Chapter Six

 

 

All around them, the night was alive with the sounds of howling, though the Broken detected no movement in the shadows of the trees on all sides. He felt trapped, pursued. And in truth, he had to admit that the creatures might have been there, lurking in the darkness, shadowing their footsteps, and he would likely not have seen them anyway.

The fight with the bandits, though brief, had sapped what little reserves of strength his wounding had left him, and it was all he could do to put one plodding foot awkwardly in front of the other, a simple task which would have been beyond him had the girl not been walking beside him, one of his arms draped across her shoulders. His vision, too, was suffering and had continued to grow dimmer until he seemed to be looking through a tunnel surrounded by darkness. Even the ground beneath his feet was little more than a blurred smudge, and it was an act of fate to continue to put one foot in front of the other, for he could not have said for certain what he trod upon.

The Broken had always thought of himself as a predator, a lonely hunter making his way through the world. Now, though, he knew what it was to be the prey, felt what the wounded deer must feel as it struggles vainly to escape while its pursuers dog its heels, the scent of blood driving them on.

He glanced at the girl at his side. If their circumstances frightened her, she did not show it, did not weep or cry out as others might have. What was it, he wondered, that kept her moving so, that made some continue on when others might throw up their hands and give up?

For the Broken, that thing had always been his skill, and he had traveled bravely only because he knew that his skill would protect him against all but the greatest of dangers. The girl, though, possessed no martial prowess to rely on, had no blade with which to demonstrate that skill even if she had. He wondered who, then, was the braver of the two of them, but he did not do so for long. It was easy enough for a man to step into the darkness surrounded by lights, wielding weapons that might drive it away, but it was quite another for him to step into that night with no way to defend himself, doing it because he believed it necessary. Because he believed it right.

The girl possessed a strength he could not truly understand, but if he managed to, he believed that it was a strength which would make all the difference. “We…must find a place,” he said, “to hide. And soon.”

“Okay.”

No wasted words, no asking if he thought they would survive. Okay. Just that and nothing more, her voice slightly strained not from fear but from the burden of his weight on her.

“They will find us, if we do not,” he said. Likely, the creatures would find them even if they did discover a shelter, but he saw no reason to worry the girl with that knowledge while she carried so much already. “It is only a matter of time.”

She nodded, glancing around. In the light of the pale moon, the world surrounding them was indistinct, a place of shadows and the trees grim specters marking their progress. After a moment, she pointed off into the darkness. “I think we should go that way.”

Up to now, the girl had seemed content to follow his lead, the two of them sticking close to one of the forest trails, as doing so granted them far easier passage than they would have achieved fighting their way through the forest undergrowth. He had believed it more important to put as much distance between them and the camp—and the sweeping patrols that would no doubt have been sent from it—than to risk the deep woods and what dubious concealment they provided. He was surprised, then, to hear her suggest a direction, and he looked the way she indicated, seeing if he could discern some reason for her choice.

Perhaps because of his failing sight, the direction the girl indicated looked much like any other to him, and he considered. Stepping off the path was dangerous. For one, what drove the nightlings’ hunt was not their vision, but the senses on which most predators relied—namely, smell and sound. Traveling into the undergrowth would slow him and the girl down, giving their hunters more time to track them, to hone in on the scent of blood his wound left behind them. Their trail would likely be easy enough to follow, not even considering the noise they would make pushing their way through the maze of brambles. But as dangerous as they were, the nightlings were not the only threats present in the deeper parts of the forest where more mundane beasts such as bears and wolves made their dens. More mundane, perhaps, but that would matter little to a man or a young girl should they find themselves clamped in the jaws of such a beast.

Still, the expression on the girl’s face appeared resolute. “You are sure?” he asked.

She shrugged. “Not really.”

He still preferred the idea of the path, would have chosen it instead of the girl’s suggestion. But then, he thought, the choosing of your own path is what has brought you to this place, to this darkness. And if that were true, perhaps it was best that he not trust his own decisions. Besides, it was likely they would die in the next few hours, whatever choice they made. “Good enough for me,” he said, and when the girl looked up at him, he offered her the best smile of which he was capable. “Lead on, little sister,” he said.

A strange expression flitted across the girl’s face then, one that seemed to contain equal parts sadness and joy. “Alesh used to call me that,” she said. “He’s always been like a brother to me.” A thought seemed to occur to her, and she met his eyes. “Why did you try to hurt him?”

He hesitated for a moment, thinking, then shook his head slowly. “Truly? I don’t know.”

“You should, I think,” she said, with no recrimination in her voice or tone, just a simple statement. “For something like that, you should know. Shouldn’t you?”

“Yes,” he said. “Yes, I should.”

She nodded. “Come on, Tarex.”

