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Premee Mohamed is an Indo-Caribbean scientist and speculative fiction author based in Edmonton, Alberta. She is the author of the “Beneath the Rising” series of novels, which have been finalists for the Crawford Award, British Fantasy Award, Locus Award, and Aurora Award. Her three novellas have been finalists for the Nebula Award, Aurora Award, British Fantasy Award, Georges Bugnet Award for Fiction, and Robert Kroetsch City of Edmonton Book Prize. In 2022 she won the Nebula Award and World Fantasy Award for her novella And What Can We Offer You Tonight and the Aurora Award for her novella The Annual Migration of Clouds. She has been a finalist for the Hugo, Ignyte, British Fantasy, and Crawford awards.
Her short fiction has appeared in print and audio venues including Analog, Augur, Nightmare Magazine, Slate, Fireside Fiction, and PodCastle. In 2017 she was nominated for the Pushcart Prize for her story 'Willing' (Third Flatiron Press). Her short story “Never Was Born His Equal” was published in the anthology The Other Side of Never in May 2023, edited by myself and my husband, Paul Kane.
All of which is to say, Premee Mohamed is an extremely talented—not to mention prolific—writer, and well-versed in the novella form. With The Rider, The Ride, The Rich Man’s Wife, Premee blends Fairy Tale and Western in a post-apocalyptic setting to great effect. Every seven years, the hunt comes to Wrathford, and the unlucky chosen one must evade the pursuit by The Rider and his Wife until nightfall to survive. No one can remember anyone surviving the Hunt. Or almost no one. When Lucas’ brother Kit is chosen, he can’t let his brother die alone. He’s all Lucas has left. The two brothers set out to survive, and thus the scene is set for an epic chase through an apocalyptic landscape, with the brothers meeting peril after peril and discovering the truth behind the Hunt along the way.
Enjoy.
—Marie O’Regan
Derbyshire, 2024
When they come for your head you must run for your life
The rider, the ride, the rich man’s wife
—Skipping song, origin unknown
––––––––
The new well was salt.
“Just our luck,” said someone, but it wasn’t luck. It was the odds of geological formations round here, that was all. Always about fifty-fifty, salt or sweet. I could tell people didn’t believe it, crowding around Rowse to study the steel bowl full of water—glass-clear, not a single speck of anything, no chalk or dirt or slime or grit, beautiful to see.
The old man wasn’t having it. “Looks don’t tell you nothing.” He thrust it out in defiance, and someone took it and drank, and spat of course, cursing. Then I wanted to try it too, see how bad it was, because Rowse was right and yet folks always find it difficult to feel something in their gut, to know instinctively something is true, and to hear that it’s false—the heart rebels against it. The water looked fine to me.
“Lucas, don’t. It’ll make you sick.” Kit, my twin brother, the voice like mine, the thoughts even like mine in my head. He touched my elbow, tentative, not quite pulling me back, hoping just the touch would serve to stop me.
“I have to know,” I whispered to him. “Mr. Rowse? May I?”
“Damnfool kid,” he said, but handed it over anyway. And it wasn’t just regular salt but something awful, bitter, drying out my mouth and biting into it not like a sip of liniment but poison, a smell and taste like the lye-water you used on white clothes. I spat too, gagged, felt the world reel around me. Rowse tossed the rest of the water onto the rucked-up dirt around the hole.
“Let no man say I lie,” he said, and that got a few laughs.
When I was done coughing they set me and Kit on the treadmill to winch up the two chaps who had been down there digging, because we were the smallest and lightest of the men—and proud to be called men, though we were just seventeen—and the wood of the big wheel was getting too worn out to be worked by mules or ponies. Then I just had to watch Kit’s boots moving careful and slow on the slats, and time my steps to his, while I listened to the others talk.
“Salt as the sea,” Rowse said, shaking his head.
“When have you ever tasted the sea?” said Mrs. Edwards.
A few more tired chuckles. “It’s not the end of the world,” said someone.
No, but the well had taken months of work to hit water, all our wells did. And every time, the salt ate away at the heart, it never came back; you could see it in people’s eyes, bitten away by the white crystals like teeth. Old man Rowse, who organized and planned the whole thing, who pulled the whole town together, look at him there—it was the end of something for him, slumped and skinny under his ancient leather hat, the silver moustaches (salt as the sea!) drooping, new grooves in his cheeks.
Mrs. Edwards said, “He’s right. Level’s good. We can get the kids running buckets of the stuff to the sunstill. It won’t be like having a good well, but it’ll be better than not having done it, what with the state the old one’s in.”
Rumbles of agreement. Kit hissed, “Pay attention!” even though we were still moving at a snail’s pace on the wheel.
“I don’t need to,” I said. “I’ve got you.”
He rolled his eyes. Town motto pretty much. Start telling it to us when we’re kiddies. We may not have much, but we have each other. This you’re supposed to be proud of—supposed to carry it with you like a flask, take a nip whenever times get tough (you’ll know when the time comes) (so they say).
Wet, tanned arms sprouting over the edge of the stone casing, grappling for thin air. A couple of men went to get them, the diggers. Their voices loud now that the wheel was stilled: Salt, salt as the Devil’s own piss. Salter than that, maybe: their hair and eyebrows were frosted white with the stuff. We had honest to goodness struck brine, not brack.
“Off you go,” Rowse said, and Kit and I climbed down, already a little disoriented from treading the spinning thing.
“The fence—” Kit began to say to me, because we had been aiming to repair the fence in the south pasture today. But he cut off his words and stared, and held his hands out to either side of him as if he were standing in a rowboat.
I felt it a second later—not exactly the ground moving but felt what he had felt, as we both often did. The slight vertigo of stepping from moving to still ground, then this new thing, this tremble under our feet.
No one spoke. Not to say Did you feel that too or What was that or Jesus Christ! We trembled together, all in a circle like at mass, with that same sense of dutiful grimness. Kit was thinking (I knew he was) that we had hit something we shouldn’t have with this well, as sometimes happened—a pocket of oil or poison gas or superhot steam or something. There goes the town, there goes everything.
But the movement subsided and I shuddered as it went because it felt somehow wet, serpentine. Like standing in mud with airfish moving all around your ankles, rubbing on you.
This was not about the well. If only.
The sky lost its light, turning from its whitewash blue to the dark sapphire of deep water and then past that, a dim, looming green. We stood and watched it go as if we had dropped something into the river, sinking without a trace. Against the flat darkness thunderheads began to build on the horizon, effortlessly shouldering each other out of the way, muscular and uncaring, piling up and up on one another in sunset hues of amber and rose. And still no one spoke. No Tornado! Get inside! or What’s wrong with them rainclouds?
Instead we waited. These were the signs that came before the sign. That they were different every seven years meant we had to wait. And there it was: slicing through the heavy, lit-up clouds, something small and silvery, like a falling star.
I had thought it really was a falling star but as it vanished behind us there came a tremendous clatter and then a spang of metal, a noise of impact without intent, and Kit and I ran for the center of town, following the rising cloud of dust to where the church had once stood.
Mostly still did, except that the thing, whatever it was, had struck the main tower, shearing right through the stone and sending the entire thing to the street below along with its bell. And that was something, because I’d never seen the bell up close and of course from street level it looks about as big as a thimble. Now it splayed like a dead steer, split from the fall and half-buried in stones and dirt and mortar. The broken edge of the bronze was so clean it reflected my astonished face like a mirror. Of the thing that had fallen there was no sign. Perhaps it had only been light after all, light of a killing kind. The sign.
“We’ll discuss the well tomorrow,” Rowse said behind me, and I jumped. The others began to wander off, heading for home, some quicker than others. Kit and I watched them go. No one looked back.
I thought As if anything they do makes a difference and he nodded as if I had spoken.
“Why can’t the ghosts pick on some other town?” Kit muttered under his breath. “There’s places with more folks.”
Rowse shrugged, and ran his thumb gingerly along the broken edge of the bell. “Reckon we’ll never get a new one,” he said, as if to himself. “That’s that, I suppose. Well, I don’t know, Kit. Them of the Silver and Dust left here long ago, you know. Driv out by whatever folks back then were pouring into the ground...like a kettle of boiling water into an anthill. But they say it did something to the ghosts. I don’t know what. Ghosts used to be civilized folks once. You knew where you stood when it came to ghosts. These things...they ain’t ghosts.”
I tried to imagine what they might look like, our particular afflictions, and found that I could not. Despite the rain that would attend their coming I still pictured them approaching through the dust that normally blanketed Wrathford: two trembling silhouettes in the amber light, and their hounds roiling around their feet like a mudslide, the filth filled with freshly-polished bones. Two monsters that should have been a blessing, bringing rain, but instead coming with death. A tale like it, Rowse told us once, was also part of the history of a wet green land—but he didn’t know which one. A place where the rain fell often enough, anyway, to wash the crows clean so that they were black instead of ochre.
Right on cue the rain began, sparse drops as big as coins plocking into the rock-hard dirt of the street. I thought about the seeds that might grow from this soaking, seeds that had lain quiet since the last hunt, waiting, infinitely more patient than us. How sometimes people would find a sack of barley or whatnot hid by their great-grandma or something and plant it and up it would come. In a good year. Like this: a hard rain once every seven years.
We looked up and down the street at the closed doors and shuttered windows. How damp and awful it would be inside, with no air coming in. Everyone had their water collectors out, and folks were already darting around on the outskirts no doubt, setting up the piping and the filters to get water into the cisterns.
And some folks were done that part and were putting offerings out on their front porches if they had any, windowsills if they didn’t. Some just out on the street: a trembling hand shooting out, spilling a little, then slamming the door and locking it, the sound of the turning bolt as loud as a gunshot. A tin mug here and there, most with a crumbled piece of cornbread or a spoon of field peas. Richer stuff for a few: honeycomb, white bread, jerky on a good china plate.
Kit said, “We didn’t set aside anything to leave out for ‘em.”
“It doesn’t make a difference,” I said. “Everyone says that. If you offer something or don’t offer something, you could still get picked.”
“Then why do they do it?”
I shrugged. Why do people pray? Nothing answers their prayers. Why did even we, who were not godly men, mutter Help me Jesus when bone was showing or a wall fell in? In a land where Rowse said folks had once watched gods walk around same as coyotes, just as skittish and wild, and the faith with the cross showed up as a late-coming imposter? No, folks just say things, do things, because we’ve always done them. Not because they make sense.
Same with the rhymes and songs some people said would keep them safe today. We could hear the notes rising over the dull thud of the rain, a dozen different tunes. I had always thought of our townsfolk as a rigorously rational bunch, occasionally superstitious, because not a farmer existed anywhere that wasn’t, or a blacksmith for that matter; but there was never belief, only habit. Prayers weren’t made to be answered, only to be a comforting thing like a lullaby sung to the kiddies at night. You didn’t expect to get something out of them. People listened to the elders tell their stories about them of the Silver and the Dust, but stories was all they were. It was a world where you put a seed in the ground and it caught or didn’t catch and it was nothing to do with imps or fairies or spirits or demons; where you measured a piece of timber and it was twenty-eight inches and it stayed twenty-eight inches whether you marked it with a piece of chalk or a piece of charcoal. But this, this felt different. I had never seen the like.
“It don’t make a difference, right?” Kit said. “Mr. Rowse?”
“Not as far as I know. And even if there was rules to the choosing, I expect they’d break them without losing sleep over it.”
At my side it was like I could hear Kit thinking, transmitted each time his elbow bumped mine. Like a spider tapping out messages on her web. Everything he wanted to say, everything he wanted to ask. The way, like me, he knew that Rowse had just said And supposing you are picked I do not need to tell you to keep the rules of the hunt. Do I. I am sure I do not. Now that you’re almost grown.
“That’s not fair,” Kit said. “If they’re allowed to break the rules and we aren’t.”
Rowse said, “The problem with kids is you think you all invented the moon and the stars in the sky. You all think nothing was there in the world before you and you came up with everything for the first time. Listen, it was years ago we all saw what happened when someone tried to cheat.”
“Who was it?”
“Don’t interrupt,” he said, even though I had been pretty sure he was at the end of a sentence. “And it don’t matter anyway. They was about your age. A little older—maybe eighteen, nineteen. A fool of a girl and a worse fool of a boy. She got picked, and he tried to interfere, and just before sunset we found their heads in the square. The rest they keep. Is that how you want to die? Breaking their laws instead of the laws of men?”
“Nossir,” Kit said automatically.
The rain was getting heavier, and I was shivering. With our shadows gone we seemed to move through a land without depth; our boots were getting wet and our soaked clothes shrank to our backs. “Let’s go home,” I said.
Rowse waved to us as we went, still tense, unsatisfied—everything in his taut skinny body said it, everything but his mouth. I wondered what else he wanted to say, but he’d tell us tomorrow, no doubt, when we were talking about the well, because that was surely going to be a long talk. We’d have to plan the location of the next well right quick if we wanted to get any depth before the ground froze up.
Kit and I trudged back through the mud as if it were something we did every day but in truth I could not clearly remember the last time I had walked on soaked earth. I felt queasy, unsteady. Seven years ago was when our own folks had died—not taken by the ghosts but by whip-fever, both in a matter of weeks. My memory of the time was a locked room, windowless and dark, only the skittering of mice and birds within it.
“We could leave town,” I said, as I often did.
“We could,” Kit replied, as he often did.
We wouldn’t leave. Everyone we knew was here; everyone everyone knew was here. It was dry and hot and grim and boring and desperately precarious, some years more so, some less, and you never became inured to any of it—the heat or the drought or the dullness—so every day it struck you anew and you wondered dimly whether folks here had always lived like this or if it had been different at some point, remembered by nothing but your bones.
But at least here was the river Rett (formerly the Ratt, formerly the Rath, depending on which survey map you looked at), which meant folks could farm here; and there was community, and traders came by now and then, ahorse or by water, and the Wife and the Rider only came every seven years, and one person, just one person, didn’t seem so bad when you thought about it, which we didn’t. We knew damn well there were towns out there worse than Wrathford, bigger or smaller, where folks got killed in various ways way more than one person every seven years. Simple fact.
And all right. Sometimes they did take more than one person. But not for the hunt—just retaliation for breaking the rules. For interfering, which indicated a lack of respect. For malingering or desertion, for trying to hide people or leave town. Unerringly folks would get sniffed out, dug out. Cellars, attics, bunkers, caves near the river. Then instead of one death there might be dozens, as payback instead of payment, or so Rowse told us. He was the only one we’d ever heard talk about it, and he had to be nagged, coerced, bullied, and bribed to do it. No one else brought it up. Even among the kids there were plenty who wouldn’t sing the skipping song about the Rider and the Wife, their fear as pure and real as that of a tornado or a cottonmouth.
Today was the day no one could hide. Only wait in dignified and stoic silence like seeds to be chosen. You never knew what day in the seventh year the sign would come, just as the seeds never knew when the rain would come. All you could be was ready on the day.
––––––––
The rain began to taper off at sunset and we stopped our work to study the sky, fearing that green, the colour of danger and death. But the rainclouds parted and thinned to leave us with blue—ordinary blue. Softening to gold, and with the light a cool, wet breeze, bringing the smells of earth and trees and the faint, stony odour of a low river running high.
We were both wheezing from the effort of digging in the mud, as heavy as shifting concrete. Tomorrow we’d be shaking like old men in our arms and our legs. But the work needed doing; the rain was a blessing but the farm wasn’t built to handle so much of it at once, nobody’s was, and all the livestock was terrified of the flowing water and the thick mud and they were panicking, rushing the fences, kicking down the brick or stone walls of the dugouts that held their everyday drink.
Standing between us, Obadiah the mutt twitched suddenly, like he’d been stung by a wasp, and barked—loud, full-chested roars of outrage and danger. I put my fingers under his leather collar and held it tight, though it didn’t feel like he was going to bolt. His whole body shook from the effort to scare off whatever it was he felt needed scaring. “Hush, Obie. Hush! You’ll send us deaf. Hush, quit it! We can hear you! Sit! Sit!”
He sat, growling deep in his gut, eyes wild. Kit looked around, confused. “I don’t see nothing.”
“He must’ve scented something.” But you didn’t grow up with a dog and not learn what the various tones and notes meant in its voice. This wasn’t no stray coyote or wolf, or another dog; it wasn’t a mountain lion or a cat or something good to eat like a rabbit or a deer. It was a stranger, but we stood at the rise of the field, and the thick yellow light flooded the whole landscape like oil and there was no one out here, only us. The leaves of the pea-plants moved a little, rattling softly, then were still. Obie growled on, his teeth bared, lip lifted till it near touched his eyes.
“Look,” Kit whispered.
I sighted along his raised arm till I saw it at last: far in the distance, ants creeping along the thin silver string of the road. Two folks ahorse, and something at their feet—like a cloud of black dust, but how could you have so much dust when it had been raining all day?
My stomach dropped. “It’s them.”
And it was, even though they were too far to see anything except the two motes in the flat light—two dark flecks casting no shadows, when their shadows should have been as long as ours, longer. The Rider, the Wife, on the road to town, unhurried. And of course they had no need to hurry. They had one quarry to choose, and that quarry would not flee them—not until the appointed time.
Last time we had been nursing Ma and Pa both, and hadn’t seen the two ghosts; and the time before that I couldn’t recall at all, having been too little, two or three years old. I did not even know what time of year they had come. If I had ever imagined them at all it had been built upon the vague remarks of Rowse over the years, the handful of words you could seize on if you chose. I thought they’d be ghostly like in the books, not quite see-through as glass but outlined in some fashion, scratched upon the world like an engraving. I thought they would be in rags—the remnants of shrouds, rotten from long years in the grave. And I thought they would glow. Not the glow of a candle maybe but a pale blue light, something that told you it wasn’t an ordinary fire, an ordinary burning. It would be a light without heat, like a firefly.
All this passed through my head in moments as we watched them ride slowly down the wet road till we could see them clearly, and the roiling mass at the hooves of their horses too, which no longer resembled dust but a nest of black snakes, all scales and teeth.
“The pack,” Kit said. I nodded. Rowse had said that too, and it had been part of the old story—the Rider and his master the Wife, and also their hounds, who were allowed to do as they wished once the hunt began. No rules and no quarter, not for them.
