"Come to me," he said, and I could feel the veil lightly landing on my face. I panicked in my sleep within a sleep, thinking, "I have caught the disease," and then suddenly came awake to the sound of a dog barking.
I scrabbled out of bed, dressed quickly, and went to the door. Upon opening it, I was greeted by a most unpromising sight. The oldest, saddest-looking gray horse I had ever seen was tied up to the crank handle of my well. The beast's spine was concave, its tail was a ragged whisk broom, and it kept its head bowed as if in humiliation at the physical state its years had visited upon it. Circling nervously between the well and the tree line was an underfed black dog, whose skeletal anatomy was completely evident through a thin scrim of hide. I had seen likenesses of him in allegorical paintings by the artists of antiquity. He was often depicted with a blind beggar, and was meant to represent Want.
To round out this embarrassment of riches, I discovered a crossbow along with a quiver of twelve arrows lying next to it. A thirteenth arrow was stuck in the ground, spearing a scrap of blue paper with writing on it. I pulled the shaft from the dirt and retrieved the message.
Cley,
Here are the things you requested. The horse, Quismal, is not swift but he is strong. The dog, Wood, has been known
to be ferocious on certain occasions. Teed it a scrap of meat and it will follow you for two days. Give it more and it will do your bidding. We would have liked to have given you a rifle, but those who had them thought it would be better to keep them on hand in case of an attack. The crossbow is a well-seasoned weapon. It can kill accurately at one hundred yards. Good luck, Cley. We will never forget you.
Your friends, The Citizens of Wenau
This note gave me a clear understanding as to my neighbors' assessment of the potential success of my mission. Perhaps I should have taken this warning, given in to fear with the rest of them, and waited to see what would happen. The unkindest item in the entire inventory had to be the crossbow. How effective could it really be at a hundred yards against the charging wolf girl, Greta Sykes, or one of the Master's mechanical monstrosities?
"I might just as well spit in self-defense as fire this old log," I thought as I leaned over and lifted the weapon. It was more firepower than I possessed, though, so I made the decision to pack it on the horse. I strapped it to the saddlebag along with the quiver, thinking that if things got too horrifying, I could at least impale myself on one of the arrows.
I went back in the house and gathered my supplies: a sack of herbs, the bone knife Ea had given me, some dried meat, a blanket, and, of course, the green veil. Before I closed the door to leave, I took one more look around my small rooms and was filled with a melancholy sense of longing that I might one day return to live out the rest of my life in peace and comfort.
Outside, I called to the dog to come. It continued moving erratically around me in wide circles, its tongue lolling, its eyes suggesting madness. Reaching into my pack, I retrieved a scrap of dried meat and held it out.
"Wood," I called. "Come, boy."
The instant the creature saw the meat, it bolted out of its meandering orbit and made straight for me. I had only a second to turn to the side as it leaped into the air to snatch the morsel and nearly two of my fingers. He took his prize a few feet away and began devouring it, making all manner of unnatural noises. I approached slowly, my hand out.
"Good, boy," I said. "Wood, Wood, Wood," I sang softly.
The ungrateful wretch growled and lunged for me. At the last moment, I jumped back, and as it passed, I gave it a mighty kick in the rear end. It yelped and ran away into the undergrowth.
By the time I was able to get onto the horse, which took a good measure of struggle, the sun had nearly set. There was still a mere wisp of red light on the western horizon above the treetops. It was going to be a beautiful night, warm enough but with a nice breeze beginning to blow. A few stars had already appeared in the sky directly overhead, and I prayed for a moon so it would not be too dark in the forest.
I had been on a horse maybe once or twice before in my life, and that was as a boy when I lived along the Chottle River. Now it seemed a long way to the ground from where I sat. The poor thing buckled somewhat under my weight, and it stank like death had already taken up residence in its swollen belly.
"Go," I said, but it didn't move.
"Charge," I said, and drove my heels into its flanks. It passed gas in a long, loud, gurgling stream and then lurched forward like a drunken man put off-balance by the planet's rotation.
My quest was begun. As we inched our way toward the tree line, the black dog came dashing out of the undergrowth in pursuit as if aware he was an allegory who could not be separated from his blind beggar. I did not consider my chances of success or the insidious ways I might die. Instead, I contemplated Below and his terrible need for control.
3
I TRAVELED ALL NIGHT ON THAT LUMBERING NAG, cowering ering at every dark form that rustled the fallen leaves or swooped low beneath the canopy overhead. Meanwhile, the black dog disappeared for a half hour at a time and then, all of a sudden, broke from the undergrowth to my right or left and ran between the slow-moving legs of my mount. Quis-mal was confused by this and immediately halted in his tracks. I tried driving my heels into his sides to get him going again, but I might as well have been kicking myself. Finally, I discovered that a few kind words whispered into his ear did the job better than any violence. "Onward, noble steed" I said, or some such nonsense, and sure enough he lurched forward.
The voices of crickets in the breeze became conspiratorial whispers. Even the full moon, which I had been so happy at the start to have as a companion for the journey, began to take on a sinister aspect. We broke into a clearing, and I looked up to stare its milky brilliance full in the face. The features of its physiognomy were exceptionally clear and struck me as closely resembling Below's. I thought about the Master, standing atop a high tower, spinning on the heels of his boots to take in the entirety of the puny lives of Wenau. It would have been no surprise to see a giant thumb descending to squash me.
I breathed deeply in an attempt to suppress my fugitive imagination, and it was then that the scents of the forest broke through to calm my fears. From that one inhalation, I was able to distill the aromas of trailing serpent vine, fantail blossom, and the oozing root of tarasthis fern. These were all familiar to me from my daily forays into the woods to search for medicines. Each of them, when dried and ground, was a cure for a different illness—gout, river blindness, acute melancholy— and now just their fragrances were enough to cure me.
I kept to the trail that had been forged in recent years by merchants from Latrobia, but with the first light of morning, I coaxed Quismal into the underbrush, and we headed northwest for the fields of Harakun. I hadn't seen or heard Wood for over two hours before changing direction and was resigned to the fact that he had most likely found a rabbit to torment instead of myself.
By the time the sun was high in the sky, I was exhausted from having traveled all night. Quismal was damp with perspiration, spluttering and frothing from both ends, and obviously as much in need of rest as myself. When we finally broke clear of the forest and forged the creek that defined the southern boundary of the plain, I found a huge, spreading Shemel tree overhanging the water. It was here that I decided to stop for a spell. I tied the horse to a low-hanging branch where he would have access to both water and grass. Retrieving the crossbow and quiver of arrows from the saddle, I chose a spot in the shade for myself and sat down.