They both stood there gasping. Somewhere a donkey snorted. Rothir stepped forward to prod the hard remnants of the darkburn with his foot: it did not move. Gathering the corners of the smouldering blanket, he tried to drag it away. The blanket disintegrated into ashes, releasing bits of darkburn that fizzed and hissed against the dewy grass.
He waited: above him in the huge sky, the Shieldholder waited: still nothing moved. Rothir had not heard of darkburns regenerating from their shattered limbs, but he would not put it past them. Too much about them was still mysterious.
This one, at least, seemed fully dead. The smell of decay was already waning – proof that it was an artifice, he thought – and the terror was sliding down from reality to memory. He walked back to the fire, where he could just see Yaret standing like a statue in the moonlight, clutching her bow.
He wanted to reassure her: but what reassurance could he give? He did not even know if the darkburn was alone. All too often another attack would follow. He was listening carefully for the sound of stonemen but heard nothing. None the less, they were likely to be around.
“Eled slept through that,” said Yaret. “I would not have thought it possible.” Her voice was hoarse.
“I’ll watch for the rest of the night,” said Rothir. “Dawn will come in two hours or so. We’ll leave as soon as it’s light enough. How long will it take you to pack up and be ready?”
After a few seconds she replied. “About a quarter-hour. But it may take us longer to get Eled awake and up onto the horse.”
“We must do it as quickly as we can.” He sat down in front of the cleft, facing west, the direction from which the darkburn had come; while Yaret sat down facing east.
“I’ll watch too,” she murmured. “I can’t sleep after that.”
“It was not the same as the creature you saw chasing Poda?”
“No. Quite different. The smell this time was not so bad, I think. This one was taller. But it felt different as well. The sense of – what shall I call it? Grief. Horror. Dismay. That was worse this time. There was grief in the other one too, but more hatred – a whole world of hatred; and less fear.”
“I do not distinguish so many shades of feeling in them as you do. It is all horror and despair.”
“Yes.” After a pause she added, “This one felt like a thing in torment.”
“They are things designed to make us feel torment.” He spoke into the night. “Don’t take those feelings as real. They are imposed on us by the darkburns, and they disappear when the darkburns are destroyed. But this one is powerless now.”
“Will there be others?”
“It’s possible. If you are going to stay awake, we may as well sit back to back. It’s easier.” They shuffled together.
“So you think it may not have been alone?” Yaret muttered over her shoulder. “Do these creatures travel in packs, then?”
“Occasionally,” said Rothir. “And also…” He thought of telling her about the stonemen, and decided against it. Stonemen did not usually, in his experience, attack in darkness. And the darkburn was enough bad news for one night.
“Are they alive?” Her voice was small in the shadows. “How can such a burnt thing be alive?”
“They’re not alive in the way that we are.”
“But they feel. Only living things can feel.”
“They make us feel. That’s not the same.”
“Is it not? They smell like death,” said Yaret, “like decaying flesh. A burnt tree does not smell that way.”
“Yet they are burnt through and through. There is no flesh in them to decay. They are made of ash and charcoal. The stench too is designed, I believe, to cause us horror.”
“Made? Designed? By who?”
Rothir was silent. But a moment later Yaret answered her own question.
“By wizardry, I suppose... Or something like it.”
Assuredly, he thought. And he thought the wizard’s name, as well; but he would not speak it.
Yaret said nothing more until a donkey wandered over to them, a heavily breathing shadow that snuffled in enquiry. She reassured it with a few quiet words in her feathery language. Rothir hoped the horses had not fled too far – particularly Poda. If she had been badly frightened it might be back to the starting post with her.
However, there was no use worrying about that until it was light enough to see. Once the donkey had moved off Yaret was silent, her back tense against his own. He hoped his presence would give her some feeling of being shielded, at least. He was confident that he could protect them against another darkburn, even against two.
But if a horde of stonemen followed… No, that was unlikely. Stonemen could see in the darkness no better than himself. To cross this land they would need torches, which would give them away. Even if they were close by, they would wait until the morning to attack. Listening carefully, he heard nothing but the ordinary small noises of the night.
Slowly the eastern sky turned from black to a thickening blue, as heavy as a velvet cloak, before fading to a wan, exhausted grey: the rich velvet was transformed to worn-out wool, threadbare and thin. He stood up and looked for the horses.
There they were, only a few hundred yards distant, Narba close up to Poda with the donkeys by her other side. The male donkey – Dolm – stared east belligerently as if he had spent the last hour watching too.
