The Crow (49 page)

After a while, he realized what the relief was. For the first time in days, he did not feel nauseous. His earth sense reached deep into the ground with a profound, contented joy.

Where am I?
he asked himself. He didn't know that he had spoken aloud, but he must have, because someone answered him.

It is not where,
a voice said,
but when.

Hem jumped, his skin tightening with shock, and he looked wildly around. He couldn't see who spoke.

Do not fear,
said the voice.
Here is no harm. Breathe the good air.

Hem stared at the tree. Perhaps the voice came from there: it had felt so alive.
Are you speaking to me?
he asked, feeling foolish.

There was a pause, and then, as he watched, the air before him twitched, as if it were a curtain, and a naked man was suddenly standing in front of him. If standing was the right word, thought Hem; he floated above the ground, in an orb that seemed to ripple with waves of shimmering light. His hair was long and dark, lapping down his back, and he was pale-skinned; but what caught Hem's attention were his eyes, golden and cleft with a vertical pupil. An Elidhu...

We have met before, Songboy,
said the Elidhu.
Or was it after? It is sometimes hard to tell.

Hem nodded, his mouth suddenly dry. He knew that this was the same Elidhu he had seen in Nal-Ak-Burat, although he bore no resemblance to the half-tree, half-man he had seen then. He was not as frightening in this semblance, but Hem's heart hammered in his chest; here in the open air he seemed more wild, more untamed, more beautiful.

Does my home please you?
asked the Elidhu.
This is myself.

Hem nodded fervently, not quite understanding and, in any case, finding himself unable to speak. The Elidhu laughed, then he reached forward and touched Hem's forehead. His hand was dry and cool. Hem shivered, not with fear, but with a deep delight, and a pleasant warmth spread through his body.

Ah, you are weary,
said the Elidhu.
So weary. Rest, my child.

As he spoke, the Elidhu was becoming less substantial, as if he were made of mist; Hem could see through him to the hills beyond. He watched as the Elidhu slowly faded until he had vanished altogether. His voice lingered in the air after him.
Rest in my home...

Home, Hem thought; ah, I know what he means. Here was no lintel, no door, no roof, and yet he was suffused with a sweet sense of homeliness, of belonging in some indefinable way to his surroundings. All at once he felt no fear or confusion, just a voluptuous sleepiness. He yawned, lay down on the soft grass in the shade of the tree, and fell fast asleep.

When he woke again, back in the hut with the snouts, he felt completely refreshed, as if he had slept for hours and hours. He lay for a time on his pallet, thinking about his strange dream. Could it have been real, after all? Given that he had kept himself awake in order to raid the garden, he could not have had more than a couple of hours of sleep; but he didn't feel tired. He lifted his arms above his head, stretching, and saw with a tiny shock a green bruise on his forearm, where he had tried to pinch himself awake during the night.

Once Hem had solved the pressing problem of food, he began to settle into the camp's routine. It was very simple: training all day, meals morning and night, a lighter meal at noon. The snouts were certainly not starved, which made him wonder at their emaciated appearances. To his relief, the counting didn't occur every night: it was a tedious ritual that seemed to bore even the Hulls and other commanders.

Saliman had told Hem about the rigid caste distinctions in Den Raven, and Hem studied the Hulls cautiously, trying to guess where they fitted in the rankings. Unlike the other snouts, he found it difficult to tell the Hulls apart: they all used glimmerspells, glamouring themselves as noble men and women, but the disguises didn't fool Hem's eyes. Those at the camp were not on the whole, Hem reckoned, especially important. However, there was one Hull, universally referred to as "the Spider," that really frightened him; Hem took care to evade the Spider's notice, as he could feel the aura of its sorcery even from the other end of the training ground. He was glad that he had not met the Spider on his first night; he thought he would almost certainly have been discovered. The other Hulls – he counted six – had less native power than Hem did, although they used it prodigally. After his short training in the ethics of the Balance, Hem was shocked when he saw one Hull weathercalling, tearing a rent in the clouds to let sunshine fall on the vegetable garden, and then, just as casually, causing a local rainstorm. No Bard would use their magery so wantonly.

