“Odd,” said Simia.
She pushed through the undergrowth and strode down the slope. “Come on, it must go up again in a bit.”
They set out once more but had only walked a few steps when they came to a halt.
There, beyond a few branches of trees, was the valley they had just left behind. Lamplights blinked in the treetops, the occasional dark figure wandered through the canopy and just ahead was the stream they had crossed only minutes before.
Simia turned on her heel and marched past Sylas with a look of fierce determination.
“We must have circled back somehow. Come on!”
Sylas opened his mouth to say something, but then just turned to follow. They had only walked a dozen paces through the thicket before the ground again seemed to be levelling out. Again they reached a clearing, and again they saw the ground falling away, and as soon as they started down the slope they stopped in astonishment – for there, through the bushes and wood smoke, were the same lamplights, the treetops and the familiar stream, babbling in the half-dark, seeming almost to mock them. They were back where they had started.
“I think I know what’s happening here,” said Simia, smiling suddenly. “You know why they call this the Valley of Outs?”
Sylas shook his head, perplexed.
“Because no one but the Suhl can find their way in. They always find themselves walking out again!”
“Right …” said Sylas, trying to get his head round it.
“Well, isn’t this just the opposite? I mean, we’re inside the valley, and perhaps the same magic that keeps other people out—”
“… is keeping us in!” exclaimed Sylas, a smile spreading across his tired features. “So however many times we try to climb this hill, and whatever point we try from, we’ll always find ourselves walking back into the Valley of Outs!”
Simia put her hands on her hips and grinned. “Exactly.”
Since they had gone as far as they could go, they sat down on a bed of dry leaves and gazed through the branches and bushes to the valley below, framed by the dark silhouettes of the two vast hills. The moon and stars lent everything a trace of silver: the distant hilltops, the curls of smoke rising from hundreds of fires, and somewhere below, only just visible through the fingers of the forest, the glistening surface of the lake.
For the first time they felt the true power of this place: the ancient and unfathomable magic that bound it together, from root, to trunk, to treetop – the magic that now held them close and would keep them safe.
“It’s like a dream,” murmured Simia under her breath.
Sylas nodded and almost without thinking he raised a hand towards the overhanging branches and opened his fingers wide. In the same instant, the twigs and leaves swept aside like the curtains of a stage, revealing the valley, the lake and the twinkling skies in all their majesty.
Simia’s grin flashed in the half-dark. “Show off!”
Sylas laughed and started to close his fingers, but she reached out.
“Don’t,” she said. “Leave it.”
And so Sylas left the branches as they were, framing the most beautiful view either of them had ever seen.
They sat quietly, listening to the birds settling to roost and the animals of the night calling to the rising moon. To their surprise, these sounds suddenly faded, as though making way for something else. A moment later, they heard the sorrowful sound of a pipe. The music came from deep in the forest, and was quickly taken up by hundreds of instruments scattered throughout the treetops of Sylva: pipes, violins, guitars, horns, all playing as one.
Then the Suhl began to sing. Their words seemed to seep from the trees themselves, filling the valley with a mournful chorus:
In far lands of dark and high lands and low,
I hear songs of a place where none ever go;
Locked in the hills, ’midst green velvet folds,
A treasure more precious than gem-furnished gold,
For there dwell the Suhl, the last broken band,
There dwell the lost and there dwell the damned …
The thing throbbed and quivered, its glistening flanks oozing a sickening slime. It was a formless shape, a mess of organic sludge that barely cohered into a single thing. The tiny chamber in which it lived dripped the same oily filth and pulsed to the same quickening rhythm, as though it and the thing were one and the same: one sustaining the other. The air was thick and hot and wet. Trails of vapour rose and formed swirling, putrid clouds beneath the cave-like ceiling.
Suddenly there was silence.
The half-formed heart halted. The vapours ceased their constant movement.
The thing trembled. And then …
THUMP … THUMP …
THUMP-THUMP … THUMP-THUMP … THUMP-THUMP …
The thing swelled and receded. Something inside tensed and then a bulge moved beneath the glutinous surface. Then another: this time distinct and pointed.
The pulse accelerated, gaining volume, building and building, faster and faster until soon it was no longer a heartbeat but a rush of sound, a deafening percussion of panic.
Suddenly the thing erupted in frantic motion, twisting and stretching, turning and bulging. As the jelly was breached, more black mucous flowed down its sides and new vapours palled in the chamber.
And then, with a sudden surge, something forced itself upwards, striking the ceiling with a thud. It slewed to one side and then collapsed, slapping down into the ooze.
The heartbeat steadied and began to return to a measured pace. The walls ceased their throbbing altogether, for their work was done.
Something had been born.
It was partly submerged in the oily mire, so that it could almost not be seen. But in some strange contortion there was an arm and a hand – a human hand – and that hand rested against a human cheek. A woman’s cheek. It twitched, the little finger tapping against the fine dark skin.
And then, slowly, the hand began to clench. The fingers curled, and as they did so there was movement at their tips, beneath the fingernails. Slow and slick, the points of rapier talons emerged into the gloom. They grew and grew, until they were almost half the length of the fingers. Until they scratched the woman’s cheek.
The figure arched in a spasm of pain. She shrieked, her eyes wide and staring, the pupils drawn into narrow slits.
It was not a woman’s shriek. It was the screeching wail of an animal.
“If sorcery itself has form, it is the Black. The Black is all we cannot know; it is enchantment and it is despair.”
IT STARTED BEFORE THE first warming rays, in the darkness: a playful chirrup from a nearby branch, followed by an answering call. Then another, even nearer at hand, and another, building on the first, clamouring to be heard. Soon a mounting chorus filled the forest. Thousands of sparrows and swifts, finches and wrens, kites and kestrels, all raising their heads towards the crowning