“Hush,” I said to Obie, but it was like he couldn’t hear me. “Hush. You’re not doing any good.”
We knew the Rider—seeing the familiar face was a soft, light shock, like missing a step on a staircase. Phineas Webb, a distant kinsman on our father’s side. Out of the Bethsaida Webbs, which distinguished them (as if we cared) from the McIntyre Webbs. He had been the last quarry, seven years ago, and had been caught and killed. But here he was anyway, riding to the left and a few paces behind the woman, perfectly solid and real, all his clothes splattered with old, black blood. And of course on the one hand we knew it was him—everybody knew. And on the other it was not something you thought about day-to-day. It was something you pushed down and away inside you, till it vanished into the safe darkness where all those other things went. It forced the knowledge on us, not belief, because of course it was unbelievable that a dead man should be here on the road, but we could not deny it.
And her—the woman, Constance Thompson, beautiful and real too, a cold white face like porcelain and fair hair curling loose on the shoulders of her old-fashioned blue gown. We watched them approach in silence, no sound of hooves in the mud, and nothing from the slithering creatures with them, nothing except the growling of the dog and my breath and my brother’s breath.
Who will they choose, do you think? I felt him think.
And how will they be chosen? I thought back.
The question didn’t matter, the answer didn’t matter. In a day it would be over and then for seven years we would not think about it again. The pair vanished around the curve of the road passing through No-Name Creek, the thin willows and alders not even rustling at their passage. Real, honest-to-goodness ghosts. All that blood.
“We should do the ewes’ hooves tomorrow,” Kit said after a minute. “I’m beat and I don’t want to cut ‘em by accident.”
“Yeah. Pa would kill us.”
“That’s money, boys, that’s money you’re ruinin’ right there, that ain’t no sheep, that’s cold hard cash,” he said, mimicking the old man’s voice.
I laughed, and turned, and the ghosts appeared in front of me, silent and reeking.
They were so close that if I had taken a single step I would have hit my head on the nose of the lead horse—the Wife’s horse, a spotted Palouse, dapple grey but the dapples all crimson as fresh blood. And Obie fell silent and cringed behind my brother as I stared up at them, choking on the stench of corruption, my heart fit to burst.
They didn’t dismount. Only turned their horses’ heads and moved past me a step, two steps, and time stretched out—time became a pale rope, unraveling thread by thread and getting longer and longer, they were moving past me, that meant
Christopher. Lucas. I ain’t gonna tell you boys to look after one another, the voice of our mother, who had died after our father, three weeks she fought for air and life after we buried the old man, fading every day, because I know that’s what you do naturally.
MMa, it’s all right...we’ll get Doctor Mears again and...
But you got to look after the farm, because
The white hand of the Wife, white as bone, as a sun-bleached carcass, pocked and cracked the same way, reaching out to touch my brother’s forehead where he stood unmoving, eyes huge. And I knew I looked the same way because he was me and I was him and he was not my brother at all but me, another part of me walking around and talking, my heart escaped from my chest, he was me, and
Because no one’s gonna take you boys in, and God I wish I didn’t have to say that but it’s true. People got enough problems. So the property has got to be your family now and you boys have to
Fingertips touching his skin, leaving the mark, and then he was falling to the mud and they were gone, leaving no hoofprints nor pawprints, and the dog barking again in terror, his voice loosed from his small yellow body and tearing around the land like a storm.
––––––––
We ate supper even though we weren’t hungry, because we felt like we had to. It was more a responsibility to the day’s work than it was to the body, which kept trying to push away or gag up every spoonful we put in our mouths. And all my blood was molten lead, moving sluggish and thick in my veins, so that I felt at any moment like I might crash through the chair, then the floor, then just keep falling till I got to the middle of the world where the monsters lived. They would hunt him and he would die and tomorrow at dusk I would be alone.
“Luke.”
“What?”
“I...nothing. Pass the salt.”
I passed the salt. He shook a little onto his soup, stirred it in, set his spoon down on the table, tore bread, dipped.
I realized then that I was staring at him as if trying to memorize his every move—like I was one of those traveling carts that came to town sometimes offering photographs, capturing an image in chemicals so true to life you couldn’t believe it. Every fold in your shirt, every freckle on your face. My own self in the mirror, left-handed where I was right, that was all, and very odd that had seemed when we were kids. But the same brown skin, the same brown curly hair, the same eyes, the same clothes. He looked thin and small and vulnerable, impossibly so, because it was impossible that I thought of myself that way, but he was me and I was him and so I knew I would look the same way to him. Two kids about to be one kid, not two men about to be one man.
When they come for your head
“With all the rain there’ll be time enough for one more crop of peas,” he said.
“Before it freezes up. Yeah. I reckon so. If we’re careful sowing.” I. Not we. I.
“Cold hard cash.”
You must run for your life
“The coldest,” I said. “The hardest.” Seven years we had raised ourselves. No, seven years we had raised one another—always me running at things and Kit following behind telling me not to, always me getting into scraps and swindles, always him bandaging me up after, always him telling me to slow down and think, always me insisting he hurry up and move, the eternal waltz of two folks trying to run a farm meant for six or seven people.
You must run for your life
“Rowse always says...“ I began.
He looked up at me, alert, wary. There was a shift in the air—like the darkness coming in through the open windows along with the smell of rain. I watched it come in, the darkness. Settling on the floor around us soft as a cat. A single lamp burned on the table, the little pool of tallow staring at us unblinking from behind the glass. On the rag rug in front of the fire, Obadiah moaned in his sleep.
“He says you can’t cheat,” Kit said. “There’s rules.”
“He also says it’s not a done deal. That some folks have made it. Here and elsewhere, when they used to hunt there.”
“He does,” Kit agreed. “Three people, he says.”
I stirred my soup, picking through my next words. We had been generous with the dumplings tonight, both of us thinking without saying it that we could afford to be—that from tomorrow on, all our stores would be feeding one instead of two. We knew Death sat at the table tonight, eating invisibly from her own bowl, polite-like.
But Rowse had spent years and years, all our lives practically, and before that, we knew, training folks—kids mostly, because the adults scoffed at him—in what he called woodcraft. It wasn’t woodcraft, really, as we thought of it. Everybody already knew how to survive a night or three out in the brush in case you got stuck out there. But that was what folks wanted to hear, and I think they would have stopped him if he’d said he was training us for the hunt instead of ordinary life. He had tried to prepare us to be chased, to hide, to burrow, to climb. To do your best to live through the day, if it was you on the run with the mark on your forehead. As far as I knew, no one he’d taught had actually been chosen. Till now.
You couldn’t fight them. But you could run.
“Most folks’ll go towards the river, he said.”
“Makes sense,” Kit said. The Rett was normally shallow and slow, a trickle barely warranting the title of river, but it would be swollen now with the rains. It ran between two stomach-turningly tall, virtually perpendicular cliffs for a couple of hundred miles—as neat and flat on both faces as if it had been chopped out with a stonemason’s chisel. Rowse, who read books, said that was called columnar basalt, why it looked like that, and why after big storms or earthquakes you’d see broken-off pieces like the shapes in beeswax. There was a passage near the town, and folks had built a crane and a lift some years back, powered by a treadwheel (mules if you had them, obliging teenagers if you didn’t) which was the only reason we could get riverboat traffic. Before that, they’d chopped steps laboriously into the cliff, a twenty-year project back in the day, so that if you were very careful, you could climb down without breaking all your bones, and reach the water. And once you reached the water, the pack would lose your scent.
I wasn’t sure what you’d do after that though. It seemed to me that they’d still be able to see you—and the Rider and the Wife weren’t like ordinary folks in that respect and others. They could appear and disappear (which I admitted we’d seen today); they could hear for miles, it was said, and see in the dark. I assumed you’d have to float downstream and hope you didn’t get battered to a paste on the rocks, or drown, or freeze, or fly off some unseen waterfall or get sucked into some hidden sinkhole. All it took, after all, was one breath of water.
Kit said, “But you don’t like that.”
“No.”
“And the old man never did say how those three folks made it through the day.”
“I notice that,” I said. “It occurs to me you could maybe run towards the old city instead.”
He looked dubious. I knew how he felt. First off, you had to take the creek to get to the city, if you didn’t want to run flat-out on the remains of the asphalt road—which we still did, now and then, simply for the joy of traveling on a flat, hard surface that wasn’t packed dirt. It felt different underfoot. The road was unprotected though; you might as well paint a bulls-eye on your shirt. The Wife and the Rider gave you a head start, but it wasn’t long. Just long enough for sport. Not long enough for a real chance.
Second, our whole lives we’d been told not to go there—it was dangerous, full of wild animals and wild folks and the simple and unavoidable fact of all those teetering buildings and overpasses and streetlights and suchlike. Nobody from Wrathford did go there, as far as we knew. There was nothing there for us, and a better-than-average chance we’d be kidnapped by bandits or crushed by a slab of concrete. Luckily, all those wild folk felt the same way about us—not worth coming here to plunder such undignified booty as sacks of barley and the occasional cowhide or bale of wool.
“It’s cover,” Kit said after a minute. “Better cover than the creek or the river.”
“That was my thinking.”
“Hm.” He licked his spoon clean and turned the round side his way, frowning; the mark on his forehead was the size of a postage stamp, and glittered faintly blue, like fish scales. When we came in the kitchen, before we lit the lamp, I had noticed it glowing. Not much—like moonlight on a cloudy night, but enough to see. I had to file these things away now, fuss over putting them on their shelves in my head, because focusing on the details was better than screaming with despair or doing something foolish.
“They give you the night to get your affairs in order,” I said. “That’s what the old man said.”
“How’d he come to know so much about them?” Kit said.
I shrugged. Rowse was in his eighties or thereabouts; he was one of the few folks who traveled out of town and came back with books and oddities; he knew all about the old, wet, green land and the wild hunt that had birthed these monsters somehow in the new one. He knew about the world that lay, he said, just behind this one—a strange world where nothing was sensible or rational and even the numbers didn’t run the same. A world where magic was real. And which allowed, for one night and one day, passage between them...I didn’t like the idea. Magic should stay in stories where it belonged.
“The city’s a big place,” I said.
“It is that.”
“It’d take two folks a long time to find someone there,” I said. “If he didn’t want to be found. Even with the dogs, I reckon.”
Kit nodded. “I don’t have any affairs to get in order,” he said after a minute. “If I did, you’d know about it already.” To my surprise, he summoned a weary smile, tears heavy in his eyes. “I’ll make a damn poor Rider,” he added. “She’d be better off sticking with Phineas for another seven years, and that’s a fact.”
“It’s true,” I admitted. “You can’t ride for beans.”
“Well, make sure you lie about it at my wake.”
“I will.”
––––––––
To look at him in the grey light of dawn pained me. Not only because he was my heart walking around (who let him do that?) but because he looked so skinny and awful and ragged, like a barn cat with mange, so I knew I must look like that too. And because we had walked to the monument at the starting place bowed down under a weight we couldn’t see and I thought that was the weight of the cage we were carrying—the sturdy iron bars of all the rules we knew and didn’t know about this hunt, all the laws and regulations and whatever else the Wife and the Rider brought with them from the other place. If I had thought about it at all I would have wanted us to seem young and proud and powerful and strong, like a stud bull caged briefly before setting him on the young heifers, but no, that wasn’t how we looked at all.
We had slept, at least, a couple of hours. It should have been impossible with all the fear and frustration and worry, but the body doesn’t know what the mind’s up to sometimes, and our bodies knew only we had been working hard since sunup. So our bodies scruffed us and put us down like dogs in front of the fire, next to the table with our unfinished supper.
I had strange dreams of a dark greenness, or a green darkness, full of watchful eyes and whispers—a place strange to me and a place in which I too was a stranger, because that was what they were whispering about, the watchers. But I couldn’t understand them and I woke knowing only that they could see me and I could not see them, which I hated. And Kit said he did not dream at all, but I didn’t believe him.
Not a lot of folks had come to see him off. You were allowed to—Rowse always said that—but folks mostly didn’t, not even friends and family. I used to think that was all right. You could say your goodbyes during the night, and not have that last image as your final memory of your friend or brother or husband or wife or kid: of them kneeling in front of the two horses, inches from the pack of snapping teeth and bulging eyes.
But then the morning came and I couldn’t let Kit walk here alone, so here we were. I avoided looking at the ugly statue that marked the starting point—white, eerily unmarked by dust or age, a stretched-out and twisted face that seemed to be howling in pain, attached to a straining neck like a horse or a deer, and that merging uncomfortably with the bunched muscles and veins of some big, skinned animal, maybe a pig—it was hard to tell and I didn’t want to know. The four limbs of the statue were folded under it, half-buried in the dirt, but it was still about ten feet high. To a man, we were all keeping our distance from it.
Rowse said, “Here,” and put something in my hand—a big, square paper package, folded over and in on itself, forming a sealed whole. “Give it him, if they let you.”
I squeezed it experimentally—bread and cheese, I thought. Probably not different from our own (barley bread, salt cheese). And maybe some jerky. I handed Obadiah’s rope leash to Rowse and walked the few steps to where Kit knelt and did not give it him but opened his pack and put it inside and then buckled it shut again.
Then I went back to the old man and the dog. It wasn’t too cold—the air was mild and damp in the grey light—but I felt numb all over, and realized I was shivering, my teeth chattering.
“I’m sorry, Luke.” Rowse squeezed my shoulder. He looked even wearier than I felt, and all the shine had gone out of his long moustaches and his hair, so they looked dead and dusty, like cobwebs.
“Thank you for coming, sir,” I said, and meant it. “You didn’t have to. None of you did.”
“Glad they did,” he murmured.
“Me too.”
Mrs. Edwards nudged through the crowd—not much of one, about two dozen folks—and put one big arm around my shoulder like a blanket. “Lord almighty,” she said, and crossed herself with her free hand. “Lord. Mister Phineas Webb dead these seven years and unable to rest. Out here on a horse like a living man. Lord God help us.” Her voice was tight with revulsion but also something else—indignation, maybe, not so much that the dead walked the Earth but that someone she knew, someone who should have been decently buried in our small, neat, Christian graveyard, was doing so. It was a sin or he was being sinned against, in her opinion, that much was clear.
I didn’t want to look at my brother and I didn’t want to look at my dead kinsman in his state of enslavement and so I looked at the others, which meant I was the only one who saw when the man lurking at the back of the crowd forced his way to the front of it, reaching for something in his chamois vest.
I was tired and slow from the fear and the lack of sleep but I still felt it was no excuse as he raised his hand with the little blued pistol and I said nothing, not quite realizing what was happening. He had a gun; well, lots of folks had guns. Kit and I had three hunting rifles of our own, left us by Pa. And this was a small one. And he had it hid...and now he was going to shoot it. Well, well.
“No, you damn fool!” Rowse moved like a snake for all his years, finding the spaces between folks and whipping through them at speed, so the man only got one shot off before Rowse had him, wrestling him flat and pinning the gun hand to the mud. People shouted and scattered as the fellow kept shooting, unthinking or unable to stop himself till the barrel was empty, six shots.
I stood with my mouth open, clutched to Mrs. Edwards’ side, and then struggled free and ran for Rowse and the man, uselessly, since the old man had tugged the other fellow up to his feet, leaving the gun on the ground. Looking around wildly to see if anyone had been shot, I realized he hadn’t been aiming for any of us but for the Wife and the Rider—at least in their direction. What he thought a bullet was going to do against any kind of immortal beings I had no idea, but he’d almost done it—Webb’s greenish-black felt hat had been knocked to the ground, a ragged hole punched in it.
Everyone had gone quiet again; someone was weeping, high and muffled, as if their face was covered. The Wife nudged her horse forward, the blood-dappled Palouse coming slow, silent in the soft earth, still casting no shadow, so it looked like they were floating. Rowse turned the fellow loose with a quickness and retreated, standing behind me and Mrs. Edwards. Obie moved aside for him silently, pressing his face to the back of my thigh.
The man—I vaguely recognized him, like I vaguely recognized most folks in town—stared up at her, defiant, trembling. He was all over in mud, out of which his eyes shone like broken glass. “You got no right,” he said. “You got no right, we don’t belong to you, none of us do, we’re free folks who—”
His rapid, stuttering speech cut off as she lunged from the saddle, seizing his face with one hand and lifting him with terrible strength, his legs pinwheeling, his screams squeezing out like smoke from her grip. Slowly—she enjoyed the slowness, you could tell from her wet, red smile—her fingers tightened and tightened, till all five disappeared into his skull. And then it simply burst like an overripe apple hitting the ground, raining teeth and shards of crimsoned bone.
The body fell to the ground; at a gesture from the Wife the pack flew at it, no individual dogs in the mass but a kind of black slickness more insect than animal, smothering the corpse. I was glad for that, I realized; it was better to not see. The noise of the crunching and breaking, the slurping and swallowing, was bad enough.
The Wife rode back quite calmly—eight or ten paces—and reined her horse in. Kit had gone from white to grey. I thought it was likely that he would faint, and wondered what they did if that happened. Rouse him and start the hunt anyway? Kill him right there? Was it considered a forfeit?
It seemed not. The sun crested the hill to our right-hand side, touching the fields with a whisper of weak, pinkish light. And the Wife nodded to the Rider, and the Rider took from his gore-stiffened coat a complicated, circular horn of gold with three flaring bells at the end. And that must have been magic, to not need the breath of a living man. The Rider lifted it to his lips and a high, pure sound floated over the valley. The hunt had begun.
Kit glanced at me, seeming otherwise frozen. His face was wet with tears.
“Run,” I whispered. “Run!”
He didn’t move. I held myself back from going to him, yanking him to his feet, maybe even kicking him; I felt warm again, hot actually, with terror and worry. He could not kneel there and weep. Could not. He was wasting precious seconds. And I could not help him. “Kit! Dammit!”
Slowly he got up, as if in a dream, and held his rucksack straps with both hands, even though they were already tight to his body. Then he began to lope slowly west, keeping the sun at his back—heading for the river, as we had agreed last night. They would seek him there, assuming he was heading for the river steps, then hopefully lose his scent when he backtracked into No-Name Creek. It wasn’t much of a plan but it would buy him some time...
