Maia looked grim. ‘She says perhaps you should ask what will happen to her if you don’t find her.’
The Faun Light had been moving as fast as a stallion. Its prints were grouped tightly, its forked hooves tearing up sprays of dirt in its wake. It had galloped through this lonely wood perhaps an hour or so ago, hammering out a trail that wove through the gnarled trees. In the dawn sunlight sprinkled through the murk of leaves above, Cade could see the creature’s bulk had pressed its hooves deep into the ground, its weight squeezing moisture from the soil. The beast seemed much larger than he remembered.
He jumped, startled yet again to find one of the Sisters lurking behind him as he waded through the waist-high ferns. These armoured women seemed to vanish from sight every time he looked away. They were holding back, giving him room to interpret the trail, though Maia was never far from his side and he could feel One-Ear keeping a baleful watch upon him.
Cade still could not comprehend these women, let alone trust them. What they were, where they came from. Their appearance had kicked the world out from under him. The Horned Throne had been an indisputable presence in his life, as real as the earth upon which he walked. Now it seemed He was merely a primal echo of some greater cosmic truth, just as Abi had said. The concept defeated him, and he was glad of it. The possibility that Abi was in danger was all that mattered now, the only truth Cade cared to understand.
One-Ear gestured angrily.
‘You need to move faster,’ Maia told him.
‘Tell her ladyship, I’m moving as fast as I can.’
‘She can hear you perfectly well,’ said Maia. ‘So please be aware that you are addressing an honoured Oblivion Knight of the Silent Sisterhood.’
Not so high and bloody mighty that she could stop me from shaving an ear off her, thought Cade with a smirk, then paused to wonder fearfully whether One-Ear and her Sisters could read minds as well as cloud them. He quickly resumed brushing aside the ferns, picking out hoofprints, moving as swiftly as he could without losing the trail. He considered the sprawl of woods ahead. A thousand hiding places beckoned. Dense trees, dark hollows, green hillocks, everything drowning in thick ferns.
The path to Abi was known only to him. Without his guidance, these imperious gargoyles stalking behind him would be lost. Though he didn’t like to think what one of those enormous guns might do to him if they caught him trying to slip away.
Damn these bald hags, he thought, sizzling with resentment. He and his fellow orphans had been happy in the Cradle. They never wanted for protection. Why were these wretched Sisters of Silence even here?
One of them was carrying some kind of small metal utensil. It clicked and whirred in her hand as she scanned their surroundings, probing the undergrowth like she was dowsing for running water. The woman gestured at Maia, frustrated, her mysterious tool ineffectual.
‘We need human eyes out here, a hunter’s eyes,’ Maia told him. ‘If you see anything unusual, you must tell us immediately.’
Cade ignored her, absorbed in the trail, which now was staggering sideways and back, the hoofprints seeming to balloon in size with every step.
‘What is it?’ said Maia.
He motioned she be silent and immediately heard the jostle of guns made ready.
He could find no trace of Abi, no threads of hair or fabric, no streaks of blood, though judging by these tracks his quarry was now large enough to have swallowed her whole. He brushed aside another fern and trembled at the sight of what he found there. Hoofprints now bigger than those of a carthorse had resumed their progress north-east. But that was not all that had sent a shimmer of fear down his back.
Whatever beast he and Abi had summoned into that cornfield, it walked now upon two legs.
The bracken ahead of him was undisturbed, though the thing that had moved through it must have stood twice the height of a bear. It had moved with stealth, aware of its pursuers.
Again, Cade thought the Sisters had vanished, but there they were, aiming their guns into the trees. Maia had drawn a bulbous pistol. The surrounding leaves chuckled in the breeze, boughs creaking like rope. Cade could sense an unnatural stillness that spoke of something watching them from afar. He could sense it, the way a deer can sense the drawing of a bowstring. He scanned the distant undergrowth for an outline hunkered among the trees, some tell-tale movement that would betray the position of an adversary. But his vision throbbed with pain, disturbed by the Sisters’ unearthly presence. Cade felt panic brimming in his chest, then realised his mistake.
The trees were empty. Something had scared the birds from even the highest branches. Something was already here.
The attack erupted from behind before he could yell a warning.
He turned to see a black wave, like a hill tearing itself loose from behind the trees and crashing into the Sisters’ midst. He saw the woman with the dowsing device scooped off her feet by huge ribbed horns that smashed her through a tree, showering Cade in blood and tumbling leaves. He screamed in fright at what he thought at first to be a volley of thunderbolts. The Sisters’ guns were more like cannons, booming beasts that spat flashes of lightning, turning the woods into a flickering hell of noise and violence. They blasted bloody splashes across an immense muscled back before the giant disappeared into the trees.
