This was good, because the young mage was nearly asleep on his feet.
It had been a long day, and a much longer, more frightening night. His head had stopped pounding, but there was a dull pressure on it, as if his brain was swollen and pressing against the insides of his skull.
After the first hour or so, he wasn’t really awake. It was more like being in some long dream of walking, a dream woven together of the hiss of leaves against his pant legs, the soft footsteps of the armadillo, the distant calls of night birds and the hypnotic thrumming of crickets. It did not seem like a thing that could really be happening. It was a dream, surely. There was no ditch, no plants, no distant ghuls. There was no armadillo, no person called Oliver. Surely, he was somewhere else, someone else, and this was only a dream, a brief fantasy of a very minor mage.
Later on, he thought it was most like the time when he was eight and had a raging fever. Too tired to stay awake, too miserable to really sleep, he had sunk into a long waking dream that wavered across the line of hallucination. The cottage and the bed and everything he thought of as Oliver had gone away. What was left of him hung suspended in a strange, indistinct world where he froze and burned and froze and burned.
It had been a long time before the fever had broken.
This was a little like that. He walked and dreamed, neither asleep nor awake. He thought for a while that the ghuls were walking next to him—it seemed that they must be, somehow—but when he roused a little and looked to either side, there were only the sides of the ditch. A little while later, he looked for his mother the same way, but the dream of her shredded into leaf and stem and dried grasses.
He didn’t know how long he had been walking. Perhaps he had always been walking. Perhaps everyone else in the world had died of old age, and he was still walking.
The bottom of the drainage ditch developed a distinct slope. Oliver listed sideways and caught himself. The heavy jar of his foot on rocks roused him a little from his dream.
“Whuh—? Hnnn?”
“Here,” said the armadillo. “Up here.”
The ditch had run into a stream. A low bridge crossed the road. Oliver stumbled toward it.
“Ghuls…?” he said. He wasn’t sure what the word meant anymore, only that it was important.
“Lie here,” said the armadillo, herding him with his tail and one paw. “Under the bridge, just past these plants.”
The plants were silvery-gray and had small, ridged leaves on long stems. Blue flowers rose in long spires, washed pale by moonlight. When Oliver struggled through the stand, a heavy, dusty smell washed around him.
“Catmint,” said Oliver, to himself or the plants or the armadillo.
“It’ll hide your scent. Come on.”
Oliver went to his knees. The shock of his palms hitting the dirt seemed to take a long time to travel up his arms and down his spine. “I’m tired,” he said to the armadillo.
“You should go to sleep.”
Oliver needed no more urging than that. He slept.
A few hours before dawn, the armadillo lay in the catmint stand, watching the road. Moonlight lay over the fields and turned the road into a ribbon of bone.
A figure came running down it. It was shaped like a man, but it did not run like one. Its arms were held straight down by its sides, the knuckles large and red, fingers scissoring at it ran.
The armadillo did not move, did not blink. He might have been a collection of slick stones. Only his eyes moved, imperceptibly, following the ghul’s path as it ran.
The ghul did not even pause at the bridge. The heavy smell of catmint hung in the night air, eclipsing the smell of a small boy, or the faint, leathery scent of armadillo. It crossed the bridge, footsteps thumping, and continued on.
Oliver, dead to the world, did not even wake as the ghul passed. Nor did he wake, just before dawn, when the ghul thumped back the other way, hurrying now, afraid to be caught out on the road by daylight.
The armadillo had always been glad that Oliver didn’t snore. His life had just never depended on it before.
He waited until the dust had settled from the ghul’s passing, and then carefully extended a paw and nibbled thoughtfully at his claws.
The countryside needed rain. The drought had gotten bad, if ghuls were coming out and devouring farmers and going unnoticed.
He had considered leading Oliver around in a wide circle, back to Wishinghall and his mother. The Rainblades were no place for a child, even a mage.
But the drought needed to be broken. Things were worse than he had realized. It seemed unlikely that Oliver would be the one to do it, but perhaps all mages were unlikely. Somebody needed to try.
The sun came up, hot and pitiless. Dust shimmered in the light. The armadillo sighed and got to his feet.
“Come on,” he said, nudging Oliver with his nose. “Time to go.”
4
It was another long hot day. The sky was mercilessly blue. Grasshoppers sang in the ditch. There should have been frogs calling, too, but Oliver had only heard one, creaking out a “hnagh-hnagh-hnaaaagh,” like a broken door hinge. It sounded lonely.
“Well,” said Oliver, trudging along, “at least we got away from the ghuls.”
He said it out loud, partly to hear his own voice over the grasshoppers, partly in hopes that the armadillo would agree with him. Hearing about the ghul crossing the bridge in the night had made him queasy, more ill than terrified.
The armadillo didn’t say anything.
“Surely they won’t follow us,” Oliver tried. “They’ve got their spot on the farm, they won’t risk leaving it…”
The armadillo still didn’t say anything. His tail left a long snaking line in the dust.
“Armadillo?”
The familiar stopped and turned his head, meeting Oliver’s eyes.
“Oh god,” said Oliver, feeling his stomach clench, “they’re following us, aren’t they?”
“I don’t know,” said the armadillo. “But I think they will. With the pigs gone, there’s nothing left to eat on the farm, and you know about them and might raise the alarm. There are lots of reasons to come after you, and very few not to.”
“Should we get off the road? Try to hide?”
“Not yet.” The armadillo faced forward again and began stumping along on his short legs. “We’re more likely to run into people on the road. They probably won’t attack a group. And they won’t start moving until evening. They don’t pass well in daylight.”
Oliver bit his lip.
“Besides,” said the armadillo, picking up the pace, “this is the only road to the Rainblades that I know about. If we leave it, we risk getting lost.”
“What if we don’t find people before tonight?” asked Oliver.
“We’ll sleep off the road a little way. No fire tonight.”
“There’s hardly any food to cook anyway,” said Oliver glumly, and followed the armadillo down the road.
By noon, Oliver had made a discovery. If he held his copy of Encyclopedia of Common Magic in front of himself, and looked up every few seconds, the road was flat enough and straight enough that he could read and walk at the same time.
He read the entry on ghuls five or six times, as if hoping that more information was lurking in it somewhere, and if he read the article often enough, it would spring into existence on the page.