In the Empire of Shadow

Chapter Seventeen

“If this Shadow’s so tough with its magic,” Wilkins asked, looking around at the scattered bones, “why hasn’t it spotted us and sent a bunch of its monsters after us?”

“It probably hasn’t noticed us yet,” Pel muttered unhappily, as he trudged on down the highway. He looked straight ahead, at the tree-lined highway, trying not to see the bones below or the clouds overhead.

“Well, why the hell not?” Wilkins demanded, stopping in his tracks. “It noticed these people!” He kicked at a skull fragment.

“We don’t know that,” Pel insisted, pausing reluctantly. “Maybe it was wild animals or bandits that killed them.”

“Bandits?” Wilkins picked up a thigh bone. “Something sucked the marrow out of this, Brown-what kind of bandits would do that?”

“Animals, then,” Pel said. “Come on, let’s keep moving; I don’t like it here. Whatever did this, it might come back.”

“I never heard of any animal that would do anything like this,” Sawyer said, joining the discussion.

“’Twas most likely Shadow’s beasts,” Raven said, leaning his bandaged left hand against a tree by the roadside. “This looks very much in their fashion.”

“Which is what I said in the first place,” Wilkins pointed out. “So why hasn’t Shadow sent the beasts after us?”

“It did, back at the ship,” Amy said, not very confidently.

“But not since then,” Wilkins argued.

Amy shrugged; she was obviously struggling to hold down her lunch. Her bouts of nausea had become far less frequent over the last few days, but she still had trouble when they came across something unpleasant.

Human bones scattered across the highway were definitely unpleasant. Pel had no idea how old these were, or how long they had actually been there, but he didn’t think they had been brought there from somewhere else; it looked as if a small group of people had been killed and torn to pieces right there on the spot.

“Maybe they did something to attract attention,” Pel suggested. “Used magic, maybe.”

“Brown, we’ve been using magic,” Wilkins shouted. “Back at the ruin that twit Taillefer was bloody flying, and why didn’t that attract Shadow?”

“I don’t know,” Pel said. “Maybe we were just lucky that time.” He frowned.

“We’ve been using magic over and over again, Brown,” Wilkins insisted. “Our tame wizard here’s lit us a fire with his fingers every night.”

“We’d no need, had we funds to pay an inn, or had Shadow not done away with all laws of hospitality,” Valadrakul pointed out. “But as it is, we’ve no tinderbox, no other way to make fire. Would you eat your food raw, and sleep unwarmed?”

“It’s better than getting ripped apart, like whoever these people were,” Marks snapped.

“But we haven’t been,” Wilkins said. “And I want to know why.”

Raven said, “Perhaps the Goddess protects us.”

“Shit,” Wilkins replied.

Pel didn’t say anything more; he just turned and marched onward.

For five days now they had been off the Starlinshire Downs and onto flat country that Raven assured them was a coastal plain; they had marched on across Shadow’s countryside, passing through towns and villages without stopping, since they had no more coins to spend. No one spoke to them; children, and sometimes adults, ran and hid at the sight of strangers. Even those who spotted them stealing food never called out or protested; they turned away, or simply watched, without intervening.

Most of the towns had had gibbets in the square, and most of those gibbets had been in use, with corpses of varying age. Some had been fresh, as if the travelers had only just missed the execution; others had been little more than bone and blackened skin. Most were men; some were women; and in one village four children had dangled there, naked and eviscerated-three girls and a boy, none older than twelve.

Pel no longer argued that Shadow might just be the victim of hostile propaganda.

The travelers had grown quieter, gloomier, and more nervous with each new atrocity, and the weather had not helped any; the bright sunlight and greenery of Castle Regisvert were only a memory, and they had been walking beneath a heavy overcast since shortly after that first town, where they had wasted Susan’s handful of coins at the inn.

