Chapter 6

(In which we rejoin Elizabeth, who has landed alone, in the middle of a vast and confusing garden-maze)

    Elizabeth wasn’t sure if she was awake or still dreaming. There were fleeting moments when her limbs responded to her commands, but even then they felt like they were swaddled in cotton. Her eyes did not seem to be closed, but the only information they passed to her brain was the sort of ghosts-of-light images seen on the underside of her eyelids, too slippery to bring into focus.

     She gradually became aware of an insistent, pressing feeling; an urgency not unlike a full bladder, but it seemed to come from outside of her, as though she was being squeezed through an aperture too small for her body. She wondered if this was what it felt like to be born. The pressure transitioned to pain, starting with a hot pinprick from her scalp into her skull that quickly progressed to a chorus of similar sensations that struck parts of her body in a seemingly random pattern: her throat, now her abdomen, now her toe, now her lower spine.

And then it was done. One moment she was in darkness, the next she felt the air pulled out of her lungs, yanked out like she was vomiting...and then she did vomit, forcefully retching until the muscles of her abdomen were sore and twitching like snakes.

As the sensation of being emptied-out left her, as the nausea and the vertigo and the haze in her mind lifted, she sensed something missing. Blindly, she panicked and fumbled for her glasses; the familiar weight on the bridge of her nose was gone. It took her a few moments of scrabbling before she realized she did not need them: her eyes had focused perfectly well, unaided. Blades of grass swam in the foreground of her vision, and she could feel the cool greenery against one side of her head. Her position sense came back with a start: she was lying on the ground.

At the same time, Elizabeth realized that the product of her retching was in a puddle next to her, and a newfound wave of revulsion arrived. She rolled away from the vomit and got onto her hands and knees. Her left hand felt cold and stiff, like it was asleep from being laid on. The rest of her body was achy and mildly detached from her mind, as though it would do what it was told, but only reluctantly so, and complaining loudly the entire time.

She rocked backward to a kneeling position and looked around. It was still dark out. A slight breeze blew her hair from her forehead, a late summer or early autumn chill. Grim was nowhere to be seen.

She leapt to her feet. Grim! The Shadow! Had it followed them? She whipped her head from side to side, searching for the gigantic creature, listening for any disturbance in the surrounding darkness. But there was no sign of it, or of any other living creature.

Next to her was a road of packed dirt; in one direction it disappeared over a rise, and in the other led to a building, a single tall column with a long, barn-like structure attached to the bottom. Lights blazed at its base.

Elizabeth patted at the ground around her, taking care to avoid the sour-smelling puddle of sick, trying to locate her glasses. Even if for some reason she could see okay without them, that blessing might be transient. But they were nowhere to be found. As she groped in the grass, she noticed her numb left hand was starting to wake a bit, but it still hadn't regained full sensation. She held it up to the light to see if it was swollen or bruised. It glinted; was it wet? Why were her fingers so thin? Was it--?

An involuntary cry escaped her as she suddenly realized: the knife she had been holding. She had felt it do...something...to her hand as she passed through. Felt like it was spreading through her palm and fingers. She also remembered what Grim had called her, in those first few moments of their meeting in Silas's bedroom: Eliza the knife-fingered. At the time, she had been focused on why he had twisted her first name, ignoring the title that he had attached to it. He knew this would happen, she thought, He must have known.

My eyes, she suddenly realized, That's why I can't find my glasses. She scrunched up her face and found that the sensation had also changed in a strip on her upper cheeks and forehead. She reached up to touch this part with her right hand. Though the overlying skin felt normal, deep within it did feel like there was something embedded there, something approximating the shape of her glasses. But her clothes remained--she pulled at her sleeves and the hem of her hoodie and her t-shirt underneath--unattached.

Elizabeth took a step onto the road, looking up and down to check for--what, exactly? Cars? Horse-drawn carts? The road was desolate, but the lack of plants growing in its center suggested it was at least partially maintained. The shoulders extended for a few yards on either side before giving way to a fence of wooden posts, and beyond that, the orderly grid of an orchard of mid-sized trees. The trees' canopies were egg-shaped, and their manicured borders suggested a topiary of endlessly repeating hills of leaves.

