The nothing
Alec Worley

Cade peered out from between the mountain crags and gazed across the forbidden lands beyond the Cradle. He was always struck by how those rolling prairies below seemed limitless, unbounded by the sheer cliffs that enclosed his own domain. He tried to pick out roads or villages, or perhaps one of those great walled cities of which Abi had spoken. He had been born somewhere out there in that ocean of green. In a farmhouse, perhaps. Or some lofty palace tower. Who knew? His parents had known, their graves lost too beneath these darkening skies.
 	Cade squinted at the storm clouds mounting a barricade across the horizon, seemingly in defiance of the prevailing wind.
 	A voice bellowed up at him from behind and he jumped in fright, almost losing his grip on the rocks.
 	‘Get down from there, boy!’
 	He looked back to see Barrion frowning up at him from below, a tusked hog slung across his huge shoulders and a brace of purple gillybirds strangled at his belt.
 	‘I got tired of waiting for you,’ said Cade, feigning annoyance as he clambered down the rock face as casually as he could manage.
 	The master hunter continued barking at his apprentice as he descended. ‘What’s gotten into you, lad? You know the Lands Beyond are not for your eyes. Nor for anyone’s.’ His icy blue stare was livid above the black beard that consumed the lower half of his face. ‘Unless you want the Nothings to come after you.’
 	Cade could not help but shiver at Barrion’s words and hoped his companion hadn’t noticed.
 	‘I’m too old to be scared by fairy tales, Barrion.’
 	‘Disobey the Horned Throne and you’ll soon see what’s a fairy tale and what’s not, lad.’
 	Cade jumped down beside him and threw him a look of defiance.
 	Barrion chuckled. ‘Oh, so he’s a big man now at seventeen harvests old? Big enough to carry that all the way back to the village, is he?’
 	Barrion indicated the enormous dead stag that Cade had somehow managed to roll onto a makeshift sled. It must have been some ten harvests old, its antlers grown to a sprawl. The thing weighed as heavy as sin, heavier still after being hauled from the woods in which Cade had killed it, those antlers catching on every root and branch on its way out.
 	Barrion shook his head. ‘Did I not explain that we were coming up here for small game? Sweetmeats, Cade. Easy to carry. The harvest feast is tonight. Do you think the women will have time to prepare a beast that size? ’Tis a mortal waste.’
 	Cade spoke excitedly. ‘I was in the trees gathering eggs when he plodded out the woods beneath me. The wind was before me for an hour. He had no notion I was there. It would have been a mortal waste not to take him.’
 	‘And how many herds did you scare away in taking him down?’
 	Cade grinned. ‘One shot, straight in the eye.’ He patted the slender throwing axes at his belt.
 	‘Like hell, you did,’ said Barrion, taking a sudden interest in the corpse. Cade waited, and Barrion concluded his inspection with a snort. ‘And why did you feel the need to perform such a feat, lad? Who were you looking to impress by dragging this monster through the village?’
 	Cade swallowed. ‘No one.’
 	Barrion eyed him doubtfully and spat over the trail’s ledge.
 	‘A man should choose his burdens wisely,’ he said and trudged away, muttering under his breath. Cade grabbed the rungs of the sled and dragged it behind him, the stag’s weight already unbearable. He clattered down the narrow mountain trail after Barrion, careful to avoid the sheer drop beside them as they descended towards their village buried deep in the foothills below.
 	They walked in silence until evening threatened the sky, casting an orange gloom over the horseshoe of mountains that encompassed the Cradle, shielding it from the Lands Beyond. Cloud-shadows crawled down those grey slopes, down acres of purple heather, over the bristling green woods and across the lake, a gleaming grey sheet spread across the valley’s basin.
 	The Cradle was said to be accessible by a single secret road known only to the Matriarchs. But Cade knew the truth. The mountains were not completely impassable. His exploits as a hunter had taken him into every corner of the valley and he knew where in the lower ranges a man might pass into the Lands Beyond. Yet he also knew ancient measures had been put in place to prevent such excursions.
 	The trail followed a bend and the Tor came into view. It had been carved out of the shoulders of the northern mountains aeons ago, a huge monarch reclining upon His throne. Even from this distance, Cade could see His cloven hooves awash with bright tributes of summer flowers and wicker poppets. The Horned King bowed His great goat’s head, forever contemplating His kingdom.
 	Cade mumbled a prayer. ‘I am an orphan of the Cradle. I give thanks to the Horned Throne. He is sky and soil, root and branch.’
 	A cooling breeze blessed him with the scent of wildflowers. The smell reminded him of his boyhood, exhausted in bed after a day of mad games in the fields with his friends, cool sheets wrapped tight and safe around him. How empty of such excitement and comfort the Cradle seemed to him now. For all its majesty, the valley seemed devoid of allure and mystery these days. The Horned Father could give him no answers and all Cade had was questions he wished he could ignore. Why were they forbidden from leaving the Cradle? What was out there in the Lands Beyond?
 	Barrion was trying to break the ice.
 	‘A fine harvest this year, lad. Enough to brew twice the mead we had last year. I doubt we’ll wake ’til long past sunrise two days hence.’
 	Cade grunted, preoccupied, his arms in torment, though he was determined not to show it as he dragged the clattering sled behind him.
 	‘You know Estrilda?’ tried Barrion. ‘That dark-haired one from the stables? She was asking after you. Wanted to know where you’d be seated at the feast tonight. That Sara from the smithy asked the same, and so did her sister.’ He laughed.
 	Cade scowled. Barrion clearly thought him a fool, a child, easily patronised.
 	‘Fish from the rivers, fruit from the soil, girls from the village.’ Barrion winked. ‘The Cradle provides, lad. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.’
 	‘You’re wrong about Abi,’ Cade said.
 	Barrion stopped dead and turned with a look of concern.
 	‘The rest of us call her “Abigael”, lad. When we have to. Sounds like you two have become close. For how long?’
 	‘Long enough to know that what everyone says about her is not true.’
 	‘’Tis true she’s trouble, lad.’
 	‘So you keep telling me.’
 	‘So does everyone in the blasted village, but still you won’t listen.’ Barrion managed to staunch his frustration and laid gentle hands on Cade’s shoulders. ‘Understand. She’s not…’ Barrion struggled to find the words. ‘She’s not right! She doesn’t fit. You know even the Matriarchs couldn’t divine a use for her.’
 	Cade snorted. ‘Abi shamed them all, that’s why. She could interpret the old scrolls better than any in the cloisters.’
 	‘And questioned those scrolls too often, which is why she’s shovelling dung in the goat pens these days. Not only that, she’s got your nose turned places it shouldn’t be. What are you thinking? I can see she’s got pretty eyes and a full figure. Come on, lad. Tell me that’s all you’re after…’
 	Cade calmly set down the sled.
 	‘Speak of her that way again, Barrion,’ he said, ‘and see if I don’t raise my hand to you.’
 	Barrion stepped back, muttering in astonishment.
 	‘It’s as they say, then,’ he said. ‘First she has you peering over the walls into the Lands Beyond. Then she has you threaten your master without a glint of fear in your eye. She has a hex upon you, lad, whether you know it or not. I knew she was wrong. She’s a mistake. She doesn’t belong here.’
 	‘Of course she belongs here, Barrion. She’s an orphan like us. Like all of us. She was sent to the Cradle from the Lands Beyond to be cared for after her parents died.’
 	Cade jabbed his finger at the Tor. ‘Is that not His custom? The creed of the Horned Throne welcomed her. If there’s a mistake, Barrion, then is it not of His making?’
 	The blow landed hard across Cade’s cheek, knocking him onto the sled. The stag shifted beneath him, the sled slipping down a shelf of rock onto the ledge beside the trail. He went to stop it, but Barrion grabbed him by his tunic, lifting him off his feet and bellowing in his face.
 	‘No orphan leaves the Cradle! That is His law. He provides and so we obey. That is His custom. For even one of us to cross the boundary would bring ruin to us all.’
 	Cade struggled but Barrion’s arms were like branches of oak, his teeth bared behind his spit-flecked whiskers.
 	‘The Matriarchs cannot protect her forever, boy. Not when she persists with her blasphemies, and poisons others with them.’
 	Cade looked down. The sled’s escape had been stopped by a sapling, perilously close to the brink. Realising his own feet hovered near the ledge, he grabbed Barrion’s arms for fear of being dropped. The man glared back at his apprentice, eyes cold.
 	‘Folk won’t stand for it,’ Barrion said. ‘And nor will I.’
 	‘She’s not what you think she is,’ Cade said. ‘She’s not a witch.’
 	Before Barrion could answer, their attention was stolen by a soft but insistent chime, carried upon the wind. The village bell. Someone far below was hammering that bronze shell in a panic. Barrion flung Cade to the ground, shrugged the dead hog from his shoulders and bolted down the slope like a hound. Cade’s own heart rang as he gathered himself to sprint after him. The great stag shifted on the slope beside him, then vanished over the ledge. Cade peered after it. He watched the animal tumble through the air for a second before it cast a sheet of blood and spinning splinters over the rocks below.
 	The goats had got loose. They were everywhere – braying, humping, clashing in the streets. They nibbled at the white cloths laid upon the feasting tables, spilling empty plates and cups onto a ground now strewn with dung. They gobbled fruit from the overturned horn-baskets woven by the children in annual thanks for the Horned Father’s protection. The animals munched and gazed stupidly as their human keepers raced about them.
 	Cade stumbled and kicked his way through the whinnying throng, close behind Barrion as he entered the village. The alarm bell had ceased long before they arrived, but the place remained in a state of panic. Cade saw frightened nursemaids dragging children behind doors, infants bawling. Men rifled through sheds, barns and cellars, frantically searching. Cade froze as he heard one of them call out.
 	‘Abigael?’
 	Barrion grabbed one of the field workers and demanded to know what was going on.
 	‘The queer one,’ the man said. ‘She’s gone missing, slipped away. Some say she’s already fled the Cradle!’
 	Cade’s legs were reeds in a gale, his belly an empty pit. Abi was gone? She had been so distant these last few weeks, fearful. The awful logic of her disappearance knocked him dizzy. Perhaps she was only hiding in the woods. Perhaps she had stumbled upon a bear or a pack of sabre-wolves. 
 	Perhaps she was even more reckless than he thought. She may have crossed the boundary into the Lands Beyond, and she had done so without him.
 	‘Where is she?’ Barrion had Cade by his jacket once again, shaking him, flecking Cade’s face with spit.
 	‘I don’t know,’ Cade spluttered.
 	Cade had never seen Barrion so wild, his lips curled, snarling like a cornered bear.
 	‘You two are wedded in this mischief, I know it. Now tell me!’
 	‘Upon the Father,’ Cade said. ‘I know not.’
 	Barrion swore and dragged Cade beside him as he lurched on, towards the heart of the village. He called others to his side, a captain rousing men to war.
 	Cade did not struggle; his mind was too addled. Had she crossed the boundary already? Was he and every other orphan in the village already doomed? How could she be so callous? Again, that awful logic reminded him. She had terrified him in the past with talk of the Lands Beyond, yet intrigued him with her theories that nothing at all would happen should anyone leave the Cradle. The warnings of the Matriarchs were but an empty custom, she insisted.
 	She had told Cade of things that she had read in the ancient scriptures, things that men like Barrion would call blasphemy, grounds for murder, even. She had been vague in detail, but seemed to suggest that the cult of the Horned Father was but a fragment of a truth greater and more glorious than any of their people might realise. Cade knew her certainty had been absolute; as absolute as her fear of those who hated her.
 	But what if she was wrong? No one knew what punishment the Horned Father might visit upon His children for their disobedience. Tavern scholars spoke of harvests crumbling to ash or a winter that would freeze them to death in their homes. Others spoke of ghost stories heard as children, of spirits known as the Nothings. Then men would discreetly make the sign of the Horn-Star and talk would progress to other matters.
 	Barrion hauled him into the village square amid a throng of other villagers, dragging him up to the huge table erected upon the steps of the Cloven Altar. Here the Matriarchs, honoured brides of the Horned Father, should have been sat feasting. Instead, Mother Alder stood alone, already addressing a fearful crowd. She wore only her green shift, still looking tall and proud, though shockingly plain and vulnerable without her veil of leaves and horned crown. The crowd had gathered bows and muskets. Torches had been lit, fogging the evening air with the angry stink of smoke and hot resin.