Even as I watched he collapsed mid-step, and lay dazed in the dirt. My vision narrowed to a bright, tiny pinprick as I counted the seconds. I couldn’t believe it. Eighty-nine, ninety, the voice said in my head, the prim voice of the schoolroom, when he finally got up and began to run again. Mrs. Edward was squeezing my shoulder so hard that the entire side of my body ached.
Oh God. God help us. I can’t let him do this. I can’t, I can’t. I thought I could. Maybe they will kill us both for this but I can’t let him go alone. God please.
The crowd was dispersing. I waited until almost everyone was gone, then handed Rowse Obadiah’s leash again. “Look after him,” I said. “Don’t let him come after...Kit.”
Rowse looked me in the eye, and if he was horrified he hid it well. He looped the rope twice around his hand, and rubbed the dog’s scruffy head with the back of his knuckles. “I will.”
“He’ll try to get away. He’ll pull. He’s stronger than he looks...keep ahold of him. Please.”
He nodded.
I knew if I looked at the Rider or the Wife I’d lose my nerve, what little nerve I’d just built up in the last minute. I turned my back on them and headed crossways across the fields, aiming for the range road that led to our house, calculating times and distances in my head.
They’d kill us both. Him for breaking the rules and me for trying to help. They’d kill us both for less than that. They were driven by desires I’d never understand, or following orders no one alive had ever heard.
But I couldn’t do nothing. I thought I could. I thought I was brave enough. Now I knew I was wrong. A brave man would have gone home and shut the door and thrown away the key. Not me.
––––––––
They cheat, anyway, of course; they always cheat. They cheat because they have the ability to cheat and we don’t. My boots squished in the wet earth, every step as loud to my ears as a shout. They make it rain every time and then we’re easier to track than we would be in the dust. Just like anything else you’d be after—a hare, a coyote, a deer. All those things their own names behind them in the mud.
I thought about our ordinary hunts, which we didn’t do too often—no one did, except in rough years, because there simply wasn’t much game around. Kit cautious and creeping as a deer himself, on high alert, and always waiting too long to take his shot; me never able to stop myself when I ought to, and shooting too soon. It was a wonder we ever brought anything home for the pot sometimes. Anything. I only love this place because my brother lives in it.
After this we will leave, we have to—we won’t be able to stay here, the others won’t be able to look us in the eye. We won’t be heroes. We’ll be something else and they’ll cast us out, I know they will. We’ll find somewhere else. Follow the river.
I told myself all sorts of bullshit as I ran, hunched over in my tan jacket and my brown rucksack and my grey dungarees, hoping I looked like part of the land—like a mat of dead leaves in a stream or maybe like a lichen-covered rock. A tumbleweed tumbling. Not that it would fool the dogs but maybe the Rider, maybe the Wife.
Constance Thompson. That was her maiden name; she had another one when she married, she changed it to his, Rowse said. That husband’s name we never knew. Only from the rhyme would you know the first of the only two things we did know about him—that he had been rich—and then from Rowse you would know the second, which was that Constance Thompson had killed the man whose name she had taken. For stepping out with another girl, Rowse said. And then the Devil—or somebody, though not one of the old gods of the land, since they were all dead or driven out, like he said—went to her, to Constance, and asked her to be his bride instead. And she agreed, and her dead husband became the first Rider, and no one knew what he suffered in that false life after death. The Wife could speak; folks had heard her speak. But the Rider never did. His only sound was the blowing of the horn to open the hunt.
It was like a fairy story come to life just often enough to make us remember it was true, and not so often that we believed in the other ones. But those were the ones I wished were true now. A godmother to come help me, a good fairy in the forest (not that we had a forest—just varying heights of thin scrub), a knight riding across the land. Maybe with a magic sword.
Instead we just had me, running, out of breath, looking behind all the time for pursuit—though of course they’d be on Kit’s trail, not mine—and an ancient dead and crumbling city all billboard and overpass. A half-mile ahead of me, down the long shallow slope of this year’s fallow pasture, I couldn’t see my brother but I could see where we’d agreed he should go, shrouded in silvery-green, half-dead stubborn willows. A deep gully lay there, chewed away by time, wind, and the occasional flash flood; you could go around it if you didn’t mind a long detour, but if you wanted to go over, there was a wooden catwalk from God only knew when, crossing a concrete culvert below.
If you can get them onto that old footbridge, I’d said last night and he’d nodded. We had both been struck by the idea that we could have set up a real trap in advance, any time we wanted to—any time at all in the last seven years—and we hadn’t. It was simply too inconceivable that we’d ever be chosen. That we’d ever need it. I guess no one thinks they’ll be the one, until it happens. But how was that possible? I had believed it myself, and yet I dropped flat in thunderstorms thinking I’d be the one person in town hit by lightning, which was far less likely than being picked by the Wife. Suppose you can’t make yourself believe anything.
There wasn’t much cover up here, and it was running out fast. I eased myself behind one of the last sturdy trees, a live but nearly leafless oak, and waited for Kit to emerge from the shelter of the willows and climb up onto the footbridge.
We had no idea if it would work. We were guessing only that a ninety-odd pound boy could get across the thing where a horse and rider wouldn’t, except we didn’t know if the horses were as heavy as real horses or if they weighed nothing, like ghosts. No hoofprints, I thought again. My heart beat loud in my ears. Where was he? Maybe he’d thought of something else, some other trick, and was miles from here already. His hourlong head start was long over.
Get up on there, he’d said, modeling it out with bits of twig; we had already been yawning, our bodies trying to pull us down to sleep. Let it collapse, and maybe it won’t stop ’em, but I bet it’ll slow ’em down. And then I can get out through the culvert.
It’ll be full of water, you know.
Even better. No scent.
He was a strong swimmer, like me, but he wasn’t watchful enough in the water; and now I remembered, with a sick, silvery flip in my gut, the day I’d had to drag him out of the creek and dump the water from his lungs. How limp he had been in my arms, how heavy for a nine-year-old, when all I wanted him to do was fight me and struggle as I pulled him to the bank...all he recalled was that he’d put a foot wrong, and panicked, and hit his head on a stone. The hit he remembered. Taking the water into himself he didn’t. But if I hadn’t been there . . .
I’m not gonna tell you boys to look after each other
There he was at last, thank God. Unmoving, I scanned the lands around us, watching for the approach of the hunters. It would be a risk for him to show himself, but that was the only way they’d know he was at the bridge, know to follow him...I couldn’t see his face at this distance but the way he moved worried me. Climbing up onto the rickety bridge, holding his arms out as it swayed—that was good, it was as fragile as we had hoped—but then dropping down onto all fours, like a cat, and staying there.
No good. Stand up! Stand up, I shouted in my mind, as if he could hear me, as if what we joked about all the time was real—reading one another’s minds. A pretty simple schoolbook, we always said. Single syllable stuff. Ha ha. Get up!
He swung down, stiff and awkward, and disappeared into the concrete mouth of the culvert. I clutched the knife-sharp bark of the oak, pressed my cheek to it, willing the pain to focus my mind. God damn it. He couldn’t take cover there, not really. It wasn’t a dead end but it was as good as one, open at both ends and straight as an arrow. All they’d have to do was catch him at either end. And why had he hidden without even trying to get them on the bridge?
I told myself again that he’d just come up with another plan, but I knew he hadn’t. It wasn’t his way. He had just run for cover, no more thought in it than a rabbit seeking any dark hole in the ground. And there they came, the Rider, the Wife, the pack, sauntering the other way along the township road. The dark cloud of the dogs was not baying yet, only yelping with eagerness, like they were real. Their collective nose was pressed to the grass, leaving a furrow as they walked through the pale gold already greening after the single day’s rain.
I swallowed. Kit might still be in there, or he might be coming out the other side—which would bring him closer to the hunters, not further.
Do something, anything, anything. I slid out of the cover of the trees, hunching low, and ran for the gully, not looking back. One good thing about being small, you’re quick and you can hide...the pack began to cry, the sound shockingly close, a trick, I told myself it must be a trick, and kept running.
The ground grew ever softer and more unsteady, cracks opening in the red-brown earth and crumbling underfoot like wet sugar. I spotted Kit’s bootprints and even his handprints here and there where he must have stumbled and caught himself, and I ran over them with my own, muddling them together.
The howling was not like real howling any more, the barking not like real barking. I risked a look back and saw the pack closing, the two horses and their riders still distant, trotting rather than galloping, outpaced by the eager dogs. Of course they didn’t need to rush, not in a rigged hunt.
No one dog seemed willing to separate itself from the mass, or maybe they couldn’t. Either way, the entire thing poured onto the wooden bridge after me, and ghost or not, the structure creaked and screamed like a caught rabbit, listing heavily to one side. I sprinted across it as best I could, sped on by terror. Thing was barely a foot wide, gaps everywhere, boards missing—vaulted those as best I could, came down too heavily on some that cracked under my flight. The entire bridge twisted underfoot as the pack closed in.
Almost before I realized it I was on the far side, kicking frantically at the last, wobbling support. The board snapped loose, rearing into the air tipped with two rusty nails like a striking snake, and the entire mass of dogs toppled over the side, screeching as they hit the concrete and its broken rebar below.
I paused just long enough to stare down at the writhing, bellowing mass, to see the blood—real, red blood!—darkening the silty grey water, and then allowed myself a single glance at the far bank, where the Rider and the Wife were not looking at me, only fighting, in silence, to pull their horses back from the crumbling edge of the gully where the bridge supports had ripped loose both wood and earth.
Not looking at me didn’t mean they didn’t see me, of course. No time to lose—maybe if they caught just a quick look at me they’d think I was Kit. I slid down the muddy bank, reached the top of the culvert, and pelted towards the far end. At any second I expected teeth to close around my flying ankles, claws to rip at my legs, a reeking furry body to launch itself onto my back and smash me into the rounded concrete. I might have been out of eyeshot but smell was another thing entirely.
At the far end, Kit’s head popped up at the sound of footsteps, his eyes huge with fear at first, then only horrified and confused as he realized it was me. “You can’t—”
“Go, go, quick! Into the water!”
I dropped down next to him and we squeezed through the iron bars separating the end of the concrete tube from No-Name Creek, hearing clothes and flesh rip against the rust-shattered metal. The pain I felt was distant, buried in the urgent animal need to get away, get away get away get away, and then there was only the cold of the creek, higher than I had ever seen it and running faster than we could go flat-out.
I kept a hand on Kit, tight enough around his wrist that I didn’t particularly care if I left bruises. Knowing they’d be expecting us to get out at the closest point to the river stairs, I snatched at a bed of dead cat-tails where the water slackened a little in a curve, losing speed, and pulled Kit out there.
“The city,” I gasped. “Come on.”
“Luke, we’ll never—”
“In a minute. Come on.”
––––––––
The water had let us, for a time, outpace them; I did not believe we had outrun them. But we ourselves were in no shape to run any more, and we crawled into the shadow of a crumbling support pillar to lick our wounds and catch our breath, which at least gave us the advantage of having our backs to something solid. The city itself was at least an hour away, maybe more in our condition.
“If you say we’re not gonna make it, I’m throwing you back in the creek,” I said.
“I didn’t say nothing.”
“You were about to.”
“Well, I’m not wrong,” he said, and forced open his bruised and reddish eyes to glare at me. “What the hell are you doing? Trying to get yourself killed in front of me? You know suicide’s a sin.”
“Plenty of things are sins.”
“What’s that got to do with anything?”
I sipped water from my canteen, wincing. “How come you didn’t let them see you? You were supposed to—”
“Luke, you shouldn’t be here. Just...go. Go home. Maybe they won’t see you and you’ll live. Then one of us will live.”
Because what you did means death for us both, he didn’t need to say. I knew that; I had been thinking it for hours. “What if I—”
“No!”
“Don’t yell, for Christ’s sake!”
“No,” he whispered, reaching out to shake me by the shirt; his knuckles were skinned deep enough that I could see bone winking in each one. “Goddamn idiot. No! Don’t you think they saw that we were twins? You were there at the start, when they blew the horn. They’ll know if you try to take my place. I’m the one they picked, I’m the one they marked.”
“The dogs can’t tell our smells apart. It could work.”
“It can’t. Stop being fucking stupid. They’ve all got eyes and they can fucking count.” He closed his eyes again, letting his hand fall away. “No. You broke the rules. The only way you get out of this is if they don’t find out.”
“To hell with the rules. At least let me help. I can’t...I...“
He sat motionless, his chest still heaving. Not for the first time I wondered if that long-ago near-drowning had done something to his insides, something that lingered. Maybe he’d always carry it with him, whatever it was. Not the memory in his head but held inside his body. I didn’t like there to be differences between us; the left-handedness was bad enough. This was worse if it was true.
“So we both die instead of just me,” he said.
“Or we both live.”
He shook his head, resigned. The rest I did not need to say. I wouldn’t leave him; he couldn’t drive me away. We’d have to split up, but I was still out here where I should never have been. Even if he might have made it to dusk alone, now we’d never know; if he did, and they spotted me before the sun went down, I’d signed both our death warrants. What I’d done wasn’t fair, but it was in response to the unfairness of our hunters, and he could not deny that either.
“If we live through this, I’m going to kill you,” he said.
“I know.”
We got up, limping, stiff, and kept moving. The pack and their masters would not be far behind, and while I hoped we had killed or incapacitated some of them, I suspected it would not matter. That was interesting though: “Did you see when they fell?”
“Mm?”
“The dogs. When they fell onto the metal—I saw blood. You can hurt them, they can bleed. Maybe they can even die, who knows.”
“That’s good to know, I guess.” He hitched his pack higher, not looking at me. “We can do that too, in case you forgot.”
––––––––
The air was so wet it was hard to breathe, but I knew that was my fault, not the fault of the air. Only once in seven years is it expected to hold so much moisture in it even for a short while. Anyway in a week there wouldn’t be any sign of it—everything would be dusty like normal, silverygold dust, the ground dry like normal, the hardpan desert north of town its regular self, except that there would be new green leaves everywhere. Nothing grows faster than a desert plant when it gets a drink. Sometimes in spring and fall we get an unexpected shower of five or ten minutes, and then you can hear them going, the seeds closest to the surface.
As we approached the city, moving as quick as we dared through the brush near the creek, it was clear that it too was never meant for so much rain—made sense, I supposed. This area had always been a dry land. Not as dry as this, Rowse always said, but an ordinary kind of half-desert, half-prairie place, with grasses and herbs and shrubs and trees pretty used to the conditions and not thirsty all the time like other plants. But the city hadn’t evolved here like they had, and it wasn’t meant to manage rain the way Wrathford did. Standing water glimmered along every distant street, forming a perfect grid, like the whole city was paved with mercury. Probably it was draining somewhere, but slow, gulping and burping like a cow with the bloats.
“It’s like they said,” I murmured. “Lotsa places to hide.”
“I was thinking of that fellow that she...that the Wife killed,” Kit said, as if I hadn’t spoken.
“Really? I’m trying not to think about it.”
“Didn’t he look a bit...maybe I imagined it. But I thought maybe he looked a little like the Rider...like Webb. Not much. Just around the eyes, the forehead. And the hair.”
“Makes sense,” I said. “If Webb was his kin, maybe he was trying to...I don’t know. Kill him again. Properly. Put him to rest, like Mrs. Edwards said.”
“Do you think he was aiming at the Rider? Or the Wife?”
I shrugged. Since he had missed both, the question didn’t seem relevant; but it was obviously bothering Kit. To me, what the man had intended was of no account, since it had had no effect except getting him killed. But that was Kit, of course—always ruminating on what folks meant to do instead of what they did do.
We were still perhaps half an hour distant from the city when the wind struck up, uneven and ferocious, buffeting us even in the shelter of the cattails and reeds. A few drops of wind-blown rain slapped me in the face, so hard and cold that for a second I thought they were coins. “Ow!”
“You’re welting up,” Kit said, surprised. “Maybe we—ow!”
Hail, not rain. Glassy white stones piled up at our feet, some as big as bullets. I covered my head with my arm and looked up cautiously, not wanting to get my eye put out. Summer hailstorms weren’t unknown here, of course, and I spared a protective thought for our crops back home—maybe they’d be spared the worst of it.
It didn’t look like a quick one, in my inexpert opinion. If anything, the light was dimming, visibly going from the ordinary white of day to a kind of putrid apricot colour, shining from everywhere and nowhere behind the rapidly gathering clouds. Even as we watched, the heavy mass of thunderheads twisted on itself and began to drop tiny funnels—at first so small we could cover them with an outstretched thumb, then longer, broader, fluttering down like ribbons. They skittered across the underside of the clouds, moving in the greenish sky as if they were warming up for a boxing match.
“I can’t believe throwing a tornado at us is in the rules.”
“They make the rules,” I reminded him. “It’s like deals with the Devil. He does all the paperwork and you just sign.”
“Lily-livered cowards,” he muttered. “Ow! Jesus. Come on, or they’ll find us all full of holes like buckshot.”
We knew the storm was meant to drive us out of cover, but knowing didn’t mean we could do anything about it. The hail was coming too thick and the stones were too big; and behind us, where we dared not look again, the funnel clouds were gearing up for a big one, and if we were caught in the open we’d be flung up into the sky like dead leaves. Tornadoes ripped through Wrathford every now and then—mostly around, given the size of the town, but occasionally one would score a direct hit, and all you could do then was get into the root cellar and hope for the best.
I knew the colour of the sky all too well, knew the roar of the funnel touching the earth, the queasiness as the air pressure pushed and pulled on our ears. Thought of the farm again, even though I didn’t want to—of the whirling dirt like a carpenter’s hand-drill, bearing down, point-first, precise, and tearing up our fields, the barley, the oats, the peas, the corn, everything.
We ran, propelling ourselves with our arms, leaving our heads uncovered. Some of these hailstones, I wanted to say to Kit. Some of these are big enough to kill a horse. Some of these—
But if I was thinking it he was thinking it too, and he put his head down, and I put my head down to match, and we ran on. Thought about how we’d look to the hunters as we did so: two little ants, two little spiders, dirt-coloured, exposed on a vast landscape. They hadn’t swatted us yet but maybe they didn’t want it over too soon; maybe they were watching us now, enjoying our panic and our fear, maybe sniffing it in the wind like the smell of roasting meat.
