Chronicles of Ancient Darkness
Chapter 28 : That was how Renn found him: standing rigid with his knife in his hand, staring upwards

That was how Renn found him: standing rigid with his knife in his hand, staring upwards.

'What's wrong?' she said. 'Why did you run away? Are you did you eat something bad?' She didn't want to voice her fear that he might have the sickness.

'I'm all right,' he replied which clearly wasn't true. His hand shook as he sheathed his knife.

'Your lips have gone grey,' said Renn.

'I'm all right,' he said again.

As he sat beneath the beech tree, she glanced at his hands, but couldn't see any blisters. She tried not to show her relief. 'Maybe a bad mushroom?' she suggested.

'The Hidden People,' he cut in. 'What do they look like?'

'What? But you know as well as I do. They look like us, except when they turn their backs, they're rotten -'

'Their faces, what about their faces?'

'I told you, like us! Why? What's this about?'

He shook his head. 'I thought I saw something. I thought maybe it's the Hidden People who are causing the sickness.'

'No,' said Renn. 'I don't think it is.' She dreaded having to tell him what she'd learned at the healing rite. It wasn't fair. After everything he'd done last winter . . .

To put it off, she went to the stream and washed the clay from her face, then chipped away the thick layer on her palms which had allowed her to carry the hot ash without getting burned. Then she grabbed a clump of wet moss and took it back for Torak. 'Put this to your forehead. It'll make you feel better.'

Sitting in the ferns beside him, she shook some hazelnuts from her food pouch and began cracking them on a stone. She offered one to Torak, but he declined. She sensed that neither of them wanted to talk about the sickness, but both were thinking of it.

Torak asked how she'd found him.

She snorted. 'I may not speak wolf talk, but I'd know your howl anywhere.' She paused. 'Still no word of him?'

'No,' he said shortly.

She ate another nut.

Torak said, 'The healing rite. It didn't help, did it?'

'If anything, it made things worse. Oslak and Bera seem to think the whole clan's against them.' She frowned. 'Saeunn says she's heard of sicknesses like this in the deep past, after the Great Wave. Whole clans died out. The Roe Deer. The Beaver Clan. She says there may have been a cure long ago, but it was lost. She says it's a sickness rooted in fear. That it grows fear. As trees grow leaves.'

'Like leaves on a tree,' murmured Torak. He reached for a stick and began peeling off the bark. 'Where does it come from?'

She couldn't put it off any longer. She had to tell him. 'Do you remember,' she began reluctantly, 'what Oslak said on the walkway?'

His fingers tightened on the stick. 'I've been thinking that too. "Eating my souls . . . "' He swallowed. 'Soul-Eaters.'

The birds stopped singing. The dark trees tensed.

'Is that what you mean?' said Torak. 'Do you think the Soul-Eaters have something to do with the sickness?'

Renn hesitated. 'Maybe. Don't you?'

He leapt to his feet and paced, dragging the stick over the bracken. 'I don't know. I don't even know who they are.'

'Torak -'

'All I know,' he said with sudden fierceness, 'is that they were Mages who went bad. All I know is that my father was their enemy although he never told me anything.' He slashed at the bracken. 'All I know is that something happened that broke their power, and people thought they were gone, but they weren't. And last summer -' he faltered, 'last summer, a crippled Soul-Eater made the bear that killed Fa.'

Savagely he stabbed the earth. Then he threw away the stick. 'But maybe you're wrong, Renn, maybe they didn't -'

'Torak no. Listen to me. Oslak scratched a sign in the dust. A three-p.r.o.nged fork for snaring souls. The mark of the Soul-Eaters.'

FIVE.

The Soul-Eaters. They were woven into his destiny, and yet he knew so little about them. All he knew was that there were seven: each from a different clan, each warped by their hunger for power.

Down by the river, a vixen screamed. In the shelter, Vedna tossed and turned, worrying about her mate. Torak lay in his sleeping-sack, thinking of the evil that could send a sickness to ravage the clans.

