surrender. “The moss will grow thickest on the southern side of the trees,” he said. “If we continue south long enough, surely we will find our way back into wholesome lands again.”
“Leaving this place behind,” Dyer said quietly, thoughtfully. It was strange, but to Vansen he sounded almost unwilling, a notion that sent a pulse of fear chasing up the guard captain’s backbone.
The morning, or at least the stretch of hours after waking, slid by quickly. There was moss everywhere, on almost every tree, deep woolly green patches. If it grew more thickly on one side than another, it was a minute difference, after a while, Vansen began to doubt his own ability to distinguish. Still, he had no other plan and he was growing increasingly frightened. They had lost the road in a thicket of black-leaved trees too thick to pass and they had not found it again. He had not seen a single thing that looked familiar. It was hard not to feel that the forest was continuing to grow around him, that its borders were stretching outward faster than he and Dyer could ride, and that not only wouldn’t they find their way out again, the shadow-forest would soon cover everything he had ever known, like wine from an upended jug spreading across a tabletop.
Dyer’s mood also worryed him. The bearded guardsman had grown increasingly more distant, even as their horses strode shoulder to shoulder; he hardly spoke to his captain, but talked much to himself and sang snatches of old songs that Vansen felt he should recognize but didn’t. Also, the man kept looking at him oddly, as though Dyer were harboring doubts of his own—as if he no longer quite recognized someone who had been his daily companion for years.
“I feel the fires,” Dyer said abruptly.
“What fires?” The horses had stopped; they stood weirdly still and silent. A forested valley leaned close above the two guardsmen on either side, as though they were in the mouth of some huge thing that in a moment would close its jaws and shut them away from the light forever.
“The forge fires,” the bearded guardsman replied in a distant voice. “The ones that burn under Silent Hill. They make weapons of war, Bright Fingers, Chant-Arrows, Wasps, Cruel Stones. The People are awake. They are awake.”
As he struggled to make sense of Dyer’s bizarre statement, Vansen felt a sharp but noiseless wind come hurrying down the canyon. The mists swirled upward, rising and parting, and for a brief instant he thought he could see an entire city at the top of the valley, a city that was also part of the forest, a mass of dark trees and darker walls, the two almost indistinguishable, with lights burning in a thousand windows. His horse reared and turned away from the vision, dashing back down the path they had followed. He heard Dyer’s horse’s hoofbeats close behind him, and another sound, too.
His companion was singing quietly but exuberantly in a language Vansen had never heard.
Dyer was still behind him, but silent now: he wouldn’t answer any of his captain’s questions, and Vansen had given up asking, simply grateful not to be alone. The twilight had grown thicker. The guard captain could no longer distinguish any difference in the thickness of the moss on the trees— could barely tell the trees from the darkness. The voices in the wind had crawled deep inside his head now, cajoling, whispering, weaving fragments of melody through his thoughts that tangled his ideas just as the thickening brambles tugged at their horses’ hooves, making them walk slower and slower.
“They are coming,” Dyer abruptly announced in the voice of a frightened dreamer. “They are marching.” Ferras Vansen did not need to ask him what he meant: he could feel it, too, the tightening of the air around them, the deepening of the twilight gloom. He could hear the triumph in the wordless wind-voices, although he still couldn’t hear the voices themselves except where they echoed deep in the cavern of his skull.
His horse abruptly reared, whinnying. Caught by surprise, Vansen tumbled out of the saddle and crashed to the ground. The horse vanished into the forest, kicking and bounding through the undergrowth, grunting in terror. For a moment Vansen was too stunned to rise, but a hand clutched him and dragged him to his feet. It was Collum Dyer, his horse gone now, too. The guardsman’s face was alight with something that might have been joy, but also looked a little like the terror that Vansen himself was feeling, a pall of dread that made him want to throw himself back down on the ground and bury his head in the spongy grass. “Now,” Dyer said.
And suddenly Ferras Vansen could see the road again, the road they had sought for hours without success. It was only a short distance away, winding through the trees—but he barely noticed it. The road was full of rolling mist, and in that mist he could see shapes. Some of the figures, unless the mist distorted them, were treetop-tall, and others impossibly wide, squat, and powerful. There were shadow-shapes that corresponded to no sane reality, and things less frightening but still astonishing, like human riders dimly seen but achingly beautiful, sitting high and straight on horses that stamped and blew and made the air steam. Many of the riders bore lances that glittered like ice. Pennants of silver and marshy green-gold waved at their tips.
An army was passing, hundreds and perhaps thousands of shapes riding, walking—some even flying, or so it seemed: teeming shadows fluttered and soared above the great host, catching the moonglow on their wings like a handful of fish scales flung glittering into the air. But although Vansen could feel the tread of all those hooves and feet and paws and claws in his very bones, the host made no sound as it marched. Only the voices on the wind rose in acclaim as the great troop passed.
How long was a sleep? How long was death? Vansen did not know how much time passed as he stood in amazement, too moonstruck even to hide, and watched the host pass. When it had gone, the road lay all but naked, clothed only in a few tatters of mist.
“We must… follow them,” Vansen said at last. It was hard, painfully hard, to find words and speak them. “They are going south. To the lands of men. We will follow them to the sun.”
“The lands of men will vanish.”
Vansen turned to see that Collum Dyer’s eyes were tightly closed, as though he had some memory locked behind his eyelids that he wished to save forever. The soldier was trembling in every limb and looked like a man cast down from the mountain of the gods, shattered but exultant.
“The sun will not return,” Dyer whispered. “The shadow is marching.”
21. The Potboy’s Dolphin
THE PATH OF THE BLUE PIG:
Down, down, feathers to scales
Scales to stone, stone to mist
Rain is the handmaiden of the nameless.
There was a tower in Qul-na-Qar whose name meant something like “Spirits of the Clouds” or “The Spirits in the Clouds,” or perhaps even “What the Clouds Think”—it was never easy to make mortal words do the dance of Qar thought—and it was there the blind kingYnnir went when he sought true quiet. It was a tall tower, although not the tallest in Qul-na-Qar: one other loomed above all the great castle like an upheld spear, a slender spike that was simply called “The High Place,” but its history was dark since the Screaming Years and even the Qar did not visit it much, or even look up at it through the fogs that usually surrounded their greatest house.
Ynnir din’at sen-Qin, Lord of Winds and Thought, sat in a simple chair before the window of one of Cloud-