The temptation was to take cover in the first structure we saw but we both resisted it, because we would have been cornered, trapped, and we wanted something we could escape—gesturing to each other instead of speaking, running down the edge of the hail-pocked streets where the water was shallower, listening to the oncoming snarl of the wind.
After a few minutes we decided to stop being so damn fussy and dove into an open doorway—a frame, as it turned out, with no door to slam. And the glass in the big front window was gone too, letting in the wind and the rain every time it shifted direction. But the roof seemed sound enough, and when we had backed away from the front of the room it was drier and quieter.
I slumped against the wall, shivering; between the hail and the spitting rain and the water on the streets, I was soaked to the skin again. Kit sat next to me, his face like mine streaked and spotted with the marks of the hail. The blue smudge on his forehead—that fish-scale glitter—was hidden under a smear of blood. I knew it was still there, even if I couldn’t see it. They’d never put something on you that could be washed off as easy as that. It was more like a brand.
Outside the hail came down in waves, now louder, now quieter, like the wordless sound of an argument in the next room—angry one moment and drumming on the walls, then petulant in reply, just the noise of the smaller stones falling into the water. “We might risk a fire,” Kit said.
“You bring any wood?”
“Something here might burn.” He looked around, listless.
“I’ll go.”
“Be careful.”
I left my rucksack next to him; the soaked leather was like carrying an icy-cold stone on my back. We wouldn’t need much fuel, I reckoned, not for a flame we would only dare keep alight for a few minutes. A couple of pieces of wood, plus something for kindling. Or maybe we could use some of the greased paper Rowse had given us...given Kit, wrapped around the supplies.
I winced with belated guilt. The old man was no kin to us, technically, but he’d stepped in as best he could when our folks died—not trying to raise us, because who had that kind of time? But looking after us and looking out for us, and keeping the farm running, sometimes in ways we could see and sometimes in ways we found out about later. He had hired help for us from his own pocket, taught us how to use the few pieces of equipment in the barn, filled in the gaps in what we knew about the livestock. It would be sad to die and leave him, of course, but it was sadder still that Kit and I would both die, when he had believed he was losing only one kid to the ritual.
The storm had driven us into what looked for all the world like a regular shop in Wrathford—the big glass window in the front, a single door for an entrance, one storey. The tile floor was marked with rows of holes and scratches, discoloured where shelving must have been removed. Even in the dim stormlight I could see everything had been picked bare. But at the back I discovered another door, perhaps leading to a storage room, hopefully not outside. Maybe with something overlooked for us to burn, like a wooden chair or desk or a couple of books.
It was locked, but I could see it wasn’t a deadbolt—the tongue was curved, like most interior doors. I pushed my penknife into the gap between the jamb and the keyplate, and slowly moved it upwards till the blunt side of the blade squeezed the tongue into its recess.
“Hey,” I whispered, unsure whether Kit could hear me over the storm. “I think I—”
The door abruptly swung inwards, sending my knife clattering to the floor, and before I could even reach for it, a hand had closed over my wrist and yanked me inside.
––––––––
So these were the wild people they said lived here—these were the bandits, the cannibals, the twisted new growths from the old trunk of the dead city. I found I was in a state of high alert rather than actual terror though, because they just didn’t look...wild enough, and they had been hanging out in the back room of a shoe store.
All three did have guns and all the guns were pointed at us, and the safeties were off, but I just didn’t think they’d shoot. All the same I kept my mouth shut, wanting to hear them talk before I said anything. Words could lie just as much as looks (worse, even), as Rowse would have reminded us, but if they were going to lie to us, I wanted to hear it out.
“They’re just kids,” one of the women said eventually, though her gun didn’t waver; it stayed trained on Kit’s chest, steady as a rock. “They can’t be old enough to shave.”
“Old enough to walk is old enough to cause trouble,” the man said. “You two here for trouble? Hmm?”
“No sir,” I said.
He guffawed. “No sir. And I bet you have to call the ladies ma’am, don’t you? Or else you get whupped?”
I shrugged. The list of things that could earn you a whupping as a kid was longer than the entire Bible, and “disrespect”, generally, under which using the wrong address fell, would have been dozens of chapters all on its own.
“All right,” the first woman said, and holstered her gun; the other two followed suit. She was tall, delicately built, her skin the same brown as mine and Kit’s, hair tucked under a tightly-tied blue and white kerchief, like the other woman. I thought she might be in her mid-fifties—definitely a ma’am rather than a miss—but she moved with a quick, springy lightness that seemed much younger. Their clothes didn’t seem too wild either: trousers, shirts, and vests like you’d see at home, all neat and threadbare, like they kept getting washed, dried, and periodically re-dyed to be the same colour, various shades of faded black. If they were bandits, they were dressed like respectable ones.
She said, “We should report them.”
The other two nodded, though they had clearly registered the icy bolt of terror that pinned Kit and me to the floor at the words. Report never meant anything good, first of all, and secondly that implied time—time we didn’t have.
“Report us to who?” Kit’s voice shook with anxiety.
The tall woman crossed her arms over her chest. “We’re part of a cooperative,” she said. “Everything gets shared so everyone gets a share, that’s our motto. Which includes information. Newcomers to the territory are supposed to be reported. You don’t look too keen on it,” she added. “Or am I wrong?”
I swallowed, trying to push down the lump in my throat, which felt like a broken piece of bone. “We’re...”
They waited while I tried to figure out whether there was one single thing I could say to get them to turn us loose. The longer we stayed in one place—the longer we stayed in one place together—the worse it would go. Even now, the pack and the riders might be splashing up the street, their approach hidden by the rain and the wind.
I looked from the tall woman to the other one, younger, rounder, her pale face calm under an elaborate tattoo of an animal I didn’t know; and the man, older than both of them, a light grey beard and thick grey hair making me think of Rowse. His eyes were blue and steady, curious rather than calculating, like he was looking at a strange bird.
“Someone’s after us,” I finally said. “We came in here to hide from the storm, but we also gotta get away from...from them. If you turn us loose we’d be mighty grateful. We’re not here for trouble. We have to run.”
The woman raised her eyebrows, genuinely surprised. “Someone from here?”
“No. From...from back home.”
“You’re from...where, that little town ten miles away? By the river?”
“Wrathford. Yes’m.” I took a deep, shaky breath. It didn’t help. “It’s...we’re...it’s sort of a long story. But they weren’t too far behind us when we came in here. Please don’t report us. Just let us go, and we’ll . . .” Die in a slightly different location than expected, in a gruesome fashion as per usual.
“Now hang on,” the man said, his tone weary rather than actually suspicious. I’ve fallen for this before, he seemed to say. “Is this the part where you give us some sob story, and then the minute we turn our backs on you, we find a couple of knives in ‘em? Because I promise you, son—”
“No!” Kit laughed, seemingly in surprise, a small, strangled noise. “Do you really think we look like those kind of people?”
“No,” the man said doggedly. “But that’s how they get ya. And we don’t know why them folks are after you. What if it’s some local sheriff trying to catch a couple of juvenile delinquents?”
“Look, you can just leave,” I said, aware of how high and desperate my voice was getting. “We won’t follow you. You’d know it, you’d see us. Wherever you’re going, we’ll go the other way. I promise. We promise. We give you our word.”
“He speaks for you?” the tall woman said, looking at Kit. He nodded.
But they still didn’t move. I felt the tension building in my stomach, working its way up, till my chest was tight, my shoulders, my jaw. Whatever my body had planned next, I didn’t even want to know. I felt like I might pop like a kernel of corn on a hot griddle.
Finally the woman said, “My name’s Hopkins; this is Moss, and he’s Declan. Dec if you like. You want to come with us?”
I didn’t move. “To get reported?”
“Nope. Anyway, I hope we don’t regret this,” she added over her shoulder as she returned towards the door at the back of the store. “But if you really do need somewhere to hunker down a little while, we’ve got a lot of places, and no one’s ever found them that didn’t know about them, I promise you that much.”
I stared after her, torn between hope that she was right—that they had places the riders would never find—and the instinctive terror of strangers that made me want to turn down the help, insist we could do it on our own. We don’t want to be beholden to you, I began to say, then shook my head sharply. You were allowed to run, you were allowed to fight, you were allowed to hide. If these three found us a hiding spot and then vanished, they couldn’t be implicated in helping Kit—not like me, anyway. They’d be safe. We’d be safe. And in eight or nine hours, the sun would set and the Rider and the Wife would be gone.
I glanced at Kit; he looked away. What choice do we have? his face said.
“We’ll come with you,” I said. “We’re much obliged.”
––––––––
Definitely from the way folks at home talked about the city I had been expecting something like a mountain—an endless, awe-inspiring mass that reached into the sky, swarming with people (wild people specifically, colourful and screeching to one another like birds). Noise and life and chaos, a bright anarchy of fires and lawlessness and probably limbs roasting in oil drums. Instead, we saw almost no one as we left the little building and went back out into the rain. A few people hurrying to pull in clothes on lines strung out their windows, three or four folks trotting through the streets like us, holding bits of plastic or wood over their heads to try to stay dry. And one of the wild beasts I had been expecting—a small black bear, soaked through and rootling through a pile of garbage from a tipped-over green container.
We were still on the outskirts, Dec explained—the tall buildings were mostly in the middle of the city, what he called downtown and “the bank district”, and those were all enduring their abandonment much better than the smaller ones out here, which were getting beat up by the weather and the desert. No one bothered to fix them up, he said; if you found your shelter was starting to crumble or sag, you’d just move. Plenty of room for everyone in the city.
“How come the city was abandoned?” I said as we carefully circumnavigated a flooded footbridge next to a tunnel. In the murky, silt-heavy water below cars could still be seen, tight lines of them packed close as tadpoles in a puddle, head-to-tail.
“They don’t talk about that much in Wrathford, hm?” Dec didn’t sound surprised, just a little resigned, as if he had been hoping the story of the city was important enough for us to know as neighbours. I felt embarrassed that we didn’t know. And that was odd, wasn’t it? To not know the history of the place right next to us, that you could see easily on a clear day? I wondered why we’d never talked about it in school. Or why our folks, or even Rowse, in loco parentis, had never told us. Maybe no one knew.
“We don’t rightly know either,” Dec said, reaching down to help me up the last few inches of rusty ladder as we climbed out of the tunnel. “Up—mind that last rung there. So I suppose you kids wouldn’t be likely to know, if your folks don’t know. Me I find it kinda sad. It’s a beautiful place...in the morning, with the sun shining, the birds singing, you find yourself wondering what it was like when it was running like it should.”
It didn’t look too beautiful to me—rain-sodden and run-down, neglect showing in every square of sidewalk and every foot of road, and crammed with rusting cars and broken windows—but I nodded.
“They told me there was an evacuation.” Moss glanced up at the street signs—surprisingly legible on tall metal poles, bright green and white—then motioned us to the right, towards the tangle of tall buildings still some miles distant. Her voice was soft to the point of being muddled, as if she was speaking through snow, and her accent was quite different from Hopkins and Dec, who sounded like Rowse. “Something was coming—something so awful we couldn’t even imagine—I don’t know what. I suppose if I could guess what it was then it would be something I could imagine, so that would be wrong. Anyway, they didn’t have long. I’ve heard it was a matter of hours. Everybody had to leave right away. They abandoned the city in a single day.”
“Not everybody,” Dec said. “Any time something like that happens, folks always get left behind—they don’t get the message or they’re old or sick or they lost track of their pets or they’re just stubborn or whatever.” He sighed. “We’re still finding them, sometimes.”
“They’re still living here?” I said.
“No, we find their skeletons, I mean. Not very often. The city set here for, oh, what do you think, Hop? Thirty or forty years? Before folks started being able to move around again and found this place to live.”
“Something like that.” Hopkins, who was some paces in the front, acting as point, seemed to only be half-listening; she gave me the impression of someone for whom ancient history was far less interesting than current events, no matter what they were.
For me, I thought the very idea of this city-threatening cataclysm was the most interesting thing I’d heard in ages—interesting enough to temporarily shove down my constant, guts-loosening fear that we were about to turn a corner right into the Rider and the Wife and the pack. Surely in a place so great and mighty, with such impossibly tall buildings, all decorated with the carvings and gargoyles like it was, and all these domes and arches, all these statues in stone and metal, all these lakes and parks and houses and bridges, no threat could have made them do much more than laugh...what could it possibly have been? “Where did they all go?”
“Dunno,” Dec said. “That part always gets left out. I suppose when you’re running for your life it don’t matter so much where you go, as much as how much of a lead you’ve got on what’s after you.”
“I hear that,” I said, and meant it.
“So that means Wrathford is actually much newer than here.” Kit’s brow furrowed as he worked it out. “Even though it looks older. And here is much older, even though it looks newer.”
“Right. Because all the new little settlements that sprang up for farming or raising animals or whatnot had to be built outa things you could find on the land. And cities, well, don’t.” Dec smiled. “You wait till the rain stops, you’ll see. It’s...it is really beautiful here. It’s the only place in the world for us.”
“I don’t like this rain,” Moss said. “It isn’t natural...it hardly ever rains this time of year. What day is it, August third?”
“Fourth, I think, Moss.”
“I don’t like it,” she said again, and hunched her shoulders high around her ears, as if it would make a difference to how wet she already was.
I opened my mouth to explain about the Wife and how she could control the weather—part of her game, like a cat playing with a mouse—but then I closed it again. It didn’t matter. We were being chased and that was all they needed to know.
Around us, just like Dec said, the buildings were starting to get higher and higher; a few streets away I could see them rearing up in the greyish sheets of rain, dark and stiff, so tall it did something to the mind to just look at them. Eighty floors? A hundred? More than that? How could you possibly build something that had a hundred floors without crushing the lowest ones under the weight? Even the castles we read about in our history books only had a couple of levels, and they had had to take heroic measures to prevent the lowest stones from simply crumbling to sand.
“Tsst!”
We stopped at Hopkins’ urgent hiss, and Kit and I immediately backed away from the edge of the sidewalk to the closest wall. The other three followed, digging their guns out of their jackets and vests.
“There’s...horses out there,” Hopkins whispered. “A couple of blocks south...just got a look. But something else.”
“Dogs?” Kit whispered back.
She shrugged, her face uncertain: Don’t know. Looks it. But also there’s something not quite right about them...No need to tell us. I could tell just from her voice. And the rain started to slacken off, leaving us in a kind of bright haze, mist rising from the surface of the water. Their storm had done its job, driving us into the city and disorienting and mazing us; they didn’t need it any more.
“My God.” Dec’s voice was barely audible. “What are they... what’s happening?”
I edged nearer to Hopkins and peeked past the curve of her arm, trying to move slow in case the riders were close enough to see. Hell, maybe it was two other folks—tourists like, riding in from another town. I stifled a laugh. Amazing what the mind did in the face of death.
We were at the top of a hill, I realized—not much of a grade, but enough to see the horses at the bottom of it, small and still as wooden toys. And the Rider, and the Wife. Even just the sight of her hair, the colour of mouldy lace, pinned me in place with fear. At their feet boiled the pack, and either by their movement or the powers of their masters they had formed a kind of dry patch, so that you could easily see the light grey of the road under their ceaseless paws, where everything around them was six inches deep in water. They didn’t look at all like dogs at this distance.
“Are those two the ones after you?” Dec said.
I nodded. “Are we close to your hiding spot? They might follow us there. The dogs...”
“No,” Hopkins said. “It’s a while from here. But we’ll have to take a different way.”
Quick and quiet we peeled off the wall and hurried after Hopkins, even though in the new silence the sounds of our feet were so loud they made me wince. The splashing was covered somewhat by the constant sound of running water as it entered the street drains, but I didn’t think that was enough. Surely the dogs were looking around, even now; surely their ears were pricking, they were getting ready to yell out after us.
More than ever before I felt like an animal, or felt like I knew how animals felt. When the gopher sees the shadow of the hawk it doesn’t even know for sure there’s a bird casting it, and it runs for darkness, for the hole. Rabbits too, chipmunks, lizards, snakes. Snakes are so afraid of everything you wouldn’t even believe it. Me I’ve never seen anything eat a snake but lots of things must, for them to be so afraid.
We moved fast up and down the streets, following Hopkins, rights and lefts seemingly at random and often passing through buildings instead of around. As we got closer to the tall ones, I wanted to look up—crane my neck till my head settled in between my shoulderblades, so I could see the top of them—but I forced myself to look straight ahead. When I realized Kit was falling behind I said nothing, only slowed down till we were side by side, and ran with him, and the others slowed too, not saying anything. He was trying to hide it, but his breath was louder than mine.
“Up,” Hopkins whispered, and Moss said, “Are you sure?” and Dec said, “I was just there a month ago and it was fine.”
I thought up would mean climbing the outside of the buildings somehow, except that none of them had stairs that I could see. Instead, Hopkins led us into one of the entranceways, through doors made out of glass thicker than I’d ever seen in my life—as thick as my wrist, no wonder time and disaster hadn’t busted them up—and through a strange snowfield of fallen chandeliers, all smashed crystal and twisted metal and wire. Again I tried to imagine how they would have looked when they were alive—no, not alive, I meant to think only hanging from this arched, blue-painted ceiling—and I couldn’t fathom it. Each chandelier, and there were half a dozen, was bigger than our house back in Wrathford.
“We should tie the doors,” Dec said. “I saw some cables—”
“No time.” Hopkins took us down a carpeted hallway and stopped at a grey-painted door marked STAIRS, then hesitated. “What—”
Outside, muffled by distance and the doors, came the faint but unmistakable cry of the pack—fluting, high, eager. Bloodthirsty. She blinked, baffled, then said, “Go! Quick!”
We piled through the door and began to climb the narrow concrete steps, all of us panting for breath after a few flights but since we were doing it together no one seemed to notice. It was pitch-dark except at each landing, where a skinny rectangular window, too narrow to climb through, allowed a thin bar of grey light through its dusty, wire-gridded glass.
“What in the hell were those things? Not dogs,” Dec gasped.
“They are, kind of,” Kit managed, wiping his forehead, taking off a thick smear of dirt, sweat, and dried blood that made his sleeve look like it had been soaked in tar. “And maybe now’s a good time to warn you that the riders are...well, they’re kind of ghosts. But not really.”
“Oh, come on.”
“It doesn’t matter,” I said.
