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.”