They started through the underbrush, and if anything their progress was even slower than he had feared. Dense bushes guarded the path as if jealously protecting the inner forest’s secrets, and thick roots lay hidden beneath a layer of leaves, making footing treacherous. More than once, Tarex slipped on some unseen hazard and would have fallen had the girl not caught him, displaying a strength surprising for one so small.

They had been at it for nearly half an hour with barely any progress—Tarex could still see the path they had left in the distance, largely but not completely occluded from sight by the dense bushes and limbs—when he heard a howl that was far closer than any which had come before it. Looking behind him, he also noticed that those brambles and vines which they had passed through were coated in his blood—a lot of it. He was surprised that he had any left, but that wasn’t what was important, not now. The trail of blood would serve as good as a sign pointing the pursuing nightlings directly at him and the girl. Nightlings which, judging by the distant howls which were growing closer by the second, would be on them soon enough.

It was finished then, or nearly so. Tarex had known his end was coming for a long time now had, in many ways, sought it, and what regret he felt was not for himself but for the girl. He, after all, was a Breaker, had become one in his grief. He had not meant to be, had thought the elders of the Ekirani fools when they’d labeled him as such, marking his flesh with the tattooed script so that anyone who saw it and knew it for what it was would also know him for what he was, or, at least, what they had believed him to be. In the end, he realized, they had been right. His had not been a quest of redemption or justice but of vengeance—crimson, bloody vengeance—not against those who had wronged him but against the world itself. A quest he had been bound, always, to give his life to, and it was no surprise to find that the debt collector had finally come to settle accounts.

He had pictured this moment, the moment of his death, a thousand times, a thousand ways. He had thought himself at peace with it. Somewhere, deep down in the recesses of his being, those recesses which so few men can plumb—and fewer still would care to even if they could—he had longed for it. But in none of those imaginings, no matter how vivid, how real, had the girl been present, and her presence changed everything, made of his end not an inevitable conclusion to a bloody quest but a tragedy, the impact of which would reverberate to unknowable lengths, immeasurable in the way that the ripples of a stone tossed into a pond could not be measured.

“Sonya,” he said wearily, his voice little more than a whisper, “I will remain here, you mu—”

“There,” the girl said breathlessly.

Ahead of them, the undergrowth continued for a few dozen more feet, promising fresh scratches and nicks along their skin when they attempted to push their way through and more wasted time. But beyond that, barely visible to his failing sight, a hill rose on their left. And at the base of that hill, outlined in the faint moonlight as if the gods themselves had marked it for his and the girl’s finding, was a small cave, perhaps five feet in height and near the same width.

There was no telling how deep the cave might go, and he thought it all too likely that one of the forest’s more mundane predators such as a wolf or bear would likely have made use of such space, might well be waiting inside to pounce on anyone foolish enough to use it for shelter. But the howls had grown closer as they tarried, so close the Broken could practically feel the breath of the nightlings on the back of his neck. He shot a glance behind, half-expecting to see an army of them lined up in the darkness, their shapes little more than vague, menacing shadows, their malevolent eyes glowing in the night as they watched their doomed prey, savoring the moment. There was nothing, however, only the underbrush they had crossed through minutes before, and the path in the distance.

True, the cave might be occupied—in truth, the Broken would be surprised if it wasn’t—yet he knew that they were running out of time. The nightlings might not be on them, not yet, but they soon would be—of that he had no doubt—and then there would be no escaping. Not for him, but more importantly, not for the girl either.

“You have done well, Sonya, to find this place.” He thought to ask how she might have known it was here, to question what impulse had sent her in this direction when one had looked much like the other, all of it little more than a vague, shadowy blur, but he did not. The how of it did not matter. Cave or no cave, they were doomed, but at least when he made his final stand he would not have to worry about the nightlings getting behind him or to his sides. The narrow opening of the cave would ensure that only one or two of the creatures could come at him at once.

Their only hope, then, was to make for it, to imagine that he might somehow be able to stand against the creatures until light came, driving them back to the shadows. A vain hope, of course, for it was all he could do to keep his feet under him now, and the god-blessed weapon hanging strapped at his back felt like an impossibly heavy weight, one he could not imagine picking up, let alone wielding in combat. But he was reminded of an old saying he’d heard long ago, one of the Ferinans’, or so he had been told. A man in the desert must drink what water he finds. A vain hope, maybe, but vain hope was better than none at all.

“Really?” she said, looking up at him hopefully as if seeking his approval. He might have told her, in another time, another place, that it was not she who should seek approval from him, but he from her. Yet, he did not. Each moment they spent here was one they would not get back, and he was certain that the nightlings would not be so idle.

“Yes,” he said. “Come.”

More minutes were squandered fighting their way through the brambles and the bushes. Branches and roots contrived to trip him, threatening a fall that he would likely never rise from. He pictured himself fallen, lying there as the roots and branches of the forest grew up and over him, swallowing him whole.

