CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

The figure at the crossroads tensed his muscles and drew himself up to full height: There would be no passing this day.

No one had ever passed through the forest untouched; the figure before him had lived in it and traversed it a second time with apparent effortlessness. He had worked hard and suffered much to keep the man before him alive—soon, he alone would possess all elements of the knowledge and their connotative power.

In his altered condition, Sidrus had taken weeks to circumnavigate the outskirts and reach this point of interception. His anxiety to be enlightened peaked and crested within his broken body, sending torturous spasms of adrenaline into his healing wounds. He tolerated the sensation unflinchingly: It would not last long. When he finally entered the sacred ground, in command of the Erstwhile and able to touch the most sacred centre, all things would be put right.

Sidrus had not reached the vial in time. The Mithrassia had begun to thrive before he had even reached the outskirts of the city: The evil old cunt must have lied about the hours he had to spare. When Sidrus had the knowledge of the Vorrh and was properly healed, he would return and slowly split the medicine man apart, at a far, far slower pace than he had ripped open the dove with the antidote.

The contents of the bottle had stopped the horror from finishing him, but his body was a shattered wreck: His genitals were gone; three of his toes had fallen off and only two of his fingers were left intact; most of his teeth had been eaten away and his face was a putrefied mess; a quarter of his adrenal system was blighted to smithereens. It would all be rectified when he entered the sacred core.

The Bowman had stopped, as if jarred by the sight of him. Sidrus had seen this before and made some quick mental adjustments.

“Come closer, friend. I mean you no harm,” he slurred, his twisted mouth diffracting the intensity of his words. “I am Sidrus, a Boundary Holder of the great forest. I hold warrant for these lands.”

Williams stepped closer to the insatiable hunger.

“I will not shake your hand. It is no longer a custom in these parts, and anyway, you would find the sensation displeasing. As you can see, I have been the victim of a terrible illness. It is not infectious and I am not ashamed of my injuries. Please, do not be worried about my appearance.”

“I am not,” answered Williams, almost truthfully.

“You do not know me, but I have been aware of you for many years. I have protected you from much danger at the hands of hired mercenaries.” Williams seemed blank and disinterested in these facts and did not show the slightest degree of gratitude.

“You no longer carry your bow?”

“Bow?”

“The living bow that guided you for years.”

Williams shrugged and said, “I have no knowledge of these things. I think you are speaking to the wrong person.”

Sidrus was astonished at the effrontery of these lies; Williams saw the eaten face shift into the expression of the spectral vision from the slip of vanishing paper. He understood it as a warning and held his bag closer to him.

“You can trust me; I have done much to protect you.”

“So you keep saying, but why? And from who?”

Sidrus enjoyed games of cat and mouse only when he was undeniably the feline; this display of churlish arrogance was beginning to annoy him, but he played along, the act of ignorance not distracting his sights from the end goal.

“You have enemies and adversaries who did not want you passing through the Vorrh again. Your previous colleagues branded you a deserter, a murderer, and worse. They wanted you dead or banished, not wandering through the lands of uprising. A bounty was put on your head; all manner of scum have tried to slay you and collect the reward.”

Williams realised that this man’s disease had gone deeper than his face; it must have chewed at his brain. “I don’t know what you are talking about.”

“About the Possession Wars?”

Williams shook his head, writing disbelief and disinterest in deep marks around his eyes.

“About the Vorrh?”

“The what?”

“The Vorrh. The great forest.”

“What forest?”

Sidrus’s face could no longer be described. In fury, he pointed behind Williams, who turned, looked, and irritably slumped back. “I see no forest.”

“I have given flesh, money, and years to save you. I suffer like this and you mock me?!”

Sidrus was in a rage of tears.

He drew two black canes out from beneath his coat.

“I mean you no offence,” said Williams, “but what you speak of holds no meaning for me. There is nothing like a forest out there; I know because I have been walking for days. There is only a vast, dismal mire.”

Sidrus, so eternally contained and controlled, was finally undone. The truth that he had sought for so long, and come so very close to, slipped further from him with every word. Had the Bowman really forgotten all and been blinded into an illusion? Was this the ultimate effect of exposure to the forest, its greatest defensive irony? Or was this all a foul, vindictive game, a vicious lie to keep him from a life of riches and wealth beyond all imagining?