“All right, they’re not like real ghosts,” Kit said. “But maybe it were best you all thought of them that way, like they’re out of a ghost story. They can...do things. I guess you’d call it magic. They were the ones called up that storm, for one instance.”
“Why are they after you?” Moss said. “I thought maybe we were helping you get away from, I guess, regular peedies or slavers or something. I didn’t know you were running from ghosts.” She thought for a few steps, then added, “Are they getting revenge? Are you the ones who killed them?”
“We absolutely are not and I can promise you that, ma’am,” I said. I was feeling light-headed from the climb; Kit and I were in pretty good condition but we never expected to run up fifty flights of stairs as part of the hunt. The collective was tiring too, and in silent agreement, we all stopped at the next landing to catch our breath.
“There ain’t no such thing as ghosts,” Hopkins said firmly, wiping her sweaty face with the end of her hair kerchief. “Is that what they told you kids?”
“We saw—”
“It’s two folks dressing up to scare you,” Dec said, holding up his hands as Kit and I protested. “No, no, now I’m not saying they’re not genuinely dangerous. Did I say that? Listen, the kind of folks that hunt kiddies have probably got a museum collection of other brain problems to go with the big one, if you catch my drift. I’m saying they can’t be ghosts, not that they can’t be child-snatchers.”
“And we’re not gonna let them get you,” Hopkins added firmly. “Up, come on. It’s not too far now.”
After ten more floors Hopkins opened the door into a hallway, dozens of identical brown doors set into the fancy green-and-gold papered walls on each side, each with a little numbered plaque on it like a gemstone. A fresh, wet wind blew our hair back. Daylight filled the far end of the hall, shining through what turned out to be the opening of a glass walkway that connected to the building across the street. The floor seemed to be tiled with a mosaic of blue and green squares, but these were interspersed with larger squares of plain glass—or holes, I couldn’t tell.
“Lord ‘a mercy,” Kit said, his voice trembling around a laugh. “Why’nt they build it with a plain floor?!”
“They never said,” Dec said. “See, Moss? Told you it was still there. Come on. Hiding place is on the far side.”
I found it was better if I looked at the coloured squares, which were still so clean and new that you’d think they’d just been laid yesterday. Grout between them still white, too. The glass squares were pretty bad though—we were higher up than I’d ever been in my life, much higher than the distance from the top of the cliffs down to the bottom where the river ran.
Kit shadowed me step for step, only glancing occasionally at the glass walls, where the view was other buildings like this one—tall, tiled with windows—and between them, here and there, the scrub and desert surrounding the city, the thin dark crack where the Rett flowed unseen between its walls of columnar stone. A sky slowly blueing, filling me with fresh despair like water coming up in a well. We were so far from sundown still. Hours.
Still, every minute that passed brought us a minute closer to it—to life, to cheating death from the cheaters. If we could just hide, and re-emerge after the sun went down...
“It’s good that you ran for the city,” Moss said quietly, her voice echoing back from the glass.
“I was just thinking the same,” Kit said. “Because—”
“People mostly go for the river, don’t they?”
“Moss!”
Hopkins’ voice cracked out like a whip, freezing us all in place—not from the volume, which hadn’t been loud, but the warning. I glanced between them, confused. People mostly did run for the river, we’d have been expected to as well...
...Only if they already knew about the hunt. Knew about the Rider and the Wife, I thought, seeing Kit’s face change subtly next to mine, a new fear, different, confused. They were lying to us.
Before I could even think of lunging at them, running back to the safety of our building, they had their guns out, and it was very different from those first moments in the store—when we were standing in that unnatural storm, wet, frightened, no one trusting the other, and we were right to not have trusted them, we were right. Even in the bright sunlight streaming through the glass walls I could see that their faces had changed. They looked like three different people, like masks had been taken off.
“Get,” Hopkins said flatly. “This would’ve been easier if you’d kept your trap shut, Moss. Get. Go on. To the other doors.”
I looked at the gun she held—not like anything I’d ever seen in town, much bigger, heavier, a flat black surface more like fabric than metal. “If you kill us, they’ll come after you,” I said, hating the waver in my voice. “It’s against the rules for someone else to hunt their prey.”
“They never have two,” Hopkins said. “And I can see the mark on this ‘un. So I can kill you no problem. Want me to do that?”
“No!” Kit said, scrabbling for me, his hand closing on my sleeve. Under his coat of dirt, his skin was like chalk, like he was about to faint.
Slowly, still facing them, we walked backwards the rest of the way down the glass walkway. It trembled with every gust of wind; I barely felt it. My blood had turned to ice and I didn’t know if it was anger or humiliation or plain old fear, that now for certain the Rider and the Wife would find and kill us, since these three had clearly led us to a place the hunters knew.
I wondered how long they had had an arrangement like this; I wondered when they’d last had to use it. I wondered whether the whole collective knew, if the whole city knew. If the whole city was a trap so large that we weren’t even mice in it, who could see the structure, but ants, who were too small to perceive it. While we had walked Dec had told us it was called the Lost Soul Collective—kind of a joke, he said, because the original founder had been named Matthias Soul. “Spelled just like that,” he said, “S-O-U-L.” It wasn’t even funny.
At the far end Hopkins produced a ring of keys from her jacket and waited till we passed through into the other building, then locked the doors, shutting us in. They were the same thick glass as the doors to the street, and I had no doubt that it would take more than any average cataclysm to shatter them—certainly not the combined efforts of me and Kit, not even if we had a good night’s sleep, a hot meal, and a blacksmith’s forge full of tools to use.
She glanced at us as the others turned to go, their shoulders bowed as if they were ashamed. Quietly she said, “For what it’s worth, I’m sorry. I didn’t know it was going to be a kid this time.”
“Didn’t stop you,” I said. “So it’s worth shit.”
Her face tightened, but in the end she bit back whatever she was going to say—and I understood that, since there ain’t much point in giving your wisdom to the dead—and left. I watched her go, rejoin the other two, the lost souls, and watched them dwindle back to tiny dots across the expanse of glass until they were gone.
“We should’ve known,” Kit said dully next to me, putting his hands on the warming glass. “One of us should. I can’t imagine why we didn’t. Maybe they have a little bit of glamour on them too. A present from the Wife.”
“I suppose so.” I sighed. It wasn’t him I was angry at, or me, or even them really. The anger was at the unfairness of it all, that you grow up in a world full of rules and rules and rules, that you spend every day crushing yourself small to fit into the box of one rule or another, sunup to sundown, and then you have to watch other people break them and laugh in your face for being such a sap. The unfairness of a life being pushed around by the weather, animals, seeds, soil, happenstance, churchmen, water, and grownups, nary a decision you were allowed to make on your own, and the pushing just...never stopped. And they told you it never would, so you should get used to it.
“We’d better get back down to the ground, if we can,” Kit said. “We’ll have to find a new place to hide.”
“No, they’ll be waiting for us down there. They know we’re up here, so that’s the first place they’ll be. Right by the doors. And if the sun gets low, they’ll come up here to get us.”
“So we’re trapped.”
“Maybe we can...I don’t know. Maybe there’s another way out of the building. I saw a few that looked like they had underground floors. If this building has some, and if we can get to those without being seen at the street level . . .”
Kit shrugged. Better than waiting for it, he thought, without hope, and I thought the same, and we went the few steps further into the room we’d been locked inside, a big empty carpeted place with a few chairs and tables pushed into the corners near the windows, where people had maybe come to sit and look out at the city, God knows why.
At least from the exertion and warmth our clothes were drying out; we sat on the floor, emptied the water out of our boots, squeezed our socks dry, remarked on the waterproofing job we’d done on all our footwear last winter (very good at keeping water out apparently; but once water got in it wasn’t going anywhere), ate and drank from our packs. Rowse had indeed given us a couple of sheets of jerky, and it was very strange to eat something from home, sitting up here so far in the sky, minutes from death, in the warmth and the smell of dust and blood.
When we reassembled ourselves, still to no sign of our pursuers—waiting at the bottom, just like I thought, or on their way up—we headed to the far side of the room and opened its only door, expecting to find a hallway identical to the one in the building we’d just left.
Instead, our boots crunched on dry grass, and the wind brought the smell of stone and woodsmoke, and the sky was blue and huge, nothing around us at all but the landscape of Wrathford in early spring or late fall.
And the edge of the door vanished in my hand.
––––––––
We had only been in the city for a few hours, but already it had had its effect on us—the effect it must have had on the city dwellers within moments of birth, the sense of being enclosed, sheltered, like living in a castle behind walls, moat, palisades. Now, exposed to the openness again I should have felt a sense of homecoming, but I flinched as if I had been slapped, and hunched my shoulders against the immensity of the sky.
“Where are...did they send us home?”
“I don’t know,” I said slowly. Kit knew I didn’t know, and I knew it too, but he still had to ask it and I still had to answer it, so we could reassure ourselves we were seeing the same thing—a knife sharpening a knife, not both of us losing our minds. “Why would they?”
“Maybe they were told to,” Kit said, absently rubbing his arms and wincing. “Maybe it’s just another way of cheating... dumping us back practically at the start.”
Looking around, that sounded pretty likely to me. Though of course it didn’t explain how we’d opened up a door halfway up a building and found ourselves outside, with no buildings in sight. Our shadows were black and crisp on the grass, the soil felt solid under our boots; the air smelled normal, tasted normal to the tongue.
“Where’s the town then?” I looked around nervously, trying to get my bearings. There were no familiar landmarks, no roads, no fences, no sheds or barns or even dugouts or shacks; not even the low hills in the distance had any of the notches or bumps or face-like protrusions in the stone that I knew as well as I knew the fields around our house. I guessed we must be much further from home than we’d ever travelled—not that that would be hard, given that we hadn’t been more than a hundred miles away since we were tiny babies—but still nearby, near enough. The hope mixed with the fear and made my stomach feel curdled. We were completely exposed out here, not even a bush to lie under when the hunters came.
A dark smudge in the other direction from the hills looked like trees, or maybe a creek; even though that was where they’d surely assume we went, we headed that way anyway. We hadn’t been walking but five or ten minutes when Kit stopped and bent over, sudden, then went to his knees.
“Jesus! Are you hurt? What happened?”
“Hm?” He was holding a stem of something, rolling it gently between his fingers and thumb. “Smell that.”
I sniffed to oblige him, and said, “Do you want to get caught out here? We can’t just stop moving.”
“Do you know what that is?”
“No.”
“Me neither. But I know every single plant around all of Wrathford. Look.” He sniffed again and held the shining, green-grey stem against his lips as he spoke. “That bush over there with the red flowers...that doesn’t grow near us. And this, I don’t know what this is. Or these grasses.” He touched the hard, squarish clump with the toe of his boot, still bearing a white gouge from the concrete of the culvert.
“Well, so what? You don’t know every plant in the world. Come on, keep moving.”
He did, but kept a quiet running commentary the entire time about these thornbushes, those flowers, that bush, this herb, until I eventually stopped listening. At least he was still walking, and at least the darkness in the distance resolved itself quickly, thank God, into first scrappy undergrowth and then forest, thick and ancient of mien, the trees going from saplings as we entered to mature trees we couldn’t get our arms around even if both of us tried.
And I had to admit that Kit seemed right—these weren’t the trees from home, of which there were fewer, easily numbered and identified, even the dozen or so types of willow that you had to figure by leaf. There were tall, straight pines or spruces—some kind of conifer—not like the squat, gnarled pines from home that grew across the ground, reaching barely higher than our shoulders. Between the dense trunks, our footsteps were silenced in the thick carpet of needles. I bounced experimentally on it, unable to hear any noise over the sound of the birds in the trees, whose songs I also did not know.
“They can’t ride in here,” Kit said, his voice lightly questioning rather than hopeful.
“Maybe an ordinary horse,” I said. “Theirs...but it’ll slow down the pack, I think. They can’t run flat-out in this, I expect, even once they get on our trail.”
“We should split up,” he said. “Divide the scent. See if it splits the pack. One of us might make it...”
“We should,” I agreed. “But I’m not gonna leave you just yet.”
“But soon,” he said. “You promise?”
“At the end,” I said. “When the sun goes down and you’re safe, and you can go out and show them you’re alone. Where are we going, anyway?”
“How should I know?”
“Well, you’re in the lead.”
He punched me in the arm, without conviction. “Rowse would tell us to get up high,” he said. “If we can get up one of these trees, maybe we can see the lie of the land better. See where we really are. Let’s look before we decide anything.”
We picked a likely-looking thing that was almost, but not quite, an oak—its acorns were all wrong, the caps faceted like gems and an inky-black colour—and shimmied up awkwardly, scraping our palms, faces, and even ears on the rough bark. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d climbed a tree. Most of the ones around Wrathford were too low to bother doing it for fun, and the branches too thin to support the weight even of a youngster. Even the birds looked nervous, perching on some of those trees.
When branches started to creak warningly under my boots, I stopped, and stepped down one level, and carefully moved over to a thicker one, wrapping my legs tightly around it like I was ahorse. “Can’t do this back home,” I said.
“This isn’t so bad.” Kit crawled over on all fours and gingerly clung to the same branch, closer to the trunk. “Not as high as that building with the glass hallway.”
“I read that there’s trees in the world that grow higher than that,” I said. “Or used to be, anyway.”
“I bet those wind turbines you can see from the Ledbetters’ farm are higher than that building,” he said thoughtfully. “Lord God what I’d give to see those right now.”
I nodded, and wondered if the ache in my chest was a bruise, or just tiredness, or homesickness—it certainly had come up sudden when he mentioned those turbines. I used to think they were the most beautiful things in all the whole landscape, the blades pure white tipped with black like the feather of a gull, or like swords, the swords of giants who could wield such things with ease. Not all of them turned, but for me the turning was never the point. It was seeing them white, so sharp and clean against the darkness of a stormy sky, rising high and proud and untouchable as cathedrals above the dirt. Folks had had to abandon those too, I supposed. It was too bad we couldn’t use them, because the few windmills we had in town for milling flour were small and measly in comparison.
“Oh,” said Kit.
“What is it? Where are we?” I looked up from the deathgrip I had on the branch, blinking to clear my vision. “...Oh.” Although I knew we had only walked a few minutes into the trees, the plains we had left were gone. Forest stretched around us, a thousand different colours of green and grey, undulating like a home-stitched blanket but unbroken. No holes, no gaps. And no roads, no buildings, no chimney smoke. Something crept over me, a strange certainty, cold as rainwater. “This is...I think this is where they come from. Where they...live, ‘cause I can’t think of a better word, for the seven years between coming to the town.”
“We’re in their home,” he said after a minute. “I think you’re right. And I don’t think these trees are going to do us a lick of good. She wants to chase someone who runs. She doesn’t want folks to hide in trees. She’ll do whatever she can think of to make us run. The whole place is meant for it.”
I didn’t have a good reply. Slowly I backed towards Kit, and he backed towards the trunk, and we began to climb down, as careful as we could. My hands were shaking and I didn’t want to lose my grip unexpectedly.
But I did let go, startled, when the sound began: a clear, bright noise, like nothing I’d ever heard before, like and not like the horn the Rider had blown to start Kit’s hunt—a fluting note that held and held. For a second I teetered backwards, feeling the ground snatch greedily at me, and then Kit snatched at my wrist and slapped my hand back onto the tree.
Unspeaking, we peered down through the branches and leaves, trying to not breathe. Something was thumping softly through the needles towards us, a strange gait, not the gallop of a horse or the sprint of a person, but right quick. A dog? Something else?
“A deer,” Kit whispered, his lips barely moving.
“No,” I whispered back. It was something else—something between human and deer, coming at us fast, but exhausted, panting and stumbling; I thought it was on its last dregs of strength, and felt a stab of pity. This creature had not blown the hunting horn we had heard. It was being hunted itself, like us.
“Psst!” I whispered, even as Kit slapped at me, trying to stop me. “Hey! Up here! You can climb—hey!”
I would have thought it wasn’t close enough to hear us, but a few steps later it staggered to the base of our tree and looked up, the face still indistinct through the leaves, letting me see nothing but the horns—short and shiny, like polished wood—and the wide, frightened eyes. And even then it took a few more short steps away from us, uncertain, clearly terrified. Then it spun and began to claw up the tree, awkwardly, not making much height.
“Stay there,” I whispered, and climbed down a few branches, till I could grab the thing’s arm and help it climb—the hand that flailed for mine was small and strong, and covered with a delicate fuzz, not like deerhide but like the nose of a cat. Not till it had reached the branch where Kit still clung did I notice that the fingers had no nails—not torn out, but smoothly covered in the fine hair all the way around, even on its palms.
Her palms? It had the face of a girl—a little younger than us, though she was probably thinking the same thing. An ordinary face, but covered in the same fine hair as the hands, of a light fawn colour, flecked with white spots. Large eyes, bright green under black brows and tangled, dirty black hair. From the place where hair and forehead met protruded two horns, gleaming, sticky with fresh sap, branched just once like the horns of a yearling buck. Her gasping breath where it fell on my face reeked of fresh blood, but she didn’t seem to be hurt—she wore a light green dress with no sleeves, all of one piece, like the kind you put on young kids, dropping it over their heads. The dress was ripped here and there, smeared with crushed leaves.
Her lips were moving, but I couldn’t hear her; I leaned my head close, avoiding the horns.
“Dogs,” she finally managed.
“I know,” I said. “We can climb down and—”
“We absolutely cannot,” Kit said.
I gnawed my lip. “Well, we can’t stay here...are any of these trees close enough to reach?”
“We’re gonna have to,” Kit said grimly.
I wanted to hurry but I knew it wouldn’t pay; it was still a bone-breakingly long way down, and anyway the dogs would hear us. We wriggled and writhed from branch to branch, climbing down nearly to the ground and then back up a half-dozen times to find limbs thick enough to bear us, listening to the sounds of pursuit approach—the crashing, the crackling, and then the unmistakable lusting grunts and growls of the pack.
We froze, all as one, and watched as the dogs approached—boiled out of sight, like spilled molasses, at the base of the tree we had pulled the girl up—and then vanished, yelping and belling into the distance. Still we waited, fingers digging into the bark.
