Evis lifted an eyebrow.
“And if I do not?”
I leaned down, so that my face was even with Evis’s. “Then I shall lead the day folk against your Houses. I shall speak the words that bring them out. I shall speak the words that will light the torches. I shall speak the words that will bring them down upon you, and I shall join them, and the fires shall burn and will still be burning when winter comes again.” I felt myself swelling, heard the huldra whisper. “Shall I begin?”
Evis looked sideways, made the slightest of nods at Mama.
She shouted something, threw a bundle of hair and twigs she’d had hidden in the palm of her hand, closed her eyes and spat.
I laughed. I saw the bundle coming, brushed it aside as easily as one waves away a gnat. “Oh, no,” I said. “That’s not the way. But let me show you a spell I know.”
I lifted my hand. The huldra showed me a hidden thing. I laughed at the thought of it, and I would have cast it forth, but for a subtle twisting in the dark, and a chill, and then the sound, faint, of a voice.
Darla’s voice.
I shrank. Memories came tiptoeing back, sneaking past the huldra’s dark fancies. Flames and fires, shouts and screams, and the smell of Darla’s hair.
She is dead, said the huldra. Dead, gone, take your vengeance.
Make.
Them.
Pay.
Mama cussed, drew her booted foot back, kicked me.
Hard, and then again, right below my right knee.
“Don’t you listen, boy,” she croaked, her face turned to mine. “I know what it’s sayin’. I know what it wants. But you listen to me now, boy. It might be strong, but it ain’t smart. You are.”
I saw flames, saw Darla, lolling and bloody and dead in my arms.
Mama hissed. No words, just a hiss, and then she reached up and slapped me.
“It knows your name, boy. But don’t you forget-it ain’t even got a name. It ain’t got nothing ’cept what you give it.”
The huldra shrieked in rage. I held it tight, letting it make me tall again, tall and strong and knowing.
Evis grabbed Mama, yanked her back. I lifted the huldra, made a sound that might have been the beginning of a long, secret word, and it was then that I saw something light and familiar amid the gathering shadows.
Darla. My Darla. Faint and ghostly and wavering, a candleflame in a whirlwind. But it was her, and she spoke. Somehow, above the thunder and din of the huldra’s cries for vengeance, I heard her speak.
“I am not dead.”
And then she was gone.
I froze, the unspoken word burning on my lips, the huldra raging and shaking in my hand, a maelstrom of strange, strong magics poised to leap from my fingers.
I am not dead.
I knew she was. I’d held her. I’d felt her body grow cold. I’d washed her blood from my skin.
But-
The huldra howled.
I took the huldra, forced it to fall silent, strained and strove and bent it briefly to my will. I cast out my sight, soared above Rannit and the rain and the clouds, looked down upon the city from a great and impossible height.
And then I spoke a Word wrenched from the heart of the huldra.
Magics spun, darting to and fro amid the clouds, gathering, flocking, wheeling and turning and diving, finally piercing the rain and the dark to soar over Rannit’s sooty rooftops and black, flooded streets like a flock of playful shadows. Here and there they converged, sped away, circled. Here and there they exploded, diverging into a thousand paths, only to come together again in a single fluid rush of shadow upon shadow.
And then, impossibly, they all came together, coalesced and settled, eagerly awaiting my call.
Darla.
“She lives,” I said, with some difficulty. I lowered the huldra, which burned in my hand, and met Mama’s bleary eyes. “Darla lives.”
Evis kept his face carefully blank. “Of course she does,” he said, agreeably. Disbelief was plain on his pale dead face. “Let it go, finder. Let Mama take it.”
I shook my head no.
Mama began to weep.
“You think me mad.” Normal words were hard to form. “But she lives. I have seen her.”
“Then you don’t need that thing no more,” said Mama. She opened her bag, held it out to me, under the huldra. “Let me have it, boy. Before it’s too late.”
Again I shook my head. “I have need of it yet. Darla waits for me.”
“Damn, boy, it’s lying! Can’t you see that? It wants you to use it! The longer you hold it the less of you is left!”
The huldra raged, still urging me to mayhem, still showing me images of Darla dying under a writhing mass of halfdead.
“No.” The huldra struggled in my grasp, trying to pull away. “She needs me. I can save her.”
Evis laid his hand on Mama’s shoulder, made some small sign to his men. “Permit us to accompany you.”
I didn’t need the huldra to see the pity in his eyes.
I shrugged. My shadows beckoned. The huldra buzzed and howled, but I squeezed, pushed its protests aside.
“Follow, if you can,” I said. “The way leads into the dark.”
I ascended, not bothering with the stairs, leaving a good portion of the floor above in sudden splintered ruin.
I took a single step, and then another. I only barely felt timbers fall around me as I shouldered them aside, and then I was back above the rooftops, back inside the dark.
My shadows waved to me, from across most of Rannit. Thunder and lightning played close about them, so close I grew suspicious. I coaxed another word from the huldra, spoke it, saw more shadows wheeling in the night-shadows similar to mine, but clothed in the will of another.
I smiled. The huldra hushed. Grudgingly, it offered another word, showed me a way to hide my approach, to silence the echoes of my words. I made myself invisible. Invisible and as silent as the passing of time.
I felt a questioning, a probing, a subtle touch emerge from deep within the night. I sidled away from it, watched it pass, chuckled at how easily I evaded being found. Memories came rolling back to me-memories of other walks in the dark, of other battles of shadow on shadow, of the way magics sprang so easily from my lips.
There was more too. I saw strange rooms, felt the heat of strange fires, heard screams, heard a women beg for mercy. There was also laughter, and I recognized it as my own.
I saw the Serge, saw flames sweep across it, boiling over dune and rock, leaping from sage bush to stunted dessert tree. Trolls fled, bounding, catching fire and screaming, too slow, too slow…
And music. Music played on instruments I couldn’t name, formed of notes that sang of magic. I saw a flower, plucked it, made it wither in my hand…
The huldra let slip the smallest hint of triumph.
I pictured Darla. I remembered her laugh, her perfume, the way her skirt hugged her legs as she walked.
I took what I needed from the huldra, pushed the music and the screams aside, struggled for a moment to remember my secret name. The huldra flashed hot in my hand.
“Show me what I need, and only what I need,” I said.
It seemed to me that the huldra laughed, harsh and dry, with the sound of old papers rustling.
But it obeyed.
I saw a row of three houses, set deep into the Hill. The windows were tall and wide and dark. The doors were barred, and bound with iron like garrison gates. The two outside houses leaned against the middle, as though exhausted, or asleep.
I tried, but could not pass my sight beyond them.
Words came, not mine, not the huldra’s.
“Mark this place well,” they said. “Some call it Oddling. Few pass therein.”