Darren Shan - The Thin Executioner

They slowed as they neared the cliff and looked at Jebel expectantly. “Well?” Bush asked. “Where is it?”

“Give me a moment,” Jebel frowned. “I know the entrance was close to here, but I can’t recall the exact place…”

He took a few steps back. As he retreated, his gaze flickered upwards. He saw that the shadows had converged and were sweeping towards the spot where Bush and Blair were waiting impatiently.

“Perhaps a hot iron applied to the soles of your feet would help,” Blair snapped.

“Hold on,” Jebel shushed him. “It’s close. Just give me a few seconds….” He glanced left and right, pretending to search for the entrance to the fictitious cave. Bush and Blair’s eyes were fixed on the young Um Aineh. They weren’t aware of anything behind them.

The shadow reached the base of the cliff. Jebel took one more step back and abandoned his pretend search. “It’s wrong to steal from the dead,” he said softly.

“Never mind that!” Bush barked.

“The treasure!” commanded Blair.

“There isn’t any,” Jebel said, and pointed behind them. “Unless there’s treasure to be found in the lands of the dead.”

Bush and Blair sensed the danger too late. If they had dived for safety, they might have escaped, but instead they spun around to see what Jebel was pointing at. For a second they gaped at the massive shadow. Then the rock pulsed and snatched them from where they stood.

The pair screamed — their cries muted by the encompassing rock — and thrashed to break free. Bush managed to turn away from the cliff and reached out to Jebel, his face filled with terror, pleading for help. Jebel instinctively raised a hand to grasp Bush and pull him free. But then the rock snapped back into place and hardened, trapping the pair of villainous Masters within its folds.

There was a thin, ghostly cry. “ No-o-o-o-o…”

Then silence.

The shadow swirled around its victims for a minute, then split into nine parts and drifted away, leaving the fossilized dead behind.

Jebel studied the rocky remains. Blair’s back was to the boy, barely sticking out of the cliff, easy to miss if you weren’t looking for it. But Bush was facing him, eyes and mouth wide, hands reaching out to beg for help over the hundreds and thousands of years to follow, until the snow and winds eroded his image.

Jebel stared somberly at Bush’s terrified expression and his extended hands, noting the curl of his fingers, the way his palms tilted upwards. If anyone passed by here in later years, they might think that this was a sculpture carved out of the rock and wonder if it was the representation of some beloved martyr or holy man.

Jebel turned his back on the cliff and the doomed Masters Bush and Blair and trudged down to the caves, where he ate a quiet meal. Then he wrapped up warmly and sat in the gloom, eyes distant, feeling very alone, replaying the death of Bush and Blair over and over in his mind, taking not even a grain of satisfaction from the grisly memories.

Jebel ate, brooded, and slept. There was no way of telling day from night in the caves, but he didn’t care. He wasn’t interested. A great weariness had settled upon the boy. He didn’t think about the future, what would happen to him if he ever left this place, where he might go if he did. He was alone with his thoughts, and most of those were horrible.

He tried to find comfort in the happier past, recalling Debbat Alg, his family, Bastina and her mother, life in Wadi when he was innocent and free. But none of that seemed real to him now. It was hard to believe it had ever happened. A world without pain, loss, betrayal, hate, death, loneliness? Impossible!

Most of the candles in the cave had burned down. Jebel had been replacing the dead candles from a stash in one of the walls, but he had made up his mind not to fetch any more when the current batch flickered out. When the last was quenched, he would live as a shadow in a world without light.

Jebel might have remained in the caves until the end of his days, a silent, lost hermit, except fate hadn’t finished with him. One day, after a dark, timeless age, he heard somebody coming. The person was moving quietly, but Jebel’s ears were attuned to silence, and he could have heard a spider scuttling.

Jebel positioned himself in a pitch-black tunnel and watched as a man with a candle entered the cave. Jebel knew the man, but he didn’t want to call out. If he did, he would be dragged back into the real world. It was safer to squat here in the darkness, let the man leave, and hide in the abandoned caves forever.

The man explored the cave, then climbed into one of the tunnels that led to the surface. Jebel wanted to let him go but was afraid the man might wander too close to the cliff, drawn by the spectacle of Bush and Blair. So he reluctantly broke his silence and spoke up.

“Tel Hesani.”

The Um Kheshabah whirled around. When the boy stepped forward, Tel Hesani’s face twitched with fear. “ Jebel? ” he croaked. “Are you a ghost?”

“No,” Jebel said, squinting as he moved into the light.

Tel Hesani stared at Jebel with disbelief, then broke into an incredulous grin. “Jebel Rum!” he roared, rushing forward and embracing the boy. “I thought you were dead. I’ve been searching the banks for your body.” He let go and took a step back, gazing at Jebel with wonder. “How did you survive?”

“I hitched a ride,” Jebel said softly.

Tel Hesani frowned. “With whom?”

“Death.”

Tel Hesani didn’t know how to respond to that. While he was searching for words, Jebel pointed at the ceiling. “Bush and Blair are up top.”

The Um Kheshabah’s lips curled. “Those fiends! I had a feeling we weren’t finished with them. Lead me to the monsters, and I’ll—”

“They’re dead,” said Jebel. “I tricked them and sacrificed them to the rock spirits. They’re trapped in the cliff now. They can’t ever leave.”

Tel Hesani blinked and shook his head. “Wonder heaped upon wonder.” He studied Jebel and saw the emptiness in the boy’s eyes, his stooped shoulders and distant expression. “You’ve been here alone all this time?”

“How long has it been?” Jebel replied without much interest.

“Nearly three weeks,” said Tel Hesani, sitting and gently tugging Jebel down beside him. “I fled after you fell into the as-Sudat. I found shelter, slept as best I could, then headed downriver to search for your body but also to come here. I knew I would be safe if I found my way back to Hamata. I could hole up for the rest of the winter, then sail back to Wadi in the spring and try to save the lives of my family.”

“It mustn’t have been easy, surviving out there,” Jebel remarked.

“It wasn’t,” Tel Hesani said softly. He was thinner than ever. He had aged fifteen years and didn’t carry himself as straight as he once did. He could have told Jebel of his recent trials, digging through the snow to find frozen berries, fighting off wolves to feast on the corpse of a deer, sleeping inside its carcass for warmth, fleeing from a bear. But he didn’t want to burden Jebel, as he felt the boy had suffered enough himself. “When do you want to leave?” he said instead.

The question took Jebel by surprise. “Leave?” he echoed.

“For Tubaygat. There’s still time. It will take a couple of months, but we might make it if luck is with us.”

“You want to go to Tubaygat?” Jebel asked stupidly. He had given up on the quest and barely thought of it recently. On the few occasions that he had, it struck him as the foolish fancy of a child who had known nothing of the world. “Why?”

“ Why? ” Tel Hesani exploded. “To save my wife and children, of course!”