Rothir looked down at the shattered darkburn. It was hard to tell what shape it might have had. The fallen shards of limbs were twisted like charred branches. It might have been the remnants of some old burnt-out tree that had been hacked up and strewn around.
He did not touch any of the pieces. As he went to fetch the horses Yaret began to drag her packs out from their shelter in the cleft.
It took a quarter-hour, as she had predicted. The raincover was rolled; the waterskins were full. The packs were strapped onto the donkeys and to Poda, because Narba would have a heavy enough burden. Eled was hoisted up onto the horse, and his leg made secure with its support of bark before Yaret climbed up behind him, wincing slightly. She had handed Rothir a slice of porridge to eat as he rode. They set off well before the sun rose, through the thin grey dawn.
He led the way on Poda, restraining himself to keep her to a steady walk. The land seemed changed now, no longer empty and benign but full of ominous hints. Every breath of the wind seemed to carry a warning. Things flickered at the edges of his vision, unresolved. The sense of something watching had returned although there was no watcher that he could detect. Annoyed at himself for being so suggestible, he concentrated on the path ahead.
They walked for two hours, Rothir leading, and the donkeys trailing in the rear. They were heading east by northeast along the length of the empty region for which he had no name and which Yaret called the Loft. His heart sank as he noted how slowly they were travelling and calculated how far they had to go.
By the time they took their first halt, Eled was already slipping sideways in the saddle. Yaret’s face was tight with the effort of keeping him – and herself – in place. It was beginning to rain.
“Rain is good,” Rothir assured her as he dismounted and then lifted Eled down. “It may reduce the power of the darkburns. It certainly won’t help them.”
Yaret looked as if she wanted to ask something; but she withheld her question until Eled was lying on the grass with his eyes closed. They had agreed to give him half an hour’s rest. Then she addressed Rothir in a low voice.
“What else should I know about the darkburns?”
He considered what to tell her. “They take many shapes; but can be hard to make out. They seem to spin and blur somehow.”
“Smoke?”
“Not just smoke. I think perhaps they distort the vision as they do the mind. Some seem to have no limbs, and some have many. A few look vaguely human, although often smaller, and headless.”
“The first I saw was almost serpent-like. But shorter and with legs. Closer to a giant lizard, perhaps. What else?”
“They come singly, as a rule; although occasionally others follow. They seem to not like heavy rain. They don’t avoid watercourses, but do not cross them easily, it seems.” Although the stonemen evidently had ways of getting them across water, he would not go into that. “They attack humans unerringly, but not animals.”
“The first one I saw was, I guessed, hunting not Poda but her rider. So that means they can see; and have intelligence.”
“A dog can do as much,” said Rothir. “And the darkburns have no eyes. They may use scent or some other sense to find us.”
Yaret looked around. They could only see for about a mile in any direction before the landscape drooped into an indeterminate grey canvas. The drizzle was light, but hemmed them in with blank walls of mist.
“The name you give them. Do they originate from the Darkburn forest?”
“Probably.”
“And these things are always… burnt?”
“Entirely. Some are brittle. The thing this morning broke in pieces easily enough, although your arrows just bounced off it. Others are tougher; but can still be broken, if you have the strength.”
“Why do they attack?”
“That I cannot tell you.” There was no point delving into a complicated account of his people’s history. In any case it did not concern her.
She studied him and nodded. “Very well. I have two observations.”
“Yes?”
“Firstly, the lizard-shaped thing that I saw was not just burnt, but actively burning.”
“So you said.” Even though Eled had suggested the same, Rothir was not sure if he believed them. How could she be sure about that inner glow when she had only glanced at it for a second before hiding her face? And Eled might merely have picked up what she said to sharpen his own hazy memory. “Your second observation?”
She hesitated. “The darkburn this morning, Rothir. Was that attacking us?”
“Yes, of course.” He was puzzled by the question. “What else could it be doing? It didn’t come across us by chance. That wasn’t random. It sought us out.”
“Exactly. And felt like a thing in torment.”
“I told you – those are feelings created to cause terror and confusion.”
“If you say so.” Yaret sighed. “You burnt your hand in fighting. I’d better bind it up for you.”
He looked at his left hand, which he had been ignoring until now. “There’s no blistering. It’ll do without a bandage.”
“No, it won’t. It needs something to protect it,” she said firmly. “Why risk damaging it further? Your face too. Though I suppose you won’t let me bandage that.”
