Prince Mortiman held his spear, hands clenching and twisting around the haft.
“I can’t just leave him,” Caliph said.
His ears picked through every sound. The falling leaves, the shush-shush of wind in the bracken. Nothing strange disturbed the mountain woods but he felt a slight involuntary shiver.
Sena’s voice drew his attention. He looked up, saw her eyes: wide, blue and frightened. “Caliph. We. Have. To. Go!”
She kicked her horse. Its bouquet of tails snarled. It coughed viciously and stamped its claws into the clay. Even these intimidating creatures seemed to grow nervous as evening sucked away the day.
Prince Mortiman turned his horse around and lashed its reins.
Sheridan seemed impatient. “Come on, Dad.”
The baron of Bogswallow raised his eyebrows at the High King.
“If we don’t want to be left, we’d best let your animal find his own way home.”
Caliph abandoned his work with a sigh. He buckled his bag and hurriedly pulled himself back onto his saddle.
“This is ridiculous,” he hissed.
The daylight faded as Vaughan and his father watched both ways while Caliph got his horse turned around in the thick brush.
But as the High King negotiated the terrain, he felt his well-anchored skepticism begin to crumble. Old familiar fears rose out of memory. He urged his horse into a gallop. Surreal tentacles seemed to morph and lengthen from behind.
Something snapped inside Caliph at the exact moment that the horse truly began to fly, as though the fear of rider or beast had somehow infected the other.
Clawing from the darkness of his past as much as from the mountains, a nameless horror bore down on Caliph Howl. It had eyes. Greedy, leering eyes. And teeth slick with the blood of dogs.
CHAPTER 36
Caliph lashed the reins on the mad snarl of horseflesh beneath him. Branches blurred: a delirious black net above the shred of claws. He felt like he was eight again. He felt nauseous.
He couldn’t tell whether he was tumbling or sliding or falling down the mountainside. A dry corn leaf, blown high above the valley like a runaway kite, wobbled through the air.
Down, down, down. The horse leapt a gully, scrambled for its footings, found balance and charged on. Down into forests of dying autumn where the bitter ale of fermenting leaves curdled air. Down where sunlight grew lost and confused. Down into nightmares he had forgotten long ago.
He had no idea where Sena and the others were. As though a mental tie had snapped on an overburdened wagon in his mind, a carefully stacked mountain of irrational fears rumbled down behind him. They burst forth in an avalanche, tumbling after his horse into the foothills.
Like a child running from the dark, there was no why. It was fear of the darkness. Nothing more.
Stones clattered on the steep grade. The horse roared. Its claws divorced ground. Everything grew silent for one eternal moment as the sky and trees spun past Caliph’s eyes. He watched the branches pass in slow revolutions like great black swatches of funerary lace.
The muted muddy tones of autumn twirled past him. Rough bark. Ragged leaves. Sticks and stones. The black markings of ghostwoods, like a million sinister eyes, stared at him from pallid faces.
They watched him fall.
He should have died in the mountain woods of the Healean Range. He should have cracked his legs or neck in half or crushed his skull on numberless boulders.
Instead he landed in a deep patch of decomposing leaves that had accumulated in a wash where two hills met.
Like a dart thrown at a board he landed miraculously, standing up, planted to his shins in spongy compost. Behind him, his horse lay silent as though exhausted by the long run.
The rational part of Caliph’s head yammered at him to stop, but instinct drove him on. He forgot the freakish rarity of his landing, relinquished one of his boots to the suction of the bog and fled on foot.
Away!
He galloped with an uneven gait. His unshod foot tore against fallen branches and stones. He cursed. He could feel the darkness behind him, a creature that mimicked his limp, pushing itself over the ground. He could hear it clawing through the leaves, hunting him between the blackened trunks.
Without looking back he sprinted up one of the wooded hills and began down the other side. From behind, he heard the heavy sound of pursuit change to an echo of his own feet shredding leaves.
The thing moved fast—faster than he could run.
Tears from sprinting in the cold blurred Caliph’s sight. But up ahead, something gleamed. Something the light picked out at odd angles. Pink flat shapes standing in crooked rows amid the saplings.
Caliph coughed up, nearly choked on a sour laugh.
His bare foot felt like it was on fire. Icy tasteless air burnt his lungs. Limping, cackling at the irony, he stumbled into the Howl burial grounds.
His voice escaped, broken and dissonant from his parched throat. It snagged in the trees. He whirled, nearly blind, jerked the safety ring counterclockwise, and drew his chemiostatic sword with a crackle of green.
A flurry of dark cloth filled his vision. Something flew through the air. It had launched itself just before he turned around. A black-and-gold shape struck him heavily in the chest, sending him sprawling amid the graves.
His sword, jolted from his grasp, did mindless cartwheels on the spot, sent its bolt of electricity harmlessly into the ground.
The creature pinned him with expert efficiency. Everything went black.
“Caliph? Caliph? It’s okay.”
A cloak’s heavy folds parted revealing a yellow sky, shadowy branches and a disheveled but gorgeous halo of golden hair.
Sena’s lips gasped, forming airy words just above his face. Her body pressed him into the carpet of leaves.
Even though Caliph’s horror had already given way to dazed surrender, his mind, for some unaccountable reason, had snagged on the memory of their struggle in the library.
His hand fumbled reflexively for his sword but it was stuck in the ground several yards away.
“I think you’re bleeding,” she wheezed.
She was real. Caliph’s hideous exhaustion-strangled laugh echoed through the trees. He closed his eyes and began to cough.
“Thirsty—”
“Me too. The water is a hundred yards back with my horse.”
She rolled off and lay on her back like him, staring up at the tangle of limbs. For a minute they both gulped oxygen.
“I don’t know where the others are.” She swallowed. “I think Sheridan fell. I saw you go down the slope and followed you. Your horse is dead.”
Caliph winced and tried to sit up.
“Don’t—” She forced herself to all fours, pulling a leaf from her hair. “You stepped on a branch and ran part of it into your foot. Hold still.”
Her fist took hold of a fat twig protruding from the tender skin between his toes and yanked it out with a swift straight jerk. “It’s a mess down here,” she said.
Caliph bit back on the pain that exploded in his foot.
“Thanks.” He sounded ridiculously apologetic.
She examined the wound for fragments.
Caliph swore under his breath. It felt like she was digging with a shovel.
“What did you say happened to Sheridan?” he asked, trying to stay still.
“I don’t know. Maybe he got eaten and that’s why we’re still alive.” She scrunched her nose in distaste and put her mouth to the wound. She sucked hard and spit.
“I’ll go to the horse. I think brandy and linen is all we have to work with.” Crouched at his feet in the twilight like a beautiful ghoul, lips red with his pain, she made efforts to reassure him. “I’ll hurry.”