The Farwalker's Quest (30 page)

The trees thinned until one stood alone. Ariel recognized its shape from the abbey—but this cherry had died. A bloated moon gleamed on its branches, where shriveled leaves clung. They rustled a warning. A dark blot oozed down the trunk to the earth.

Its touch stirred dust or ashes below. From the cloud, the shadow rose into the shape of a young man, but with no face. Ariel shuddered, fearing it would leap and take hers.

“Misha? Is that you?”

The shade moaned with the wind. “You did not bring it. The bone.”

“Yes, I did.” Her hands, though, were empty. Searching with the twisted logic of dreams, she checked both her socks for the needle and then pushed up her left sleeve. Instead of a scar there, Ariel stared at an unhealed slash in her skin.

A black hand gripped her wrist and yanked down. Her arm bones sprang out through the wound.

Gasping to scream, Ariel froze. Symbols etched the larger bone of her forearm. The telling dart's message had been carved into
her
.

“I understand all.” The shadow moved closer, exhaling rot. Its voice thinned to a hiss. “Shhhall I shhhow you?”

Fear sucked Ariel's heart into her belly. This dreadful thing was no kind teenage ghost. It stank not only of death but of absence and loss, forgetting and pain. A distant part of Ariel's mind knew she was dreaming, but nothing would change if she woke herself up. This raw Misha would embrace her the next night, or the next. Always there, endlessly waiting.

Certain she was asking to die, but unable to resist what that primal dark offered, Ariel stepped into the blackness. “Yes. Show me.”

Not long before dawn, she awoke. One cheek rested on clammy, wet earth. Her left hand dangled, numb, in the creek. She jerked upright, her heart thudding, and spit mud from her lips. Ariel yanked at her sleeve. Her forearm bore merely a scar.

Grateful to be alive and inside her skin, she hugged her arms to her chest. Handprints, not all of them hers, tracked the mud all around her.

Without bothering to wipe the muck from her face, she crawled to Zeke where he snored in the grass. Before the sun rose, they were walking again.

Her dream lingered, both hounding her and leading her on. For the first time since flunking her Naming test, Ariel Farwalker knew where she was going and what lay ahead.

“Uh-oh. Look.”

Ariel glanced back. Zeke had stopped. Shading his eyes, he squinted at the horizon ahead.

“I saw something flash.” He pointed. “There, again.”

A small cry escaped her. Something moving in the distance had reflected the sun.

“It's coming toward us,” Zeke added. “Do we have to keep going this way?”

Ariel gritted her teeth. “This is the right way.”

From the moment she had awakened yesterday morning, she had been seeking a spire among the eastern mountains. She and Zeke had soon left the grassland and now minced along the gravel-strewn border between mountain and desert. Every mile forward revealed new peaks, but not yet the one that she wanted. Like a fang, it would be more pointed and sharper on one side than the rest, fringed, if not shrouded, with cloud. A voice in a nightmare had hissed its name: Cloudspear. Ariel's skin prickled when she thought of that voice.

The alarm now in Zeke's voice troubled her, too.

“This won't be the right way if it leads us to Mason or Gust!” he exclaimed. “I don't think Scarl could have passed us to be doubling back. Find some other route, Ariel, or a good place to hide, right away. Or I will. If we wait too long, whoever it is will be able to see us.”

Ariel had no intention of turning into the desert, so she frowned instead at the rumpled land to her right. A wet glimmer traced the bottom of a ravine. A swath of lavender flowers tinted a ridge. If not the path her feet wanted, then which way instead? Frustration warped her face. She hated that their safety depended on her.

Then something like the pull of a tide drew her feet toward the creek-threaded gully. They'd inclined northeast for days, but now that she had a reason to detour, her instincts responded.

When he and Ariel reached it, Zeke splashed into the stream with his boots. The water drained from the gulch like blood from a scratch, the slopes above too loose with shale for easy walking.

“This is good,” he said. “We won't make any tracks.”

Behind him, Ariel wavered. Once they entered the gully, she'd lose the vistas that would reveal Cloudspear. Besides, she didn't want to get her boots wet.

