And sure enough, there was no sign of the second sword he had been wearing at his back.
“You did have them,” I said, getting to my feet, my body feeling like it had been plunged into icy water. “I saw them. Only a moment ago you had them.”
“No,” he said, his expression as before, “you are mistaken. I have only this.”
“Where did you get it?” I spluttered, nodding at the sword.
“What?”
“Where did you get it? Tell me about the first man you killed with it.”
“I don’t remember.”
He was quite calm, but his face had changed. A grayness had come into his eyes and his features had grown hard and implacable.
“I do,” I shouted. “I remember but you don’t? Does that strike you as terribly likely, swordsman?”
I turned hurriedly and kicked at Renthrette. There was a pause, and then his voice-or a voice like his but quite changed now-came low and cold as a mountain ice storm.
“You cannot wake her,” it said.
I spun and found that Orgos had risen silently and now loomed over me, all semblance of my friend running from him like melting wax. The grayness I had seen in the eyes was spreading cloud-like throughout his features, and with it came an odor, increasingly foul and pungent, but dry as old bones. It was decay.
“You are not Orgos,” I announced, somewhat redundantly in the circumstances, hoping that this would dispel whatever it was that was materializing.
“I am what is left of him,” the creature rasped. The cloud dissipated and the blasted corpse was revealed, desiccated and crumbling. The lipless jaws parted, but the sound that came out was more an emanation of the whole body than it was a voice:
“Fly, William, or perish utterly. Fly, or cower in despair. Fly, or have your body rent by pain, your mind by terror, and your heart by misery. Fly, or learn to wish for death and grieve unceasing that it never comes.”
The specter’s sightless eyes held me fast and, as its lower jaw fell away completely, its fleshless arms rose and bony fingers closed hard about my shoulders, pinning me to the spot. A new coldness, like the moist chill of grave earth, seeped into my body. I screamed, a long wail of horror, right into the skeletal face which closed on mine like some deathly suitor. One of its fingers splintered. Then another. Part of the face collapsed into the hollow skull, and the forearms snapped abruptly. The ribcage caved in, and in less than a few seconds, the entire corpse had crumpled in a shower of dust. It fell in a pile at my feet, dwindling still, fragmenting, disintegrating, reducing to powder.
And still I screamed.
SCENE IX The White City
An hour had passed, an hour in which I talked a skeptical Renthrette through the details of my ghastly encounter bit by bit, over and over, as I worked to convince her that this wasn’t some bizarre prank. As the incident faded I expected to rediscover my sanity and find some ingenious way to dismiss it, but I didn’t. The visitation had happened and it had been a conscious force, not the product of some hallucinatory mushroom accidentally included in dinner: a dubious claim which was impossible to substantiate, of course, but one I was sure of nonetheless.
Renthrette was equally certain that this was a none-too-clever ruse on my part to justify fleeing for Stavis as the apparition had instructed. I told her that even if I did want to leave this bloody place-which, obviously, I did-we still had no idea how we would actually do that, so conjuring this spectral advisor just to change her mind made no sense. Go back to Stavis? Fine. How exactly? Which direction was it in? Did I have to summon a storm and a black carriage like the one which had brought us here in the first place, and, if so, how precisely was I supposed to do that? She grudgingly backed off, which was just as well, because I was on the verge of telling her that the thing which had come walking up to me in the forest had claimed to be what was left of Orgos, which would mean that he was already dead. If that was true. . Well, there seemed little point in confronting that possibility right now.
And there was one bit of evidence on my side. The bones hadn’t all collapsed into dust, and those fragments that remained-including part of the skull-looked to me more goblin than human.
“So what does it mean?” I asked, staring into the fire. I couldn’t quite shake the feeling of a deep cold in my bones.
“Mean?” said Renthrette distractedly. “It doesn’t mean anything. Not everything means something, you know.”
“Yes, it does,” I insisted. This was the one thing I had learned from my years in the Thrusian theater. Everything means something, even if you can’t control what that meaning is. If you ever doubt that little unimportant-seeming things mean something, try farting on stage during a tragic death scene. Trust me on this. “This means something.”
“Then, what?”
“I’m not sure, but I’ll make a guess,” I said, fiddling with a stick which had caught fire at one end. “Some goblin force, a spirit or something, crossed over from the other forest, from Sarak-Nul, I mean, and came looking for us. It was very specific in its choice of identity and there has to be a reason for that. It animated a goblin corpse, perhaps, and used my thoughts to clothe it, as it were, as a person I knew. I had been thinking of Orgos earlier-missing him, I guess-and it somehow seized my mental picture of him and fashioned its form accordingly. Something like that. It chose a person I respect, a person whose company I missed, and presented him as he exists in my head, which is why it got the swords wrong. When that mistake was revealed, the spell (or whatever it was) fell apart for some reason, as if the controlling force couldn’t sustain the illusion once I became suspicious. The question is, why go to all that trouble?”
“Maybe it was just some wandering ghost-” began Renthrette.
I cut her off, swallowing back the now ludicrous urge to say that I did not believe in ghosts. “No,” I said. “It had a purpose. It was trying to get rid of us by saying that we were in danger, out of our element, guaranteed to fail. . ”
“Whatever it was, it read you like a book,” Renthrette remarked, a sly little smile crinkling the edge of her mouth.
“Thanks,” I said. “But my point is that it was willfully misreading the Orgos in my head. He never would have said all that stuff about running away. That suggests real purpose. It wanted us gone enough to violate the disguise in a very risky fashion. There is more to this than meets the eye. If we are so impotent, why did it want us out of the way? If we are so obviously doomed, why go to the trouble of trying to get rid of us? Maybe we actually aren’t completely out of our element. Maybe we can do something aside from getting ourselves killed. . Tough to believe, but there it is.”
We continued our trek across the forest for the rest of the day. Renthrette led, sedate and watchful. I followed, glancing behind me from time to time in case that rustle of wind in the trees was actually the corpse of an old mate coming to share some thoughts on what we should do next.
The air was moist and cool, and wisps of mist still trailed along the forest floor and over the still, dark surface of the river. Then a rocky escarpment rose up on the bank and we had to turn from the water and into the forest to get round it. It was about thirty feet high, irregular, and creviced in ridges and craggy, tuber-like growths. A few withered bushes and weeds struggled out of the thin soil in its cracks, and boulders dropped from God knew where were scattered among the undergrowth. And in one horseshoe hollow was a cave. Its mouth was tight, only a few feet across, and inside was a dark tunnel that burrowed back toward the river.