 	Barrion thrust Cade into the arms of another man with orders to hold him tight. Cade felt strong hands gripping his jacket as he watched Barrion shoulder through the crowd, unsling his hunting bow and kneel as he presented it to Mother Alder. Ice wriggled down Cade’s spine as he heard Barrion speak.
 	‘In the name of the Horned Father, for the safety of the Cradle and its orphans,’ he said. ‘Mother, bless this, my humble weapon, for a witch may only be killed by an instrument thus sanctified.’
 	Cade cried out, jostled by the crowd. ‘She’s not a witch!’
 	‘Whatever she is,’ said Barrion, still staring up at Mother Alder. ‘She means to cross the boundary and bring the Horned Father’s wrath upon us all.’
 	Mother Alder looked weary. ‘You don’t know that, Barrion. None of you know that.’
 	‘She has stolen food and water from the stores,’ someone cried.
 	‘And clothes from our porch,’ yelled another.
 	Another was angrier still. ‘She flirts with blasphemy before our children, and she has done so for too long.’
 	The men roared their approval, but Mother Alder did not wilt before the blast, though her handsome face darkened with a private sorrow.
 	‘Mother, quickly,’ Barrion said. ‘She may have passed the stones already.’
 	Cade cried out as Mother Alder raised her hand.
 	‘Make it swift,’ she told Barrion, then made the sign of the Horn-Star over his bow, then over the lowered heads of the assembled. The men received her grim sanction with admirable humility. For they were to murder one of their own, an orphan of the Cradle.
 	‘But where are we to start looking?’ one of them hissed.
 	‘Fear not,’ another replied. ‘Cade here is the finest tracker in the Cradle.’
 	The man’s words trailed off. Cade had already sidled from the crowd and he imagined his captor’s astonishment at the sight of the vacant jacket in his hand. He felt a glint of satisfaction and shivered as he scurried away down a darkened lane.
 	Cade found her trail heading upstream. Blades of grass were broken, torn by the passage of stiff shoes, the kind worn by one who meant to travel far. He wet his parched mouth with a scoop of chill water then stooped to examine the ground. The emerald moon blazed green, full ripe tonight. Cade felt comforted by the presence of that great shining apple still dangling above his benighted world.
 	The grass had not been pressed beneath any great weight. The shorter, stiffer reeds had already sprung back in place. Abi had passed through here less than an hour ago, ploughing this subtle furrow through the pasture as she hurried uphill. The stream wriggled for a quarter-league up the mountainside, a green snake glittering in the moonlight as it passed a dense line of trees that Cade knew all too well. A good long run lay ahead of him – longer still for Abi, a scribe from the cloisters unused to traversing the wild. But Cade could see no figure moving along the glimmering waters ahead, no tell-tale shadow creeping about the distant banks.
 	Glowing green faun lights swarmed in bunches along the stream. As a boy, Cade had believed the old stories that told how these insects were actually spirits, servants of the Father, sent to guide wanderers to a safe destination. But he knew he would receive no such guidance tonight. Cold fear soaked him at the thought of Abi reaching the boundary before him.
 	He sprang up the trail, settling into a bounding run, his hunting axes clacking at his hip. This was all his fault. Abi could be in danger, as could every orphan in the village. His sheltered world faced an apocalypse of his making. May oak and earth forgive him. Fool that he was for showing her this route. Madman that he was for allowing her to approach the boundary and giving Abi her first glimpse of the Lands Beyond. That forbidden vista was the preserve of no one in the Cradle but the Matriarchs and master rangers such as Barrion.
 	His pace slowed as he reached the foothills, his breath laboured as he fought his way up their steep banks. His last visit to these pastures had been during a happier time, when the goldlace and bloodthistles bloomed. Cade had been helping re-thatch the sheds when Mother Alder had condemned Abi to the goat pens for the rest of the season. Cade had helped her carry dung barrows to the fields, a favour that quickly became habit.
 	She appreciated his assistance and he was fascinated by her seemingly endless capacity for talk. She spoke at first of her duties under the Matriarchs, who dwelt in stony chambers in the high reaches of the village. She had been taught to understand the ancient runes, then progressed to tedious copywork, salvaging with her quill the history of the Horned Throne from countless crumbling scrolls. But oh, how she devoured those endless lines of information. It was for her like opening a door into a new world, a world beyond her dungeon cloisters. She asked much about Cade’s exploits as a hunter and he obliged her with casually audacious tales of stalking dangerous beasts among the treacherous margins of the Cradle. How he relished the look of fascination in those inquisitive brown eyes.
 	They had discussed philosophy in the privacy of the empty fields, shovelling pellets of dung along the furrows as they debated what might lie beyond the stars. She had been punished with her current duties for her ceaseless questioning of Mother Alder, whose every answer, whose every angry demand for silence, served only to inspire more questions.
 	‘We orphans are told our parents are dead, but did we not have other family to care for us in the Lands Beyond? Who dictated such a tradition? Who are the founders of our custom? The Horned Father? Or someone else? If we are never to leave the Cradle, then is this all our lives are to be?’ Abi’s questions troubled Cade, though her curiosity was infectious. Her passion enthralled him as much as it terrified him.
 	‘The truth is bliss,’ she once told him. ‘Not ignorance.’ Those words had struck him hard, made him ashamed of his comforts, of his fears. He was no sheep in thrall to the shepherd, but a man. And he became determined to prove that. He yearned to inspire her.
 	Cade paused for breath atop a steep rock and looked back at the village. How quickly might Barrion follow his trail? What might he and his followers do to Cade when he eventually caught up with him? Cade skipped on, from rock to rock, bounding like a billy goat, away from the gushing stream until he reached the shelf of trees. He hauled himself onto the ledge and a wall of pines stood before him.
 	He pounded sparks from his flint to set ablaze a stout torch from his belt. Was she waiting for him by the stones on the other side of the trees, too afraid to cross the boundary? Could he reach her in time? If so, what would he do? Talk sense into her? If she refused to listen, would he have to stop her? The thought of harming her, even for her own good, set his belly churning.
 	He entered the trees, his crackling torchlight washing over the ground, revealing a shifted pebble, tufts of moss smeared underfoot. The smell of pine smothered him, a carpet of dead needles flesh-soft beneath his feet. He pinched a tassel of hair from a splintered branch. The strands were long and milky-yellow, plucked from the roots. Abi had battled her way through these branches, determined. Perhaps she lay injured nearby. If he was lucky. Perhaps she was dead, her carcass sprawled and wolf-ravaged, awaiting his discovery. He felt a sickening glimmer of hope.
 	The pines eventually released him onto a grassy mountain ledge dominated by a single towering stone. It was coffin-narrow, flat as a headstone. Beyond lay a sea of hills and fields, ghostly green beneath the moon.
 	Cade stood alone, his torch whooshing in his hand as he spun around in search of Abi. He sobbed her name. 
 	Nothing.
 	The air here seemed to tremble with a gravelly hum that haunted the edge of Cade’s hearing. He felt a slight but dizzying pressure in his head, like palms pressed hard upon his ears. Two more stones stood glowering a short distance away, either side of the stone before him. Countless more stood beyond those, Cade knew, erected centuries ago along the mountains of the Cradle, forming a ring that surrounded the sacred valley.
 	The boundary stones watched as Cade probed the grass. Abi’s trail passed between the standing rocks, continued down the grassy slope and vanished into the Lands Beyond. Those black clouds Cade had seen to the north that afternoon were now advancing, a sarcophagus lid moving to shut out the moonlight.
 	Cade felt weightless with panic as he comprehended the unavoidable truth that lay pressed into the grass before him. The boundary had been crossed. An orphan had left the Cradle. Catastrophe would follow. His torch fell dead to the ground and he dropped before the stone, pressing his hands in entreaty upon the lichen-splattered rock.
 	‘Forgive her, Father! This is my sin, not hers. Punish me and spare the others, I beg you. It was I who caused this. It was I who inspired this blasphemy.’
 	He ground his forehead against the stone.
 	‘I should never have brought her here.’
 	Cade looked out across the Lands Beyond, remembering the eternity of blue skies and green pastures it had been months ago. But he had been more enchanted by the sight of Abi, standing beside this very stone. She had stripped off her dairymaid’s cap, pale hair shamelessly aflutter, shielding her eyes as she fell in love with the horizon. He knew then that he had lost her. In bringing her here, in attempting to draw her closer to him, he had succeeded only in casting her away, striking in her a longing for that which neither he nor the Horned Father nor anything in the Cradle could ever hope to satisfy.
 	The Horned Father gave no answer. There was only that deadening murmur in the air as the boundary stones considered Cade’s entreaty. His hands fell away, his palms tingling. He had seen something move in the Lands Beyond.
 	Cade instinctively flattened himself upon the grass, thankful his torch was extinguished. He was unsure what he had just seen, but something about it caused his heart to beat hard against the earth. Not daring to raise his head, he stared into darkness, cold grass nuzzling his face. Had he seen only a scarecrow? He recalled something with outstretched arms, its ragged garments licking the air. Yet he knew full well that scarecrows stood staked in their fields; they did not shamble silently about the earth of their own volition.
 	He must be mistaken. Horned Throne preserve him, he had to be mistaken.
 	He slowly raised his head, struggling to steady his hastening breath as he peered out from behind the stone, and over the bushes that covered the steep slope.
 	Ice drenched his scalp at the sight of a shred of darkness bobbing on the spot some distance below, far too big to be a rabbit. It vanished beneath the brow of a hill before he could identify it.
 	A fox, then. It must be a fox, he thought.
 	As he struggled to convince himself, the shape rose again, nearer this time. It was steadily mounting the hill. He could see a figure, perfectly visible in the moonlight, cloaked it seemed, its long vestments flapping in the wind, arms thrashing as it clawed its way up the slope towards him.
 	Cade heard himself whimper, feeling his limbs shake with a sudden energy as he went to bolt back through the pines. The figure stumbled and fell. He heard a distant yelp of pain. Long pale hair flashed in the moonlight.
 	‘Abi!’
 	Cade sprang, eyes fixed on the exhausted figure struggling up the hill below. He took several strides past the boundary stone before he realised what he’d done. 
 	As he passed between the boundary stones and down the hillside, Cade’s skull rang like a bell, its shimmering echoes ceaseless, entrancing. He shook his head to clear it and ­stumbled onto his rump, suddenly fascinated by the feel of the grass caressing his palms, cold and damp. He could smell foxglove and heather, richer and sweeter than anything that grew in the Cradle. The sky shone black, bedewed with diamond stars. Cade felt as though some cataract had been lifted from his eyes, enabling him to behold the world with a new and hypnotic clarity. The pale green moon gazed down at him and he could see every ring and grain on its radiant surface as clearly as if he were holding it in his hand. He reached out, half-expecting to touch it, when the moon opened its eyes and screamed at him.
 	Cade recoiled in terror, flailing as he realised someone was shaking him, trying to drag him upright.
 	‘Get up!’ Abi screamed at him, her hair wild, her face streaked with dirt. ‘Move, Cade! Run!’
 	Cade gazed up at her, struggling to comprehend, to sober himself from the haze of newfound sensations.
 	A shock of pain lashed his cheek as Abi slapped him. She dragged him to his feet, clawing at him, urging him back up the hill towards the boundary stones. Cade could feel his new alertness settling into focus and he found himself absorbed by the sight of his legs steadying into a run beneath him. Whatever was happening to him could wait for an explanation. Abi gasped at his side, her skirts clawed to rags, her baggage lost. The crags tumbled into the empty foothills far below. Nothing but the wind stirred the cascading grass that swept away into the Lands Beyond.
 	‘It’s gone,’ Cade said. ‘Whatever you’re running from, Abi, it’s gone.’
 	She cried out as he pulled her back, pointing into the empty chasm below.
 	‘Look,’ he said. ‘I see nothing.’
 	She seized him by the shirt, her breath hot in his face, eyes white rings of terror in the dark. 
 	‘That doesn’t mean it’s not there.’
 	She wrenched him back up towards the boundary stones, but Cade shrugged her off. Something else had moved down there. A thicket of tall grass some sixty paces below had shifted against the wind. Cade was already crouched, weighing a slender throwing axe in his hand. A grabbler perhaps, lumbering through the weeds in search of worms?
