The Shadow and Night (35 page)

“Why should I?” Merral answered sharply, feeling on the edge of anger and trying to control himself. “We are dealing with animals. Aren't we? You mean to tell me that you think we face
things
with the intelligence and technology to pick up a tight-band EM signal?”

“Maybe. . . .”

“So why didn't
you
tell
me?”
Merral asked, his anger now supplemented by a definite unhappiness at the idea that what they faced might be far more than some sort of clever animal.

“Because I wasn't sure. And I am still not sure. . . .”

A sullen silence descended between them, and suddenly they both apologized at the same time.

“Sorry! I'm—”

“—No, me too.”

Vero patted Merral on the shoulder. “My fault. Naive Earther that I am. I should have thought. Can you switch the thing off?”

“Yes. And I will do it now.” Merral unclipped the diary and spoke to it. “Diary. Menu Command: Location signal—disable until countermanded.”

The manufactured voice responded in its flat lifeless tones, “Location signal is now disabled.”

Merral put it back on his belt. “So, my sentinel friend, you don't think it's animals we face? You feel there is an intelligence here?”

“It is a possibility. No more. One of many possibilities that I have thought of and some that I haven't.” He sounded rueful. “Probably among the ones that I haven't thought of is the correct answer.”

Merral waited for some elucidation of the possibilities, but Vero seemed disinclined to give them and said nothing more.

After some time Vero spoke in a low voice. “You get some sleep.” He paused, as if listening to something. “It is quiet here, isn't it?”

“Yes,” Merral said listening again. “It is. Or is it my imagination? There should be more noise. Keep a good watch, my friend.”

When Vero woke Merral it was raining. The air seemed thick with the incessant soft, gentle dripping of water as it trickled off the needles and branches of the firs to tap on the roof of the tent.

“What have you seen?” Merral grunted sleepily as he pulled his jacket on. In the pitch blackness of the night, he sensed his friend shedding a damp outer jacket under the fly sheet and clambering through into his side of the tent.

“I don't know,” Vero answered with a strangely unsettled tone. “There isn't even any starlight now. It's pitch black and I find it very disorienting. I was careful not to go too far from the tent. In case I got lost. I wish you'd been there. . . .”

“Why?”

“I heard . . . or I thought I heard . . . sounds.”

“Wind perhaps?”

“No, no. Not the wind, not the river. It was different—as if it was voices.”

“Voices?”

“So it sounded to me. . . . Distant voices, as if the wind had brought them. . . .” Vero seemed to shudder. “But, as I think I told you when we first met, we are trained to be sensitive, to be able to listen to what others cannot hear, to see what others cannot see. Tonight, I wished I had not been so trained. . . .”

Merral reached out, found his friend's arm, and squeezed it gently. “You can get to see and hear things in wind and rain. Did you think they were human?”

There was a shudder. “I hope not. . . .”

“Anything nearer?”

“No, I checked around on the scope in infrared. It's too dark for anything else. Some deer by the river. I think I saw another owl.”

“Again? Get a good look?”

“No. I couldn't seem to image it in infrared.”

“Maybe the feathers are effective insulators. So they may not radiate enough heat to be picked up. Well, it's a theory. Anyway, let me go out.”

“Watch well, Merral. The knife, the gun, and a couple of flares are under the tent awning.”

“I hope not to need them. And you sleep soundly, Vero.”

In the long, weary, and uncomfortable hours that followed, Merral found himself frequently thinking of the pleasant evenings and nights he had spent in the countryside in the past. Tonight, in the rain and the dark, he felt as if they might have been on another planet. Merral, trying to analyze his feelings, decided that the darkness was one factor. The night was pitch dark, unbroken by stars or even any flash of lightning, and at one point he found that he literally could not see his hand in front of his face. With the infrared mode set on the fieldscope, he could at least make out the general landscape and see the vague glow of his sleeping friend in the tent. While that was an improvement, the strange effect of seeing things in a ghostly monochrome only seemed to make him feel more disoriented. The rain, he felt, was another factor. It was a soft, wetting mist of a rain that not only fell, but also drifted up, under, and somehow even inside things. Despite the excellence of his garments, Merral very soon found that he was getting wet. So he stood up, feeling the cold water drip and ooze down inside his clothes, and felt miserable.

He knew, though, that it was neither the dark nor the rain: There was another factor, and that was hard to define. There was an atmosphere of unease, of some sort of inexpressible hostility that got on his nerves. Merral realized that he was close to reaching a level of fear that he had never known existed. Everybody was familiar with some levels of fear; you might have a fear of being crushed by a falling tree, a fear of falling off a cliff, or a fear of being caught in a forest fire. Yet that was, he realized, something normal, natural, and even good. Now, though, he sensed he was close to something deeper: a darker, wilder fear that threatened to overwhelm all logic. Was this, he thought, what they had called
terror?

So Merral prayed for himself, for Vero and their mission, and for the strange things that were happening on Farholme. But—and he found this the most depressing thing of the night—there seemed to be no answer to his prayers. The act of praying seemed to him to be almost futile, and his words seemed cold and lifeless. It almost seemed—and he hardly dared frame the thought—as if the throne of heaven was vacant.

