The forest went on for two hours, and it was not a good forest.
Elliot had grown up beside woods. Woods had noise in them, birds arguing, something small crashing off through the bracken, the wind doing its work in the tops. This had none of that. The trees stood too far apart and too straight, the light under them the color of pond water, and the only sound for two hours was their own feet and Lyssara's breathing.
She walked ahead of him the whole way. Not out of courtesy. She'd put herself between him and the dark at the front, and every so often she'd stop dead, listen for a five-count, and move again without a word.
"You've done this before," he said, somewhere in the second hour.
"Walked?"
"Been hunted."
Lyssara didn't answer that. After a while she said, "Keep your voice low. Sound carries strangely here," which was not an answer either, and Elliot let her have it.
She is very good, Etreuf said. That is not a compliment. It is a description of a problem. Whoever taught her that stopping trick was a soldier, and she was young enough when she learned it that she does not know she is doing it.
Meaning?
Meaning she has been running since she was a child, and children do not run from bandits. They run from families. A pause. That is more than you needed to know about her, and you will do nothing useful with it, because you have decided she is a person you are going to help.
She has a name.
They always do, said Etreuf.
Then the trees ended, and the country beyond them opened up, and Elliot forgot everything he'd been about to say.
The land past the forest was flat and enormous and gold, plains running out to the edge of sight under a low green-lit sky, grass to the knee, moving in slow ranks like water. He had never seen so much of anything at once. Hollowmere was a valley. A valley had sides.
"Serenia," Lyssara said, watching his face with something almost like amusement. "The plains go three weeks east before they turn to sand. First time?"
"First time," Elliot managed.
"Enjoy it. That's the last nice thing you'll look at tonight."
She pointed.
The cemetery sat out on the plain about a mile off, and it was not a graveyard the way Hollowmere had a graveyard, a wall and a yew and forty stones. It was the size of a town. Elliot could see the shape of it in the dimness: rank on rank of markers running out in every direction, black and orderly, with a low wall around a section that must have been the old heart of it and nothing at all around the rest, because the rest had outgrown any wall anyone could build. There were paths in it wide enough for carts. There were lamps burning at the crossings.
And at the center, small with distance, a stone mausoleum, glowing faintly green from within.
The pull went through him like a hand closing.
Every step of the last week, the pressure at the back of his skull, the deep note in his teeth, all of it stopped being a sensation and became a direction. It was there. It had always been there. Under his shirt his mother's coin went warm.
He was walking before he registered that he'd started.
"Hey." Lyssara caught his arm. "Hey. Look at me." She got in front of him, and her green eyes searched his face, and whatever she found there made her jaw tighten. "You've got the look. I've seen that look. Men get it about gold, and about women, and it never once ended well."
"It's not like that."
"It never is." She let go. "Last chance. South road. There's a caravan town four days out and I'll get you onto a crew and you'll never have to think about any of this again."
Elliot looked at her, and something occurred to him for the first time.
"You could take it," he said. "The south road. You don't owe me anything, I cut a rope, that's all. You'd be gone by morning."
Lyssara went very still.
"Yeah," she said. "I could."
She didn't explain. She turned and started down the slope toward the plain, and after a second Elliot followed, and neither of them said anything about it for a long time afterward. But he noticed, and he would go on noticing, over the months that came, that the offer had been the first thing he ever said to her that she hadn't had an answer ready for.
The fog came up out of the ground half a mile from the gates.
It didn't roll in. It rose, thin and white, out of the grass itself, and it thickened as they walked until Elliot could no longer see the plain behind them, and the lamps of the cemetery hung ahead in the murk like a row of little moons.
"It does that," Lyssara said quietly. "It's the only place on the plain that has fog. People say the ground's too full."
The iron gates stood open. They were beautiful, real work, scrolled and heavy, the kind of thing a rich house puts on its drive, and they had been dragged here from somewhere and set up in the middle of nowhere, and they hung on their posts with no wall on either side of them. You could have walked around. Elliot understood, looking at them, that they weren't there to keep anyone out. They were there so that everyone who came would choose to walk through.
He walked through.
Inside, the graves went on forever.
That was the thing that got him, and kept getting him for the whole first quarter mile: the care. He had expected something squalid. It was immaculate. Every marker was straight. Every path was swept. The grass between the rows was cut short and even, mile after mile of it, and the lamps at the crossings were trimmed and full of oil and burning steady in the fog. Somebody walked this ground every day.
The stones had names cut into them. Not all, plenty said only A MAN, TAKEN AT THE WELL or A CHILD, NO NAME KNOWN, BURIED WITH HER SHOE. But the named ones had been cut carefully, with a mason's patience, thousands and thousands of them.
