Confusion creeps palpably across my face.
“You can protect your friends, and yourself as well. It’s the best chance for you all.”
I feel my mouth bunching, breath tight in my chest and harsh in my nose.
“And perhaps, when you arrive at the cemetery, you will petition the spirits for
yourself
. They might then help you, instead.
Just
you.”
“Could they end the war?”
He leans forward.
“War is the spirit that seeks your life. War is a spirit, and you need the help of spirits against it.”
“It’s Makemin will get me killed.”
“Why? Does he hate you? What reason does he have to kill you?”
“He has only to see I’m not with him. Or he’ll drag me into death somewhere ... I can’t ... He’ll know, or he’ll guess ... ”
“He’s possessed. They all are. You’ve
seen
that.”
He’s talking about the insanity I saw bellowing from every face. He’s right.
“Will the spirits really help him, if he asks them?”
“They might very well.”
Makemin must die, not get what he wants, whatever that is.
“Have you gone in there?” I sound desolate.
He opens his arms.
“As you see.”
“The spirits made you sick?”
A motion that looks like a nod.
“But, with that—” I point to the charm in his fingers.
“I was already afflicted when I discovered it. I found it as I fled. Fled from what killed all the others.”
“Couldn’t you use it to go back?”
This seems to strike him as a completely novel idea.
“Why would I go back? ... Why would I go back?”
“You might find a way to be released from your sickness, with that.” I point again.
“I don’t want to be released yet.”
“But,” I falter, “surely you must be suffering!”
“Yes,” he says, thoughtfully. “Suffering, yes.”
Pepedora seems to drift off.
“But it’s all so interesting,” he says finally. “And it can’t last forever.”
He smiles.
*
I don’t have to think twice about what to do. I set out for the woods and the graves again. Not far outside town, I run into Thrushchurl, high-stepping toe first on his coffin-shaped shoes and swinging his arms jauntily.
“You don’t look like yourself,” he cocks his head. “Are you going hunting? You haven’t got a rifle.”
“I’m not on a proper sort of errand. Do you have gloves on you?”
Without a word he pulls a pair of elbow-length, shiny rubber gloves from his coat pocket and hands them to me.
“And your scalpel?”
“Always,” he replies, and hands it to me, the blade thrust into a long bit of cork.
“Spit on them all before you use them,” he says. “I don’t want anything being traced back to me, you know.”
“I will.”
We part, he heading to the city. After a few dozen steps he turns and calls to me, not too loudly.
“You might keep an eye out for a pile of rocks, or a quarry.”
“A quarry? What for?”
“That’s right,” he says, as though I’d expressed perfect understanding, one palm held up at me as he walks off against flat light.
Now the woods press on both sides of the road, which begins to wind. With each bend, the way narrows. I turn a bend and the road is now only a yard or so wide, and a man is creeping toward me on its opposite side. He is all in dark, loose homespun and a sweeping garment over that; his white head droops down and he scours the bare ground with his eyes. I want to avoid him, but I fear the results of trying. He has a weirdly smooth way of walking, and he holds his arms straight at his sides, all the fingers of both hands splayed out to their fullest extent as though he were trying to stretch his cuffs. He looks up at me with a gasp. His milky face has a sharp little nose, a white moustache with braided ends dangling past his lips, and a long beard hangs straight from his cheeks. Thick white hair is pulled straight back from his square forehead. He stands bolt upright now and steps over to me, so that I haven’t time to see his eyes.
“Have you seen my dog” he asks, and adds another word at the end I can’t make out. It might have been “miss.” There was no question in his tone. Now that he stands in the gloom of the trees and the dusk I can’t see for myself, but he speaks like a man without a tooth in his head. His jaw works obscurely in the shade, behind his beard, and I hear the loose cheeks and lips slop and flap a bit.
Not knowing what else to do, I actually try to recall noticing any solitary dogs, but after only a moment, during which he lists a bit back and forth, he says “I have many fine dogs,” in the same abrupt way, and the impression that I’m talking to a fool or a madman solidifies. He is fingering the fabric of my tunic in the front. My eyes rest on a patch of bald shabbiness along the shoulder seam of his cape or robe, whatever it is. He gives off a strong, ammonia-like smell, but there’s no human gaminess in it.
“Yes,” I say simply, moving off.
When I turn a few paces later, I see him standing straight where he was, still looking at the spot I’d just vacated. I round the next bend and stop, return stealthily to spy on him. He creeps along as before, out of sight.
I leave the path at once and strike out into the woods. Staying within view of the path, I find the spot where we had left it before, the rocks and trees are familiar. Following them in, I know I can follow them out again. I spit on Thrushchurl’s gloves and the uncorked blade of his scalpel, then I go in.
A colossal Predicate’s head, hairless, half shapeless, boneless, and partially transparent with a grey hue, hangs in the sky, wreathed in clouds. The bulging eyes are dark balls visible through the tissue, crossed by the slender edge of closed eyelids. The mouth is a lipless arch. It is a dreaming head, sinking toward the forest.
As I stand, still as I can, where I am, I can hear noises begin to fill the woods. I hear flapping wings and vocal noises, soft cries, a rustling and mutter, first here, now there, all around me and gathering, but no sound is distinct enough to name. They are only noises, some punctual and some continuous, and they seem to call to one another. I imagine a ring of those sounds forming around me, and then closing, but I don’t budge from my spot—only crouch down on my haunches to help myself keep still.
I hear the regular beating of feet on the leaves—it rushes up swiftly, and passes me. I never saw anything.
More feet, slapping now. For a moment I see, flickering into the cover of the trees from the bank of a paltry stream, a vast sea lung, clear as glass, borne along on many naked human legs. Its sides are trickling, and white foam oozes down the legs—are they attached to the thing, or are there many men carrying its mass?
