CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

 

YHEY TRAVELLED ALONG the hidden threads of the world, Ralas joined to Tricky by their hands, woven together at the fingers, matched at the palm where the lines of their lives surged and ran. It was nothing like his first experience of magic seizing him, through the splash in the water, using an element to translate instantly from one point to another. Although she warned him she was about to use another trick, showed him the spindle and the reel, talking him through the strange simplicity of casting the line, when she seized him the moment was as different from his previous life as stone from air. For one thing all the pain went away.

It was like he became music itself. The two of them were tiny complexities of constant themes and motifs, whirling in a living, dynamic throng, mastered by a single mighty composer into a symphony that was so vast it was beyond his understanding. They travelled on the melody of Tricky’s line, searching for its resolution at the one point in the universe where the cadence came to a natural close. All around them the whirling dance of the world paced itself to the beat of time, to the harmony and discord of its billion parts, and he was a part of it, a song of his own, brief but essential.

And he was once again standing on the kind support of the earth, his companion’s hand in his, the air full of dark smoke, tears pouring from his bruised and battered eyes. The pain was back. He hurt and they seemed to be facing a totem pole made up of half-rotted corpses. They stank to the heavens but they were beautiful, incredible. He could just hear the traces of their tale. He waited another second, another, as she turned to him, mouth opening to speak. He waited for the music to leave him and longing for it never to leave him. It left slowly and he felt his tears trying in the hot breeze.

“It’s music,” he mumbled to her, a gibbering fool. “Music!”

She smiled and nodded, tears on her face too. “Yes.” She pulled a silk kerchief out of her coat and dabbed his eyes and chin with it before scrubbing her own face dry. “And here we are in the dissonant chords, mate, on the trail of one who kept the score. So let’s be careful.”

The totem pole stank. It was swarmed black with flies. A whiff of it and a few cold little bodies battering around him soon had him back to his ordinary senses. “What’s this?”

“It’s a border marker of the Tzarkomen,” Tricky said. “Beyond ye shall not go and all that. Means we’re in the right place. Come on.”

The right place was a thickly wooded grove in a land of rough rocky terrain, sandy soil and boulders. Rolling hills and steep scarps alternated with dips of forest. There was no such thing as a clear sightline or an unimpeded view in any direction. It would have been hard to drive any army through this land, but then, maybe they weren’t coming in at it from the same angle. In any case it was hard to walk on, even without the promise of a lingering and excruciating death.

Tricky took a bearing on their direction every few hundred yards and adjusted her path accordingly. They came across trails now and again—overgrown—but she avoided these. Every so often she paused for a long sniff at the breeze. The fetor of rotting flesh was here and there, and above them spirals of black birds circled in stacks, but lazily, as though merely keeping an eye on things they couldn’t be bothered to own. Ralas had spent only a little time at the undead front during the war. He expected an onslaught of the things he had seen there but aside from the odd twig snap that could be put down to something else there was no sound of anything on the move except themselves.

As the day grew older a gentle but insistent heat began to collect beneath the trees. They followed the course of a dry stream for a mile and then came to a rivulet that trickled through an acreage of mud that had been trampled into pocks and craters, then baked and cracked. Here were the footprints of many Yorughan, and the bones of Yorughan, with dry flesh baked on. A couple of vultures hopped about and flapped off as they approached, heavy, barely able to lift themselves off the ground. The breeze sighed through the dry leaves.

“This is the main trackway from the south,” Tricky said as they paused there. She turned around, her dark hair like smoke on the wind. Ralas eased his aching feet.

“If you have such strong magic, why can’t it get us closer to wherever we’re going?”

“Because I don’t know what I’m looking for. Exactly. I don’t know exactly. We come in quietly, we look around. And there are some charms and shiz stopping me doing that. They’re not known as the world’s greatest sorcerers for nothing.”

“But nothing’s happened. I mean. We saw a totem pole.”

“Fetish pole, but all right.”

“We saw a fetish pole.”

“And it saw us.”

“What?”

