Reading the notes before me was hard for many reasons.

  Firstly, the caravan was still on the move through lands rarely trodden, and now seemingly abandoned since the Storm came. My carriage jolted from side to side, the wheels grinding through old ruts and loose stone, making true focus difficult even under the best of minds and moods.

  Secondly, my mind was elsewhere.

  It wandered beyond the cramped walls of the carriage, out among the men who walked beside the train. Men with weapons and armor who now feared me. Men of reason and proof who once debated gladly at my side, yet now doubted and distrusted me.

  I glanced to my shuttered windows more often than I looked to the papers before me. They showed only darkness.

  Yet I imagined otherwise.

  I pictured eyes lingering in that dark. Faces turning as I passed. Distrust carried in every motion and quiet exchange.

  Truly, I felt myself more alone than I had in years.

  I could still feel the cancerous dust in my throat. In my lungs. In my eyes, and on my lips.

  In the struggle I had taken a good handful of it into myself. I remembered the taste of it still—bitter, chalking the tongue, settling somewhere behind the ribs where breath is meant to come freely. A truer promise of inevitable death was rarely found in this world. The records were clear enough, and the experts spoke with a single voice: inhalation meant death. Not swiftly perhaps, but certainly. The body would swell, the organs would fail, and the victim would rot from within while still drawing breath.

  It was only a matter of time.

  Yet I had brushed something even deadlier.

  The growth. The Blue Grass. That strange vegetation which had wandered so far beyond the forms of this world that no proper name remained for it. Foliage that no longer grew as plants do, but gathered itself into shapes and colors as if nature itself had forgotten its purpose. A thing that killed without hesitation or mercy. Men, beasts, vermin alike—ended by the faintest touch.

  And I had taken it in my hand.

  Thus far, in all the reports I had studied, in all the accounts gathered from traders, soldiers, and scholars alike, I had observed only two specimens that did not meet their end in that hellish greenery.

  The False Man.

  And me.

  I was in the midst of reading the accounts of others who had traversed the same path and met their end upon it.

  One record told of a merchant whose young son had walked the road in the warmth of a summer evening. The winds had been strong that day, stirring the grasses and carrying their foul seed upon the air. The boy had shown no sign of harm until the next morning, when tumours began to rise along his groin and chest. They grew slowly, painfully, until the child could neither stand nor breathe without agony. The account ended with the father describing how the boy’s voice failed him before death finally came.

  Another report came from a mercenary company petitioning the University for compensation. A widow had sent the claim. Her husband had slipped upon winter ice while crossing the growth and fallen among the frozen stems. The men wrote that his body began to rot before their eyes. Flesh split and swelled as though weeks of decay had been forced upon him in a single minute. By the time they lifted him from the ground, he was already a corpse.

  There were many such accounts.

  Merchants. Soldiers. Pilgrims. Scholars.

  I did not need to study them thoroughly. They all told the same story, written in different hands.

  The growth killed.

  The dust killed.

  The air itself, when stirred, carried death with it.

  And yet I sat there, reading their words by candlelight.

  Which left only one conclusion.

  I was impossible.

  For I was. I was abnormal.

  Nothing else recorded had survived—least of all without the smallest sign of the malformity that followed. I felt well enough. Lonely, tired, and sick of the whole cursed affair, but well in body. I had studied my hand again and again, the same hand that had closed around the spiraling growth. I had turned it in the candlelight, searched every crease and vein, every nail and knuckle, and found nothing.

  No swelling.

  No sores.

  No creeping discoloration.

  The smell did linger still. That strange sweetness clung faintly to the skin. The scent of pears, ripened and bruised. In truth, it was as though I had done nothing more dangerous than pluck a branch in an orchard, or breathe the salt air of a summer shore.

  I was well.

  Yet I felt as though I were dying all the same.

  And the Hum.

  I had not felt it. Not since the moment I spent every last measure of fury upon that mockery of a man—hurling stones, dirt, and curses at it until the creature fell beneath a soldier’s shot.

  It had vanished with it.

  That absence troubled me more than its presence ever had.

  I was in precisely the state in which the thing should have returned. It should have pressed itself into my skull, burrowing behind the eyes. It should have ground upon my thoughts until sweat ran and breath came short. It should have tormented me until I begged for the quiet of death.

  But no.

  There was nothing.

  No vibration in the bone. No whisper in the mind. No pressure behind the teeth.

  I was alone.

  Well—not entirely.

  There was a whole battalion of men and women out there who would wish nothing more than to be rid of me. To see me placed far from them, or laid beneath the soil altogether.

  And if I were to speak plainly, I found myself wishing much the same.