 	He tried to pinpoint the spot, but the space at which he was trying to stare seemed to keep pushing his eyes away. Try as he might, they simply would not focus on the spot where he had seen the grass move. Yet every time he looked away, he thought he could see something moving steadily towards him. He looked again, trying to catch himself out, but his eyes just slipped across that benighted patch of ground, as if whatever stood there was too abhorrent to behold. Cade could see nothing.
 	Abi shrieked as she tugged at his arm, begging him to move. But Cade refused to stir. He knew Abi to be as fearless as any hunter. To hear her voice ring with such terror felt to him somehow indecent, and he craved to obliterate the cause of it. Spurred by anger, he pounced, gauging the distance between them and that shuffling patch of grass as he flung the axe high in the air. Its thin steel head dulled with charcoal, the axe was almost invisible in the moonlight, silent as an owl as it dived for its target. Cade tried to glare at that ruffling grass, impatient for the death-squeal of whatever lurked there. But the harder he tried to look the more readily his vision bounced aside. His head throbbed.
 	The axe rang as it shattered in mid-air, just short of its mark. Cade froze. There came no threats, no snarls of rage. The wind carried no musk. There was nothing there, and yet on it came. When Cade looked aside he could perceive the grass continuing its bristling path up the hill towards him, the sward flattening as if beneath a heavy and implacable tread, slowly closing the distance between them.
 	‘Why?’ he said, his voice sounding slow and stupid. ‘Why isn’t it dead? What is it?’
 	He felt another splash of pain across his cheek as Abi released him from his stupor.
 	‘Now’s not the time to ask, Cade. Run!’
 	Suddenly he was scrambling back up the hill with Abi, neither daring to look back. The boundary stone rose before them, imperious as it watched the two young sinners struggling below. He and Abi had put themselves beyond the Horned Father’s reach, beyond salvation. How could He welcome them back into His blessed sanctuary? How could He possibly protect them, when the very thing that pursued them could have been sent by Him to deliver punishment?
 	Cade clawed his way uphill. The long grass snagged the toes of his shoes; sharp stones slit his hands and shins. The boundary stone loomed black, its silhouette melting into the night sky as if fading from reach. His movements felt dream-slow and he sensed a presence gathering behind him, hungering for him. He imagined it reaching for him, tearing through the caul of reality, about to clamp an immovable hand upon his shoulder.
 	Cade whimpered as Abi dragged him after her, pulling him past the stone, back into the Cradle.
 	Cade saw Abi sink to the ground, limp and breathless. He hauled her onto his shoulders as though she were a hunter’s kill, his legs threatening to buckle under her dead weight as he carried her into the pines. She was too exhausted to protest as he dumped her in a hollow at the foot of a tree. He peered back through the ramrod trunks at the boundary stone that guarded their retreat. The air was still. Nothing yet stirred near the stone. As his own breath returned, he felt giddy with relief. He rested his head against the bark and thanked the Horned Throne for His forgiveness of two foolish children.
 	‘Are you hurt, Abi?’
 	She shook her head, a thicket of hair masking her face as she panted.
 	‘That thing out there,’ said Cade. ‘What manner of abomination was it?’
 	She brushed her hair aside and looked up at him, her face ghostly and imploring. She spoke in gasps.
 	‘I know not, Cade. And it matters not. All that matters is that we are safe. Thank you. And thank the Throne.’
 	Relief engulfed them both and they threw their arms around each other. Cade enjoyed a moment of wondrous surrender before rage erupted and he snarled at the girl.
 	‘What madness possessed you? Crossing the boundary. Your mischief risked us all.’
 	‘They would have killed me if I’d stayed. You know that, Cade. You too, had they thought us partners in witchcraft.’ She shook her head, wincing in regret. ‘I was so sure nothing was there.’ She laughed as if realising a poor joke. ‘Throne forgive me.’
 	‘They mean to hang you still, Abi. They believe you to be a witch.’
 	‘A fine word for a woman who questions their thinking.’
 	‘Do you think I jest?’ Cade said, irritated by her remark. ‘We cannot return until we have planned what to tell them.’
 	‘I know exactly what to tell them, Cade,’ she said with a hopeful smile. ‘I’ll need to speak to Mother Alder. She’ll understand.’ Now it was her turn to shake him. ‘We know the truth, Cade. No orphan must ever leave the Cradle and now we know why.’
 	‘What do you speak of, Abi?’
 	‘The boundary stones, Cade. They stand for our protection. I’ve read about them in the ancient texts. I think they divert spirit matter, the energies of the earth, in such a way as to hide us from what’s out there.’
 	Cade shivered. ‘From the Nothings?’
 	She steadied him with a zealous grip. ‘I fled because of doubt. Now I return to the Cradle with a faith stronger than ever, with proof of the Horned Throne’s power.’
 	The earth shuddered. 
 	Cade looked about him, searching for the source of the tremor. The great boundary stone shifted beyond the pines. It lurched like an enormous tooth loose in its socket. Then it cracked, bursting into rubble as it collapsed in a cloud of dust.
 	Before he could comprehend the impossibility of what he had just seen, Cade felt a familiar chime in his head. It passed through him like a seismic wave, leaving him feeling somehow cleansed, liberated. He felt he could pinpoint every cricket chittering in every thicket about him.
 	Abi was screaming.
 	The boundary stone adjacent to the one that had just fallen was itself crumbling from view. Its death howl resounded with a tenor too substantial to have been a mere echo. Cade knew the ring of stones that surrounded the valley was collapsing, one stone after the other. He stumbled under the weight of his realisation and toppled into Abi who knelt now beside him, sobbing and pleading.
 	‘What have I done? Oh, Horned Throne, forgive me.’
 	Cade felt weightless, dizzy with loss. The Cradle was no more. His home since infancy had been invaded by the Lands Beyond, and whatever vengeful energies dwelt there. The dust that lingered where the boundary stone once stood blew apart as if at a sudden breeze. Abi saw it too, though she looked away, wincing in pain.
 	Something stood there, he knew, the dust disappearing around it, as if the stone and whatever sacred energies it possessed were repelled, shattered by the very presence of its conqueror.
 	Cold fear squirmed in Cade’s belly, wriggling through his guts like an eel, as a half-glimpsed silhouette moved through the dust towards him.
 	And several more followed.
 	Cade fled with Abi back through the pines, numbly aware of the branches slashing his cheeks, tearing at his hair. They eventually broke from the line of trees, welcomed by the gushing stream that would lead them all the way back to the village. They paused for a moment, hands on trembling legs as they caught their breath. The Horned Father watched them from atop the darkened Tor, His curled horns bowed as if in mourning.
 	‘We have to warn them,’ gasped Cade. ‘The village. They need to know what’s coming. What we’ve done. Even if they kill us for it.’
 	Abi lowered her head and nodded, sobs punctuating each gasping breath.
 	He took her hand and they slid together down a high bank of dirt and roots. Cade relished the reckless speed of their descent, thankful for the distance it put between him and whatever drifted after them through the pines above. They rolled onto a grassy bank in a cloud of dirt.
 	The meadow lay empty before them, the stream a glittering path, merry with faun lights. They had a clear run, but men carrying torches and muskets were already lumbering up the rocks to their left. Cade went to hide Abi in the plunging stream, but Barrion had already seen them. By the time the others were aware of their quarry, the master hunter had an arrow aimed at the chest of his former apprentice.
 	Cade froze, covering Abi, though he knew the shaft would go straight through him at such close range. The arrow’s tip did not tremble and Cade caught himself marvelling at the unfamiliar clarity with which he could see Barrion’s blue eyes piercing the darkness, stark and merciless.
 	‘Did she cross the boundary?’ asked Barrion, his voice cold.
 	Cade knew the truth would earn him instant death. ‘Hear me, all of you,’ he said. ‘Something’s coming.’
 	‘Did an orphan leave the Cradle?’ Barrion said. 
 	Haylan the smith growled beside him, his face wolfish with rage. ‘Why else would the boundary stones have fallen, Barrion? The Father’s wrath is upon us. Killing that witch now might at least curb our sorrows.’
 	Abi snarled back at him. ‘Don’t think I wouldn’t meet death in glad payment for the ruin I’ve caused, Haylan. But you need to listen. Something followed us through those trees. Something that means to kill us all.’
 	Another man cried out. ‘The village!’
 	Everyone turned to look. Smoke was streaming from the distant thatched roofs. Cade staggered back at the sound of ghostly screams carried on the breeze. Abi seized him and thrust her head into his chest.
 	‘I’m sorry,’ she sobbed, repeating the words until they choked her. He hadn’t the strength to catch her as she dropped to her knees and vomited at his feet. The men ignored them, bellowing in outrage, most of them now fleeing back across the meadow. Cade reeled at the thought that there might be yet more pursuing spirits, that the destruction of the boundary stones may have permitted some kind of invasion. Abi caught his shoulder as she hauled herself upright, her eyes dazed, jaw slack and dripping.
 	‘I know a place,’ she croaked, then raised her voice to shout after the fleeing mob. ‘Upstream,’ she cried. ‘Come with us! There’s a fissure in the rock beneath the Tor. Within there are tunnels through which we could escape.’
 	But the men had already fled. Only Barrion remained, staggering on the spot, staring at the ground as if it might disclose a solution to this madness.
 	Cade caught her. ‘What tunnels?’
 	‘The Iron Caves,’ said Abi. ‘The scrolls say they were explored by our forebears.’ She called to Barrion, imploring. ‘There are passages within, passages that could lead us to the Lands Beyond.’
 	Barrion looked up at her. Cade knew that ravenous glare. It was the last thing seen by countless beasts the instant before an arrow entered their eye.
 	Barrion’s arrow whispered past Cade’s ear as he threw Abi into the tumbling stream. She disappeared into the rushing waters and Cade leaped after her. A vortex of freezing water enveloped him, seconds before disgorging them both a short distance below. 
 	Abi went to climb onto the bank, but Cade pulled her back into the bubbling waters, behind a cloud of faun lights. They were in a brook at the foot of the Tor with no hard cover between them and the master bowman positioned high above. Abi shivered beside him as he waited for the arrow that would kill one of them. Seconds passed. Barrion was clever. He knew how to tempt his prey out of hiding.
 	Cade pictured his mentor’s piercing blue eyes awash with tears as he scoured the dark for a sign of his former apprentice. This was a good man driven to murderous madness by fear, by betrayal. For a moment Cade welcomed the thought of that arrow piercing his treacherous heart.
 	The thatched roofs of the village were now ablaze, weaving a veil of smoke over the moon that carried to where they crouched in the water. The rest of the mob had disappeared to join the conflagration. The cold of the water was intense, stiffening Cade’s muscles. His head ached. He thought he heard something above the rattle of water. Shouts nearby, a scream, a clash of blades.
 	Cade led Abi in a sprint from the stream, directing her towards a sheltered goat track that he knew wound up the side of the Tor. Again, he almost yearned for Barrion’s arrow to find his back; its absence would mean the master hunter had been claimed by the Nothings.
 	When he and Abi reached the trail, the two of them battled their way up the foot of the Tor for several minutes without looking back. Urging Abi ahead of him, Cade risked a single glance over his shoulder, though he already knew they were being followed. He knew from the pain burrowing into his temples, and from the way his vision wavered upon several figures making their way up the foot of the track behind him.
 	Cade ran his hand along the cavern wall. Beneath a crust of lichen, it was unnaturally flat. He kicked it.
 	‘It’s metal,’ he said.
 	‘The Iron Caves,’ said Abi, dreamy with exhaustion.
 	Cade swept his crackling torch about the narrow walls of the passage ahead, revealing lines of rivets, a vaulted ceiling, a floor black with dirt, arrow-straight into the waiting darkness.
 	Abi’s memory had served them well. With his help, she had found the trail she was looking for. It wound like a fading scar up the east face of the Tor, ending behind a waterfall. A ledge had once existed behind that sheet of water, but it had long been destroyed, no doubt to thwart the curious. But the intervening centuries had grafted a network of vines in its place, strong enough to allow him and Abi to climb across and through a gaping fissure in the rock beyond. Casting nervous glances into the night behind them, they lit the last two of Cade’s torches and scrambled into the darkness.