“The pole saw us, marked us, watched us all the way. It has eyes in the sky.”

Ralas squinted upwards. “Those are just vultures.”

“Vultures with eyes in their heads. They’ve watched us come in. We have made it to the place they want us to see.”

“I’m sorry. They want us to see what now? Who is they? There’s nobody here.” Ralas eased his back and fought for clarity against the tide of her apparently obvious statements.

“The Tzarkomen are dead,” she said. “But they are here, they are left in these things and their will is here, and they know what we have come for.”

“This Book thing?”

“Yes.”

“You think they’ll let you have it?”

“Well, we’ve got this far,” she said.

She led the way forwards across the mud, between tall rushes trying to regrow, through a field of yellow and white bone laid like old sticks in the grass. Ralas looked as closely as he could, minding his footing around the sharp, broken ends of the long bones where they’d been cracked open and the marrows looted. Here and there weapons stuck up through the wispy, dried remnants of last year’s seeding plants. A shield on its back provided a rainwater puddle that had dried almost to the last drop, heavy with a harvest of large red and black snails. The second wadi they reached held an entire torso, preserved by the black coat it was still wearing. Though the hands were missing and the ribcage had been thoroughly plundered, the neck and skull remained intact, the rest of the body mired in the dried earth. Ralas recognised the coat as being like Heno’s Heart Taker badge of office. This one had its arm outstretched as if reaching for them, or pushing them away. Both, he felt as they neared it and stepped around its summons.

Beyond this was a meadow clearing and the burnt remains of what had once been a sizeable collection of huts. All the roofs were gone but the mud structures of the bases were still there, blackened and crumbling. There were no bodies here. As they stepped onto the ground of the village he felt the air change from a numb emptiness to something quite different and he stopped, automatically, looking up at Tricky who had ascended to the top of a few remaining steps at the side of one home to get a better view.

A kind of whisper floated past him, a voice heard from a great distance, blurred by wind and time. He felt his face brushed by a faint breeze that otherwise did not exist. He wanted badly to ask a question but dare not break the quiet with his voice in case he broke something else. Somewhere in another house a hollow object fell and rolled, clearly audible as it clattered against wooden boards. He saw a movement at the corner of his eye and when he looked the faintest outline of a figure was there at the broken-down doorway of a large structure, hesitant, crouched, as if hiding. Even as he looked it was already gone.

Another, sharper movement made him half whirl, off balance. Something small but distinctly dark, like a shadow, had darted between the buildings and the loose brush and trees of the edgewood.

“Soul hunters,” Tricky said, coming down and joining him to his relief. “We don’t have long. Well. I don’t. You’re probably good. Let’s find this thing.”

“What thing? What hunters?”

She began to lead him swiftly between the homes, taking an inventory of each as fast as she was able, looking intently for something. “Soul hunters are old demons, summoned by sorcerers to guard places or objects from interference by the living. They don’t have any mind, as such, and they don’t have any bodies. They are hungry for life itself, connected to the realm of the dead—it’s not the dead but let’s call it that. They will take anything they can get, but they’re bound here, so they can’t go outside the circle which I am guessing is set at the limit of the houses judging by the fact that…”

“Nothing in here is alive.” Ralas finished.

“Yes. Now they’re hunting us. Well, me. I don’t think they can do much with you but it’s worth finding out.”

Ralas wasn’t convinced. He looked up.

The dark shadow slipped through a window and behind a distant mound. A second one crossed its path, moving forwards and vanishing as he watched, seemingly evaporating into the sunlight between the walls. Again the voices came, blown on a wind in another plane, past his ears. Howling and crying, rage and despair—he might not know the words but the song of war was always the same.

“I’m looking for a ghost,” she said. “There…” and she pointed over two broken-down spars through the skeletal frame of a minor home, filled with a rubble of broken pottery and heaps of mouldering cloth.