Hem found that life as a snout was, more than anything, intensely boring. No one except him seemed to be bored, but Hem sometimes thought he would suffocate with it. Disobedience scarcely existed: when snouts were given orders they obeyed immediately, without question. At night they went to sleep early and did not stir. There were none of the midnight cruelties that Hem had occasionally witnessed during his time in the orphanage: no sly, vengeful beatings or murders of weaker children. He found it uncanny.

Occasionally Hem saw children collapse under the training. They were taken away, and at first he thought that they would be treated for exhaustion. When he questioned Reaver about it, however, he was told that if it happened more than three times, they were not seen again.

"Only the best stay at Sjug'hakar Im," Reaver said, with a pride that made Hem's stomach curdle. "All the weaklings are vanished."

"Where do they go?" asked Hem. Reaver gave him a swift, contemptuous glance, and Hem realized that he had broken a code. He covered it up with an imbecilic giggle. In Sjug'hakar Im, you did not ask any questions if a snout suddenly disappeared, just as you never asked any questions about anyone's past life.

Retribution for transgressions, real or imagined, was severe. Hem had not been there long before he began to suspect that punishment was doled out randomly, with no thought for even the crudest justice. Snouts were punished as examples to the others, to reinforce with fear the bewitchment that kept them enslaved. It was also what passed in the camp for entertainment.

Reaver had already told him about the spike, but there were other savage punishments. One of the more merciful – because it was, at least, quick – was the cur kill, which Hem witnessed on his third day. The blocks were ordered out for their usual morning drill, but instead of breaking for the midday meal an announcement was made by one of the Hulls. The snouts roared and whooped, waving their weapons over their heads, and then began to chant. It was too far away for Hem to hear, and he turned to Reaver to ask what was happening.

Reaver, his face distorted with a lust that made Hem recoil, was shouting with the others. Together they were making a massive noise: "Cur kill! Cur kill!" He took no notice of Hem's question. Not wanting to seem conspicuous, Hem joined in the chanting.

Still chanting, the different blocks arranged themselves in a long line, one or two deep, which stretched all around the perimeter of the square training ground. They put their weapons down behind them and punched their fists into the air. Then the Spider led a small figure into the center of the ground. Even from this distance, Hem could see that it was shaking so much it could hardly walk.

For a horrible moment Hem thought it was Zelika. But then he saw it was too tall: it looked like a boy, his hands and feet shackled by chains. As the boy shambled to the center of the ground, the chanting raggedly ceased, and the huge crowd of snouts became completely, menacingly silent.

The Spider put up its hand and spoke. Although it hadn't lifted its voice, by some sorcery Hem could hear it perfectly, as if it spoke next to his ear.

"Here is one who has broken the rules of the pack," the Spider said. There was a growl from the snouts, and the boy whimpered. A dark stain spread over the ground where he was standing: he had wet himself. Hem had never seen anybody so afraid.

"What happens to traitors?" hissed the Spider.

"Kill!" The word rumbled over the square, and then silence fell again. The Hull walked, with a painful slowness, back to the Prime Hut. The boy stood in the center – a small, broken figure, utterly alone. Even from this distance, Hem could see him shaking.

When the Spider reached the Prime Hut, it hit a gong. It was the signal for sudden madness; the crowd of children started yelling and running to the center of the training ground. Hem yelled and ran with them, sick with fear. Very slightly he hung back, not enough to be noticed, but just enough so that he would not be among the first to reach the boy. As he neared him, he had a brief glimpse of the boy's face, his mouth stretched in a scream that no one could hear, and then he was overwhelmed by a surge of punching, biting, kicking figures, transformed into frenzied demons. Someone elbowed Hem aside, almost knocking him over, in their frantic desire to get their blow in.