Rapid, singular steps, distinct from the sound of bare feet on clay and purposefully marching through the leaves toward me. I pick my way as quickly and silently as I can toward a defile of stones that tumbles from a low rise down to the stream. Hiding among the rocks, I try to pick out the source of the steps, but I can’t see anything and the steps have stopped.
Faint groan of metal. Two shapes travel up the bank of the stream, on my side. They come near enough for me to recognize the man from the road, sitting in a two-wheeled cart, snowy head softly glowing against the mounded wrap he’s bundled in. A pair of huge cats draws the cart; one is grey and haggard, with a pelt like unshorn wool, and the other is a buttery golden-ash color with dark rings around its eyes, a swaying, bloated gut, and scrawny legs. Both are slobbering with effort, lashed between two poles. They stop, and the man alights, raising his arms to the huge sea lung, fingers still rigidly outstretched. The lung flutters like billowing glass, all but invisible on the opposite bank, hidden among the trees.
I’m certain he’s a Predicate. I leave my hiding place and stalk up to him. Never in my life have I missed my footing on rocks, so I dare to stay on the defile until I’m within a few paces of him.
I step softly up to the Predicate. His trembling hands are still out in the air before him, and his cats are laboriously backing up and lurching forward again, trying to angle the cart toward the stream. I suppose they are thirsty.
Slowly I lift my hand. His long hair hangs in a braid to the small of his back, flanked on either side by long unbraided locks swept from above his ears. I pinch a bit of the left lock away and double it in my fist. I put Thrushchurl’s scalpel through the loop and, in one motion, sever it. I pocket the hair and slip back to the rocks, from there up the defile toward the low rise.
His toothless mouth gurgles and clicks—he has turned and seen me—he leaps up onto the stones with an acrobat’s speed. Now the cold fear has me and I straighten up and sprint, picking my steps, up the stones moving in a straight line and looking for a place to hide—I am already within its confines when I realize I’ve found the rock pile Thrushchurl meant. While the old man is still out of sight, I dart in among the big stones and conceal myself there.
The ammonia smell, and then that clicking gurgle in the mouth. A dark shape flashes by the gap in the stones before me. He’s missed me, and is searching. Then, near me, another thing moves—dry steps on the stones. I can hardly stifle a shout when something hairy bounds past me in the dark. Silence. Slowly I lift my head.
Now I can see out among the rocks. In the open space, the old man stands motionless, staring. Opposite him, a huge black hare sits, returning his gaze from eyes that are just two starlike glints in liquid black. This hare is strange—its face doesn’t twitch. It stares at the old man, who begins to back away, hands held out in front of him. He turns and moves off over the stones, picking up his robe, looking back again and again with sweeps of his white locks.
I don’t like that hare either, and I climb out of my hiding place. The moon makes a faint radiant patch on the fog, and I follow it back to the path.
*
The hairs have turned brittle and hard as glass in my pocket. I instruct White Dead Nettle to boil a pint of the cleanest water available in a clean pot, and wait for a bit to boil away before I throw in the lock. The steam turns bitter at once, with a musty, vervain smell of dank stockings.
“Give me my dose now. Pepedora must know it works.”
“I put myself at great risk to get it.”
“Don’t worry. Pepedora will keep his word.”
“How do I know his charm will work?”
“How do we know yours will work?” Wormpig replies affably. He takes up the glass and looks at the contents in the light. “Is there any risk?”
“Nothing serious. But it will be a bit of a shock, I imagine.”
“Feh,” Wormpig flips his hand at me and downs the glass in a gulp, pinching up his face. I cry out at the same time—
“You drink it so fast! You’ll regret that!”
I can see he already does—his eyes are starting from their sockets and the muscles of his face are pulling his features flat out to the sides. He sinks rigidly to the ground one hand flat by the base of his throat and wheezing like an asthmatic, reels backward eyes spreading apart.
“Oh, you fool!” White Dead Nettle is at his side, holding his arm and trying to force water down his throat. She has the right idea, but the water rills back out of his mouth and down his chin.
“Is he choking?” she asks me, more irritated than alarmed.
“He won’t choke if we can get the new words to start coming out.”
She thumps him flathanded on the back repeatedly and I start barking questions at him in Alak. His red face darkens swells and creases, his voice begins to thread into his wheezing. From his stricken face his eyes fix on my face in desperation. I bellow—
“What time is it!? Lovely day don’t you think!? Which way to the station!? Is that the post office!? When does the train leave!? What time is it!? Would you like to play cards!? Do you know any songs!?”
He is mewling, tears stream from his face, but now and then a more or less appropriate sounding vowel emerges from his mouth.
“Isn’t the weather lovely this time of year!?” I scream.
“YES AUTUMN IS MY FAVORITE SEASON THE DEAD LEAVES SEEM SO DELICATE!” he roars in Alak, the words audibly scouring his throat.
And soon the Alak language gushes from his lips. His relief is obvious.
*
Speaking Alak together, Wormpig and I determine that a number of small doses, taken within the space of a single day, wouldn’t put Pepedora’s delicate health in danger.
I go to the shrine with the statue of the giant book and steal a flask full of the mare’s blood offering, laced with the poisonous saliva of the shrine bats. Three times the following day, I set a bowl of it in the vicinity of a big wasps’ nest Wormpig showed me; its paper mass bursts from the infested wall of an abandoned house. The wasps consume the blood, and on my two subsequent visits I collect those less hardy specimens whose bodies litter the ground below the nest. These I take to White Dead Nettle, who crushes them with indigo powder and adds them to the ink we brew together in the meantime. When a good quantity of this ink is ready and bottled, it joins my writing tools and a roll of special wasp paper I’ve secreted in a cave.