The faintest shapes of a figure bending down to cover something, then looking up, hands clutched to its chest, then turning to flee—he saw it like a dream of shapes in smoke, a thing of light and shade that could easily be missed in the broken cloud lighting that swept across them as the afternoon weather began to turn. The figure was female, the head large with some kind of scarf on it, he thought. As it faded away, leaving the place, its shape took form again and repeated the whole sequence of movements exactly, rushing, hesitant with fear, determined—all this he could see simply by the way it moved, and then it was gone. And back. Again, it planted its secret, tamped it down, turned to scatter or throw something over, fled. And again.

Tricky showed none of the fear he felt. She rushed over to the spot, Ralas close behind her.

The ghost faded away as they reached the building and stepped through a gap in the wooden frame to stand where it had been. The space it had filled held only dust motes, agitated by their arrival. Where it had been closing something there was a trap door yawning open in the floor. In the thick dust, not quite obliterated by their own footfalls, a set of child-sized footprints led out of the hole.

Tricky was fishing around in the pockets of her long coat. She fumbled and then pulled out a circle of glass, rimmed with bronze, and stuck it into Ralas’ hands, gripping his fingers for a moment. He found himself looking to her eyes and foolishly had a vision of the two of them standing at an altar, the glass a posy, the words of the missed and lied-about wedding waiting behind his lips.

“I gotta go,” she was saying. “You look through this and tell me who’s there. All right?”

At the end of the small room they were in, a darkness moved, swift, passing through a stool and table as if they weren’t there. It looked small, humanoid, but the head was too long, the fingers too long and too sharply ended, stretching out like needles—

The hands on the glass with his became soft and feathered. With a clapping frenzy a large crow darted upwards between the last rafters and flapped away heavily into the sky, leaving him alone with the shadow thing, the glass in his hands and a stupid look on his face as he realised she’d abandoned him. Left for dead, he thought, and just had time to see the dark shadow gather itself and pounce.

Five talons tore through him from left to right, large enough to cut him into six pieces, had they cut flesh; but they were jagged and caught and tore at something else. He felt it stretch and catch, his body ready to fall as it had fallen so often, all necessary powers taken from it—but then something even more peculiar happened. The talons snagged. The attack stopped. It would not go. His metaphysics defeated it.

There was a pause in the tearing; a surprise, he felt, and then it let go and he was right back where he had been before, undamaged, the glass held up before him giving him a perfect window into another world as the creature that had hunted him sped past. All round the window he saw nothing, not even a disturbance in the dust, but as it turned to look at him through the glass he saw something with thousands of eyes; a vast, multiply-split jaw, festooned in teeth, shrouded in a kind of living darkness that pulsed into tentacular life and as quickly became smoky tendrils of in-substance that ballooned and drifted to the movement of vast and invisible tides. The thing’s body boiled with these, as though it was made of ropes and vesicles without a bone. He felt its hunger. He was always hungry too.

Now that the moment had passed and he was unharmed, relatively speaking, he looked around. There was no sign of it. In that distant building the clattering object clattered again, as if struck in anger.

Then the world behind the glass changed again and the ghost he had seen was suddenly there, fully fleshed and solid. She still moved through him, as if he didn’t exist, but now he could see her—she had the dark, plum-coloured skin with grey/white tones that Kula had. Her face was painted with an intricate pattern he realised must be a tattoo, in white and red inks. It made her look like a fox. Her arms and hands were marked in the same way, with a million tiny lines. As she bent over she was dropping a child down into the hold in the ground, holding her by her upper arms, then letting go and saying something into the hole. Then without a pause she was closing the trap door and pulling over it a long rug covered in half-finished baskets so that in a single instant it seemed there was nothing there beneath. Then she ran.

As he turned the glass to see where she went the hut was solid again, the door a white rectangle blocked by her body, then showing the running forms of other shapes, grey, black and huge. He saw her cut down by a huge Yorughan sword a moment before he had the presence of mind to put the glass down.

That Kula was the survivor of a massacre, that’s what it meant. But why this was important? He thought they were looking for a book. He looked into the hole but nothing in him wanted to investigate it. He probably should. If there was a book around it would be in there.

