Of Dark Things Waking (The Redemption Chronicle Book 3) Read online

  And then, like a punch to the shoulder that jerked him from his reverie, he smelled it: nauseous as rotten eggs, scuttling through the darkness to the northwest like a cockroach.

  Northwest? Shientel slumped against the Tears, its back to the mountains; Iggy literally felt the stone digging into his muscles at that very moment. To go northwest, the thing would have to be climbing the mountain range, or . . .

  Taking the Black Pass.

  His eyes snapped open. The cries of murdered trees and the anguish of starvation faded, leaving a heavy melancholy. He tried to fight through it, to get his thoughts in order.

  He knew the thing had been taking the roads. He knew it had been moving at a man's pace, maybe even trudging through the snow, though it had left no tracks. But somehow knowing that it had to take the Black Pass through the Tears helped to further crystallize his impression of it as a solid thing, a creature of some kind. It definitely wasn't flying, or it could have gone straight over the mountains; it was definitely corporeal, or it could have gone straight through them.

  The Black Pass.

  He was exhausted from a day spent enduring the city's atrocities, and the burden of his last meditation had nearly crushed him. He knew where it was, what direction it was headed. He could afford to let it keep moving for tonight and catch up to it tomorrow.

  He set his back to the mountain and closed his eyes, chased into sleep by visions of drifting death.

  In the morning he made his way to the Pass, only to find it blocked.

  "It's not safe," the guard grunted. "Closed by order of Lord Locklyn."

  "I'll be careful," Iggy said.

  "You and the last dozen who tried to go through," the guard snarled. "We lost good men trying to pull them back out. Whole pass is a death trap, you get that? No one goes in."

  Iggy peered past him, into the murk of the Black Pass. Snow choked off the passage in drifts, but it hardly looked impassable. Again, he saw no tracks or any sign that someone had been through.

  "Did someone enter it yesterday? In the afternoon, sometime?"

  "Ain't you listening?" the guard said. "I told you, no one goes in."

  "But maybe there was another guard here yesterday, or . . . ?"

  "Look, I don't know who you're looking for—your baby sister, maybe, or your precious granddad. They didn't come this way. No one does."

  Iggy looked past him again, remembering his meditation. It came this way, he thought. I know it did. "It's a'fin. You don't even have to tell anyone I was here. No one will come after me. I'll take the risk."

  "You'll get out of here," the guard growled, dropping his hand to his sword, "or I'll make you."

  Iggy withdrew. There was no need to fight the man; he could get past him easily enough. But how in Hel had his quarry slipped right past the guard? What was it?

  Invisible, somehow, he suddenly thought. Has to be. But even that didn't make sense—wouldn't an invisible creature still leave tracks?

  He returned to the alley where he'd slept the night, and became the hawk. A single quick lunge took him to the rooftop, where he gave the city one last scan, this time from above. Nothing jumped out at him, so he returned to the Black Pass and soared into it, the guard throwing him one lingering look as he passed.

  He could have gone higher—Hel, he didn't need to bother himself with the Black Pass at all—but he wanted to follow the path his quarry had taken, to make sure he didn't miss any signs. He flew in just deep enough to get out of sight of the guard, then became himself again and started through the snowdrifts on foot. After a few minutes of this it became clear why the Black Pass was so treacherous: it wasn't the snow, it was the darkness.

  The Pass was a straight, vertical gouge through the gut rock of the mountain, the impossible aftermath of some act of God or sorcery in a forgotten age. It was wide enough for several wagons abreast, but the rock towered so high on either side that sunlight rarely reached the ground. On their journey through it last year, they'd had torches if they needed them, and the other travelers had also brought their own lanterns. All told it had been enough illumination to hold the darkness at bay, to make the journey feel like a starlit journey through a corn field.

  Now, though, it was black as pitch. With the guard out of sight, the only entry point for sunlight was also out of sight, reduced to a dull, leaden glow down the passage behind him. Managing the snow drifts in the dark reminded him of making his way down the dangerous foothills leading into the Waste—an effort that had cost one of their horses its life and very nearly killed all of them as a result—but without the lights that had guided their steps on that journey. He had one torch in his pack, and the flint and steel to light it, but once it was gone he'd be left in darkness.

