He had got down almost far enough when he heard someone say, ‘Hello Mark Jenkins.’
Spinning round, he shrieked, ‘God! You scared me!’
Mark strained his eyes through the smoke to see who was there.
‘Who is that?’ he asked loudly and drew his battle-axe.
The disembodied voice came to him through the haze; for a moment Mark thought he could see the outline of a man, but it flickered in the smoke and then was gone.
‘Who is that?’ he asked again. His voice cracked; his hands were shaking.
‘One half of a marriage that went tragically wrong, Mark Jenkins, but I will not make that mistake again.’
An itch began to irritate the back of Mark’s left wrist and he rubbed it against the coarse fabric of his tunic while he searched the forest for the steam and smoke visitor. When pain paralysed his forearm, he suddenly realised what had happened – and that it was too late to scream. He flailed about wildly for a moment, gripped the tree in a one-armed hug and then slumped to the ground.
In the instant before he felt himself fade away, Mark was given a glimpse of the entity’s vision for the future, Mark’s future. Then he did scream, but no one heard him. He slipped into the darkness and was still falling when the entity rubbed a handful of snow across the back of his bloody, pus-covered wrist. He would need gloves. Reaching into the muddy hole beside the tree, Mark retrieved Lessek’s key, slipped it inside the pocket of his Gore-tex jacket and jogged north along the path into Falkan.