Through what was left of the lonely night, Merral saw and heard nothing, although once he felt sure that, over the soft, steady drip of the rain off the branches, he could hear soft, slow wing beats above him. And when, at last, dawn broke, it seemed to bring little comfort, with the blackness around merely being replaced by a formless and clinging wet grayness.

Damp and cold, Merral woke Vero and together they ate a cheerless breakfast in the tent, folded it up, and loaded the packs.

Under the gentle gray rain they set off toward the cliffs, picking their way slowly up among the wet boulders, rough grass, and tall dripping pines and spruces that obscured the cliff ahead. As they did, Merral looked around, acknowledging to himself how different things looked in the rain. In front of them, above the green-steepled firs, wisps of white cloud drifted across, obscuring the grim ramparts of rock that rose up behind. To their right the cloud, mist, and rain mingled with the spray of the waterfalls, as the Lannar recklessly and noisily plunged downward off the plateau. The very top of the plateau was obscured by a wreath of pale clouds.

After a quarter of an hour of stumbling and sliding in the mud, they came to something of a clearing and were able to take stock of the task ahead.

Merral tilted his head over to Vero. “Well, any trail is now lost, but it hardly matters. There is only one way ahead and that is the way we chose last night.”

Vero nodded, shaking a large drop of rainwater off his snub nose. “Yes. But Merral, I have to say that I am worried about what we will meet on this hill. I think—I
feel—
that there is something up there. And that that something is not friendly to us or the Assembly.”

He stretched out a dripping hand and pointed to the cliff. “May I make a small suggestion?” His voice was unsure. “I have studied, as all sentinels must, something of the distasteful science of warfare. Your reading of the first part of the Word will have been the nearest that you will have come in this respect. After thought last night, I have decided that I do not like the route you suggest.” He traced the line up the slope with a wet finger. “It is too obvious. The gorge at the top is a mere fifty meters or so across. We will climb over the sill edge there onto the plateau, tired and weary. It would be an ideal place for us to either be seen or . . .” He paused. “Meet opposition.”

“You mean it's a fine site for a . . .” Merral ransacked his memory. “An ambush. Is that the word?”

“Exactly so.” Vero wiped water off his face. “Now, it seems to me that if we kept over to the left we could come onto the plateau at a higher level. Perhaps a hundred meters higher. It's hard to assess it from here. It would make for a tougher climb, but we are also more under trees. And we would not be as obvious.”

“Vero, I'm beginning to feel that we are in some pre-Intervention tale.”

The wet brown face seemed to wrinkle with some deeply unpleasant emotion. “I hope, my friend, you do not speak truer than you can imagine.”

There was silence, and then Vero raised his head and spoke loudly in a firm voice that rang out around the trees and the rocks. “Our Father, who is the defender and ruler of your people, we fear this place and what is on it. Protect your children and go before us now. In the name of the one who is both Lamb and Shepherd. Amen.”

“Amen.”

There was silence, and then a dripping hand touched Merral's shoulder. “Now, to the climb. . . .”

The slope was harder than Merral had imagined. He was tired, and even though the route they took was one of a series of oblique traverses, it required continuous exertion. Where there was soil, the rain had reduced it to a soft, greasy mud so that they found themselves slithering without warning. Fortunately, the firs and scrubby bushes meant that they rarely slid down for more than a few meters. Their hands and legs soon became muddy and, inevitably, as they tried to clear the rain out of their eyes, the brown mud was transferred to their faces. Where there was only wet, loose rock, they found they had to test every step carefully lest a block roll away under their weight. Despite the drifting rain, they found that under the effort of climbing they soon warmed up, and the high humidity meant that it was not long before sweat was running off them. A few hundred meters up, Merral called a halt and sat down heavily on a slab of rock, panting for breath.

“Vero,” he muttered eventually, when he had the spare energy to speak, “the idea of sliding down and asking for a ride back home in the belly of some warm, dry rotorcraft seems very attractive.”

His companion grunted. “I sympathize entirely.”

Then Vero looked up to the crest of the sill above them with determined eyes. “But I believe we must climb this. And, increasingly, I think we must be in a position where we can find such weapons as we have easily.”

For an instant, Merral felt himself on the edge of rebellion. The words “I'm not climbing this cluttered with a bush knife and a tranquilizer gun” framed themselves in his mind. Then he pushed the thought aside and, without a word, pulled out the bush knife from his pack and attached it to his belt. With some difficulty, he was able to put the tranquilizer gun in his jacket pocket.

Then they set off again, and as they climbed on upward, weaving their way between crags and trees, slipping in the mud and bruising themselves against the rocks, Merral found the climb beginning to blur in his mind. The wet pine needles, rough tree trunks, chocolate-colored mud, and protruding razor-edged black lava blocks seemed to merge into a single slope that ran on upward forever. When, gripped by the risk of slipping down hundreds of meters to the scree below, Merral tried to watch his feet, he found instead that he walked into sharp branches that poked at and whipped his face and hands. When he concentrated on avoiding the branches, he lost his footing and slid.

Once, when they had stopped and were trying to get their breath, there was a great crash and a slab of rock fell down on the other side of the river, plunging noisily downward in a damp cloud of dust and debris. Merral and Vero stared carefully at where it had fallen from, but there was no sign of anything other than natural erosion having caused its fall.