Dark Mist Rising (40 page)

‘The meat be bad,' Jee announced, opening the pathetically small remaining packet of goat meat.

‘Faugh! What a smell!' Tom said. ‘Bury it, Jee. Roger, we need more food.'

The three of them gazed at me: Tom confident, Jee wary, Stephanie hopeful. She said, ‘Can you bring some cake? Or apples?'

I tried to imagine stealing apples from a root cellar or cake from a larder inside a farmhouse of savages. ‘No, I don't think so, Your Grace.'

‘Oh.' Her face fell.

‘Take me with you,' Jee said. ‘I will get them.'

Jee would have tried to steal anything that Stephanie wanted, from cake to jewels, but I was not going to take him. I still was not certain what would happen when I returned the three of them to the land of the living, and I was not going to do it more than once. Living people might be different from boots and shaving knives. And then what?

‘Jee, you must stay here to guard the princess. Wait here now.'

‘Where are you going, Roger?' Tom called as I walked away.

‘Wait here,' I said over my shoulder. Why did I not want them to see me vanish as I crossed over? I told myself that I did not want to scare Stephanie, but that was not the truth. I did not know what the truth was. However, it led me a little way into a hillside grove, from where I could see a cluster of Dead in a little dell below. I lay on the ground and crossed over.

Cold—

Darkness—

Dirt—

And then a greater cold, and snow up to my knees. It was night, with a nearly full moon low on the icy horizon. Shivering, slipping, cursing, I made my way down the hillside towards a farmhouse that was little more than a hut, its shutters closed against the winter night. But there was a ramshackle chicken house beside the hut. Surely I could break into that and grab a chicken before savages erupted from the house to shoot me. Surely I could—

‘Stop,' a voice said from the darkness.

I almost screamed. A woman stood beside me, emerged from the shadow of the chicken house, where no woman had stood before. She wore a smooth white cloak and carried a big bundle.

‘Stop, Roger Kilbourne.'

‘What ... who ... ?'

‘What I am does not matter. What
you
are, does matter, and you are a traitor.'

‘A—'

‘A traitor, yes. What else do you call those who aid the enemy? You are no better than the faithless
hisafs
who use your sister.'

I moved closer, to peer at her face. She showed no shrinking, no fear. Under the hood of her white cloak, her face was neither young nor old, plain nor pretty, and her eyes were green. I said, ‘You're one ... another one of the women of that shadow web, those who use soul arts—'

‘I am a witch. Why can you not use the word?' she said impatiently, and I recognized the tone. It was Mother Chilton's tone, Alysse's tone, even Fia's tone – all the web women who had scolded me for not doing as they instructed.

I said, deliberately avoiding the word
witch
, ‘I am not a traitor. I merely need food for—'

‘We know why you need food. Here.' She thrust the bundle into my arms, then leaned close to me. Her breath came frosty from between lips thinned with anger.

‘You are a traitor, Roger Kilbourne, whether you know it or not. You were told to not cross over again and—'

‘My father, a
hisaf
, said that I—'

‘—yet you have not only done so, you have brought with you three from the land of the living. Do you suppose your father ever imagined you could do such a thing? That if he had ever imagined it, he would not have warned you not to? You have even brought one with great and untaught talent, and now—'

‘I tried to get Alysse to help me rescue the princess, and she said that the princess did not matter!'

‘We did not know then all that Stephanie is, or how she might be used. But I am concerned with
you
, Roger Kilbourne. You were told how Soulvine Moor seeks to destroy the web that threads together the living and dead. You were
told
. Yet you have immeasurably damaged that web by your reckless actions. Three living brought into the Country of the Dead, three who are not
hisafs
, when just
one
born there has made possible such havoc! How can we make you understand what you have done?'

‘The savages were going to shoot them,' I said, and despite myself it came out like a sulky boy, not a man rescuing his sovereign and his friends. Always the web women did this to me – reduced me to an erring child. They rescued me, seduced me, scolded me, reproved me. I was weary of it all.

‘Yes, the savages were going to shoot them, and do you not think Stephanie would have been safer in the trance of the Dead than as your mad sister's tool to destroy both living and dead? You were told that once before. She would not be quiescent for ever, you know. Better she should be dead.'

Her callousness angered me. Or perhaps it was not callousness but, rather, an ability to look further ahead than I ever could.
She would not be quiescent for ever
. But Stephanie would have been so for a very long time, and she would have been deprived of her life here, in the realm of the living – a little girl, six years old. She might even have ended up in one of the circles of the Dead destroyed for ever by a whirling vortex from Soulvine Moor. I saw Stephanie's thin sweet face, eyes with their dark shadows of sleeplessness framed by lank brown hair, and everything in me recoiled from this web woman's pragmatic and far-seeing willingness to sacrifice the princess, and with her both Tom and Jee.

I said, carefully spacing each word, ‘I ... would ... not ... let ... them ... be ... killed.'

‘No, you would not. And as a result, Soulvine Moor has acquired more power from the damage you have done to the natural divide between life and death.
You
must stop crossing over
. Do you even understand what your actions have enabled? It is partly because of you that
hisafs
can now cross bodily and not merely in essence. How you could take it upon yourself to—'

A shout from the shuttered hut. Sudden light spilling from an open door. The
crack
of a
gun
.

Immediately I bit my tongue and crossed over. But not before I saw a white deer, almost invisible against the snow, bound away from the chicken house and into the winter woods.