  Forget it. No sense in getting myself killed, and I can't look for tracks by the light of one torch anyway. He became the hawk again and shot toward the thin crack of daylight at the Pass's crown, wings pumping. The sparkling sprawl of the mountains greeted him as he crested the rise, a breathtaking vista stretching away to the northeast and southwest like an invitation to soar. He ignored it and turned along the angle of the Black Pass, following it northwest toward the highlands beyond.

  On foot, they had spent nearly two full days in the Black Pass last year; now, his flight took barely two hours. He kept a high altitude, relishing the bite of cold in his feathers, dipping when the air became too thin to sustain his speed. When the city of Feldra spread out beneath him he made a single, tight lap around its limits, but his quick scan found nothing out of the ordinary. It was time to meditate again.

  He tucked his wings and dove, pulling up a mile or so from town and becoming himself again beneath a secluded overhang. Being the man felt a bit like returning to his old home in Southlight: familiar and foreign at the same time. I have to be more careful, he thought. It shouldn't feel strange to be myself. He imagined becoming the hawk for too long, feeling his lifelong identity fade away into the simple instincts and glorious flight that ruled the bird of prey. He would leave it all behind—the revolting cities, the new King's enigmatic search for power, his friends' new positions of authority. Forget it all and soar until he was just another hawk, a creature of simplicity.

  He expected the idea to scare him. Instead, it had a startling allure.

  Suddenly he longed to talk to Chuckler, the gelding he had befriended in the Black Pass last year. His friend had a way of making light of even the most frightening ideas; he could easily soothe Iggy now.

  And how troubling is it, Iggy thought despite himself, that when I crave conversation, I think of my horse?

  He shook his head and tried to put the thoughts from his mind, but they chased him up the snow-soaked ridge as he left his little alcove and sought a good vantage point in the highlands. For years he'd known that his connection to the All-Mother endangered his ability to remember who he was. But since he'd left Ordlan Green, that danger had grown a thousand-fold. Speaking to animals, taking their side over his friends', had been bad enough—but becoming them, not just understanding their view but possessing it, was a different matter altogether.

  These days of solitude, first on the open plain and then in the crisp silence of the mountain sky, only made it harder. Maybe I need to force myself into the city when I get back. Spend some time with my friends, spend a little time being human.

  The thought repulsed him more than he cared to admit.

  He found a nice high vantage point, with the mountains looming behind him and the Fahrnar Highlands a jumble of rocky bluffs and snow beyond, and fixed his eyes on the city of Feldra. He expected the presence to be there, somewhere—it had a destination, he was sure, and maybe Feldra was it.

  Then he sat in the snow, put his hands to the cold rock, and reached out. For ten minutes he searched through the frozen stone and the mountains' distant gaze, the drift of gentle snowfall and the city's careless atrocities. He was about to give up when he finally caught a flicker of it back in the pass, probably still strugglin
g through the snowdrifts in the dark. Of course. He felt like a fool. I flew, but it's walking.

  On the heels of this realization he had a second: I could go back and descend on it right now. This is my chance to corner it.

  The idea tempted him. He'd been on the road more than a month; his patience had long since worn thin. And this was the clearest impression of its location that he'd gotten yet. It might be my only chance to find out what the damned thing is. He thought of the firewalkers they'd faced in Shepherd's Hill, the living statues at the peak of Thakhan Dar. And to kill it if I have to.

  He tensed and approached the ledge, ready to leap off and become the hawk once more, but memories of the Pass's cold darkness dowsed his eagerness. It's moving through that darkness without trouble. Hel, it's moving through it faster than we did with light. Only a day of travel, and it was nearly to Feldra. It had doubled their pace from last year, even impeded by the snowdrifts.

  This told Iggy it was skilled in the dark. If he fought it in the Pass, it wouldn't just be unimpeded—it would be advantaged.

