Dusk Read Free Page A

they had been, not as they now were.
    But of course, he had looked anyway. Unable to help himself, he saw what was left of the man and woman who had taken him in and brought him up from childhood, and who had died so obviously trying to protect him. And as his eyes alighted on the bloody ruins, flies already finding the wounds, another of the strange voices twisted into his head. He squeezed his eyes shut and fisted his hands, desperate to drive it back whence it had come. But he did not know where this was or why it was, so he was all but powerless against the ripple of weird words echoing through his consciousness.
    Then a scream had cut through the sound and banished it for a while. Another cry followed, closer this time, so Rafe turned and ran. Guilt pricked at his neck like the gaze of the dead. His parents lay there unburied, open to the world, offering themselves to the scavengers and carrion that would come wandering in from the fields and hillsides soon enough. But there was also something urging him on: the sight of his parents’ deaths seen between rough boards; the sound of the man’s sword as he twisted it from his mother’s cleft ribs; the knowledge that, by returning and offering himself up for the same fate, he would be betraying them in the worst possible way.
    A dead thing is just that, his father had once told him. A dead thing is less than a rock in the fields. A rock has seen the past and will see the future; a dead thing will rot to nothing, go back to the earth and perhaps care for the next circle of planting and harvesting. It’s what the dead thing was that matters, not what it is now.
    His parents were no longer there. They had gone to wherever the ideas of living things go when they die. Into memory, perhaps, or an afterlife, or simply into the Black to add themselves to history.
    So he sat on the open hillside and shivered and shook as he viewed the village lying dead in the valley. Ten minutes ago the man in red had dragged himself across the bloodied ground, leaving a smear in the dust behind him. He looked like a porcupine slowly winding down, or a cactus given brief life. His robe was pinned even tighter by the arrows, soaked a darker red by his copious blood. Then he had stilled. He had not moved since.
    Rafe wanted so much to go back and make sure the killer was dead. That he had been alive when he killed Rafe’s parents was impossible, of course, with so many arrows venting his blood. But now that the man in red was silent and still, Rafe wanted to make sure. And, perhaps, he wanted to exact some sort of useless revenge. Take a sword to the corpse. Spread him across the village to accompany the death he himself had meted out.
    The teenager—barely a man, though he liked to think of himself as such, his parents’ blood drying to a crust on his cheeks and forehead—did the hardest thing he had ever done. He turned his back on his village and started climbing. Through the mountain passes and into the next valley lay Pavisse. His uncle Vance lived there, he would help. He would know what to do. And he was all that Rafe had left.
    Almost blind with grief, Rafe stumbled upward. He was sobbing and crying, hearing the dying shriek of his mother with every step.
    High above, skull ravens rode the thermals and stared down.
                   
    IT WAS WAY past midnight by the time Rafe crested the mountain pass and started to make his way down into the next valley. Pavisse sat like a glinting gem in the distance, spread across the valley floor and creeping up its slopes where mines sank wounds deep into the land of Noreela’s skin. Fires flickered in the night, street lamps scored lines of light into the landscape, the bustling noise of the town reached him even this far up. He guessed it was still a few hours’ walk, but at least the lights would guide his way.
    He had heard many stories about Pavisse but had never actually been there. They ranged from the gentle-but-firm advice