Fanciful thoughts, ones he told himself were brought on by delirium caused by blood loss, that and nothing more, yet with each passing minute, they became more and more real, and no amount of rationalization could make them disappear. For in the night, in the darkness, where the light and the sun are only vague memories, little more than dreams in truth, there is no place for logic or rationality. There is hardly a place for thoughts at all save those animalistic drives which seemed ingrained in the body of a man—holdovers, perhaps, from the ancestors before him, those who first discovered fire and learned that it was good, that in its light a man might find shelter from many of the night’s terrors.

The howls and scurryings of the creatures chasing them drew closer still as they forced their way through, and Tarex began to think that these hungry snarls did not belong to the nightlings chasing them at all, began to believe them the malevolent utterings of each bush or vine they passed as it reached out to try to take him.

When they finally pushed their way clear of the last of the underbrush—something Tarex had decided some minutes ago would never occur—he took a deep, gasping breath similar to one a drowning man might heave when discovering that, unexpectedly, the churning currents had brought him up for air.

He started toward the nearby cave in a desperate shamble but realized after a moment that the girl was not with him. He turned to see that she had stopped at the edge of the undergrowth and was eyeing the cave warily as if it was a snake that might bite her. “What is it?” he asked. “What causes you to hesitate?”

“What if there’s something in there?” she ventured in a low, scared voice, showing her true age for perhaps the first time since they’d met, showing that fear of the dark that all children seemed to share and which some—if they were very lucky or very foolish—lost as they grew into adulthood. “Something like a bear,” the girl went on, “or…or a wolf?”

Then we will die, Tarex thought. A week ago, he would have had little difficulty fighting such a creature, in driving it off at the least, but he was that man no longer, and it was not just his wounding that made it so, for his wounding was far from the greatest change which had been wrought in him. “There won’t be.”

“H-how can you be sure?”

I cannot. “Night is the time of predators,” he croaked, swaying on his feet, “and so if any claims this cave as its own, it will be empty now. The beast will be out looking for food as all creatures of the night must.”

“Y-you’re sure?”

No. “Yes.”

She nodded, taking him at his word, though the gods alone knew why she would. The two of them, the dying man and young girl, started toward the cave entrance. They reached it in what might have been minutes or hours, Tarex couldn’t be sure, for he was fading fast now, his mind too far succumbed to the fog filling it, filling him to be able to keep track of the time. His world consisted of no more thought than putting one clumsy foot in front of the other, of nothing but the tunnel of his vision, shrinking by the moment. The cave lay hidden in shadow, in a dark that was deeper than that surrounding it, and so there was no knowing what might lie within. He glanced beside him at the girl, and though he could see fear in her shadowed expression, he could see resolve as well. She would go in, fear or no fear, he knew, because he had told her it was safe. But the world was never safe, not truly, and few knew that better than its predators.

“Follow,” he said. He stepped into the cave alone, the girl behind him, and without her helping him along, he became aware of just how bad off he truly was. He had taken only two steps when he stumbled and fell to one knee. The girl was there in an instant, and they both grunted with effort as she levered him to his feet.

“My…bag,” he rasped, barely able to force the words out past his gasped, pained breaths. “There…is…flint and…a lantern.”

“But…the nightlings,” she answered. “Won’t they know where we are?”

He would have hidden her from the truth of what they faced, if he could, but it was coming either way, and there was no use in lying to her. The world, after all, did not obey the lies of men, so he turned to face her, one hand on the inside wall of the cave for support. “They know already.”

She didn’t argue then, and he heard more than saw as she reached into his bag. She struck the flint and a moment later light bloomed in the darkness, making Tarex wince at the brightness after hours spent in the night. “Very good,” he said, glancing around the cave. The opening in which they stood was slightly wider than the entrance, perhaps as much as ten feet and that many high. He was not sure, at first glance, how far back the cave went for shadows pooled outside the lantern light. He started deeper into the cave, meaning to scout it out, for the last thing he needed was to be facing nightlings at the front of the cave only to have some creature awaken from its slumber behind them.

But he’d only taken but a single step when he heard a chorus of howls from outside the cave, and he knew the nightlings were close, too close, and he and the girl were out of time.

“Stay behind me, Sonya,” he said, drawing his weapon and nearly fumbling it from fingers clumsy with fatigue.

Holding his weapon in one hand, he took the lantern from her and moved toward the cave mouth. Shadows flitted in the darkness, dozens, perhaps hundreds of them. Figures shifted and moved through the underbrush. The forest was suddenly alive with the sounds of them, their growls and snarls that sounded somehow jubilant as they realized they had found their prey at last, cornered in a cave from which there was no escape.