Could Grim be at the house? He wasn't anywhere she could see, not on the road or its shoulders. Should she really be so eager to track him down? If he had known about her hand and had failed to warn her, then what other details had he omitted in his hurry to get her to Edge?

She decided to take a scouting circuit around the house and the tower. The sky was moonless, but the night was far from dark: the black tapestry above was populated by a greater number of stars than she had ever seen. She wasn't a student of astronomy, but even the constellations she could pick out with ease--the Big Dipper, Cassiopeia, Orion's belt--were nowhere to be seen. To the right of the tower, jagged mountains blackened the lower borders for a quarter of her view, their silhouettes unpeppered by the lights of homes or roads.

Elizabeth approached the fence that bordered the road. It was built from wide planks of wood, solid construction. Meant to keep something out, she wondered, or something in?. Placing one foot on the lower rung of wood, she swung her other leg over, landing in an athletic crouch on the other side. The ground was springy, and felt to her fingers like a thick bed of moss.

She eased past three rows of trees, pausing at each before moving to its neighbor. Their leaves were ovular and spiked at the borders, like holly leaves. She took one between the fingers of her right hand; it was firm, but not hard. Round, plum-sized fruit were interspersed between the leaves, their skin slippery and seemingly unattached to the flesh underneath.  They smelled like pipe smoke--not unpleasant, but definitely not appetizing.

As she stepped from behind the third tree, she jumped back reflexively. There had been motion off to her right, someone or something a few trees closer to the building. Elizabeth held her breath, listening for a rustling or a footstep or someone else's breath, but the only noise she could hear was the paper-like crinkling of the leaves jostling each other in the breeze. The softness of the ground had effectively muffled her own footfalls, but it could just as easily have allowed someone to sneak up on her.

The trees' canopies extended to ground level, so she was hidden as long as she stayed where she was, and whoever was out there stayed where they were. She could return to the road, but in that open space she would be more exposed than if she remained among the trees.

She gazed at her left hand, testing its fingertips with the pad of her other palm. The points were sharp, and the palmar aspect of the fingers was tapered into what felt like a fairly keen blade. If there was indeed someone else out here, and if they were hostile, she might be able to get a quick poke or slash in and then run for her life.

Getting down on her hands and knees, Elizabeth risked a peek around the border of the tree. She moved slowly and steadily, reasoning that quick motions were more likely to be detected in the dim light. She rotated her head right and left, looking up and down the causeway created by the arrangement of the trees.

It was subtle at first, but she did see someone there, doing the same thing as she was--in fact, more than one person. Three trees closer to the tower, and about three trees farther down, she saw what appeared to be heads low to the ground. In the dusk, she could see a quick flash close to the ground, the glint of the tower's light off of a ring or a bracelet. Or a weapon.

Her heartbeat quickened as she withdrew her head. Okay, she thought, at least two people out there. And they probably know where I am. This is no longer the time to hide. I'll be safer if they don't know where I am, which means I need to move quickly, as quietly as possible.

She took a deep breath. If she ran and led them on a quick chase deeper into the orchard, then stopped and allowed them to overshoot her, she could reverse direction and hopefully get back to the road. As long as they didn't try to converge on the row she was in. As long as there were only two of them, and no one left on the road. Maybe she could use the knives of her left hand to hollow out an opening in the leaf-walls of one of these trees? Hide until daylight came and she could figure out the next step? Maybe she could ambush one or more of her pursuers from such a hiding place, if it came to that.

Readying herself in a crouch, Elizabeth tensed her body into a spring. She gave the ground a quick probing push with the toes of her back foot, making sure she had enough grip to take off without slipping and falling. Silently, she counted down. Three. Two...

One. And Elizabeth was off like a rabbit, her body willing her legs to pump before she thought the final word. She could see her pursuers doing the same thing in her peripheral vision, the blur of their legs pistoning as they kept pace with her in their corresponding rows. The path grew darker as she distanced herself from the tower, and she prayed the way would remain clear of obstruction; it would only take a single errant branch or rock to trip her up. The gradient started to slope down, and she had to check her speed to prevent herself from toppling forward.

