South of the city is a meadow, just above the inter-tidal zone: more of an upland bog, rife with sedge, rushes and coarse coastal grass. The meadow, flanked on three sides by the scrub-oak and heavy needle pines that mark the sandy edge of the Ravenian Sea, is an anomaly. The expanse of thick foliage and dense fertile soil, thanks to a narrow stream rushing by just out of sight behind a stand of pines, form an unexpected oasis trapped between the intimidating Blackstone peaks to the east and the cold salt waters to the west.
On this night, the meadow grasses are brushed back and forth by Twinmoon breezes charging unchecked north and south along the narrow channel. Painted pale Twinmoon white, the grasses glow with the muted brilliance of a snowfield at midday.
Gabriel O’Reilly appears, interrupting the ghostly surface, a blurry cloud of spectral smoke. His battle with the almor has taken him across the Fold, through the great emptiness and within a breath of the evil force lying restlessly inside. He has seen the centre of the world, has passed through the dead of the Northern Forest and through the great cataclysm that pushes the edges of the universe ever outwards. It is all he can do to maintain his sanity as he looks into the face of a god – it must be a god, for nothing else could generate such beauty, such destruction and such pure, uncomplicated power. But this isn’t his God; he’s not home yet.
Gabriel O’Reilly has felt the fires of the demon lands, smelled their putrid stench and sensed their inhabitants: legions of creatures marshalling their resources in an effort to weaken his resolve and purloin his very essence. At times, he has seen home, Virginia, and though he doubts any of it is real, he imagines he can smell it, touch it, feel those lush rolling hills beneath his bare feet. Slamming through forests and burrowing through mountains, O’Reilly and the almor careen, a tangle of demon limbs in a ghostly fog across time and worlds. As they pass through the pristine wilderness of his home, he checks beyond the rise of each hill, hoping for just one glimpse of a Confederate brigade marching to face the Army of Northeastern Virginia.
And all the while he holds on to the demon almor, the one sent to take Versen and Brexan, the only friends he’s made in five lifetimes, forcing himself to remember why he grips the creature so hard, hanging on despite the drain on his sanity.
Now the almor is gone. O’Reilly has no idea how long they have battled, but suddenly the demon vanishes, falling away into the burned over wastelands of a distant world. It is as if its will to engage him has run dry.
Has it been days? Years? O’Reilly doesn’t care. Instead, he casts his senses about the meadow, detecting no sign of Brexan, Versen or the scarred Seron they fought together. As much as he can remember of disappointment, the spirit feels it now. He had hoped that beating the almor would have given him a way home: the path to heaven, the right to look upon the face of his own God.
But it hasn’t happened, and he is still here in Eldarn. O’Reilly floats above the meadow another moment, his indistinct face a mask of loneliness; then without a sound he slips between the trees and disappears into the forest.
He is not gone a moment when others appear along the edge of the meadow, following O’Reilly through the trees, hunting him. One, the leader, pauses to stare across the Ravenian Sea. It has been many years since William Higgins has seen the sea, long before his daughter was born, before he left his family in St Louis to seek his fortune in the mountains above Oro City, Colorado. He turns after the others; they are close behind O’Reilly now. As the cavalry soldier-turned-miner fades from view, his ghostly white boots pass through a fallen cottonwood tree. The sound of a spur, chiming through the ages, rings once above the din of the onshore breeze.
*
Although the sounds of the Prince Marek shattering in the harbour do not reach her, Brexan Carderic is unable to sleep. Moving north, she is less than a day outside Orindale, expecting to reach the outskirts of the Falkan capital before dawn. She doesn’t hear the Prince Marek coming apart, but the stillness that follows in the wake of the ship’s death reaches her. She makes her barefoot way slowly along the shore, recalling the loss of her boots, discarded in the Ravenian Sea after she cut Versen loose from the stern rail of the fat merchant’s ship. With every step towards the city, the Malakasian imagines first how she will find this man and second how she will torture him when she does. Burning Versen’s body was the most difficult thing she’d ever done, yet she did it meticulously, thinking she will have one chance to get something right, but she will live with its memory for ever. She chose every branch carefully, avoiding green wood so her fire would blaze quickly into a fury. Even as the flames claimed Versen’s body, Brexan sat, imagining the horror of failing to get that first spark to kindle.
She cries as she remembers that day, sitting by his side, rising only to find a piece of scrub-oak, a pine bough or a thatch of cedar brambles. She didn’t speak to him, or kiss him goodbye, nor did she take any of his scant belongings as keepsakes. Instead, she sat with him, watching as his pyre burned down and eventually out.
Mark Jenkins stands on the forward bench of a small skiff borrowed from an elderly fisherman he believes now to be the Larion Senator, Gilmour Stow of Estrad. He has a half-moon gash above one eye, and blood clouds his vision. Mark thinks he must have been hit by a splinter of glass when what was left of the aft end of the Prince Marek began breaking apart; he ignores the bleeding and, screaming out her name, searches the wreckage for any sign of Brynne. He scans the castaway spars, rails, barrels, beams and sections of sailcloth that have begun floating away. He has given up hope that the Pragan woman will appear alongside the skiff, offer him an alluring grin and ask if she might come aboard. He tries to spot a pale upper arm, a bare cheek, temple or even a supple leg in the light cast across Orindale Harbour by the northern Twinmoon.
Before him, the great sailing vessel sinks away. Apart from avoiding the undertow as the tons of metal, wood and tar careen towards the bottom, Mark doesn’t give the remains of the Prince Marek more than a glance. He is shouting Brynne’s name, but it fails to occur to him that Steven and Gilmour might be lost as well.
Then a thought nudges him. There’s something… he has seen something, something he can’t remember at the moment, but even that is enough to give him pause, to turn him around stiffly, a mannequin on a rotating pedestal. The last few minutes have been too traumatic; his search for Brynne has distracted him. There are other problems, other threats.
Where’s Garec?
They left him sleeping in the catboat. That isn’t it. There’s something more.
Versen? No.
Mark’s voice fades until he can barely hear himself whisper the Ronan woman’s name.
The clouds. Those clouds of mist. Where are they?
He saw one; it had been coming out over the harbour, right before the ship shattered in two. He searches the night, rubbing a sleeve across his face to wipe the blood from his eyes. There it is. It’s as if a black fogbank has blown west to hover over the harbour. Despite Mark’s certainty that he witnessed the cloud moving away from shore, towards the Prince Marek, not ten minutes earlier, now it looks to have stopped – not retreated; rather, it remains stolidly in place, about two hundred yards off the waterfront. But it’s frozen there, impervious to the efforts of the onshore breeze to carry it back into town, thicker than any normal cloud and heavier than fog ought to be. Like a column of ethereal soldiers poised to charge, the mist looks as though it is awaiting its next set of orders: fall on the partisans and kill them all, or perhaps, return to the city and await further instructions.