Pel almost wished it would rain and get it over with, but it didn’t; the clouds hung oppressive and unmoving overhead, growing steadily thicker and darker, but never releasing so much as a drop of rain. Wind rustled ominously in the leaves, but at ground level the air was still and thick and heavy, and smelled of mold.

Pel waited for a moment longer, but Wilkins seemed to have said his piece.

“Come on,” Pel said. He started walking. Raven straightened up and joined him; the others followed.

“You know what it is,” Wilkins said. “We’re walking into a trap, that’s what it is. Shadow wants us to come to its fortress and save it the trouble of hunting us down. If we turned back, we’d probably have the monsters after us in a minute.”

Pel turned to argue, and saw Susan and Prossie staring at Wilkins intently as they walked; they obviously thought the soldier was onto something.

“That’s ridiculous,” Pel said.

“Why?” Wilkins demanded belligerently. “What’s ridiculous about it?”

Pel’s mouth opened, then closed.

What was ridiculous about it? It made far more sense than Pel wanted to admit.

And what would he do if it were true? To turn back would be to invite attack. True or false, he had to continue.

He turned forward again and kept walking.

* * * *

Prossie glanced up from the half-eaten chicken leg she held and noticed that Wilkins was, for the moment, alone; he was sitting to one side, leaning against the base of a rather unhealthy-looking tree and gnawing on a chunk of poultry, while most of the others were clustered close around the fire.

She rose to a half-crouch and took a quick few steps over to the tree, staying low, as if there were enemies out there watching, ready to shoot-and for all she knew, there were.

She wished she could still read minds; the freedom of mental silence, of being out of the Empire’s net, was still new and strange and wonderful, but it was also horribly frustrating to not know what anyone was thinking, to not know if there were people out there she couldn’t see. She was unaccustomed to knowing less than the people around her.

It wasn’t really frightening any more, but it was frustrating.

And lonely.

“Spaceman Wilkins,” she whispered, as she squatted beside him.

He looked up. “Yeah, Thorpe?”

“May I talk to you?” She didn’t look him in the eye; non-telepaths never liked it when telepaths looked directly at them-as if the eyes had something to do with mind-reading.

Wilkins put down his chicken and wiped greasy fingers on his already-filthy uniform trousers. “You need to talk, Telepath?” he asked belligerently. “About what?”

“Yes, I need to talk,” Prossie said, annoyed. “I can’t read your mind here.”

“That’s what you said, anyway,” Wilkins acknowledged, his tone a little less hostile. “So what do you want?” He glanced at the neckline of her uniform, and she realized that squatting as she had might not have been clever. “If it’s what I think,” Wilkins said, leering, “I don’t know-there’s not much privacy, and I never screwed a mutant freak before. You noisy? Mind if the others watch?”

“That’s not what I want,” Prossie said, refusing to rise to his bait; she guessed that he wanted an angry response. “I just want to talk to you about something you said earlier.”

“Maybe I don’t want to talk to a mutant,” he replied, a challenge clear in his voice.

Prossie stared at him for a moment, wishing she could see whether he was joking, just what mix of fright and anger and hate and resentment and lust he was feeling. His expression was a peculiar one, not quite smiling, a little tense-she had never been good at reading expressions, since she had never had to be. She had always just read the thoughts behind the face.

She couldn’t do that now, though, and she finally decided to get directly to the point.

“Do you really think we’re walking into a trap?” she asked.

He glanced past her at the others, then back at her, and asked, “Why?”

“Because I don’t want to die,” she answered bluntly.

“Everybody dies,” he said, looking down and picking up his piece of chicken. Whatever emotional game he had been playing with her seemed to be over. “The only questions are when and how.”

She smiled bitterly. “True enough, Spaceman, but if I get a choice, I vote for much later, and of natural causes.”

“So you don’t get a choice,” he said, taking a bite of chicken, still not looking at her.

She actually thought for a moment of snatching the food from his mouth, but the remnants of her lifelong conditioning held; she didn’t touch him, but she didn’t leave, either.