 	‘This is no cave,’ said Cade. ‘Yet we’re inside the Tor. How can this be?’
 	He began brushing aside a curtain of moss, gradually revealing a corroded frieze. It depicted a human monarch seated atop a mountainous throne. Cade inspected it fearfully and saw the figure wore a wreath of laurel that curled upon his head like a crown of horns.
 	‘What blasphemy is this?’ he said.
 	Abi had wandered ahead. ‘It was a heretic who discovered this place,’ she said. ‘She was an orphan, sent to the Cradle as a babe, just like us. She believed a race of demigods from beyond the stars had built this place beneath the mountains, but abandoned it aeons before she was born.’
 	‘But the Horned Throne is real,’ said Cade, shaking his head. ‘He is soil and sky, root and branch.’
 	‘That He is,’ said Abi. ‘Throne forgive me, but I see that now. Yet what we know of Him may be an echo of something else, something greater, a truth that exists still among the stars.’
 	She ran her fingers over a fearsome crest stamped upon one wall: a bird of prey, double-headed, wings flared in defiance.
 	‘We must hurry,’ said Cade, trying not to look at it. ‘This passage heads north, towards the other side of the mountain. Following it gives us our best chance of escape, does it not?’
 	Abi shrugged. ‘If such a chance even exists.’
 	Cade took her arm as they hurried down the seemingly endless passageway, slowing only to scramble over mounds of earth that had spilled through the walls long ago. They ignored the empty corridors branching left and right, past doors and stairs so immense that this place must surely have been populated by a race of giants. They scurried through halls so vast their torchlight couldn’t find the walls and ceiling, and it felt like they were running on the spot.
 	Cade murmured to himself. ‘Uncanny, this place. Is it not exactly what you spoke of, Abi? Is this not the truth you sought?’
 	She didn’t answer.
 	Cade let his thoughts gather pace, eager to distract from his fears as they hurried down another dark and level passage. 
 	‘You’re right. You must be, Abi. The Father, the Cradle, the Nothings. They must all be part of it. We ourselves could have a place in some wider world we’ve yet to discover. ’Tis a marvellous thought.’
 	‘Aye,’ said Abi, grimly. ‘Though others have paid dearly for this revelation.’
 	Her pace was sluggish. Cade had to hurry her again. He hadn’t had time to cover their tracks, so the Nothings would likely have found the fissure. If so, they must have entered the tunnels by now. He glanced behind him but saw nothing. The smell of stale earth sickened him, reminding him that the rain and sky could not reach him through the immensity of dirt piled above. The only moisture in the air down here stank of rot and rust. Dead roots sprawled through fissures in the iron walls, clutching at his arms as he hastened past.
 	Even down here, in the insistent darkness, Cade was aware that he could feel his surroundings more acutely somehow. He was familiar with the excitement of the hunt, how it invigorated his senses until the world around him sang. But this was something more. When he had crossed the boundary in pursuit of Abi, when the stones surrounding the valley had collapsed, he had heard that strange chime inside his skull. More than that, he had felt it, comprehended it with something beyond his physical senses. And he felt it still, an echo that sank quivering needles into his brain.
 	The passage eventually hit a wall of earth, the ceiling ahead of them having long ago surrendered under its titanic burden. Cade’s sharp eyes picked out a column of iron rungs fixed to one wall. He quickly led Abi up through a twisted hatch in the ceiling, beyond which lay another corridor. Trusting to instinct, he headed left. Abi followed, almost reluctantly.
 	The metal walls now cramped his shoulders. The flames of his torch tickled the ceiling, stinging his eyes with smoke as he squinted down the tunnel ahead.
 	‘Do you know where you’re going?’ said Abi. ‘Because I don’t.’
 	‘I have a sense,’ said Cade, knowing he had none. With no sun or stars by which to maintain his bearings, he knew he could be leading them away from the other side of the mountain and instead deeper into this unfathomable maze. He fancied no faun lights would find him down here and guide his way to safety.
 	‘We need to keep going,’ he said, expecting each step to bring him within sight of another unyielding wall. If they had to double back, he knew they would become lost. He thought of the Horned Father brooding in His seat somewhere above him. What better way for a heretic to perish than buried alive beneath the shrine of his former deity?
 	He and Abi both turned with a gasp as something hissed in the passage behind them. It sounded like the rattle of dirt, or perhaps the crunch of an approaching footstep. They stared into the darkness, paralysed. Cade could feel Abi shuddering beside him as the heat of the flames neared his thumb. Soon the warmth and light of his rapidly shrinking torch would abandon them, releasing them into that waiting blackness. They would be left clawing blindly at the walls for an escape they would never find, and that which hunted them would then find them.
 	Cade heard no advancing footsteps, but then considered whether the Nothings even trod upon solid ground. Perhaps walls of earth could not impede them. Perhaps reality was to them like water to a fish. Even now, he thought, they could be swimming through iron and bedrock towards them. He imagined a thin hand reaching up through the dirt to grasp his ankle.
 	The thought was too much. It spurred him to a panting run, dragging Abi behind him. She had fallen unnervingly quiet, her pace slowing until she shambled after him like a dead thing.
 	Cade dashed past another passageway and felt a chill wash over one side of his sweating face. He drew back, probing the darkness with his torch. The flames brightened momentarily, engorged by a nearby breeze. Abi stumbled behind him, dropping to her knees, gasping as her torch rolled away from her.
 	She was struggling to breathe, eyes wild and imploring in the torchlight, strangled by her own terror.
 	‘Look at me,’ Cade said, gripping Abi’s shoulder as he drew a long slow breath. She stared back at him, every intake of air a convulsion. ‘We are almost free of this place. Just a little further. I promise.’
 	She gulped for air. 
 	‘Dead.’ She strained the word through gritted teeth. ‘All dead. Mother Alder. Mother Malin. Ilda. Girtrid. All they did for me. All they gave me, taught me. All their love. All gone. All dead.’ Tears glimmered down her cheeks.
 	‘You don’t know that,’ said Cade, unsure what he was even saying. ‘Just breathe, Abi. Like this.’ 
 	She ignored him and her torch expired in the dirt beside them, the darkness now barely held at bay by Cade’s own sputtering light.
 	‘All this,’ she snarled. ‘This is all because of me. This is my fault. Mine. Mine!’ She repeated the word over and over, pounding at her skull. He went to stop her, but she shoved him away. ‘They can have me,’ she moaned. ‘They deserve me. For what I’ve done.’
 	‘You don’t mean that, Abi.’
 	‘I’m nothing, Cade,’ she said. ‘Nothing worth saving.’
 	‘They would have hanged you if you stayed, Abi. What choice did they give you? Kick a bear up the arse and you can’t blame it for biting you.’
 	‘I should have listened. Should have done as I was told.’
 	‘How can you do as you’re told when you were born with a brain the size of yours? Wanting the truth is not a crime, Abi. It’s who you are.’
 	He winced. The pain in his skull was returning, drowning that strange echo in his brain. Perhaps the Nothings could hear that echo too. Perhaps it was leading them straight to him, like wolves tracking the scent of wounded prey. He tried to shut out the discomfort, push it back, and as he did so, felt the passageway throb like a living thing. The pulse tightened his skull until he cried out.
 	‘Cade?’
 	‘Abi,’ he whispered, fighting back a mounting nausea. ‘When I crossed the boundary, I felt something. I felt it again when the stones collapsed. It was like a bell ringing inside my head. It left me feeling like I was seeing things clearly for the first time in my life.’
 	Abi’s look of fear was melting into one of astonishment.
 	‘You felt it too?’ she said.
 	Cade strained to see into the gloom behind her. The pain in his skull narrowed to an audible whine. No distant footsteps echoed towards them. Nothing breathed. And yet it seemed to Cade as though that very absence was itself a kind of presence, a blackness that seethed with vitality. He remembered how his eyes had refused to behold those terrible figures as they crossed the ruined boundary. Now he wondered if his ears might similarly refuse to detect their approach. If the Nothings could not be seen, perhaps they could not be heard.
 	The very thought of it made his brain boil, as if something were mauling it, trying to wrest the organ from his skull.
 	‘I can feel them coming, Abi,’ he groaned.
 	‘No,’ she said, her voice thick, slurred with dread and pain. ‘They’re already here.’
 	She snatched Cade’s torch and bolted down the passage, pulling Cade after her.
 	They tumbled into a huge antechamber where a pair of immense iron gates confronted them. The torch cast its dwindling glow upon a monstrous lock clamped above their heads. Cade could see a sliver of familiar green luminescence at the apex of the door-frame.
 	Abi thrust the torch into his hands as she reached to examine the lock. The velvet gloom seemed to tighten around him, absorbing everything in the room but the locked gates standing before them. Cade could sense it again, the emptiness a living thing closing in on him, trapping his heart until he could feel it fidget like a rabbit in his chest. There was nothing there, nothing visible, nothing tangible. But it was there, a wound in reality, bleeding darkness into the world. Abi cursed and snatched Cade’s knife from his belt, though the lock appeared devoid of any keyhole.
 	He was being hunted by servants of a god. Things of the night, of fairy tale. Nightmares come to life. He was but human, as helpless as the deer he had once hunted in the Cradle, preyed upon by beings of a cunning unfathomable to his primitive instincts. The Nothings’ victory was inevitable. What hope had he? His eyes darted about him. Darkness everywhere. Distance was no obstacle to such as the Nothings, Cade now felt sure. They could be watching from a mile away. Or perhaps they waited in this very room. He imagined faces fishbelly-pale, blackened grins lined with a thousand crooked teeth, eyes smiling as they savoured the thunder of his heart, waiting for the darkness to drown him.
 	He yelped, dropping the torch as its dying flame nipped his hand.
 	His world went black and blindness sent him mad. Goaded by fearful imaginings, he became a caged animal battering at the iron gates. Terror strengthened his onslaught, but the barrier barely trembled.
 	He felt Abi pulling him back, trying to calm him. His elbow struck her face, but he was beyond caring. Nothing mattered but tearing his way through this metal wall and escaping that which hunted him in the dark. He scrabbled at the rough metal, tearing fingernails, wetting his hands with blood. The knot in his belly tightened to breaking point as the darkness deepened.
 	A flash of white suddenly drove it all away, blinding him again. He stumbled back, a flickering light now illuminating the chamber from its rubble-strewn floor to its high, vaulted ceiling. Abi stood nearby, blood streaming from her nose, shielding her eyes as she stared at him. It took two more heartbeats before he realised.
 	Each of his hands was enveloped in a dazzling bouquet of lightning.
 	Cade yelled in alarm, casting his arms about him, trying to fling away the crackling light that swarmed about his fingers.
 	Abi’s face flashed in the dark, eyes wide with anguish. ‘Cade, calm down!’
 	Her voice steadied him a moment, and he held his shaking hands before him, long enough to realise the lightning didn’t burn. It merely prickled his hands, fizzing like blood returning to a numbed limb. Impossible.
 	‘Steady, Cade,’ said Abi. ‘I think I know what’s happening.’
 	She was laughing. Why was she laughing? Cade didn’t want to know. He wanted no more of this terrible new world. He wanted it gone. He wanted blue skies and familiar green. The maelstrom in his hands intensified, seeming to feed upon his distress. He couldn’t breathe. He wanted to be gone from this place. He brought his hands together, gathering the coruscation, then hurled it away with a cry of rage.
 	The blast of lightning struck the gates, shattering the ancient lock as it shoved the doors aside with a groan that shook the chamber. Behind them stood a crumbling wall of roots wallowing in blessed emerald moonlight.
 	Cade fell whimpering into Abi’s arms, his hands smoking and shaking as the archway’s lintel sagged high above, dribbling dust. She pulled him through the rain of crumbling dirt. The debris rattled on the floor behind them as they clambered up the screen of roots. Cade heard the lintel come free with a momentous gasp. A torrent of earth and stone followed after it. The deluge thundered to the ground, shaking the wall of roots to which he clung, deafening him. Choked by the uproar of dirt and blinding dust, he climbed on, spurred by the sight of the pale green moon peering through an aperture in the earthen ceiling.
