move in an elaborate game of checkers. Have you ever played?'
He turned to her, and she shook her head.
'It’s a simple but fascinating game,' he said, leaning across conspiratorially. 'I’ve never lost.'
Mariah turned and stared out over the plains. The lights had brightened, and if she concentrated, she thought she could hear voices. There weren’t any coherent words. The harder she tried to pick out actual shapes and sounds the more sure she was that there were none to hear, only tones, rising and falling in an eerie cadence.
There was something wrong with the lights, she realized.
A campfire’s light would have flickered, throwing both light and shadow across the sky. It wouldn’t be so bright, and you’d see it dance. She knew that. A town was different. The light came from a number of sources and coalesced into a single canopy overhead. This wasn’t like that either. The closer they came, the more it resembled a ray of light – a cylinder shooting straight up from the desert floor all the way into the high banks of cloud.
Balthazar inclined his head slowly, like a dog listening to the cry of a distant animal. As Mariah watched, he licked his dry lips and seemed to mouth several words. He saw her looking at him and smiled.
'It sounds as though things are going well,' he told her. 'Perhaps one might venture so far as to say very well. With a little luck, and I am always lucky, my dear, our work may prove a little easier than I originally expected.'
He slapped the reins to the horses’ backs, and the wagon lurched forward again. Mariah stared at the light intently as it grew brighter and more intense. She didn’t say a word. It wasn’t that she was listening to Balthazar, or even the curious ululating tones that weren’t quite voices, she was simply lost to the light. Every now and then she thought she saw something more defined, a shadowed shape whirling within that luminous ray. And occasionally, as those shadows writhed and twisted, they looked almost human.
She couldn’t tell if they were trying to get out, or if they were scrabbling desperately to find their way in.
Chapter Thirty-One
Creed crouched in the small clearing, keeping himself just out of sight of the Deacon’s camp. Tension had his skin crawling. He cracked his fingers. He chewed at his lip. It wasn’t just that something was wrong – everything was wrong. He felt it like a frisson in the air itself. He hid there for as long as he could bear, then pushed to his feet and started to prowl, circling like a wildcat. He was almost sure there wouldn’t be a weakness in the barrier, but he’d been wrong before. Supposing there was a flaw; he wouldn’t find it by sitting back on his haunches and waiting. He reached out occasionally, to test its resistance. As the darkness deepened he thought he saw an actual wall shimmer between his fingertips and the tents. Again and again he tested it, causing the charge to flicker in and out of focus beneath his touch. If he strayed too near, the locket grew icy, freezing into his chest, and the pain drove him back.
He moved slowly and carefully around the perimeter of the camp, always looking and listening. He didn’t know who or what else he might be out there, but one thing struck him as pretty much sure, no barrier – whatever it might be – had ever been erected just to keep the likes of Provender Creed out of a camp. So, thinking through it, Creed was fairly damned certain something else was out there in the darkness with him.
He paced the perimeter.
A little more than a quarter of the way around the circuit, he saw something. A flickering light. It was a fire, and not a small campfire. This one was big enough to be a pyre. It had been lit back a ways from the weird icy wall, in among the scrub of trees. The blaze sent shadows dancing over the skeletal limbs, in turn sending more shadows dancing across the dirt. Creed crouched and slipped closer, moving as quietly as possible.
The fire was blazing hot. Whoever had set it wasn’t too concerned with it being seen, that was certain. The flames crackled. The sound masked Creed’s approach. He felt like his heart would drive itself out of his chest if it got beating any faster.
'Damn,' he whispered. 'Just what in the
Three tall shadows surrounded the fire. Two had their backs to him, and the third stood directly across the fire. They each had long poles in their hands. It seemed as though they were intent on stirring the coals and keeping the fire burning hotter, but as Creed eased back a low hanging branch to get a better look, it was all he could do to bite back a scream.
The fire pit was maybe three feet across. It was deep, and even from where he stood, twenty or thirty feet back, the heat was stifling. It was like a bowl carved into the earth, filled with glowing coals. To one side they’d stacked a pile of dead branches to feed in when the heat died down, but it didn’t look like that was going to happen anytime soon.
None of that mattered. What mattered was the man – thing? – trying to claw its way free of the inferno. Creed recognized the three immediately. They were the strangers who’d invaded his room. He reached instinctively for the reassuring handle of his six-shooter but stopped no more than an inch from the grip when he realized how useless the weapon was. At least one of them ought to have been dead; he’d been pumped full of enough lead put down a horse.
Long arms covered in blackened, searing flesh groped for the sides of the pit. There was a mewling, mindless sound that might have been a voice, once, but whenever it rose, one of the three slammed the end of their pole into the side of the thing’s head, or its shoulder, pressing it back and silencing it with the force and shock of each new blow.
Something beyond the obvious was wrong. It took Creed a moment to sort it, and then he frowned. Fire. Meat. Wood. Charcoal. But there was no smell. Any one of those things ought to have been giving off some sort of smell. The meat, a sickly sweet stench – he’d burned bodies before – during a bout of plague further west – but all he smelled here was the maddening, cloying sweetness of the fog of incense.
The man-thing lunged to one side. It rose half out of the pit, and Creed reeled back, biting his lip hard to prevent any sound from escaping. Where the man’s torso should have met hips and leg, nothing but charred trailing guts and blood dangled. One of the crow men lashed out with his stick, and the thing tumbled back, an almost surprised grimace of pain crossing its ruined features.
Creed didn’t know what to do. He knew he was no match for the three. Together with Brady he'd barely managed to chase them off. They were like a pack of crows – chase them out of your field all you wanted, they’d just circle and come back. He didn’t know what that thing in the pit was either, though he suspected that – at least at some point in its existence –it had more in common with him than the others. There was nothing he could do to help, but he couldn’t just stand there and watch it being tortured and burned.
He reeled away from the translucent barrier as a heart-chilling cry broke like shattering ice over the clearing. In the silence between heartbeats a huge shadow enveloped everything, snuffing the light from the fire and plunging the world into utter, impenetrable darkness.
Creed staggered back and hit the wall. He winced as the cold, icy pain tore through his body. He opened his eyes again. The darkness was gone, only the pain remained. No, he realized, a tall willowish woman stood beside the fire-pit. She glared down into it contemptuously. Creed’s hand slid instinctively toward the six-shooters on his hip. He tried to slow his suddenly rapsing breath. His hand shook. He gritted his teeth and pulled the gun. The woman turned her head slightly and looked right at him. She shook her head, just once, very slightly.
'I wouldn’t do that if I were you,' a voice said inside his head. The crow men fell away before her in a flutter of dark clothing and shuffling feet. If she frightened them, Creed wanted no part of her. So far, she hadn’t told them he was nearby, and he thought – for some odd reason – that this was reassuring. He holstered the gun.
She turned toward the camp and strode up to the shimmering barrier. It brought her closer to Creed. He backed away step after stumbling step as she neared. She didn’t acknowledge his presence at all. When she reached the wall of light she placed her hand flat against it and scowled. Luminous rings rippled out from her fingertips along that transparent surface. For a dozen feet either side of her the barrier was suddenly lit by a bluish glow. Stepping closer, she placed her other hand beside the first. And pushed.