  He growled and stepped back from the ledge, shaking his head. The risk wasn't worth it. Besides, he would never learn its destination if he alerted it to his presence now.

  His fraying patience had seen him this far. He sighed and sat down, resolved to let it see him on a little farther.

  A snack of manna helped to settle his thoughts. Lyseira had loaded him down with the stuff before he'd left, but he was finally down to his last few days' supply. It didn't worry him—he had better winter survival skills than most—but it was good to enjoy it while it lasted. His stomach sated and his mind made up, he napped for the afternoon, trying not to think about the thing in the Pass creeping steadily closer.

  Some vague nightmare woke him, shoving him toward consciousness like the blaring of a distant horn. He opened his eyes to a gorgeous, early dusk, the sun's dying light seeping into the snow and glittering across the highlands. It's close. He'd never been more certain of anything. Now. Find it now.

  He scrambled to his knees and shoved his hands into the snow, seeking the frozen dirt beneath, and felt it the moment he reached out: putrid and boiling, a stain of nausea on the pristine countryside. Close, this time, as if he'd caught it off-guard—crouched just over the next hill, feeding.

  Iggy's eyes shot open. Feeding?

  He jumped to his feet, heart pumping. It had never been so close. This was his chance.

  Staying low and quiet, he crept toward the closest ridge. He'd taken to carrying a simple fighting staff last year, even spent some time sparring with Seth while they'd been on the road. Now he gripped it in one hand as he ascended the hill, braced for any surprise.

  At the crest of the rise he saw a gently sloped ridge, dropping off a few hundred feet away into a snow-choked ravine. A little house—barely more than a cabin—stood between him and the drop-off, with an empty goat pen just behind it. The cabin's front door hung open.

  On face, nothing about the scene was out of the ordinary. But something about the silence and the open door caused every hair on the back of his neck to reach for the sky.

  I should be the hawk, he thought, or the bear, something that can fight or at least let me escape fast. But neither would let him open doors or explore a house made for human beings. He took a steadying breath, rechecked his grip on his staff, and made his way down the ridge.

  As he drew closer, he saw that the snow in front of the cabin had been nearly flattened. A fight, he thought, and then he saw the spray of darkness across the white of the ground, like an artist's perfect arc of paint. It was hard to make out the color in the failing light, but he knew it was blood. His eyes followed the trail to a small hump in the snow, the size of a goat . . . or a small child. He hesitated, torn between checking the body or the cabin, before realizing that turning his back on that open door could be the last mistake he ever made.

  So he pressed forward, reached the door in silence, and carefully leaned in.

  In the wan light of a single lantern, he took in the scene. A slaughtered woman, splayed unceremoniously over a broken table; a desiccated corpse, nearly mummified, frozen on the ground; a dead boy of perhaps nine winters near the rear window, blood still pumping furiously from a gaping wound in his back.

  All of this assailed him instantly, but most horrifying was the man standing in the dark, his eyes locked on Iggy as he peered around the corner. He'd taken multiple cuts to the face; his ravaged jaw hung loosely beneath his dead eyes. He held a black longsword in one hand, still dripping with blood, and wore a black cloak that seemed to swallow the light around it.

  "Well done, boy," he rasped in a voice like the wind between the gravestones. "You finally found me." A long, ugly gash gleamed with naked blood from the man's right shoulder clear to his left hip. "It's good to know the speakers are intrepid as ever." Then he darted forward, sword suddenly high, and struck.

  Iggy jerked up his staff in panic, stumbling backward; it turned the black sword with a squeal, but snapped like a twig. He fought for balance as he staggered back into the bloody yard, his abrupt terror threatening to knock him to his knees.

  Suddenly, as if a curtain had pulled back, the Pulse's raw agony revealed itself. The thing in the black cloak was an abomination, a tangled sickness as vile as a tumor. It twisted every Pulse message it received, distorted it and remade it into horror. And a mere second ago, despite being only a dozen feet away, Iggy had been utterly blind to it.

  Too late, he realized he was not the spider in the web at all. He was the prey.

