Kings of the Wyld (The Band #1)

But now the nightmare was real, the dream made manifest in the burnt-parchment leaves and the open sores weeping on the face of leprous trees. The air was thick with gloom, and every so often the dread silence was pierced by the screeches of hunters and their prey, killing and dying in the dark beyond.

They split into pairs. Kit agreed to stay behind and watch over the ship, which they’d landed in a broad ravine to help hide it from eyes above. Gabriel, brooding like a child forced to go walking with his parents, stood with Moog. The wizard withdrew a tall wooden staff from his bag, the head of which was capped by a crystal globe clutched by silver serpentine fingers.

“It’s a scrying device, like that old crystal ball of mine that Gabe …” He faltered. “Uh … that Gabe disposed of for me. Kindly. In the river.”

Gabriel, agitated, waved him on.

“It only works at close range,” he explained, then tipped his hat back and set his face so close to the orb his nose grazed its surface. His bushy brow furrowed, and Clay saw a wisp of purple smoke swirl inside the globe. After several long moments, however, the mist dissolved, and Moog stamped the base of the staff on the ground in frustration. “Blast this gods-forsaken forest,” he swore. “I never could get any bloody reception in here. Anyway, Matrick is that way.” He pointed east.

“How do you know?” asked Gabriel, brightening somewhat.

“Because that’s where he fell,” said Moog. He set off briskly, and Gabe skulked after him.

Clay and Ganelon set out south and east, close enough to the others that a shout could alert them if need be. Clay spotted few living creatures as they went, but the ones he did see were deeply unsettling. There were fleshless owls crouched in hollowed-out trunks, tracking their steps with eyes that glowed like embers. Birds the size of crows with long, hooked beaks perched in rows upon twisted boughs. He saw something disappear down a hole in the ground that looked distressingly like a grubby child with a long, ratlike tail.

They trod carefully through a stand of trees with writhing white snakes for branches. The serpents stretched toward them as they passed, and more than once tried lunging and hissing loudly, hoping to catch them off guard, or to startle them into stepping within reach of another tree. Clay had seen that trick work before, and so had died yet another of Saga’s countless bards.

Once, Clay heard the snap of a twig behind him and turned to find a huge black warg an arm’s reach away, so close he could feel the hot gust of its breath on his face. The monstrous wolf was the size of a Kaskar plough horse, and Clay had just begun composing his death scream (he was thinking something high-pitched, sort of a falling from a great height meets I’ve just shat my pants, with a touch of petulant little girl doesn’t get her way thrown in to spice things up) when he heard a deep growling behind him.

Two wargs, his mind told him. You’re gonna need a new scream, Cooper.

But then Ganelon brushed by his shoulder. The warrior’s teeth were bared, his face a frozen snarl, and the growl was his, growing louder, until he and the warg were nose to broad, wet snout. Ganelon’s growl became a throaty yell, and then a wild, bloodcurdling scream. The beast’s ears went flat against its skull, and a moment later it slunk back a step, then another, before turning and fleeing with its tail between its legs.

Clay stood openmouthed as Ganelon turned and walked back past him without any commentary whatsoever.

Strangely, they heard nothing from Gabe and Moog after that, which meant either they hadn’t heard it happen or were in no position to respond. In any case, that was probably bad.

The smothering forest gave way to marshland and they were forced to tread carefully. Pools of miasmic slime gurgled and steamed; one misstep and he’d soon be short a boot—or a foot, if he didn’t pull it out fast enough. Clay couldn’t help but remember the sort of things they’d usually found in places like this: quivering oozes that devoured flesh and turned metal to rusted scrap, scuttling beetles that exploded if you mistakenly stepped on their shells. He had heard it said by an exceptionally clever bard that if you tried to number the ways you could die in the Heartwyld you’d be dead before you finished counting.

His least favorite was a carnivorous plant with a grasping black tongue that mimicked the terrified shrieks of its past victims.

“Helpmegodspleasehelpme!” it howled as they went by, and then pleaded with the voice of a frightened young woman: “Pleasestopithurtsithurtshelp.”

And just when Clay thought he couldn’t be any more freaked-out, a skeleton in a soiled white wedding dress came shambling through the knee-deep muck. It clutched a wreath of dead flowers to its bony breast, and its empty sockets gazed mournfully at Clay as it waded past.

He suppressed a shiver. He really, really hated this forest.

“Oh, it’s not so bad,” said Ganelon, indicating to Clay that he’d spoken out loud without meaning to do so.

“Not so bad?” he scoffed. “It’s like the … baddest place ever. Name one place that’s even remotely as bad as this.”

“The Quarry,” Ganelon replied instantly.

Clay said nothing, mostly because he had nothing at all worth saying. The two of them plodded along in uncomfortable silence for a while. They plunged back into a thickly wooded forest. The trees here were bent and gnarled, squatting like a colony of rotters beneath ashen cloaks. Something that looked identical to blood wept through fissures in their knotted trunks, and Clay could have sworn he heard a few of them weeping in the gathering dusk.

“You can see here,” said Ganelon eventually. “You can hear and smell, even if it smells awful. And you can feel.” He reached to snag a leaf from a tree overhead. It crumbled in his hand and he tossed it to the putrid wind. “You can’t feel anything in the Quarry.”

Clay ducked beneath a spanning spiderweb, careful not to graze it, lest its occupant come scurrying down from the darkness above. “I guess so,” he said. “But you were just a statue, right? So at least you didn’t know what you were missing.”

“Is that what you think?” asked Ganelon.

Something about the other man’s tone stopped Clay in his tracks. If he didn’t know better he might have thought the southerner sounded hurt. “What do you mean ‘Is that what I think?’ You were stone. I saw you.”

Ganelon slowed, then stopped. He rubbed the back of his neck and looked discomfited, like he wished he hadn’t brought up the Quarry in the first place. “Stone is stone,” he said, cryptically. “But when you’re petrified … I don’t know. I can’t explain it. I mean, it’s magic, so maybe Moog would know more about it than I do.”

Clay felt a premonition of dread flower in his gut. “So what are you saying? You were a statue … but you weren’t stone?”

“Not really, no. I couldn’t see. I didn’t feel. I wasn’t hungry or thirsty. But I was still there, inside.”

Inside?

Clay shook his head. “That’s … no …”

Ganelon’s laugh was a bitter thing. “I ain’t lyin’, Slowhand.” He wheeled and resumed walking.

Clay stood dumbfounded for so long that he was forced to jog to catch up. “Are you telling me you were alive in there? That you were awake? For nineteen years?”

“Pretty much.” Ganelon didn’t look back. “Well, I guess I sort of slept sometimes, or at least my mind just shut itself down. But mostly I was awake, yeah.”

Clay couldn’t believe what he was hearing. He’d assumed, like anyone would, that when you turned someone to stone they were simply that: a stone. Accordingly, he had thought the prisoners of the Quarry to be, in a way, fortunate, since the entirety of their sentence, whether it was ten years or a thousand, would pass in the blink of an eye. But now Ganelon was telling him that all those statues, those people standing silent in the dark warren of that terrible place, were still conscious.

What became of a mind left to languish for a thousand years? Or ten, even?

Or nineteen? Clay felt ill, suddenly.

“Ganelon,” he said, but the southerner marched on without slowing. “Ganelon, wait!”

The warrior glanced over his shoulder. “What is it, Slowhand?”

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