  Within my wagon there was no instrument that might grant such an end. Not even a humble letter opener lay upon the desk—nothing with which to quietly part my own veins and allow death to take me as it had taken so many others.

  No one came to me.

  No one spoke.

  I was, in name alone, the leader of this farce of an expedition. That notion had vanished long ago, dissolved somewhere between my quiet withdrawal and the death-mark that refused to do its work.

  Yes.

  I should die.

  It seemed the proper order of things.

  By nightfall, I resolved it would be done.

  I would find the end that nature and the Void alike had already decreed for me, yet which my own body had somehow refused. One way or another, I would correct that error.

  A pistol would suffice. The Bull Hounds carried plenty of them. One would hardly be missed, not for such a purpose. And if not a pistol, then a dagger. Steel was steel. It would do the work well enough.

  Then the darkness could take me again, properly this time, and spare me the farce my life—and this expedition—had become.

  And as I searched my memory for which wagon carried the powder and arms,

  There came a knock upon my carriage door.

  It was violent, loud, yet not without a strange order to it.

  Knock. Knock. Knock.

  A methodic rhythm.

  No one had sought me these past day and night, not since the attack. The sound struck me as intrusion more than greeting, especially as my thoughts had been turned toward matters most private.

  I considered rising to open the door.

  Before I moved, another blow struck the wood. Harder than the first. The carriage shuddered beneath it. The force of it dragged me from my thoughts and left me staring at the door, wondering what creature outside demanded entry with such insistence.

  So I did not rise.

  I leaned back instead, and watched the door.

  The knocking ceased.

  Then, as if the visitor had concluded that patience would gain him nothing, the latch burst and the door flew inward. Cold air rushed into the carriage as a swirl of dark robes and long, angular limbs forced its way through the opening.

  When I saw the shape of my visitor, I should not have been surprised. Yet I was all the same.

  Halvdan.

  His head was still beyond the frame of the door, obscured by the upper beam, while the rest of his long and awkward body filled the entrance like some crooked pillar forced into the wrong place.

  Cold wind rushed into the carriage behind him. It stirred the loose papers upon my desk and nearly smothered the small candle that lit the cramped space. The northern air carried a bite now, and it crept along the floorboards and into my bones.

  He lingered there a moment.

  Then, after a pause that stretched far longer than it should have, he stepped inside and pulled the door partly shut behind him.

  I saw his face.

  It was swollen with tears.

  His cheeks were flushed red, the tracks of drying tears still visible where his sleeve had failed to wipe them away. His eyes were swollen as well, yet they still held that same piercing quality they had always possessed.

  Halvdan’s eyes had never been idle things.

  They were made to think. To probe. To worry at the world until it yielded its secrets. And they did so still, even now, through the wreckage of whatever grief had passed over him.

  He crossed the narrow space in two uneven strides and dropped heavily onto the seat opposite mine. A small pile of books and papers slid from the bench and disappeared into the dark of the carriage floor.

  He paid them no mind.

  His gaze never left me.

  Or it had.

  I felt his eyes move across me. His head tilted slightly, then his upper body leaned forward, studying me with a care that bordered on accusation. Even through the haze of tears his gaze was sharp, probing, the sort of look he once reserved for rare specimens or disputed texts.

  At length he seemed satisfied—or perhaps merely unable to find what he sought. He sank back into the seat and fixed his eyes upon mine once more.

  “I see no swollen skin. No tumours—unless you have hidden them beneath your robes.”

  His voice was slower than usual, worn thin by fatigue, yet the familiar edge of inquiry remained.

  He drew a long breath and let it fall away in a heavy sigh.

  “I see no horns. No scales. No signs of a tail, or any other marks of the Devil. Nor of God.”

  His eyes held me there.

  “I see only you—and your damned blank face.”

  “I hope you are satisfied with your inquiry,” I said. My tone was plain. I had no patience for his cold aloofness, his academic flair.

  “I am not.”

  The words came sharp and loud, his voice suddenly clear. Halvdan rarely raised it unless properly shaken or offended. Given the state of his eyes, it was no mystery which of the two had brought him there.

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  “Well then, observe what you must,” I replied, “so you may feel content and leave me be. I had other plans for this evening.”

  “Yes. To die.”

  The words halted me.

  I looked at him more closely then.

  He had leaned forward across the small table between us, the carriage jolting beneath him as the wheels struck the worsening ruts of the northern road. Papers shifted beneath his hands, rustling softly with each sway.

  “You think you are a wall,” he said. “Always you surround yourself with mystery—vague words and that damned blank expression, as though it shuts the rest of us out.”

