no mouth, a language with no words, a raging music that twists him, distorts his bones, desiccates his lips, erases his eyes, warps his flesh to wisps of ash.

There is no healing here.

He opens his eyes. He watches the stars fade into the slowly lightening sky. His bones are scattered over the earth's brittle surface, a skein of dust with no purpose. The wind rises to a scream, boiling clouds swallow the horizons, lightnings punish his sight. The earth folds and climbs up to meet the sky: but no, it is a wave, here, leagues from the sea, a single wave, crested with white foam. It is completely silent. More than anything, it is silent, and its silence terrifies him. He watches as the impossible wave surges inexorably toward him, swallowing the earth in its path. It will devour everything, even the clouds. Mercy is a human vice; the wave knows nothing of it. Soon everything will be silent.

* * * *

Hem woke up and lay shivering, clutching his thin cloak around himself.
There is no healing here.
The dream voice resonated through his skull as the terror of the dream receded. He bit his lip, wishing he could summon Ire. He struggled with himself, cursing his weakness, but he couldn't stand it; at last he cautiously reached out and felt for Ire's presence. Faint, too far off, but still perceptible. Perversely, that brief contact made him even more lonely.

It was completely dark. He lay on the naked floor of a small room, thick with the acrid smell of urine and old food, but the stench lent no warmth; the air was freezing. His skin itched as small vermin nibbled him.

What have I done?
he thought to himself.
There's no way out of this nightmare, except death. I don't want to die.

There is no healing here.
The voice mocked him.

With a jolt, he felt the tiny vigilance outside the doorway stir, alerted perhaps by his brief mindtouch. Hem pushed his thinking down into the secret depths of himself, holding his breath; the thing sniffed around briefly, and then subsided without sending an alarm. Hem heaved a low breath of relief.

Sleep, he thought, I need to sleep. He hurt all over with tiredness, but sleep would not come. He lay on his back and stared open-eyed into the darkness.

After Zelika had been taken, Hem had lain in a stupor as the dusk deepened into night. Ire had returned to the hide sometime after the last footsteps had retreated, but he said nothing, not even nagging for something to eat. He crawled close to Hem, leaning into the center of his chest, crooning in sympathy with the boy's speechless misery.

Around midnight, Hem sat up. He opened his pack and took out some food and shared it with Ire, who ate listlessly and then found a perch and went to sleep. Hem was beyond sleep. He stared into space for hours, thinking.

It was possible, he thought coldly, that Zelika was dead. Unlikely, though: if they thought she was a spy, which she was, they would want to glean whatever information she had. And Zelika, he realized now, knew quite a lot. The full scale of the disaster of her capture began to unroll in his mind. A Hull could pick her memories like a vulture picking a carcass. They would know about Nal-Ak-Burat, about Hared, about the hopes and fears of the resistance. They'll know about
me,
Hem thought, with a clutch of panic. There was no way of keeping anything hidden if you were scried. Hem shuddered at the thought of such a violation, of what it would feel like to have a Hull inside his head, picking through his most intimate shames; but he pushed the thought aside. He was done with grieving and regret: the question was what to do now.

He should report back to Hared and tell him what had happened. But he could not leave here without Zelika. The thought formed coolly, like a decision he had already reached without being conscious of it. He had to get Zelika back. He had to find out what the Hull had discovered.

They'll know about me. If I show up, they'll know who I am.

He looked at his arms. With his dark hair and olive Pilanel skin, Hem might have conceivably passed for a Baladhian if he had not spent the past few weeks underground. His skin was sallow and pale, too pale for the Suderain. His language skills were good enough now to pass without comment, but would not survive any deep probing.