“Have you ever travelled through or lived in a forest?” asked Sidrus, searching out any avenue that might separate truth from lie.

“I have the dimmest recollection of a forest destroyed; broken stumps and hacked roots; a place of mud and death, illuminated by thunder and lightning that tore men into pieces. But that was a long time ago and far from where we now stand.”

More lies.

“Were you alone? Apart from men, what other creatures dwelt there?”

Williams paused, as if in thought, his hand moving slowly into the corner of his canvas bag. “I can think of only two: mules and angels.” The pistol clicked into gear and he swung it up, letting the bag drop to the floor. But he was no match for the speed of indignation. Before he could commit to a shot, Sidrus bounded across the space between them, arcing one of the sticks up and over, its practised blade exposed. It severed the bag and its strap, slicing through the tendons of Williams’s arm. Sidrus spiralled around him in a blur; he was standing behind the Bowman before his cry had reached Sidrus’s ears.

“I have had enough of your mocking lies!”

Williams grabbed at his bleeding arm; the rest of the world fell away from under him.

When he came to, it was darker; the shadow, which seemed to construct the room he was in, smelt rank. He gagged against his consciousness and tried to move. Nothing shifted; he was held in some sort of constraint. He could hear the wind nearby; it sounded as though he were outside, on some desolate landscape. Then he made out the snapped lead and its fringed remnants of light: a stained glass window, long, meagre, and broken, its coloured frames all stolen years before. He recalled the tiny chapel behind the figure at the crossroads; its description fit his rudimentary assessment of the space he strained against: He had been tied to the simple altar.

Sidrus’s voice had changed: There was no sign of his earlier emotion. The anger had been distilled.

“I mean to have my answer from you today. I will not tolerate any more of your foolishness. I have been a servant to the Vorrh all of my life; I have tended to its needs and commands; I have engaged with its watchers and culled its predators. I know that the child they call the Sacred Irrinipeste opened your soul to it, and I know you carry its essence locked in your heart and head. My knowledge of it is extensive; yours will make it complete.”

Williams choked against his restraints of rope, throttled by his own ignorance.

“If you will not give it to me,” continued Sidrus, “then I will take it.”

“I have nothing to give!” spluttered Williams with all of his strength.

“Then I shall cut you down and peel you away, until you are only your voice. You will have no choice but to tell.”

The wind cascaded through the broken window, flickering the last of the afternoon light. It bent the puckered fragments of clear glass and the fatigued lead arteries that held them in their tenuous position.

“It is said by some that parts of memory reside outside of the brain, saturating themselves into the muscles and running the length of the spine. I believe that to be true, and so I am going to dig them out, one by one; wake them and release them, so that what you know of the core will be free to reach my ears.”

The purposeful torturer attached a tourniquet to Williams’s upper thigh. A small brazier smouldered nearby, a quenching iron glowing in its heat. Sidrus saw the Englishman’s terrified eyes staring at it.

“Not a drop of your precious blood will be wasted. By the time I finish, it will exceed the organs it has so faithfully served. It will rush and buffer your brain with overrich oxygen; only your pain will equal its need to empty its power. Together they will shriek the truth that you refuse to give.”

The first cut felt like only pressure, until he skinned the nerve and everything in Williams’s mind turned white.

—

He did not know how many times he had passed out or how many times he had come to. New agonies awaited him with every breath. The night arrived and the wind dropped; he was about to scream again when he felt it change, its velocity fluttering and calming into a whisper.

“Now,” he heard himself say. But now what?

He felt something, far outside the chapel, searching him out, rushing to his side. Was this what Sidrus searched for? A secret approaching, to be given to him and then passed on? A secret whose journey was triggered by blood? Sidrus moved closer.

“Speak up, Oneofthewilliams: Your time has come, as I told you it would.”

The whistle outside was shrill and fast, only moments away. Sidrus was oblivious; he pushed his disgusting face closer to his prey’s mouth, but the sounds he heard had no meaning.

Williams saw the voice from the corner of his eye. It flashed white in the window for a fraction of a second, and he recognised it as the first arrow, the one that Este had made for him; he almost smiled before it sliced through his throat, pinning his words to the altar.