“What are you waiting for?” Zeke stared back at her.

“I'm coming,” she growled. It was crazy to worry about wet boots when whatever approached might want to kill them. She got nearly ten steps before the cold water seeped in.

With Zeke regularly twisting to gaze back toward whatever had flashed, they began a slow jog. The gorge's tight bends hid much of what lay ahead. Bear grass and briars straggled across the steep hillsides. The smell of wet stones made Ariel think of her nightmare.

When the vacant, hissing blackness had offered to show her
the telling dart's message, she had known it would give her a view through a window belonging to Death. All things, made and unmade, succumbed to that void, and Ariel feared to approach. But the symbols had become part of her somehow, a message both to her and of her, and she wanted, she needed, to be shown.

Blinding her eyes, engulfing her in an icy embrace, the dark shape had swallowed her whole. Its cold voice had wormed into her ears, and Ariel had tried then to scream. The hiss poured instead from her own open mouth. Her last rational thought had been, “Lost.” The world, lost, and her friends, lost, and her soul, lost: all lost.

As she drowned in that word, drifting in blackness, an image appeared in her mind. A fang, she thought, one that would bite. This fang pointed up, though, standing alone.

Her dreaming mind clutched another idea. “Stone,” she thought. “Mountain.” The peak anchored her in the swirling dark. The hiss faded. The growl of a predator slipped overtop.

“Cloudspear,” it said. “The mouth of the mountain. Come united. A message is caught in a throat.”

Like water through a gap in a boat hull, reason flowed back into Ariel's mind. She asked the darkness, “That's what the telling dart said?”

“What was outside is known or has fallen behind you. The inside still speaks.”

The darkness receded. The image of Cloudspear remained like a glimpse of the sun in eyes that have closed.

When it, too, faded, Ariel found herself sprawled near the dead cherry tree. Dressed once more in the form he had taken in life, Misha sat cross-legged near her. One of his hands gleamed a wet red. The other raised a—

Knife blade!
Ariel jerked away. Her alarmed motion woke
her, casting her to the muddy bank of the creek where her dream and her night's sleep had ended. The dream sent one last image, almost too late. It wasn't a knife in Misha's hand after all. He'd gripped only a large pale feather.

Now, two days later, Ariel splashed upstream next to Zeke, wondering what kind of mouth could belong to a mountain. It might be a source of uncanny noises, like blowholes in sea cliffs. Or it could be a cave, a big crack, or lips formed of stone. Perhaps such a mouth could speak of lost treasure or open to reveal the Vault. She just hoped it wasn't able to bite.

Feeling as though one set of teeth nipped at her heels while another waited ahead, Ariel looked over her shoulder. She couldn't see very far.

“Ask some of these rocks if anyone's behind us,” she suggested to Zeke. “And how close.”

Without stopping, he pointed ahead. “I'll try when we get to that outcrop. We'll be more hidden there, and the big ones are easier to hear.”

To drown her worries and help lift her waterlogged boots, Ariel began humming the song she'd sung for Scarl and Zeke. She tested some new phrases under her breath.

Walk where the nightmare leads
,

Looking for Cloudspear
.

Follow the water's path
.

Don't walk, but run
.

Rainwater running now
,

Dripping from Cloudspear
.

Look for the mountain's mouth

Far from the sun
.

“How do you keep doing that?” Zeke asked. “Thinking up fresh words, I mean.”

“I don't know. They just show up in my head. But they don't rhyme much.”

“They don't need to.”

Ariel wasn't sure she agreed. She preferred songs that rhymed. But this one fit well with the rhythm of her feet.

Zeke's outcrop was farther away than it looked. By the time they arrived, the afternoon had begun to wane. Nibbling dried fruit, Ariel tried to sit still and rest. Even a few moments without motion made her nervous. She was too certain Gust or his Finders dogged them.

Zeke patted the stone bluff tentatively, as if greeting a strange dog. He gave Ariel an embarrassed glance.

“Don't listen, okay? My songs don't sound as good to people as yours.”

“I want to hear, though. I would never laugh, Zeke, honest.” She couldn't talk him out of his self-consciousness. Finally she stuck her fingers in her ears and said, “All right, all right. I'll hum to myself.”

