Matt stared into the darkening trees. 'I was wondering if we should go back, try to find Caitlin.'
'Good idea. You'll be able to navigate this tug through the rapids, right? We'll be able to scour the forest, dodge all those Whisperers—'
'All right.' It was the first time she had heard real anger in his voice and it frightened her.
'Look, I know how you feel about her, but she's the kind of person who's going to survive if she can survive. We could always search on the way back...' Her words dried up; they sounded hollow even to her.
She turned her attention to Crowther, who stood, swaying, with the red light of the setting sun gleaming off the eerie mask. Mahalia pushed herself away from the rail and marched over to him. Dragging on his overcoat, she forced him to sit on the deck, and then she pulled out a knife.
Matt started in shock, and rushed over. As she brought the knife to the side of Crowther's face, Matt knocked her hand away, the knife clattering to the deck. 'What do you think you're doing?'
'It's the mask - it's got a life of its own. You remember what he told us—'
'What are you doing?' he repeated. The coldness he saw in her eyes unnerved him, and it was very rare that anything upset his equilibrium.
She picked up the knife, held it easily. 'I'm going to get the point into the side of his head and prise out those bolts. And if it's attached in any other way I'm going to cut it off his face.'
Matt tried to decide whether she was joking or just trying to annoy him, which she seemed to try to do to everyone at one time or another - a control thing - but her face was impossible to divine. 'You'd cut his face?'
'Well, let's look at it this way: what's more important to him - a career on the catwalk or being stuck for ever behind that thing, with it sucking the life out of him?'
'You don't know that's what's happening. The process might just be taking longer this time. It might drop off of its own accord.'
'Might. You like that word, don't you?' She read Matt's eyes carefully, saw that there was no point in pursuing the matter. 'You've got no idea what he's like.'
'And you do?'
'Actually, yes. He doesn't like being controlled—'
'Nobody does.'
'He really doesn't. He feels he's not up to much and he tries to hide away, but all he's really doing is hiding away from the things that he believes control him. He's a free spirit.' She sheathed the knife.
'You really think you're smart, don't you? And tough. But you're a kid. That's all you are. So don't ever forget it.'
Mahalia watched him walk away, the ice in her face gradually giving way to a dull heat beneath.
Shortly after, the mask began acting up again. The first sign was beautiful colours shifting in psychedelic patterns over the river, their reflection making it appear as though vast and astonishing alien creatures swam back and forth just beneath the surface. For a while it was entrancing and Matt, Mahalia and Jack watched it from different points around the deck. Then came the sounds, bass rumbles and high-pitched shrieks, invisible fireworks, music fading in and out, some almost familiar, some intriguingly otherworldly; a mystical son et lumiere.
Slowly it became more intense and disturbing. Mahalia sought solace with Jack under a blanket near the aft-rail, kissing and groping, but he came at the touch of her hand with a young teenager's desperation. She didn't know whether to be upset or thankful for the sudden stickiness. She would have made love to him, her first time and not out of love at all, but out of a desperate need for closeness and comfort and some stability in a mad, mad world.
Sometime in the small hours, Mahalia and Jack were woken by Matt's exclamation. A tremendous surge of golden light rushed over the boat and exploded with silent but furious illumination beyond the other bank. At first, Mahalia thought it was another of the mask's creations, but when a second blast came over she realised it was too regular.
She went over to the rail and saw that some kind of battle was taking place amongst the trees on both sides of the river. Fleeting figures, some golden, some dark and squat, moved swiftly back and forth, attacking each other. Occasionally, strange sounds retorted and someone would fall before a fluttering cloud, either golden or black, moved up into the branches; or there would be a burst of light, white or multi-coloured, or a surging blast of red heat.
She jumped as a plaintive keening came from behind her. Delirious, yet on some level aware of what was happening along the banks, Triathus was either crying with grief or singing, she couldn't quite be sure, but the alien sound churned up a heaving swell of emotion inside her.
Something bumped against the hull and she hurried to see if the boat itself was under attack. Numerous logs floated in the dark water - the remains of blasted trees, she thought at first, yet the shifting shadows gave the illusion of movement. Another explosion of light directly overhead revealed the truth, and Mahalia recoiled in shock. The objects were moving. They were not the remnants of trees, but the litde, dark men, all on the verge of death, their bodies so torn and tattered that some were impossible to see as having been human-shaped at all.
Every now and then the spark in one would expire and the corpse would explode in a mass of frantic fluttering, gone in a second. Mahalia was sickened but transfixed. The flow of bodies appeared to be never-ending, the hull now sounding a relentless beat of war drums. Triathus' keening reached another level.
'This is madness.' Matt was at her side, watching the water with a grim expression. 'They're just slaughtering each other. What's it supposed to achieve?'
The mask's incessant hallucinogenic effects only added to their sense of dislocation. Yet in the occasional flash, they saw similar warping effects occurring far off along the horizon.
'What is that?' Mahalia was no longer sure of anything any more.
Jack's hand wormed its way into hers. 'It's the edge of the world.'
'Where reality starts to break up and leak into the Great
Beyond,' Matt said, recalling what they had learned in the Court of Soul's Ease. He took a deep breath. 'We're nearly there.'
An hour later, with the cataclysmic battle barely diminishing, they realised Triathus' time was nearly gone. The course of the plague had been rapid. His breathing was thin, his eyes fixed. The golden light that made his skin glimmer had faded to a dull washed-out yellow and the black lines now ran the length of his body.
