Alexey Pehov - Shadow Prowler

I occasionally glanced round, turning cold inside as I expected to see someone or something following in my footsteps, but everything was calm and quiet. I tried not to make a sound and listened to the summer night with my hearing heightened to the maximum.

But the only noise was the wind. It would die away, like some little wild animal, and then, at the most unexpected moment, suddenly start playing in the black gaps of the dead houses, jumping out of gateways with a mysterious whistle, swaying shutters that had come off their hinges so that they banged against the walls of the houses, teasing the loose sheets of roofing metal and setting them rattling menacingly, then hiding again.

Only once did an incomprehensible and therefore frightening sound set icy shivers running up and down my spine.

As I stole past a once-wealthy house with faded green paint, I heard a faint child’s cry that broke off abruptly. Retreating in shock to the other side of the street, I merged into the shadow and listened in silent terror. The crying had come from the ground floor. The windows were boarded up, but that was definitely where the cry was from.

I waited. My heart was pounding rapidly, like some wild bird begging to be released from a cramped cage. Good old Harold was desperately afraid of hearing that sound again-the angry, desperate crying of a hungry infant abandoned by its mother.

But there was not another sound and, after waiting for a few seconds, I went on my way. I walked hurriedly, glancing round all the time, afraid to believe what I had heard. And the fear gradually released its grip.

I tried not to show myself in the sections of the street that were illuminated by the moon, but at the same time not to press too closely against the walls of the dead houses. They made me feel a kind of instinctive childish horror, with that mournful expression in all their silent, broken window-eyes. These imaginary glances gave me a really horrible feeling, and my overexcited imagination obligingly kept throwing up all sorts of pictures, for the most part quite unpleasant.

At those moments I really felt like sending the king, Hrad Spein, and the map to hell, and simply disappearing from the city. The only thing that stopped me was the fear of breaking a contract.

The fact that Graveyard Street ran just behind the houses, parallel to the Street of Men, did nothing to inspire me with optimism, either. Finally, I caught sight of the judge’s house. I don’t know if a judge actually lived there or the name came about for some incidental reason. But the judge’s house was what this gray, three-story stone block was called in the plans of the city.

Immediately behind the judge’s house, if the plans could be trusted, there was a narrow alley leading to the Street of the Sleepy Cat. Like Graveyard Street, it ran parallel to the Street of Men, but on my left-hand side. In principle I could carry on along the Street of Men and reach the Street of the Sleepy Cat from the broad Oat Avenue, but that was a long, long walk and the Forbidden Territory isn’t the kind of place that encourages long, relaxed nocturnal strolls. I swear to that on the Quiet Times! The sooner I could get out of there, the better. The narrow alleyway would cut down my dangerous journey by at least half, which would be most welcome.

“Well, may a h’san’kor devour me!” I swore in a low voice.

The house beside the judge’s house had collapsed and one of its walls had fallen into the alley, blocking my way to the Street of the Sleepy Cat. Unfortunately I wasn’t a mountain goat, to go scrambling over all that rubble. Even Vukhdjaaz, may his name not be mentioned at night, would break his leg here.

I’d have to go the long way round.

My gaze fell on the point where the walls of the somber houses melted into the night. How far was it to Oat Avenue? I realized that the street was quiet and there was absolutely nobody there, and yet… Somehow I wasn’t burning with desire to walk along the Street of Men. Slit my throat, but I wouldn’t, and that was an end to it. The same intuition that saved me the night I crept into the duke’s house had grabbed hold of me by the shoulders and wouldn’t let me go on. But then how was I going to get onto the Street of the Sleepy Cat? The only answer was to go through one of the sinister houses standing on my left. Maybe the one closest to me-the judge’s house.

Standing there in a shadow as thick as rich cream, I hesitated in torment, trying to decide which was the lesser of two evils-to walk along the Street of Men or to poke my nose into a dead house. I didn’t find either option much to my liking, but standing there doing nothing was just as dangerous as continuing my journey.

There was another quiet child’s cry from the house opposite the judge’s house, and I shuddered. The sound had come from the second floor.

The first time I heard the crying, I had put it down to my overexcited imagination, but this time there was no avoiding the fact that I really had heard it. And this discovery was far from filling my heart with peace and delight. Ghosts? The spirits of the dead? The curse of the Rainbow Horn?

I don’t know what it was or what it wanted from me, but I certainly wasn’t going to be fooled by a child’s cry and go running to save the innocent infant, like some idiotic knight in a fairy tale. There aren’t any children here, there haven’t been for two hundred years. At least, not any live ones.

I carefully unfastened my crossbow and loaded a fire bolt instead of one of the ordinary ones. It looked just like a battle bolt, except for the red notches on its tip that helped distinguish it from its nonmagical brothers. It was a serious weapon that could easily topple a knight clad in full armor.

A few moments passed, during which my heart sank and became entangled in my guts, then the terrible crying stopped as suddenly as it had started. A second’s silence… And then I heard quiet chuckling. Malicious laughter. The way a child can laugh when it’s torturing a cat and knows that it will never be punished by the grown-ups. The hair on my head began stirring and my back was suddenly streaming with cold sweat. For almost the first time in my life I wanted to yell out at the top of my voice in sheer animal terror. Nothing had ever frightened me so badly before.

It was time to clear out of there, and quickly-that laugh didn’t make me feel like having a polite, relaxed conversation with its mysterious owner. I no longer had any doubt that this unknown creature had set out to hunt poor Harold. Otherwise how could it have turned up two blocks away from where I’d first heard it?

When I heard the chuckling coming from the ground floor of the house, I abandoned all doubt and hesitation. I hurtled up the steps onto the porch of the judge’s house, pushed open the door, and plunged into the ancient darkness, on the way dragging out of my pocket a disposable magical trinket that gave out a dim light. I could see just well enough to avoid running into the nearest wall or the furniture and to find the old door, warped with age, that led into the inner chambers. There wasn’t even enough time to take out one of the bright magical light sources that I had bought from good old Honchel. I could already hear the laughter in the street, beside the porch.

Anyone else in my place would have fired at this unknown mysterious jolly weeper, but I’m more careful than that-it’s the way For trained me. What if I didn’t kill the weird beast, but only ended up making it even more furious?

I kicked open a door of I’ilya willow, which everyone knows is impervious to the ravages of time, and burst into a dark hall with its walls lost in pitch-darkness. Almost stumbling over the broken furniture lying scattered about in disorder, I dashed on, and the sound of my steps could probably be heard a league away.