None ventured close, remaining on the edge of the lantern light, sticking to the shadows as their kind always did, and that was well. What was not was that Tarex knew the lantern did not contain enough oil to last through the night, not even close. The creatures seemed to know it too, roaming back and forth all around the cave mouth, none charging toward him and the hateful light he carried. Waiting, biding their time.

As he watched the shifting figures, a sudden wave of dizziness washed over Tarex, one worse than any that had come before it, and the strength left his legs in an instant. He was on his knees then, his breathing labored and heavy as his lungs struggled to perform the normally simple job which they had been at all his life.

“Tarex!” the girl shouted in fear, her concern, concern for him so evident in her voice that he felt his heart ache with a pain nearly equal to his wound.

“Go further back into the cave, Sonya,” he said. Or, at least, he meant to, but the dizziness came back in a wave, flooding his thoughts and his mind, and he lost himself for a time. The next thing he knew, he was lying on his back staring at the darkness of the ceiling. She was beside him, bent over, her small hands on him as if she were trying to shake him awake the way a child might, unaware that it was not sleep which came for him—it was death.

There was something strange about the light, flickering in his vision, and with a laborious effort he turned his head to see the lantern beside him where it must have fallen when he collapsed. The girl had righted it, that much was clear, but it was equally clear that the oil was running low, the flame sputtering threateningly. Soon, then. At any moment, the light would die and they with it as the creatures still roaming outside rushed inside to finish the hunt.

He looked up at the girl, could see the knowledge of what was coming in her eyes. Then, suddenly, his delirious mind cast him into a memory, the memory of walking into his house so long ago, of finding his wife and son lying dead, the table and chairs at which they’d eaten dinner as a family every night shattered and as broken as his family, as broken as he became. Then, as quick as it had come, the memory was gone, and he was in the cave again, staring at the girl. I could not save them, he thought. But by the gods, I will save you, at least. He tried to rise, but the body does not obey the commands of the heart, has its own prerogatives, its own truths, and he was rewarded for his efforts by a sharp pain lancing through his back and no more.

Still, he tried again, but he could not make his weary muscles, fatigued from over-exertion and blood loss, obey his commands, and finally he collapsed back into a gasping, sweaty heap. “I…am…sorry,” he said to the girl.

She tilted her head to the side as if surprised by his words. “For what?”

Everything. The word was on his tongue, but then the girl turned, glancing out of the cave mouth through which they could hear the anticipatory sounds of the nightlings. “They’ll come soon, won’t they?”

“Yes.”

She nodded slowly. “I wish Alesh was here.”

Tarex thought his son might have wished his father had been there too, long ago, might have even thought it in his last moments. It was a terrible weight to bear, a terrible burden, to be someone’s hero, that much he knew, but he also knew that there was none he would rather carry, if he could. “So do I,” he managed past the pain and was surprised to find that he meant it. Perhaps, had he been, the man, Alesh, would have killed Tarex outright, as punishment or revenge for his men taking the girl as they had. Perhaps—likely, even—he would have been right to do so. Yet, if Alesh’s presence would have meant that the girl and her innocence remained in the world of the living for even another day it would have been well worth the cost of one exile’s life, a price he would have paid gladly.

But Alesh was not here. There was only the two of them—him a broken, dying man too hurt to rise, and she a little girl. Them and only them and the lantern threatening to sputter out at any moment. The dizziness was coming back now, perhaps hastened in its return by his exertions, and he could feel it coming the way some people claimed to be able to smell an approaching storm in the air.

“Listen, Sonya,” he said, suddenly feeling a sense of urgency, of wanting to say something, needing to say something in the vain hope that his words would make it right, would protect her in a way that he could not. “I…” He trailed off then, still feeling the sense of urgency, of needing to tell her something, but not knowing what that something was, being unable in that moment to think of anything that might take the dreaded knowledge of their approaching deaths from her eyes, a knowledge he was seeing less and less of as his vision tunneled and tunneled further.

“It’s okay,” the girl said, patting his hand gently as if he were a child who had just awakened from a terrible nightmare and needed comforting—which, considering the last few years of his life, wasn’t as far from the truth of things as it might have been. “I’ll protect you.”

She said the words earnestly, her small face pinched in resolve, and while some might have found the girl’s claim laughable, he did not. He knew that without her, he never would have made it out of his tent at the army encampment, wounded as he had been. She had saved him then, there was no question. Yet that had not been the most powerful way in which she had saved him, not from dangers to his body, but from those to his mind, his heart.

For years, he had been broken. Yet in her kindness, in her innocence, she had made him whole. So he did not laugh as others might have but only gave her a small nod, the most of which he was capable just then. “If…given the choice,” he whispered, “I would choose no other.”

She smiled, clearly pleased, and said something, but her words were beyond him, for the darkness wasn’t coming into his mind, not then. It was already there. And there was nothing else.