To rule the Forest . . .

But no-one could do that. No-one could conquer the trees, or stop the prey from following the ancient rhythms of the moon. No-one could tell the hunters where to hunt.

When at last he slept, his dreams were haunted. He crouched on a dark hillside, frozen in horror as a faceless Soul-Eater crawled towards him. He scrambled back. His hand met a scaly softness that wriggled and bit. He tried to run. Tree-roots coiled clammily about his ankles. A winged shadow swooped with a leathery thwap. The Soul-Eaters were upon him, and their malice beat at him like flame . . .

He woke.

It was dawn. The breath of the Forest misted the trees. He knew what he had to do.

'Is Oslak any better?' he asked Vedna as he left the shelter.

'The same,' she said. Her eyes were red, but the glare she gave him warded off sympathy.

He said, 'I need to talk to Fin-Kedinn. Have you seen him?' 'He's downriver. But you leave him be.'

He ignored her.

Already the camp was busy. Men and women crouched on the walkway with spears, while others woke the fires for daymeal. In the distance came the 'tock! tock!' of hammer on stone. Everyone was trying not to think about Oslak and Bera, tied up in the sickness shelter.

Torak followed the path downstream: past the rapids, and round a bend which took him out of sight of the camp. Here the Widewater flowed less turbulently, and the salmon were fleeting silver darts in the deep green water.

Fin-Kedinn sat on a boulder by the river's edge, making a knife. His tools lay beside him: hammer-stones, shapers, beaker of black, boiled pine-blood. Already a small pile of needle-sharp stone flakes nestled in moss at his feet.

As Torak approached, his heart began to pound. He admired the Raven Leader, but was scared of him too. Fin-Kedinn had taken him in after Fa was killed, but he'd never offered to foster him. There was a remoteness about him, as if he'd decided not to let Torak get too close.

Clenching his fists, Torak stood on the bank. 'I need to talk to you,' he said.

'Then talk,' said Fin-Kedinn without looking up.

Torak swallowed. 'The Soul-Eaters. They sent the sickness. It's my destiny to fight them. So that's what I'm going to do.'

Fin-Kedinn went on studying a round, buff-coloured stone the size of his fist. It was a Sea egg: a rarity in the Forest. The Ravens used mostly slate, antler or bone for their weapons, because flint in the form of Sea eggs was found only on the coast, where the Sea clans traded them for horn and salmon skins.

Frustrated, Torak tried again. 'I have to stop them. To put an end to this!'

'How?' said Fin-Kedinn. 'You don't know where they are. None of us does.' With his hammer-stone he tapped the Sea egg, checking from the sound that the flint was free from flaws.

Torak flinched. That 'tock! tock!' brought back painful memories. He'd grown up to the sound of Fa knapping stone by the fire. It had made him feel safe. How wrong he had been.

He said, 'Renn told me there have been powerful sicknesses like this in the past but also a cure. So maybe -'

'That's what I've spent all night trying to find out,' said Fin-Kedinn. 'There's a rumour that one of the Deep Forest Mages knows a cure.'

'Where?' cried Torak. 'How do we get it?'

Fin-Kedinn struck the Sea egg a hard blow which took the top clean off. Inside, the flint was the colour of dark honey, threaded with scarlet. 'Not so fast,' he told Torak. 'Think first. Impatience can get you killed.'

Torak threw himself down on the bank, and tore at the gra.s.s.

Using a small antler club, Fin-Kedinn struck flakes off the core, deftly controlling their size by the speed and slant of the blow. Tock! Tock! went the hammer, telling Torak to wait.

Eventually, Fin-Kedinn spoke. 'In the night, an Otter woman came in a canoe. Two of them have fallen sick.'

Torak went cold. The Otter Clan lived far in the east, on the sh.o.r.es of Lake Axehead. 'Then it's everywhere,' he said. 'I have to get to the Deep Forest. If there's even a chance . . .'

Fin-Kedinn sighed.