Matt, Mahalia and Jack knew instinctively that it was a time for silence. Of all of them, Mahalia watched the most intently. She noted every tremor that crossed his face and it was in that intensity of observation that she saw the rarest of sights: that fleeting instant when life finally goes. It was barely perceptible, as if the slightest breeze moved from his head to his toes. A fugitive tear surprised her, but she wiped it away before the others noticed.
The golden moths came forth with a gleaming force that surprised them after the dull shadows of his passing, twirling around in a fascinating dance of grief and hope. They wound their way up in a column, finally disappearing into the heavy clouds overhead, like stars winking out.
They stood with heads bowed, and then drifted to the rail. Now the signs of the plague were unmissable on the flora: wilting leaves or blackened night blooms, black lines visible on trunks. And every now and then they would see the unsettling rips in the air that Matt and Jack had witnessed previously. The gashes were only small but growing wider, as though the entire land was a tapestry coming apart at the seams.
'Can you see - everything's getting worse the further upriver we get?' Mahalia swathed her hands in the dirty, sweaty cloth of her T-shirt.
'And it's bad enough round here,' Matt said.
*
After the blue, there was only the unending golden sand and a sky of heat-bleached whiteness. Behind Caitlin, the energy still crackled amongst a millennia-old circle of vitrified stones. She didn't look back.
Stepping out into the wastes, she felt the sand run away from her boots. In her head, her thoughts were carried off in a whirl of black feathers. Somewhere, Amy may well have whimpered, but it wasn't heard. The pounding of Caitlin's heart was the rhythm of war drums; her vision gleamed with blood. The world lay before her, holding nothing that she feared. The path ahead drove on towards destiny.
She walked.
The mist came in with the dawn. The fighting had died away sometime during the small hours, and everything was now still and smothered beneath the blanket of grey. Beyond the muffled lapping of the river, the Wildwood exuded an intense quiet that was just as unsettling as the chaos of the previous night. As if in response, the mask had slipped into one of its calm phases.
Matt had slept in the galley to avoid the disturbances crackling all around, but Mahalia and Jack had opted to rest under their blanket on deck, dropping in and out of sleep so often that after a while it became difficult to tell what were dreams and what was reality.
It was Mahalia who woke first, confused by the stillness. The mist was dense enough to obscure both banks; they could have been adrift at sea. She went to the rail, her spirits reflecting the damp, grey weather, and listened. The lull couldn't be trusted.
She wrapped her arms around herself and watched Jack, who still slept deeply. Memories of Carlton surfaced and she shed a few tears, and after a while they were accompanied by a wash of guilt that the terrible loneliness she had feared had already partly been assuaged by Jack, whom she was convinced she loved, and was loving more with each passing day. That purity of feeling was contaminated by the desperate knowledge that she couldn't face losing him; any more loss in her life, she thought, would destroy her.
They had worried that Sunchaser wouldn't work for them after Triathus' death, but whatever instructions he had given to it still appeared to be in effect. It responded to their needs, going faster when they considered it necessary, or adjusting its position in the flow of the river. At that moment, Mahalia could tell from the shifting patterns in the water that the boat was drifting in towards the port bank. She told herself that couldn't be true, but then ghostly trees started to appear from the mist.
She ran to rouse Matt and Jack, and when they returned to the port rail, Sunchaser had come to a halt next to the bank. They were surprised to see that the Forest of the Night had ended. The trees Mahalia had glimpsed were intermittent in a flat, scrubby landscape that had the oppressive rotting-vegetation smell of a marsh, though how far it stretched was impossible to tell, for the mist only allowed twenty or so yards of visibility.
'Why have we stopped here?' Jack's voice was a nervous whisper.
'I don't think Triathus would have allowed Sunchaser to take us into danger.' Matt took in every detail of the area in an instant. 'Perhaps we're supposed to take on water here, or something.'
'I don't think I'd like to drink that water.' Mahalia indicated the brackish pools lying amongst the reeds and yellow marsh grass.
They looked back and forth uneasily as the mist shifted in a faint breeze, revealing and then hiding aspects of their surroundings. After a moment, Mahalia jolted when she saw that what she had taken for a copse were men, eight or more, standing stock-still, watching the boat.
Matt went for his bow, Mahalia for her sword, but the men made no attempt to attack. Bearded and long-haired, they were in their late forties and older, two certainly in their seventies, and they wore long grey robes, tied by a cord at the waist like some monk's habit, and a circlet of oak cuttings and ivy around their brows.
One who carried an intricately carved staff stepped forward. He was around sixty, but imposingly tall with piercing grey eyes. 'Welcome,' he said in a theatrically resonant voice, 'to the last encampment of the Culture.'
The leader's name was Matthias. It took a while for him to convince Matt, Jack and particularly Mahalia that his group posed no threat, but eventually the three of them disembarked, leading Crowther carefully in their midst.
Matthias came to a halt when he saw the professor. 'The mask!' he gasped.
'It's all right - he's not dangerous,' Mahalia said hopefully. 'Please ... he'll just walk with us.'
Matthias relented, but the other members of the group kept their eyes on Crowther.
'We still try to measure time in the old way, though it is nigh-on impossible here,' Matthias said, 'but it has been long, long years since we last met some of our fellows.'
'You're human?' Matt said.
'There are a few of us here in the Far Lands, but not many. It is hard for most to adapt to the peculiar nature of this place. It can drive men mad, given time. It can make them forget everything they believed in.'
'But you survived.'
'We have a particular understanding of other realities. Come to our camp. We would hear news of our old home, and in return we can offer good food and drink. And here, everything is given freely and without obligation.'Mahalia and Matt both realised they were very hungry, though Jack appeared to eat hardly anything. 'Can we afford the time?' Mahalia asked quietly.