Sometimes we’d spend all night up there together and there would never be a light at all, neither one of us would shift from the nest until dawn. Or later.
I felt nested now, my body settled into his, warm and safe and entirely happy. Somewhere out there must be sunlight and the starting day, things to do, life and death, all the mortal world in its struggles – but not here. Here was Thom, and here was I, all bound up in this blessed fog and we were plenty for each other.
Fires sleep the night through, if you bank them up and damp them down thoroughly. Then they wake in the morning if you stir them up, shake them down and toss them something to eat. Men are generally much the same. Thom was all of that, doubled and squared. He loved to sleep, as much as he loved to dance; shaking him awake was so much effort I used my Aspect for it sometimes, just to be easy on my shoulders. Too bad the Aspect couldn’t cook, I had to do that side of it myself; in human form he loved to eat, that too. Sleep was better, though, always. He’d sooner sleep than anything. Almost anything. Actually, I thought he might be asleep right now, in the fog there on the hill.
There was always one other way to wake him, that didn’t involve downright violence – that was the one thing that I knew he liked better even than sleeping – but he wasn’t going to get that every day. It wouldn’t have been good for him, he’d have come over all smug and expectant.
Besides, I was never really in all that much hurry to rouse him. Whatever the promise of the day, whatever the promise of his body, I used to treasure that first hour more: wrapped in his heat and the quilts’ softness and the day’s gentle light, gazing up at the planes of glass and watching the sky beyond resolve from a milky cocktail to blue or white or storm-grey as the day chose, and thinking how I was supposed to kill him soon but I didn’t have to do it now, not now, not today...
One thing about Oz, he’s never in a hurry. Not for himself, and not to see any of his other projects to resolution. He’s monumentally patient; happy enough to go at a geological pace, when that’s what it takes. Besides, I had licence not to rush it.
Give him time, make him fall for you; make the betrayal all the sweeter, make sure he knows when it happens, that he knows what’s coming and that it comes from you and from me...
Those were my instructions, and they made my excuse. Weeks and weeks I waited, telling myself that I was only following orders; and all the while settling in to my own new identity, reassuring myself that Jacey and all his kin couldn’t track Desi down, however hard they were looking for Fay.
For a while I could fool myself, it was like this fog: like swaddling for my mind, padding all my edges, dulling everything down.
If you can’t see them, they can’t see you. Hold on to that. And if you never move, they’ll never see you. Hold on to Thom, you’re being paid for this, remember...
Actually, I thought I could see things in the fog. Just my imagination painting pictures on a blank, swirling canvas, that was all. I knew that, I wasn’t foolish. Even so, it felt like I was watching my time with Thom being played out before my eyes, rather than remembering it in the privacy of my head: as though I were a clear-sighted seagull looking down through the lights of the lantern. Nothing like a crow, no, looking down on billowing white and seeing nothing through it. Oz’s spies must have lost us for sure, in this charming fog. I could relax, let everything slip, indulge myself in what we’d been.
Mostly I thought that what we’d been was happy. Okay, I was meant to kill him, but I had to make him happy first, that was in my job description; and I guess it rubbed off, that happy thing. I never learned to love him, maybe, but I loved to share his company, his body and his life. He showed me how to live easy within the world, how that was possible. I wouldn’t say he taught me to do the same – I still had all my secrets, grief and guilt and fear tied like knots in my heart – but just being with him was enough to loosen me up, at least a little.
Day by day, see us drifting in the fog there? Two innocents in a life-raft, afloat, cut off. Well, one innocent, and one who had been there and moved on and hoped maybe one day to move back, but in the meantime, alas, she had to kill a man. Snuff a flame.
Murder a god, apparently. I don’t think anyone told me that at the time. If they did, apparently I wasn’t listening, it didn’t stick.
Neither did I stick to my task. At first I was inveigling my way into his heart, as ordered, the better to make the ending worse. Then I was just nestled there, frankly putting off the day; then at some point it became clear even to muddled little me that I wasn’t actually going to do it.
So then we had to have the talk. You know the one: confession, apology, heartbreak. Reparation. Everyone’s been there.
Not everyone’s taken money to murder a god, but that’s incidental. You can’t weigh guilt any more than you can measure pain. We all do what’s there to be done, and we all feel bad about it after.
I told Thom who had sent me, and for what; I told him to run and hide, while I pulled a snow job on Oz. While I buried Oz, indeed, in an avalanche of snow:
job done, here’s the ashes, let me mix up that mortar for you now; and yes, thank you kindly, absolutely I will take my reward, for absolutely I have earned it.
And part of that reward was his help in hiding me from the Cathars, which is maybe why he couldn’t see my new knots of guilt and deception, all tangled up among the older deeper hurts. Or maybe he just wasn’t looking. I was his pet then, his sexy young girl-assassin, and he loved me for it. I don’t suppose it had crossed his mind that I might betray him.
He knew it now. The fog was suddenly full of fury, it seethed and boiled all about us, and where it struck it stung like whips; and we couldn’t shift, we couldn’t stir, we couldn’t even cry out at the pain as it lashed us.
My Aspect was there but I couldn’t reach for it, not even that. It was like one of those dreams where bad things are happening and you can’t move. More, worse. It was like all my bones had softened in the fog and I could do nothing at all but lie there in a knot with Thom, sore and scared and suffering, waiting to suffer worse.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
F
OG IS A
seduction and a lure and a lie.
How did I ever let myself, let the two of us get snared this way?
Because I was seduced, of course. Because I was lured, because I was lied to.
Fog’s
insidious
. Of itself, it is; it comes like a thief in the night. It sneaks in under your guard, it blurs your boundaries, it’s inside before you know it. And then nothing is safe or certain or reliably there; and if the fog is not innocent to begin with, if it’s been
sent
, then all bets are off and seduction is absolutely on the agenda.