The Sisters of Silence ceased fire, the air now a blizzard of tumbling leaves and wood dust. Cade felt a long arm enclose him. It was One-Ear, pulling him behind a tree. Cade squirmed in her grip; he felt like a mouse being dragged into a spider’s burrow. The others had cleaved to the larger trees, melting from his sight. One-Ear remained motionless, breathless as a dead thing. The stiffness of her embrace sent waves of maddening revulsion through his body. She was thumbing a large rivet built into her gauntlet, silently tapping out an order to the rest of the squad.
Minutes passed. The snow of leaves dwindled. Silence resumed. One-Ear finally stirred from cover.
‘Wait,’ said Cade. One-Ear hesitated and clicked the rivet in her gauntlet several times more.
By now the smaller predatory mammals – the bristlers and branch rats – should have emerged from their burrows. Yet Cade could hear no telltale rustling among the bracken. Even the ever-present moss midges had been dispelled from the air. The beast was still here, manoeuvring among the dense trees that cloaked its bulk, calculating its next devastating charge.
The limb of a tree lunged out from the swamp of ferns to his right, crashing aside a Sister who had been protecting One-Ear’s flank. The branch was gripped in a huge dark fist. The air suddenly ripened with a steamy perfume of sweat and honey as a familiar figure tottered into view on cloven hooves.
Half-drunk on its musk, Cade felt his knees buckle, though whether out of terror or adoration he did not know. Though it looked like the Horned Father risen in outrage from his throne upon the Tor, Cade knew it was not He. It was something else, something that wore His image. He knew from its malicious smirk, long brown teeth leering from behind human lips. Yet some instinct of self-preservation screamed at him to believe it was indeed the Horned Father.
It is Him. It must be Him.
He lied to himself over and over, for to believe anything other than the lie was to suggest a universe gone mad, a reality that harboured horrors beyond his imagining. Merely to contemplate such a concept was to invite madness.
Cade stared helplessly as the beast thrust its club at him like a spear. His head jerked as a powerful hand shoved him away. He heard an explosion of splintering wood. The earth trembled as he scrambled behind cover. Peering out from behind a fallen log, he beheld a scene out of legend, a primordial monster locked in mortal combat with a champion of humanity.
One-Ear had drawn a fabulous silver sword from her back, carving the air in silent flashing swirls. Her long legs needled the ground as she swirled about the beast’s flanks, her blade guiding away every crash of its immense club, threading herself into a series of counter-strikes.
The other Sisters surrounded the monster, their guns at the ready, giving their leader room to express her artistry. Slashes of luminous sap drooled over the black fur that covered the beast’s crooked legs, its bulging loins. Its naked torso was nut-brown and slabbed with muscle, its huge arms veined with green. A gnarled star of horns stood erect at its brow, tearing at the branches of the trees as it fought. Its eyes were pinpricks of gold.
It had hoped to strike and run, but its prey had proven tantalisingly elusive, an affront to its bestial majesty. It snorted as it stabbed at her again, trying to nail the bronze spider scuttling about its legs. But One-Ear turned the blow with an expert glance of her silvery fang, webbing the air with patterns that made Cade’s eyes burn to look at them.
He could see rows of scars cratered across the creature’s straining back where the guns of the Sisters had struck it. The thing had somehow healed. Cade recalled how it had drawn psychic sustenance from both he and Abi, rendering their arcane energy into solid flesh. Was it using Abi to regenerate its wounds? Charging into the Sisters’ ranks to deliver as much damage as it could, then retreating out of range to restore itself and charge again?
The creature struck a ringing blow upon One-Ear’s armoured shoulder then swung its club in a wide arc to deter her allies. The weapon descended, about to slam One-Ear to paste as she staggered back. But she spun her blade in a glimmering parry and the club fell in half, sheared in two. One-Ear had already moved aside, letting the creature stumble under its own momentum.
Cade ducked, clutching his ears as the Sisters’ cannons roared once again, blasting divots of flesh from the creature’s body. It ran at them, trampling two of them as it barged through the trees to escape the deadly fusillade, vanishing into the woods, too swift to follow.
One-Ear paused. Something was amiss. Her hand went to her waist, seeking Cade’s axe. But he had already slid the weapon from her belt with nimble hands when she had pulled him behind cover. He gripped the wooden shaft between his teeth, invisible beneath the bed of ferns as he elbowed along the ground towards freedom.
Cade knew the beast would eventually wear the Sisters down and kill them all. He could feel the creature restoring its wounded body, drinking from the same boundless reservoir of energy from which he had summoned it. He could feel the weight of that energy lapping like water at the edge of his consciousness as he crawled further away from the Sisters.