But I, despite hunger, could swallow nothing. My belly churned, already full of doubts, questions, horrors real and envisioned. Was I really a traitor, aiding Soulvine Moor in its quest to rob the quiescent Dead of whatever should come next for them? Had I really made things worse in this war?

Things did not look worse in the Country of the Dead. They looked exactly the same: light patches of pale fog motionless over the ground, low even light, stillness and quiet and very few Dead in these high mountains. But more must be happening beyond my sight. How had the web woman known of those happenings – or indeed where I was in the Country of the Dead? Web women were not
hisafs
; they could not cross over. I did not understand what they could or could not do.

I did not understand anything.

‘By damn, that tasted good,' Tom said with deep satisfaction. ‘I'm ready now to walk ten miles, see if I'm not. And to carry you the whole way, Your Grace.'

‘I will walk with Jee,' Stephanie said. The circles under her eyes were darker than ever, the tender flesh looking far too bruised for a child, but her cherry-stained lips smiled. The smile brought me no cheer.

I, Roger Kilbourne, aiding Soulvine Moor. And if – when – I brought three mortals back again to the land of the living, would I aid it still more?

Better she should have been shot
.

No. Not better. No.

‘Let us go,' Tom said. ‘We must— What is that?'

One of the Dead walked towards us from the trees.

It was an old woman dressed in a gown so frayed and worn that patches of the skirt had weft but no warp. Her eyes were open but unseeing, and she walked in strange jerks, not with the tremors of the very old but rather as if some foreign power moved her unwilling legs. Her arms dangled loosely at her sides. Her face was serene.

Tom reached for the bow and arrow stolen from a savage soldier.

‘No!' I said. ‘She's not dangerous, she's—' What? Dead. She was supposed to be dead. The Dead did not behave like this. ‘Stay here, all of you.'

They did not, of course. Jee remained with Stephanie but Tom followed me, even as I followed the dead woman. She lurched with that jerky gait across the hilltop and into the trees. There was no trail here. She stumbled in a straight line through undergrowth, across a shallow stream, under a stand of high pines. When she fell over, she righted herself. The falls did not tear her gown nor scratch her face.

After perhaps a half-mile she came to a group of Dead. They sat in a circle, seven strong. Before she could become the eighth, I grabbed her with my one good hand, turned her to face away from the circle, and shook her hard.

‘Mistress! Mistress!'

Slowly her eyes focused, and behind me I heard Tom draw a sharp breath. He had not seen this before. But always it is old women who are most willing to talk to me.

‘What want you, lad?' She spoke in Tarekish, and I switched to that guttural language.

‘Where are you going?'

Puzzlement came into her watery blue eyes. She looked at me, at the countryside, at the featureless sky. ‘I am dead.'

‘Yes. Where are you going?'

‘No place. Where would a dead person go? I am here.'

Tom demanded, ‘What does she say?'

She turned towards his voice and saw the circle of the Dead. Her puzzlement deepened.

I asked, for the third time, ‘Where are you going?' My belly tightened. If she could actually tell me ...

But she could not. Old women of the savage mountains were no different from old women of The Queendom. If I had wanted her to talk of her childhood, she might have done so. But the Dead are not interested in talking about the present, not even their own present, not even enough to stay roused. The old woman's face lapsed back to tranquillity while her feet tried again to move towards the circle.

‘Tom,' I said, ‘tie her to that tree over there. Tightly enough that she cannot escape.'

‘
Tie her?
A dead woman?'

‘Yes. Tear a strip off the bottom of her gown if you've nothing else.'

‘But why, Roger? She can't harm us!'

‘She can harm herself.'

Tom planted himself firmly in front of me, the old woman between us. Her feet kept moving, although my one good hand easily restrained her frail body. Tom said, as he had once before, ‘I do nothing more without answers, Roger. Tell me about this.'

I gazed at his troubled face. He meant it. He would obey no more orders without more information. Even though I doubted that he would accept my answers, or believe them, or be reassured by them.

‘Soulvine Moor is waging a war with all the rest of us, Tom. With The Queendom and the Unclaimed Lands and Tarek's kingdom. That is the real war, not any rebellion against savage rule. The war is being fought both in the land of the living and the Country of the Dead. Soulvine Moor wants to break down the barrier between the two realms and channel the power of death into themselves, so they can live for ever.'

Tom's face flashed through several emotions and finally settled into pity.

‘Roger,' he said gently, ‘that don't make sense. How can death have power? Why, the woman's dead and just look at her! A limp rag that can't go nowhere.'

The old woman's feet kept moving, her bare toes brush-ing against my boots. I wanted to make her stop; I wanted to make Tom understand; I wanted to stop explaining what he could never understand. I was exhausted and irritated and afraid.

‘That's the best I can tell you,' I snapped. ‘Believe it or not, as you choose. But this war is why Stephanie is having nightmares and why Lady Margaret and the nurse were killed and why I could bring you and Jee and the princess across the grave to this place. You remember the grave, Tom? You remember crossing over? Make sense of
that
.'

He did remember. I saw it in his eyes – the darkness and worms and his fleshless arms and legs flailing helplessly – and I felt ashamed. I owed Tom as much as he owed me. But I could not give him explanations I did not have. I knew death had immense power –
something bright and
terrible rending the sky
– but I did not understand how Soulvine Moor was channelling that power. I was a
hisaf
and I crossed over, but to do something is not necessarily to understand how it is done.

Tom said, ‘If this old woman sits in that circle over there, it aids ... it aids Soulvine Moor?'

I nodded. This he could understand: us against them.