“You had best go to your families and make sure they are safe, but I want every able-bodied man on the palisade as soon as possible. Go now.”

He finished the last of the Gaderian in his glass as the three men hurried off. It would have been a pity to waste it. There was a regular battle going on out there. He set down the empty glass and strolled off the veranda towards the firing. Behind him, Osmo’s blue werelights sputtered and went out.

THREE

“W HAT is it?” Hawkwood asked, waking to find Bardolin standing listening to the night-time jungle.

“Something—some noise far off, towards the coast. Almost I thought it was a cannon firing.”

Hawkwood was wide awake in an instant and on his feet beside the wizard. “I knew we were close, but I didn’t think—”

“Hush! There it is again.”

This time they both heard it. “That’s a cannon all right,” Hawkwood breathed. “One of my culverins. Perhaps they brought them ashore. God’s blood, Bardolin, it can’t be more than a few miles away. We’re almost home.”

“Home,” Bardolin repeated thoughtfully. “But why are they firing cannon in the middle of the night, Hawkwood? Tell me that. I don’t think it means good news.”

They both sat down by the fire again. On the other side of the flames Murad lay like a corpse, mouth open, his face rippled with scar tissue.

“We’ll find out tomorrow,” Hawkwood said. “A few more miles, and it’s finished. We’ll board the Osprey and get the hell out of this stinking country. Breathe clean air again, feel the wind on our faces. Think of that, Bardolin. Think of it.”

The far-off gunfire continued for perhaps an hour, including one well-spaced salvo that sounded exactly like a ship’s broadside. After that there was silence again, but by that time Hawkwood had set up his primitive compass and taken a bearing on the sound so that in the morning they could march straight towards it. Then he fell asleep, exhausted.

Bardolin remained awake. They had long since given up the keeping of any kind of sentry, but as the weeks had drawn on he had found himself needing less and less sleep.

Their journey had been incredibly hard—indeed, it had come close to killing them. They had been transformed by it into matt-haired, sunken-eyed fanatics, whose only mission in life was to keep walking, who revered Hawkwood’s home-made compass as though it were the holiest relic, who scrabbled for every scrap of anything resembling food and wolfed it down like animals. All the patina of civilisation had been scraped away by day after day of back-breaking toil, and the filth and heat of the rainforest. Many times, they had decided they could go no further, and had become resigned to the idea of death—even inured to it. But odd things had saved them at those critical moments. The discovery of a stream of pure water, finding a freshly killed forest deer, or a medicinal herb which Hawkwood had recognised from his travells in Macassar. Somehow they had lurched from one lucky windfall to another, all the time keeping to the bearing that Hawkwood set for them every morning. And they were going to survive. Bardolin knew that—he had for a long time. But now he also knew why.

When the darkest hour of each night came upon him he lay alone by the fire and fought the disease that was working in him, but each time it progressed a little farther before it receded again.

It came upon him once more this night. It felt like a blest breath of cold air stealing over him, a chill invigouration which flooded strength into his wasted frame. And then his sight changed, so that he was beginning to see things he normally could not. Murad’s heart beating like a bright, trapped bird in his chest. The veins of blood which nestled in his fore-arms pulsing like threads of liquid light.

Bardolin felt his very bones begin to creak, as if they were desperately trying to burst into some new configuration. His tongue circled up and down his teeth, and they had become different; the inside of his mouth felt as hot as an oven, and he had to open it and pant for air. When he did, his tongue lolled out over his lower lip and the sweat rolled off it.

He raised his hands to his eyes and found that his palms had become black and rough. Joints clicked and reclicked. His hearing grew so acute it was almost unbearable, and yet madly fascinating. He could hear and see a whole universe of life twittering in the rainforest around him.

This was it, the most seductive time. When the change felt like a welcome relief, the chance to metamorphosize into something bigger, better, in which life could be tasted so much more keenly and all his old man’s aches and weak-nesses could be forgotten.

At one instant he writhed there, perfectly suspended between the desire to let the change have its way and his own stubborn refusal to give in. Then he had beaten it again, and lay there as weak as a newborn kitten, the jungle a black wall about him.

“Bravo,” the voice said. “I have never seen anyone fight the black disease with such pugnacious determination before. You have my admiration, Bardolin. Even if your struggle is misguided, and futile in the end.”

Bardolin raised his exhausted face. “I have not seen you in a while, Aruan. Been busy?”

“In a manner of speaking, yes. You heard the gunfire. You can guess what it means. The ship is intact, though—of that I made sure. My only worry was that the survivors would sail away before you reach the coast tomorrow, so I have whistled up a landward wind which will keep them anchored if they do not want to be run aground.”

“How very thoughtful.”

“I think of everything. Do you imagine you would have made it this far without my help? Though that mariner of yours is certainly ingenious—and indomitable. I like him. He reminds me of myself when I was young. You are lucky in your friends, Bardolin. I never was.”

“My heart bleeds for you.”

Aruan leaned over the fire so that the flames carved a molten mask out of his features. “It will, one day. I will leave you now. Keep fighting it if you will, Bardolin, but you harm yourself by doing so. I believe I will summon someone who may be able to clarify your thinking. There. It is done. Fare well. When I see you again you shall have the wide ocean under you.” And he disappeared.

Bardolin drank thirstily from the wooden water bottle, sucking at the neck until it was empty. When he felt the cool fingers massage his knotted neck he closed his eyes and sighed.

“Griella, what did he do to you?”

The girl leaned and kissed his cheek from behind. “He gave me life, what else?”

“No-one can raise the dead. Only God can do that.”

The girl knelt before him. She was perhaps fifteen years old and possessed of a heavy helmet of bronze-coloured hair which shone rich as gold in the firelight. Her features were elfin, fine, and she hardly reached Bardolin’s breastbone when standing straight.

She was a werewolf, and she had died months ago—before they had even set foot on the Western Continent. What monstrous wizardry had raised her from the ranks of the dead, Bardolin could not imagine and preferred not to guess at. She had appeared several times during their awful journey back from Undabane, and each time her coming had been a comfort and a torment to him—as Aruan had no doubt meant it to be. For Bardolin had come to love her on their westward voyage, though that love filled him with twisted guilt.

“If you only let it happen, Bardolin, I could be with you always,” she said. “We have the same nature now, and it is not such a bad thing, the black change. He is not a good man, I know, but he is not evil, either, and most of the time he speaks the truth.”

“Oh Griella!” Bardolin groaned. She was the same and not the same. An instinct told him she was some consummate simulacrum, a created thing, like the imps Bardolin had grown as familiars. But that did not make her face any less dear to him.