Thornkeep

They left at first light, and the dark was already waiting for them.

It stood on the northern ridge like weather. In the gray dawn it did not look like a shadow at all; it looked like a hole, a slow black bruise in the shape of a hill, and the sun that was gilding every other roof in the valley seemed to slide off its edges without touching it. Archie had spent fifteen years looking at buildings against skies. He knew what a silhouette was supposed to do. This one swallowed light and gave nothing back.

"Do not look at it too long," said Ser Halbert Voss, who had walked them as far as the last farm and no farther. "It gets into the eye."

He had brought them two things. One was a bundle of lamp oil and tallow candles wrapped in oilcloth, "because it hates a flame, though it'll not say so." The other was a boy.

"Pell," said Voss, nudging him forward. "Sixteen. Best bow in the levy, which is a poor sort of boast. He'll take you to the treeline and not a step past. Pell, you'll nod and agree."

"Aye, Ser," said Pell, who had not stopped staring at Venn since breakfast.

He was a rangy, freckled boy with a quiver slung across his back and a battered leather cap that looked as if it had once belonged to someone with a larger head. He walked beside Zoe for the first mile in a state of cautious worship, and by the second had discovered that she was willing to answer questions about the bow. By the third he was showing her how to anchor the string at the corner of her mouth, and Zoe, to Archie's quiet astonishment, was a student of the first rank.

"You'd a good eye already," Pell told her. "It's only the elbow."

"It's always the elbow," said Zoe.

"My da says that. He says the elbow is where a person's nerve lives."

"Your da is a philosopher."

"He's a cooper." The boy grinned. "But he's got opinions."

Behind them, Venn and Jin were having an argument about whether it was ethically permissible to blow a brass trumpet during a stealth approach. Archie let it go. It was the first thing he had heard in a month that had not been about dying, and he was surprised to find that he wanted the argument to continue.

…

The first shadow found them at midmorning.

They had come into the burnt country by then. Thornkeep's dark had been creeping for twenty winters, and where it had passed there was a belt of dead land a mile wide, strange and gray and utterly still. The grass had gone to ash-colored thread. The trees stood stripped, with bark the color of old teeth. Nothing moved. There were no birds. The only sound was the crunch of their boots on a ground that felt faintly, wrongly, like crushed bone.

"This is the old road," murmured Pell. He had gone pale under his freckles. "That's the miller's wall. There was a mill here. There was a— there were people." He put a hand on his bowstring. "I shouldn't come further."

"You've done enough," said Archie. "Go back to Voss."

"Aye. Aye, I—" The boy stopped.

He was staring past Archie's shoulder at the wall.

Something was detaching itself from it.

It came away like a skin peeling off a wound. One moment there was a mossy stretch of fallen stone, and the next there was a patch of dark that had not been there before, standing a foot off the wall, wavering. It was the shape of a man. It was not a man. It had no face, no weight, no edges; it was a silhouette cut out of the day and left standing, and as Archie watched, it lifted a hand, and the hand had too many joints.

"Don't breathe," said Jin, very quietly.

"What?"

"The villagers. Drowning in dry air. It's taking breath." Jin had a dagger in each hand and had not noticed drawing them. "Don't let it get close."

"How do I not let it get close? It's—"

The shadow flowed.

It did not run. It crossed the ten feet between itself and Archie in a long gliding slide, like ink moving through water, and the cold came ahead of it. It was not winter cold. It was the cold of an emptied room. Archie felt it reach into his chest, felt his lungs seize, the old stranglehold come back as sharp and bright as the day he had walked out of the radiology suite, and for one blinding second he was not in a valley under two moons but under fluorescent light, with a doctor saying mesothelioma in the careful voice of a man handing over a parcel.

He swung the sword.

It went through the thing as through smoke. The blade did not even feel the resistance, and the cold only deepened, and his knees went. He was on the ground. He could see the sky, a clean pale blue, and he was dimly aware that he was making a horrible whistling sound, and that there was something black and long-fingered closing over his face.

So this is how it—

An arrow went past his ear.

It was not a clean shot, not by any standard but Zoe's. It was a thin, bright, furious hiss of goose feathers that parted the air a hand's breadth from his temple and buried itself in the shadow's chest. The arrowhead had been dipped in nothing. It was only steel. But when it struck, the dark screamed. It folded around the shaft like paper round a flame, and burned, and was gone, and Archie rolled onto his side coughing up lungsful of clean cold air.

"Got it!" yelled Zoe. She was standing twenty yards off with her bow still raised and her mouth half open as though surprised at herself. "Oh my God. I got it. Archie, I got it!"

"I noticed," he wheezed.

"I was aiming for the shoulder!"

"Very—" He coughed. "Very precise."

"It's the elbow," said Pell, from behind her, in an awed whisper.

…

There were more.

They came out of the walls, out of the shadows of the dead trees, out of the long gray grass; they came in ones and twos at first, and then in a slow, unhurried flood. Archie lurched to his feet with the sword hanging in his hand like a stranger's and watched Jin go into them.

