The roaring of turbulent air and clatter of falling twigs and wind-driven debris was deafening. In amongst it, Wren thought she could perhaps hear the Huluk Kur crying out. They were fierce and hard men, but an entelech wielded by a determined Clever could be fiercer and harder still. Wren could not imagine anyone standing in this tempest, let alone moving through it.
She lifted her head, eyes narrowed against the biting gale. There was nothing to see. Just the obscuring, churning storm. Which began to subside even as she stared, blinking, into it. The wind dropped. Dirt and snow began to settle.
Ammenor was limping towards her from out of a mist of ice crystals. Behind him, beside him, Wren saw terrible things. Not one of the Huluk Kur who had entered the clearing still stood. Some were dead, some merely maimed. That ice mist hid much, and Wren was glad of it. What she could make out was more than enough. Gelid shards which had burst outward, springing from bone like winter knives, splitting faces open. Raw red flesh where the storm of grit had scoured away skin. Eyes white, frozen in their sockets.
She could hear nothing but the gentle settling of snow and ice, and the moaning and the weeping of those who still lived. And a voice, she thought dimly. She blinked again and looked at Ammenor. He was unsteady, pale. The skin beneath his eyes had loosened and slipped. There was blood trickling from his nose. He was talking to her, she realised.
‘Run, girl,’ he was saying. ‘Don’t wait for me. Run…’
And his voice bubbled away in a tangled froth as an arrowhead appeared, protruding from the front of his throat. Wren had not heard the impact. Ammenor’s eyes just opened a little wider as those bushy brows lifted and he made a strained coughing sound. He stopped and lifted one hand towards his neck and began to turn as he did so. His fingertips brushed the bloody point jutting out just above his collarbone.
As he turned, another arrow hit him in the shoulder. He went down onto one knee. Wren could not move. She lay there in the brush, transfixed.
Indistinct figures were moving among the last remnants of the icy tempest. It was as if the Cold Men had come to life, suddenly closing towards Ammenor. But as the air cleared, Wren saw that these were no statues. More Huluk Kur clubmen. They did not all come into the clearing, she wanted to cry out to Ammenor. They were not all close enough. You were not savage enough.
Then Wren felt the weight that had been holding her down lifting. Her limbs remembered themselves. She began to rise, not to run as Ammenor had told her but to go forward. To cloak herself in the entelech and spread her wings and carry death with her into that clearing.
Her movement betrayed her. Before she was even fully on her feet, the nearest of the Huluk Kur was staring at her. He was still staring at her as he calmly and slowly pushed the point of his spear down into the notch between Ammenor’s neck and shoulder. Deeper than Wren would have thought possible. Ammenor gave out a long, fluttering gasp. The Clever fell forwards. The spear came out covered in gore.
The moment in which Wren’s eyes remained locked with those of Ammenor’s killer stretched. Her mind filled its unbounded space. She could not save Ammenor. She did not know precisely where all her enemies were, or how many. Already, in the indistinct corners of her vision, she could see more shapes moving, coming closer. If she died too, there would be none to carry warning of the Huluk Kur’s intent, nor to work vengeance upon them.
She spun about and ran into the forest. Twigs and brambles lashed at her clothes and face. She bounded over fallen branches and roots half hidden by snow and slush. Behind her, she heard the warriors shouting in their hard-edged language. Their cries followed her like the voices of blackbirds.
XVI
She knew she could not outrun them. She knew too that she did not need to. Through all her life, one thing only had been unchanging, constant: she was a Clever. She had denied it and hidden it. No longer.
Her body ran and staggered and stumbled. Her mind took the raw stuff of the Autumnal entelech and made real one of the countless possibilities it carried within it. She shaped a mist, thick and heavy. She wove it from the air and called it forth from the trunks of the trees. She wreathed herself in it so that her very passage through the forest laid it in thick banks amongst the trees. It flowed behind her like a sluggish river and spilled over every hump and hollow of the ground and sent tendrils curling up into the canopy.
The mist was so dense it swallowed all sound. She heard only her own footfalls and ragged breathing and the cracking of twigs beneath her feet. Behind, there was only silence. As if the world there had ceased to exist, erased into a still, grey fog. She ran on, and everything disappeared in her wake.
Without Ammenor, she could not be certain which way to go. It hardly mattered. Her vision blurred, as if the mist she had summoned was leaking into her own eyes. The only thing that was important was putting distance between her and the wolves behind her.
The ground began to fall away and she found herself leaping, almost falling, as her own weight rushed her on and on. She brushed against tree trunks that flashed past her. She reeled and almost fell time and again. Yet she did not slow. Not even when her lungs and throat began to burn in their desperation to feed her body with air. She staggered into a wide and rocky stream and went flailing across it in plumes of icy water.
The trees thinned and she ran on and up, her leggings now wet and heavy. Every muscle cried out. She let the entelech go and her body shook with its passing. She stumbled – she could not run any further – onto a moor of heather and grass. There were fewer trees here. She had left behind the forest, wrapped in its silent shroud of mist.
There at last she slumped against the bole of one of the pines. She leaned on it, and on the staff she held in her other hand, and panted. Gasped for a renewed vigour that would not come. She felt like she might be sick.
She did not know how long she stayed there, for time slipped away from her. She was not even sure what gave her warning. It might have been a sound or a glimpse of movement. It might have been nothing but chance that made her look back the way she had come just as a lone Huluk Kur warrior came trotting into sight.
‘Come on, then!’ Wren cried, pushing herself a little unsteadily from the tree.
It was the man who had killed Ammenor. She thought so at least: her vision was still not clear.
‘I’m glad it’s you,’ Wren said to him, knowing he would not understand or care. She cared though, and that gave her some strength to call upon. It gave her the will to suffer just a little bit more, and to bend the Autumnal to her purpose one more time.
He closed on her with determined strides, no hint of hesitation. He had both hands on his spear and held it level with Wren’s stomach as he drew nearer. She allowed him to come within a dozen paces and no further.
She made small movements with her free hand – reaching and grasping – the more easily to envisage her desire. It was hard to tell whether that really helped or not, but she got what she wanted.
Arms of mist came over the Huluk Kur’s shoulders. The vapour masked his face, taking hold so firmly that he jerked to a halt and reflexively dropped his spear. He raised his hands and tried to claw his way free but it was only fog that held him and his fingers passed through it as if it was not there.
Wren imagined the mist penetrating his eyes and his mouth and nose. Writhing its way into him. She heard him scream. The sound was muffled. She blended decay into the mist. Rot and the maggots that fed on it. The softening and browning, the melting and the eating by which flesh became earth. He screamed again, a sound that quickly faded away.
The Huluk Kur slumped to his knees. His arms hung limply at his sides. Wren turned her back. She did not want to see what would be revealed when she eventually allowed the mist that hid his features to dissipate. This was the first man she had killed with aforethought, and without a hint of regret afterwards. That did not mean she liked it.