It was over very quickly. The snouts, their bloodlust sated as quickly as it had been summoned, began to walk toward the mess hall, joking and laughing. Many were splattered with blood; some were even wiping blood from their mouths. A latecomer kicked the pathetic remains of what had been, only a few short moments before, a human being. It was scarcely recognizable, a broken carcass on the ground, still pathetically shackled. Hem's belly roiled with disgust and terror and pity: he had never seen anything so horrible and grotesque. He forced himself to grin as Reaver came up to him, his eyes shining with a glazed ecstasy.

"Whoo! About time we had one of those!" said Reaver, clapping his hands together in a horrible parody of glee. "Did you see how he wet himself? And look!" He held up a shred of flesh. "I got his ear!"

Hem gave a coarse laugh, and followed Reaver into the mess hall.

That night, Hem seriously considered escaping. He didn't think he could bear it. He thought about the mob, slavering and glassy-eyed in its lethal frenzy. He couldn't forget the look on the boy's face, his abject despair and terror, as the maddened children ran toward him.

Perhaps Zelika had been cur-killed? Hem dismissed the thought at once; it was too unbearable to think of. He refused to believe she was dead; and in any case, even if there were only the smallest chance that Zelika was alive, he would continue until he found her. He was going to rescue her, and that was that.

He wondered who the snouts had been before they were captured into brutalizing slavery, what families they had been torn from. Very occasionally he had seen flickerings of those former lives in vagrant expressions that chased across their faces: ghosts of gentler feelings, which were always followed by a brief dazed puzzlement, the same expression he had seen on Nisrah's face when Zelika had pleaded with him to escape. Who would the snouts be, if they survived the camp? How could they live with what they had been?

Hem was no innocent: he knew what children could do to each other. He had thought himself prepared for anything he might encounter. Now he realized that he had been wrong. The forces in the camp were much more toxic than the mindless, vicious pettiness of damaged children: the violence was controlled, focused, and deadly. It was
intelligent.

It made him deeply afraid.

But underneath Hem's fear lay a horrified pity. Murderer or murdered, every snout was a victim.

Hem had not thought about Maerad for a long time. His sister had slipped to the back of his mind, an anxiety and grief that lay among many others: his fears for Saliman and Soron; his sorrow at being forced to leave Oslar and his vocation for healing; his mourning for the destruction of the great city of Turbansk, a destruction he still could not fully imagine or comprehend. But this night her face sprang vividly into his mind, as if she had called him across the dark, empty leagues that separated them. He realized with a pang of guilt how long it had been since he had thought of her, and his longing for her broke open inside him like a fresh wound. He missed her so badly. He had missed her all his life.

The nightmare that surrounded him was no phantom shadow of dream; nothing could take its stain off his soul. Yet right now, more than anything else in the world, Hem wanted Maerad's small, cool hands on his forehead to wipe away the bad dreams. He wanted the comfort of her breathing body next to him as he slept, the complex spice of the smell that was hers alone. A grieving love filled his body, a sweet, unassuagable ache that seeped through him from the marrow of his very bones.
Maerad, my sister...

When at last he slipped into an uneasy sleep, the dream of the silent wave came back and made him cry out, although he did not wake. In his dream, he realized the earth's slow, molten anger was part of the music the tree man had whispered to him – its violent bass notes.

Even in his sleep, Hem found himself wondering what an Elidhu really was; such beings were so outside his ken they were almost unimaginable. They did not fear death, because they did not die. The implications of this seeped through Hem's dreams, infecting him with awe and horror. The music of the Elidhu was shot with darkness, which both deepened its mystery and beauty, and drew it far beyond Hem's grasp. The Elidhu were neither good nor evil; such words were invented by human beings to explain human actions. They did not apply to the Elementals. He could not understand them; yet somehow, since the tree man had spoken to him, that music had become part of him.

The voice of his dream, the Elidhu's voice, sounded in his mind, and Hem's fear began to ebb away, leaving behind it, like a gentle residue, the peace he had felt a few nights earlier in the Elidhu's home.
There is no healing here,
the Elidhu had said. But also, giving Hem a mysterious sense of hope:
It is not where, but when.

XX