He thought of the disguising spell that Saliman had taught him during some idle hours in Turbansk. It was, Saliman had said, a speciality of Cadvan's, and it fooled Bard eyes. It was not a well-known technique, as few Bards could master it. It was time-consuming and exhausting, and it had a limited duration, so if he were to be disguised for several days it would have to be renewed regularly But perhaps, thought Hem, he could manage a limited version of it that wasn't so tiring, rather than a complete transformation of himself: a few subtle shifts in his facial features, changing his blue eyes to brown, refining his cheekbones and darkening his skin. He was thin, but he could make himself slightly thinner so he looked as if he had been half-starved for weeks. It might work.

He knew how to shield himself, so the telltale glow by which Bards recognized each other was hidden. If he were to pass as an ordinary Suderain child, he would have to shield himself so deeply that no one would suspect the smallest glimmer of Barding within him, and he would have to keep the shield up all the time. That would be very tiring, but maybe not impossible. He had learned self-discipline and wariness in his years in the orphanage.

Slowly, methodically, he thought through the details of what he might do and weighed the risks of his plan. If he were caught, the consequences didn't bear thinking about. But he knew, with a fierce certainty, that he could not abandon Zelika to the Hulls. A complex shame that he had simply watched as she was captured – that, despite everything, despite Ire's astounding attack on him, despite the impossibility that he could have helped her at all, he had somehow allowed it – swirled beneath all his thoughts. He felt that now he could begin to understand a little of Zelika's madness: she had watched her family captured and killed, and could not exorcise the shame that she had survived.

Hem knew that Hared would be furious; he would think he was being "heroic."
I am not a hero,
thought Hem,
but I can't leave my friend behind, not knowing whether she is dead or alive, without even trying to rescue her.
He flinched away from thinking about what Saliman might say.

He began to prepare himself. If the Hulls had found out down, making himself as comfortable as he could on the prickly ground, and fell into a dead sleep.

Ire was back the next day. Hared had sent back a curt message:
Don't be a fool,
and ordered that Hem come back to the base in three days' time. It was less incendiary than Hem had expected.

He waited for three days, resting as much as he could, trying to control the nausea that constantly afflicted him in this place. He practiced holding it within him, willing his body to ignore it. He could do nothing properly if he were sick all the time. After a day, he found a way to suppress it; the sickness was still there, but he could live with it.

That three-day wait was one of the hardest things he had ever done. Every moment he was tormented by the fear of what might be happening to Zelika; terrible images rose unbidden in his mind. But he knew he had to leave a gap between Zelika's appearance and his own if his plan was to have any chance of succeeding.

Again and again he went over the sequence of events that had led to Zelika's capture, wondering if there was something he could have done to prevent it. He realized now that the main reason Zelika had agreed to come with him was that she hoped to find out what had happened to her brothers and sisters; he knew that she suspected that they had been captured rather than killed. He blamed himself: he should have guessed. Now that he thought about it, it was obvious; and yet the possibility that she might see one of her family hadn't even entered his head. Of course, she had lost all self-control when she had seen her brother. Uselessly, Hem cursed that cruel chance.

Worst of all, he remembered it was his fault that she had come at all. It was Hem's cajoling that had made her agree to work with Hared. If it hadn't been for him, none of this would have happened. He allayed his misery by observing the camp with ferocious concentration, taking careful note of everything he saw. To his surprise, there were no more sorties into the forest. No one came looking for him and nothing moved on the road. He thought this was encouraging; if they had discovered something important, they would surely have sent a message to Den Raven.

He watched the little figures training all day, from the moment the pale sun emerged in the morning to last light, and noted what they were doing. He decided that his initial estimate of around three ranks of children – just under one thousand – was fairly accurate. Then he sent Ire back to Hared with his latest observations, and said he was staying where he was.

Ire returned a little flustered, with direct orders that Hem return to Hared. Hem nodded, smiling grimly, and began to prepare his disguising spell. Ire watched him in silent alarm for a time, and then asked him what he was doing.

I'm going into the camp,
he said.
You'll have to tell Hared.

You're as braintwisted as the girl,
hissed Ire, in sudden anger.
You'll never get out. Not even birds fly over that place.