He came striding up the hill, the fog-feller, the creature who had felled us with his fog. I would have called him a wight, I guess – though I know a couple of boys who would instantly have corrected me,
that’s not a wight, that’s a wraith
, or whatever. They have no
idea
how annoying that is.
Whatever he was – and
fog-feller
will do it, that’s close enough – he was gaunt and long-legged and made of old, like weathered stone and twisted trees, all grey and cold and rooty. He was humming, I think, under whatever breath he had, whatever more he needed when I thought all the fog was his breath, his lungs, his purpose.
And his song, that too: the fog and the drone were both one thing, unshaped and immaterial, impossible to get a grip on. Well, I had fog in my bones now, I couldn’t get a grip on anything and Thom was worse, Thom had sucked that stuff inside him and almost put his fires out. Even so, I could feel them both still working away, fog and drone together: dissolving what should have been solid and fixed, rubbing away all the distinctions between past and future, between here and now, leaving us lost in an inchoate dreamworld with nothing to cling to but terror.
It wasn’t like the easy drift of an anaesthetic, not now. Not now I knew. It had been like that at first, unnoticeable, sneaking up on us as we lapsed into memory and imagination. Now it was a cold hand clamped about my heart, the only real thing there was until the fog-feller reached us and reached over and picked us up.
One hard hand each, long fingers winding around chest and shoulders like hedge-roots winding about the stones of a broken wall, except that the skin of them was rough and pebbly like dry stone for the wall, and chill like stone in a winter’s dawn, and there was nothing in them that was anything like life. Except that they moved like living fingers, fast enough; and he stooped and straightened and stepped away like something cast from nightmare, fog in his eyes, and now we hung in his grip, one in each hand like dolls, like puppets, like broken things.
His cold grip on my skin matched the fear that gripped my heart. I could feel both of those, and nothing else. Where my Aspect was, I couldn’t imagine. Lost in the fog. Lost for good, I supposed. We weren’t getting out of this. We couldn’t even twitch, either of us.
This was what I’d been supposed to do to Thom: render him helpless, let him realise that he’d been betrayed and that he was going to die now, give him plenty of time to savour that before it happened. Instead I’d chosen to confess all, give him the chance to run instead, help him find somewhere to hide up and then lie to Oz about it. And so here we were, the both of us together, facing the same fate.
The way he was stalking across the countryside, the fog-feller must be planning to take us all the way, so that Oz could actually watch us die. That wasn’t like him, to be personally engaged, he mostly liked to operate from distance – but we’d made this personal, I suppose. Between us.
It didn’t make much difference, anyway. We could die just as handily there as here. I did briefly wonder how it would happen – me at the fog-feller’s hands, perhaps, just slowly crushed to pulp, with something more specialised reserved for Thom? – but really that didn’t make much difference either. There’d be pain, and confusion, and eventually an end. Something to look forward to.
It was a pity, maybe, not to go down fighting, but not everybody gets that chance. Oz wasn’t one to take risks; he’d keep us fogged until the last.
This was it, then. I wasn’t exactly peaceable about it, but okay; I could live with that.
Die with it.
I didn’t really have a choice.
O
VER THE HILL
and down onto a moorland road, with fog still billowing about us. Nobody would be reporting an unworldly creature walking in the hills; nobody would be seeing anything out of the ordinary, anything at all.
Until actually I did see something, up ahead. See it and hear it too, a single point of light and a subdued, muffled rumble.
It was just the way he carried me, this creature – maybe he was a troll, or an ogre? a fog-ogre, a fogre...? – with my head facing slackly forward; it was only by chance, but I could see what came. And my mind was clearing by the moment, washed through with fear, so that I could focus my thoughts even while my body span adrift.
That would be what Oz wanted, of course: he’d want me to know exactly what was coming, and be utterly unable to avoid it.
This, now? This was not what Oz wanted. Not what the fogre wanted, either. He stepped off the road and walked away into his fog, onto the uncharted moor.
That light must just have found his shadow, just in time. It turned to follow us, and its noise grew louder, harsher. Dropped a gear.
Motorbike. I knew that already, I’d known it from the first.
I was still trying not to hope.
He couldn’t have got here this fast, could he? Could he? He didn’t have a bike left to his name...
If it was him, he probably couldn’t help. This fog-feller was mighty strong. I should probably hope that it wasn’t him, just to keep him safe, let Oz settle for me and Thom and not add to the day’s tally.
Probably.
Even so. I guess I was hoping despite myself, because however hard I tried for anxious disappointment there was really nothing in me but relief when the bike just kept on coming, when the fog-feller finally stopped trying to outpace it, when he turned almost at bay as he dropped us and stretched his arms out wide and waited for what came.
When the bike came, and the driver kicked down its stand and stepped off and shook the wind out of his hair and oh, yes, that was Jacey.
Jacey on a big white Beemer; I didn’t think I’d ever seen a white one before this.
Jacey with a passenger riding pillion, which I hadn’t been looking for, hadn’t expected, hadn’t thought to wonder about. Ought probably to regret, but I wasn’t doing too well at the
sauve-qui-peut
self-sacrifice thing, it just didn’t come naturally.
Actually, let’s be honest, it didn’t come at all.
I did contrive to feel faintly guilty about that, but mostly I was just glad that the way I’d fallen, I could still see what was happening.
Until that pillion passenger echoed Jacey, and stepped off the bike. Jacey didn’t wear a helmet, but he did; and that was white too. And he took it off and ran his hand over stubble showing faintly white again, and
Oh, no, Jordan, not you too, not both of you...