“Likely. Though from no place I’ve been, nor met men from—not from the way he spoke. The world is wide.” She pressed her lips together. “Or he might have been here long enough to forget all language but his own. Madmen do that at times, I hear, and there’s no telling how long he’s been on the island.”
“Nor how long he was changed,” Erik said, though he wished that the thought hadn’t occurred to him.
The man had kept enough of his mind to ask for death, and not to attack them. Had his eyes stayed white, Erik suspected, matters would have been different. How many years had he spent fighting off bloodlust? How many feeling the corruption take hold of him, looking at flesh that warped into nothing?
Toinette hacked at a vine, of the immobile sort, and added almost conversationally, “Christian, whoever he was, and more devout than me. I’d have killed myself were I him. Either God would understand, or hell could be no worse.”
“I’m not sure hecould,” Erik said, remembering how the elk had kept coming while stuck full of arrows, and how its not-flesh had mended almost as soon as it was cut. A severing blow, with his whole strength behind it, had been the exception—or had the stranger used the very last of his will to keep away the unnatural healing? Erik thought of the stone knife and the dried blood upon it, the same color as the blood that had come from the man’s neck. “I think he tried.”
Their footsteps were loud against the trail, punctuated by the swish of blades and the snap of plants. “Poor devil,” said Toinette shortly but with great feeling.
“No,” said Erik. “Poor—but not yet a devil. He saw to that.”
He blessed the unknown man for it, but wanted to curse him too, for the thoughts now running the course of his mind.They’ddelivered the stranger as much as he had done himself. That was well enough, and Erik didn’t want credit—but the forest, where they could remain themselves with little effort, was only the start of their troubles.
If the same fate overtook them, was there any salvation, even of the most fatal sort, on the island?
He doubted it.
Thirty-Three
The temple came fully into view, and all else around it faded.
It wasn’t just by comparison. The trees around the temple were gray and leafless. From their looks, they’d long ago abandoned even such twisted life as the others had possessed. There was no wind, but their branches moved sluggishly against the sky, in patterns Toinette could watch for only a few seconds before the back of her eyes began to ache.
“It’s just as well we didn’t try flying earlier,” she said, looking back down. “Landing through that—” The thought of even a scratch from one of the branches made her shudder. She and Erik both kept very close and used their swords with thorough care.
Cutting their way through didn’t take as much effort, despite that. The plants, from wayward moving branches to patchy grass, were all brittle, crumbling at not much more than a touch. The grass was gray too, and the leaves of the plants. That color was more noticeable there, without bark to obscure the shade.
“I think they’re all dead,” said Erik. “Most likely everything here is. Look.”
He gestured to the foot of a nearby tree. Toinette turned her head and saw one of the hairless squirrels lying there, though at first she almost didn’t recognize it. Normally that would have been down to scavengers, but as far as she could tell, nothing had touched the rodent—or no animal. It had the same grayish undertone as the grass around it.
Pits of blackness spotted its skin, though, and a larger one, craterous and uneven, sprouted from its side. Toinette had seen a growth like that on a beggar’s jaw once, but that had been flesh. The…growth…on the squirrel was nothing, void formed into irregular shapes and fastened onto living flesh. The creature’s mouth was open, as if in a scream, and Toinette could see more pitted darkness inside.
She swore and looked down at her own hands, then to Erik’s face. She couldn’tseeany dark patches forming, but clothing covered a great deal, and stripping there and then would be foolish.
Nothing moved in the dead forest to either side of them. No birds called. The moving branches creaked slightly, and the stream flowed in the distance, but that was all. Toinette could hear each of her breaths and most of Erik’s. “Do you know any spell to protect us?” she asked.
“I don’t even know what I’d be protecting us against,” he replied. “That is, this”—a quick wave of his hand took in forest and dead squirrel alike—“but I don’t know what sent it. Our best defense is most likely speed.”
It wasn’t the answer Toinette had hoped for, but it was one she’d more or less expected. “The plague didn’t touch our kind,” she said. “I’ll hope that’s a sign.”
* * *
Trees thinned and died, their trunks collapsing into sharp angles in the forest. Toinette’s and Erik’s footsteps crunched on dry dirt. It sounded like ash, and floated the same way when disturbed, but the smell was cold, wet, and bitter.
Erik spotted more small corpses by the side of the road. Most were desiccated; a few were only bones, stripped by weather if nothing else. Therewasair in the darkness. It was frigid and stale, but it served its purpose.
A few yards before the temple, the last of the trees vanished. They approached the great steps through a gray wasteland, a wide ring where nothing grew and not even the dead remained. Erik would have felt exposed, with such sparse cover, but he couldn’t imagine any would-be attacker coming from his surroundings. He and Toinette felt as unlikely and as much out of place as fish in the desert.
The temple was as gray as the dirt. Each step was surely a full foot in height, and there were at least fifty of them. Above, pillars four times the height of a man stretched up to end in shapes Erik was glad he couldn’t make out clearly, then supported a vast conical roof. It seemed to cast a shadow in the darkness, and the shapes from the pillars danced within that deeper blackness.
Toinette’s breath hissed through her teeth. “This…” she said, craning her head up and then shaking it in disbelief. “This doesn’twork. We should have seen it when we were flying over the island the first time. The trees aren’t that tall.”
Erik wanted badly to argue. The trees might have been on a hill, he would have liked to say, and the temple in a valley, or they might have been distracted and missed the temple, or the sun had been in their eyes. It hadn’t been. They’d been looking carefully. And their wanderings over the island had left him in no doubt that the temple was more or less on a level with the forest around it. “No,” he said and clenched his throat against a wave of nausea.
“No,” said Toinette. She took the pine needles from her hair and smelled them again, prompting Erik to imitate her. It helped, but only slightly.