Then he saw movement in the hole, a black-against-black shiver of anticipation, and he almost put up the glass but instead he held it close against his side and went out into the stuttering daylight, winding his way to the central gathering point where he supposed she might fly in again, or at least where he could easily see the sky.

The centre of the village was a rondel which had been sunk into the ground, leaving a broad circle with stepped seating around it. All that was left of it was the earthwork, sandy and overgrown with weeds. People were standing there, arrayed on the tiers. As he came around the corner of a hut and saw the circle they turned to look at him. They were of medium height and all dressed in robes of dark colours. Their skins were a variety of tones and colours from deep purple through all the brown and ochre families up to a pale slate grey. Some had staves, topped with bones or feather fetishes. Others held nothing. Those closest to him were armoured with bone chokers and bracers, their front and back covered in plates made from scapulae other, flat bits of skeleton from a variety of creatures. One or two had helms of the skulls of monstrous things or gigantic, long-beaked birds. All were tattooed with the red and white marks he’d seen on the ghost. All were silent, motionless, as if they’d always been there. An air of patience and waiting hung about them, a flatness that left Ralas unable to be properly afraid. That and he was tired of fear. He wasn’t even what he should be afraid of among the spirits.

He looked through the glass at them. They were exactly the same seen through its revealing lens, although some had auras of a blueish light around them, concentrated on their heads and shoulders. These were also the least decorated of the group, and the most central—the ones he would have said were the leaders. He put the glass down, relieved at least to see no hideous invisibles displayed in it. From the sky a sharp caw announced Tricky’s return. A big black bird thumped down onto the rondel’s centre point and when it landed and straightened up from its crouch it was already booted and growing, feathers to coat, beak to face; in a single liquid movement the last Guardian appeared. It was only in this moment he dared admit to himself that’s what she was and it was a very different thing to know than to suspect. He felt nervous and underprepared.

The ghosts didn’t look surprised. Ralas moved cautiously to meet her and they watched him until he was at her side. The central figure, the most plain in comparison to his fellows, moved forwards one step towards her and spoke in the traders’ tongue.

“You have come by the long road. You looked for the Book, like the Kinslayer.”

“For your part in it,” she said. “I came by the long road. You gave him the Book.”

“We gave him a book,” the old man said, composed. “And the lives of all our people.” He turned and bowed his head briefly in Ralas’ direction. “And now you bring us a gift for the dead.”

“W-what now?” Ralas asked her but she waved to shut him up.

“I have questions,” she said. “About this.” With a flourish she produced the tiny bag which he’d last seen in Dr Catt’s offices and without hesitation spilled out the entire massive shape of the black box onto the ground. It came out tumbling and the lid slid off it, revealing the empty finery of the interior. A silken pillow rolled out and came to a halt at his feet.

Now Tricky had her hands on her hips like she meant business. “What have you got to say about it?”

As one, as if they were one person, they all had flinched backwards as the box appeared, shuddered as the lid fell, leaned in to peer inside it and watched with fixity as the pillow rolled away and settled on Ralas’ feet like an errant cat come home. Swift, dark forms flitted from hut to hut behind them, up on the eaves, down in the shadows of the walls. The silence was unearthly. The air around the box shivered.

“The Reckoner is dead,” the Tzarkomen said at last. “Our bargain is done.”

Tricky seemed very dissatisfied. She faced up to him as if to a bad shopkeeper. “You never mentioned this. You never said anything about any books.” Ralas realised she knew him, from a long time back. Yet one more thing she never mentioned.

“The Book of All Things is gone, that’s all you need to know. You will never find it.”

“Ah yes. But my question isn’t where it is, Zafiko, my question is what is it? What was it for? Why did he want it?”

The leader gestured around at the village. “You have seen him take what he wanted of us. We and a few others are all that remain of an entire people. We defied him at the last, when we had already spent all in his service, and he repaid us most fully for our disagreements. The Heart Takers consumed the dead.”

“What is it that you made?”

“Where is she?” he said, and pointed down at the box. “The Kinslayer was dead before she was complete.”