 	Cade clawed his way up through the soil, pulling clods of turf down upon Abi as he fought his way through the hole, hungry for the air of the outside world. She struggled up after him, tearing the rags of her skirts as she hauled herself through the gap. Cade glanced back through the hole at the mounting wall of collapsed rock and earth.
 	Nothing could get through that, he told himself. Nothing.
 	An enormous oak whispered above him. He pulled himself out from between its roots and fell onto a grassy slope, gasping in the fresh night air. The mountains of the Cradle rose behind him. Before him lay the Lands Beyond.
 	Cade knelt on a grassy shore before an ocean of corn, deep enough to drown in. The shaggy stalks stood taller than any crop that grew in the Cradle, their stiff leaves clacking in the night breeze. The rows combed the land all the way to distant hills patched with farmland. And beyond them one would find cottages, towns, even cities, all populated by strangers who knew nothing of life within the Cradle. He was no longer looking down upon this world as if studying a map. He was now part of it, thrillingly vulnerable to all it might contain. Yet his wonder soured as his reason returned. He shuddered to think of Abi seeing him so unmanned before those awful gates. He felt suddenly naked, piteous in his terror. Throne forgive him, he had even struck her. He clutched the ground with his wounded fingers, welcoming the pain.
 	Abi stood in silence nearby. As he struggled for words, Cade felt subtle currents shift in the air. Light flickered nearby. He turned to see threads of lightning squirming over Abi’s knuckles. As she watched the little bolts play about her fingers, Cade recognised her look of awe. He had seen it before when she had stood by the boundary stone and surveyed the Lands Beyond for the first time. The lightning vanished obediently as she closed her hand.
 	She looked up at him, grinning despite her bloody nose.
 	‘I was right,’ she said, delighted. ‘This is what they were keeping from us for all these years. The boundary stones, Cade. They cast a pall to hide us from those that would hunt us, as I said. But they did so by cloaking our abilities, by cutting us off from whatever sphere we derive these powers. But now that spell is broken. The veil has been lifted from our eyes. Now those energies could be ours to command.’
 	Cade did not want to think about ‘energies’, about how he had destroyed those unbreakable gates. All he wanted was as much distance as he could muster between himself and that which had hunted them through the metal catacombs beneath the Tor.
 	From the north, those storm clouds had now conquered the sky, blotting out the stars and reaching for the pale green moon. He hungered for dawn to arrive and chase them away, give him time to think, to make sense of his shattered world. The destruction of the Cradle, the Nothings, lightning conjured out of the air. The cornfield began to whirl sickeningly, forcing him to look away.
 	Abi paced about, oblivious to his disquiet as she jabbered on. ‘Our folks brought us to the Cradle as babes, brought us there for our protection. They must have known what we are.’
 	‘Our parents are dead, Abi. We were brought to the Cradle because tradition demands every foundling be raised there.’
 	‘Perhaps our parents still live,’ she said. ‘Perhaps we were told they were dead to keep us from leaving. We cannot trust anything we’ve been told, Cade. The world is bigger than we knew. This morning, did you think the Tor could have been anything other than what you have been told it was?’
 	Cade recalled those iron halls wrought by some unimaginable race, the ancient frieze of that laurel-horned monarch, a mocking echo of the world he once knew. The thought that his parents may still live felt yet more fantastical. His mother and father had been so complete an absence in his life, they may as well have never existed.
 	Cade groaned, his fists bunching the grass.
 	‘Don’t hide from this, Cade. Don’t hide from what you know you are.’
 	‘No, Abi.’
 	‘We’re witches.’
 	The words seemed to vibrate as Cade heard them, blurring the world and its few remaining certainties.
 	‘And not just us,’ said Abi, relentless. ‘Everyone in the village, every orphan in the Cradle. Mother Alder. Even Barrion. Everyone!’
 	‘How could that be, Abi? They would have known. Wouldn’t they?’
 	‘How could they have known when none of them ever set foot outside the boundary? Not even the Matriarchs.’ Her eyes flashed with mounting excitement as she hounded her thoughts, chasing a grand revelation. ‘It’s why we were told never to leave, never to think. It’s why I was forbidden from questioning the scriptures. Everything we did, everything we were taught, every­thing we worshipped was to keep us hidden from those that might harm us, from superstitious folk, from creatures like the Nothings. All was done to preserve the lie.’
 	Cade wished he could fault her logic.
 	‘If it was done as you say, Abi, then it was done to keep us safe. The Father, the Matriarchs, they sought to protect us.’
 	Abi smiled darkly. ‘Well, I no longer need protection.’
 	The certainty in her voice unnerved him. ‘Even if you’re right, Abi. We still must be cautious.’
 	Cade’s head throbbed. The Nothings were near. He imagined them scrabbling below ground, perhaps even burrowing like worms through the barricade of rubble that had descended beneath the tree. Abi muttered to herself, absorbed in her own epiphanies. Cade stared at the hole between the roots of that great tree, half-expecting pale faces to emerge. They were definitely near. He could feel them like a precipice at the rim of his senses, an absence waiting to engulf him.
 	‘I’ll be a slave to guilt no longer,’ said Abi. ‘Not for the crime of knowing the truth.’
 	Cade stared at the hole, realising that his eyes could linger there without pain. There was nothing there. Nothing. Surely nothing, though he could feel something’s gaze upon him from somewhere. Stubble bristled on the back of his neck.
 	He turned to look out across the corn.
 	The rumbling storm clouds obscured the moon. Gloom was descending.
 	Abi was nodding to herself. ‘And if that power be bought in blood, then I swear to honour its cost.’
 	‘Abi?’ Cade pointed into the distance.
 	Things were moving through the corn, steadily ruffling the leafy avenues. Though it burned his eyes to do so, Cade counted at least six of them, still far away but steadily advancing. Cade felt the icy cloak of terror settle upon his shoulders once again. Those that had pursued them through the Tor had been left buried to the south, while the ones that attacked the village must still be within the Cradle. These were approaching from the north, shadowed by the storm. Were the Lands Beyond infested with Nothings?
 	‘The scrolls,’ said Cade, his mouth dry. ‘Did they tell you where next we might run?’
 	‘Why would we run now?’ she said.
 	Cade felt a fresh ripple of terror, thinking she may have gone mad.
 	‘Remember what you did to those gates?’ she said, eager and excited. ‘Think what destruction we could summon together. We could blast these things back to the realm that spawned them.’
 	‘We don’t know that,’ said Cade, his voice quivering.
 	‘There is nowhere we can run that the Nothings cannot follow,’ she said. ‘We need to stand and fight them.’
 	The thought of facing such darkness again stole his voice away. He tugged at her arms, whimpering like an impatient child. She shook him steady.
 	‘I may not be able to destroy them alone,’ she said. Her voice was firm, though bubbled with fear. Her eyes were bright in the darkness, expectant. ‘Don’t be afraid,’ she said.
 	Those words steadied him like magic, recalling his shame before the gates of the Tor, a memory he longed to obliterate. He stiffened, making ardent promises in his head to stand by her, protect her, tear apart with bare hands any horror that threatened her if it would but prove himself a man in her eyes.
 	His hand found hers and something shivered in the air between them. The clouds devoured the last of the moon, obscuring the cornfield and all that lurked there as they ran down the hill and plunged into crackling blackness.
 	Cade dashed as stealthily as he could between the ragged walls of corn, shielding his eyes from the deluge of leaves. He gripped Abi’s hand as she followed, as sightless as he. The soil underfoot felt soft and treacherous, keen to twist an ankle as they ran.
 	Cade halted. Abi bumped into him, breathing hard. He heard a steady crackle nearby, leaves disturbed by the passage of something other than the wind. He tugged Abi and they moved on. His hand was numb from squeezing hers. Something throbbed between them like a heartbeat. Together they would banish the thing back to the netherworld with a rush of lightning, perhaps set the corn ablaze in doing so, then flee as the conflagration consumed the others. He blundered through another wall of stalks, pain beginning to knuckle at his temples, announcing the presence of the Nothings.
 	What was he doing? This was folly, glorious insanity. Cade welcomed the waves of fear he felt crashing through him. Abi groaned beside him, their grip now squirming with sweat. He hurried on, the blackness settling into a jungle of dark shapes as his eyes adjusted to the gloom. The pain in his temples burrowed into the backs of his eyes.
 	He paused again to listen. Something crunched nearby. The sound was blurred somehow, as if his ears fought to reject it, though the creature’s tread was unmistakably heavy. Cade did not welcome the sudden conjecture that these things might once have been spirits, but by now had passed fully into this world as things of muscle and fang. Perhaps they had been nourished by his fear, gorging themselves until their forms congealed into some kind of unholy flesh.
 	The leaves rattled like talons. The sound sliced through him, a blade of fear that threatened to slit loose his bowels. The thought of fouling himself before Abi only encouraged his rising panic.
 	‘Ready?’ whispered Abi.
 	Cade shook aside his dread long enough to concentrate, to reach into that well of energy beyond the world and draw lightning into his hands, summon light and power enough to drive the horrors away.
 	Agony was all he found there, a spike of it transfixing his brain.
 	His eyes bled dancing lights. Abi shrieked too as they collapsed in the dirt. Their powers had abandoned them. Why? 
 	The corn was crackling, louder and louder, rushing towards them.
 	Abi reeled, moaning in pain as Cade pulled her away and they broke into a run. Pelting through the corn, he continued in his flight for at least a minute before realising that she had slipped from his grasp.
 	He swayed on the spot. The realisation that he had lost her sent his insides spinning. He wheezed her name, hands groping for her in the dark. He could hear her calling him, though her voice seemed distant. 
 	Something else was crunching steadily through the corn towards him.
 	His spit turned to dust. His heartbeat choked him. His head screamed. Pain and darkness wove a delirium of childhood nightmares: spidery fingers picking at his window; voices giggling dark promises under his bed; his young hands lifting the sheets beneath which he lay and revealing a pair of famished yellow eyes peering up at him. Impossible things, childish delusions banished by maturity. And yet, just such an aberration was moving towards him with a hunter’s tread, its existence an affront to everything he knew of the world. Fear sucked strength from his legs, slowing his pace until the field felt like a swamp. The universe was broken, fractured into madness and chaos. Cade clutched his head as if it might burst with pain.
 	He staggered through several banks of corn, dazed as he paused to stare into each darkened alley for any sign of Abi. He fumbled for an axe from his belt and lurched into the next row of corn.
 	Something stood there.
 	Cade froze, tormented by the sound of his own whimpering sobs, as the shape turned to face him.
 	Its outline was obscure, Cade’s senses resisting the sight of it. But he glimpsed its eyes, gleaming and merciless. The sight of them choked the scream mounting in his throat just as it sent a fresh wave of agony exploring his brain. He dropped his axe before he could hurl it, dazzled by pain as the monster came at him. Reduced to instinct, Cade bolted off through the corn like a startled hare, only to see another oily silhouette emerging from the stalks to receive him. Gleaming hands flowered in the dark, reaching for him.
 	The thing flinched back as something glittered past its face – the slender blade of Cade’s own hunting knife. It had been flung without finesse, well wide of its target, but it granted Cade the second he needed to pivot and spring in the direction of the girl who had thrown it. Buoyed by relief, Cade caught Abi with such force that he almost lifted her off her feet. They stumbled into a run, Abi leading the way, their hands locked in the darkness.
 	The Nothings rushed after them as they blundered through the corn. The pain in Cade’s skull seemed to shepherd him left and right like a buffeting tide. But Abi held him tight on course as she crashed through wall after wall of corn ahead of him, never slowing. They gained ground and the pain in his head began to evaporate. He felt like he could run forever. His palm began to tingle in Abi’s grip.
 	They smashed through leaves, tripping on stalks, deaf to any sound of pursuit. Cade felt the pain start gnawing at the back of his skull every time he slowed his pace. This cornfield was another maze, nothing but dark lanes of dirt and leaves to left and right, endless and identical, a relentless monotony. It was as if the earth itself had succumbed to the night’s madness and was replicating the walls of their prison as they ran, hoping to lead them on until they collapsed from exhaustion. His hand throbbed.
 	Abi pulled him to her every time he stumbled or slackened his pace. His lungs felt like bloody rags, struggling to feed his tortured limbs. There was no way out of here. Even Abi was slowing, stumbling, her breath reduced to drowning gasps. The Nothings would soon be upon them. He closed his eyes.
