Chapter Twelve
Twelve
It wasn’t falling. Not quite.
Gut swoop of gathering speed—repeated smash of branches across his face in the dark—eyes narrowed to slits.
He kept his arm up as best he could. Still, he felt a sharp sting in one eye as some thin twig or leaf edge got through.
With the other hand, he held his pack in place between his legs and under his arse.
Boots dug in for brakes, bleeding what momentum they could from the ragged, accelerating toboggan plunge of his body down the slope.
The pack juddered under his hold. Boots tearing up dirt that slipped in under his coat, his shirt, rubbing with gritty intimacy up across the skin of his back.
It was all he could do not to whoop as he barreled down the gully toward the ground.
Making enough fucking noise as it is.
Above, he heard Garner coming down fast behind him, yelling curses and crashing noisily through the same branches and brush and darkness.
The bottom came up and hit him—his boots went ankle deep into scree.
The sudden arrest snatched him almost fully upright.
The pack went flying. He tumbled sideways, clouted his ribs on a boulder, bounced off.
Landed in a winded heap facing back the way he’d come.
He was just in time to see Garner arrive in much the same messy fashion.
They both lay still for a moment, looking at each other.
Then, reluctantly, Garner began to laugh.
It started as a chuckle, lifted an answering grin from Duncan’s lips, and then suddenly he was chuckling, too. Garner laughed louder, then winced and stopped. He propped himself up on one elbow, pressed tentatively on the left side of his chest with his other hand. Winced again.
“You all right, old man?”
“Cracked a bloody rib by the feel of it. Got any more bright ideas tha want us to try before we call it a night?”
“Aye. How about we don’t lie here moaning and get on the move instead? We bought ourselves some time with this, but it’s nothing you could stretch. Warrior-caste Huldu could jump that whole drop in a couple of bounds and come up grinning.”
“Warrior caste?” Garner looked back up the cliff wall. “Tha think that’s what’s coming?”
“I think I’d rather not find out. Can you walk all right?”
“Just bloody watch me.”
They picked themselves groggily up, went about retrieving their gear. It took longer than Duncan would have liked. His pack had burst open on landing, spilled across the forest floor around them, and it was darker under the drop-off than it had been up above.
No time for torches. He grabbed up what he could easily see, gave up the rest as lost. Luckily, the Kegg bombs shone pale in the low light, and hadn’t scattered far.
He found and counted off fourteen of the sixteen he should still have, was not prepared to beat the bushes for the remaining two.
He fastened and shouldered the pack. Looked expectantly at Garner.
“Haughton place, you said?”
Garner nodded, pointed with the Woodward. “That way. About half an hour, if we get lucky with the undergrowth.”
Duncan racked another shell in his own gun, fed two replacement cartridges into the receiver. Harsh, metallic sounds in the mulch-odored gloom.
“Come on, then, Hawkeye.” He grinned. “After you.”
Grumbling, the older man led off, away from the scree pile they’d landed in, down a faint, shelving incline beyond.
The going was easy enough, soft and springy underfoot, without too many roots to trip on.
Duncan let Garner pick their way, most of him listening back behind them for signs of pursuit.
He had no intention of showing it, but beneath the outer calm he affected, the speed of the Huldu response had shaken him.
The Forest breathed gossip and rumor and news like a single huge nervous system.
Everything was known somewhere by something, everything was felt, and if for some reason the trees themselves would not carry the word, then you could rely on something that lived among them to do it instead.
The bladande, the tree pixies, were particularly swift and garrulous, but no one took them especially seriously, least of all the haughty, insouciant Bright Folk.
This was unlooked for. By rights, he and Garner should have been back at the White Mare in front of a blazing hearth, drinking away the eldritch Forest shivers before any Huldu took note of what had been done to the cairn.
Instead, in his confidence and easy rage, he’d stormed right through some kind of trip wire he still didn’t understand, set instant alarms ringing far and wide.
Run, Duncan, said the chiming voices in his head. Run, run, run.
He looked at Garner’s hesitant gait, the way he pressed his arm against his side every couple of steps. Run—aye, chance would be a fine thing!
“Can we pick up the pace a wee bit?” he asked, straining to sound amiable.
“If tha wanna to go flat on thy fat face over an oak root every ten yards, be my guest.” Garner, irritable, didn’t stop or even turn.