“Indeed I won’t. You sound like my sister,” said Rothir, without thinking about it; until he saw the reproving look she gave him at this careless admission of her gender.
She dressed his hand with star-moss and bandaged it in green-striped wool without a word. Although he was very aware of her proximity and touch he decided to think nothing of it.
By the time she had finished, Eled was struggling to get up.
“I’m ready,” he said.
“You need to eat first,” said Yaret, and Rothir was reminded that it was still better for Eled to believe her male while she was performing much more intimate tasks for him.
They gave Eled some dry biscuit and a drink. Before the half hour was up Rothir mounted himself on his horse behind Eled, with his cloak covering them both against the steady drizzle.
“Narba will bear our weight for a little while,” he told Yaret. “You ride Poda.”
“I’d rather ride a donkey.” But Poda allowed her to mount with only the faintest twitching of her haunches. Rothir thought that the mare might be becoming inured to darkburns to some degree. All their horses had suffered repeated exposure to them this last year. Even his own stoical Narba had, on his first encounter, tried to rear and bolt; but slowly Narba was being trained to bear the stench and horror, just as Rothir was training himself.
Perhaps the hatred emanating from this one had been less fierce than some. Yaret’s question recurred to him. Had it been attacking them?
Of course it had. Why else would it rush upon them in that way, except to bring them death by fire?
“Leg hurts,” mumbled Eled.
Rothir was immediately alarmed. The leg must be very painful for Eled to have said anything about it. He adjusted the bark support carefully until Eled sighed and said, “Better now.” Possibly he was lying, but Rothir would take his word for it. They had to move on.
To distract Eled and to keep him awake, he began to talk to him in Vonnish, secure in the knowledge that anything Yaret overheard, she would not understand. Even so, he stayed off the subject of their recent mission, and kept to a more soothing theme by talking about their home – if you could call Caervonn home. The Vonn had many homes, and none. Their headquarters, Thield, was a town of tents, always temporary, always moving. But Caervonn was the home they still aspired to, despite their twelve-year exile. Rothir had not been there since he was a young man. He no longer considered himself young.
Eled was young, though; he had been only a boy when they had left Caervonn. To him it was still a place of dream and hope despite the threats that now assailed it. Or probably assailed it – for in truth no-one was sure how things stood there at present. Much would have changed.
But he knew that Eled saw Caervonn as a shining place of half-remembered legend; so as such he described it. The young man listened with unusual concentration as Rothir spoke of the city’s six high towers, its long streets lined with ancient cobbles; the odd, appealing angles given to its structures by their hexagonal design. It was supposed to be a tribute to a bee-hive, but since Caervonn had been built twelve hundred years ago there was no way of being sure if that was true.
None the less it was part of Rothir’s own shining legend. As he spoke of the warm summer evenings when the terraces were full of music and the clear deep sky above them full of swifts, he was filled with a terrible sense of grief and loss so strong that it made him feel physically sick.
Eled sighed with a different sort of pain. “The women are beautiful in Caervonn, they say.”
“As beautiful as anywhere,” said Rothir. “And courteous and cultured.”
Briefly, he allowed himself a glimpse of his own dream, the one that had accompanied him on several particularly cold and lonely journeys. The dream of one day entering Caervonn, riding triumphant in the line behind Huldarion, and seeing the people cheering from the balconies. They would be smiling, welcoming: one would throw a handful of petals, catching in his hair, and he would look up to see a woman as dark and lovely as a rose… She was a woman entirely of his imagination, but the promise of her brought him comfort.
Rothir was aware that such hope was essentially illusory. He did not indulge in these dreams often. Nonetheless, it was important to keep Caervonn alive in his mind. He pitied the younger man whose teens and adulthood had been spent in exile. As a wandering Rider of the Vonn, Eled had been a patroller, hunter, and warrior, as Rothir had himself, yet a citizen of nowhere.
At times the Vonn had hired out other skills; in Rothir’s case, blacksmithing. But at least he had had a life in Caervonn before this one, even if it had been a life of increasing strain and conflict and finally battle, before Huldarion and all his kin were driven out of paradise… Although Caervonn had been no paradise those last two years.
All too soon, Eled’s questions and attention lapsed. Rothir held him upright on the saddle for as far as he could before he had to call a stop.
“Another half an hour to rest and then we’ll switch horses again,” he told Yaret. She nodded mutely underneath her dripping hood.