He chewed and swallowed, took another bite, chewed and swallowed, then looked up and found her still there, staring at him. He stared back for a moment, then tossed the rest of the chicken aside.

“What do you want, Thorpe?” he asked. “Who are you spying for now?”

“I’m not spying for anyone,” Prossie said. “I’m just trying to stay alive.”

“And what if I don’t believe that? You’ve always been a spy; maybe you say you can’t read my mind now, but that doesn’t mean you’ve stopped spying. You can still talk to Base One, right? You can still report on whether I’ve been a good little boy, still loyal to His Imperial Majesty? Well, maybe I don’t want to give you anything to tell them. Maybe I don’t know who you’re working for back there, whether you’re a good little soldier or some politician’s flunky, and I just don’t want to get tangled up in anything.”

“I’m not spying for anyone,” Prossie insisted. “I can still talk to my cousin, yes, but I haven’t heard from her for two days now, and I don’t tell her everything, and she’s loyal to our family and the Emperor, nobody else. If you think we’re working for General Hart or Under-Secretary Bascombe, we’re not. And I’m just asking for me, nobody else.”

“So what do you want from me?” Wilkins asked.

“I just want to know why you think we’re walking into a trap, and whether you know of a way out.”

“I think it’s pretty obvious why I think it’s a trap,” he said. “If this Shadow is as all-powerful as these people say it is, wouldn’t it have to know we’re here? I mean, even if it doesn’t know anything from its magic, or whatever it is, we’ve been passing through town after town, in broad daylight, and if it’s got anything better than messengers on foot, there’s been plenty of time for a message to reach it. Valadrakul got a message to that flying nitwit somehow, and I’m pretty sure I’ve seen smoke used for signalling, so I figure Shadow knows we’re here-but it hasn’t come after us.”

“Maybe it doesn’t care,” Prossie suggested.

Wilkins shook his head. “You think it’s that kind of a thing? Then what were all those people hanged for? What spread those bones around the highway back there? If those were all murderers, the whole region would have been depopulated by now. If they’re thieves, you’d think they’d have learned-Raven said this has been Shadow’s turf for a couple of centuries now. About the only thing I can think of that people just can’t learn to do, even if it gets them killed, is to keep their damn mouths shut-so I think Shadow’s the kind of boss who takes loose talk seriously, and doesn’t stand for any kind of loose ends. It wouldn’t allow a bunch of foreigners to stroll across the countryside any old way they want-not unless it was watching them somehow, and they were doing just what it wanted.”

Prossie nodded. She had learned the word “paranoid” from the Earthpeople, and it seemed to fit what Wilkins described; it also matched her own perceptions of Shadow.

“So maybe it’s not exactly a trap,” Wilkins said. “Maybe it’s not going to kill us; maybe if we turn back we’ll just find a bunch of cops who’ll take us in for questioning, instead of those black animal things. Maybe when we get there it’ll offer us all a chance to join its side, maybe go back to the Empire as traitors, saboteurs-I don’t know. I do know that either it’s tracking us, and knows perfectly well where we are, or else Raven and the wizard have been lying to us and we don’t know a damn thing about what’s going on here.”

“Makes sense,” Prossie admitted.

Wilkins studied her, then asked, “So, Thorpe, you can still call Base One, right? You can tell them whether to send reinforcements, or try to pick us up?”

“I can ask Carrie to pass on a message,” Prossie agreed, “but that’s it. They’ll probably ignore it.”

“That’s about the only way we’re going to get out of this, though-if they send in someone else. If you tell them that it’s a trap, won’t they listen to you?”

Prossie hesitated.

“Listen, Wilkins,” she said. “There’s something I didn’t tell anyone-I don’t know if you know all the rules we telepaths have, some people do and some don’t, but we have rules about what we tell who of what we read, and I’m not supposed to tell you this, but the hell with that.”

