Finally he picked it up, startled at the lack of ceremony, the plainness of the act: it was just paper, light and dry in his hand. And the writing was of an ordinary, jagged script, though what it said burned through his mind like fire.
I WILL DESTROY THE WALL. MY NAME IS SHADOW. THERE IS WORSE THAN DEATH. I WILL DESTROY THE WALL. THERE IS WORSE THAN PAIN. I WILL DESTROY THE WALL. THERE IS WORSE THAN MOCKING LAUGHTER. I WILL DESTROY THE WALL. I WILL DESTROY THE WALL.
— Shadow
29
The light of afternoon was beginning to dim, but they were able, still, to keep an eye on the forest floor for more of the distinctive marks they’d seen by the hall. They had not yet found any. Loup led them, sometimes changing directions for no apparent reason, once even leading the group in a wide circle, and it seemed he’d done so on purpose. The others traded exasperated looks but didn’t question the magician.
The cult girl — Lalie, as they began to call her, despite her ignoring this at first — kept a sullen silence, but briefly inclined her head in thanks when Anfen passed her a strip of dried meat. She ate it ravenously. She warmed to no one, but Sharfy was the one to whom her looks were the most venomous. No one questioned her yet. Nor did Anfen decide — after some murmured debate with Loup — to keep her hands tied, not yet.
When we get near a town, perhaps, he thought. Inferno cultists were not permitted in most cities, Free or Aligned, which meant they were usually killed on sight. Lalie did not bear many of the tribal scars or tattoos of long-standing cultists, but nor did she yet seem willing to lie about her beliefs, or forsake them. The Mayors would hear her story, and they would resort to torture, if she kept it to herself. War was war; no one had to like it.
The doomed hall and its museum of death had done the expected bad things to Anfen’s mind. Only Sharfy’s face, Sharfy with whom he’d travelled most out of this group, was free of being split and cracked open in his eyes. Lalie and the Pilgrims he tried not to look at. Lalie especially was the stuff of nightmares, not helped, he guessed, by the dried blood that had caked her real face for so long. And these trees, these fucking trees, how he hated them, more than the old Pilgrim Case did, no matter who complained and who didn’t. When he came close to one he had a strong lust to hack into it with his blade. It didn’t matter that they’d come through the haunted part of the woods unscathed.
Anfen also knew Case was battling to keep pace with the group, and seemed on the brink of a one-man mutiny. It would be a challenge, when the peevish complaints ceased being quietly muttered and began being grumbled aloud, to keep from cuffing the old man’s head, or screaming at him, or more. He didn’t want things tense with both Pilgrims. But it was too late now — they would not avoid another night in these woods, and largely because of that one old man’s lagging legs.
‘We’ll be safe if we’re quiet,’ said Loup as they set up camp for the night on a rise in the ground, away from the mist. ‘Could be that the noise and whooping and hollering was what drew the beasties from the ground.’
‘Maybe so. Lalie, what time did they attack? During your ritual?’
She answered, to Anfen’s surprise. ‘After. Late.’
‘Go on,’ he said, deciding to press her. ‘You’ve been fed. Earn it.’
She shut her eyes and spoke hesitantly: ‘We had collapsed, spent, around the fire, when they came. They … they stood by our sleeping bodies, we didn’t know for how long. Hours or minutes. They were perfectly still, in our midst. Watching us. Someone woke and saw them. She screamed. We others woke and ran. They didn’t follow. They stayed still, perfectly still.’ She swallowed and her voice quavered. ‘We went to the hall. Barricaded it. They didn’t come, not for a while. Morning was not far. We began to wonder if … we had imagined them. Then, out the window. I was the one who saw it. Right outside, peering in. It moved strangely. We didn’t hear them come. It looked right at me.’ She was shivering.
‘What then, Lalie?’ said Anfen, but she fell quiet and he let her stay that way.
They had a small fire with carefully treated wood but after their broth was heated that was all, cold night or not. ‘And we’ll have two on watch, all night. Siel and Eric first. Case and myself second. Sharfy and Loup third.’ Eric’s possible link to Siel was one way to nip in the bud any potential mutiny …
Lalie tossed and turned, whimpering in her sleep. Loup crouched by her, laid a hand on her forehead and murmured a few words. She soon lay quiet. Whatever Loup had done caused a drop of blood to trickle from his ear. ‘Another thankless deed,’ he muttered, holding his head in pain. ‘But she needs it. Us too, with that moaning. Dreaming of beasties and blood. Silly girl.’
Who needs thanks and praise? They’re just accusations of what good you haven’t done, Anfen thought before drifting to oblivion, where colourless dreams awaited, the kind mercifully overlooked by his memory each morning.
Eric sat by the dead fire and Siel — to his surprise — sat behind him with her back pressed against his. The night woods were quiet around them, save the odd scuffling noise as a small creature lingered now and then at the edge of their camp, sniffing them out.
‘You aren’t a prince,’ said Siel after a few quiet minutes. ‘Or nobility.’
To lie or not to lie … ‘No, I’m not. But I’m the next closest thing, an unpublished novelist. That’s a joke. How could you tell anyway?’
‘At the hilltop. You know of my talent?’
‘At the hilltop, I discovered your talent, yes.’
She laughed quietly, which was fine music to his ears. ‘I see things,’ she said. ‘Glimpse through windows into the past. I don’t like it. Here where bad things have happened, it’s awful. I walked into a room at our old house and one day saw a man strangling an old woman. That was the first time it happened. I was five. Sometimes I can block it out, sometimes I can’t. When they found I had talent, they tried to make me a mage in Happenstance. But my tutor was killed by bounty hunters. I’m not glad about that; she was nice. But I’m glad not to be a mage. Glimpses are bad enough.’
‘Happenstance … that’s what your magic’s called?’
‘It’s Wisdom’s school. Or it was, before they destroyed all the temples and burned the books.’
‘Wisdom — another Great Spirit?’
She sighed as if annoyed to be drawn onto an objectionable subject of discussion. ‘Yes, but it’s misleading. She doesn’t really have much to do with their spell craft, though they thought otherwise at first. She’s connected to the raw kind of magic they use, but not to the ways they use it. It’s complicated to explain.’ She waved a hand to brush the subject away. ‘Anyway. When we mated, I learned things about you. One is that you lied about yourself.’
Mated. That word seemed a fitting description of their encounter on the hilltop. He nodded. ‘Is that why you did it, to learn about me?’
‘The main reason. I also like it, sometimes.’
‘Ouch.’
‘Though it is different for me, I think, from how it is for most women.’
‘Did you learn also that I’m scared to death here? I was marched to your camp at knife-point, for fuck’s sake. I thought this group was likely to kill me, unless maybe they thought I was important.’
‘Yes, I knew that too. But you are important. You are a Pilgrim.’
‘What does that mean? What’s going to become of me?’
She paused so long before answering he wasn’t sure she’d heard him. ‘You’ll decide what becomes of you,’ she said. ‘I don’t know. I can’t see the future. Almost no one can, not clearly, or the magic schools would still be here and Vous would never have taken the castle. And I don’t know what it means that you’re a Pilgrim. Only that it’s important.’