‘A potion?’ Hannah couldn’t believe she was discussing magical potions while lying face-down in the dirt hoping some zombie warrior wouldn’t discover her while he was busy slaughtering innocent – okay, maybe not innocent, exactly – trees.
‘Something like that, yes,’ Alen said, ‘but we don’t call them potions.’
‘They didn’t seem to notice us – or anything. Are these Seron dangerous? They seemed like-’ she stopped, not sure if the word meant anything here, then continued, ‘well, they seemed like zombies to me.’
‘Zombies,’ Alen said. ‘Interesting word.’
‘It means- well, I guess it means the living dead, or the walking dead.’
Well then, Seron are not zombies,’ Alen said, ‘they are very much alive; Nerak has never given them the chance to die – although I believe most of them would welcome death.’
‘But are these Seron dangerous? They don’t seem to be.’
Alen looked at her and Hannah could see fear mixed with amusement in his face. ‘If they were to capture us tonight, Hannah, they would tear our bodies apart, most likely celebrate with a macabre ritual – using pieces of us – and then eat what was left over. Yes. They are extremely dangerous, and we will be exceedingly careful to avoid them.’
Hannah listened to the Seron working among the trees. ‘Why doesn’t the forest take over their minds like it did ours?’
‘I am afraid that just being a Seron warrior is more terrifying than anything the forest of ghosts could show them: those men and women are constantly tortured by glimpses of who they once were, long ago. It must be tragic.’
‘But you said Nerak breeds them.’ Hannah was curious. ‘What have they got to remember if they come from parents who have already lost their souls?’
‘Seron produce human children, Hannah, because despite their appearance, they remain human. It is just that once a child is born to a Seron woman, it is-’ He paused, searching for the right words.
‘They are immediately expendable?’
‘And once they have grown enough to perform basic survival needs, Nerak strips them of their sense of themselves, leaving a shell to fill with whatever values or ideas he likes. He has been known to experiment, filling Seron children with animal urges – dog and grettan senses… hideous.’ Alen shuddered.
‘How do you know so much about them when you said there haven’t been any in over five hundred Twinmoons?’ Hannah sounded sceptical.
The lines in Alen’s face seemed to deepen. ‘Because, Hannah, I was with him when he learned the process.’ He stopped talking as Hoyt and Churn materialised out of the darkness. The horses’ hooves were wrapped in torn cloth to deaden the sound.
Still moving close to the ground, Hoyt beckoned to the others and whispered, ‘Let’s go.’
Rising as silently as she could, Hannah felt the stiffness in her legs and promised herself a steaming hot bath, an icy-cold gin and tonic, and at least an hour with the Denver Post at the first decent hotel they passed. She struggled to get astride the saddle and felt Churn reach over and haul her onto it; he patted her on the back, slipped across to his own mount and waited for Hoyt to motion them forward.
Hannah reined in the horse to a slow but steady walk and tried not to think about the Seron children. It was the most appalling thing she had ever imagined, building an army over a generation of abuse, and focused cruelty. As the sounds of the Seron, chopping, sawing and stripping enchanted trees from the forest of ghosts, filled the night, Hannah swallowed hard: she had no idea that anything so terrible could exist – in any world.
As she followed Hoyt north along the path the wagons had taken earlier that day, she tried not to think what might be waiting for them as they moved closer to the Malakasian border and Welstar Palace.
THE FALKAN PLAIN
‘That’s it,’ Garec said. ‘Whittle it down, but don’t cut it too deeply, or you’ll leave weak spots – trust me, the last thing you want is to have an old bow shatter at full draw just because you chipped away too much at one area.’
‘How do I know if it’s too thin?’ Mark stopped shaving the freshly cut branch and waited for clarification.
‘You’ve got plenty of wood left right now,’ Garec said. ‘Keep going and when you’ve cleared some of the outer layers, use mine as a model. Gods know I don’t want it any more.’
‘But yours is wrapped. What is that? Leather? Hide?’
Hide strips,’ Garec nodded. ‘I tan them from deerskin and use them to strengthen the bow. It’s a tedious process, but if you dip them in salt water then wrap them across each other, they dry up and tighten into a tough but still pliable layer.’
‘I want to do that too,’ Mark said.
‘Well,’ Garec said, amused, ‘first you’ve got to kill a deer.’
‘That’s fine. I’ll shoot the next one I see.’ Mark had never been a hunter. Apart from his attempt at fishing with Versen’s bow and a few wild shots at flocks of ducks unfortunate enough to be flying over Port Jefferson one autumn many years earlier – none of the ducks were ever in any real danger – he had never fired a weapon of any kind.
‘You’ll have to find one,’ Garec said. ‘Then you’ll have to hit it with an arrow – and forgive me for bringing it up, because I wasn’t there, but didn’t you struggle some with a bow the last time you tried this?’
Mark looked over at his Ronan friend; Garec could see the bruises where the Seron had punched him in the face. ‘That was fishing, Garec. This is killing.’
Garec flashed back to the way Mark had used his superior swimming ability as a lethal weapon. He had no doubt Mark would use his new bow as often as he could. ‘Trust me,’ he said, ‘you don’t want to get so adept at killing that it begins to feel like fishing.’
‘I think I know the difference.’ Mark didn’t look up from his work.
‘For now, yes, but after a while, the lines begin to blur. It gets easier – too easy.’
Mark stopped whittling and looked at Garec. ‘I don’t need you to worry about my soul. If God exists – and I still believe He does – but He certainly hasn’t been around this neighbourhood in a while. He and I can settle our accounts another day.’
Garec hesitated a moment, then, unnerved, asked, ‘So your God doesn’t permit killing?’
‘Oh, He permits plenty of it, but He- He disapproves.’
‘How does he feel about fishing then?’ Garec forced a smile.
Mark laughed for the first time in days. ‘I understand He was quite a fisherman himself, Garec! You just teach me to shoot this thing and I’ll take care of the rest.’ He held the branch aloft. ‘How’s this?’
Once, while exploring at Riverend Palace, Garec had come across a room that looked as if it had been an art room, maybe a classroom, filled with half-finished sculptures, figures struggling to emerge from otherwise nondescript sections of red oak or marble. The fire that destroyed the palace more than a thousand Twinmoons earlier had missed the chamber. Garec had been unsettled by his discovery – as though he had come upon something he shouldn’t be seeing: two adulterers locked in a tryst, perhaps. The sculptures all evolved into something terrifying; not a flower emerging from a walnut log or a woman’s face slipping free from marble bonds, but malformed, half-finished things – souls trapped between who they had been and who they might become. There were birds flying gracefully with one wing, trapped in the wood by the other, and an enormous red oak log in the centre of the room, taller than him, that halfway up changed into a man. Garec figured it was Prince Markon, but all his efforts to superimpose a kingly face and noble demeanour on the carving failed; the man had a desperate look in his eyes, and looked as if he was struggling to escape.
In all his time at Riverend Palace, Garec had never returned to the room. There was something wrong with those sculptures, a thousand Twinmoons old and still trapped. As he watched Mark whittle away at the length of green wood, Garec felt the same sense of unease; he was watching a killer being born with a few strokes of a hunting knife along a branch. He looked down at the foreigner’s boots, nearly buried in a pile of shavings: would his feet disappear entirely before Mark was finished sculpting his bow?