'Who else could you send?' said Torak. 'You're needed here. Saeunn's too old for the journey. Everyone else has to guard the sick, or hunt, or catch salmon.'

Fin-Kedinn chose a thumb-length antler shaper, and sharpened a flint flake with delicate grinding motions. 'The people of the Deep Forest rarely concern themselves with us. Why do you think they'd help?'

'That's why it should be me!' insisted Torak. 'My mother was Red Deer Clan! I'm their bone kin, they'd have to listen to me!' But he'd never known his mother, who had died when he was born, and he spoke with more a.s.surance than he felt.

A muscle worked in Fin-Kedinn's jaw as he took up the haft of the knife: a length of reindeer s.h.i.+n-bone with a groove in it to take the flint. Dipping a sharpened flake in pine-blood, he slotted it into the bone. 'Has it not occurred to you,' he said, 'that this might be exactly what the Soul-Eaters want?' He raised his head, and his blue eyes burned with such intensity that Torak dropped his gaze. 'Last winter after you fought the bear, I forbade anyone to speak of it outside the clan. You know this.'

Torak nodded.

'Because of that, the only thing the Soul-Eaters know is that someone in the Forest has power. They do not know who.'

He paused. 'They don't know who, Torak. Nor do they know the nature of that power. None of us does.'

Torak caught his breath. Fin-Kedinn's words echoed what Fa had said as he lay dying. All my life I've kept you apart . . . Stay away from men, Torak! If they find out what you can do . . .

But what could he do? For a time he'd thought Fa had meant his ability to speak wolf; but from what Fin-Kedinn had said, there had to be more.

'This sickness,' said the Raven Leader, 'it could be a trick: the Soul-Eaters' way of forcing you into the open.'

'But even if it is, I can't just do nothing. I have to help Oslak. I can't stand it seeing him like this!'

The hard face softened. 'I know. Neither can I.'

There was silence while Fin-Kedinn slotted in more flint, and Torak stared across the river. The sun had risen above the trees, and the water was dazzling. Squinting, he made out a heron on the far bank; a raven wading after sc.r.a.ps of salmon.

The blade was complete: about a hand long, and as jagged and sharp as a wolverine's jaw. To finish it, Fin-Kedinn wound finely split pine root around the haft to make a warm, sure grip. 'Now,' he said. 'Show me your knife.'

Torak frowned. 'What?'

'You heard. Show it to me.'

Puzzled, Torak unsheathed the knife which had been his father's, and handed it over.

It had a beautiful leaf-shaped blade of blue slate, and an antler haft bound with elk sinew. Fa had told him that the blade was of Seal Clan making. Fa's mother had been a Seal, and she'd given it to him when he'd reached manhood; he'd fitted the hilt himself. As he lay dying, he had given the knife to Torak. Torak was very proud of it.

But as the Raven Leader handled it, he shook his head. 'Too heavy for a boy. A Mage's knife, made for ceremony.' He handed it back. 'He was always too casual about such things.'

Torak longed for him to say more, but he didn't. Instead he set the new knife across his forefinger, appraising it with a critical eye. It lay level, perfectly balanced.

Beautiful, thought Torak.

The Raven Leader flipped it round, caught it by the blade, and held it out. 'Take it. I made it for you.'

After a moment's astonishment, Torak took it.

Fin-Kedinn cut short his thanks. 'From now on,' he said, rising to his feet with the aid of his staff, 'keep your father's knife hidden. Your mother's medicine horn, too. If anyone asks about your parents, don't speak of them.'

'I don't understand,' said Torak.

But Fin-Kedinn wasn't listening. He'd gone still, staring at the river.

Torak shaded his eyes with his hand, but couldn't see much for the glare. Only the heron on the far bank, and a log in midstream, sliding downriver.

In the camp, a woman began to keen: a tearing sound that rose above the rapids and chilled Torak's blood.

Men and women came running down the trail.

Torak gasped.

That wasn't a log floating downriver.

It was Oslak.