  His eyes hardened.

  “You are easier to read than you think. Your malaise has been plain since the beginning of this venture. What happened out there would push any man from whatever edge he was already standing upon.”

  He drew in a slow breath, his eyes never leaving mine.

  “No sores? No feeling beneath the skin, or in the lungs?”

  His voice tightened.

  “Otto—is there any sensation in you at all, besides your fucking malaise?”

  I waited before answering.

  I searched myself for any sign of change. No ache, no strange stirring beneath the skin. Nothing inward, nothing outward. My body was as it had been the day before, and the day before that.

  I had already stripped and examined myself in the privacy of the carriage. Every limb, every mark. I had found nothing.

  “No,” I said at last. “There is nothing, Halvdan.”

  He continued to study me for a few moments more with that same hard, measuring look. Then the tension seemed to leave him, and he fell back against the seat once again.

  “If I have sprouted horns,” I added, “you must be the one to tell me.”

  He laughed.

  He laughed harder than I could remember hearing from him. Yet the sound came alone. His body did not follow it. His eyes still held me fast, sharp and searching, and no true humor reached his face.

  It was a release of breath, and no joy followed.

  “Sour oaf,” he said at last. “Now you bring humor? After weeks of rivaling the Devil himself in grim countenance?”

  “I am still here. I hav—”

  I stopped myself.

  “I am simply troubled,” I said instead. “Tired. Very tired. Too much has been laid upon me. Too many voices not my own. A task larger than any man placed upon me and those who travel with me.”

  I broke Halvdan’s gaze and looked toward the carriage window, drawing the curtain aside just enough to peer through.

  The world beyond seemed colder than it ought to be, even in the height of summer. The North had never cared much for seasons or reason.

  “We set out to find what was killing us,” I said quietly. “And yet it did not kill me.”

  I turned back to him.

  Our eyes met again.

  “There has been a change,” I said. “The Hum is gone. It has not troubled me since the incident.”

  “Hm.”

  That was all Halvdan offered at first.

  His eyes shifted away from me and settled upon the carriage door. They moved slowly along its frame, up and down, as though the wood itself might assist him in sorting his thoughts.

  “Gone,” he said at length. “So—no more pain?”

  “No.”

  “You spoke before of a voice. Something that addressed you.”

  “Yes.”

  “And now?”

  “No more.”

  “The Hum troubled you. It hurt you. It followed you in the darkest hours.”

  “Yes.”

  “And since the incident—you have felt nothing?”

  “Nothing.”

  His brow lifted slightly, and whatever search had occupied him seemed to reach its end.

  “And yet you choose this moment to end your life,” he said dryly. “I would have thought opening a good bottle of wine the more fitting response.”

  “A compelling argument,” I murmured.

  “Are you against it?” he asked. “Should I leave, so you may do what must be done?”

  “No.”

  The word came from me more quickly than I intended. I felt a brief confusion at my own answer. The thought had been firm only moments ago. Now it seemed distant, as though it belonged to another hour.

  “You came here for a reason,” I said instead. “You have been in agony yourself. That much is plain.”

  He nodded and turned his gaze away.

  “Yes,” he said quietly. “Conversing with saints can have that effect.”

  The remark struck me with sudden confusion.

  “You?” I asked. “What saint would grant you audience?”

  “None, you fool.”

  His voice sharpened as he said it, though the weariness remained beneath.

  “But what else was I to do,” he continued, “when my companion has shut himself away and may well be tainted by demons, God, or something in between?”

  “So who did you speak to?”

  Halvdan scoffed, and something like a smile crept across his face. It carried no warmth yet, only the faint shape of one.

  “You had done the impossible,” he said. “You breathed the corrupted air, and touched the malign growth. And if the soldiers are to be believed, you also chose to assault that vile creature with little regard for safety or tactics.”

  He shifted in the narrow seat, leaning back and crossing his legs, his eyes drifting up toward the carriage ceiling. The old paneling there carried a pleasant inlay of roses and acanthus, now trembling faintly with every jolt of the wheels.

  “And then you vanished,” he continued. “Retreated into this carriage like a hermit into his cave. No one dared check on you. To most of them you were already cursed—or dead.”

  His gaze wandered along the ceiling, following the carved vines from one corner to another.

  “I knew you better than that,” he said at last. “You would have welcomed death, you insufferable oaf, with the Hum and the whole miserable world pressing on your skull. So I assumed you were not dying in your carriage.”

  His eyes returned to mine.

  “But I needed knowledge. This was new ground—something that had brushed death and lived. So I turned to the resources we had brought with us.”

  He exhaled softly.