 	Horned Throne, hear my prayer.
 	He thought of the earth beneath their pounding feet, the fertile loam beneath its crust. His fingers tingled, aching to feel that crumbling soil, moist and cool.
 	I beg not Your forgiveness, only that You receive Abigael, orphan of the Cradle, into Your keeping. She was just. She was kind. She was loved.
 	Cade reached deeper into his vision until he felt himself electrified by roiling whispers, the secret energies of the soil.
 	Lead Your foundling into pastures green, for she has served You well.
 	His hand stiffened as if in seizure, though Cade barely felt it.
 	Deliver her from darkness, Father.
 	Abi’s cry startled him. A blinding thicket of lightning was writhing in the air between their parted hands, the fulmination apple-green, ripe as the moon. They both fell aside as they pulled their hands away and the lightning snapped into nothing, releasing a luminous green vapour into the air. Abi lay gasping in the dirt beside Cade as they watched the smoke thicken. Its tendrils thrashed like wounded snakes, knitting into a pair of unreadable yellow eyes either side of a narrow head crowned with curling horns.
 	For an instant, Cade thought he might still be in the Cradle, perhaps in bed, stricken with fever as the imaginings of his childhood frolicked before his eyes.
 	The Faun Light shook itself into existence, its body twice the size of any goat herded in the Cradle, its shaggy black fur steaming green, casting a lantern-glow about the swaying corn. Another miracle sprung from a fairy tale, an envoy of the Horned Throne, an angel of soil and sky sent to lead benighted wanderers from the dark.
 	He could feel it drawing vigour from him, using him to channel energy from beyond the veil. The Horned Throne was reaching out beyond the sundered boundary of the Cradle to help them, despite all they had done. If evil sorcery dwelt in the world, then so too did mercy and goodness. The Faun Light skipped as its cloven hooves materialised, each leg thudding in the dirt.
 	Abi wheezed with exhaustion as she touched its muzzle, confirming its miraculous reality, then bowed her head as if she couldn’t bear to meet its gaze.
 	Cade felt pain cramping the back of his skull once again, heralding the approach of the Nothings. The Faun Light pawed the ground, eager to lead them to safety, but they were both too drained to move. Spurred by pain and fear, Cade managed to lift himself. He hauled Abi onto the Faun Light’s bony back. Its thick fur smelled like soft summer apples. Abi suddenly struggled, realising what he was doing. She clasped his hand as fiercely as ever, but the sweet green vapour steaming from the creature’s fur seemed to send her into a daze. Cade could hear the approaching rustle of corn through the pain shrieking in his ears as he gently transferred Abi’s grip onto a fistful of the goat’s fur.
 	The Faun Light fled through the corn before Cade could slap its rump. Within seconds they had vanished, leaving Cade in darkness. He burbled prayers of thanks as his killers drew near. Exhaustion numbed him, though his brain buzzed unbearably. Cade heard the first of the Nothings approach from behind, its presence heightening that buzz to a razor whine. He fought through it. Without turning to look at it, he gauged its height, its position, waiting for it to move again. He closed his eyes and gripped the last of his axes.
 	The Nothing shifted behind him and Cade sprang from the ground, eyes still closed, twisting as he lashed out with the axe, intent on burying it in the creature’s skull. He felt the blade connect, shear through flesh. The Nothing recoiled, though it issued not even a whisper of pain. Cade enjoyed a bewildered instant of triumph before something hit him deep in the belly, robbing him of breath and dropping him to the dirt.
 	As he gasped on the ground, he saw the moon briefly unsheathed from the clouds, casting its pale green light upon the scene of his death. He was surrounded. As he rolled onto his belly, something struck his back, electrifying him. His limbs spasmed in the dirt and he spiralled into unconsciousness, dreaming of the last thing he had seen lying in the dirt beside him: his throwing axe, smeared with blood, pasted with a slice of human ear.
 	Cade felt a pinprick in his throat. A soothing warmth restored him to his body, culminating in a rush of strength that threw him shrieking and thrashing onto windswept hills. His heart thundered. Beside him knelt a bald young woman in glorious bronze armour. The filigree plates on her shoulders gleamed in the glowing dawn that was gathering to confront the sullen storm clouds.
 	‘You’re safe.’ She spoke in a voice lilting and sweet. ‘Take a moment to steady yourself. I’ve given you something for the pain.’
 	She had a foreign accent as grand as her armour. Her pale skin was flawlessly smooth, untouched by the sun, miraculously unblemished by scars or pockmarks. Cade felt he should have been mesmerised by this angel but there was something oddly repulsive about her placid green gaze. It was like staring at needles inching towards his eyes. He had to look away.
 	The cornfield had gone and he was alive, resting against a soft bank of moss. Bushes of pale grass hissed before him, whispering all the way to the distant glimmering sea.
 	‘The girl,’ she said. ‘We need you to find her.’
 	Cade felt drunk, struggling to wrangle his thoughts through a migraine fog. The Horned Throne had sent help. Abi had escaped. Now he himself had been saved from the Nothings by this strange young maiden.
 	His voice slurred as he spoke. ‘The Nothings. They had me. They were here. Where did they go?’
 	Someone grabbed him from behind and hauled him to his feet. He was wrenched around to face another armoured figure. She seemed to have appeared out of nowhere. The woman glared at him over a grille that covered her mouth and neck, her copper-eyed stare unbearable. On the right-hand side of her stubbled skull was a patch of bloody gauze where her ear had once been.
 	He squirmed in her grip, overwhelmed by an inexplicable repulsion, and she slapped him curtly across each cheek. Startled, he watched as she jabbed an accusatory finger at his face, then lifted her nose in a silent gesture of sniffing the air. She then pointed at the grass and traced an imaginary trail somewhere off into the distance. Her stare was like a blazing summer sun. He struggled to look away. The pain of it seared through whatever narcotic addled his senses. Before he could cry out in protest, she slapped him twice again then dropped him to the ground, kicking him up the backside with an armoured boot to hurry him along.
 	Cade scrambled out of reach, his body prickling with gooseflesh, shivering with disgust, as if he had just escaped the embrace of a flyblown corpse. Several more women stood behind her, spires of bronze, muzzled and cloaked, their shaven heads crested with a proud ponytail. They carried strange blocks of iron which Cade realised must be some form of rifle. These muskets were absurdly bulky, though the women hefted them as easily as if they were toys. Though their ponytails stirred in the mortal wind, the women did not seem part of this world. Their presence seemed to elude Cade’s senses, evading his comprehension. He thought himself deaf when their heavy armour betrayed no creak or clamour as they moved. He could not hear them breathing. They were like silent spectres projected from some netherworld, statues of living bronze, whose icy sheen repelled his eyes every time he tried to study it. All he could feel was their absence, holes in reality. Nothings.
 	‘What I’ve given you for the pain should also help you see a little clearer now,’ said the girl. ‘Should make our presence a little more tolerable.’
 	Realisation dawned, and with it came anger. He snarled at them all.
 	‘It was you all along. I thought ghosts had murdered my people, but it was you.’
 	He recalled the suffocating maze beneath the Tor, the deadly avalanche, the terror of the cornfield. Through it all, he had borne a delusion. The thought of such stupidity – of his peasant ignorance – pained him, stoked in him a fearless fury.
 	He closed his eyes and reached deep, deep into the earth. He sought lightning, a horned angel, anything to drive these women away. The girl tried to stop him, but it was too late. The resulting pain hit him like a chunk of rock and he almost blacked out. He shrugged her aside as she went to steady him.
 	‘I am Novice Maia,’ said the girl. ‘And these are Null Maidens of the Sisters of Silence. We are anathema to your kind. Just as the standing stones of your valley nullified your powers, so do we.’
 	Cade snorted. ‘You don’t sound very silent to me.’
 	‘Unlike my sisters, I have yet to take the sacred Vow of Tranquillity. For now, I act as their interpreter.’
 	Cade struggled to his feet. ‘You want me to find Abi for you? Well, interpret this.’
 	He hawked and spat on the ground at her feet.
 	The woman with one ear glowered at Cade. He recoiled as she advanced on him, soundless as a phantom, but the younger woman intervened. She did not speak, but instead made a series of gestures, her hands dancing, fingers fluttering as she spelled out her entreaty. One-Ear gestured back, harsh and abrupt. The younger woman signalled her reply, insistent and beseeching. The older woman turned away, exasperated.
 	‘We are not murderers,’ said Maia, turning to him, her voice tender. ‘We gathered your people for their own safety. Our comrades are tending them in the valley as we speak. They are all in our care. Safe from harm.’
 	Cade looked about him. Nothing but grassland. Nowhere to run.
 	‘Are you witchfinders? Sent from the city?’
 	Maia smiled. ‘Not from any city you could comprehend,’ she said. ‘And we have been sent to do nothing more than protect you.’
 	‘The Horned Throne protects us,’ he said. ‘He is soil and sky, root and branch.’ He half-hoped his words might conjure another Faun Light to spirit him away.
 	‘Then we serve the same master,’ said Maia. ‘What you know only as the Horned Throne is in fact part of a greater truth, a truth that spans the galaxy.’
 	‘What’s the galaxy?’
 	Maia’s look of sympathy rankled him.
 	‘A kingdom of worlds that you know only as glimmering stars,’ she said. ‘Each ruled by the Emperor of Mankind, on the Throne of Terra.’
 	The greater truth. Emperors of Mankind. How Abi would have been fascinated by all this.
 	‘His light shines upon pastures just like these,’ said Maia. ‘And you would have been hidden forever from that light if we hadn’t found you.’
 	Once again, he pictured the laurel-crowned figure on that ancient frieze beneath the Tor. Was that the god of which she spoke?
 	‘Enough,’ said Cade, dazed by thoughts of worlds, people, even gods beyond his own. He felt nauseous, sick with perplexity. The eerie presence of these women was pouring agony into his brain.
 	‘You are already connected to a world wider than we will ever know,’ said Maia. ‘You are a witch, blessed with a connection to energies beyond anyone’s understanding. But with that gift comes great danger, which is why we must find your companion.’
 	One-Ear gestured impatiently. The novice stalled her.
 	‘I don’t know how she got away,’ said Cade. ‘We got separated. She just disappeared.’
 	One-Ear clenched her fists.
 	‘Things dwell in the immaterial realm from which your kind draw power,’ said Maia. ‘Things that would mean you harm.’
 	Cade swallowed at the thought of him helping Abi onto the Faun Light’s back, sending her off into the gloom atop that spectral beast.
 	Maia read his face and her expression hardened. ‘Have you seen such a thing?’
 	‘I have not.’
 	‘Hear me, boy.’ Her voice suddenly rang like steel. ‘They know your thoughts. They will assume the shape of that which you trust. If you have seen any such thing, you will tell us this instant. You cannot conceive the dangers involved.’
 	She was right. He could not. To him, all she said was just a morass of fear and bafflement. He thought of Abi, how she had stood by him, dragged him from danger time and again. It was the only thing that still seemed real.
 	‘If I help you find her,’ he said, ‘what will you do with her?’
 	One-Ear exchanged amused looks with her Sisters. She made a curt gesture.
 	Maia looked grim. ‘She says perhaps you should ask what will happen to her if you don’t find her.’
 	The Faun Light had been moving as fast as a stallion. Its prints were grouped tightly, its forked hooves tearing up sprays of dirt in its wake. It had galloped through this lonely wood perhaps an hour or so ago, hammering out a trail that wove through the gnarled trees. In the dawn sunlight sprinkled through the murk of leaves above, Cade could see the creature’s bulk had pressed its hooves deep into the ground, its weight squeezing moisture from the soil. The beast seemed much larger than he remembered.
 	He jumped, startled yet again to find one of the Sisters lurking behind him as he waded through the waist-high ferns. These armoured women seemed to vanish from sight every time he looked away. They were holding back, giving him room to interpret the trail, though Maia was never far from his side and he could feel One-Ear keeping a baleful watch upon him.
 	Cade still could not comprehend these women, let alone trust them. What they were, where they came from. Their appearance had kicked the world out from under him. The Horned Throne had been an indisputable presence in his life, as real as the earth upon which he walked. Now it seemed He was merely a primal echo of some greater cosmic truth, just as Abi had said. The concept defeated him, and he was glad of it. The possibility that Abi was in danger was all that mattered now, the only truth Cade cared to understand.
