The Vorrh

nowhere near, so Tsungali let himself be diluted by time, so that no one saw him crouching down among the energetic growth and high, containing walls.
    Ishmael padded softly down the hallway and found her in her favourite room, drinking golden wine from a long-stemmed glass. She did not hear him arrive, so light was his footfall. He was wearing Chinese silk slippers that she had left for him. Very quietly, he said, ‘Thank you, Cyrena.’
    She stood up and looked at him, allowing herself to linger on the details of his presence, basking in his proximity. He was wearing silk pyjamas and the blue dressing gown that she had left him. His hair was still wet. She looked at his face, at how the scars around his eye seemed to gather his features together at that point, giving it a bunched squint. His nose was a little worse for wear; the straight line of it veered a little between loose folds and taut stretchings. Apart from this, it was the normal face of a slender young man who looked as though he had lived a troubled and weather-beaten life. He began to raise his hand again, his insecurity blooming under her gaze, but she crossed the room to stop him, reaching out to his hand and holding it in her own. She led him to the window seat and they sat looking at each other for an endless, unruffled time, the evening darkening around them.
    ‘I don’t know where to start,’ she said eventually. Handing him her glass, she moved away to fill another, then turned back to him. ‘It’s been a long time since the carnival, and many things have changed for us both, I am sure, but… perhaps we should begin where we left off before?’
    He stared at her for a moment and then smiled, his new eye gleaming almost as brightly as the other. He reached for her hand and together they walked up to her bedroom.
    Outside, the swallows were changing to bats, to measure the space of the sky with sound instead of sight. Inside, contentment had come to the house of Cyrena Lohr – all except for the bow, which seethed in its wrappings.
    * * *

    I have emerged into a morning that is cold for this season, in lands whose heat I can barely envisage.
    I have escaped from a tunnel of years and come out from beneath a great shadow. When I look back, I expect to see a vast and endless forest, but there is only a desolate bog land, black with peat, its undulating hummocks stretching for miles before being broken by distant, ragged peaks. A night sea of wet earth laps the horizon; I cannot make out the path that I must have forged along its compacted surface. I have been standing on this rise for over an hour, attempting to recall myself and everything that must have been around me in that place, but it will not come to meet me. There is only the faintest image of another land like this, sheltering in absence at the beginning of my life, a battlefield of churned earth and oblivion, yet it will not come forward to be recognised or superimposed over this one.
    My belongings tell me little. Most of them were obscure and foolish, and I have discarded them; to prove their worthlessness, I will walk over them when I leave, trampling them into the mud of this place. The only thing of any use is an obscure map on torn, stained paper, which has faded over a period of unknown time; that and a large handgun with a box of its heavy bullets. I must have been carrying it to hunt or for protection, but it is difficult to imagine any kind of creature or threat stirring in that featureless mire.
    The only thing that holds me here is waiting. I feel that there should be somebody else, that they are missing, catching up with me maybe. I find myself scouring the black land below, looking for a trace of movement, for a companion making their way to here. I feel, on the periphery of my awareness, that someone will walk beside me. But nothing moves and no one comes.
    I have waited and puzzled for long enough; it is time to move on and shake off the shadows.
    I think the map has been made with oblique reference to the black bog below me, possibly conceived and drawn from this very vantage. It shows the vast mass as an oval, egg-shaped depression. There are noticeable scars in its interior, though some are now half-erased and swallowed up. The scars are crescent-shaped, and rotate around the edge of its interior; they look to be areas of ancient deforestation, which would explain why they are numbered, but these seem confusing and random. The largest cutting seems to have been