He had not known that there were Deniers living in this forest; but then, never before had he walked into its ancient heart. He knew that he had nothing to fear from them, and that they would probably hide from him. It was likely that he had already been seen. But that sense of sickness would not leave him.
Mouth dry, he continued on.
The avenue of trees opened out on to a glade studded with wooden stakes, driven into the ground in a tight pattern, impenetrable and threatening. They stood high as his hips. In the centre of this spiral was a body, impaled through its back, through its arms and its legs. The tips thrusting up through the broken flesh glistened in the faint starlight.
It was a woman, stripped naked. She was lying horizontally above a score of shafts; her head level as if it too had been pierced by a stake. He did not know why she had not simply slid down.
There was no obvious path to her. A stables cat might wend its way through but no grown man could. Ivis edged closer — he could see no one else about. With one boot he kicked at the nearest stake. His foot rebounded from it, proof that it had been driven deep.
‘I am not for you,’ the woman said.
Cursing in disbelief, Ivis stepped back. He drew out his sword.
‘Iron and wood,’ she said. ‘But iron never has anything good to say to wood, does it? It delivers the shout of wounding, and then it promises fire. Before iron, wood can only surrender, and so it does, each time, every time.’
‘What sorcery is this?’ Ivis demanded. ‘You cannot remain alive.’
‘How big do you imagine the world, Tiste? Tell me, how vast is darkness? How far does light reach? How much will shadow swallow? Is it all that your imagination promised? Is it less than you hoped for, more than you feared? Where will you stand? When will you stand? List for me your enemies, Tiste, in the name of friendship.’
‘You are no friend of mine,’ he growled. He had seen her breath in her words, pluming up into the night, and he could just make out the spike buried in the base of her skull. If that stake was the same height as all the others, then its tip pressed against the bone of her forehead, driven straight through her brain. She could not be alive.
‘It is, I think,’ she said, ‘the other way round. But then, I did not invite you. You are the intruder here, Tiste. You are the unwelcome guest. But I am here and that cannot be denied, and so I am bound to answer your questions.’
He shook his head.
‘The others are done with me,’ she said.
‘What are you?’
‘I am you when you sleep. When your thoughts drift and time is lost. I am there in each blink of your eyes — so swift, so brief. In that blink is the faith that all will remain as it was before, and the fear that it won’t. I lie with you when you’re drunk, when you are senseless, and your flesh meets mine and I rut with you all unknown, and take from you one more sliver of your life, for ever gone. And so you awaken less than what you were, each time, every time. I am-’
‘Stop!’
She fell silent.
He saw runnels of blood flow down the shafts beneath her, saw the gleaming pool those runnels flowed into. But none of this could be real. ‘Tell me your name.’
‘The Tiste have no name for me.’
‘Are you a goddess of the forest?’
‘The forest knows no goddess. The trees are too busy singing. Even as they die, they sing. They have no time for gods in the face of all this death.’
‘Who did this to you?’
‘Did what?’
He slashed with his sword, hacked through a broad sweep of the stakes. Splinters flew. He kicked at the stubs, pushed them aside, and stepped into the maze.
‘What are you doing?’ she asked.
He did not reply. Some things could not be countenanced. No decent man or woman could withstand the brutality of this apparition. Ivis no longer believed his own eyes. He did not think this night was his own. He did not think he was still in the world he knew. Something had happened; something had stolen his soul, or guided it astray. He was lost.
His blade scythed through stakes. He drew closer to her.
‘Iron and wood,’ she said.
Limbs aching, sweat sheathing his face, he reached her side. He looked down at her face and met the woman’s eyes.
She was not Tiste. He did not know what she was. Her eyes were slits, tilted upward at the outer corners. Her skin was white with blood loss. The tip of the stake piercing her skull had pushed through her forehead just above the eyes, breaking the skin. She smiled.
Ivis stood, chest heaving from his frenzied attack on the forest of stakes. He bled from splinters driven into his hands and forearms. This woman should be dead, but she wasn’t. He knew that he could not move her.