“What?” He eyed her warily.

“We were set up. I don’t know the details, I didn’t get it all, but Bascombe deliberately screwed up this whole expedition just to get rid of those people.” She waved a hand at the others, sure that Wilkins would understand that she meant the Earthpeople and Faerie folk. “He was listening to Shadow’s spies back there at Base One when he picked Carson for command. And when things started going wrong, he and General Hart decided that they want us all dead, so there won’t be any evidence that they screwed up. That’s why I’ve been so sure we weren’t getting rescued.”

Wilkins blinked. “Why didn’t you tell the lieutenant, back at the ship?”

“You think he’d have believed me? A mutant, telling him he can’t trust his own superiors? Lieutenant Dibbs, we’re talking about.”

“So why are you telling me, then?” Wilkins asked. “Why should I believe you?”

“Because you figured out that we’re being set up again-that Shadow’s watching us. So maybe I think you’re smarter than the lieutenant. And maybe if you know a bit more, you can figure out how we can get out of this.”

For a moment the two stared silently at each other; then Wilkins said, “Yeah, I can see what you mean.” He glanced over at the others. “Problem is, there are a couple of things we don’t know here.”

“What?”

“What Shadow wants with us,” Wilkins said, “and which of us it wants.”

* * * *

“’I wish the damn clouds would either break up or rain’,” Sawyer said angrily to Pel. “You had to say that.”

Pel glared back at him; it wasn’t worth trying to talk over the constant patter of the rain, or the splashing as they slogged through the mud. His stolen shirt, taken from a farmer’s hut two days before, clung damply to his back and dripped down his wrists; he almost regretted its acquisition.

“Think you he tempted the gods, then?” Raven asked, peering out from under the dripping cloak he held over his head.

“Something like that,” Sawyer agreed. He had stolen another farmer’s cap that morning, but it was clearly not doing him much good in the steady downpour.

Raven shook his head. “The foolishness of you pagans,” he said. “To think our mere words could thus affect the Goddess’ scheme.”

“You’re calling me a pagan?” Sawyer exclaimed angrily. He stopped and grabbed Raven by the arm.

Raven turned and struck at Sawyer without thinking; Pel saw him start to wince, and then suppress it, as his mostly-healed but still tender fingers hit Sawyer’s wrist.

Sawyer saw it, too, and let go. “Sorry,” he said.

“’Tis naught,” Raven said. “I spoke ill of your faith; ’twas rude of me.”

By now the entire party had stopped; Pel and Raven and Sawyer had been at the front, and the others were now gathered about them, sinking into the mud of the road.

“Oh, come on,” Amy said. “If we keep going maybe we can find somewhere to get out of the rain.” She turned and trudged onward; she limped slightly, thanks to popped blisters, but seemed to be over her illness. Susan followed her lead, tugging at Ted’s wrist to make sure he came, as well.

Prossie, who had been near the center of the line talking to Valadrakul, turned to look over the party, and Pel saw her frown.

Sawyer, too, noticed her expression, and looked over the rest of the group.

“Hey,” he said, “where’s Ron?”

“Who?” Pel asked.

“Ronnie Wilkins.”

Amy and Susan and Ted kept walking, unaware of the consternation as the others all turned and looked around.

“He’s gone,” Marks said, sounding very surprised. He took off his helmet to look around better, and blinked as the rain drenched him.

“When did you last see him?” Pel asked.

The others glanced at one another.

“At that last village, I guess,” Sawyer said. “Just before it started raining.”

“He was with us when we left the village,” Singer said unsteadily; he was cradling his swollen left wrist in his right hand. The badger scratches he had received back at Castle Regisvert had become infected, and Valadrakul’s crude attempts at treatment had done little good; Pel had thought it amusing, or ironic, or at any rate worthy of note, that scratches left by an ordinary badger had turned out to be septic, while the various wounds he and Prossie and Amy had gotten from Shadow’s hellbeasts were all healing cleanly.

