Pilgrim (17 page)

“What is it?” she asked. “What do they say? Have they found him?”

“Shush!” Barzula said, his eyes intense, but his voice was not unkind, and StarLaughter tried to stifle her impatience.

Slowly Sheol smiled, and then the other Demons followed suit. Smiled, and then howled with laughter.

“What is it?” StarLaughter cried.

Sheol turned her head to the birdwoman. “They have located the StarSon,” she said, “and he walks into a dark trap.”

She lifted her face into the sun. “
Trap!
” she screamed.

F
araday was terribly wounded by the donkeys’ rejection. Never previously had they snapped so at her, or kicked. Why, if they had wanted some different path from hers, had they let her know it in such a mean-spirited manner?

She travelled silently, and Drago let her be, walking by her side, only speaking in low tones when they needed to camp and erect their tent, or to warn her of a particularly deep chasm in the desiccated earth that intersected their path.

They’d been appalled by the sight that had greeted them on the northern border of the Silent Woman Woods.

The Demons’ influence had laid waste to the land. Vegetation had either disappeared completely, or had bleached out to grey stalks running with red rust. Cracks angled crazily across the dried plains, and balls of vegetation and dust rolled with a horrible languidness towards distant horizons. Sometimes they dropped out of sight into the unknown depths of dark chasms that split the earth.

Small creatures—lizards, grasshoppers, beetles—scurried in and out of the cracks in the earth. Most had terrible suppurating wounds, most behaved…oddly.

It had only taken Faraday and Drago a few minutes to understand why the creatures were so wounded: they attacked each other without provocation, mindless, soulless
attacks that gained them only a brief mouthful of flesh that they sometimes swallowed, sometimes spat out.

They tried to attack Faraday and Drago as well, but the blue-feathered lizard hissed at them violently, and the creatures eventually kept their distance.

The journey through the Plains of Arcness was hardly enjoyable. This was a cold, bleak desert, scorched of life and laughter, and running with madness.

“And this is only what the Demons can accomplish in two weeks,” Faraday murmured, heartbroken by the sight. “What can they do in six months, or with Qeteb at their side?”

She glanced at Drago, but his face was as bleak as the landscape, his thoughts obviously no better, and she was glad he did not answer her.

The feathered lizard ranged ahead of them as they walked north. It scared away what life there was, sniffed out cracks—and poked its talons down particularly interesting ones—and curled up as if to sleep when it got so far ahead it had to wait for its companions to catch up.

Sometimes they could see his blue clump of feathers far ahead, a bright, incongruous splotch of colour in a drained landscape.

They walked northwards in as direct a line as they could go, heading for the hills of Rhaetia and then the Nordra. Drago hoped they could find a boat to carry them further northward faster than their current rate of travel.

At odd moments of the day Drago felt a sickness sweep through him, a knowledge of where the Demons were and, to some extent, of what they did. The link that had been forged between them was both help and hindrance. Drago knew it was invaluable to know where the Demons were. On the other hand the link was so sickening (and reminiscent of the horrific pain he’d endured during the leaps, a memory of hooks dragged from his heels up through his body), and the knowledge of the speed and
joyousness of the Demons’ travel so disconcerting, that Drago often wished he could remain unaware of their presence, and their progress.

He was glad they did not yet know of his survival, and wondered what they would make of it when they did find out…and what they might do.

Sometimes he looked skyward, expecting any moment to see the great dark sweep of the cloud of Hawkchilds. But the Demons obviously had them occupied elsewhere, and Drago felt some measure of sympathy for whichever poor soul they’d decided to torment.

He pushed Faraday northward as fast as he could, although their progress was slowed by the necessity to shelter within their tent during the Demonic Hours. They became adept at travelling until the last possible moment when they would whip the tent from Drago’s pack and erect it almost in the blink of an eye, dropping their packs outside and snatching the lizard to safety as they scrambled inside.

There they would sit, often talking, but just as often snatching some sleep as the grey miasma settled its heavy infection over the land.

Some few days after they had left the Silent Woman Woods, Faraday began to dream.

At first the dreams were formless, just a feeling of dread and helplessness, but after the third one Faraday began to distinguish the lost voice of a child.