She sprinted for a couple hundred yards, the trees’ repeating shadows creating a striped border to her vision, then picked one ahead to mark her about-face. She clutched at it with her right hand as she skidded to a stop, using the grip on its branch to help halt her forward motion, risking the rustling noise and hoping her pursuers’ heavy breathing would hide it from their ears. She whirled and raced the opposite way, back toward the road.

And braked just in time to avoid the wooden fence.

Elizabeth did a double take, hardly realizing that this abrupt change in momentum had caused her to fall backwards, landing on her bottom on the spongy moss. She had just run for at almost a minute; how was she back at the fence?

Snapping herself back to the moment, she was on her feet in a heartbeat, her left hand clawed, poised to strike...but her pursuers did not approach her. She could see them maintaining their positions next to the fence, both standing as she was, paused in a waiting position.

It was then that she noticed behind one of them, a few trees farther down, a third figure, standing in the same halted stance. She whipped her head around to examine the opposite direction, and sure enough, farther down this way as well, another figure. The road sloped down too far to see much farther, but she thought she could detect the beginning of yet another silhouette a few more trees down. And she saw a motion as she turned, a motion repeated down the line of figures, at the back of their heads. A motion that was echoed by the soft brushing of her own hair against her neck.

Elizabeth was struck by a feeling of déjà vu...this was like being in a changing room with multiple mirrors, arranged so she could see herself multiplied in the reflections a hundred times. She raised her right hand; each figure did the same. She lowered it, and they mimicked her precisely. She twisted back and forth; it was the same to her right and her left.

She wasn't being pursued. She was being copied.

Elizabeth advanced on the figure further from the tower, but as she stepped toward it, it stepped away. She turned the other way and tried it again, but this figure also matched her approach step-for-step, and they never got any closer to each other. It was a bit disconcerting, for she never saw her front reflected, just a dim view of the back of her head, sweatshirt, and pants; it would have been less creepy if she could just see her own face on these projections.

She turned her attention to the orchard. Her plan to circle the tower was not working. Unless...was it a speed thing? Instead of running, she walked at a steady pace, counting off twenty pairs of trees before spinning around and again finding herself just a few arm-lengths away from the fence and, beyond this, the road. She tried walking backward, keeping her gaze on the fence, but when she looked up to see if she was getting farther from the tower, she found she had just undone her work. "Dammit!" she hissed.

Well, maybe the time for subterfuge had ended. Maybe she should just walk up to the barn and look in some windows. Or knock on the door and introduce herself and hope that even if Grim wasn't in there, someone nice would be. Someone nice who spoke English. And wouldn't know that she had just thrown up in their driveway.

Climbing over the fence, she moved to stand in the middle of the road. As her feet touched the dirt, the doubles in front of her disappeared, sliding out of existence as though they had walked behind invisible curtains. Interesting. Maybe that particular peculiarity was limited to the orchards themselves. Was the fruit so valuable that it needed to be protected against thieves?

She walked toward the building, watching the orchard on either side for anything that might jump out. It took only a minute to recognize that this plan, too, was not working; no matter how many steps she took, the barn grew no larger in her perspective. Whoever was in there did not want visits from strangers. She reentered the orchard, the projected doubles snapping back into existence as she approached the trees.

At its tallest peak, the tower tapered in a curve until it ended in a sharp point. There was no walkway or any other projections to interrupt the tower’s outline. Suddenly, she saw a light winking within its shadow...was there a window she couldn't see? Was there someone in there? Without thinking, she took a few steps down the orchard row to see if she could make out someone moving.

With a start, Elizabeth realized she was now getting closer to the building. She glanced to her side, to see if there were doubles keeping pace with her, then swore to herself when she looked back at the tower; it had receded to its previous distance.

But this had given her a clue. She walked with her eyes firmly fixed on the top of the tower, which extended high enough into the air to remain in her field of vision even over the tops of the trees, and started to walk through the orchard. Yes! The tower stayed where it was, and she could get closer and further, just like normal. As long as she didn't break eye contact with it, she could hold it in place. She began to complete a circuit around the building, moving swiftly. The cover of night wouldn't last forever.

