Stalking Darkness

closer
.
    Suddenly something grabbed him from behind in an icy grip, pulling him to his feet. Alec couldn’t turn his head far enough to see what it was, but the putrid stench that rolled off it made him gag
.
    “Join the feast, boy,” a gloating, clotted voice whispered close to his ear
.
    Struggling out of that loathsome grasp, Alec whirled to see what the creature was, but there was nothing there
.
    “Join the feast!” the same voice said again, still behind him no matter how fast he turned
.
    Stumbling backward, he fell into a heap of bloated corpses. No matter how he struggled he couldn’t get up; every move enmeshed him more in a tangle of flaccid limbs
.
    “Aura Elustri málrei!”
he screamed, flailing wildly
.
    “Join the feast!” the voice howled triumphantly
.
    Then the sun went black
.
    Alec jerked awake, still smelling the terrible death stench of the dream. A plump slice of moon visible through the branches told him it was still far from morning. Hugging his knees miserably, Alec took a deep breath, but the air smelled fouler every moment.
    “Oh, Alec, I’m so frightened!”
    Looking up in amazement, Alec saw Cilla crouched a few feet away. Illuminated by some ghostly inner light, she looked imploringly at him. Ghost or not, he was too relieved to see her whole again to be frightened.
    “What are you doing here?” he asked softly, praying she wouldn’t disappear as suddenly as she’d come.
    “I don’t know.” A tear slid slowly down her cheek. “I’ve been lost for so long! I can’t find Father or Grandmother anywhere. What’s happened, Alec? Where are we?”
    She looked so real that he took off his cloak and placed it around her shoulders. She pulled it around herself gratefully and leaned against him, feeling very solid and real. For a moment he simply knelt next to her, trying hard not to question her presence. At last, however, he pulled back a little and looked down at the top of her head resting against his chest.
    “Why did you come?” he asked again.
    “I had to,” she whispered sadly. “I had to tell you—”
    “Tell me what?”
    “How much I hate you.”
    Her voice was so soft, so gentle, that it took a moment for the import of her words to sink in.
    As his heart turned to lead in his chest, she said, “I hate you, Alec. It was your fault, even more than Seregil’s. They saw you, followed you. You led them to us. I’m glad you’re going to die.”
    “No! Oh, no, no, no,
no!”
Scrambling away, Alec flung himself into the farthest corner. “That’s not true!” he cried. “It can’t be true.”
    Cilla raised her head slowly, her eyes black hollows in the dim light of the moon. She smiled, and the fetid stench rolled through the cage again. Her smile widened to a grimace, a snarl, a silent scream, then a black arm shot from her mouth, lengthening impossibly as it reached for Alec. Locking black talons around his arm, it dragged him over Thero’s limp body and back to her. For a moment his face was inches from hers, her wild eyes boring intohis, mouth stretched obscenely around the arm protruding from it. Then her whole body swelled into a black, man-shaped form.
    “Are you so certain?” the thing asked in the voice from Alec’s nightmare. “Are you so very certain?”
    Releasing him, it wavered, then flowed out through the bars like smoke.
    “Damn you!” Alec screamed, knowing Vargûl Ashnazai was close by, watching. “Damn you, you blood-swilling son of a whore! You lie!
You lie!”
    A single harsh, mocking laugh answered him from the darkness beneath the trees.

44
W HITE S TONE AND B LACK
    T he wind whipped Seregil’s cloak around his knees and pulled at the bow case and quiver strapped to his old pack as he stopped to wait for Micum and Nysander. Looking back along the ledges to the north, he could just make them out, Nysander leaning on Micum and a stout staff as they picked their way over an expanse of tumbled stone. Over them loomed Mount Kythes, its jagged peak thrusting above the tree line like an elbow from a worn green sleeve.
    Seregil shook his head in wonder. Despite Nysander’s fragile appearance, the wizard had managed to keep up a steady pace over the past two days. Seregil and Micum took turns supporting him while the other scouted ahead. They were at the foot of the great mountain now, toiling south along the edge of the forest that flanked the coastline for as far as they could see. The area was rough and uninhabited, but there