His gaze never came up from the ground they walked.
“If, on t’ other hand, tha don’t like that idea, then we’re going as fast as we can.
Now stop bothering me, lad. Hard enough to see in this bloody light as it is. ”
Duncan grimaced. They walked on in silence.
Owl hoot from somewhere off to their left.
Twitchy sounds and motions in the undergrowth, as living things scuttled away from the human scent and noise they were tracking through the woods.
The trees stood sentinel stiff around them.
The minutes crawled by. Duncan sent his senses out, stretched as gossamer thin and far and wide as he knew how.
The Forest shifted around him, somehow darker and more luminous at one and the same time.
Intimations of doom nipped at his heels, put up the hairs on the nape of his neck.
A cold, creeping knowledge was in him, and no way to convey it to Garner at levels the other man would understand.
Something is coming.
It wasn’t the howls they’d heard in the darkness under the trees, it wasn’t the names the nixie had given him. Those were just the flicker-flash of lightning on the fringes of a storm whose looming shape and size he could still not grasp.
He thought briefly of Martin Hardy again, the colonel’s somber declaration.
Another kind of war. With new enemies and rules we have yet to learn.
Enemies who now, apparently, wanted a word.
Should have taken that train to London, Duncan.
About two hundred yards farther along, they came across a mossy drystone wall drowned beneath the trees, waist high and running what Duncan estimated was due north. Garner grunted in satisfaction. He stopped and breathed deep, winced. Patted the top of the wall.
“Look at that. Craftsmanship. Old Arthur Haughton’s grandfather built these back when we were both still weans. Man was a dry-stack master.”
“Was he, aye?” Duncan, trying hard to keep a tight, ballooning impatience from his voice. “So will we cross here?”
“No, we can follow it awhile yet. We’ll move faster that way. Cross farther up, once we’re close to the farm. We’re nearly there.”
“Right, then. Want me to take lead for a while?”
Garner shot him a look. Led off again, faster, forcing the pace, but with sharp, hard breaths, and that arm pressed tight against his side.
Duncan sighed, cast a mistrustful glance back the way they’d come, then fell in behind the older man.
He ran a hand along the moss-grown march of stonework at his side.
It looked longer abandoned than you’d expect.
“What state’s the Haughton place in these days?” he wondered aloud. “The farm buildings, I mean.”
“How would I bloody know? Haven’t set foot in there for years.”
In the edge on the other man’s voice, Duncan thought he detected mourning.
The Garner family farm wasn’t a lot of miles from here, and was presumably in a similar state of neglect.
Like the wall they walked alongside, most man-made structures under the Forest canopy seemed to decay at an accelerated rate, almost as if the new growth carried some kind of attendant rot, a miasma intensely corrosive to anything built by human hands.
It had to be hard, seeing something like that happen to the place you were born and raised, the place your memories were rooted in, the place you once called home.
You’d avoid going back there, or even thinking about it much, if you could.
And—since the man was already on his mind—Duncan had to wonder if there was some similar sense of loss in Martin Hardy’s thinly buried rage at anyone who would disparage the country and empire he served.
You came back with the indelible stench and desolation of the trenches on you, saw—or thought you saw—a similar rot setting in at home.
Cracked glass and stone, bulwarks and battlements thrown down, Victoriana bereft.
You saw things fall apart, begin to slide, brought low by forces the previous century had taught you were yours to dominate and direct…
Aye, that might be hard to take.
And then the tiny shock—up through the earth under his feet midstep, the way you’d sometimes feel the impact of distant artillery much farther down the line.
The tremor of incoming, so faint he believed, wanted to believe for one desperate, willful moment, it might be the onset of a cramp in the sole of his foot.
But it wasn’t.
It was something hitting the ground back at the base of the drop-off, and landing in a crouch. Something alive. Something that hissed and snarled, and rose back up to stand tall in the moonlight like a demon summoned. And scent the breeze for trace.
They were out of time.
“How much longer?” he asked Garner sharply.
“The Haughton place? Five minutes, I’d say, maybe ten.”
“I’d say we’ve got about two.”
Garner jerked around to stare at him. Ashen faced.
Duncan nodded. “Aye. Can you run?”
“Bloody have to, won’t I!”