Now he could hear the thing just above them, clicking and scratching like the armored claws of a crab dragging across the wet rock between tide-pools. The mists had grown thicker. He could barely see the girl moving before him as she climbed a short rise, even though he was still clinging to her hem. A shower of stones fell between them and he looked up to see a dark and indistinct shape loom out of the curtaining fogs only half a dozen yards above. If that was the thing’s head, it was misshapen as the stump of a twisted tree. For a moment he could hear it breathe, a deep, scratchy wheeze, as a scrabbling leg probed down the rock face. Vansen let go of Willow’s garment so he could draw his sword, but the ragged limb stopped short. The thing was still too far above them. It drew back into the mists.
“Go—quick as you can to open ground!” he told the girl, then turned to shout back to the others. “Let go and draw your swords, but don’t get separated! Dawley, do you have arrows still?” He heard the young guardsman grunt something he could not quite make out. “Try to get a shot if you can see it well enough.”
Vansen scrambled up the path behind the girl, doing his best to lean in toward the hillface despite every screaming sense telling him to lean back, away from the reaching arms of the thing that stalked just up the slope. Behind him the men had become a disorganized rout, but he did not know what else to do; to make them try to continue walking while holding onto each other and their weapons would be to invite disaster. They needed to find their way to some open space where Dawley’s bow and their swords might save them.
He staggered and put his foot down on loose soil, then windmilled his arms to keep from tipping out into the misty invisibility behind him. As he regained his footing, another scrabbling noise came from behind him, then a strange wooden creaking and a sudden screech from one of the men—a sound of such naked animal terror that he could not even tell who was making it. He turned, blade held high, to see the huge thing had lunged downward out of the fogs like a spider gliding down a web.The men around it were screaming and hacking away. In the instant it was among them, it still had no semblance or shape of anything he could understand—spindly arms long as tree branches, hanging rags of skin or fur almost like singed parchment. It was a madness, an obscenity. For an instant only he saw in the chaos what seemed to be a sagging hole of a mouth and a single empty black eye, then the huge thing went scuttling backward up the cliff face with a kicking, shrieking bundle clutched in its folding limbs. Beside him, Dawley cursed and wept as he loosed a single arrow at the shape, then it disappeared into the mists again. It had taken Collum Dyer.
They staggered now in silence, Vansen choked with despair. The thing had caught what it wanted and they did not see it again, but it was as though it had reached down and plucked their hearts away with their comrade. Vansen had known Collum Dyer since he first came to Southmarch. He found his thoughts turning helplessly again and again to that moment, to Dyer’s screams. Once he had to stop and be sick, but there was little in his stomach to vomit out.
When they finally reached the edge of the cliff path they stopped, gasping for breath as though they had been running at uttermost speed, although they had spent most of the hour since the attack barely at walking pace. Mickael Southstead and Balk were gray with fear; they knelt on the ground, praying, although to what gods Vansen couldn’t guess. The girl Willow was clearly frightened, too, but sat on a stone as patiently as a child being punished.
Young Dawley stood with his bow still in his hand and his last arrow on the string, tears in his eyes. “What was it?” he asked his captain at last.
Ferras Vansen could only shake his head. “Did you hit it?"
It took Dawley a moment to reply, as though he had to wait for Vansen’s voice to blow down a long canyon. “Hit it?” “You shot at it. I want to know what happened, in case it comes back. Did you hit it?”
“I wasn’t trying to hit it, Captain.” Dawley wiped at his face with the back of his hand. “I was… was trying to kill Collum . before it took him away. But I couldn’t see if… if I…”
Vansen closed his eyes for a moment, fighting back tears of his own. He put his hand on the young guardsman’s quivering shoulder. “The gods grant you made a good shot, Dab.”
So bleak and quiet was the company, so defeated, that when Vansen saw the moon again he didn’t speak of it, not wanting to raise hopes that had been so often dashed. But after an hour more trudging silently behind the girl he could not ignore the fact that the mists were clearing. The moon was not alone—there were stars, too, speckled across the sky as cold and bright as ice crystals.
They walked on through the high grass of wet hillside meadows and through thinning stands of trees, still alert to any sound, but after a while Vansen was certain that something truly had changed. The moon was far down in the sky now, a sky that had always before been blurry with fog and cloud.
They were all staggeringly tired, and for a few moments he considered stopping to build a fire so they could dry out wet clothes and snatch a little sleep, but he was afraid that if he closed his eyes he would open them again to find everything submerged in silvery nothingness again. Also, the girl was striding determinedly forward despite her weariness, like a horse on the path back to the barn at the end of a long day, and he didn’t want to disturb her. Now that the mists had thinned, he let go of her ragged smock and dropped back to walk for a little while with each of the men in turn, Southstead, Dawley, Balk, saying nothing unless they spoke to him, trying to turn his savaged company back into something whole again, or at least into something human. He couldn’t pretend that he was not overseeing a disaster, but he could make the best out of what he had.
They trooped on through shadowy glens and over moonlit hills.The sky began to change color, warming from black to a purple-tinted gray, and for the first time in days Vansen began to believe they might actually find their way out again.
But where? Into the middle of that fairy army? Or will we find that we have been wandering for a hundred years, like one of the old tales, and that all the world and the folk we knew are gone?
Still, even with these heavy thoughts in his head, he couldn’t help smiling when he saw the first gleam of sunrise on the horizon. His eyes welled up, so that for a moment the patch of bright sky smeared. There would be some kind of day after all. There would be east and west and north and south again.
The sun didn’t burn through the mist until it was high into the sky, but it was the real sun and the real sky, beyond doubt. No one wanted to stop now.
Most astonishingly of all, before the sun was halfway up the morning sky, they struck the Settland Road. “Praise all the gods!” shouted Balk. He ran forward, did a clumsy dance on the rutted dirt that covered the ancient stones and timbers. “Praise them each and every one!”
As the other men tumbled down into the grass by the roadside, laughing and clapping each other on the back in joy,Vansen looked up and down the road, not completely ready to trust. It was the same road, but what arrested him was what part of the road it was.
“Perin Cloudwalker!” he murmured, half to himself. “She’s brought us back to the place where we met her. That’s miles from where we crossed over. And miles closer to Southmarch, thank the gods!” He staggered on aching legs to where the girl stood, smiling a little, staring around her in calm confusion. He grabbed her and kissed her cheek, lifted her up and put her down again. He had a sudden thought then and hurried eastward down the road with the men shouting questions after him. Sure enough, at the next long straight stretch he found a height where he could climb up and see that mists had enveloped the road not a mile away to the east. She’s brought us back to our side of the Shadowline, but also we’re now between the shadow-army and the city, bless her! But how could that be? He tried to understand what had happened but could only guess that the substance of the lands behind the Shadowline was different than that of other lands, and not just because of mists and monsters. Somehow the girl had managed to find her way across a fold of shadow and bring them back to the place where she herself first crossed over, long before they even found her.