Maybe ordinary germs couldn’t live on Shadow’s unnatural creatures.

“I did a count,” Singer added. “I know he was with us.”

“He was here,” Marks confirmed.

“How long after that, though?” Pel asked.

Singer shrugged. “That was the last time I saw him,” he said. “He was way at the back.” He looked at Marks. “I thought he was talking to you.”

“He was, for awhile,” Marks agreed. “But then he said he wanted to think, so I left him alone and came up to talk to Sawyer.”

“I remember that,” Sawyer said. “So no one’s seen him since then?”

No one had.

“D’you think the monsters got him?” Sawyer asked. “Shadow’s things? Or maybe something else, some other magic?”

Singer snorted derisively; Raven smiled.

Valadrakul shook his head. “I doubt ’twas Shadow.”

“I think he must’ve just left,” Pel said. “He decided not to come with us, and didn’t bother to argue about it.”

“He decided not to walk into a trap,” Prossie said quietly. “Not when he isn’t one of the ones it wants.”

The others stared at her for a moment; then Marks said bitterly, “And the son of a bitch didn’t ask me to come with him, either!”

“Or any of us,” Sawyer pointed out.

“Probably figured he had a better shot by himself,” Singer suggested wearily. “Probably right, too.”

“Well, he’s gone, now,” Pel said. He turned, without another word, and began marching onward, following Amy and Susan and Ted.

“We aren’t going to try to find him?” Singer asked.

“Why should we?” Pel called back over his shoulder. “He’s a big boy; he can take care of himself.”

“And where would you seek him?” Raven asked. “’Tis a broad land, and he’s had time to conceal himself where’er he would.”

Singer blinked at him, then said, “Yeah, you’re right.” He trudged after Pel.

After a moment’s hesitation, the rest came close behind.

* * * *

“I’m going to bunk,” Marks whispered.

Prossie turned, startled.

“Like Ronnie,” Marks explained. “He was right; why should we all get killed? This Shadow thing probably just wants Raven and his wizard pal, or maybe the Earthpeople.”

Prossie glanced around. They were in open country now, a low, grassy plain where no trees grew, much of it too sodden to farm; the highway wound its way along the higher, drier portions, past the dreary little farms that mostly seemed to raise various sorts of berries. They hadn’t passed anything resembling a village for several miles, and their last meal had been nothing but stolen raspberries-sweet, but not very satisfying.

“Where will you go?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” he said. “It all looks pretty much the same, so who cares?”

Prossie was considering that when Marks asked anxiously, “So, Thorpe, are you with me?”

“Who else are you asking?” Prossie asked.

“Nobody,” Marks replied hastily. “I mean, I figured you and I, we could make like we’re married, if anyone asks…”

She knew what he meant. Prossie looked at him more closely, considering.

Bill Marks was hardly her idea of the perfect mate; he was of medium height, not particularly well built, with a receding chin and a bad complexion-not really ugly, but not anyone’s image of handsome, either. She didn’t doubt for a minute that he wanted to carry the fiction of a marriage a little further than answers to questions from nosy natives. The notion did not particularly appeal to her. With the right person, maybe, but not with Bill Marks.

Hell, he didn’t even call her by her first name.

“What about Singer and Sawyer?” she asked.

“What about them?” Marks asked, flustered.

Prossie looked him in the eye, then turned and looked at the others, a dozen yards ahead.

“Well, you know,” Marks said, a little desperately, “Singer’s got that bad arm, and besides, the more of us there are, the more likely we’ll be noticed, you know, by Shadow or someone…”

“Never mind,” she said. “I think I’ll take my chances with the rest of them, at least for now. You go ahead, and good luck!”

Marks hesitated. “You sure?” he asked.

“Yes,” Prossie answered firmly.

She was sure of her decision-but she wished she was sure she was right.

