“Get out of the way!” Cheydar bellowed, running after Dagon.
Eric took careful aim, pressed the trigger. The hyaenodon stumbled, shook its head. Eric shouldered the air gun, reached up, and hauled himself up onto the oak limb above his head. Dagon met the second hyaenodon like the first, brought it down, heart stabbed. It died vomiting up its last meal in which Cheydar was sure he saw the chewed remains of a human hand. Eric grinned like a maniac from the oak tree. Suen just kept saying, “Oh my God. Oh my God.” But she shrugged away Cheydar’s hand when he rested it on her shoulder. A third hyaenodon retreated into the fog.
In the middle of the afternoon the fog cleared as far back as they could see through the trees, and the hyaenodon that had been trailing them disappeared. Then they saw a herd of chalicotheres that were the hyaenodon’s usual prey. Perhaps it went after them or returned to the ready source of meat its fellows had become.
The trail began to cut across the face of a steep slope, and after consulting his map and compass, Cheydar led them down the slope to a fast-moving river, with gravel beds between half submerged slabs of rock. Armour-headed salmon swam in the deeper pools hunting trilobites the size of a human hand. They followed this river downstream and as evening encroached they heard the cadence of waves on a shingle beach and came out of forest by the sea, gleaming in yellow moonlight.
“Not a place to swim,” said Cheydar, pointing out at a huge fin.
“It’s only a basking shark,” said Dagon.
Cheydar looked at him with annoyance.
“Is there anything you don’t know?” he asked sarcastically.
Dagon looked at him, didn’t reply.
They walked on for some while longer until the setting sun illuminated a silver post in the trees above the beach. They climbed above the beach and came upon the post, no closer than five metres. The post was higher than a man and as wide. It was a plain silver cylinder with what could have been runes, or could have been circuit diagrams, etched into its surface.
Cheydar stared at it and felt a crawling superstitious dread. He had been raised on stories about these things, about the power, the death. So many people had died trying to cross fence lines, or by just crossing accidentally. He glanced to his left, into the forest. No trees grew in line to the next post. There was just short grass and lichen on the ground. It was like this all the way along; trees never grew close enough to a fence where their falling might damage a post. No creepers or vines grew, nothing grew that might obscure posts from view. A human, crossing the line between posts would die, dramatically. Animals crossed the line without ill effect. It was just the way it was.
“Where are these words?” Suen asked Dagon. He pointed to a framed area on the post and looked at her. Her lips pulled back from her teeth in sudden anger. “And how are we supposed to understand that?”
“Your husband would have understood it. The language is old-Earth English; the language of scholars, the language that was yours when you came here.”
“Ours,” said Suen pointedly. She led the way into forest then, keeping to the edge of the trees, away from the death posts.
Eventually they came to an area where trees had fallen on ground turned boggy, their roots clawing at the sky. Beyond this was a break in the ground risen to head height; a recently risen wall of mud. Just before the break, spring water bubbled and new streams were cutting their way into the forest. They moved away from the fence line and got past this by climbing the trunk of a fallen elm. Above the break only a couple of trees had come down. The ground was dry here, but there were deep cracks in it where it had moved.
“Underground river,” said Dagon. “Changed its course; undermined everything.” And one of the things it had undermined was a death post. The post was tilted at an angle and glassy underground cables exposed.
“Here,” said Suen, “if we cross on the side the post is tilted from we will not be harmed.”
“It is good to be so certain,” said Dagon.
“You do not have to try,” snapped Suen.
Cheydar gazed across the line and wondered if he dared cross, even to follow Suen. There was too much dread caught up in the idea. Never before had he so feared death. Perhaps it was because there was nothing here he could fight. He turned to say something to Dagon; anything to ease the tension in him. The snarling bark came just behind him and he was jerked off his feet by his back pack, shaken, then hurled to one side as the straps of his pack broke. He struck a tree and fell to the ground half-stunned and staggeringly tried to right himself as the hyaenodon went for Suen. Air guns cracked and the creature turned, its teeth clashing at the air. Cheydar ran at it, drawing the sword Dagon had given him. He saw Dagon in front of it, sword drawn, ready for the cut, but the creature turned at the last moment and its jaws snapped on the sword and broke it in half. Then it had Dagon in its jaws, shaking him, still running, into fence line. The air filled with lightnings. Clamped in the creature’s jaws, Dagon was sheathed head to foot in fire. The hyaenodon went down, releasing him; a burning thing on the ground that after a moment rose into the air again as if impaled on the lightnings. Cheydar saw this, smelt burning fur and burning flesh, black after-images flickering across his vision. Then the lightnings went out. Dagon’s blackened corpse dropped to the ground beyond the fence, extremities breaking and falling away in charcoal shells. The hyaenodon was not burnt, but it did not move again. Cheydar gritted his teeth over sickness and horrified surprise. Not him, not Dagon, he shouldn’t have died.
“Why did it kill the hyaenodon?” asked Eric, his voice flat.
“The power was there to kill a man. The hyaenodon just got in the way because it was holding him in its mouth,” replied Cheydar. They were both standing back by the trees looking at Suen who stood close to the fence and stared at the blackened corpse. What could she possibly say or do now? It was time to turn back and follow David and Sheda to Elmarch. Time to end this pointless quest. Perhaps, thought Cheydar in the most secret part of his mind, for an ending to oaths. Suen had ceased to have a right to his loyalty when she no longer supplied his food, a roof over his head, and a means to decent interment after his death. Only plain stubbornness had kept him with her.
“What will we do now?” asked Eric.
Cheydar paused a moment over his reply and saw Suen take a step towards the fence. He did not believe she would go further. She feared death as much as any and a working fence was certain death. In some stories it had even been described as the fence separating the living world from the land of the dead.
“We will go to Elmarch, perhaps down the coast so we avoid all the Cariphe’s lands. We’ll take service there. Perhaps the army… No!”
Suen was striding towards the blackened corpse of the Daybreak Warrior. Cheydar ran after her with Eric close behind him. They did not reach her in time. She crossed the line of the fence, came to stand over the corpse. Cheydar hesitated only a moment at the line, Eric not at all. As they reached her she was breathing heavily and had an insane look to her face. Cheydar realised she had meant to die. The fence had not killed her, perhaps something had gone wrong, burnt out. Cheydar realised he was shaking. He reached out to rest a hand on her shoulder, but at that moment she dropped to her knees and bowed down, sobbing. Cheydar felt sick with fear after the fact. He glanced at Eric whose face was now white with shock at the realisation of what they had done. They had crossed the fence. They were in the Forbidden Zone.