Chapter 88: Tracks

Rook stopped so suddenly that Mara nearly walked into the coffin on his back.

He turned and raised the lantern toward the road behind them. Blue light spread across the packed earth, revealing the long corridor of trees they had already crossed. The path remained empty. Nothing moved between the trunks, and the branches overhead hung in complete stillness.

Rook narrowed his eyes and slowly moved the lantern from one side of the road to the other. He checked the roots, the spaces between the trees and finally the branches above them.

Vanessa rested one hand near her curved blade. "What is it?"

"Just a hunch." Rook kept staring into the darkness. "Feels like something might be following us."

Mara looked behind them and saw nothing except their fading tracks. "You could have said that without making everyone think we were about to be attacked."

"If I knew we were about to be attacked, I’d have said something more useful."

Frederick walked back from the front of the formation. He studied the road before turning his lantern toward the trees. "There’s nothing there. We’ve had people watching the rear since we entered the Hollow. Something large enough to threaten this group couldn’t follow us for this long without leaving a sign."

The woman carrying the anchor shifted the weapon against her shoulder. "I’ve also been dropping caltrops behind us."

Rook glanced down at her hand. A small leather pouch hung from her wrist. "So that’s what you’ve been throwing."

"You thought I was dropping pieces of equipment?"

"I thought you were careless."

She pulled one of the caltrops from the pouch. It had been fashioned from grave-iron, with four barbed points arranged so that one always faced upward regardless of how it landed. The metal had been darkened to prevent it from reflecting light.

Mara examined it. "Would something like that actually hurt an Abomination?"

"If it steps on one, we’ll hear something," Rook said. "A grunt, a growl, maybe the sound of it trying to tear the barb out. Those things are nasty."

The anchor wielder returned the caltrop to her pouch. "None have been disturbed. Whatever you felt, it didn’t come through the road behind us."

Mara gave Rook a faint smile. "I guess you’re being paranoid."

"It’s better to be paranoid than unprepared."

Rook searched the trees once more. The feeling remained, faint and irritating, like someone watching the back of his head from beyond the lantern light. He found no movement, no damaged branches and none of the deep tracks they had discovered earlier.

Frederick ordered the group forward.

They travelled for another hour beneath the tangled canopy. The Dark Hollow Road remained straight, yet the view ahead never changed. Trees passed beside them in endless rows. Their lanterns revealed the same packed ground, the same black trunks and the same branches woven together overhead.

More of the Manager’s symbols appeared along the way. Each had been carved into the left side of a tree, with the final line indicating the direction of travel. Rook checked several as they passed and found the same hardened sap within the grooves.

Then the marks stopped.

Frederick spent several minutes searching both sides of the road before returning to the last symbol. He compared it with his route map and looked ahead into the darkness.

"Your turn," he told Rook.

Mara raised her lantern toward the road. "Did we reach the halfway point?"

"Not yet," Rook said. "The Manager’s trail ended early."

He approached the final marked tree and examined the bark around it. No second symbol had been left on the opposite side, and none of the nearby trunks carried a warning or change of direction.

"The previous patrol only followed the carvings," Frederick said. "They turned back when they stopped finding them."

"So from this point, we track properly."

Rook lowered the lantern and began studying the ground. Most of the soil along the center of the road had been compressed by generations of travelers. Individual prints became difficult to separate from one another, though the edges still contained softer earth where old marks survived.

He found several shallow grooves near the roots.

They were too narrow for footsteps and too uneven to have been made by a dragged weapon. Three parallel scratches crossed the soil, disappeared beneath a patch of fallen leaves and emerged farther ahead.

"Claws," Rook said.

Frederick crouched beside him. "The creature from earlier?"

"The depth matches."

Several of the heavy footprints appeared near the grooves. Their shape had blurred with time, but each sank deeper than the surrounding boot prints. Whatever left them had moved along the road in the same direction as the Manager.

Rook followed the marks while the rest of the expedition spread out behind him. The trail appeared and vanished depending upon the ground. When the soil became too hard, he searched the trees instead.

Branches extending over the path had been broken several paces above the ground. Some had snapped completely and fallen among the roots. Others remained attached by strips of wood, their ends hanging toward the road.

Mara lifted her lantern toward one of them. "Something tall passed here."

"Or something wide," Rook said. "It stayed close to the edge and forced its way through the branches."

"How recently?"

"Hard to tell. The wood has already started closing around the break."

They continued following the damage until every trace disappeared.

The claw grooves ended in the middle of the road. No heavy footprints continued forward, and the branches beyond that point remained intact. Rook searched the opposite side, expecting the creature to have crossed, but found nothing there either.

A broad opening waited between the trees to their left.

It was easy to overlook in the darkness. Thick foliage had grown across most of it, hiding the space beyond the first row of trunks. When Rook pushed the branches aside, his lantern revealed a narrow passage entering the forest.

He examined the closest tree. A large section of bark had been crushed inward, and dark sap had hardened across the damaged surface. The marks lacked the sharp edges of a weapon or claw. Something heavy had struck the trunk with enough force to bruise the wood.

Rook moved to the tree on the opposite side of the opening and found similar damage.

"Something went through here," he said. "Something large."

The young Reaper with the bladed tonfas looked into the foliage. "You want us to leave the road?"

"If we want to find the Manager."

The Reaper looked toward Frederick. "That seems considerably more dangerous."

"Everything here is dangerous," Rook said. "The Manager left the road. Whatever followed him did the same."

Frederick studied the opening before nodding. "Rook leads. Keep the formation close enough to assist one another."

They entered the forest.

The space between the trees narrowed quickly, forcing them into two uneven lines. Branches caught against Rook’s coffin and scraped across the wood as he pushed forward. Tangled roots covered the ground, and layers of dark leaves concealed holes deep enough to break an ankle.

Rook examined every damaged branch and disturbed patch of growth. He clicked his tongue whenever another sign ended beneath newly formed bark or fresh leaves.

Mara stayed close enough to see what he inspected. "What’s wrong?"

"After so long, new growth cover the damage done by the manager and whatever followed him."

She looked toward a branch that had been crushed against the ground. New wood had already formed around the break, twisting both sections back together.

"Does that mean these are Abomination trees?"

"No. Everything in the Underworld tries to return to how it remembers itself. Plants do it faster than most things because their memory is simple. Break a branch and it grows back. Crush the grass and it rises again."

Rook pushed aside another cluster of leaves. The ground beneath showed no tracks.

"After two weeks, most of the damage is almost gone. Give it another week and we might not have found the opening at all."

They advanced slowly. Rook located several broken stems and a deep scrape across one root, though none provided a clear direction for long. The forest swallowed every sign after a few paces.

Mara searched beside him, repeating what she had learned during her rushed lessons at the Forty-Second. She checked beneath branches rather than stepping over them, looked for leaves turned against their natural direction and watched for anything caught on thorns.

Most of what she found meant nothing.

Then she noticed a dark stain upon the underside of a broad leaf.

Mara crouched and rubbed one finger across it. Black residue clung to her skin. She raised it toward her nose and smelled damp grass, soil and something faintly metallic beneath both.

She held her finger beneath the lantern. "What about this?"

Rook looked back, then crouched beside her. He rubbed the edge of the leaf between two fingers and examined the brittle flakes that came away.

"Good find."

"What is it?"

"Dried blood. Human blood."