And then the hunters came—not the Wife, not our Rider, but two strangers on tall white horses, as white as bone. Big heavy men, well-fed, rich-looking, corpse-faced under brown beards and hair, trailing cloaks so long they covered the backs of their horses to the fetlocks, one in pale lilac and one in dark red. Armour gleamed under the cloaks, or maybe chainmail. They too paused at the tree, conferred with one another, then rode on, single-file through the trees.
We stayed up there another few minutes in case they doubled back, then in silence, nodding to one another, we kept moving through the trees, cross-ways to the direction the dogs and the riders had come.
––––––––
It was a long time before we dared come back down, and only because the girl spotted the first water we’d seen running through the endless forest—a small, fast stream, dyed brown from the leaves and needles, but good enough to wash in. We left our packs on the bank and stepped down gingerly, shivering at the cold. We’d still leave a trail, of course, but all three of us stank even to my nose—sweat, dirt, blood, greasy hair—and we might knock it back a little with a wash.
“My name is Estrid,” the horned girl finally told us when we climbed back onto the bank; her head swivelled alertly as she spoke, still worried about her own pursuers. Her voice was light, and she had a strange accent, not like anything I’d ever heard. It was definitely English, but every word came out right strange to the ears.
“I’m Luke Hall,” I said, gesturing between us. “That’s Kit.”
“Thank you for helping.” She frowned. “I...I did not know the king hunted more than myself. I think that has never happened before.”
“I don’t think your hunter is the same as ours,” Kit said. “Ours are a woman—Constance Thompson, who killed her husband—and a man, Phineas Webb.”
She shook her head, then winced and began to plait her wet hair away from her face, her fingers moving slowly, as if she was getting used to them. “Ours is the king and his squire. The king...he had a name once, I think. The squire is known only as the squire. They died...a long, long time ago. Hundreds of years. So they say. I don’t know. Sometimes you see them up the mountain when it’s stormy, hunting deer with their dogs. The dogs aren’t really dogs, either. Lost souls.”
Kit flinched; Estrid blinked at him curiously and went on. “But sometimes they come into a village and they choose someone. Like my village, Fechaeld, but it is only a hundred people so it has not been one of us for a long time. He chooses from all the whole land, wherever he wants. But then...that person is the deer. They change. And they have to be hunted.”
“What happens when they’re caught?” I said.
“The king cuts off their head,” she said quietly, and reached up to touch her horns. Her hand fell limply back into her lap. “And he adds the horns to his throne, which is made of all the horns of those he has killed.”
I looked at her with new sympathy, thinking of the fear she must have felt as she changed, her skin growing the light fur of a fawn, the pain, maybe, as the horns grew from her skull. And every single year, every year without fail...“Has anyone ever survived the hunt where you’re from?”
“No.” She blinked. “Of course not. The king has to have a deer.”
Or else what? I almost said. It occurred to me that I didn’t know what happened to us either, if the Wife didn’t get her way. Rowse never said. “Well, for our town, they say people have made it,” I said, but the words felt cold and dead in my mouth, like stones. Estrid looked like she didn’t believe me, either. I wondered whether it was just a comforting lie the old man told folks to make them feel better when their loved ones were chosen. That they had a chance; that it didn’t always have to be a death. It was terrible to think that the chance was an illusion every time. “I don’t know if it’s true.”
We sat there a few minutes more, exhausted. I was so worn-out I thought it wouldn’t be so bad if the Wife and the Rider simply burst through the trees right now and tore off our heads; at least I could rest then. Kit looked about ready to drop; I knew I looked the same, because he was the mirror to my own self.
“Maybe this is the place all the hunters come from,” Kit said. “And so this is the place they send all their quarries...another cheating place, a place to cheat time. No time passes in the real world where the hunt begins, and they can keep us in here and play as long as they like.”
I thought about my moment of triumph when I saw the blood of the pack in the water—when I thought even for a few minutes that it was possible to fight them, maybe kill them. But how could you kill what was already dead? All you could do was run.
After a while we got up and began to walk up the stream, because there didn’t seem to be anything else we could do. In the distance, sometimes nearer, sometimes further, we heard the sounds of different horns—different hunts, crisscrossing one another and making a joyful racket about it, enjoying our terror and our flight. How many prey—how many of us were in the forest? It might be dozens, hundreds. I hoped not.
“I’ve never seen doubles before.” Estrid glanced at us shyly, wanting to look at both Kit and me more closely but nervous about it. “Not grown-up...in my village, if there are doubles and they both live, they separate the babies. They can’t be together.”
“Why not?” I said.
“They say it’s evil, it calls down evil, for the double to stay as two. The devil likes doubles. He’ll come and...” She waved her paw-like hand vaguely. “Tempt them. To work for him. But if you separate them, then the double is broken, and they are just two people. So he never finds out.”
“Do you really believe in the devil?” Kit said, mildly annoyed. “A real, honest-to-goodness devil?”
“Believe? I don’t know what you mean.”
We walked on and I waited for Kit to say what he did mean, but he was quiet, his mouth moving as if he were sorting through answers like beans, tossing out the bad ones. The process looked like it might take a while.
“Most of us don’t think the devil is real,” I clarified after a while. Kit didn’t seem to hear me.
Estrid nodded, unconvinced. “Then who do you think does the things that the devil seems to be doing?”
“No one. They just sort of happen.”
“Maybe where you’re from,” she said.
Kit was still ruminating; I smiled for the first time in what felt like forever. We had the church back home, of course (well—most of it, now), and we had the language and the vocabulary, but we didn’t really have what I would have called faith. Not most folks. A couple, here and there, like Mrs. Edwards. We mocked Rowse gently for believing, even, in the ghosts of history—the ones he told us about. Or the gods he said used to live nearabouts. But even after Ma and Pa died, neither Kit nor I had ever believed for a second that we’d see them again as ghosts; we had not expected to, and we never had. Not even hints or signs or prodigies, like other folks sometimes claimed. Mr. McCullough saying his mother came back as a white crow, just like she said she would, or Harriet Gest that everyone said was a witch anyway telling us that after her son died, his ghost kept reappearing to turn around all the spoons in the kitchen so they were cup-side down, no matter how often she flipped them over again. I didn’t believe in any of that. But it was occurring to me I might have to change whatall I did believe in these days.
All along our right-hand side the stream chuckled on, now wider, now narrower, in some places the banks leaning so near that we could have stepped over in a single stride. I wished Obie was here, selfishly—I supposed he would be slain like us if he really were, but he had never been in a real forest before. I imagined him darting around like a youngster instead of the nearly ten-year-old dog he was, sniffing all the new things, sneezing as the pine needles got in his nose. And splashing in this stream, so clear and shallow and clean, not like No-Name Creek.
When I told Kit, he nodded. “This place is probably how dogs imagine heaven,” he said solemnly. “And all these new birds and squirrels and maybe rabbits and suchlike.”
Estrid smiled. “I miss my dog,” she said, ducking her head. “Of course, my mama and papa, and my brothers too, and home and my bed. But I miss Ulli. She’s not truly my dog,” she added hastily. “She belongs to Papa like everything else, and she watches the house and she goes hunting with him. But when I am at the house, she spends all her time with me.”
“Our dog’s a working dog too,” I said. “Sort of. He watches the house, like you said. And he guards the livestock. He’s not much of a stock dog, but he can manage sheep all right.”
“Some of the sheep,” Kit said. “The smaller ones.”
“Yeah.”
“Ulli was the only one who tried to protect me when the king came,” Estrid said. “I know that’s how it’s supposed to be, but...”
Kit and I nodded. That’s how it’s supposed to be. No one in town kicked up a ruckus when someone was picked for the hunt. No one cried or screamed or dragged on the quarry’s hands when the time came to send them to the monument and stand under the hunting horn waiting for those first notes. Whatever folks were thinking, whatever they were feeling or planning or remembering, we all acted like it was no more than a morning at the fair. Like watching the animals we raised get sold off for meat, as normal and everyday as that. Husbands, sons, daughters, brothers, lovers, friends: no different from a prize ram, led away on its rope, gone forever.
The whole town looked away and said This is normal. I wish we at least had the guts to say It isn’t right, but even if every single person felt it, no one ever said it. It felt like complicity, it felt like nodding to the Rider and the Wife, saying Come on in, we accept you. Everyone too scared for their own necks, I supposed, to speak up. Made sense. We hadn’t spoken up ourselves, so how could you expect anyone else to?
All the same, I thought uneasily, when you came to think of it: we had no lists of names, nothing in the register at the church or at Town Hall, where deaths and births went down—no memorials, no plaques, no statues, nothing at all to record the names of those who had been chosen. It was like they had vanished entirely from memory, not dead the way ordinary people were dead, with paperwork and a tombstone. No one ever talked about it. No one wanted you to remember that it happened. Like the terrible statue at the starting point, alone in its field, everyone simply looked away and thought about something else. Why didn’t we have even a single sheet of paper somewhere?
Somewhere just ahead of us a shrill noise arose, a cry composed of a hundred smaller cries—the warning call of birds fearful for their nests and chicks—and then silence, every throat stilled now that it had done its job of raising the alarm, wishing no more attention upon itself. My heart skipped several beats. For a split-second I thought of last night’s dream. Those eyes, watchers that we could not see ourselves. I had thought they would be full of malice, but maybe it was simply fear. The bright, frightened eyes of birds.
Run, get away from that silence, was all I could think, and Kit and I flanked Estrid as we did, turning back from the direction we were headed and setting off the other way. I figured if we didn’t know where we were headed, any direction was as good as any other; you couldn’t get lost if you weren’t headed anywhere. My legs hurt and my chest hurt, and I felt like I was running through wet clay, and I didn’t think it was just a feeling; we were moving at a snail’s pace, worn out and no juice left in our bodies.
And so the king and his squire caught up to us in minutes, bursting abreast through a gap between two trees I would have swore couldn’t have fit a single horse, reining up quickly as if to check that their quarry was the right one—and if we hadn’t been it, I might have found it funny that in a forest full of hunters and hunted, it was all too easy to poach someone else’s kill.
The squire’s horse reared high, the hooves slicing through the air not two paces in front of my nose, and stood foursquare again, silent and restive, the lips pulled up like a growling dog’s to show sharp white teeth, more like a wolf than a horse.
For a few seconds no one moved. I felt pinned to the spot, helpless to do anything but watch: the two pale men, their skin translucent and bluish like milk; the knife teeth of the horses; the horseshoes that looked like gold, except that they simply could not be even if the king were the richest man in all the world, because gold was too soft for that. And the smell, like a tangle of bones rotting in the sun, sweating out stinking drops of yellow fat.
“Good,” said the king, or Gut, a deep and oddly distant voice, as if it were coming from another part of the woods. He reached for something under his cloak—a sword, or a glass-clear replica that resembled the memory of a sword—from a black leather scabbard, so long it seemed to take forever to come free, ending in a broken but wickedly sharp tip. With both hands he lifted it into the air, and Estrid cried out—incoherent words of disbelief and horror—and something snapped free inside of me and I spun and gave her a shove.
“Run, go!”
She darted away in every respect like the deer she had been transformed into, and the swiftness of her movement was so startling that the king and the squire only stared after her in confusion. If she had disappeared in front of them like a ghost I thought they might not have been more shocked. And it bought me just a moment’s time to scrabble on the ground for a branch and drive it up at the squire, not really thinking I’d unseat him, not thinking I’d connect at all, reacting rather than thinking, trying to give the girl a minute to get away.
The white horse screamed like a woman and reared, throwing its rider with a startling thud onto the ground. Until right that second it never occurred to me that a ghost would make a sound like a man falling. The horse bucked and slashed at me as I jabbed it with the branch, trying to evade both the hooves and the whistling swings of the king’s sword as he hacked away at me, unable to get a clear hit over the panicking horse.
Meanwhile, the squire was trying desperately to get himself out from beneath the hooves of his own mount, rolling and throwing up his hands to protect his face. “My lord!” he cried. “My lord!”
The king seemed to not hear him, kicking his horse into a gallop towards me and Kit, the golden shoes flashing in the deep green dimness like sunlight on water. I threw myself to the side, not quite in time to avoid a godalmighty thump across one shin from the horse’s front hoof. It stumbled but did not trip, and then the king was rounding on us, towering with rage like a thunderhead. His eyes were entirely black, like drops of pitch, or just holes into somewhere without light. “Yow bastards! Little bastards yow art!”
The squire finally managed to rise, tangling in his lilac cloak, and drew his own sword, short and transparent as his lord’s. I had dropped my branch, and cast around quickly for a new one, but there was nothing on the ground but twigs and roots. And then getting a weapon mattered less not at all, for Kit was doing the same thing as I was, and the squire and the king were both turning on him instead of me.
I shouted something, not words but a war-cry of sheer anger, and managed to throw myself over Kit just as the king leaned from his saddle, sweeping his squire out of the way. The blow of the ghostly sword felt as real as metal, knocking me flat and driving the breath from my body so that for a moment I didn’t even feel the pain of the cut, only that my shoulder was on fire and something was battering me from behind—my rucksack, I realized, one strap sliced right through and dangling from the other.
As I rolled to avoid the oncoming hooves again, I called for Kit to run, leave me, not knowing where he was or what he was doing, only that I had felt him wriggle free as the sword hit. The king bellowed and raised his blade again—and something black flew out of the trees between us, deadly silent and as big as a man.
“What in the hell—” I gulped, not meaning to, my mouth full of needles. I spat, scrambled to my feet, and spotted Kit backed up against a tree a few paces away, stunned half out of his wits.
For the thing was a dog, black with a few spots of tan, shiny as a freshly-curried horse, and with grizzly-sized claws, or so it seemed in those first few seconds. It did not bark, only growled low and constant as it lunged at the horses, sending them shrieking and plunging backwards like unbroken colts. As they reared, tangling man and cloak and hoof and limb, the dog darted in and out like a hunting swallow, raking with claws and teeth, opening shallow ugly gashes that bled a dark red, nearly black. At last the king’s horse clearly decided it had had enough, and reared sharply enough to throw its master, or almost, leaving him dangling from one stirrup as it kicked and thrashed.
The dog spun, urgency in its every move, and dashed past us, then pivoted again, just as quick, and stared: Are you coming, fools? Can you understand me?
I wasn’t waiting to see who won between the horses and the riders; the dog had the right idea. I grabbed Kit with my good arm and we ran after our saviour, barely able to see it in the ever-thickening darkness of the woods, knowing only that the sounds of the hunters were falling behind us.
––––––––
We stopped once for Kit to tie a kerchief around the cut in my shoulder, then once for me to try to throw up—nothing doing, just a thin dribble of bile and a lot of wreck and ruin in my stomach—then again, and not really with our consent, at the edge of a small, cloudy spring that bubbled from between a couple of blue-coloured stones. Mainly I reckoned it was as good a place to collapse as any, and the water covered the sounds of our voices.
Kit got out his canteen, then hesitated and glanced at me.
“Dunno,” I croaked. “You know what Rowse would tell you.”
“Mister Rowse,” he said automatically. “And I know looks don’t tell you nothing.”
The dog, with an air of impatience, shouldered past me and lowered its snout to the pool at the base of the spring, drinking deeply enough that its stomach billowed out as we watched.
“Oh, all right,” Kit muttered. “I suppose you’re the big scientist then.” He stooped and shook out the last few brownish, leather-smelling drops from the canteen, then filled it to the top and brought it carefully to me, passing it into my good hand. “Look at that,” he said. “Now we match.”
“I ain’t no devil-handed critter now, thank you,” I said placidly. “Me bein’ a lefty is temporary.” The water was icy cold and didn’t taste like anything much—and I knew water like that could still make you sick, but I couldn’t stop drinking it either. It wasn’t even so much that I was thirsty as that it tasted better than anything ever had in my life, because my mouth tasted like the bottom of a midden.
I gave Kit back his canteen to fill again, and studied the dog, which studied me back with the confidence of an animal that knows it’s stronger than the nearest threat. It was a big critter all right, much bigger than Obie and easily twice the size of the strays you saw around town. And it was wearing a collar, which I hadn’t noticed before. A wide band of dark green leather, bronze or brass hardware—not much, just a simple buckle. Nowhere to tie a rope unless you passed it under the leather. Looking at the dog, I thought maybe I’d just leave the rope in my pack right where it was.
“Isn’t the devil s’posed to appear to folks as a black dog?” Kit sat, pointedly keeping me between himself and the dog.
“Cat, I thought.”
“Hmm. Or cock, I’ve heard that too.”
“I wonder why always black,” I said drowsily. “It’s just a colour like any other. Hell, it’s harder to breed an all-red chicken than an all-black one. Hey dog, are you the devil?”
The dog glanced at me down its long snout, then got up off its haunches and began to walk through the trees again, peering back with a hot, unblinking stare to make sure we followed.
“I wouldn’t call that a no,” Kit observed.
“It did save us,” I said. “Maybe there’s good critters in here as well as bad.”
“Or maybe somebody’s hunting it,” he said. “Poor mutt.”
It was Kit who noticed the odd silence behind us, not the frightening quiet of birds and bugs gone still from fright, but a muffling, like the world sounds through a thick fog. We were following the dog along a narrow but definite game trail, about wide enough for a hare, and I turned to see it closing up behind us like a stitched seam, filling with trees a few paces behind our boots. In Kit’s opinion this was proof that the dog was the certifiable devil, or a demon, anyway, but I didn’t think the dog was doing it. This seemed like the kind of forest that would do it anyway, no matter who was walking through it. At any rate it seemed to mean that we would be harder to chase, so I took it as a positive.
Ahead, at last, there seemed to be a clearing—or anyway the light changed from the endless dusky green to a lighter shade, like beech leaves. The dog sped up, moving from a walk to a trot, and then to a run, and we scrambled as best we could to keep it in sight.
“Ulli!”
Estrid half-climbed, half-fell from a small, twisty plum tree on the far side of the clearing, running through wrist-thick saplings and vaulting the mushroom-fringed trunk of the fallen giant that must have made the opening in the canopy. She embraced the dog, laughing and weeping at the same time. “I am so sorry,” she said, “I have already forgotten your names—thank you—how did you find her? Ulli, how did you come here? How did you follow me?”
“She found us,” Kit said. “Saved us from the king and the squire. And anyway,” he said, giving me a look, “sometimes folks follow where they’re not supposed to. Part of life.”
