"Us can't say," it whispered. "Smells like leather and metal. And noises there be, quiet ones."

A tall, menacing shadow fell over Vansen, blocking the faint glow of the guttering fire. Suddenly very much awake, he snatched at his blade, tangling

it and himself in the clonk he used as a blanket, but the shadow did not move.

It was Gyir, his hand held out in a gesture of demand, the eyes in his fea¬tureless lace staring at Ferras Vansen with an intensity that seemed to glow.

Give. Vansen could almost hear the word, although the faceless creature had not spoken aloud. Give.

"He wants his sword," Prince Barrick whispered, sitting up. "Give it to him…"

"Give him…?"

"His sword! He knows this place. We do not."

Vansen did not move for a moment, his eyes swiveling between the prince and the looming, red-eyed fairy. At last he rolled over and pulled the scabbarded blade out from under his cloak. The fairy-man closed his fin¬gers around the hilt and pulled it free, leaving Vansen holding the empty sheath as Gyir turned and vanished into the undergrowth around their small hillside encampment, swift and silent as a breeze.

"This is mad…" Vansen muttered. "He'll sneak back and kill us both."

"He will not." Barrick took off his boots and wiped his feet with the edge of his tattered, filthy cloak before pulling the boots back on. "He is angry, but not at us."

"What do you mean, angry?"

Skurn fluffed his feathers in worry. Small fragments of sticky eggshell flecked his beak and breast. Whatever had startled the raven seemed to have caught him midmeal."Them all are mad, the High Ones," the bird said qui¬etly. "Have lived too long in the Black Towers, them, staring into they mir¬rors and listening to voices of the dead."

"What does that mean? Have all of you lost your minds?"

"Gyir is angry because the raven heard the noises before he did," Bar¬rick said calmly. "He blames himself."

"But why should…?" Vansen never finished his question. From farther up the hillside echoed a noise unlike anything he had ever heard, a honk¬ing screech like a blast from a trumpet that had been bent into some im¬possible shape. "Perin's hammer," he gasped, "what is that?"

"Oh, Masters, them are Longskulls or worse!" squawked the raven.

"Whatever the bird scented, Gyir found." Barrick was still donning his boots, as calmly as if preparing for a walk across the Inner Keep back home.

Vansen struggled to his feet. "Shouldn't we… help him?" The thought was disturbing, but he had little doubt there were worse things afoot in

these lands than Ciyir. He had seen one of them lake his comrade Collum Dyer, after all.

"Wait." Barrick held up his hand, listening. The youth still had that un-thinking air of command-the inseparable heritage of a royal childhood despite looking as disreputable as the poorest cotsman's urchin, even by the feeble glow of the fire. His hair, wet and festooned with bits of leaves, stuck out as eccentrically as Skurn's patchy feathers, and his clothes could only have looked more ragged and filthy if they had not originally been black. "It's Gyir. He wants us to come to him."

"Why? Is he… has he…"

"He is unharmed-but he is still angry." Barrick smiled a tight, secretive smile.

"Your Higness, what if he tricks us? I know you do not fear him, but think! He has his weapon back. Now would be the perfect time for him to murder us-it is dark, and he knows this forest much better than we do."

"If he wanted to kill us he could have done it any of the last few nights. He is not just angry-he is frightened, too. He needs us, although I am not quite sure why." Barrick frowned. "I cannot hear him anymore. We must go to him."

Without even a torch to light his way, Barrick started up the hillside in the direction of the scream. Vansen cursed and bent for a stick from the fire, then hurried after him.

The returning rains had washed the pall of smoke from the sky, but not the ever present Mantle, as Gyir called it: even in the middle-night a dull glow still bled through the close-knit branches above them, as though the murky skies had held onto a touch of the daylong twilight, soaking it up like oil so that it would sputter dimly through the night. But it was difficult to see even with the nightglow and the pathetic, makeshift torch: by the time he caught up to the prince, Vansen had scraped himself raw on several branches and had fallen down twice. Barrick turned to help him up the second time.

"Faster," said the prince.

But I was having such a good time dawdling and enjoying the sights, your High¬ness, Vansen thought sourly.

Skurn caught up with them in a moment-the raven could make faster time upslope than they could, hopping, sometimes flying awkwardly for a few yards at a time. The old bird seemed always to move in an odor of wet earth and a faint putridity: Vansen scented him a moment before he heard him flapping along behind them.

"Head down, Master," Skurn hissed. Vansen narrowly avoided running face-first into.How branch. Thereafter he found the bird's smell easier to bear.

Vansen gasped when Gyir abruptly stepped out of a copse of trees di-rectly in front of them. The fairy-man's sword was dripping black, his jerkin and gloved hands also spattered.

(!yir gestured toward the copse behind him. Vansen went to look, still un¬able to shake off a fear that the faceless creature might turn on them at any moment. Because he was looking back over his shoulder, trying to locate Gyir in the nighttime dark, he almost stepped on the first body. Hand trembling, he held the brand down close, trying to understand what he was seeing.

The body seemed all wrong, somehow-folded into angles normal bones did not allow. It had a long, bony head which stuck out before and behind, and hard, leathery skin which only made the inhuman shape more obvi¬ous. The dead creature's arms were long and might have had an extra joint in them-it was hard to tell because of the darkness, but also because Gyir had made such a bloody mess of the thing. Still, it was the head that was most disturbing, especially the long, bony, beaklike snout, and although the dead creature's forehead was nearly human, the deep-set eyes might have belonged to a lizard.

The clothes that it wore were disturbing, too. The fact that this monster wore anything at all, much less a full battle-rig, an oily leather jerkin under chain mail, was enough to make Vansen's stomach squirm and a sour taste rise into the back of his mouth.

A second beak-faced corpse lay a few feet away, the bony head cut al¬most in half, the clawed, bloody hands still spread as if to ward off the deathblow.

"Perin's hammer, what are these… things?" Vansen asked. "Were they after us?"

"Don't know, but Gyir says they're Longskulls," Barrick said. "That's one of the reasons he's so angry. He's still suffering from the wounds the Followers gave him, he says, or he would have had all three of them."

"Longskulls," wheezed Skurn. "And not ordinary roving Longskulls either, this lot. They belong to someone, they do-can tell it by their wearings."

Gyir bent and turned the creature's ugly head with his sword blade so that they could see a mark scorched onto its bony face-a brand, several overlapping, wedge-shaped marks like a scatter of thorns.

"Jikuyin," Barrick said slowly. "I think that is how Gyir would say it."

The raven gave a croak of dismay. "Jack Chain? Them do belong to Jack Chain?" He fluttered awkwardly up onto Vansen's shoulder, almost over¬balancing him. "We must run far and fast, Master. Far and fast!"

"The one you talked about?" Vansen looked from the silent Gyir to Bar-rick. "I thought we had left his territory behind!"

The prince did not answer for a moment. "Gyir says we will have to take turns sleeping and watching from now on," he said at last. "And that we must keep our weapons close."