The creature clung to Khalim’s back, breathing a quick, shallow rhythm against his neck. It was light as a bird, and its fingers ended in tiny, sharp talons, black and shiny as obsidian, that clicked together as it adjusted its hold on his shoulders. It was a meat-eating creature, Khalim guessed, based on the claws and its many pointed teeth—though maybe it didn’t eat anything. He hadn’t been hungry since his still-shaky memories of the world before the citadel, and there wasn’t anything identifiable to eat in this place even if he had been. He was lost, and so very cold, but the world beyond had not been as cruel as he’d feared.
The question remained, then, why someone would lay a trap to catch small creatures in the wood, if not to eat them. Its iron jaws could have easily closed on Khalim, had he been less fortunate. At the very least, he wouldn’t have starved to death before he freed himself.
“So,” he said. His voice was flat and muffled to his own ears, swallowed up by the forest. “Where are we going?”
A soft, cold rain fell over the trees, though the sky remained full of stars, spinning in great arcs overhead. Threads of silver light traced their way over roots and muddy earth. Khalim shivered. At least the creature was warm, draped over his shoulders like a cloak.
“Out of the wilds,” it whispered in reply, a soft hiss in Khalim’s ear. “There’s a path up ahead.”
The stars gave little illumination, and the rain filled the air with a fine mist. If there was a path, Khalim couldn’t see it. “What’s on the other side?” he asked.
“Other places.” The creature’s bone mask found a spot in the crook of his shoulder, left bare by his ragged clothing, and came to rest there, sending a chill through his chest and down his back. When it spoke, its teeth brushed against his skin. “Places with people. Gods’ places. You’ll see.”
“I just came from a god’s place,” Khalim said.
He climbed up onto the ridge of a huge, dark root, its surface rough and splintery under his feet. Before him lay a gap in the trees, a window of night sky overhead, and something that might have once been a road. Broken stones lay half-buried in mud, clasped tightly to the earth in a lattice of roots and fallen branches. A small, scurrying creature, only a shadow in the surrounding gloom, caught sight of him and dashed away to hide beneath a hollow log. The small glittering eyes of its young stared out from the darkness, fearful and silent.
“Oh, but you left,” the larger creature on his back said. “You left to wander the wilds.”
Khalim jumped from the root to the wet ground beneath. Water collected in a glassy puddle at the base of the tree, reflecting the stars like a mirror, but he still felt rain on his face. “Yes, I did. I couldn’t stay there. I was turning to stone.”
Water slicked the remains of the ancient highway and made it shimmer in the starlight. It wound through the trees, twisting back and forth as though it had been built to accommodate them as they grew. The forest, then, was even older than the ruin. In the distance stood a tree so large that twenty men could not reach halfway around its trunk. It must have been older than the world, Khalim thought, older than the gods. In comparison, he was but an insect, so small that neither his presence nor his absence would be noticed.
“Jahan was happy to become a statue,” he said aloud, “to keep watch by the gate. But I’m not like him. He’s—he was—a warrior. A leader. He sacrificed himself to save others. I don’t think I’m as brave as he was.”
Now that he stood upon the road, he could see it stretch out in either direction, gray stone breaking through the undergrowth in jagged ridges and wind-worn curves. Neither would lead him back the way he had come. Even if he could make his way to the citadel again, would Jahan open the gate for him? Would his god welcome him once more?
He wasn’t going back, so it mattered not. Besides, his only concern now was to find his way out of the wood. He could decide what to do after that.
“Where to now?” he said.
The creature lifted one long arm and pointed with a single claw to the left. How precise those claws were, almost like fingers. They could grasp a pen, if the creature knew how to write, which seemed unlikely. Khalim had only ever met a few people who could read, all of them in the city of Phyreios, with its houses of learning and vast magical knowledge, all of it now lost to fire and earthquake. He himself had not been among them.