He had expected clumsiness. Jin was a coder with a brain tumor and a bad back, a man who had spent two decades with his face six inches from a monitor. But there was nothing clumsy in the way he moved now. He went in low, daggers crossed, and cut left and right with a dry economical flick, and each cut carried a flash of something pale along its edge. Steel's no use, Archie realized. It's the iron. Or the intention. Whatever it was, the shadows sloughed apart where Jin touched them, and he stepped through the gap without a flicker of expression, as though he were stepping around puddles on his way to work.

"Left!" Jin called. "Venn, left!"

"I see it!"

Venn came crashing in from the side with his axe over his head and the hawk-painted shield on his arm, roaring something that might have been for Rihanna! but was lost in the noise. He brought the axe down on a shadow's shoulder, and the thing split like wet bark. He spun, grinning, and a second shadow slid onto his back. He yelled, reared, flung it off by main force, and rolled clear with his teeth bared.

"DID YOU SEE THAT?" he bellowed.

"I did," said Jin. "Please stop shouting."

"I'M ALIVE AND I'VE GOT LEGS!"

"I know. We all know. Behind you."

It was a rout, in the end, but it was an ugly one. The shadows kept coming, and the four of them held in a rough ring with their backs to the miller's wall, Archie and Venn on the outside, Zoe in the middle shooting over their shoulders. Archie caught a dark claw across the forearm and felt the cold bite through the leather like a knife through silk. Zoe took a long gash across the back of one hand. Pell, who should have run an hour ago, loosed his arrows steadily from behind a fallen cart with his tongue between his teeth. Twice, Archie saw the boy open his mouth to cry out and shut it again, pressing the back of his hand to his lips as if trying to hold something in.

He did not run until the last of them was gone, and then he sat down very suddenly in the ash and put his head between his knees.

"I'm all right," said Pell, to the ground. "I'm all right. I only— it was only my first."

"You were great," said Venn, collapsing beside him. "You took out three. I counted. I'm giving you a nickname. From now on you're The Elbow."

"I'd rather not."

"You don't get a vote. It's a Hollywood thing."

…

They bound their wounds with strips of Archie's undershirt and walked on.

Pell went back at the treeline, as Voss had commanded, walking quickly with his shoulders hunched and his cap pulled low. He turned once and lifted a hand. Zoe waved back. Then the ash-colored woods closed behind him, and the four of them stood alone at the edge of a road that led up and up, between the dead trees, to the gates of a castle.

It was larger than Archie had expected.

It stood on a spur of black rock, with a curtain wall that curved in a long arc and a keep like a closed fist at its heart. It had been beautiful once. He could see that even now, in the flinty light: the careful proportions of the barbican, the slim round towers with their conical caps, the long window slits that had been designed to catch the morning sun on the eastern face. Whoever had built Thornkeep had loved it. It had the unmistakable fingerprints of care. And over it hung the dark, thick and slow and turning, not a cloud but a cupped palm, as if the whole place had been held up against the sky and told to be quiet.

"I'd have designed the gatehouse differently," Archie said.

"Of course you would," said Zoe.

"The sightlines are all wrong. It's a hell of a bottleneck. If you set your drains right, you could—" He stopped. He had said it automatically, and the sentence was left hanging, stupid and tender, in the dead air. "Sorry. Professional habit."

"Don't be." She had come up beside him, and her shoulder was an inch from his. She was holding her bow in her left hand, and the right, the bandaged one, was curled against her collarbone, where the pendant lay under her shirt. "I like it. It's the first time you've talked about something you love."

"I don't love gatehouses."

"You do. You've got a face."

"I do not have a face."

"You're making it now."

He was, he discovered. It was the one thing in the world he did not mind being caught at.

The gates stood open.

They had never been shut, Archie guessed. A small door in the right-hand leaf was ajar, and through it he could see a courtyard that had gone to moss and silence, and a flight of steps going up into the great hall, and, in the middle of the yard, a well with a bucket still hanging on its rope. There was a smell on the air, faint and old and wrong: not rot, not smoke. It was the smell of a room in which someone had lain ill for a long time and the windows had never been opened.

And from deep inside the keep, thin and clear, as clear as a bell in an empty church, a woman began to weep.

It was not a scream. It was not a wail. It was a quiet, exhausted, steady weeping, with the small hitching catch in it of someone who has been crying so long that she no longer remembers why. It rose and fell. It went on. Archie felt every hair on his neck rise.

Don't go toward it, Voss had said.

Venn had gone gray under his tan. Jin had sheathed one dagger and was holding the other very low and very still. And Zoe, beside him, did the thing that Archie would remember afterward, when remembering was almost all he had: she reached over without looking and took his hand, quite naturally, as if it were something she had done a thousand times.

"Ready?" said Zoe.

"No."

"Me neither." She squeezed. "Let's go."

They stepped through the gate together, and the dark closed over the sky behind them like a lid.