And so it went for the remainder of the day: crawling, crawling across the empty landscape like ants across a vast barnyard. They spoke little, for the weather was not conducive to conversation and Eled seemed to need all his energy to stay upright on the horse. The stops became increasingly long and the spells on horseback shorter.
At last, before he really wanted to, Rothir called a final halt. It was not yet even dark and his heart urged him on; but he knew he must not risk exhausting Eled on this first day of travel.
So they camped in a dryish hollow sheltered by a lonely tree. Eled was asleep almost as soon as Rothir laid him down; he had to wake the young man up again to make him eat.
Yaret said little. She merely nodded when Rothir told her, “We will set no watch tonight.” Despite the slowness of their travelling – or perhaps because of it – he felt drained of energy. They both needed sleep after the previous night’s disturbance.
Yet for all his tiredness he lay awake, listening, unable to relax. The donkeys will warn us, he told himself; they did last night, after all.
But he would not have been surprised to open his eyes in the morning and find the donkeys and their owner gone. Why would Yaret bother to continue on this thankless journey? She could easily take her own route north from here.
In the end he made himself sleep; and woke to find the donkeys were still there. Yaret was already attending to Eled, who looked a little better than he had the previous night.
“Which horse shall I be on today?” he asked Rothir.
“Still Narba,” answered Rothir. “With Yaret up behind you.”
“Ah! She clutches on to me too hard,” said Eled, and then tried to smile at Yaret to show it did not matter.
“Do I? Sorry,” said Yaret contritely. “I’m just trying not to fall off myself.”
“That’s all right,” said Eled. “Shall we start? I’m ready.”
Initially he seemed strong and they made good progress. Soon they left the high grassed plains behind, and began to cross the Hayle. This was a land of boulders, huge inexplicable rocks that dotted the ground and hindered any rider. The travellers could not have galloped here even had they wished to do so. The boulders had sat there for centuries or longer: trees grew from some, and had split them into smaller flocks of jagged stones.
Rothir noticed that Yaret kept looking around, wary and puzzled.
“What’s the matter?”
“Nothing. It’s only… I keep thinking that there’s something here.”
“There’s something everywhere,” said Rothir. “We just don’t spot them. Plenty of rabbits: maybe antelope. Fangols. Moorhounds. Hares. The odd wolf, but not too close, I hope.”
“Is that still the Darkburn forest to our right?” She pointed to a shadow marching parallel to their path, indistinct through the continuing thin drizzle.
“Yes. Our route runs parallel to it.” The forest was perhaps two miles away. He would have preferred to take a route away from it, but that would mean a longer journey with no benefit of easier ground, and he did not have the time. The Darkburn river and forest would not begin their long curve round to the south and then the west for another thirty miles or so. They were stuck with it.
“So we are still on the Darkburn Loft,” she murmured.
“We call this area the Hayle.”
“It still feels like the Loft. A habitation.”
“Whatever else is here with us, is harmless.” He had been watching his surroundings carefully, and there had been nothing to perturb him on the field of boulders. The only lion spoor he’d seen had been weeks old. No sign of wolves – nor, thankfully, of darkburn trails.
In the afternoon, as they struggled over the uneven ground, Eled’s strength began to wane. His leg was obviously troubling him; so they took another long halt to let him rest.
While the other two shared some biscuit Rothir climbed the highest of the nearby boulders to look out from its top, five yards above the ground. It was not high enough to see any great distance even though the rain had almost stopped. He observed no darkburn trails. No distant Riders of the Vonn either… But then he had not expected that; he had merely hoped.
Hope, he thought as he gazed out towards the mountains, which seemed hardly closer than before. So many years trying to live on hope, and for what? When will any hope be fulfilled? When will we come into our own?
He shrugged the thought away and slid back down the boulder. He had asked himself that question so many times, and the answer had always come back the same: don’t think about it. Put it in a box. You have a job to do. The nature of the task before him had changed over the years, but the necessity had never gone away. Right now his task was to get Eled to the rendezvous in safety.
He had less certainty about what it might be best to do with the injured man after that. Farwithiel, perhaps… But that was a problem for the future.
The day dripped past them and fell imperceptibly into dusk before they halted for the night again. In spite of his worries about Eled, and his half-expectation of the donkeys disappearing, Rothir slept soundly. He awoke to the rasp of donkeys grazing; to a sky thick with clouds but free of rain: to a land of dull, washed stones, and a clear horizon that was still too far away.