She breathed out. Would they never stop, these hounds of the School? Would they hunt her all the way to the ice in the north? She could not believe that, and therefore she could not believe that all hope was lost. And if they did, if nothing else would shake them loose, there was still the entelech. She did not want to kill again, but she would if the choice was between that and her own death or incarceration.
The man had disappeared from view. No others came into sight, though she knew they must be here somewhere, not far away. There had been six or seven or eight of them in that boat on the Hervent. Even if not all had come ashore, there would be at least three or four of them hunting her. No one in their right mind would come here on their own. Wren smiled to herself. No one in their right mind except a Clever with nothing left to lose.
She pushed herself away from the tree and went north.
It was not possible to move both silently and invisibly. The woods gave her cover, but betrayed her passage with snapping twigs, crunching needles. When she ventured across open ground there was no sound, but her mind quailed at the exposure. How could anyone fail to see a woman scurrying across these bare slopes?
That was just where they did see her in the end. As she staggered over a hard rock field, her feet pulsing with pain, she heard a single shout some way behind her. She glanced back and saw two of the Clade coming out onto the same wide waste-ground. Not hobbling and struggling as she did, but running. A part of her wanted to weep at the sight. The greater part was not done yet.
The slope steepened and turned. She rounded a rocky outcrop that took her out of her pursuers’ view. Crags above her which could not be climbed. She limped on. Open rock ahead of her, patched with snow, rising to the north. She began to reach for the entelech, bereft of other choices, knowing it might wreck and ravage her in her enfeebled state. Beneath her, down a steep short scree, a hollow choked with little knotted trees and bushes.
She heard footsteps and stones tumbling behind her. They would be around that outcrop and onto her in moments. She stopped, and began to turn. She set her staff to the ground as she did so, pushing herself around with it. Its heel slipped on smooth rock and shot out into space. It took her weight with it and she had neither the strength nor balance to stop herself.
Wren went sliding and rolling down the scree. Stones battered her and tore at her clothes. She careened downwards in a shower of pebbles, plunging towards the thicket of scrub below. The sound was deafening and seemed to hurt as much as the blows to her knees and elbows and back.
She fell amongst wizened pines and thorns that gouged at her face. The impact winded and dizzied her. She stared up through obscuring needles and twigs. Three Clade men were up there at the top of the scree, staring down. They were pointing and exchanging curt words. She did not think they could see her now, but they knew where she was.
There were fragments of bark and stone dust in her mouth. She spat them out, and even that effort hurt. She wanted to move. Her limbs refused. She wanted to call the entelech to her. Her mind and will floundered as precious moments flickered by. The Clade began to descend.
Then the world seemed to blur and shift. A mist passed across it, shapes flowed. At first Wren thought it was her own faltering senses that were tricking her. Then she dimly saw the Clade men hesitating, turning this way and that. It looked as if some thickness of the air had taken hold of their heads and mantled them in mist. She saw one reach out an arm as a man might do in darkness or blindness. Another turned and scrambled back up the scree. He blundered over the loose rocks and began to struggle back the way they had come. All the while, the crags above seemed to ripple and distort. The clouds in the sky rolled and coiled and ran like milk.
This was a Clever, Wren knew. This was an entelech playing across her senses and her mind, just as it did those of the Clade. They had lost her, her fell pursuers. They had lost their grip upon the world itself, for a time at least. She would do the same if she lingered here.
She crawled and crept her way through the undergrowth, heedless now of whatever noise she made. Even that sounded muffled and fluid in her ears. She emerged on the far side of the thicket and went on hands and knees up the slope of the bowl.
Only one of the Clade men was still visible to her by then. He was reeling like a drunken oaf, wandering away over lichen-cloaked rocks. She blinked again and again, as if that might clear the mist from her eyes and the strangeness from the trembling world. It did not entirely. When she looked north though, she could see clearly enough to just make out a far distant figure receding. Ascending into a higher band of trees. Trails of mist reached out from him and they lingered after he was gone from sight. They pointed the way on and up, into the forest.
Wren got stiffly to her feet and set out to follow him and that trail of fading mist. Her feet still hurt. She limped. That seemed fitting, for she was almost certain that, as he had disappeared, the faint, faraway man had been limping too.
IX
There was a house – a shack, really – built of split logs. It was old, the wood worn and stained and overgrown with lichens. There were little windows, sealed and covered over with furs. Wolfskins. It sat in a wide clearing and bushes grew around it. Many of them bore nuts or berries, and they had surely been planted where they stood for that very purpose.
None of that was what caused Wren to stand still and stare for long moments. The bushes were not the only things sprouting from the ground. Standing among them, before the house, was a great ring of statues unlike any she had seen before. The circle filled almost the whole breadth of the clearing, with perhaps a dozen paces between each of the figures. They were of a stone she did not recognise. Dark and smooth as if polished.
She could not imagine how any human hand could have crafted such effigies as these. They had the outline and form of men and women, but none of the details. No features, mere bulges for heads. Ridges and curves that suggested arm or leg. They were all hint and indication. It was almost as if an array of fine sculptures had been roasted until they softened and slipped, sloughing away everything that was specific or distinctive until only the crudest memory of their former shape remained.
Some of them were bent over, some halfway buried as if they had been petrified in the act of shrugging their way up out of the earth. One or two were so small they might have been children.
Wren was so captivated and puzzled by this strange collection of stonework that she did not at first notice the door of the hut opening. By the time she looked that way, the man she had come so far to find was already standing in the doorway.
He was tall and broad, though some of that was perhaps the heavy bearskin he was wearing as a coat. His beard was itself so dense and wiry that it might have been torn from the pelt of some great beast. It had more than a little grey in it. That beard and the great bushy eyebrows and the deer-hide cap pulled low over his brow obscured much of his face. What Wren could see of it was creased and weathered and blotched. He was old.
And he was lame, of course. One foot was booted in fur; the other was not there at all. In its place was a blunt wooden stump bound to what remained of his leg with an intricate web of leather strapping.
Ammenor limped out a few paces. He jabbed a massive thumb at the mute and mysterious statues.
‘It’s a Permanence,’ he said gruffly.