  “Guitred was of no help. He merely stared at the road with those dead eyes of his. Said nothing. Did nothing.”

  A brief pause.

  “I confess I even tapped his cheek, to see if the old martyr might be stirred to some useful response. It did not avail me. He remained silent.”

  He shrugged, grimaced, and carried on.

  “So I went to Ahlia. No—I did not go to Malin. I had no wish to be burned alive.”

  I could not tell whether he meant it as jest or confession.

  “She was in her wagon,” he continued. “Covered as always, so that no gaze might enter, and none of hers escape. I went in all the same.”

  There he faltered.

  He swallowed hard, and the wetness returned to his eyes.

  “I have always hated the saints,” he said quietly. “They follow no rhyme or reason. Most seem more curse than the worst devil. Ahlia is no exception.”

  He looked back at me.

  “It hurt at once.”

  His voice lowered.

  “Her presence alone made me dizzy. My sight blurred. My limbs went numb. Her eyes cut through me as though bone and flesh were nothing.”

  He paused.

  “And her throat bled.”

  The words came with visible effort.

  “It bled as she spoke. The cursed blood ran freely. It soaked the whole carriage.”

  “Otto, I demanded answers. I wished to know what could have touched you—what voice had found its way into your skull and urged you toward death—and what force had kept you alive when the most certain plague of our age had already taken hold of you.”

  He pressed a hand to his brow. Tears still slid down his cheeks, yet he remained himself through it, steady in mind if not in composure.

  “Another wave of it struck me then,” he said. “The discomfort. She was not pleased to receive me, yet she knew the matter held weight. My robes are still stained with her blood, you know.”

  He drew a slow breath and let it out.

  “She said the Hum was the Devil. The arch-enemy of God. That it had smitten you so that you would endure its torment and abandon our mission.”

  Halvdan nodded faintly to himself as he spoke, forcing his thoughts into order.

  “But you had always refused that notion,” he continued. “You insisted it was something else. Something greater—or perhaps merely stranger—than a creature so simple as the Devil himself.”

  He looked back at me.

  “I told her this.”

  He leaned forward now, the motion sudden despite his exhaustion. His eyes were still wet, yet the force within them had not dimmed.

  “She refused. Refused outright.”

  The word came sharp.

  “She would hear none of it. Nothing but the Devil could curse a man in such a manner, she said. I told her you would know the Devil if you saw him. That you had faced the thing within your skull long enough to judge its nature.”

  His jaw tightened.

  “She answered that the Devil may wear many robes to deceive and torment the faithful.”

  Halvdan’s fingers tightened against the edge of the table.

  “So I told her what you had told me—that what you felt was greater. Not merely wicked. Not merely cruel. Something older. Something like a god, or a force beyond anything written in their sermons.”

  He swallowed.

  “That is when it hurt the most.”

  He paused there, as though the memory itself pressed upon him again.

  “She said God must have protected you,” he continued quietly. “That the Almighty had shielded you from whatever hell had been prepared for you.”

  His eyes lifted back to mine.

  “And I reminded her,” he said, “that you are no believer. That you have always been a man of worldly reason, and empty of spiritual devotion.”

  “She told me God must have protected you. Yet you had felt no relief—none at all. Only when her own power shielded you in Felthaven, when the heavens thundered. So then, it was her force, not God’s.”

  He went on, the tears now spent, his voice settling into the cadence of a man presenting his reasoning before a hall of scholars.

  “So Ahlia answered that God had indeed protected you—through her. Very well, I said, straining through her rivers of blood and the assault upon my mind. If that is so, then what protected Otto when he touched the grass?”

  He paused, his eyes fixed on me.

  “The Devil?”

  “She said,” Halvdan continued, voice thick with lingering disbelief, “that somewhere within you there lingered the presence of God. Whether you knew it or not. Whether you wished it or not.”

  He wiped roughly at his cheek, though the tears had already begun to dry.

  “She suggested that perhaps you had already become something else entirely. A saint of a different order. A saint of the occluded. Of the unbeliever. Of the scholar who kneels before no altar yet still carries the spark of the divine.”

  He barked a laugh then.

  And this time the laughter was real.

  It rolled out of him harsh and incredulous, echoing faintly against the narrow walls of the carriage.

  “THIS,” he said, striking the word like a hammer upon iron, “did not strike me as particularly prudent.”

  His palm came down upon the table between us with a sharp crack that sent the candle flame shivering. Papers jumped, and a small cloud of dust lifted from the wood.

  “A saint of the unbeliever?” he scoffed. “A patron for skeptics and miserable rationalists such as ourselves? No.”