 	One-Ear gestured angrily.
 	‘You need to move faster,’ Maia told him.
 	‘Tell her ladyship, I’m moving as fast as I can.’
 	‘She can hear you perfectly well,’ said Maia. ‘So please be aware that you are addressing an honoured Oblivion Knight of the Silent Sisterhood.’
 	Not so high and bloody mighty that she could stop me from shaving an ear off her, thought Cade with a smirk, then paused to wonder fearfully whether One-Ear and her Sisters could read minds as well as cloud them. He quickly resumed brushing aside the ferns, picking out hoofprints, moving as swiftly as he could without losing the trail. He considered the sprawl of woods ahead. A thousand hiding places beckoned. Dense trees, dark hollows, green hillocks, everything drowning in thick ferns.
 	The path to Abi was known only to him. Without his guidance, these imperious gargoyles stalking behind him would be lost. Though he didn’t like to think what one of those enormous guns might do to him if they caught him trying to slip away.
 	Damn these bald hags, he thought, sizzling with resentment. He and his fellow orphans had been happy in the Cradle. They never wanted for protection. Why were these wretched Sisters of Silence even here?
 	One of them was carrying some kind of small metal utensil. It clicked and whirred in her hand as she scanned their surroundings, probing the undergrowth like she was dowsing for running water. The woman gestured at Maia, frustrated, her mysterious tool ineffectual.
 	‘We need human eyes out here, a hunter’s eyes,’ Maia told him. ‘If you see anything unusual, you must tell us immediately.’
 	Cade ignored her, absorbed in the trail, which now was staggering sideways and back, the hoofprints seeming to balloon in size with every step.
 	‘What is it?’ said Maia.
 	He motioned she be silent and immediately heard the jostle of guns made ready.
 	He could find no trace of Abi, no threads of hair or fabric, no streaks of blood, though judging by these tracks his quarry was now large enough to have swallowed her whole. He brushed aside another fern and trembled at the sight of what he found there. Hoofprints now bigger than those of a carthorse had resumed their progress north-east. But that was not all that had sent a shimmer of fear down his back. 
 	Whatever beast he and Abi had summoned into that cornfield, it walked now upon two legs.
 	The bracken ahead of him was undisturbed, though the thing that had moved through it must have stood twice the height of a bear. It had moved with stealth, aware of its pursuers.
 	Again, Cade thought the Sisters had vanished, but there they were, aiming their guns into the trees. Maia had drawn a bulbous pistol. The surrounding leaves chuckled in the breeze, boughs creaking like rope. Cade could sense an unnatural stillness that spoke of something watching them from afar. He could sense it, the way a deer can sense the drawing of a bowstring. He scanned the distant undergrowth for an outline hunkered among the trees, some tell-tale movement that would betray the position of an adversary. But his vision throbbed with pain, disturbed by the Sisters’ unearthly presence. Cade felt panic brimming in his chest, then realised his mistake.
 	The trees were empty. Something had scared the birds from even the highest branches. Something was already here.
 	The attack erupted from behind before he could yell a warning.
 	He turned to see a black wave, like a hill tearing itself loose from behind the trees and crashing into the Sisters’ midst. He saw the woman with the dowsing device scooped off her feet by huge ribbed horns that smashed her through a tree, showering Cade in blood and tumbling leaves. He screamed in fright at what he thought at first to be a volley of thunderbolts. The Sisters’ guns were more like cannons, booming beasts that spat flashes of lightning, turning the woods into a flickering hell of noise and violence. They blasted bloody splashes across an immense muscled back before the giant disappeared into the trees.
 	The Sisters of Silence ceased fire, the air now a blizzard of tumbling leaves and wood dust. Cade felt a long arm enclose him. It was One-Ear, pulling him behind a tree. Cade squirmed in her grip; he felt like a mouse being dragged into a spider’s burrow. The others had cleaved to the larger trees, melting from his sight. One-Ear remained motionless, breathless as a dead thing. The stiffness of her embrace sent waves of maddening revulsion through his body. She was thumbing a large rivet built into her gauntlet, silently tapping out an order to the rest of the squad.
 	Minutes passed. The snow of leaves dwindled. Silence resumed. One-Ear finally stirred from cover.
 	‘Wait,’ said Cade. One-Ear hesitated and clicked the rivet in her gauntlet several times more.
 	By now the smaller predatory mammals – the bristlers and branch rats – should have emerged from their burrows. Yet Cade could hear no telltale rustling among the bracken. Even the ever-present moss midges had been dispelled from the air. The beast was still here, manoeuvring among the dense trees that cloaked its bulk, calculating its next devastating charge.
 	The limb of a tree lunged out from the swamp of ferns to his right, crashing aside a Sister who had been protecting One-Ear’s flank. The branch was gripped in a huge dark fist. The air suddenly ripened with a steamy perfume of sweat and honey as a familiar figure tottered into view on cloven hooves.
 	Half-drunk on its musk, Cade felt his knees buckle, though whether out of terror or adoration he did not know. Though it looked like the Horned Father risen in outrage from his throne upon the Tor, Cade knew it was not He. It was something else, something that wore His image. He knew from its malicious smirk, long brown teeth leering from behind human lips. Yet some instinct of self-preservation screamed at him to believe it was indeed the Horned Father.
 	It is Him. It must be Him.
 	He lied to himself over and over, for to believe anything other than the lie was to suggest a universe gone mad, a reality that harboured horrors beyond his imagining. Merely to contemplate such a concept was to invite madness.
 	Cade stared helplessly as the beast thrust its club at him like a spear. His head jerked as a powerful hand shoved him away. He heard an explosion of splintering wood. The earth trembled as he scrambled behind cover. Peering out from behind a fallen log, he beheld a scene out of legend, a primordial monster locked in mortal combat with a champion of humanity.
 	One-Ear had drawn a fabulous silver sword from her back, carving the air in silent flashing swirls. Her long legs needled the ground as she swirled about the beast’s flanks, her blade guiding away every crash of its immense club, threading herself into a series of counter-strikes.
 	The other Sisters surrounded the monster, their guns at the ready, giving their leader room to express her artistry. Slashes of luminous sap drooled over the black fur that covered the beast’s crooked legs, its bulging loins. Its naked torso was nut-brown and slabbed with muscle, its huge arms veined with green. A gnarled star of horns stood erect at its brow, tearing at the branches of the trees as it fought. Its eyes were pinpricks of gold.
 	It had hoped to strike and run, but its prey had proven tantalisingly elusive, an affront to its bestial majesty. It snorted as it stabbed at her again, trying to nail the bronze spider scuttling about its legs. But One-Ear turned the blow with an expert glance of her silvery fang, webbing the air with patterns that made Cade’s eyes burn to look at them.
 	He could see rows of scars cratered across the creature’s straining back where the guns of the Sisters had struck it. The thing had somehow healed. Cade recalled how it had drawn psychic sustenance from both he and Abi, rendering their arcane energy into solid flesh. Was it using Abi to regenerate its wounds? Charging into the Sisters’ ranks to deliver as much damage as it could, then retreating out of range to restore itself and charge again?
 	The creature struck a ringing blow upon One-Ear’s armoured shoulder then swung its club in a wide arc to deter her allies. The weapon descended, about to slam One-Ear to paste as she staggered back. But she spun her blade in a glimmering parry and the club fell in half, sheared in two. One-Ear had already moved aside, letting the creature stumble under its own momentum.
 	Cade ducked, clutching his ears as the Sisters’ cannons roared once again, blasting divots of flesh from the creature’s body. It ran at them, trampling two of them as it barged through the trees to escape the deadly fusillade, vanishing into the woods, too swift to follow.
 	One-Ear paused. Something was amiss. Her hand went to her waist, seeking Cade’s axe. But he had already slid the weapon from her belt with nimble hands when she had pulled him behind cover. He gripped the wooden shaft between his teeth, invisible beneath the bed of ferns as he elbowed along the ground towards freedom.
 	Cade knew the beast would eventually wear the Sisters down and kill them all. He could feel the creature restoring its wounded body, drinking from the same boundless reservoir of energy from which he had summoned it. He could feel the weight of that energy lapping like water at the edge of his consciousness as he crawled further away from the Sisters.
 	He broke into a stealthy run, letting the pulse in the air guide him to its source. He could feel his head clearing, his arcane senses returning, filling him with power once again. But with that power came other things, voices that whispered at the edge of his hearing, icy things that writhed like smoke, seeking human warmth. As he paused to comprehend these vagaries, he could sense them reaching for him and quickly shut them out with a shiver.
 	Whatever power he had inherited, Cade knew it was polluted. This was how he and Abi had summoned that horned monster into their world, believing it to be their salvation. He cursed himself for the peasant fool he was, knowing it would take more than bare hands and courage to save them now.
 	Distant gunfire thundered at his back and braying laughter rolled about the trees.
 	If he was to save Abi, as she had saved him, he would need to do it alone. The Sisters of Silence would not hesitate to kill her should they realise she was the source of the beast’s vigour. She was just beyond those trees, closer than he had realised.
 	He banged his shin on solid stone and tumbled over, cursing in pain. He sprawled across rubble carpeted with dead leaves. Walls of stacked rock stood nearby, furred with grass. The ruins of stone cottages, roofless and ancient were visible too, impaled by generations of sprouting trees.
 	‘Abi?’
 	There came no reply. He limped on, passing yet more crumbling walls sinking into greenery. She was here, he could feel her somewhere among these stones. Things moved nearby. Animals, he thought, though he could see none. The derelict village was empty, populated only by trees. The clouds brooded over the gauzy light of dawn. Something rolled beneath his foot. A torch, reduced to a nub of charcoal, discarded less than a season ago. He found more nearby, lots more, along with footprints and tracks from a heavy wagon. Folk had gathered here on more than one occasion, but for what purpose? He thought he felt someone glaring down at him from above. He turned to look and saw nothing up there but a length of frayed rope.
 	He could see a well up ahead, its roof and pail long disappeared. Its stones had been cleared of vegetation, as if the thing were still in use, though it must surely have run dry centuries ago.
 	Cade called for Abi again, reaching out with his consciousness into the ruins, surprised at the ease with which he could do so. He turned to see an empty doorway. He was sure he had seen someone standing there, gazing at him askance as if their head lolled unnaturally to one side.
 	His senses bristled. He could feel something ringing in the air, echoes of a grim drama that had played upon this remote stage season after season. Men had gathered here from miles around. He felt their excitement, a thrilling fear that tickled his innards, bitter with a hatred that could be quenched only with violence.
 	Figures watched him from empty windows, from behind trees. Though he dared not turn to look at them, he could tell their hair was long, their dresses tattered, each standing somehow on legs horribly crooked. They gazed at him, resigned to his late arrival, every one of their heads resting oddly on one shoulder, those that had heads at all.
 	They were directing him towards the well, from which arose the miserable stench of rot upon rot that spoke of heaps of discarded meat and bones. Despair, thick as tar, boiled up from that throat of stone, soaking everything around it, softening reality until Cade felt the ground might fall away beneath him.
 	‘Don’t be afraid,’ said Abi.
 	She stood beside him, alone and with a dreamy smile.
 	‘This day’s reckoning shall be beautiful.’ She sounded wistful. ‘Such wonders shall be born here. The truth. Finally. The answers we’ve been looking for.’
 	Cade was so relieved by the sight of her that he couldn’t help but hug her before trying to shake her from her stupor. He could feel her body pulsating with energy, writhing about her like an invisible fire.
 	‘The Horned King,’ she said. ‘He shall save us from the Nothings.’
 	‘That is not the Horned King.’ Cade steadied himself against the insanity of what he was suggesting. ‘And the Nothings are not monsters. They’re not spirits. They’re women. Flesh and blood. Warriors. I know not from where, but they’re our protectors, Abi. And they will die, as will we, unless you wake up. Now. And that’s the truth. Whatever that monster has told you, it’s a lie.’
 	Abi stiffened and Cade shrank back, his hands stung by the livid energy now pouring from her. She drifted up off her feet, her toes lifting from the ground. The beast crouched in the ruins nearby, its body a wreck of dripping wounds, its broken arm outstretched as it channelled restorative energy through Abi.