  The thing in black slithered forward in long, lunging steps. It moves like a Preserver, Iggy had time to realize before it brought its sword up, slicing a neat cut up Iggy's left thigh that burned first with pain, then with screaming cold. The strength leaked out of him, spilling him backward as his mind went blank with frost.

  "Oh, Hel," the corpse said. "You're just a pup. Are you all that's left?" As it stepped after him, readying its weapon for the kill, the sun's dying light glimmered across its face—now whole and human, every wound vanished. "So be it," it murmured to itself, and now even its voice sounded ordinary, the chill of the grave banished from it. "Be grateful you die here. You won't have to witness what comes next—it would break you."

  He spun his weapon to drive it through Iggy's heart, and Iggy became the grizzly bear.

  The man betrayed an instant of annoyance, but no surprise. He completed the strike, thrusting the weapon deep into what was now Iggy's flank. Iggy roared and wrenched away, yanking the sword from his attacker's grip as he clambered to his feet. He now dwarfed the man, a towering, shaggy brute of claws and muscle. He reared to his back legs and roared again, his bellow echoing away through the highlands, before lunging at his enemy's head.

  The man in black rolled aside impossibly quickly, easily dodging Iggy's clumsy attack, and when he came to his feet, his longsword was back in his hands.

  How―? Iggy started to wonder, but the bear took over, lumbering after its enemy on all fours, teeth snapping, vision red with rage. Again the man dashed away, his back now to the drop-off.

  Idiot! the bear in Iggy's mind snarled. Have you now!

  Wait, Iggy thought. No, wait!

  But he was too furious, too appalled, to restrain himself. He reared again before crashing down like an avalanche, and the man in black vanished beneath him. Brilliant, sizzling pain ignited in his stomach as the dead man's weapon buried itself in Iggy's gut, then a single instant of wrenching nausea as it drove clear back to his spine, severing it.

  Iggy's rear legs seemed to vanish from beneath him. He tumbled to the ground with his back to the cliff, paralyzed, his eyes latched on the black form which now, somehow, stood a dozen feet away.

  Change! he shrieked in his mind. Now! Now! And he did, but the hawk was as crippled as the bear, a ruined waste of limp flesh at his enemy's mercy.

  Sehk, he whimpered. Ah, sehk. I'm sorry, Kahls. I tried.

  Then the man in black
slashed the air with his sword twice before slamming it point-first into the ground. Lightning mirrored him, striking with pure brilliance from the winter sky, shattering what remained of Iggy's consciousness and blasting all the world to white.

  Cold crouched in every muscle, soaked in to every bone, even as his skin ached with heat. The sensations chased him through an eternal, spinning blackness, livid with fever. He had a vague but nightmarish impression of being half a man.

  Something snuffled at him, wet and cold. Are you alive? the wind whispered.

  He didn't know. If he wasn't in Hel, he was somewhere close. He couldn't remember how to open his eyes, or whether he had legs. All he knew was fever and horror.

  You're breathing. You're alive.

  Was he talking to himself, or hearing the wind? Did it even matter?

  Come on. The wetness shoved him, sent a searing blast of pain through his ruined flesh. He sucked in a whimpering breath and opened his eyes to starlight.

  As his vision slowly adjusted, the shadowy contours of a frozen creek bed filled in around him. A sheer cliff loomed just beyond, maybe fifty feet high. The Fahrnar Highlands, he remembered, and then it all came back. An avalanche of nightmares—a corpse's eyes hidden behind a human face.

  "The man in black," he muttered, his tongue sluggish, his lips scraping. He dared to turn his head, his neck shrieking warnings—and saw the giant face of a brown bear next to his own, its eyes liquid and shining in the starlight.

  I'm going to take you from here, the bear said. Not eat you. I'm not going to eat you. It sounded as though maybe it was trying to convince itself.

  The man in black, Iggy whispered back. The thing that attacked me, is it—

  Gone, the bear said. Left you for dead, and you should be.

  My legs, Iggy moaned. I can't feel my legs. I need . . . you have to find my friend, Lyseira, she— But Lyseira was a thousand miles away. He'd left her.