A small girl, helpless, vulnerable, lost, desperate.

Mama? Mama? Where are you? Why won’t you come? Mama?

The child’s lost voice tore into Faraday’s sense of frustrated motherhood. She struggled to reach out to the girl, but she was too far away to reach.

Too far away.

North.

Drago became aware of the dreams one night when he woke to feel Faraday tossing beside him. He lay a moment,
staring at her face, then laid a hand on her shoulder and shook her gently.

Faraday jerked away, her eyes wide and desperate.

She stared about the tent, as if trying to remember where she was, then the turned to Drago and grabbed his hands. “Did you hear her?”

“Who?”

“The girl, the little girl.” Faraday sat up. “I can still hear her! Drago, can’t you hear her?”

He shook his head slowly, his eyes concerned. At his back the feathered lizard raised his own head and stared at Faraday.

“Lost,” Faraday whispered. “Somewhere north…”

Drago stroked her thick hair back from her forehead, worried for her, and wondering if her dream was Demon-inspired.
Had
they scried him out?

As he smoothed her hair back, Faraday’s eyes gradually lost some of their wildness, and she calmed down a little.

“It was dream,” Drago said softly. “Nothing else. A dream.”

Faraday was not ready to be soothed completely. “Must we go to Gorkenfort first?”

“Where else?”

Faraday suddenly realised she was more aware of Drago’s hand stroking her hair than she was concerned about the lost girl, and she jerked her head back, angry that he should have distracted her away from her purpose and frightened by her reaction to him. No. No! No more love. Drago let his hand drop without comment.

“We need to reach her,” Faraday said. “She’s lost.”

“Who?”

“I don’t know…”

“Perhaps after Gorkenfort—”

“No! We should go now. I don’t want to go to Gorkenfort.”

“Faraday…”

But she turned her face away, and after a moment Drago sighed and settled back into his blanket. “We can go nowhere
now, Faraday, and Gorkenfort is north anyway. It was a dream. A dream, nothing more.”

But the dreams continued, and they drove their own angling cracks into Drago and Faraday’s relationship. As they turned westwards towards the Nordra, Drago noticed that Faraday kept glancing true north, and she became quieter and quieter the more they moved north-west.

“Star Finger,” she said one morning as they broke camp. “She’s in Star Finger.”

Drago stood and watched her. She was bustling about the tent, folding it as quickly as she could, lifting an impatient hand to jerk stray tendrils of hair out of her eyes and face.

“Faraday,” he said, but she did not look at him, and Drago was forced to walk over and take her by the arm. “Faraday.”

She straightened and stared at him. “Do you not hear her?” she whispered. “She tears into my mind every time I close my eyes. Drago, she’s so lost…so lost!”

Drago looked into her eyes, then drew her against him, trying to give her what comfort he could with his presence. She was stiff and unyielding, and Drago was not sure whether it was because she was impatient to reach the girl, or because she disliked him holding her.

Drago suddenly found himself hoping very much that it was because Faraday wanted to reach the girl.

“We will go to Star Finger after Gorkenfort,” he said quietly. “To see Caelum, and to find this girl of yours.”

She pulled away from him.

“It may be too late then,” she said tonelessly, and stuffed the tent into Drago’s pack.

Two nights later, sleeping in their tent pitched in the western foothills of the Rhaetian hills, the girl also reached out to Drago.

She was tiny, frail, helpless. Winds of demonic intent buffeted her, pushing her closer and closer to the razor edge
of an infinite cliff, and she wailed and cried,
Help me! Help me! Mama? Mama?

Even caught as he was in his dream, Drago felt tears slide down his cheek, and he understood Faraday’s desperation to reach the girl. Indeed, he could feel Faraday within the dream. She was somewhere in the darkness that surrounded the girl, and Drago could feel her reaching out, reaching out, but never quite reaching the child.

He opened his mouth to call out to the girl that they would reach her soon, very soon, be calm, hold on, we’re almost there…when suddenly he felt another presence within the dream.

Something dark and loathsome, something heavy and cruel, and something much, much closer to the girl than either he or Faraday.