  His arm shot forward, finger leveled at my chest with a vigor I had rarely seen from him.

  “No,” he repeated, voice tightening with sudden conviction. “I think you found something far more mundane—and far more dangerous.”

  His finger trembled slightly as he held it there.

  “I think you found yourself.”

  The words hung between us.

  “I think you dispelled the Void yourself when you challenged that thing in the grass. When you hurled stones and curses at it like a madman and refused to bend before it.”

  The force seemed to leave him then. He sank back into the seat once more, the energy draining from his frame as quickly as it had appeared.

  Yet his eyes remained fixed upon me, sharp and analytical once more, studying me as though I were a rare specimen newly delivered to his laboratory table.

  “Which leaves us with a rather inconvenient question,” he murmured.

  He tilted his head slightly.

  “What force did you discover, Otto?”

  I felt the air leave me.

  Some breath I had held far too long escaped my chest all at once, and my lungs drew in another in its place—ragged, coarse, as though they had forgotten how the simple act was meant to be done.

  “I do not know,” I said.

  The words came quietly, yet they scraped the throat as they passed.

  Tears pressed behind my eyes, unwelcome and hot.

  “I simply refused to let it win. That monster. The voice in my head. Whatever had sent its force to end me—and those who traveled with me.”

  My hands had found the edge of the table without my noticing. My fingers pressed against the wood as the memory returned, sharp and sudden.

  “I was angry,” I continued. “Angrier than I have ever been.”

  I searched for the words, though none seemed adequate.

  “My mind left me. My reason fled. All that remained was the body… and whatever strength it possessed.”

  The carriage creaked around us as the wheels struck another rut in the northern road.

  “So I abolished the dark,” I said hoarsely. “The Hum. The Void.”

  I lifted my head again, meeting Halvdan’s gaze.

  “And I struck at what defiled me most. The thing that stood before me.”

  My jaw tightened.

  “That inhuman mockery. That hatred given form. A creature that walked on limbs like ours yet carried none of what makes us human.”

  I swallowed.

  “Something that can live. Something that can love.”

  My voice dropped.

  “There was none of that in it.”

  “Only death.”

  “And so,” Halvdan said slowly, “you chose to end your life because you bested death?”

  The insult was there, clear enough, though softened by the long years we had worked beside one another.

  “No,” I answered.

  I drew another breath, steadier this time.

  “I chose to end it because I no longer felt like man nor devil.”

  He nodded, the motion slow, thoughtful. His mouth twisted into a brief grimace—the expression of a man who had reached a conclusion he did not entirely enjoy.

  “So then,” he said, “perhaps Ahlia was not entirely wrong after all. Perhaps something did touch you. Or perhaps you became something more.”

  He looked at me again, properly now.

  “Perhaps you found yourself. What drives you. The love of humanity—and the hatred of whatever would seek to end it.”

  His fingers tapped once against the table.

  “Perhaps it was nothing mystical at all. Perhaps it was simply strength. Your strength. Something within you that rose when it was needed.”

  His gaze drifted away from me again. He leaned back into the seat, the carriage groaning softly as it rolled over another rut in the northern road.

  “This is all still dreadfully metaphysical,” he muttered. “It would require rigorous testing. Empirical evidence. Proper observation before one could draw any serious conclusion.”

  He paused.

  Yet his face tightened again, the old tears still clinging to the corners of his eyes.

  “But it does suggest something,” he said more quietly. “That no god nor devil touched you.”

  He glanced toward me once more.

  “Only yourself.”

  A faint shrug followed.

  “Perhaps we all have something to learn from that.”

  I had no response.

  The words sat inside me like a weight I could neither lift nor examine. Tears gathered again, my throat itching, tightening. No sound came when I tried to answer.

  Halvdan watched for a moment longer.

  Then he inclined his head slightly.

  “Yes,” he said. “We are closing in on the North.”

  His tone had returned to its usual scholarly calm.

  “Distill your thoughts before we arrive, will you? I will speak with Renhard and the others. The scholars will wish to know how we proceed.”

  He stood.

  “I shall also inform them that you are alive, and of sound mind.”

  His brow lifted slightly.

  “Are you not?”

  I nodded.

  “Good.”

  He gathered his robe, already turning toward the door.

  “Good night, Otto. We will speak again tomorrow.”

  The latch lifted. Cold northern air spilled into the carriage as he opened the door.

  For a moment his tall, dark frame filled the entrance.

  Then he stepped out.

  The door closed behind him, and his long, shadowed figure vanished into the night as though he had never been there at all.

  No Hum returned.

  Only the quiet of my own soul remained.