Chronicles of Ancient Darkness Part 153

The pale lashes flickered. 'I'm Dark.'

Torak snorted. 'Why'd they call you that?'

'They didn't. They threw me out before I got a name, so I chose Dark. I thought it might help.'

Torak felt a flicker of pity, which he swiftly suppressed. 'If you're nothing to do with Eostra, how come she hasn't killed you?'

'I keep off her dogs and the child-demon things with my slingshot. That's how I helped you when the dogs attacked. And Ark guards me when I sleep.'

'Who's Ark?'

On its perch, the white raven fluffed its head-feathers.

'If Eostra wanted you dead,' said Torak, 'she'd have found a way.'

'Yes. I think she likes the power. For her, I'm a game.' He gave Torak his odd, stretched smile. 'But now I've got you. I'm not alone any more.'

Torak couldn't make him out. He was scrawny, but he'd managed to get Torak into his cave, and he'd done a good job of tying him up. Wolf sniffed the bindings, but when Torak told him in a furtive grunt-whine to chew the ones at his wrists, Wolf simply licked his fingers.

'Are you hungry?' said Dark.

'No,' lied Torak. 'Who are you? How come you're here?'

Dark took half a dried trout from inside his robe and began to gnaw. 'When my mother carried me in her belly, a white hare ran in front of her, so I was born like this.' He touched his cobweb hair. 'My mother said I was Swan Clan like her, but when I got older I began to see things, and they said I brought bad luck. My mother protected me, but when I was eight summers old, she died. Next day, Fa took me into the Gorge. I thought he was going to give me my clan-tattoos, but he left me. I kept the trail-markers clear so he could find me again. But he never came back.'

'Didn't you try to make your own way out?'

'Oh, no. I knew I had to stay.'

Torak thought about that. 'So you've been here ever since?'

Dark indicated the stone creatures thronging the ledges. 'One for each moon.'

'But that must be seven winters. How did you survive?'

'It was hard,' said Dark, picking a fish bone from between his teeth. 'The first three winters, someone left food. After that, nothing. I was cold till I gathered the musk-ox wool. Once, my teeth went bad. They hurt till I knocked some out with a rock.' He paused. 'I was alone. Then I found Ark. Some crows were pecking her because she was white. I named her Ark, it was the first thing she said to me.' He grinned. 'She likes her name, she says it a lot!'

'So all this time, it's been just you and the raven?'

'And the ghosts.'

Wolf got up and trotted deeper into the cave. Dark turned his head to listen.

'You can see ghosts,' said Torak.

Dark nodded calmly.

It was very still in the cave. Torak said, 'Was that a ghost you were talking to before?'

'My sister, yes. But as she's a ghost, she doesn't remember she is my sister.'

Torak peered into the shadows, but all he could see was Wolf, who sat sweeping the floor with his tail. He said, 'Have you seen the ghost of a man who looks like me? Long dark hair? Wolf Clan tattoos?'

'No. Who's that?'

Torak did not reply. 'But we are inside the Mountain? The Mountain of Ghosts?'

'Yes.'

'Are there other caves?'

'Lots. I like the whispering cave, because of the ghosts. But I haven't gone there since she took it. She brought demons and the cold red stone.'

Torak's heart began to pound. 'How do you get there? To the whispering cave?'

'Many ways.'

'Take me there.'

'No.'

'You've got to. How long have I been asleep?'

'Um nearly two days.'

'Two days?' shouted Torak. 'But that means tonight is Souls' Night!'

His shouts brought Wolf racing to his side.

Now Torak understood why Eostra had let him escape: because he hadn't. It suited her to leave him coc.o.o.ned like a fly in a spider's web, until such time as she had a use for him.

'Dark, listen to me,' he said, forcing himself to keep calm. 'Tonight the Soul-Eater will do something terrible. I don't know exactly what, but I know she means to conquer the dead, and use them to rule the living. You have to let me go!'

'But in your sleep you said she wants to kill you. You must stay with me. You're safe here.'

'After tonight, nowhere will be safe, she'll be too strong! With the dead at her command, she'll rule the Mountains, the Forest, the Sea!'

'What's the Sea?' said Dark.

Torak let out a roar that shook the cave.

Wolf set back his ears and yowled.

Ark flapped her wings.

With a huge effort, Torak mastered his temper. 'Maybe this will persuade you. In some way I don't understand, my father's spirit is tangled up with her. If I can stop her, maybe I'll help him, too. Now do you see why you have to let me go?'

A shadow crossed Dark's extraordinary face, and he seemed suddenly older. 'My father left me. He never came back.'

Torak set his teeth. 'What if it was Ark who needed help? You'd do anything to save her, wouldn't you?'

Dark wrung his chalk-white hands till the knuckles cracked. Torak could see that he was torn. 'Winters and winters I've been here,' he said. 'You're the first person, the first living person.'

Sensing his turmoil, Ark flew onto his shoulder.

Wolf glanced anxiously from Torak to Dark and back again.

Torak waited.

Dark shook his head. 'No. I can't let you go.'

TWENTY-NINE.

One day,' said Renn as she limped over the boulders. 'That's all I asked. One day!'

A stone whizzed down and smashed behind her.

'Sorry,' she muttered to the Hidden People.