Estrid wiped her face, not quite drying the dark half-moons of tears on the light fur of her cheeks. “You are good, you are good boys. Thank you for helping me. And you too, smart girl, good girl,” she added, wrapping her arms around the dog’s thick neck again. “I never thought I would see you again. I am so glad to see you, before I die.”
“We better keep moving.” I reached out gingerly, ignoring Kit’s warning squawk, and stroked Ulli’s glossy forehead. She gave me no notice, still focused entirely on her master. “This one seems to know where she’s going. She moves like she’s got a quarry of her own. Nose up.”
“Perhaps she smells a way home,” Estrid said uncertainly. “I do not know how, but...we came in here through a door, and then it was gone. Maybe it is back, and open again. Maybe it is carrying a smell she knows.”
Hope lit up in my chest like a match, and I let it burn for a minute, warming me. There were ways in here; of course there had to be ways out. We clearly hadn’t come in the same way the hunters came out. Maybe it was like those fancy paper toys Mrs. O’Brien folded for kids at Christmastime, so that when you held it one way it was a closed-up box, and when you held it another there was an opening that you could put candy or nuts into. You couldn’t so much as see, let alone open, the door into the box unless you knew the trick.
Then I took a deep breath where Kit and the girl couldn’t see it, and blew out the match. “This place is full of rules only the hunters know how to break,” I said. “Maybe she knows the way out. I hope so. But if I was a hunter, that’s exactly where I’d be watching.”
Estrid nodded, and reluctantly let go of the dog. “I think you are right,” she said. “But I think we should go see where she is trying to take us. All the same.”
––––––––
I felt certain that Rowse, who had drilled us for years on exactly what you could eat off the land without gut-rot at best and a slow death at worst, would have objected to us eating fruit from a magical forest full of murderous undead hunters. But Estrid had made a sizeable pile of plums while she was in her tree, and we each ate a half-dozen as we followed Ulli through the woods, being too hungry and thirsty to argue the merits and demerits properly. They weren’t bad, though vexingly thick of skin over the sweet-sour orange flesh. I stowed the pits in my rucksack against Kit’s objections that he would not have cursed plumtrees growing on our farm back home, and that was that. It made me feel warm inside to hear him talk about going home, about living.
The trees changed bit by bit, going from mostly pine and spruce, or things that looked like pine and spruce, to flat-leaf trees that looked like oak and chestnut, to smaller and younger saplings, beech, birch, alder. It made me nervous to lose the shelter of the woods, but the dog kept moving, fast and confident, head up, and I reasoned that if danger were nearby she’d find a way of letting us know. Estrid was right about that; the dog did seem damn smart. Smarter than Obie, anyway, bless him.
We moved up a hillock covered in knee-high grass, sneezing at the golden dust that rose from our every step, and paused at the top to see something oddly familiar at the base of the next slope. The dog seemed happy enough to let us stop and stare at the thing, sitting smartly at Estrid’s feet with her ears pricked for any sounds of pursuit.
It looked like a drawing from a book of ghost stories we’d read in the school library—specifically, the ornate gates of a fancy cemetery which in the drawing had been locked in their own right as well as looped around and around with a dozen thick iron chains, locks protruding here and there from the links in a not very sensible fashion, since they weren’t locked to anything. I supposed at the time the illustrator must have been in a hurry. Behind it had been a sketchy suggestion of dozens of tombstones, and a few statues and monuments. This, the story had told us, illustrated the source of the ghosts who intended to harry the living until they died of fear, thus joining the original ghosts in the afterlife. A bit sacrilegious, Kit felt, because the Bible didn’t say anything about that happening after folks died, but we both liked the story anyway.
These gates were also tall, also curved and ornate and made of some dark metal—incredibly dear if we had seen them in Wrathford, because someone would have had to bring it by riverboat, and everything cost ten times as much that way. And they hung invitingly open, which was strange, since they weren’t attached to anything and you could just as easily have gone around them as through. The same fur-thick grass grew on the far side, visible through the foot-wide gaps in the bars, waving in the same wind as ours.
“Does this look like the door you came through?” I said to Estrid.
“No. Does it look like your door?”
“No,” said Kit. “But I don’t like standing out here. I feel like a mouse waitin’ for an owl. Let’s go look, at least. Maybe it’ll...I don’t know. I think it’s all right if we all go together.”
Estrid touched Ulli’s collar and we walked down the hillside, dog then girl then Kit then me. I slowed as we neared the gates but Ulli didn’t even hesitate, trotting through then turning expectantly a few feet behind the opening.
“Oh,” Estrid said, disappointed.
I felt the same way; I had thought, really believed, that the dog would have vanished when she stepped through the gate—going home, back to Estrid’s village. And that we two would go through next and vanish ourselves, back to Wrathford (and hopefully after the sun went down). “Oh well,” I said.
“Ulli, come back,” Estrid said, patting her thigh, then absently brushing the grass-dust from her dress. “Ulli, I said come. Come, Ulli.”
The dog didn’t budge, except for the brisk wag of her tail. Come on! What are you waiting for? she seemed to say with her whole body.
I shrugged and headed toward the gates, Kit walking close enough to me to bump my arm, Estrid a few paces behind us. As we passed through them, glancing up at the huge, graceful arch, I didn’t feel anything, didn’t hear anything—no crackle of lightning, no chanting or spells—but the world changed around us. Grass became stone underfoot; walls of glittering granite appeared out of nowhere, and the sky of hazy white deepened to a dark, autumnal blue.
We stood in a kind of courtyard, about the size of the church in Wrathford, with curved doorways set into the stone walls that rose higher than our heads. The room was open to the sky, but we were clearly trapped again—or worse than trapped, more like we were in a stock-chute, to be funneled through the three doors, each of us, to what I was increasingly certain would not be our homes.
“Luke.”
I glanced over at Kit, followed the trembling twitch of his chin.
On the stone floor, standing in the bright sunlight, Ulli cast no shadow.
––––––––
The dog twitched, twisted, and in silence billowed outwards like a thundercloud, the collar vanishing rather than snapping as I had expected, the shine dulling on her fur, the shape of her face spreading out, becoming broad and wolfish, the eyes becoming tiny and hot as coals buried in the shaggy black pelt.
Estrid squeaked in terror, and I wished I could have said It was never her, it was never really your dog the whole time, I’m sure of it, but the black dog was coming for us, as quick as a bear and roughly the same size.
No thought of fighting back. In a moment it had split us apart, Estrid fleeing through one doorway on our right, the creature on her heels, and Kit and I darting through the one in front of us, or so I thought.
When I turned, the doorway was gone and I was alone in another stone room, heart pounding so hard I felt dizzy, barely seeing the three other doorways on offer. How had Kit and I gotten separated? He had been right behind me. Right behind, closer than my shadow. I had felt his breath on my face as we ran. My whole body ached to call out for him, but I reckoned it wouldn’t do any good; the hunters knew what they were doing, and they didn’t want anybody in this thing—this maze, or castle, or whatever—together.
We’re never going home. We’re going to die here. Both of us.
I took a deep breath, felt the truth of the thought, and figured I might as well keep moving, because I was still alive for now, and if I just sat down on the ground and lost my mind I’d never see if things were going to get better or worse. Plus I was worried that if I stopped I might not be able to start again. Stubbornness could keep you rooted in one spot just as easy as it could keep you moving on a track.
I knew how to keep my orientation in the woods, but that involved knowing where the sun was and about what time it was, and I didn’t know that here; and anyway you couldn’t get too lost out in the scrublands, and didn’t need any of Rowse’s fancy methods of marking trees with a penknife or anything. So I went through the doors all on one side where I found them, always moving through the middle door if there was one, or right-hand if there wasn’t. Rowse trained us for the world we lived in, and a little circle outside of that. He didn’t think of the old world—the world of the city—or this one, the world of ghosts and monsters. Maybe you just couldn’t train someone for that. Like teaching a fish the principles of flight.
The first faint cry snapped my head up like a hunting dog hearing a gunshot, and I stood for second after second, straining my ears, willing it to come again so I could tell the direction.
There: right at the very edge of hearing. “Luuuke!”
My legs more than my mind responded and I let them go, trying to follow Kit’s voice through solid stone more than once, scraping my hands and even my face on the walls and the curved granite of the doorways. “Kit! Keep callin’!”
“Luke!”
Louder, much louder. Maybe just two or three rooms away. Not once, not a single time in my life, had either of us heard the other call out with that sound in our voice and not come running. He was the wary one, cautious as a cat, and I was all cut and no measure, but that was one thing we always did. Had to do, like it was in the blood.
And they knew that, whoever made this place, because I ran around a corner and right smack into the caller, almost bowling it over—it not him because it was a critter I’d never seen before, and certainly not my brother. Only by quick-stepping backwards did I manage to not knock our heads together, and the thing, about my height and size but with a blue-grey, oddly featherless beaked head, cawed, “Luke!” in a bone-chillingly perfect imitation of Kit’s voice one last time, shattering the illusion.
The beak, toothless but sharp as a buckknife, shot towards my face so quick that only by flinging my head to the side did I save my eye; the edge sliced through my cheek clean as a razor, leaving a hot red roar next to my ear, so painful I could about hear it. Reflexively, as it pulled its head back, I followed with a punch, coming in low and from the side to hit the flesh next to the hard beak. It connected, splitting my knuckles; the thing reeled in silence, surprised more than actually hurt, and I wound up my left arm and smashed it with the elbow this time.
That didn’t lay it out, but I didn’t think I could fight to a knock-out anyway, not a critter and not a fellow; you had to fight for a living to be able to do that except by luck, and all I’d learned today was that Kit and I weren’t too well-supplied with that. But the creature sprawled, and was slow to rise, and I darted forward and snatched the short blade from its belt, more like a kitchen knife than a sword, and spun through the closest doorway, thinking only of putting distance between us.
It was chasing me, I knew it was, and I forcefully set aside any thoughts of finding Kit and wracked my brain to figure out how to evade this thing, which obviously knew the labyrinth better than I did, or get the jump on it if it caught up to me. Even unarmed I thought it was probably a match for me, especially now, tired as I was, running down like a clockwork toy.
Worse yet, I could smell but not see that familiar rotten smell from the moments of the choosing—it was like it had pressed into my memory with a weight that moved everything else aside—and I knew the Wife and the Rider were near, near enough to smell, and it was terrible to not be able to see them. They might be anywhere in here, laughing at us, leisurely preparing to kill us both—one in front of the other, I was sure, for extra amusement on their part. I knew nothing about them except their love of cruelty, like nothing else.
What would Kit be doing now? Running, I hoped. Not hunkered in one of the three-doored rooms, hoping to be passed by, like the mouse he said he’d felt like. Running at least gave him a chance—gave us a chance—to avoid our pursuers, who couldn’t see us and could only guess where we might go next. I hoped he hadn’t been captured and killed already. It was terrible to not know. Because if he had been killed, what was the point in my going on? I was here for him. To keep him alive, if I could. Not to save my own life but his.
I slowed to a walk, unable to move any faster for the moment. Everything hurt as if I’d just had a hellfire whupping at school the day before, and followed that up with a full day of work. I didn’t think I’d shed enough blood to feel as lightheaded as I did, but my body obviously had other opinions. As I leaned against a wall to catch my breath, I heard surreptitious scraping on what sounded like the far side—footsteps on stone.
Kit would have poked an eye around the door, probably, sussed things out first. I grabbed my stolen sword and leapt into the room, aiming to get the element of surprise, which for a second worked even better than I could have hoped—the armoured man yelped, dropping his own sword at my approach, so that I found myself able to walk over and kick it away.
“It’s—” he began, his voice oddly high and fluting, as if he were imitating a bird. “How did y—”
I barely hesitated. “Didn’t I tell you that if you caught me, I’d just get out the minute you left?”
“Yes, but...but I just...a moment...” His mouth flapped open, closed again. For someone who lived in a magical maze, I thought, he certainly wasn’t dealing well with the implication that one of the visitors had magic of his own—a single boy who could disappear and reappear in a new place, seeking his revenge against his captors. It had been a pretty big gamble to assume that Kit had been caught and locked up, and that he’d find some way to make them think he had powers he didn’t.
But it was what I would have done if I’d been caught, and we’d had a lifetime of using our twinship to get up to trouble; and this time it seemed to have paid off. “I could cut your throat right here,” I said. “Is that what you want?”
“I’m sorry! I didn’t know you were working for them! They never told me!”
“It was a test,” I said. “A test you failed. Now let’s just go back and take a look at...at that lockup, so we can talk about passing the test next time.”
The hesitation had been a mistake, I realized at once. I had been about to say jail and then cell, but he had been suspicious enough without me not knowing where “I” had just escaped from. His expression still didn’t quite say I’ve just figured out there’s two of you but it was leaning towards Something’s not right here.
With the armour he had on—gappy but thick—neither his sword nor mine would make much of a difference. We seemed to conclude it at the same moment, and he dove for his blade as I leapt for him with my sword pommel out. He threw up an arm instinctively as I landed, but he was already bent over and his balance lost the fight to our combined weight; we went down in a pots-and-pans riot of clangs, metal against stone, and as fast as I could I wrenched off his helmet and put my full weight into hitting him right between his unprotected eyes with the sword.
I was scratched and cut everywhere now, the armour practically being a weapon in its own right, but he did seem out—really out, like a snuffed candle—and I took a few minutes to catch my breath again before dragging him carefully to the corner of the wall and sitting him against it. He was a tall fellow, and the armour on his shoulders gave him an extra couple of inches. Even so, once I was standing on them, I was still far below the top of the wall.
“Sorry ‘bout this,” I murmured. “But not real sorry.”
I climbed down, reversed his prone body—which seemed to take forever, as he was a deadweight and as heavy as a sow—and leaned him the other way, on his knees with his face wedged into the wall. Now when I carefully climbed up onto his shoulders I was close enough to jump, barely getting my fingertips over and dangling there with my boots in thin air as he slid over to one side, moaning quietly.
For a second it occurred to me that I should have quieted him for good—once I’d hit him on the head, nothing had stopped me from cutting his throat. He’d have done the same to me, I knew, or Kit, if someone had ordered him to. But the thought made my stomach turn, and anyway it didn’t matter now. I hauled myself inch by shaking inch up to the top of the wall, my boots scrabbling on the stones for purchase, and finally found myself crouching on the flat stones, as wide as the sidewalk in the city, staring out at the labyrinth.
Where was the Wife, where the Rider? Where was their pack? I heard faint voices, rustling, scraping, the sound of metal on stone here and there; but the whole place was otherwise eerily quiet. I wondered where Estrid had gone, and if she had escaped the black dog. I hoped so.
There was a center to the thing—I could see it in the distance, a round dais of white stone rather than dark grey, sparkling in the sunlight. The middle of the maze wasn’t the way out, it logically couldn’t be, but perhaps if I could see the whole thing from its slightly higher ground, the way out would be visible from there, and so might Kit’s prison. Rowse again: Find high ground for vantage and to fight from, if you have to. This does not apply to bears, who do not care about slopes. And anyway I liked the idea of having cheated the hunters by climbing out of the maze; they weren’t the only ones who could cheat.
––––––––
The white platform wasn’t empty. It contained a white throne, carved out of something more like rock crystal than stone, and the throne contained a woman, very tall and pale, with long red hair fluttering in some breeze I could not perceive, loose on her shoulders. Like the Wife, she seemed to be wearing a gown from another age—dark red velvet trimmed with white fur and embroidered with gold, unpleasant patterns twisting in a way that made me queasy to look at for some reason. The tight sleeves disappeared into red leather gloves that reached to her elbow.
She looked surprised to see me, inasmuch as her expression changed slightly—the flick of an eyebrow, the side of her bloodless mouth moving for an instant. I tried to imagine how I looked to her and felt a moment of humiliation: a ragged farmboy, covered in blood, swaying atop the sacred stone of her dais and holding a stolen sword. An insult to her existence and her rule, as if I had set off a firecracker in the center of the church. She wanted me to feel small and meaningless, and I did—it washed over me in waves.
“Not many are able to find my throne room,” she said, her voice a pleasant purr. I thought it was odd that the movements of her mouth didn’t seem to match what I heard, but I was getting used to the idea of magic not working in a way that ever made sense. “And they generally come...the other way.”
“Who are you?” I said after trying to come up with a response to what she’d actually said, and failing. “Are you...one of them? The hunters?”
“Mm. So you’ve discovered that there are more than simply yours.”
“I think I’m discovering that the world is a big place,” I said.
She didn’t smile, but her eyes—bright red, I noticed, like her hair—twinkled briefly, like a star on a clear night. She still didn’t strike me as either particularly friendly or particularly murderous; she was like a dog, I thought, a strange dog, sniffing me out as friend or foe. And she hadn’t answered my question. In a way I hadn’t expected her to. It didn’t matter who she was or who I was; only what she would do to me now that I was here in this place, which I suspected to be anything she wished to do.
Surprising me, she said, “Yes, Lucas Hall. I am a hunter. I was the first hunter—the first queen of the wild hunt. Ten thousand years ago and ten thousand miles from your home I took up my dogs and my most loyal gamekeeper, and we ran through the black woods at midnight with my pack of beloved hounds, seeking the heart of the man I had chosen instead of a stag. And when I had caught him and eaten of that most precious of meals, then the people rejoiced. Their children would live; their women would not die in birth; their crops would flourish and the animals run into their snares and arrows.”
I stared at her. “But that’s not...”
“It is. Ever it has been. Even for you.”
No, it’s not true. Not for us, not for Wrathford. It’s her, the Wife—taking her revenge against the town, or something like that. She hates us and she wants one of us to die so that she can relive the killing of her husband again and again and again for eternity. “She’s...she doesn’t...it’s not a sacrifice. That’s only in the Bible...and it’s...it’s an allegory. No one really...”
“It is a sacrifice,” the pale woman in red said, serenely. “In your particular case she gives you the rain first—the rain you need for your dry land, to fill up your reservoirs and water your crops. Trusting that you will allow the hunt to proceed as she wishes, and she will have her due. Perhaps the townsfolk have forgotten that—or they have written a new story for her that is closer to what they wish to be true. But wishing does not change what she is. Nor what we do in the hunt.”