“Well, mixed news. Your botched efforts to hide her in the demonfire went astray as your Death Hunters couldn’t survive it long enough to dump her. She was found and now she’s out and about.”

There was no outward sign of reaction, but Ralas saw the telltale shimmers of the soul hunters stealing down from the houses towards the circle. They were almost invisible, like a heat haze. As they moved he noticed that without seeming to move at all the circle of Tzarkomen had closed around them, so that they were now in the middle of a completed ring. He didn’t know anything about sorcery but everyone knew the meaning of a magical ring. It was the shape of the unassailable fortress.

“We thought that the Bride would satisfy him and leave us at least enough to survive on.”

“Yeah like that’s the whole story. Come on. Spill it. I need to know what fresh horror you’ve unleashed now it’s all gone wrong. Was there more? Is there something special about her that the Kinslayer asked for, some way that she’s still doing his bidding?”

Tricky’s focus never left the leader’s placid face. They might have been talking in a town square on any day of the year were it not for the fact that more and more figures kept joining them. Wherever he looked the people on the tiers of the ring stood silent and still, but when he looked one way he wasn’t looking another and as he turned this way and that their ranks were filling all the time, one and another, then more, and more, each one of them dressed and tattooed like the rest; short, tall, young, old, of every age and size and kind they arrived, garbed for war and for peace, their gaze solid and unwavering, every focus upon him.

If Tricky noticed this she gave no sign.

“Let us talk first about what you have there,” the leader said, pointing at Ralas.

“I was hoping we could trade information,” Tricky said. “This is something that the Kinslayer made. I tell you about this and you tell me about the Bride.”

The old man studied Ralas for a moment. “In olden times, when the Tzarkomen first began to weave with the darkness, we thought that there was such a thing as death. We pressed where others feared to go. But we did not find death. We found other planes of being, different to this one, through which living things could pass. We never found the land of death, or its gods and goddesses. There is no such thing. There is only being, and nothingness, of which nothing can be spoken or known. We turned from studying the world to studying that which is not. The mystery was—how shall something become nothing, and how shall nothing become something and live and breathe? And the answer to that is memory. To move into life there must be memory, and to move out of life there must be forgetting.”

He walked down the last step and around the box to Ralas. They were of equal height, one in sandals, one in boots. “You are locked here by a memory, fixed by Heart Taker fire. I can fix you, if you like. I can tell you how they did it. Even they won’t know, because they are fools who have no idea what they do.” He smiled, a smile full of black and broken teeth.

Ralas shook his head quickly. “It won’t… Could you maybe, reverse it the other way so I don’t have to die?” He couldn’t help feeling a flicker of hope, quickly crushing it as the chief showed no sign of agreement.

“You’ve seen the undead, as you call them? My army?”

“All our soldiers you raised against us,” Ralas confirmed, swallowing nervously. Now the ranks of the undead around them, the spirits present, were filled. Un-alive might have been a better term, Ralas thought. The arena was so thick with Tzarkomen that there was no space between them anymore. They occupied the rondel and the space between it and the huts and they crowded thickly between the houses, and inside them, rank on rank of the standing, silent witnesses, breathless as the wind alone stirred the hanging tendrils of their hair and the rags of their clothing. It could have been all of them who had ever been.

He stuttered, “I remember thousands of them. Our friends, fighting for the Reckoner. We had to burn them…”

“Fire destroys the memory,” the old man told him gently, patting him on the arm as if to console him, though he felt no touch. “Nothing can stand against it. It is the element of forgetting. Remember that, when you have had enough.”

“But they weren’t like me,” Ralas said, suddenly struck by a fresh horror. “Were they?”

“No,” said the sorcerer. “They did not remember themselves. Only the body’s memory was active. The mind has its own fires of course, its own hunters—I believe you have seen these already. Once we discovered the truth of how the world works we used them to police our borders and keep our secrets. Such knowledge could surely be used for great ill by those who had not earned it through generations of suffering and loss. But he wanted it for himself, of course. He came for the army but he stayed for the power to open the ways to the other realms. Which is when she appeared…” He lifted a hand in Tricky’s direction as he returned, completing a circuit of the fallen coffin. “To offer us a bargain. A deathly curse, and an end to him, her guarantee. And so he is ended but too late. We had already made our own path. The book, as you see, is gone forever.”