Elliot stopped in front of one and read it, and felt something under his ribs he had no word for.
"He buries them for free," Lyssara said. She was watching the fog, not the stones. "Anyone. Any village, any family, any dead thing they carry out here on a cart. No charge, no questions, and he does it himself." Her mouth twisted. "That's how it works. You take your mother out here because you can't afford a stone, and he cuts her name in one for nothing, and he does it kindly. And then in five years his men come to your village and stand in your street, and what are you going to do? Fight the man who buried your mother?"
Ah, said Etreuf. He sounded, unmistakably, appreciative. Now that is elegant.
It's disgusting.
It is both. That is why it works. A pause. Understand what you are walking toward, boy, because it is not a monster. Any fool can take a village with fear; fear is expensive and it spoils. This one has made himself necessary. Every corpse on this plain is a debt with his name on it and the debt does not die when the mourner does, it passes to the children. Something almost wistful moved in the demon's voice. I knew men in my realm who spent four hundred years failing to build what this one has built out of shovels and patience. If he were in Hell he would be a lord.
And what would you do about him? If he were?
Kill him early, said Etreuf, and take the graveyard.
The fog closed a little tighter.
They walked another twenty minutes. The mausoleum's glow got stronger and no nearer, the way a light does in fog, and the pull in Elliot's chest got so heavy that he had to keep his breathing even on purpose.
Then Lyssara stopped, five paces ahead, and said, in a voice gone completely flat, "Don't move."
"What"
"Don't move."
The fog ahead of them was no longer empty.
There was a shape in it. Tall, taller than a man ought to be, standing motionless in the middle of the swept path, and around it, hanging in the air at various heights, six or seven long dark rectangles that did not touch the ground.
The nearest one opened. Not on a hinge, its lid slid off itself, and there was nothing inside but dark, and it snapped shut again with a wet wooden clap that Elliot felt in his back teeth.
Then another. Then three at once.
They opened and shut in the fog like mouths.
What are those, Elliot said. His voice inside was very small.
I have no idea, said Etreuf, and I am becoming extremely tired of saying that.
The tall shape came forward into the lamplight.
Black robes, hanging in strips at the hem, wet to the knee with fog. A hood, thrown back. And a mask, pale, plain, with no expression cut into it at all, cracked clean across from the left brow to the jaw, the crack old and dark with years of handling.
Through the eyeholes, gray eyes. They went over Lyssara without stopping.
They stopped on Elliot.
"I knew you would come," said Kael Morvaine.
The voice was gravel and quiet, and worse than any shout, because it wasn't angry. It was the voice of a man confirming a delivery.
"The daggers called," he said. "Three nights ago they began to sing and they have not stopped, and I have sat with them every hour since, and they would not answer me." A pause. "Then a light came down in the west. And now here you are, walking into my ground at night, with the look on your face that I have been waiting eleven years to see on somebody."
He heard it too, Elliot thought, with a jolt of something that was almost relief and mostly horror. The bolt. He felt the bolt.
"I don't know what daggers you mean," he said aloud.
"No," Kael agreed. "You don't. That's the pity of it." The gray eyes moved, at last, to Lyssara. "You came back."
"You had me tied to a post."
"I had you kept. There's a difference, and you know there is, because my men are alive." Something in the mask's angle changed. "Four of them, and you left them breathing. That was you. It wouldn't have been him."
"It was him, actually," Lyssara said.
Kael was silent for a moment.
"Then I'm sorry for what has to happen," he said, "because that was a kind thing to do."
The coffins came.
There was no warning and no gesture. They simply stopped hanging and started moving, and the speed of them was obscene for their size — two tons of iron-banded wood crossing thirty feet in a blink.
Lyssara was already gone sideways. Elliot dove the other way and the coffin came through the space between them and hit a gravestone and the stone burst, and chips of it went past his face like shot.
"MOVE," Lyssara shouted. "Don't stop moving, they can't turn fast"
Two more came at her out of the fog. She went flat, rolled, came up between a row of markers where the coffins couldn't follow abreast, and Elliot lost sight of her.
Three of them turned toward him.
He ran. He ran the way a rabbit runs, down a swept path with his boots skidding on wet grass and the roar of the things behind him, and it was very clear within about four seconds that he was not going to outrun them.
Give me the fire, he said.
Take it.
The dark opened up his spine and his hands lit red-black, and Elliot spun and threw everything he had at the nearest coffin.
The fire hit it square. It went over the wood and the iron bands in a wave, the same black threads racing outward that had gone up under the marsh-thing's skin and unmade it from the inside, and the coffin came through the fire without slowing.
It caught him in the chest.