“And this is what you do.” I could barely force the words out, feeling a wave of exhaustion come over me exactly like water, warm and heavy. If I had thought the ride was cruelly inexplicable before my brother was chosen, now it was the most meaningless thing I had ever heard of in my life. “You make people into animals so that you can say we’ve paid for the things you give us.”
“Of course not. It’s so that we don’t take them away.” This time she did smile, her teeth whiter even than the throne on which she sat. “Do they speak, in your time, in your place, of the blasted lands?”
“That’s different.”
“Mm?”
“That’s...that’s not where the old gods ruined the land,” I said, hearing my words slow to a crawl even as they emerged from my mouth. Dark dots danced in front of my eyes. Her smile didn’t waver. “That’s where folks...ruined the land...and the gods were killed or driven off...it was the other way around.”
“Was it now.”
It took all my strength to keep standing; I didn’t know what would happen if I fainted and fell off the wall. She didn’t have the look of someone who would come down and rescue me. I thought about Estrid again, and her belief in the devil, and the woman who sat before me, shining and clean—wondering if she was the devil herself, much older than the story in the Bible, so that the folks who had written it had not invented or discovered a devil, only remembered, for the devil had always been with us. Long before Jesus’ time. Long before we could write down the story of the sacrifice. “What will you do now?”
“Me? What a surprising question. What will you do now, Lucas?”
“Go try to find my brother, I guess.”
“Yes, it seems that he is the true quarry, and you are here on illicit business.” Her smile fell away slowly, creeping across her face like a spider till it was gone. “It does seem that way, indeed. But let me tell you, my dear child, that the Wife and her minion are eagerly awaiting him back in your world—to conclude the hunt, and accept the price. He is currently in a cell far below ground, at the base of my white tower. So he cannot, unfortunately, speak for his own fate. Are you prepared to do so for him?”
“Bring him up. I want to see him.”
“I do not take orders from prey,” she said lightly. “Now. Shall I send him back to die? Or will you go in his place, and let him stay here?”
I stared at her, ears ringing. And for no reason I thought again of the house after our parents had died: the quiet, the sound of the wind outside. We had never particularly thought of our family as a loud one—no singing or games or other boisterousness like some of the folks we knew—but with those two voices gone, it seemed we could barely speak. It was not the absence of sound but of love too that we felt. Not that we had ever particularly felt loved by our parents. But we had felt safe. In my head they had become the same thing, and that was what I had resolved to give to Kit, if I could. To never fail him. Or at least never fail to keep trying.
“Send us both back,” I said. “Please. Don’t split us up.”
“Because you think he will die without you? That she will kill him? That is what is meant to happen.”
“I think you’re right.” I swallowed past the rock-hard knot in my throat. “But even that I can’t let him do alone.”
“Then you will both die. Constance Thompson is...scrupulous about the rules she chooses to follow. You cannot help him in the hunt.”
“We know that.”
“So you will simply watch him perish? Do you think that is what he wants? What he would say if he were in your place?”
“I didn’t say that.”
She studied me appraisingly, perhaps assessing what the hell kind of help I could be in my condition anyway, perhaps something else. Omens and signs, that was what she made me think of. The devil not a black dog at all. Offering temptation to see if I loved anything more than my brother. Even life. What else would the devil do?
At last she said, “Very well. You have no weapons, no secret knowledge. It is inevitable that you will both die. But allow me to warn you, Lucas: even in these last minutes of your lives, allow yourself to grow into the man you will become, not the one you think your brother will become. And vice-versa, of course.”
“Thank you,” I said, not meaning it.
“You are welcome.” She moved one hand, a white flash like the flick of a bird’s wing, and darkness flew down.
––––––––
The sound of the horn woke me from what seemed to be a waking sleep—I was standing, stumbling, something touching my arm, sending bolts of pain up it as regular as morse code. Kit—alive, dusty, bloody, bruised, holding my elbow, whispering my name.
“What—”
“We need to go!” he gasped. “I don’t know what’s goin’ on, but I can hear them calling for the pack—they have our trail. My trail. I don’t know.”
I looked around wildly, seeing where the woman in red had put us—within shouting distance of the river, for whatever secret reasons of her own, perhaps simply that it seemed like as good a place as any other. The light around us was hot and golden, clearer than usual with all the dust beaten down. Sunset was coming but the sun wasn’t down yet, not all the way, and it had to be completely below the horizon before the hunt was over.
We bolted instinctively for the cliffs, though the sign for the steps—a big one, lime-washed and kept bright and crisp by the church volunteer group—was far in the distance. Too far for us to reach before we were seen. I took off my rucksack and tossed it aside as I ran, and Kit did the same, for what little speed it could give us.
There was no question of jumping—from this height we’d be jelly even if we managed to hit the water, which was unlikely. And I had the horrible suspicion that something far, far worse would happen to you after death if you killed yourself during the hunt than even Rowse was aware of, or else more folks would do it to avoid the terror and humiliation of the chase. We hesitated on the edge all the same, gasping, listening to the golden notes of the horn sound and sound and sound at our backs.
“We can’t be seen together, not now,” Kit wheezed. “This is our last chance, the last, the last, Luke, the last—this is where you leave me.”
“I know. Kit, listen, you gotta climb—get down a little ways and see if you can find one of them columns of rocks that’s looser than the others. I’ll get all the way down to the bottom and act like bait. All these rocks, they’re barely held together. You can drop one on ‘em, I’m sure of it. We just need them to be in the right place.”
“Like at the culvert.”
“Don’t know if we can kill ‘em, but it’ll slow ‘em down. We only need a few minutes, I’m pretty sure. Look at the sky.”
He didn’t look; he was staring at my face, mirroring my expression, one of oddly terrified determination, wanting to say goodbye, or something else, not wanting to say it either, because it was such a terrible thing to say. At last he said, “No. You get the rock. I’ll go down. It’s me they’re chasing.”
“Kit, no. Remember back at the culvert—”
“I know,” he said steadily. “I remember. But this time I’ll go where I need to go. You just gotta wait till I’m in the right spot, that’s all. Not before.” Trust me, his face said, and I tried to think of how to explain that I did, it was just...then in a flash he was gone, picking his way down the stones ahead of me, spider-sure even as he left the light behind him.
I waited till he had a good head start, then climbed down as well, sticking my raw and bloodied fingers into each crack between the stones and gritting my teeth against the pain. Every movement sent what felt like a lightning-bolt between my fingertips and my heels, flashing in my vision so I could barely see. I hadn’t realized how much skin I’d taken off climbing up to the wall in the labyrinth. It occurred to me, somewhat crazily, that I might have a career as a criminal now, without my fingerprints...I stifled a giggle and kept descending, keeping my eyes firmly on the rock ahead of me, feeling with one hand and two boots each time for the horizontal cracks in the columns. Columnar basalt. Don’t forget that. Whatever Rowse had said, something something rapidly cooling magma.
After about twenty feet I moved slowly to one side, further into the shadow cast by the opposite cliff, feeling the rock cold under my fingers already, trying to see with what remained of my fingers instead of using my eyes. The wind was dry and cool, slapping me without warning every few minutes. Would it blow me straight off the cliff? I hoped not.
The sword I’d stolen off the bird-thing was still stuck into my belt; I removed it slowly, my imagination showing it with perfect clarity slipping from my sweaty hand and toppling into the abyss of the riverbed so far below, tumbling and spinning end over end. But I didn’t drop it, and I told my imagination to hush up, and I began, very carefully, balancing on a two-inch ledge at best, to work the blade into the crack between two likely-looking pieces of rock, already leaning a tiny bit away from the columns behind them. It was far too heavy for me to move; I hoped only that the blade would give me enough leverage to tilt it, and then gravity would do the rest as its weight shifted.
Kit was a dot far below, only visible when he moved, like a lizard camouflaged against a rock. I was still staring down at him when not more than twenty paces away, the pack arrived and began to seethe over the edge of the stone. I froze, holding my breath. Don’t look at me, don’t look, don’t look, don’t sniff me...But they screamed and yelped and slithered over without hesitating, an oily black centipede making its way swiftly down the cliff-face as if it weren’t practically vertical. And behind them, easy, triumphant, even laughing—a strange, cold sound—came the Rider and the Wife, wading into the mass of the pack and letting it carry them down inexorably toward my brother.
“No!” he cried, the tiny voice floating up like a wisp of smoke. “No! I won’t let you—I won’t be the Rider! No!”
Good bait, good bait. Until she touched him the hunt wasn’t over; but there was still too much sun in the sky. It was a wonderment, how long those minutes were when they were counting down to death.
They sped up at the sound of his voice, and I shoved the sword ever more furiously into the space behind the column of stone, feeling the metal give, the warning sound of the handle beginning to separate from the blade. My vision was shrinking to a dark tunnel, only a tiny dot of light in the center, the last of the sunlight reflecting off an inch or so of the sword. My heart had begun to skip beats with the effort of pushing on the stone. Idly I wondered what would give first—the sword, the rock, or me.
“No!” Kit screamed, or Now!
The sword snapped. I jammed my hand into the crack and pushed as hard as I could, hearing stone grit at the bottom, hearing the bones of my arm creak—and then the weight was gone, and I overbalanced and nearly fell from the cliff, snatching at the free edge where the piece of stone had once fit.
It fell with a majestic, ponderous slowness, and even had time to flip once—head over heels—before it hit. The sound echoed all the way up and down the river, and even the stone of the cliff under my hands trembled at the impact.
Silence, save for the distant sound of the river itself. No dogs. No laughter. No one calling my name. But maybe the silence was a trap too. Maybe the silence was bait. Trying to lure me down, knowing there were two of us, knowing that rock hadn’t fallen on its own at that precise moment.
I looked at the cliff opposite, twisting my neck painfully—the light still gold but fading, becoming lilac and pink.
We had done all we could; we had nothing left in our bag of tricks. It did me no good to stay up here. I began to climb down, slowly, my limbs heavy with dread.
Everything was still except the water, which rushed along as if nothing had happened at all. The block of stone, looking far bigger on the ground than I had thought on the cliff-side, had struck the Rider and his horse, and some of the pack, too, it seemed. Blood and black matter and scraps of flesh formed a kind of halo around that end of the column. The other end had shattered on impact, and Kit’s head and one arm protruded from a tumble of beautifully-hexagonal stones. I went to him slowly, stepping around what remained of Webb and the horse, and began to shift the rubble away.
The Wife watched me, her eyes narrow and furious. “You have violated the rules of the hunt,” she hissed. It didn’t sound quite human—more like wind through dried leaves.
Kit moaned; I got my hands under his armpits and pulled him free. He had been lucky that some of the larger hexagons had bridged over one another, protecting him from the worst of the shrapnel when the stone hit; but he certainly had a broken leg, and at least a couple of ribs. His face was bloodless and gaunt.
After a minute it occurred to me that the Wife might be waiting for a reply. I looked up at her, imperious and immortal, and completely unscathed by our final gambit. “But the sun’s down,” I said. “Isn’t it? The hunt’s over. And you didn’t catch him.”
She glared at me for a long time, her gaze darting between Kit and me, and then back to the dogs, back to the red wreckage of Phineas Webb, finally back to me. And then she was gone, as if she had never stood there in the first place, and we returned to a world without magic.
––––––––
Rowse came up the steps, gestured with the covered basket that some of the church ladies had made up, and said, “Kitchen table?”
“Yes please.” I was still having trouble with my right arm, where the sword-cut had been grievously worsened by my scrambling around on cliff-faces, and both my hands hurt constantly, weeping blood and lymph into the bandages I’d had on for a week. Mrs. Edwards came by to tend to them, and look after Kit, but there wasn’t much she could do for the pain. “We’re right grateful for the food, Mr. Rowse.”
He grunted. Was I imagining it, or were his eyes glittering with tears under the shadow of his hat brim? No, I was making it up. He said, “Folks gotta help one another, or else what kind of life is this? I got some fellers ready to help with the farm tomorrow morning, too. Took me a while to round ‘em up, and I don’t know that some of ‘em know what they’re doing, but we’ll get by.”
“Thank you, sir.” I sat heavily on the chair by the stove; Kit’s sickbed had been set up on the other side, as Mrs. Edwards said it was important that we keep the air warm and dry while he got better. A pan of water steamed on the range, ready for her visit. “I have a question, sir.”
He raised one silver eyebrow.
“That man who shot at the Rider. Kit thought maybe he was kin to Webb, and so to us somehow...do you know if that’s true?”
Rowse seemed taken aback, as if that wasn’t the question he’d been expecting, then nodded. “As it happens, he was. His name was William Webb. Worked at the mill north of town.” He sighed, took his hat off, and scratched behind his ear. “We gave him a headstone in the cemetery, even though there...weren’t anything to bury, when we went to look. And Mrs. Edwards had us make up one for Phineas Webb too. Two graves, no coffins. What a world.”
“So what do you think?” I said after I’d digested all that. “What will she do when she comes back in seven years? Do you think she’ll...she’ll try to get revenge? Or something worse? You know more about them than anyone.”
“Not any more,” he said.
I glanced over at Kit, whose mark had faded when the sun went down; his forehead was white now, the white of near-death, like he’d never look tan and normal again. “We were talking about leaving,” I said. “Wrathford, I mean. After this. If we...if we made it. Taking the riverboat down to Sorestead.”
“Mm,” Rowse said, stroking his moustache. “Don’t want to be here when she comes back, hmm?”
“No, it’s not that.”
“I didn’t mean to cause no offense,” he said, and stood. We shook hands, solemnly. He said, “Well, I do hope you two’ll think it over, when he’s up on his feet again. Town needs men like you. More ‘n ever. They got enough like me.”
“It was you who got us through it, Mr. Rowse. All the schooling you gave us.”
“I don’t believe so,” he said, heading back out and tipping his hat briefly. “I think it were something else entirely, if you happen to want my opinion on it. Anyway—think it over, that’s all I ask. We’ve got our problems here, no one’s denying that. But there’s always work to be done. Never stops.”
“Mr. Rowse,” I said again, when he was fully outside of the house and I had shut the door behind me, “can I ask you one more question?”
“More curious’n a cat,” he said. “Last one, son.”
“Are you...were you ever chosen for the hunt? Were you... one of the three?”
He sighed again, then chuckled under his breath. Maybe swore too; I thought I heard it. “It was a long time ago,” he finally said. “I’m sorry to have misled you boys so long. It’s just . . .”
“No one ever talks about it.”
“That’s right. And that’s not gonna change, so don’t start with me.” He went down the last few steps, then shook his finger at me. “And don’t tell nobody. That’s a story I don’t mind telling you and your brother, one of these days. So you just send word when he’s ready to hear it.”
And that means if you want to hear the story, you have to stay right here, I almost added in his voice, but waved instead and watched him wander back out and onto the main road, shaking his head.
Back inside, I unpacked the basket the church ladies had made up for us—good Lord, an entire pie, and sour cherry, Kit’s favourite (I preferred apple myself). That reminded me of the plum pits I still had, wrapped in a kerchief in the pantry; I had thought they would disappear when we were sent back to the world, but they were still there, stubbornly solid and real. Maybe I would plant them quietly somewhere in the back forties before Kit got up, so he’d never know. I just had to know if they’d grow.
Weakly, Kit said, “Was that Mr. Rowse that was just in here?”
“Yep.” I took out more packages—cornbread, tins of sardines from far away, dried apples, jars of preserves. “What’s this? Pickled okra?”
“I like okra.”
“We are not kin by blood,” I said severely. “That proves it. One of these days Mrs. Edwards will find the adoption records to prove it.”
“All those slimy little seeds, delicious.”
I ignored him and stacked everything neatly on the edge of the table. Right down at the bottom were a couple of paper packets of chicory coffee, pasted shut and neatly labelled with Rowse’s crisp, old-fashioned cursive. I tore one open and diverted some of Mrs. Edwards’ bandage-water into the coffee pot.
“How did we ever get back?” Kit said, watching me. “I keep wondering. The last thing I could rightly recall was being in...a kind of jail cell, like the one at the sheriff’s office. A little drunk tank with iron bars and no bed.”
I dragged the chair over to the bed to get a better look at him, carefully avoiding putting a chair-leg down on Obie, who refused to leave Kit’s side. His colour wasn’t too good, but he was feeling strong enough to talk, and that was something. So I told him, and added, “She said it wasn’t what you would have wanted, but I figured I had to make a call. I didn’t know if it was the right one or not. Or what you’d have picked or not. Maybe you’d have wanted one of us to live, even if it was apart, because one’s better than none.”
“Isn’t it?”
“Well, sure it is, but...”
“In math, anyway.” He closed his eyes again. “You’re my brother. One’s the same as none. I’d have said the same thing.”
I watched him for a while, keeping an ear out for the coffee. “I told Rowse we were thinking about leaving town,” I said. “Maybe going to Sorestead.”
“Or,” he said, eyes still shut, “I was thinking.”
“Oh, Lord.”
“That we could go back to the city. And ask some questions. About the collective...about what they know. Maybe try to go back to that place. Go back for Estrid.”
“Or at least find out what happened to her,” I said slowly. “Maybe that’s possible.”
“It’s not about settling the score,” he said.
“Uh huh.” That doesn’t sound like you, I almost teased him. You, the worry-wart...it occurred to me just then that I hadn’t told him the last thing the pale woman in red had told me, because it hadn’t seemed relevant. But maybe it was. I still held it close, thinking. “Maybe,” I said again. “When you’re better.”
“It’s a big world,” he murmured.
It was that. I got up and poured us both coffee but he was asleep again, and I let him rest; he’d wake up in an hour or so when Mrs. Edwards came. I sat back down on the chair and stroked Obie, and thought about Estrid, trapped and alone, and about the city, and about the forest, and about what I did believe, if it wasn’t in the devil.
I supposed when you came right down to it I believed in the body and in the thing in the body that you might call a soul, and the proof of the soul being that we could feel love; I believed it was my duty to defend my brother and to never leave him. I believed there must be things that separated human from both animal and monster, and that to be human, you had to live those things. That to be human is an active thing and that you had to wake up every morning and choose it. To not let life make you into prey.
And maybe in the end that meant I had to believe it was better to stay in Wrathford and help rebuild. To believe we could find someplace to put a new well, and hope we’d hit sweet water this time.