He stared at the darkness, and then turned his attention to the white, empty faces surrounding him. Perhaps the spirits of the dead were not as invulnerable as their source. He went into their midst, fighting back against his revulsion, armoring himself against the touch of their fingers, speaking words of magic to banish them. He used the fire of the staff to sweep aside each as he passed, and to his satisfaction they began to disappear, one after the other. He did not look to see how many were still coming, but kept his eyes on those pressing closest, looking at each, recognizing each, knowing he must acknowledge them if they were to be sent back to where they belonged.
He did not know for how long or to how many he did this; he lost track of time and numbers and simply kept pressing ahead. The faces came and went in a wash, so many he remembered, so many he had known. He said good-bye to each as the fire consumed them, facing down the emotions that welled up within him. What he felt was a cold certainty, a hard-edged understanding of what he was doing to himself by banishing them. He was losing his past; he was giving up his memories. With the disappearance of each white face, he let go of a little more of what he remembered.
He understood now that he was the one who had summoned them, perhaps without realizing it, perhaps with help from whatever lived in these mountains.
The darkness was his, the past carried on his shoulders, memories of the dead, of those he had known and cared about and could not forget. They weighed on him; they haunted him. He had kept them shut away until tonight, then set them free.
There would be no peace for him until they were locked away again, this time for good.
The mass of white faces thinned to only a few. His brother and little sister were before him now, their blank stares sad and lost in a way he could hardly stand. He reached for them and touched them fearlessly, letting the terrible sensation of their presence wash over him as he sent the fire of the staff through their empty forms until they slowly faded away. Dead and gone, he realized, never to return. Already, their faces were so vague in his mind that he could not reconstruct their features.
When he stood alone finally, the darkness that had blocked the pass had dissipated entirely. Nothing remained but rock and cold and black night. He stood looking at nothing, and then turned back to the AV. His father and Michael stood beside it, white and ephemeral, the last of his ghosts. They were staring not at him, but at something beyond him, something he could not see. He did not hesitate, but walked over to where they waited and touched each in turn with his magic, saying good-bye. They did not speak to him or look at him. They simply stood before him as if awaiting the inevitable. Then the staff swept through them, and they, too, were gone.
In the aftermath, he thought about what the Spiders had told him.
He did not know if their mountain spirits were entities that had given life to his ghosts or if they were manifestations of the ghosts themselves, but he had been wrong to disparage them. He had not believed they existed, but now he understood that they did. Not everything that was real in this world could be seen.
He looked around for other ghosts, but the last of them had disappeared.
He could feel his memory of their faces slipping away. Although he tried, he could not seem to hold on to it. Perhaps he would remember a few of them, the ones he had known best, but most were gone forever. He had banished them with the Word’s magic, and he knew that by doing so he had made it impossible for them to return.
Their absence left an ache in his heart, a void so huge that he could not fathom how he could endure it. But when he tried to dispel that ache, he found he could not. For an agonizing moment, he was eight years old again and had just lost his family for a second time.
Only this time, he discovered, there were no tears to be shed. As he stared out into the darkness and the sweep of the land, his eyes were dry.
Chapter TWENTY
NOON WAS LESS than two hours away, and Hawk was thinking about who he would take with him when he went to his meeting with Tiger. Midday today was the designated time for delivery of the pleneten, and while Hawk was anxious to get the serum into Tiger’s hands so that he could help Persia, he was troubled by everything that had happened over the past few days. He might have been willing to dismiss both their encounter with the dying Lizard and the Weatherman’s discovery of the nest of dead Croaks as all-too-familiar occurrences in a world where death and dying were commonplace. But Candle’s vision of something bad coming their way, coupled with their chilling experience in the warehouse basement, had left him convinced that things were changing in the city and not for the better.
So he spent more time than he normally would considering who to take and who to leave behind, not wanting to put anyone at risk when he already knew there was no avoiding it. In the end, he settled on taking Panther and Bear and leaving the rest behind with Cheney. If they carried prods and viper-pricks, the three of them would be safe enough. The meeting would take place on the open streets and in daylight and would be over quickly. All that was needed was for him to deliver the pleneten and return home. Then he could begin deliberating anew about how to persuade Tessa to leave the compound and come with him.
But he had no sooner come to a decision than Owl appeared at his elbow.