“It’s Karl Pig-face,” I said. “A Rancelman!”
“No!” Chance fiddled with his glass, easing it through the dried fern so as not to betray us where we lay. “So it is! But what’s wrong with his face? That isn’t the Karl you knew!”
I looked again, more carefully. It was Karl Pig-face, right enough, but the face was … empty. Pale. Dry, rather than sheened with sweat as I had always seen it. At that instant, his head began to turn toward me, and as his head turned every skull in that endless train of bones began to turn also. Without thinking, I reached for Didir, felt her flow into me, and made my own mind dive down like some depth-dwelling fish to let her shield me. Through my eyes, I felt her watch the skeleton heads swing restlessly to and fro, like pendant fruit, the wormholes of the empty eyes seeking me. Then Karl’s head faced forward once more, and they went on, on to the north. I did not move or speak until they were vanished in dust, beyond even a Shifter’s ability to see them.
“That one sought you, Peter,” whispered Didir. “Sought you out of hate, malice, and because he is forced to do it. He wears a cap, like the other one you are remembering. He felt you, Peter.”
“But he did not tell them…” I replied wonderingly.
“They are fools,” she said. “Whoever wears the cap will do only what he is told. They told him to find you, not to tell them he had found you. So he found you, lost you, and went on seeking. Their stupidity has saved you, this time.”
“Who?” I breathed.
She did not answer. I had not thought she would. Karl had not known who sent him, and for her to attempt to Read any of the others would have been to signal our presence.
“So we are behind them now,” said Chance.
“Behind them,” I said. “But who knows how many have been set on my trail. It began the minute we left the Bright Demesne. I am not such a fool as to think these boneraisers are the end of it. Someone has gone to considerable trouble.”
“Ah,” said Chance.
“Huld!” I said. I was certain of it. It had all the marks of Huld, all his energy, his relentless malice, his fascination with the mechanisms of the techs. Who else could have learned from Mandor that Karl Pig-face was my enemy? Who else would have known of my association with Silkhands … Silkhands! “Silkhands is in great danger,” I said. “Huld would not let the chance pass to use her against me. He will take her when she leaves Xammer, depend upon it, and she is all unwary of this.”
“Well, lad, I wouldn’t let him do that if I were you.”
Curse the man. No sympathy. No hooraw and horror, no running about squawking. Merely “don’t let him do that.” Tush. Xammer was more than a hard day’s ride south, and she might be leaving at any time. Or have left already.
“There’s that Hafnor,” said Chance, fixing me with his beady little eyes. “In case you’ve forgot.”
Damn him. Of course I hadn’t forgotten. The idea made me sick to my stomach was all. Stopping existing in one place. Flicking away to another place. Starting to exist there. All in an instant. It was worse than the bones. I felt my inner parts lurch and sway, a kind of vertiginous gulping of the guts.
“No other way I can see,” said Chance, still staring at me.
With no sense of volition about it at all, I reached into the pouch to find Hafnor, knowing him in the instant by the unfamiliarity of him. I clenched my hand around him and took a deep, aching breath, only to have my mind filled with a gust of mocking laughter. “Well, and where are we here?” I felt someone using my eyes, my nose, my tongue to taste the air, my other hand to feel the ground beneath me. I saw the shape of every tree, the volume of the leaves against the sun, felt the texture of the dried grasses. “That’s here,” said the laughing voice. “Where do we want to go?” I tried to explain about Silkhands, about Xammer, but felt only a mad, laughing incomprehension and impatience. “Where, where, where? What walls? What smell of the air? What floors? What doors leading in and out? What windows? Draperies? Furniture? What landmarks seen through those windows? Where, where?”