When his lips stopped moving and he approached her, looking glum, she unplugged her ears.

“The stones here aren't very friendly.” He sighed. “But there are definitely people behind us. ‘People crawling everywhere,' it told me, ‘like ants.' It was complaining, and that's all I could get it to say.”

“Fine,” Ariel grumbled. “We'll crawl away and leave it alone.” With an anxious glance downstream, she led on.

Tucked as they were in a fold of the land, twilight arrived early. Clouds settled onto the peaks, where tendrils of mist glowed in the last light.

“Let's go up there for the night.” Ariel pointed to a ridge above.

Zeke looked dubiously at the treacherous slope and then back the way they had come.

“I know we'll be visible from farther away,” she added. “But we can't sleep in the creek, and I'm sick of being down in this crack where we can't see things sneaking up.”

When she insisted, Zeke gave in. They hauled themselves up to a hollow protected from the worst of the wind. Darkness flowed uphill behind them, so their new vantage revealed nothing but night. They wound themselves in their blankets and huddled close to share warmth.

Ariel woke to raindrops slapping her face. Next to her, Zeke mumbled and pulled his blanket over his head. Lightning flashed. In that half second of vision, Ariel saw angry swirls of storm trapped against the higher peaks to the east. Thunder rolled as though the mountains were falling around them.

Clutching Zeke's arm, she pressed her face against him. “I hate thunder.”

“I'd rather have thunder than—”

A threatening new sound tore the night. Ariel bolted upright. A roar like an overstoked fire rose from below, accompanied by the hollow clunking of rocks.

“I think that's the creek!” Ariel said. Another flash of lightning gave them a glimpse. Rushing gray water scoured the streambed, clawing high up the banks. Neither Ariel nor Zeke had witnessed a flash flood before, but both knew the fury of storm-driven waves.

Ariel tugged her damp blanket tighter. “If we'd slept down there,” she said, awed, “we'd be drowned.”

“Or at least swept away. I won't argue the next time you pick a campsite. That must be a Farwalker skill.”

Zeke cocked his head. Ariel's ears caught it, too. Someone downstream was shouting.

“They're close, Zeke!” she exclaimed.

“Not for long, if they're caught in that water,” he said. “Nothing we can do now, anyway, except hide. It's way too dark to start walking.”

Early the next morning, the two picked up their blankets to hurry away. Obstacles had only begun to emerge from the gloom, so Ariel and Zeke couldn't move fast, but by the time the sun cleared the horizon, they'd put several more miles under their boots.

When they crossed a scree field beneath a bluff, Ariel touched Zeke's arm.

“Think one of these cliffs might tell you how much farther to Cloudspear?” She was starting to fear it would never appear.

He turned, halted, and groaned.

“I guess it doesn't matter,” Ariel whispered, when she'd followed his gaze. Two figures tracked a slope they had crossed themselves not an hour before.

By midmorning, capture seemed inevitable.

“I don't see how we can outrun them,” Zeke said, panting. He and Ariel jogged as often and as rapidly as the landscape would allow, but each time they crested a hill and looked back, their pursuers loomed closer. They were men, it was clear now. They weren't moving as fast as Scarl would, Ariel thought, but the men must have run sometimes, too.

She convinced Zeke to keep fleeing. The bleak hills offered nowhere to hide, and she would rather drop from exhaustion than turn to face defeat. Her silent appeals to Misha proved fruitless. The ghost had not appeared to her since their last frightening encounter.

As Ariel and Zeke trotted past the base of a cliff, its face hid them briefly from those behind. Zeke peered up. The basalt's geometric columns formed a jagged staircase of stone.

“Quick, let's try to climb this,” he said. “I'll give you a boost.”

“Are you serious?”

“If we can reach the top before they spot us, maybe they'll pass underneath. Then we could double back and escape.”

“If we don't, they'll just wait at the bottom until we both die of thirst!”

“Do you have a better idea?” Zeke grabbed her as if to toss her to the first shelf, willing or not. Deciding she'd rather die of thirst than become a prisoner again, she accepted his help.