The Pilgrims

did nothing, just drifted and watched? Five other likely futures stretched before his view. All were bad, very bad, save one. This part of the machinery should therefore function well.

Nightmare switched views again, and now saw the world as music, mostly playing as it should, though a dramatic crescendo approached, booms and crashes coming loud indeed. The futures he saw through this lens boded similarly to those seen through the others. There, that one important instrument named Eric was not playing its notes correctly. Much of the symphony relied on it, and soon the instrument would break, the man be slain. He switched view to the patterns he’d seen before. Again, a fault in the complex web of colours and shades, a smear of jarring red, a stain spilled across it.

It was becoming clear, now. But an hour longer to think wouldn’t hurt, so he stayed in that space of sky, above the rocky platform, and thought. He could think quickly when he had to, distasteful though it was.

It was that Invia’s Mark causing all this trouble. Nightmare would have liked even a year to consider it longer, to have the impressions swirl about the deep volatile mix of his thoughts before choosing an action. But the man would be killed in so little time.

Nightmare reached down and smothered out the Invia’s Mark like a hand snuffing out a candle.

38

Eric did not have breath to scream. His eyes had opened just as the huge hand descended. Its palm — which seemed to be made of night itself, only stuffed more densely into the hand’s shape, so that it stood boldly out against the night surrounding — came down over the entire roof of the platform.

Whatever it was made of, Nightmare’s flesh passed through Eric and his sleeping companions as would cold ozone-scented air. All went pitch black and the wind could no longer be felt, not until the huge hand retracted, making its slow way skywards. When it had moved sufficiently, Eric looked up at the face within the shroud’s outline; it was mostly featureless, or else its features were obscured by the shroud’s shadow. Eyes, black slits small in proportion to its face, expressed nothing human, but he knew they gazed at him, which was the most terrifying and yet exhilarating thing he’d ever felt. A mouth, some way down, could just be discerned as a motionless crisscrossed row of upper and lower teeth, similar in style to a tribal wooden mask. If anything, this thing in the sky looked like Death. But Eric knew it wasn’t there to hurt him.

The arms spread slowly, ponderously outwards again. Nightmare drifted away like a huge cloud blown on steady winds. Eric looked sideways at his companions. Should he wake them? Would they believe him in the morning otherwise, when he told them what had happened? He didn’t, and it wasn’t because they needed their sleep. Rather, it felt that somehow this had been his moment, his alone whatever it meant, and selfishly he didn’t want to share it.

Nightmare drifted languidly away, till he was gone over the horizon.

In the morning, Kiown simply didn’t believe him. ‘And then did he do a little dance? Challenge you to an arm wrestle? Blow kisses?’

‘I know Eric, and he’s not lying,’ Case said testily.

‘Sure, he was here,’ said Kiown, rolling his eyes, ‘I believe that. Maybe he even looked right at us. But no way would he reach down and touch us. You dreamed, that’s all. Nightmare doesn’t touch people. Doesn’t give a shit about us. He just exists. That’s about all he does. Like old Case here.’

‘What if it had happened?’ said Eric. ‘Just for argument’s sake. What would it mean?’

Kiown shrugged. ‘No knowing. A blessing, a curse? I have enough trouble understanding mages, let alone Spirits. Hmm. If he cared about you enough to curse you, he’d probably just kill you like that.’ He snapped his fingers. ‘Which is why it’s good he didn’t actually do what you dreamed. Vivid dreams up on the tower: you’re not the first.’ Kiown patted Eric on the head condescendingly and smiled. ‘Now, no more of that silliness.’

The morning was like a veil being lifted from the landscape. Smoke rose in a thick hazy pall beyond the hillsides from homes in the city of Hane. ‘Eat up!’ said Kiown, digging into the provisions sack. ‘Long day’s march ahead.’

‘But Hane’s just over there.’

‘We can’t cut through those hills, alas,’ said Kiown. ‘Lesser Hane is not where we want to be. Crazy place. Population’s fenced in and starving. It’s where they’ve been putting the misbehaving ones who haven’t sworn to Vous yet. Got to go around the long way to the other side of the city. Another day’s march. And we’d better stay off road as long as we can.’

They’d only just finished eating when noise below caught their attention. An army unit marched past, two abreast. Further north the procession reached as far as they could see. Kiown gazed at it for a long while, troubled. ‘Hmmm. Those are soldiers from the castle’s own army, not from a city. They are a long way from home.’

‘What’s this mean then?’ said Case.

‘For us? We wait right here. For someone else? It means trouble, and a hefty pile of it.’

They waited. When the castle soldiers had finally trooped past, they began their climb down. Then from further up the road came another procession walking two abreast. Kiown cursed viciously. ‘Back, back to the top. Lie flat. What the …? Those aren’t castle soldiers. They’re wearing city colours. They’re from River City!’

The whole day passed them by in similar fashion. Kiown gnawed his fingernails down to bloody little nubs. When one army unit had passed a safe distance away, another would follow, sometimes only a small patrol, sometimes a line stretching to the horizon. City soldiers in plain colours, castle soldiers in their drab grey.

Kiown seemed to take all this as a personal slight. At times he ranted and swore like a madman, inconsolable. He was no longer willing to risk going down even when there were ample enough breaks between the marching units. ‘By the time we get down there, there’ll be another,’ he snarled. ‘I bet they’re going to Elvury, the bastards. They’ll clog the roads all the way there. I knew something was cooking.’

‘Sounds like a war cooking to me,’ said Case, who didn’t mind a break in travel one little bit. He lay with his feet crossed and eyes closed.

‘Course it’s a war,’ Kiown snapped. ‘The castle and Free Cities are always at war. Damn it! My Hane contacts are expecting me. They had to come this way, didn’t they?’

As evening came and a marching unit made camp by the roadside not far from where they would have to climb down, there seemed no choice but to spend another night up on the platform. Their dinner was a little more modest than recent meals had been, for the innkeeper’s supplies had begun to dwindle. ‘We had our chance to worry about that,’ said Case, looking pointedly at Kiown. ‘Chose to stuff our faces instead.’

Kiown’s hands twitched. ‘Every time you talk, old man, I get a most peculiar urge to take out my sword and rub it. Not to cut you, not to fight you. Just to tenderly, lovingly rub my sword. It’s the strangest thing.’

‘Do what you want,’ said Case placidly. ‘You think I give a shit about getting sliced up these days, you don’t know me.’

‘Oh but I could make you sing a pretty song, if I did it slowly.’

‘Relax, you two,’ said Eric, tired of both of them complaining. ‘Maybe Nightmare will come back and you’ll believe me this time.’

Nightmare didn’t return, as Eric lay there sleepless, the other two quietly snoring into the wind. But something else happened he hadn’t counted on: he was back in the room at Faul’s house.

39

First came the darkness of sleep, with only Loup’s voice, as though in conversation with itself:

‘It’s a kind of knowledge minds like ours can’t hold …’

‘… know what we’re about to do. We’re about to put in our bodies, in our minds, a little piece of