Elliot was airborne for what felt like a long time. He came down on his back in the grass between two rows with all the air knocked out of him and his ribs shrieking, and above him the fog glowed orange where the fire still burned on the coffin's lid, going out slowly, having done nothing at all.
It didn't work, he wheezed. Etreuf, it didn't work.
I noticed. The demon's voice was tight. Get up. GET UP!
Elliot rolled. The coffin came down where his head had been and drove a foot into the earth.
He got his knees under him, his hands, staggered up. Twenty feet away, Kael Morvaine had not moved at all. He stood in the path with his hands at his sides, and the mask turned to follow, and Elliot understood with a cold lurch that the man wasn't even fighting. He was supervising.
"The fire is remarkable," Kael said. "I've seen nothing like it. But you're burning wood." He tilted his head. "They're not wood."
"They look like wood!"
"So does a coffin," said Kael. "That's rather the point of one."
Boy, Etreuf said. Let me have it.
Elliot's stomach dropped. Have what?
All of it. Your hands, your legs, your mouth, all of it, the way I had you in the marsh and further. You are going to die in the next thirty seconds because you fight like a farmhand and there is a professional standing over there taking notes. The words came fast and hard. I have fought things that could break this whole field. I know how to lose slowly, which is the only skill that matters when you are outmatched, and you do not have it and cannot learn it in thirty seconds. Give me the body.
Another coffin came out of the fog. Elliot threw himself flat and it took the top off a gravestone above him.
If I say yes, he said, do I get it back?
A fractional pause.
Yes.
Say it properly.
I will give it back, Etreuf said, with hatred, because you dying and me being trapped in a corpse are the same event. Now, boy.
"Fine," Elliot said aloud, and heard his own voice shake. "But no killing."
What?
"No killing. Not him, not his men, not, nobody dies tonight. Say it."
You are being crushed to death by furniture and you want terms
"SAY IT."
...Agreed, Etreuf snarled. No killing. Now let go.
Elliot let go.
It was not like the marsh. In the marsh they had moved together and the seam had been nowhere he could find. This was different. This was stepping back from a window and letting someone else stand at it.
He felt his own body come up off the grass in one smooth motion he could never have made. He felt his own mouth pull into an expression that had nothing to do with him not a snarl. A smile. A small, cold, delighted smile, the smile of something that had been shut in the dark for a fortnight and had just been let out.
His hands came up burning.
The next coffin came in and Etreuf did not try to burn it. He turned his shoulder, took the impact along the outside of the arm, and rode it, went with the thing instead of against it, and used its own speed to put himself twelve feet clear and land on his feet in the grass.
Across the path, Kael went very still.
"Ah," he said softly. "Now I see it." The gray eyes were wide behind the cracked mask. "You're not one. You're two."
"Observant," said Etreuf, with Elliot's mouth, in a voice that was almost Elliot's and entirely wrong. He rolled the shoulder, testing it, and looked down at the burning hands with an expression of frank contempt. "This is what I have to work with. A boy, a candle, and a very great deal of your local weather." He looked up. "It will do."
Two coffins came at once.
Etreuf went between them.
It should not have been possible; the gap closed as he entered it. He turned side-on in the air, and the lids clapped shut behind him with a crack like a falling tree, and he came down running, not at Kael, Elliot noticed from somewhere far back behind the glass, but past him, angling, herding, drawing them all in one direction so they had to turn together,
You said no killing, Elliot said.
I am not killing anyone, Etreuf said pleasantly. I am losing slowly. Watch.
He ducked under a coffin, put a burning hand flat on a gravestone as he passed, and the stone burst, not from fire, from the sheer force of the shove, and the fragments went up into the path of the one behind. It slewed. It clipped a lamp post. The lamp went over and the oil went across the wet grass and did not catch.
Kael turned his head to follow it, and for one half-second his attention was somewhere else.
And in that half-second Elliot, who was not driving, who had nothing to do but watch, who had spent his whole life noticing things while other people were busy, saw the thing that mattered.
Every coffin in the field was moving. Six of them, seven, weaving through the fog. And all of them, no matter where they went or what they hit, kept their long axis pointed the same way. Like compass needles. Like iron filings.
Pointed back over Kael's shoulder, at the low green glow of the mausoleum at the heart of the cemetery.
Etreuf.
Busy.
Etreuf, they're tied to the building. Elliot's own voice, in his own head, sounded very far away and very sure. He's not making them. He's borrowing them. It's all coming from in there.
The demon didn't answer for one long stride.
Then, with an interest so sharp it was almost hunger: ...Well. Perhaps you are not entirely furniture after all.
He broke right, straight off the path, and ran for the glow.
Behind them Kael Morvaine's voice came through the fog for the first time with something in it that was not calm.
"Not that way."