Sidrus sprang back in a shower of blood, his white face drenched pink.

“No!” he bellowed at the dying man, tugging desperately at the white arrow impaled in his neck. But it was no use: Williams was gone, and the arrow would not move. Sidrus slumped backwards, defeated and dejected. He wiped a shaking grey hand over his bloodied face. He sat there until the dawn’s grey sheen made the chapel hover. The thin light moved across the room, momentarily highlighting a tiny painting of a heavily bearded prophet, standing in a flat black landscape of featureless insistence. The colourless prism illuminated the dead man’s face to reveal an expression of pleased contentment. No man who died in such pain should look like that. Sidrus scrabbled to his feet and grabbed at the ropes around the corpse. There was a smile somewhere in that face, under the bone, working like a battery and powering an expression of total peace. Sidrus shook the dead body in rage. The arrow fell loose, as though it had merely been resting there.

He could bear no more. Grabbing his things together, he speedily shovelled the blunted probes and knives into a sack. The brazier had not fully cooled and he left it behind, pushing impatiently out into the damp, brightening air.

He ran towards the forest. It took him an hour to reach its sanctified enclosure; it already felt different, less troubling: He felt at ease there. Had he got it? Were those words, those few, strange words, the secret? Could he at last go deeper and contact the Erstwhile directly, communicate with them in some tangible way? The forest warmed and flamed with beauty as the full power of the sun rose over it: He was welcome here. He had it. It had begun.

—

He dropped the sack of tools and made straight for the core. His patience had run out: He needed to find the older being and be cleansed of the wounds he had already carried for too much of his life. It was midday; huge shafts of light flooded down from the canopy, shuddering with life and birdsong. He could see the swallows darting in the sky between the spaces of trees; something rustled in the undergrowth, followed by a trill in the air; the swallows spun into a line and parted the leaves above. A great arc formed and glided down from the clouds to the forest floor. It approached at speed, almost upon him before he understood what shrilled inside the arc. It was another arrow, old, white, and twisted. It spun to the ground with huge purpose. It struck its target: a grey-skinned creature that had been hiding in the undergrowth. It fell to the ground in front of Sidrus with a force that echoed through his bones. It cried out, thrashing momentarily before falling silent.

Birds spiralled upwards, fluttering through the chattering leaves and out to quietness. He bent to examine the creature’s grey skin, unable to decide if it was man or animal; it seemed much too shrivelled, as if it had been dead for years rather than seconds. His interest faded with the recollection of his purpose; he walked away from it, not noticing the two black ghosts who approached in his departure.

Tsungali disregarded the mangled presence in the chapel: There was nothing to be gained from such a lost and empty being; he was like a white sack, limp and vacant, standing only because he did not have the wisdom to fall. Tsungali and his grandfather approached the other dead thing. The old man pulled the arrow they had shot from Cyrena’s garden out of its parched grey skin. He gave the arrow to Tsungali without his eyes ever leaving the carcass. His other hand circled above his trembling head. He knew what they had killed but could not believe that it had strayed so far from perfection. He lifted the creature’s hand and parted the fingers, removing moss and lichen that clung there. The fingernails had turned into horny claws. He pulled away tendrils of ivy that grew under the skin and what might have once been veins and arteries. The distorted covering fell away like parchment and revealed what had once been a human hand. The first human hand. The grandfather turned away and told Tsungali to shoot the same arrow out of the forest, pointing his attention into the shafts of swirling light.

From the moment the arrow left the bow, followed on its journey by the duo of earnest spirits, Sidrus’s vision started to fail. The sound of the bow echoed behind his eyes; they quivered in his head and lost focus. His skin crawled with a shiver that had previously been the avatar of Mithrassia, but this was something else, something altogether different. It must be the blood, he thought, or else the thrill at the beginning of his repair. It was as though his entire body was alive with thousands of ants, running over and inside his changing skin, rewriting his structure and purpose. He came to a murky pool and plunged his white head into its brackish waters to wash off any last traces of Williams’s death. The water felt cool and cleansing against the heat of his purpose, his exposed body embraced by the closeness of the trees. He emerged and dried his wrecked face carefully on his shirt, breathing heavily into its comfort. When he opened his tight, button eyes, all that lay before him was mile upon mile of desolate black peat.