* * * *

Pel turned, startled, at a tap on his shoulder, and found Prossie Thorpe just behind him.

“Mr. Brown,” she said quietly, without preamble, “I was wondering just what your opinion was on Wilkins.”

“My opinion?” Pel glanced around; no one else seemed to be paying any attention. He had half expected to see Nancy glaring at him for talking to another woman this way, but Nancy was dead, she wasn’t with them. “My opinion is that he’s gone,” Pel said. “What do you mean, my opinion?”

“I mean, do you think he got away safely?”

Pel shrugged. “I don’t know. He probably did, but I don’t know any more than you do. Maybe less, if your telepathy can tell you anything.”

“Not about that,” Prossie said. “I still hear from Base One sometimes, but they’ve written us all off as lost.”

Pel nodded. “I’m not surprised,” he said.

“So do you think Wilkins was right, that he did the right thing by turning back?”

“Or aside,” Pel said. “We don’t know where he went, remember.”

“But do you think he was right?” Prossie insisted.

Pel shrugged again. “Who knows?”

“He thought we were all walking into a trap, you know,” Prossie said.

“So he said,” Pel replied.

Prossie nodded. “He talked to me about it a little; he figured that Shadow might want you, because the warp came out in your house, and Raven because he’s the lord of Stormcrack, and Valadrakul because he’s a wizard, and so on, but that it wouldn’t have any use for a bunch of ordinary Imperial soldiers.”

Pel thought that over. “He might’ve been right,” he admitted.

“So what about the others?” Prossie asked. “I mean, I’m a telepath, so maybe I’m one of the special ones, too, but what about Marks and Sawyer and Singer?”

“What about them?” Pel asked, trying to figure out what Prossie was leading up to.

“What if they turned back, instead of going on with the rest of us?”

Pel shrugged; he started to say, “It’s a free country,” then remembered where he was. “They can do what they please,” he said. “I’m not their jailer.”

“But do you think it would be safe?”

Pel gave her a startled look.

“I mean,” Prossie explained, “Wilkins thought that if we turned back, then we’d find Shadow’s monsters waiting for us, that it was only leaving us alone as long as we stayed headed in the right direction. So if someone it wanted turned back, he would be running right into the monsters. So do you think Marks and Sawyer and Singer would be safe?”

“Why are you asking me?” Pel demanded. “You’re the telepath! And Raven’s the expert on Shadow. I’m just…I’m just me.”

“Raven lies,” Prossie said. “You know that; he’d tell me whatever he thought would be best for him. I think I can get an honest answer from you.”

Pel looked at her, puzzled. Her eyes were green, he saw-he had never noticed that before. Her hair was a dull brown, her face ordinary.

“You want an honest answer?” he said. “Fine; I honestly don’t know. I don’t know what’s going on; I’m just trying to muddle along. I want to go home. I want my wife and daughter back. Beyond that, I don’t care what happens, to me or anyone else. If those guys want to go back to the ship, or go hide somewhere, it’s fine with me.”

For only an instant, her eyes met his; then she dropped her gaze to the ground, and he was sure he had offended or frightened or embarrassed her somehow. He started to frame an apology, then stopped; he had nothing to apologize for.

Maybe she was just shy. Or maybe she was trying to flirt with him.

He wasn’t interested in flirting; he was a married man-or at least, he still thought of himself as one. It was too soon after Nancy’s loss to look elsewhere-or maybe he was just too tired, or too scared.

And even if he hadn’t been, Prossie Thorpe wasn’t exactly what he was looking for in a woman. He looked down at his own muddy boots.

She turned away without saying anything more.

* * * *

Raven was satisfied with their progress-or at any rate, with the speed of it; the direction was not that he would have chosen. Marching to Shadow’s fortress still seemed to him the height of folly.