“But the ways are still open in Nydarrow,” Tricky said. “I was there. You didn’t close them off.”

“To put ourselves beyond his reach and the book as well, we had to go before him. Once he had disconnected the gods it was clear he wouldn’t stop for a few warlocks. Time was not on our side but we played it to our advantage when we refused to hand over what we knew. The Book was here—it was the people of this place. He massacred them all. And so he destroyed the very thing he needed to maintain his control of the Overworld. And we made the Bride, to ensure he could take no other path. Her secret purpose was to ensure he would never find this way. It was in her but he never looked in others, he only saw them as means to ends, not ends in themselves. So that was our plan. In doing so we spent all we had left. All.”

The wind sighed and then Ralas and Tricky stood alone in an empty circle. Above them on the hillock a dry shadow flickered.

“Not all. I’ve seen her. The lost girl! Kula!” Tricky shouted into the emptiness. “Isn’t she the Book then? Is it her? Now?” She spun in place, looked at Ralas with a stricken face. “I don’t believe it,” she said. “There must be some left further north. No way was that woman back in Cinquetann the last of her kind. And Kula. And Lysandra. But… maybe they’re not dead. Maybe they only crossed over.”

She was struck at that moment by a shivering, splintering ruction in the air which seemed to spring up from the ground and surround her in less than a second. Ralas could do nothing as she screamed and tried to change form but the soul hunters, whatever they were, had got their fangs well in. Through the glass, he saw them rend and tear, pulling out something like a sticky blue-white taffy from her and sucking it in through their gaping mouths. Above the glass she writhed and buckled on the floor, defending from invisible horrors, weakening with every move. He smashed at the things with the glass, not knowing what else to do, a desperate kind of horror in him making him feel something he hadn’t felt in a long time—terror that someone else was going to die. Rage made him strike harder and the glass connected with a nebulous head so that for an instant he saw through a large, glaring yellow eye, through its black slit into a distant, icy sky full of stars and the trembling filigrees of light that were the ghosts of dead suns.

There was a noise like a shlooping in-suck of mud, the kind made when someone pulls a foot out of deep river silt with a mighty effort and the stuff takes a deep breath of water and air in return. The eye, followed by the creature, was sucked into the glass. At least that’s what Ralas thought had happened. It looked like it had been swallowed up, was being turned inside out and somehow boiled at the same time. The vision was so repellent and surprising that he jumped back, lifting the heavy disc for another blow when two shadows fled out from the edges of his vision.

Tricky was gone.

Only her long, heavy coat was left, lying on the ground.

Shaking with fatigue and his usual weaknesses back in force now the action had passed he bent over slowly, sadly, to pick it over, thinking maybe it was one of her little ways, that she had hidden herself in the lining or beneath it somehow. She wasn’t really gone. Couldn’t be gone. She was a Guardian, well, kind of a Guardian. Besides, he was going to marry her and although that was a joke, really, it wasn’t a joke either at the same time and his anger became misery suddenly as he saw that this was only a coat after all.

He turned the glass over but now it stubbornly showed only a somewhat bent version of the world he could already see, with its empty grass, its sandy, bone-stubbled ground, its burned huts and its old coat. After a moment of despair he bent down and picked up the coat.

A scrap of paper fell out of it and feathered down onto the earth. There was some kind of strange marking on it in a language, he supposed, but one he had never seen before. He picked it up, turned it over. It seemed to have been torn from a larger tome, and the marking was charcoal, but that was all. It didn’t do anything.