She walked forward until she was ten trees from the building, then, keeping her gaze locked on the tower, she rotated her body and started in a direction away from the road. In the lower portions of her visual field, she could see her images doing the same, three or four of them between her and the edifice's base; she could also barely detect the fence receding. The ground was without obstacle, no rocks or roots for her to trip over.

Fifty yards from the fence, Elizabeth turned and started to edge her way left, the first turn in her planned circumambulation. She continued for a few minutes, keeping the tower visible, scared to blink for too long should this somehow trip whatever alarm would send her back to the start. She watched the shape of it again grow larger until she was directly in front of it. The peak appeared to be three or four stories above the base; from her vantage point, she could see that the tower was made of stone, inlaid with a spiraling pattern of windows. There was a small walkway at the top, reminiscent of a lighthouse’s, just wide enough for a single person.

Elizabeth continued to sidestep, reached what she estimated was a distance from the tower equivalent to her prior turn, and again shifted her body 90-degrees, now walking around the back of the barn. Although she continued to move successfully through it, the orchard was not changing. The trees in her peripheral vision were the same size, shape, and spacing as when she first jumped the fence, and their fruits continued to exude the same subtle smoky miasma.

Likewise, this side of the tower was indistinguishable from the others. A few more turns, and she should be in the portion of the orchard opposite from where she had entered. She saw no other structures—no sheds or barns that she would have assumed an orchard's upkeep would require—but  her scanning ability was somewhat limited by the requirement to keep her eyes on the tower.

Elizabeth had grown used to the presence of shadowy figures retreating from or matching her as she walked, so it took her a moment to realize that the figure to her left was not moving in concert with her, but stood still about ten feet away. As though this figure read her mind, it took that moment as a chance to mark itself, striking a match and lighting what appeared to be a hand-rolled cigarette. Elizabeth jumped; she held her gaze on the tower, but trained her attention on this new figure. She wasn't sure if she should choose this moment to break her connection with the tower; if this shadow proved threatening, altering her gaze might prove an effective escape mechanism.

The figure spoke. "You can look at me. I've turned the garden off."

The voice was masculine, hoarse but not raspy. She turned to face the man, noting that her doubles had disappeared. He was a scarecrow of a man, tall and gaunt, and significantly older than she was, perhaps approaching middle age. His dark clothes covered him from neck to ankle and wrist, the shine of irregularly spaced buttons the only visible decoration. "I assume you are Eliza."

"Elizabeth," she corrected. "Is...is Grim here?"

He nodded assent. "He is inside, asleep. The passage was rough for him. I've been watching him until you arrived." 

"Oh. Good, then." She wasn't sure what to ask next. "What's up with this orchard?"

He raised one eyebrow, and she immediately wished she had thought of a more intelligent way to phrase her question. "It's a security measure." He took a few steps closer to her. "My name is Gareth, though most know me as Priest."

"Ah." She swallowed. His tone was not threatening, but it held weariness and condescension, as though his time was being wasted. "Grim mentioned you. He said you were the one who made the door into Edge."

"Did he say anything else?"

"Um...no. Not really. There wasn't a lot of time. We were being chased. By a monster." She paused, marking how ridiculous she sounded. "He just said you were the one who opens doors."

Priest gave a grunt of indeterminate meaning. "Chased, were you? No thought of bringing a dangerous creature through my door, into my orchard?"

She swallowed. If that was a concern, really Grim should have been the one to consider it. "I guess we thought the shadow couldn't follow us. I didn't see it anywhere in the orchard or on the road back there, though."

Priest relaxed his eyebrows. "Oh, a shadow monster. No, that's fine then."

"What does that mean?"

He turned from her, stepping toward the barn. "We should go inside. You will want to see Grim." He motioned for her to follow. "We will speak of your debt for the passage later."

Priest slid open a small door in the wall of the barn, ducking to enter it, leaving Elizabeth to follow into the brightness and wonder what manner of debt she now owed this man.