He had never questioned why the god of the citadel had chosen him before. It had always been a fact, like the sun rising in the morning or the rains coming twice a year. It was the will of the gods, and even if one had wanted to risk their displeasure by looking into it further, there was rice to plant and harvest, and newborn calves to wash, and clothes to mend, and injured ox-drivers to look after. Now, he had nothing but time, and the long broken road that wended through the wilds.
Khalim adjusted the small burden of the creature and started walking.
The wheeling sky disappeared behind a thick canopy of branches, as ancient trees clawed at each other in wide arcs over the path. A curtain of vines as thick as a man’s arm brushed against the choking roots. One of them, Khalim was certain, must have been a serpent, but it stopped moving as soon as he turned to look at it.
“So where did you come from, little one?” he asked the creature. As strange as it was, he was grateful to have someone to talk to. He still had no way of knowing how long he had spent in the citadel alone, but he was certain he would have gone mad in short order had the moon-faced owl not found him.
Maybe he already was mad, and that was why he couldn’t keep track of time. It felt like a dream, like past, present, and future had all collapsed into one eternal now, and he could only watch it play out from a powerless, distant vantage point.
That had always been the worst thing about his visions, to witness the city crumble and burn and to cry out in suffocating silence, smothered under an invisible weight. When all that he had seen had come to pass, he had been exactly as helpless as he had been while asleep.
The creature rested its head on his shoulder again. The hard ridge of its mask was uncomfortable, but Khalim thought it must be a sign of trust. It hadn’t so much as scratched him with its sharp teeth or its claws.
“Not far from here,” it said. “You’ll see it soon.”
The strange rain stopped as Khalim walked—or the branches overhead grew so thick and wove themselves together so tightly that nothing could get through. He could no longer see the stars. The broken paving stones beneath his feet faded into thin gray crescents before they disappeared into a soft, smothering blackness. The huge columns of the surrounding trees faded into a wall of shadow.
He stopped. Silence covered him like a thick cloth, pressing in over his ears. He could just feel a quiver that might have been his heartbeat, and hear his own breath—both quiet and elusive, now that he was no longer among the living. He hadn’t missed them until now.
“I can’t see,” he whispered.
On his back, the creature was feverishly hot, and sweat trickled down his spine, turning to ice as it met the air. A dull ache settled into his hands and feet.
Is this what winter feels like? Eske had told him of the dark season of the North, where rain fell as tiny flakes of ice and the sun didn’t rise for a full turn of the moon. Khalim almost hadn’t believed him. It had sounded like a myth, the sort of place where the unjust and wicked dead would be punished for their misdeeds in life.
Perhaps he was being punished now. He’d left the citadel, against the advice of the moon-faced owl and of Jahan, all turned to stone. He had not been blameless in life. I tried, but I couldn’t save Phyreios. I didn’t act in time. I let Reva hide me away, as though my life were more important than all the lives in the city. I thought more of Eske than I did of my duty.
The creature’s sibilant voice cut through his guilty thoughts. “Keep going,” it said. “Not far now.”
Khalim forced his feet to take a step, and then another. His limbs were heavy, clumsy, and he could not feel the stone. He feared he would fall, and wondered once again whether it would hurt him.
“How much farther?” He would keep this little one safe, Khalim decided, to the best of his ability—which wasn’t much, if he were honest, blind as he was. He wasn’t even certain he could run, should a threat present itself.
“Not far,” the creature said again. “You’ll see it very soon.”
“See what?” Khalim asked.
A point of light, burning red like an ember in the gloom, flickered into view. A second soon joined it, and a pair of scarlet eyes stared into Khalim’s own. A hulking form, almost as dark as the surrounding forest, moved with ponderous lethargy, lifting the eyes slowly toward the treetops.
It was enormous, and it was close, looming over him as tall as the walls of Phyreios. Its mouth opened into a terrible rictus grin, the light of its eyes limning two rows of needle-sharp teeth, white and glistening.
Khalim looked at the creature on his back, hoping that it might tell him whether they were in danger from this new arrival. Its sharp smile, a tiny mirror of the thing towering over the path, looked back at him.
Back to Chapter XXII: The Tempest
Forward to Chapter XXIII: The Port of Charkand
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