“Our turn is coming. Too soon. Too soon. I feel death-ghosts close at hand.”
“Sting!”
Sting made a weird ratcheting sound low in his throat, a sort of rusty sob. Leaf lifted him and swung him out of the driver’s seat, settling him gently down in the corridor. It was as though he weighed nothing at all. Perhaps just then that was true. Sting had many strange gifts. “Go on,” Leaf said. “Get some rest while you can.”
“How kind you are, Leaf.”
“And no more talk of ghosts.”
“Yes,” Sting said. Leaf saw him struggling against fear and despair and weariness. Sting appeared to brighten a moment, flickering on the edge of his old vitality; then the brief glow subsided, and, smiling a pale smile, offering a whisper of thanks, he went aft.
Leaf took his place in the driver’s seat.
Through the window of the wagon—thin, tough sheets of stickskin, the best quality, carefully matched, perfectly transparent—he confronted a dismal scene. Rain dark as blood was falling at a steep angle, scourging the spongy soil, kicking up tiny fountains of earth. A bluish miasma rose from the ground, billows of dark, steamy fog, the acrid odour of which had begun to seep into the wagon. Leaf sighed and reached for the reins. Death-ghosts, he thought. Haunted. Poor Sting, driven to the end of his wits.
And yet, and yet, as he considered the things Sting had said, Leaf realized that he had been feeling somewhat the same way, these past few days: tense, driven, haunted. Haunted. As though unseen presences, mocking, hostile, were hovering near. Ghosts? The strain, more likely, of all that he had gone through since the first onslaught of the Teeth. He had lived through the collapse of a rich and intricate civilization. He moved now through a strange world, all ashes and seaweed. He was haunted, perhaps, by the weight of the unburied past, by the memory of all that he had lost.
A rite of exorcism seemed in order.
Lightly he said, aloud, “If there are any ghosts in here, I want you to listen to me. Get out of this cabin. That’s an order. I have work to do.”
He laughed. He picked up the reins and made ready to take control of the team of nightmares.
The sense of an invisible presence was overwhelming.
Something at once palpable and intangible pressed clammily against him. He felt surrounded and engulfed. It’s the fog, he told himself. Dark blue fog, pushing at the window, sealing the wagon into a pocket of vapor. Or was it? Leaf sat quite still for a moment, listening. Silence. He relinquished the reins, swung about in his seat, carefully inspected the cabin. No one there. An absurdity to be fidgeting like this. Yet the discomfort remained. This was no joke now. Sting’s anxieties had infected him, and the malady was feeding on itself, growing more intense from moment to moment, making him vulnerable to any stray terror that whispered to him. Only with a tranquil mind could he attain the state of trance a nightmare-driver must enter; and trance seemed unattainable so long as he felt the prickle of some invisible watcher’s gaze on the back of his neck. This rain, he thought, this damnable rain. It drives everybody crazy. In a clear, firm voice Leaf said, “I’m altogether serious. Show yourself and get yourself out of this cabin.”
Silence.
He took up the reins again. No use. Concentration was impossible. He knew many techniques for centering himself, for leading his consciousness to a point of unassailable serenity. But could he achieve that now, jangled and distracted as he was? He would try. He had to succeed. The wagon had tarried in this place much too long already. Leaf summoned all his inner resources; he purged himself, one by one, of every discord; he compelled himself to slide into trance.
It seemed to be working. Darkness beckoned to him. He stood at the threshold. He started to step across.
“Such a fool, such a foolish fool,” said a sudden dry voice out of nowhere that nibbled at his ears like the needle-toothed mice of the White Desert.
The trance broke. Leaf shivered as if stabbed and sat up, eyes bright, face flushed with excitement.
“Who spoke?”
“Put down those reins, friend. Going forward on this road is a heavy waste of spirit.”
“Then I wasn’t crazy and neither was Sting. There is something in here!”
“A ghost, yes a ghost, a ghost, a ghost!” The ghost showered him with laughter.
Leaf’s tension eased. Better to be troubled by a real ghost than to be vexed by a fantasy of one’s own disturbed mind. He feared madness far more than he did the invisible. Besides, he thought he knew what this creature must be.
“Where are you, ghost?”
“Not far from you. Here I am. Here. Here.” From three different parts of the cabin, one after another. The invisible being began to sing. Its song was high-pitched, whining, a grinding tone that stretched Leaf’s patience intolerably. Leaf still saw no one, though he narrowed his eyes and stared as hard as he could. He imagined he could detect a faint veil of pink light floating along the wall of the cabin, a smoky haze moving from place to place, a shimmering film like thin oil on water, but whenever he focused his eyes on it the misty presence appeared to evaporate.
Leaf said, “How long have you been aboard this wagon?”
“Long enough.”
“Did you come aboard at Theptis?”
“Was that the name of the place?” asked the ghost disingenuously. “I forget. It’s so hard to remember things.”
“Theptis,” said Leaf. “Four days ago.”
“Perhaps it was Theptis,” the ghost said. “Fool! Dreamer!”
“Why do you call me names?”
“You travel a dead road, fool, and yet nothing will turn you from it.” The invisible one snickered. “Do you think I’m a ghost, Pure Stream?”
“I know what you are.”
“How wise you’ve become!”
“Such a pitiful phantom. Such a miserable drifting wraith. Show yourself to me, ghost.”
Laughter reverberated from the corners of the cabin. The voice said, speaking from a point close to Leaf’s left ear, “The road you choose to travel has been killed ahead. We told you that when you came to us, and yet you went onward, and still you go onward. Why are you so rash?”
“Why won’t you show yourself? A gentleman finds it discomforting to speak to the air.”
Obligingly the ghost yielded, after a brief pause, some fraction of its invisibility. A vaporous crimson stain appeared in the air before Leaf, and he saw within it dim, insubstantial features, like projections on a screen of thick fog. He believed he could make out a wispy white beard, harsh glittering eyes, lean curving lips; a whole forbidding face, a fleshless torso. The stain deepened momentarily to scarlet and for a moment Leaf saw the entire figure of the stranger revealed, a long narrow-bodied man, dried and withered, grinning ferociously at him. The edges of the figure softened and became mist. Then Leaf saw only vapor again, and then nothing.
“I remember you from Theptis,” Leaf said. “In the tent of Invisibles.”
“What will you do when you come to the dead place on the highway?” the invisible one demanded. “Will you fly over it? Will you tunnel under it?”
“You were asking the same things at Theptis,” Leaf replied. “I will make the same answer that the Dark Laker gave you then. We will go forward, dead place or no. This is the only road for us.”
They had come to Theptis on the fifth day of their flight—a grand city, a splendid mercantile emporium, the gateway to the west, sprawling athwart a place where two great rivers met and many highways converged. In happy times any and all peoples might be found in Theptis, Pure Streams and White Crystals and Flower Givers and Sand Shapers and a dozen others jostling one another in the busy streets, buying and selling, selling and buying, but mainly Theptis was a city of Fingers—the merchant caste, plump and industrious, thousands upon thousands of them concentrated in this one city.