People didn’t turn the labor of their creativity toward provender rooms where the only witnesses to works of art were field mice and farmhands, and yet laid across one wall was a display of horror in shades of black and rust executed by a gleeful hand. Gharek had studied the repulsive mural. If Dalvila had seen it, she would have commissioned the artist to paint something similar on one of her bedchamber’s walls or maybe the ceiling, a visual feast to look upon while she raped her latest plaything. The work half revealed in the room’s shadow displayed pleasure in torture, a lust for another’s fear. A multitude of faces crushed together, their mouths stretched wide in silent screams, their eyes bulging with terror as they stared at some horror he couldn’t see. Why such an abomination was displayed on a derelict barn’s wall was a mystery, one he had no desire to solve.
He hadn’t gone closer for a better look, and the longer he had stared at the grotesque images, the more certain he became it wasn’t paint that rendered them on the wall.
While he hadn’t run from the room, his strides were long ones, and he’d released a grateful breath when he was outside once more under the sweltering blaze of a summer sun with the song of insects serenading him.
Had Siora seen the wall when she camped in the barn? A true shade speaker might not fear ghosts, but there was more to that hideous mural than a callous mockery of the dead. Surely even she would be horrified at the sight.
He’d ridden away, following more of Siora’s tracks while doing his best to shrug off the feeling of being watched that skittered down his back on spider legs. No wonder the fields surrounding the barn were abandoned and the building left to decay.
Experience and weeks of fruitless searching had taught him that to rush toward Siora’s latest hiding place did him no good and often worked against him. It was uncanny how she’d managed to outsmart and outmaneuver him without ever truly outrunning him.
Were she a wealthy noblewoman with numerous connections and friends, he’d assume she made use of a vast network of helpers who would render aid either in the service of friendship or for profit. But this was a beggar without a belsha to her name beyond what she might scrape together for a meal. She was also a shade speaker, a fact she’d failed to mention when he suffered a moment’s weakness and offered her a place in his household as thanks for saving Estred from a stone-throwing mob. He’d paid a heavy price for that foolish kindness.
He’d tracked her through the day and into evening, not toward Wellspring Holt, but here to an eerie expanse of woodland whose perimeters stretched for leagues in a gentle curve that hugged the trade route and clung to the remains of Midrigar. The forest offered a possible hiding place for brigands and fugitives. And shade speakers on the run.
Moonlight lit the treetops but most of the woodland slumbered in full dark. It was slow going as his horse picked her way through the underbrush. Gharek held a small lamp aloft to illuminate the path ahead. He didn’t worry that the fragile light might be seen in the distance and alert someone. His mount’s hooves crushing sticks and brittle deadfall would accomplish the task long before the light did.
The music of insects and bird calls had been loud just before he crossed the tree line, a cacophony of whistles, rustles, and chirps. Those sounds died away the closer he rode to the ruins of the dead city until the silence itself held its breath and only the gloom shrouding the trees breathed. His amiable mare stopped suddenly then pranced backward, tossing her head and snorting. Gharek tapped his heels against her sides to coax her forward. She’d have none of it, fighting the bit in her mouth as she pivoted on her hooves to trot back the way they’d come.
Gharek reined her to a halt, considering whether it was wise to continue his scouting in another direction or make camp nearby and wait until morning to resume his hunt. He’d lose time with camping but trying to find anyone in this darkness while riding a spooked horse was an exercise in futility. Besides, he could make up the time in daylight. Siora was on foot, he on horseback. He’d cover far more ground in less time than she would, and the chance she’d outrun him if he spotted her was nonexistent.
He guided the mare to retrace her steps, and this time she readily obeyed the command, eager to put distance between them and the city that squatted like a pustule on the landscape. But she’d taken no more than a pair of steps when something wrapped icy fingers around Gharek’s spine and wrenched him backward. He flew off the saddle as if lassoed from behind and landed on his back. The ground beneath him vibrated from the beat of his mare’s hooves as she bolted past him into the labyrinth of trees.
He lay there for a moment, stunned and winded. The ice shard wedged against his backbone remained, though whatever had ripped him from horseback didn’t press him into the dirt. A few more breaths and he lurched to his feet, unsettled by his unusual clumsiness, alarmed by the violence of an invisible force that had so thoroughly unhorsed him. There’d been no trip rope to clothesline him, nor had he been riding fast when he fell. The lamp he held had fallen when he did, lost somewhere in the underbrush when its flickering light had guttered. Darkness hung thick enough to scoop with a spoon.
His muttered curses sounded loud to his ears as he peered into the sepulchral black, hoping he might spot the mare standing nearby or at least find a partially cleared path that led back to open pasture. He took a step only to suffer a hard clamp on his backbone, as if the icicle there had suddenly transformed into a shackle locked around his middle. Invisible tethers seized his arms and legs and he was jerked to one side and then the other as if by a drunken puppeteer with their hands on the strings.
Gharek staggered, struggling to keep his feet, struggling to free himself from the bonds that held him in an unbreakable grip that both dragged and yanked him in the direction of Midrigar’s walls. He careened through the dark, along a jagged path that propelled him into tree trunks before spinning him away to tear through the underbrush. He tried planting his feet in the dirt to no avail, his boots carving skid marks as he was pulled along like a cur on a leash. His palms left bloody smears on the bark of those trees he tried to grip for purchase and was wrenched away with little effort.
The iciness slithering down his spine spread in creeper tendrils throughout his body, wrapping around his lungs and heart, his liver, even his tongue so that his curses and snarls slowly ebbed away and his struggles waned. Speaking was an impossibility, breathing a challenge, and he was reduced to nothing more than a grunting, shambling mute driven inexorably toward an ancient city of the damned and a fate he could not know but feared with every part of his soul.
His sense of a thing waiting, hungering for him, grew stronger with every drunken step toward the black silhouettes of buildings. The image of a landscape where deserts were bloodred, seas obsidian, and skies the yellow of bile filled his mind’s eye even as his vision sharpened with an inhuman accuracy.
He heard the rustle of movement and caught the flit of a shadow from the corner of his eye. Perspiration beaded his skin from the labor of turning his head even as his feet carried him relentlessly forward. The shadow rushed him, small, quick. Had he the ability to speak, Gharek might have bellowed his triumph at the brief glimpse of familiar delicate features and large eyes with their far-seeing, enigmatic gaze. Siora. Her name was a gurgle in the back of his throat. She raised her arms, gripping a stick like a club in both hands. Unable to dodge or deflect, he could only stare, helpless, as she swung the makeshift club. A bright flash of pain immolated the image of the strange landscape and snapped the puppeteer’s strings. Darkness.