And now they were but a day away, he thought, as he peered out into the blackness of the surrounding night, and that day, if the tales spoke truth, to be spent all upon the causeway across Shadowmarsh, with nowhere to turn or hide. They had seen the marsh spread before them as the sun sank, and that was why Raven had called the night’s halt where he did.

Might he not best serve his land and his people and his cause by slipping away, and leaving these foreigners to their own devices? If they were to perish at Shadow’s hands, ’twould be a sad loss, but there had been many such losses over the years.

And this was the final moment, the time when he must decide. He had debated the matter with Pellinore Brown over their meager supper, and the Brown remained unyielding-he was bound for Shadow’s keep.

Some might accuse a man in Raven’s place of cowardice, did he now flee-but what of that? Was he not outcast now? He would know it was not fear, but prudence and hope for the future that guided his steps.

Still, to be marked as coward, even wrongly…

He had got that far in his thinking when a cry sounded; instantly, Raven was on his feet, once again cursing the fate that had left him without his sword.

“Help!” a man’s voice called, as from a distance. “Oh, my God…”

Raven snatched up a brand from the dying fire and waved it, that the air might brighten the sparks; it flared briefly, but the flame did not linger, and he saw naught but startled faces and muddy boots.

“It’s Marks,” said the man Singer; he, too, raised an impromptu torch in his good hand, and headed for the sound.

The voice cried out again, wordlessly, as Singer and Raven ran up the highway to the east, away from Shadowmarsh. Raven saw that the others, to their shame, stayed behind-even Valadrakul, who, though a wizard, Raven had thought to be a man of honor and some small courage.

The cries stopped well before Raven and Singer reached their source.

When they did reach Marks’ body, it was far too late to lend any aid beyond a decent burial; his dead eyes gleamed orange in the feeble torchlight, staring up at the black clouds above, but his face was black with dirt and blood. His throat and chest had been torn open, and Raven knew at a glance that even the finest healer could not have saved him.

“Damn,” Singer muttered. “What did it?” He raised his torch, brighter than Raven’s own, and waved it about. “Where is it?”

“Shadow,” Raven told him, lowering his own brand.

“Are you sure?” a female voice asked.

Startled, Raven whirled, and found the woman called Susan standing a few paces down the road, her black bag open on her shoulder, her hand within-ready, Raven supposed, to bring out in an instant that magical weapon of hers.

He smiled slightly. At least one of the foreigners had courage-and the skill to use it, to have followed so silently!

“What else?” he asked her. “’Tis surely another warning-more bones by the roadside for any who would follow us.”

“Why just him? Why not all of us?”

Raven turned back for another look at Marks.

“See you,” he said, “he sought to flee; we are surely a good quarter-mile from our camp. This man had turned back upon the path.”

“And Shadow doesn’t want us to do that,” Singer said.

“As you say,” Raven agreed. “Shadow would not have us turn back.”

“You don’t think it’s a coincidence?” Susan asked. “After all, as far as we know, Wilkins got away safely.”

“Insofar as we know,” Raven agreed, “but how far is that? And more, the rules may well have changed since Wilkins turned aside; we were not then so near to Shadow’s hold.”

Susan nodded, the motion just barely visible in the darkness. “So we go on,” she said flatly.

“Indeed,” Raven agreed. “In the morning, we go on.”

In the morning, they would march into the jaws of death, where only the Goddess herself could save them.

And perhaps the Goddess would save them; perhaps she had wearied of Shadow’s importunities, and would somehow use Raven and his companions as her tools for defeating it.

Or perhaps they would all die, and their souls return to the Goddess’ womb. That was death, and Raven did not seek death-but how was he to avoid it, now?

Perhaps, Raven thought later, as he settled to sleep, they should have brought Marks’ body back with them, should have buried the poor man’s remains and returned his flesh to the Goddess as well as his soul-but no one had suggested it, no one had argued, and the rain had begun anew.

Scores of men had lain unburied in the war against Shadow; one more would matter not.

And Raven knew that on the morrow, he might well be yet another.