They didn't like it when she spoke too loudly. They didn't much like her. But so far they'd tolerated her; maybe because of the little bundles of rowan twigs she'd left at every trail marker.

It had been two days since Torak left. The Swans had wanted to leave at once, but Renn had insisted that they remain at the mouth of the Gorge. She'd spent a desperate day in camp, grinding her teeth as she waited for her ankle to get better. Next morning she'd lied to the Swans that it was, and headed after Torak. They hadn't tried to stop her. They'd simply given her provisions and watched her go.

At first, things had gone well. Torak's trail had been easy to follow, and though her ankle ached, she could walk on it. She'd jumped at every sound, but her Mage's sense had told her that Eostra's creatures were far away. And in the afternoon she'd made a heartening discovery: a rocky shelter that was unmistakeably Torak's. She'd spent the night in it, and fallen asleep planning what she would say when she caught up with him.

She'd woken stiff, cold and scared. A pallid sliver of moon hung in the morning sky. Tomorrow night was Souls' Night.

She hadn't gone far when she'd found the bones of a hare, picked clean by ravens. Nothing odd about that; and yet her hand had crept to her clan-creature feathers. Malice hung in the air. Bad things had happened here. Evil had soaked into the rocks.

That had been a while ago, but she was still shaken. Her boots crunched noisily over frozen scrub and black lichen brittle as cinders. The glug of her waterskin sounded like footsteps. She stopped, to make sure that they weren't.

'They're not real,' she said out loud. 'There's nothing here.'

The stones tensed. She felt the Hidden People watching.

Eostra was watching too.

Clouds began pouring over the edge of the cliffs. Stealthily, they swallowed the Gorge, folding Renn in a clammy embrace. Eostra hadn't sent her dogs to drive her back. She didn't need to.

Like a winged shadow at the corner of her vision, Renn felt the presence of the Eagle Owl Mage. Fog stole down her throat and took her breath. Her ankle throbbed. Her courage slunk away. Why go on, when she was doomed to fail?

She had an odd sensation of watching herself from above. There she was, a lame girl cowering in a ravine. She would never find Torak. He had left because he wanted to face Eostra alone: because he wanted to die, and be with his father. And soon that wish would be fulfilled.

In the distance, a raven croaked.

Renn raised her head. That was Rip.

Moments later, even further off, she heard Rek answer him.

As Renn listened to their cries slowly fading, she clenched her fists. Rip and Rek didn't sound defeated. They sounded intent on some mysterious raven matter of their own; probably concerning food.

As if in sympathy, her belly growled. Fog or no fog, she was hungry.

Opening her food pouch, she took out two strips of smoked reindeer tongue stuck together with marrowfat. Then she sat on a boulder and began to eat. It was the best thing she'd ever tasted.

She decided that her bow could do with some food, too. Juksakai had given her a bladder of oil from reindeer foot joints, which he'd said was better than anything for keeping wood and sinew supple, even in the coldest weather. Renn lavished some on her bow. Then she checked her arrows: a gift from Krukoslik, with fine quartz heads and white owl-feather fletching. 'Good owls,' she muttered under her breath.

The fog swirled about her angrily.

The food, the oil, the arrows: these had been prepared by kind people. The clothes they'd given her were meant to confer courage as well as warmth. The Mountain Hares had said that they always made the front of their robes from reindeer chest fur, 'For in the breast of the antlered one, there beats a great heart.'

A great heart. Renn's thoughts went to Fin-Kedinn. She sat straighter. 'I'm bone kin to the Raven Leader,' she told the fog and it writhed at the resolution in her voice. 'I'm Renn. I am a Mage.'

As she headed off, the fog no longer seemed quite so thick.

Feeling more equal to the struggle than she had all day, Renn turned over what she knew of Eostra's plans.

The Eagle Owl Mage meant to live for ever. She meant to eat Torak's world-soul and take his power.

Renn halted.

Until now, she'd never asked herself how Eostra meant to do that. But if she could work out how, then she might have some chance of stopping her.

The best Renn could come up with was a rite for holding souls which Saeunn had once told her about. This was carried out when a mother or father was grieving so fiercely for their dead child that they risked going mad. Their Mage would catch the newly disembodied spirit in a rowanbark box and tie it shut with a lock of the dead one's hair. The mourner must then live apart from the clan for six moons, with only the souls in the box for company. Then the souls were freed by opening the box and burning the hair on a hilltop, so that the smoke would waft up to the First Tree in the sky.

Slipping off her mitten, Renn scratched her head. What did this have to do with Eostra?

Her fingers stilled.

Hair.

Your hair holds part of your Nanuak. That's why the Death Mark for the world-soul is daubed on the forehead.

And that, thought Renn in a flash of insight, is what the tokoroth was after on the night after the ice storm. Torak's hair. If Eostra could get some of his hair by Souls' Night, she could take his world-soul and his power.

It was horribly simple. And maybe it was also why Eostra had sent her tokoroth. She'd been taunting them, telling them that she could get Torak's hair whenever she wanted.

Renn began to run. She floundered through snowdrifts and slithered over icy scree. She ran past patches of bearberry, crimson as spilt blood.

A large bird swooped overhead, skimming her hood.