'It appears that you were fortunate indeed. We lost two more soldiers last night. We can presume that they met the same creature that you did.'
'We lost them? How do you mean?'
'They are gone. Tracks lead into the forest, but beyond that all trace has disappeared.'
Kaiku rubbed her hands over her face. 'Gods…' she murmured. 'Lucia said that the spirits' agreement to let us pass was no guarantee of safety. I had hoped to keep that from the rest of the group, at least until our morale was better.'
'That was foolish,' said Tsata. From anyone else, it would have been rude, but Kaiku knew how he was. 'Perhaps we would have been more careful if we had been told.'
'More careful than we were? I doubt it.' She would not shoulder the responsibility for their deaths. 'Everyone was frightened last night; they were watchful, despite what Lucia had told them.'
'They are more frightened now,' Tsata observed.
'As well they should be,' Kaiku replied.
There was a beat of silence between them.
'You were writhing in your sleep. Who were you dreaming of?' he asked suddenly.
Kaiku blushed. 'Heart's blood, Tsata! There are some politenesses my people employ that you would do well to learn.'
He did not look in the least abashed. 'I apologise,' he said. 'I did not realise you would be embarrassed.'
She brushed her hair behind her ear and shook her head. 'You should not ask a lady such things.' She met his gaze, his pale green eyes devoid of guile, strangely like a child's. For a moment she held it; then she looked away.
'Tane,' she said with a sigh, as if he had forced it out of her. 'I dreamt of Tane.'
Tsata tilted his chin upward: an Okhamban nod, in understanding. 'I appreciate your honesty. It is important to me.'
'I know,' she murmured. Then, feeling she needed to apologise herself, she took his hand in both of hers. 'It was only a dream,' she said.
He seemed surprised by the contact. After a moment, he squeezed her hand gently and let go. 'We all dreamed last night,' he said. 'But you, it seems, were the only one who dreamt anything pleasant.'
'I am not so sure it was pleasant at all,' she said. Though she could remember nothing for certain except that Tane was in it, she was unsure whether the dream-congress was entirely consensual on her part. In fact, she had an uneasy intuition that he had been raping her. She looked up. 'What did you dream of?'
Tsata seemed uncomfortable, and did not reply. 'We should go; the others will be waiting for us.'
'Ah! You will not get away so easily,' she said, grabbing his arm as he made to rise. 'Where is your honesty now?' she chided playfully.
'I dreamt of you,' he said, his tone flat.
'Of me?'
'I dreamt I was gutting you with a knife.'
Kaiku stared at him for a moment. She blinked.
'I see your studies of Saramyrrhic have not yet encompassed the art of telling a woman what she wants to hear,' she said, and then burst out laughing at his expression. 'Come. We should be on our way.' When he still seemed uneasy, she said again: 'It was only a dream, Tsata. As was mine.'
They emerged from the tent to a crisp dawn. It was early yet, but from the faces of the group Kaiku guessed that few had slept well, if at all. They were wearily taking down the camp, wandering in pairs or eating cold food – no fires were allowed in the forest, on Lucia's advice. The silence that surrounded them was as oppressive as it had been the day before. It made the whole forest seem dead. Asara had packed her tent up and was sitting on the grass, watching Kaiku across the camp. Kaiku dismissed her with a glance. She did not want to worry about that one for now.
A sudden commotion from the treeline drew her attention. People were getting to their feet, running up towards where two men were emerging with a third being dragged between them.
'Spirits, what now?' Kaiku muttered, and she headed that way herself, with Tsata close behind.
They had dumped the man face down on the grass by the time she arrived, and soldiers were jabbering over the corpse. 'Who is this?' she demanded, putting enough of the Red Order authority into her tone to silence them. 'What happened to him?'
'He's one of those who went missing last night,' came the reply. 'We went to look for them. Didn't find the other.' He exchanged glances with his companion. 'As to what happened to him, your guess is as good as ours.'
With that, he tipped the body over with his boot, and it came to lie on its back with one arm awkwardly underneath it. The soldiers swore and cursed.
Though he seemed otherwise untouched, his eyes were milky white, no pupil or iris visible. The skin around them was speckled with burst blood vessels, and brilliant blue veins radiated out from the sockets, starkly protuberant. The man's expression was slack, his jaw hanging open in an idiot gape.
'I think you were more fortunate than we had guessed,' Tsata muttered, 'if this is what your beast does to its victims.'
Kaiku turned away, crossing her arms over her stomach, hugging herself. 'Then why did it spare me?'
She began to walk; the sight of the dead man was more than she could take at the moment. They travelled round the gorge and onward, following Lucia's directions. She was their compass, for she could sense the Xhiang Xhi and headed unerringly towards it. The group were jumpy now. The forest had a way of tricking the eye, inventing movement from nothing, so that people would start violently and look down at their feet, or out into the trees, thinking something had scurried past. They began to hear noises in the silence now, strange taps and clicks from afar. The first time they occurred, Doja – the leader of the soldiers – called a halt and they listened for a while; but the sounds were random and monotonous, and eventually they tried to ignore them. It did little good. The tapping began to wear at them, much as the silence had before it.
The forest continued to change, darkening as they penetrated further. Purple was predominant now, as of deciduous leaves on the late edge of autumn, and the canopy thickened overhead so that they walked in twilight. A strange gloom hung in the air. The taps and clicks echoed as if they were in a cavernous hall, unnaturally reverberant.
The group threaded its way through terrain that became increasingly hard, up muddy slopes and through tangled thickets with branches they dared not hack aside for fear of retaliation. They went with swords and rifles held ready, in the faint hope that they would be any use.
Kaiku and Phaeca walked together, keeping close to Lucia. Phaeca seemed better today, despite having barely slept. Whenever she had closed her eyes she had been pitched into the same nightmare, something so horrible that she refused to speak of it. Still, she had artfully made herself up and disguised the shadows under her eyes, and it did not show on her. Kaiku had been concerned about how well she might hold up in this environment, but she felt a small relief at seeing her friend recovered.
'How is she?' Phaeca murmured, gesturing at Lucia.
Kaiku made a face that said: who can tell? 'I do not think she even knows where she is at the moment.'
They observed her for a time, and indeed, she had the look of a sleepwalker. She drifted along without paying attention to anything or anyone nearby.
'She is listening to them,' Phaeca said. 'To the spirits.'
'I fear for her, Phaeca,' Kaiku admitted. 'She said things to me, back at Araka Jo…' She trailed off, deciding that to speak of it to Phaeca would be breaking a confidence. 'I fear for her,' she repeated.
Phaeca did not pry. 'What is she, truly?' she mused.
'She is an Aberrant, the same as you and me.'
Phaeca looked unconvinced. 'Is that all she is, do you think? I'm not so sure. It's her nature more than her abilities. And her uniqueness.' She glanced at Kaiku. 'Why aren't there more of her? There were many with our powers: the Sisterhood only accounts for a fraction of the total, those that were not killed or who did not kill themselves. Yet have you ever heard of anyone with Lucia's talent?'