He put the coat on, missing her terribly. It was a bit too small across the shoulders, even though he was no prize-fighter, but it fitted as long as he didn’t try to do it up. The big sleeves and the skirting no doubt looked ridiculous on him but it was the easiest way to carry it. He tried to see if the glass would go into one of the big outer pockets and it slipped easily inside, without making the coat any heavier, oddly. He tried it again. Outside the coat, a heavy lump of glass. Inside the coat, nothing. He looked inside the lapels. There were many pockets here, each one edged in a distinctive colour of embroidery. Carefully he poked the note into one of them so that it couldn’t fall out again. Seeing that it couldn’t have fallen in the first place made him wonder if it was an accident it had been out at all. He tried some more pockets and found all kinds of tiny tat—thimbles and wool and a little packet of needles and some regular string in a roll. In another place, old candies in a paper bag and a blown glass phial with what looked like dried ink in it. Under the right arm he found a throwing axe so large that by the time he pulled out the haft he didn’t have the strength to free the blade. That went back in. Under the left arm there were some daggers and what seemed to be a very large variety of weapon hilts, each connected to blades which came out of the pocket without slicing it and went back in without clattering against their many fellows. When he let these go the lining of the coat remained smooth and in every way fitted with the tailored waist that had given its mistress such a charming outline.

He was turning around, wondering what to do, still sad and uncertain if he could really begin to think of her as gone or dead—surely not—when he saw she had used a finger to write a word in the soft earth, well, three letters.

N Y D it said. There was an arrow next to it, pointing the way. It pointed south.

He looked, to be sure. Very sure. But all the delaying didn’t change the message.

She was telling him he had to find her at Nydarrow. There wasn’t even a river down that way called Nyd that he could have persuaded himself was the destination. The place he had been tortured and where he was made into an undying, ever-agonised wreck, forever living in a feeble state. The place he hated most, if hate were even a thing he could manage now.

He started walking. He had all the time in the world to refine what it was he was trying to think about fear, well, at least he had a few days always supposing he didn’t run into more trouble and on the plus side as he had no need to eat or drink or stop for a rest it was, assailants aside, going to be fairly straightforward. Then he thought about Tricky, and what might be happening to her, with the creatures from the Overworld, in some terrible pit, but over, because it was higher up, and he started to hurry and tripped up on a dried up yellow tibia sticking out of the worn earth by the side of the path. It stubbed his broken toes very nicely so that he sat down suddenly in pain to wait until the stupidity and the agony had worn off. As he did so his gaze crossed the abandoned meeting circle and met the ruined hut where he had found the hidden cellar. In a shimmer of heat-haze a young woman was standing there.

She was a ghost—he could see right through her.

He glanced around but all the others were gone, without trace.

He looked back and she waved at him, hesitantly, leaning forward to peer at him through time. He thought there was the trace of a smile about her and he felt a conviction that this was Kula’s mother.

As soon as he thought that, the image of her broke up and blew away on the breeze. At the edge of the village one of the black dog-things which had taken Tricky now howled a sound of utter loneliness and despair from a very human throat.

He felt the weight of the lute’s case suddenly on his shoulder.

He went back to the circle and tuned the strings. Then he sang to the empty round, a simple song from his childhood that people sang whenever anyone had to make journey— the going song, he thought of it, though it didn’t have a name. Now as he sang it he realised for the first time that it wasn’t about going, but returning and he sang it for the people who had lived there who had thought they were not returning, but going, so that they could stop a madman whose bargains they had sought and suffered by.

 

The run of the river is a merry run

We bowl and wind along

 

A shadow slunk out of a burned woodpile and sat down barely visible in the long, dry grass.

 

The sound of the wave is a lonely sound

But the ocean is naught but a song

 

Another shadow slipped along through the weeds and lay down by the curve of a brown, broken skull.

 

Be sung, be rung, be run and round

Come first and last to the end

 

He was singing it for her, so she could hear it, to tell her he was on his way.

 

We turn and dance in the light of the sun

I’ll see you again, my friend.

 

He was alone with the wind and the sunlight. By the woodpile and the skull empty air stirred and sifted its handfuls of nothing. He had sung it for himself, so he was able to go—a song for the dead. And it had worked. He felt better.

As he picked his way clear of the place he watched every footfall and this time he didn’t make any mistakes.