He turned his attention back to the girl. She was silent now, terrified, her eyes jerking about the darkness, trying to see what it was that approached. She was crouched protectively about something, but Drago could not quite make it out. The child’s eyes jerked to her left, focusing on something moving towards her.

Drago looked, and cried out. A gigantic figure loomed out of the blackness, a man several handspans taller than any man Drago had ever seen before, and encased entirely in black armour.

In his mailed hand he held a gleaming, wicked knife.

A kitchen knife.

The girl hiccupped in terror, and almost choked on a sob that wrenched up from deep within her.

Drago could hear Faraday screaming, but he could not see her, and he could not free himself from the dream, nor could he move to aid her.

The black armoured man stepped to the girl’s side—

Run, run, run!
Drago screamed at her, but she was so stricken with terror she could not move.

—and seized the girl’s glossy brown curls in his left hand,
jerking her head back to expose the slim whiteness of her throat.

Then the knife slashed through the air, and all Drago could see and taste and feel was the thick redness of life pouring forth from the girl’s throat, and—

He jerked awake, sitting upright and staring about wildly. Beside him Faraday was screaming in her sleep, throwing herself from side to side, her hands reaching up and groping uselessly into the air above her.

Drago heaved in a great breath, orientating himself out of the dream, and turned to Faraday. He lifted a hand, intending to wake her from the nightmare, when her eyes flew open. She stared at Drago, and then, before he could stop her, she leapt to her feet, dived through the tent flap, and ran outside.

Into the terror of the night.

“
No!
” Drago screamed and, without any thought, ran after her.

He felt the cold fingers of the Demonic terror intrude into his mind as soon as he left the safety of the tent. Faraday was a pale shape struggling on the ground several paces away, the wind whipping her hair about, her hands groping at the ground about her.

She was screaming uncontrollably.

Drago knew that madness was only an instant away, and he knew it had already claimed Faraday, but all he could think of was that he had to reach her, that somehow he needed to be with her before he lost his own mind completely.

The cold fingers dug deeper and more agonisingly into his mind, and Drago screamed and threw himself on Faraday’s struggling body.

In her fright and horror she instinctively hit him, and Drago caught at her hands, rolling himself atop her and pinning her hands down to the ground.

“Faraday!” he yelled above the storm of madness about them. “Faraday, it is only me! Drago! Please, be still, please…please…”

She ceased to struggle and stared at his face a handspan above hers, and suddenly Drago realised that he stared into the eyes of a woman who was terrified beyond measure…

…but sane.

“Faraday?” he whispered. “Faraday?”

The cold fingers of terror continued to probe at his mind, but Drago slowly realised that although they probed and probed—and stung horribly in that probing—they could not enter.

His mind was still his.

As was Faraday’s.

“Why?” she whispered. “Why are we safe?”

He laughed softly, not caring that the fingers still pushed and prodded at his mind, but revelling in his—and her—strange immunity.

The Demons could not touch them.

“I don’t know,” he whispered back. “And I do not particularly care why.”

At that moment, staring into each other’s eyes, both forgot the girl and her terrified cries for help, as they forgot the winds of terror howling about them and the thick tendrils of grey miasma that clung to their clothes and hair.

Very, very slowly Drago lowered his head and kissed Faraday.

She closed her eyes, accepting his kiss, and then from nowhere came the memory of Drago swearing that nothing,
nothing
, was to get in the way of his determination to save the land, and from that memory her mind leapt back forty years to the moment when Axis stood before her in Gorgrael’s chamber and lifted not a finger to save her so that he, too, might save Tencendor.

She twisted her head away.

“No!”

Drago did not protest. He lifted himself from her and stood, holding a hand to help her rise.

Reluctantly she accepted his aid.

“Why?” she repeated. “Why aren’t we mad?”

Drago stared about him. The night landscape seemed to be in the grips of a fatal insanity.

The air itself was alive, twisting and writhing and roping under the Demon Rox’s influence. A small rabbit, caught outside its burrow, was winding and contorting in a dance of madness, chewing at its own paws and dribbling thick saliva down the matted fur of its chest. Somewhere a dog howled and screamed, and then gurgled into quietness.

And yet here he and Faraday stood, their minds aching from the insistent probing of the Demon, and yet safe.