Dreamers were among the first to turn their backs on historical truths. King Tehol would be swept aside, drowned in the inexorable tide of unmitigated growth. No one, after all, can stand between the glutton and the feast.
She wished him well, even as she knew he would fail.
In the midst of pelting rain she had left the camps behind, taking one of the old wood-bison migration routes through virgin forest. The mud of the ancient track swarmed with leeches and she was forced to dismount every bell or so to tug the mottled black and brown creatures from her horse’s legs, until the path led down on to a sinkhole basin that proved to be a salt-trap-the plague of leeches ended abruptly and, as she continued down-slope, did not return.
Signs of the old dwellers began to appear-perhaps they were Shake remnants, perhaps they belonged to a people now forgotten. She saw the slumping humps of round huts covered in wax-leaved vines. She saw on the massive trunks of the most ancient trees crumbled visages, carved by hands long since rotted to nothing. The wooden faces were smeared in black-slime, moss and lumps of sickly fungi. She halted her mount beside one such creation and stared at it through the rain for a long time. She could think of no finer symbol of impermanence. The blunted expression, its pits of sorrow that passed for eyes: these things haunted her long after she had left the ruined settlement.
The track eventually merged with a Shake road that had once joined two coastal villages, and this was the path she now took.
The rain had become a deluge, and its hissing rose to a roar on her hood, a curtain of water sheeting down in front of her eyes.
Her horse halted suddenly and she lifted her head to see a lone rider blocking her path.
He seemed a figure sculpted in flowing water. ‘Listen to me,’ she said, loud, unexpectedly harsh. ‘Do you truly imagine that you can follow us, brother?’
Yedan Derryg made no reply-his typical statement of obstinacy.
She wanted to curse him, but knew that even that would be useless. ‘You killed the witches and warlocks. Pully and Skwish are not enough. Do you understand what you have forced upon me, Yedan?’
He straightened in his saddle at that. Even in the gloom she saw his jaws bunching as he chewed for a time on his reply, before saying, ‘You cannot. You must not. Make the journey, sister, upon the mortal path.’
‘Because it is the only one you can follow, banished as you are.’