 	Abi was sobbing. ‘I’m sorry, my Lord. I should never have doubted you.’
 	Cade shivered when he heard a growl invade his head, promising Abi that absolution would soon be hers. Its words felt like spiders scurrying in his skull.
 	‘My thanks, my king,’ Abi wailed. ‘Oh, my thanks.’
 	The voice promised to forgive her sins, excuse her of the sorrows she had visited upon her fellow orphans.
 	Tears streamed down Abi’s face. ‘Forgive, forgive.’
 	Cade stared in horror as the beast’s wounds slowly contracted. He caught her hands, trying to pull her back to earth, driving his consciousness through his grip, trying to intersect the nourishing flow of energy.
 	‘It’s feeding on your guilt, Abi. But none of this is your fault. You said yourself.’
 	The beast brayed in frustration as it took a halting step towards them, another of its wounds sealing to a puckered scar.
 	The voice assured Abi that she was a witch, that power untold was who she was. If she would but aid him, love him beyond all others, it would help her achieve that power, power to protect those weaker than herself, to learn answers to questions beyond imagining.
 	‘You know a lie when you hear one, Abi.’ Cade’s voice ­trembled, knowing he spoke in defiance of something like a god. ‘You swore you would be a slave to guilt no longer, remember? Your only crime is knowing the truth.’
 	‘Cade?’ Abi’s eyes fluttered as if awakening from a dream and she dropped to the ground. Cade felt his mind seized by invisible claws as the beast rose with a growl and swaggered towards him. Freezing terror held him in its grip as he felt something open inside him. A freezing flood of roiling, whispering energy coursed through him and into the creature that held him. He watched helplessly as the last of its wounds disappeared, its body whole and beautiful once more. He listened, transfixed, his panic melting as it spoke inside his head. Its voice was silvery, hypnotic. It made him think of wildflowers nodding in the glades of the Cradle, the smell of mead and sun-warmed hayfields, rich and drowsy.
 	I am no monster, Cade. I am everything you ever wanted. I am mother. I am father. I am happiness, contentment. The truth? The truth is myriad, merely paths waiting to be chosen. So choose yours wisely, Cade. You are blessed with a strength most will never know, but you must be taught to wield that strength. Or else others shall wield it for you. Why do you think they are here? Those armoured harpies? They seek to harness your power, my son.
 	Cade knew it was a lie, though the question haunted him: Why were the Sisters of Silence here? Why had they come to the Cradle?
 	The beast laughed.
 	Indeed. And they would deign to call me ‘monster’.
 	Cade’s gift was his speed. He was thin and wiry, supple as a cat. The beast reached for him, poised to drain the last of his will, as Cade hurled his axe. The weapon lodged deep in the beast’s left eye.
 	There was no bellow of pain, merely a flinch of displeasure. Then the ground shook as the beast charged through the ruins towards him, snatching Cade off his feet, squeezing him like fruit. He thrashed in the beast’s grip, arms pinned awkwardly at his sides, struggling for breath as his ribs constricted and cracked. He saw the well several feet below, a dead black eye staring up at his flailing legs. He could sense the dead things heaped at the bottom of that pit, bones enriched with rage and sorrow. This is why the beast had chosen these ruins, this arena of misery – its psychic pollution would ease the ingress of its brethren. Cade could feel them, other monsters waiting beyond the veil, allied spirits eager to be drawn hither and clothed in flesh, hungry for the ruin of man.
 	The beast peered at him, as if curious to see the gradations of terror cross Cade’s face as he slowly crushed the boy’s body in his fist. Abi lay sprawled nearby. Cade’s frustration boiled inside him. He had endured a lifetime of horror in a single night, only to die like this, mashed like dung in a monster’s paw. His fury swelled as he glared deep into the beast’s gleaming eye.
 	He saw flashes and thought for a second that he was dying. But then he realised branches of lightning were springing about him, churning up from his insides. Free of the Sisters’ malignant presence, he was drawing power from the world beyond, channelling it into lances of destruction and hurling them into the beast. He felt rather than heard the creature roar in pain as it released him. He tumbled to the ground, feeling his leg strike something hard, tendons cracking in his knee. He felt his body’s anguish as a distant thing, anesthetised as he was by the cascade of lightning flowing from him. But this twitch in his concentration was enough; it had opened the floodgates to that vast sea of energy from which he drew. It filled him in an instant, flooding his being.
 	He tried to contain it, channel it like a river, but already it was a deluge, and he was but a leaf, shrinking, somersaulting as he plunged into its depths. But still he could feel the beast, and still he refused to let go. Cade let the creature’s agonies anchor him as he continued to reach out, lashing it with lightning, flails of white-hot fire tearing its body, restoring it to ruin.
 	But it was not enough. He kept losing focus. His attacks grew weaker. His attention kept branching here and there. He had become a storm, striking everything around him, each flash blinding him with images of another world, another time, another horror. He gripped his head, too stunned to breathe, deafened by a tidal roar fit to crack his skull. His eyes bulged and saw nothing but a frenzy of lightning streaking around him, sketching predatory faces, hands that reached, clawed, caressed, bodies that coiled and spasmed in the chaos. He was melting, drowning in the maelstrom of energy overwhelming his body, prickling his every pore, crushing him, strangling him to admit a drowning breath.
 	Yet still he refused to let go.
 	His consciousness was everywhere. He knew everything. He was being consumed by a realm known as the immaterium. The other names by which it was known flashed through his mind before turning to smoke in his memory. The warp, the ether, the empyrean, a sea of souls composed of pure psychic chaos. A realm traversed by a race of gods in floating iron ships, navigated by a terrible beacon of pure thought projected by a being upon a mountain throne. Yet more truths swarmed him, complexities and contradictions, and the impossibilities that made a mockery of it all. The beast was right. The truth was myriad.
 	Yet still he refused to let go.
 	Cade’s consciousness alighted on a shard of truth. In its prism he saw Abi. He saw himself. Splinters of their past, their present and future. He also saw the reason why their world had tonight become a nightmare. The horror of that truth froze what little was left of him.
 	He let go.
 	But something else would not let go of him.
 	Something was channelling his energy for him, focusing it.
 	He flinched at the brilliance of the dawning sun. He was on his back, his body steaming as he convulsed in the dirt, grinding his teeth as he strained to lift himself. He managed to turn his head and saw the beast raging nearby, its body shredded with wounds.
 	Abi clung to its horns, her hair and tattered skirts flung to and fro, like a sailor clinging to the mast of a squall-tossed ship. She had saved him, pulled him back from the warp before his mind could be consumed entirely, sustaining the energy he had summoned, holding it in place like a cork in a bottle. The beast staggered and thrashed, too weak to claw his tormentor from her perch.
 	Cade felt a familiar dullness creeping over his senses. The Sisters of Silence were coming, cutting him off from the energies of the warp. Abi slid from the beast’s crown, exhausted. The creature was now barely a skeleton clothed in rags of smoking meat, though it rose in dignity to meet its executioner. It went to swing a claw at One-Ear, but the woman had already cleaved a leg out from under it. Its great horned head followed, bursting to ash as it spun through the air.
 	Cade screamed at his limbs to move, but they remained frozen, buckled like the legs of a dead spider. That part of his brain which motivated his body had been scoured by his exposure to the warp. Yet it mattered not. What dominated his mind was the last thing he had seen in that realm of Chaos, those glimpses of the future, of the present. They had shown him the reason why the Sisters of Silence had come for them.
 	Abi was beside him, gasping as she tried to comfort him. She tried to calm him as he puffed spittle from his teeth, struggling to scream a warning.
 	Run, Abi! Run while you can!
 	She smiled down at him, brushing hair from his eyes, deaf to his pleas.
 	As the Sisters of Silence fanned out to secure the ruins, One-Ear gestured something to Maia. The armoured novice nodded and approached Abi with caution. Cade watched, horrified as Abi’s expression flickered between fear and fascination.
 	‘As your valiant friend may have already told you, I am Sister Maia,’ she said. ‘And you have led us a merry dance.’
 	‘You need to help him,’ said Abi.
 	Cade wriggled, gagging as he fought to release a scream from his throat.
 	‘That’s why we are here,’ said Maia. ‘If you’ll just come with us, all shall be explained.’ She inched towards Abi.
 	‘Who are you? Where do you come from? I’m not leaving here until you tell me.’
 	Maia paused, gazing at Abi in mutual curiosity. ‘You are not afraid of us at all, are you?’
 	‘Being afraid never does anyone much good,’ said Abi.
 	‘A fine philosophy,’ said Maia. ‘You’re her, aren’t you? The one who we spotted crossing the boundary. If not for you, we would never have found the others.’
 	Abi frowned.
 	‘You misunderstand,’ said Maia. ‘Your people are unharmed, I promise you. You’re the strongest of them all, did you know that?’
 	Abi glanced about her. She looked as though she was calculating her options, though clearly she had none.
 	‘If you say so,’ she said.
 	‘We can show you how to harness those talents, that formidable intelligence of yours. We can teach you to wield your strength.’ She smiled like a serpent. ‘Lest others wield it for you.’
 	‘You make it sound like I have a choice,’ said Abi.
 	‘No one has a choice,’ said Maia. ‘But I sense your destiny is the one you’ve always wanted.’
 	Abi looked down at Cade.
 	‘All I’ve ever wanted is the truth,’ she told him.
 	Those words made something crack like an egg deep in Cade’s chest, slipping a terrible bitterness into his belly until he felt he might die.
 	Abi’s hair rose to veil her face as a sudden wind stirred the air and a strange pressure stiffened the atmosphere. Cade watched in terror, helpless to prevent the vision he had beheld in the warp from coming to pass before his eyes.
 	He had always thought it to be nothing more than a thundercloud. When he had first seen it in the distance from the cliffs yesterday afternoon he had been too innocent to think it anything but an approaching storm. The world had been so much smaller back then. Cade had seen it in the sky again when they emerged from the Tor, a tide of black blotting out the moon above the cornfields. Now, as it obscured the dawning sun, the thing was unmistakable.
 	Wreathed in cloud, the great black ship resembled some fossilised behemoth, another monster out of legend come to threaten his world. It grumbled overhead, a landmass of iron machinery. Countless dwelt within. Cade had seen them in his vision. Witches, millions upon millions of them, soul crops yielded by innumerable worlds just like this one. They languished in chains, their powers sedated. Like the boundary stones that surrounded the Cradle, the ship cast a protective aura that hid it from the warp. Like him, these innumerable wretches were gifted, but their powers were limited, unfocused, distracted by primal emotion. Their destiny would be to lend their screams to that great psychic beacon Cade had felt blazing through the immaterium. That was their function within the awful machinery of the universe. Their souls would be added to the pyre, to blaze for an instant and then become nothing.
 	This was the fate from which his parents had sought to protect him. The Cradle was a sanctuary for witchkind, erected to save gifted innocents from the grim farmers of the Imperium, who would one day arrive to gather their harvest.
 	‘Wondrous,’ Abi murmured. ‘What is it?’
 	‘The truth,’ said Maia. ‘Yet this is just the beginning. You have so much yet to learn. We have so much yet to teach you.’
 	The warp had already shown Cade the fruit of Maia’s promise. He had seen Abi, recognisable though her face was lined with age and scars. She remained wild and strong, bolstered by decades of training, her full potential unleashed. He had seen her driving bolts of lightning into the ranks of some unearthly foe, again and again, careless that her comrades had fallen, that she was alone. Eventually the enemy swarmed her, pulled her to the ground and tore her down to her bones. All Cade had known of her – of her potential, the future he had imagined she could achieve – had come to nothing, ruined in an instant.
 	Abi was watching a smaller vessel descend to collect them, the craft even uglier than the vast ship that had spawned it. She had the same look on her face as when Cade had first shown her the Lands Beyond, as when she played with lightning in her hand, enthralled by glorious potential.
 	‘What about Cade?’ she said.
 	‘Fear not.’ Maia smiled. ‘He too shall be welcomed into the Emperor’s light.’
 	Abi tried to soothe Cade as he bucked and jerked in her arms. She insisted on carrying him herself, her face bright with thoughts of the wonders that awaited them aboard the great ship. 
 	One-Ear and the Sisters ushered them towards their destiny as Cade screamed in silence.