Chapter Eighteen: Ghosts, and the Unseen

  Neither Freydis nor Caiside had seen the apparition.

  “Wake me, next time,” Freydis said.

  “I was about to.”

  “And it just seemed to – lament something?” Caiside asked.

  “Lament, yes. But threaten, also. It didn’t seem to want us to leave. Or me, at least.” I shook my head. “Its voice was so odd. It was rasping, like a person terribly hoarse, or perhaps a – loud whisper. And it seemed to be coming from right behind me, or even right next to me.”

  “That reminds me of something that happened to your uncle and me, when we were imprisoned,” Caiside said. “In dark cells. A darkness reminiscent of these woods here.”

  “Did they keep you – in the same cell?” I asked. I had been wondering about this for some time. It would likely have opened up a whole new dimension to her relationship with Uncle Slade, of course.

  “We were not,” she said. “We were in cells across from each other, most of the time. So we saw the same wardens every day. One morning, a new one started. His name was Seamus. He was young, evidently a promising new man starting his career as a guard in the iron-fisted oppression state of Wastemoor, one day destined to be an infamous truncheon-wielder, that sort of thing.

  “The interesting bit about him was that he would never go further down the hallway than our cells. He would walk by on his rounds, check that we were there, all very good, but then at the edge of my cell he would stop. There were other prisoners farther down, but he would not walk any further. He seemed to know that he should, because he would stand there in the hall and sort of weigh the decision, every time. But he would just turn around and go back where he came from. He never brought us our food – such as it was – so he didn’t need to drop off pots in those further cells the way our usual guards continued to do.

  “As days passed, I would chat with him a bit. That’s when I learned his name. And eventually I just asked him:

  “ ‘Are you supposed to continue on your rounds further down that way?’

  “ ‘Well, yes,’ he responded. Sheepishly. ‘But I have no appetite for that.’

  “ ‘Why not?’

  “ ‘Well, I was down that way once. I went by another hall, so you wouldn’t have seen me. But I was there. And I saw something.’

  “I could imagine he saw plenty, what with some of the characters who were locked up down there. But that wasn’t what he meant:

  “ ‘I saw Ned Fernly down there. About a month ago.’

  “ ‘The highwayman?’ I asked him.

  “ ‘That’s right. I know what he looks like. I saw him when they captured him.’

  “This Ned Fernly had been a notorious criminal in the hinterlands of Wastemoor. He had waylaid travelers, and even stray Wastemoor soldiers on occasion. He was a vicious man, and he was one person whom everyone was glad when The Mage captured. She had been extremely – petulant, as you could imagine, about someone daring to break the law in her land, right under her nose. So when he was taken – ” Caiside paused – “he was hanged instantly. And that, crucially, had been six months before.”

  “And he’d been hanged instantly,” I repeated. “Out on along the road somewhere.”

  “Yes. Months before. But here was this young guard Seamus seeing him in our prison. So he was as surprised by that ghost as you were with your apparition last night.”

  “You hear such stories,” I said.

  This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.

  “But that’s not the end,” Caiside said. “Not at all. Seamus kept coming, kept checking our cells, kept turning around. It became predictable and a bit comic. So I assumed that all the guards knew of this quirk of his, it went on so long. And one day when our older warden came by to bring us our pots of food – such as they were – I brought up Seamus with him. ‘I suppose you must know about the fright that your new young colleague Seamus has taken at the sight he had of Ned Fernly,’ I said, and so on. I thought the warden would laugh.”

  “He did not?”

  “No,” she said. “Because there was no new young guard. There was no Seamus. After I learned this, we never saw him – or it – again.”

  *

  We sat where we had slept, eating a breakfast of dried fruit and hard bread. The kobold tack looked like it would keep for some time, so we were in no hurry to finish that.

  “How many days is this going to take?” I asked. “Crossing this stretch?” This was more of a rhetorical complaint than an actual question; I knew we’d be walking for days. But Caiside answered:

  “You still have the map. Why not take it out to see what it might say?”

  “Well,” I said, “I think Slade’s map is more for showing us the path to the hoard, and the turns we’ll need to make, and what we’ll see along the way, that sort of thing, than an accurate measure of the Drearwold. But let’s look.”

  I unrolled it and turned it toward them.

  “Judging by how large he drew it, compared to the southern edge of the pine woods, it would be smaller than that swath we just crossed. But not by too much, this would suggest.”

  “So, perhaps three or four days,” Freydis said. “Harder going, though.”

  We resumed moving. Down one of the furrows, then picking our way carefully through the wet floor of the forest; then up the next furrow on a slant, across it, and then we’d start the thing over again, except walking on the slants in alternating directions each time to keep ourselves going somewhat straight.

  The water between the crests had not become any fresher. The woods were redolent with its sulfur and decay.

  “We have to be careful with the water we have,” Freydis said. “I can’t imagine refilling our bottles from these puddles and pools.”

  “Maybe we’ll have rain,” I said. “We could catch as much as we could with our tarp.”

  *

  We had just the barest glimpses of sky as we walked, with the canopy so thick overhead. It was only after a few hours of walking that we came to what served as a clearing, the first we had seen in the Drearwold so far. The sky far above was a gray blue.

  “We can’t even tell where the sun is,” Caiside said. “No indication if we’re moving north.”

  Freydis and I said nothing. We thought it might be as good a place to stop for lunch as we were likely to come across; and in hindsight, we were correct about that; but we didn’t feel like stopping. We pressed on.

  “Is it known why this land is the way it is?” Caiside asked. “All these ridges? It doesn’t seem natural.”

  “It depends whom you ask,” Freydis answered. “Different people have different explanations. In Enkel Kanindal, the legend is that this was a farm plot which was being plowed by Great Trolls. These were trolls even larger – much larger – than the hill trolls of today. A few of them, or many, plowed these furrows long ago, back before even Foraestande Fall was a town. It’s a neat explanation: the trolls must have been very large, since these ridges are large. It’s self-evident. And they must have existed, because here are the ridges. And they must have vanished, because there are no Great Trolls any longer.

  “The Dwarves have a story that makes them look superior, of course. They say that dunters tried for years to infringe on the territory of Gray Mount, or Death Crags – both of them have a similar story – but the Dwarves valiantly fought them off. After that, the dunters – denied access to the mines of the Dwarves – dug here to look for their own silver, gold, amber, whatever. They were not successful; and look how hard they tried, and for how long they kept at the fruitless search, et cetera et cetera.

  “The people of Taperlandsby have the most disturbing explanation. Perhaps I should not have saved it for last. They claim that the trolls who lived here – regular trolls – dug all these trenches in preparation for burials resulting from a massacre they would commit upon people nearby. These were to be graves. But fortunately, for some reason either the dunters left, or did not carry out the attack, or were unable to even try. All the trenches remain here as a sign of the evil of the dunters.”

  “Well, at least that massacre never happened,” Caiside said. “The story could have been even worse.”

  “I suppose that serves as – as glad a tale as you’re going to hear, here in the Drearwold,” Freydis said.

  *

  I slept better, that night – too well. I woke, made to sit up, but could not.

  I was staked to the ground by a web of rope. I could not raise my arms. I tried my legs, and they were pinned, also.

  I could only raise my head, a little. A rope ran back and forth over my forehead, tied to stakes on either side of my ears. If I strained I could see that Caiside and Freydis were tied down the same way.

  .