You know me.
“Yes,” he said.
But not as I am.
“No.”
I am changing.
“Yes.”
I am lost.
“You’re dying. But we’ll meet again. We meet on the shore of a silver sea. That’s all I remember.”
The cold reached down into his bones.
Daniel sat in the chair, too cold even to shiver.
On the wooden floor before him lay a small round piece of glass. First green, then blue. Foggy with age, as if it had lain on a beach, rounded by an endless surge of sand and water. Maybe it wasn’t glass. He couldn’t tell what it was, really. He reached down and held it for a moment, turning it in his fingers, then slipped it in his pocket beside the puzzle boxes.
Daniel looked around the silent, empty room. “Good-bye,” he said.
Bidewell walked along the high narrow hallway and opened the doors one by one, and out came Ginny first, more at peace than he had seen her before. Next came Jack, thoughtful, but with a new light in his eyes.
Bidewell hesitated before the open middle door, then walked to Daniel’s chair, where he reached out to shake the man’s hunched shoulder. Daniel stirred and opened his eyes. They were sharp as knives—the wrong eyes for that face. “I fell asleep,” he confessed, then stretched. The third shepherd was still an enigma.
“We’ll convene in a while,” Bidewell said.
“Pretty interesting—a question—” Daniel began, but Bidewell raised his hand.
“No need. It’s all private.” Bidewell nodded three times, eyes flicking at three different random points in the high room, before passing through the door.
The moment is over, Bidewell thought, for which I have prepared for a thousand years.
CHAPTER 74
The Chaos
They had no choice. Another wave of dark marchers—dead, dying, or echoing timelessly—swarmed down from the ridge.
“They are too many and too strong,” their armor told them. “The generator will not protect you.”
Tiadba pulled up the device. The field dropped back into the ovoid, which sparked and hissed before falling dark. “Into the trees!” she shouted.
“They’re not trees!” Denbord protested. “They’ll kill us—you heard the armor!”
But there was no choice. Tiadba pushed her group forward. Denbord took the generator, slung it over his shoulder, and booted the cart aside, then pulled his clave from his belt—the first time they had tried to use this weapon. Tiadba did the same. The mottled black notched blades fanned out, spun, and almost vanished. Two walls of force flashed outward, defined by the angles of the blades—translucent one moment, but where they coincided, silvering like a mirror. In the mirror, which curved and whipped, the ground behind seemed to clear and the dark marchers fell back, fell away.
“We can kill them!” Denbord shouted, triumphant. He continued to wave his blade. Its field whipped around upon them. Their suits fluoresced a pale green at the near miss.
“Keep that away from us!” Macht shouted.
The breeds instinctively pushed toward the shimmering trees—there were simply too many echoes rising and spilling over the ridge, thousands of years of lost marchers massing against those still alive. The more the claves cut, the more there were. Tiadba had sudden doubts their weapons were that effective. She saw that the claves fended off the dark marchers only temporarily—they broke apart, vanished, then seemed to rise again from the black ground.
Khren was the first to push between the trees, the pearl-colored balls of light on the branches popping and snapping as he brushed them. Yet the trees did not chew up their armor, in fact wrapped branches and trunks around them, causing great fear—until they saw the branches close up behind, projecting a curtain of glinting drops as delicate as dew. The dark marchers did not follow. This was completely unlike the generator’s bubble shield, but apparently more effective. Tiadba, Khren, and Denbord led the others deeper into the forest, until they reached a clearing. Tiadba tumbled over Khren when he stopped, and Macht over them. As they untangled, the others dropped to their knees, murmuring prayers, weeping, then collapsing on the soft gray surface, while all around the trees rose twice as tall as their heads, slender fronds growing up and over, forming a bower and giving them cover as they caught their breath.
Tiadba rolled on her back, still expecting to die—or worse. All her marcher training and instincts seemed unreliable, blacked out by fear that reached deep into the old matter that made her. What had they gotten themselves into? How many more terrors would they face, much worse than this?
Were they even safe here, with cover and apparent protection, the Chaos held back, frustrated?
Macht wept for Perf. “He went just like the Tall One. Just sparked away.”
“He was slow,” Denbord said.
Macht took offense and moved on him with fists clenched, but Herza and Frinna held him back, and together they all collapsed to the ground once more, coughing out little howls of misery. Tiadba sat apart, too exhausted to join in. Nico recovered first and looked around through his faceplate, unable to believe they weren’t still being followed.
“What is this place?” Tiadba asked the armor. No answer.
“The armor doesn’t want to help us,” Macht said. “It’s useless.”
“Maybe it can’t talk about what it doesn’t know,” Shewel said.
“The armor didn’t save Perf—it didn’t tell him what to do!”
“Everything out here changes,” Nico said. “The trainer said—”
“Then why let it speak at all?” Macht shouted. “What use is it to anyof us?” He kicked and thumped his arms and hands on the gray ground, a crèche-born gesture of anger and irritation that they understood too well.
Denbord crawled over and flopped down beside Tiadba. “I don’t know whether we’re safe or just in the belly of something different.”
Tiadba felt the gray surface and noticed that her armored fingers did not produce the faint glow of adjustment they had observed in the Chaos. “The suits aren’t working very hard,” she said. “Maybe there’s a generator nearby.”
“I don’t see anything,” Nico said. “Just the purple, and those branches. I don’t like the way they glow.”
Shewel joined them and lay on his back. They all seemed to want to stay low and not touch the branches, growing ever thicker.
One positive: they could no longer see the burning crescent.
“Nobody said this would be easy,” Denbord offered, his voice quavering, not at all convinced a show of bravery was appropriate—certainly not false bravery. Macht stared at them all with large, round eyes. Herza and Frinna sat beside each other, clutching hands.
They all sucked in their breaths.
Silence—no more words—seemed best. Tiadba examined her gloved fingers, felt the suit drying and soothing her twitching, itching skin, the most comfortable clothing she had ever worn. The armor was still working, then.
Slowly she let her fear burn itself out, leaving only a hollow grief and, like Macht, disappointment. If the others looked up to her as some sort of example, a leader…
After a while the branches stopped growing and everything became still.
“If we’re in a belly, there’s nothing we can do about it,” Tiadba said. “Better here than out there.”
“We can’t stay here forever,” Denbord said.
“We know that,” Macht said. “Just shut up and let us be sad.”
“Maybe this is a mourning place,” Nico said, ever the philosophical one. Tiadba looked left, to the edge of the clearing, just a few yards away, between the smooth brown trunks that had so quickly branched out. The glowing tips gave off a dim yellow light. She wasn’t sure they would be able to escape through that thicket.
No shadows, no motion, no threat—and no promise.