She walked away.
There had to be balance and exchange. Something had to go back into the formless expanse of the primal entelechs. All this exertion was too much for her. Her body was emptied. Her mind spun and thinned. It was only some time – too late – after she had left the corpse behind her that she realised she should have taken the spear. It might have been of use, but it had not even occurred to her. Her thoughts were blunt and broken things.
Dizzy, she blundered half-blinded into a new stretch of forest and soon enough her foot found the edge of a thick root, slid over its slick, wet surface and twisted as she fell heavily.
She lay there, dazed, staring up through the canopy for a time. It would be easy to remain where she was. Easier by far than the alternative. She hauled herself to her feet.
As soon as weight was on her ankle, pain shot through the joint and up the sides of her shin. And she laughed.
‘Of course,’ she said to the forest. ‘Why not?’
Leaning on her staff, she could make a sluggish kind of progress. She imagined herself, lame like Ammenor, as a wounded deer. Hounded. How fitting and entirely of a piece with the world’s bleak humour it all felt. The wind had only been blowing in one direction from the moment she stepped onto that cursed barge on the Hervent. Of course she found herself hobbled. Of course.
She discovered that she was not afraid as she struggled on among the trees. She was angry that her hopes and dreams had become dust so completely and quickly. She was filled with bitter loathing for the savages who had carried death onto this high ground and tormented by the thought that she might have led them to Ammenor. But she was not afraid. Instead, she was finding within herself an answer to the world’s casual cruelty. If she was to die out here in the wilds, it would be as herself. For perhaps the first time in her life she could be wholly and completely what she had for so long hidden. A Clever. A powerful one.
Ammenor had clearly thought her abilities unusual in some way. He had been impressed by what she had done without training or practice. Very well. She would put his judgement to the test. The Huluk Kur would yet find this deer was a terrible quarry, with antlers sharp as knives and hoofs that broke stone.
XVII
They almost caught her in the night. She did not want to stop and rest, not even for a moment. Her body overruled her mind. As she staggered through a darkness that the half-obscured moon barely touched, she lost her footing one time too many. Her injured ankle howled its protest. When she made to raise herself up, her arms shook and folded as if boneless.
It was all she could do to crawl into a sheltered corner between two boulders. She spread her blanket as best she could over her body and made a ball of herself beneath it. Her stomach growled. Every limb hurt and shivered. Despite all of that, she fell towards sleep in moments.
They did not find her, but it was close. Their voices woke her. They drifted past in the night. She could see nothing, just hear those harsh cries. Some were distant. Her alarm perhaps exaggerated it, but the closest seemed to come from no more than a few dozen paces away.
As the sound of her hunters faded into the distance, she did not dare to move. She stayed there, pressed into the shelter and moonshadows of the protective boulders, glad of the darkness. However good at tracking the Huluk Kur might be, a deep night and a clouded moon were enough to defeat them. A small piece of good fortune to set in the scale against all the ill.
She remained in her hiding place until she judged the night well on the way to its end. Until she had not heard a Huluk Kur voice for hours. She doubted it would pay to test the generosity of her newfound luck.
The dawn found her climbing again. She craved open, high ground where she might see what was coming for her and what lay before her. She marked the first hint of light on the horizon and took that for east. As best she could tell – which was only a little more than a guess – the Huluk Kur had been heading in that direction when they passed her in the dark. She headed north, where the land allowed it. She thought the Hung Gate might lie in that direction.
For much of the morning, as she laboured along a bleak ridgeline, her left arm would give an involuntary shiver every so often. It worried her, but only a little. There were any number of greater concerns to occupy her mind, and before long she stopped noticing it. By the time she stopped to drink from a puddle of meltwater, around the middle of the day, the arm had remembered itself and returned to her control. She still felt dull and slow of thought. Her ankle still hurt. Yesterday had been worse though. Tomorrow would be better, she told herself. All she had to do was live to see it.
Soon she was high enough to see for miles. Ahead of her, the view was deeply uninviting. More rock than grass. More snow. Her mind turned to possibilities she had not allowed herself to consider until now. She was a Clever. The world was hers to shape, if she was willing to pay the price such shaping demanded.
Could she make mist of herself and flow over the cliffs and obstacles before her? Could she pass into the earth beneath her feet and emerge, remade, somewhere far away? Could she make of herself a bird and truly spread wings for a time? Perhaps. Perhaps, too, doing so would take everything she had to give, every last piece of her.
There had never been anybody to tell her how such marvels might be performed without losing herself to the entelechs entirely. She was all but certain that, in her already weakened state, she would never come back from such extravagant spending of body and soul. It would be the kind of desperate gamble that invited a Permanence into the world, and plotted a course for her out of existence. She was not ready to risk that yet. Not quite.
She slept for a few hours on a bed of moss in the lee of a rocky overhang. It gave her some shelter but little comfort. It was lucky, she supposed, that wind or snow did not come in the night. That might have been too much for her. As it was, in the watery dawn that followed she discovered what desperation looked like. She saw what was needed to make her consider gambling everything.
At first she did not know what she was hearing. A grinding, as of a distant, lazy rockslide? It went on too long and deep for that. More like an entire river of rock slowly rolling its way over the land. With that image coming to mind, she guessed what it might be.
She eased her way along a ledge from where she had slept and clambered onto the top of the ridge, wedging her staff into crevices to lever herself up. She shuffled on hands and knees over slabs of rock and patches of flat turf. The heavy rumbling note grew slowly louder.
When she came to an edge, she lay flat and stared down across a long, tumbling scree of boulders to a plain of grass below.
No hunting or scouting party this. No handful of warriors. It was the van of the Huluk Kur host. Hundreds of horsemen. Behind them, indistinct in the weak light of the morning, came the head of the main column. They must have broken their camp before dawn, she thought. Or perhaps marched through the hours of darkness.
For long minutes she lay there, lost to herself. She was too slow, too weak to race this vast, remorseless people. Her body had too little left to give. Nothing remained to her but to hide herself away somewhere in these mountains. Exile herself from whatever was happening and was going to happen. Hide and be quiet and be what – and who – Ammenor had been.
Unless she was willing to risk everything. Unless she was willing to flirt with death. Might she after all become mist or bird or…