It came to him, with a sudden, sickened urgency, that he had to get back to the little door. He picked up his sketchbook, hardly thinking why—because it was his, because it had his drawings in it—and crawled across the plank floor of the blind. He hesitated beside the corpse of Mr. Stockton. The big man stared at the ceiling with wide, startled eyes. His thermos lay close to hand. The coffee had spilled out and soaked into the floorboards. Christian thought he should take the knife and he tried to pull it out of Stockton’s chest, but it was buried too deep, the blade jammed between two ribs. The effort made him sob. Then he thought he should crawl back to Peter and pull the CZ 550 out of his hands, but he couldn’t bear to look at the hole in Peter’s forehead. In the end he left the blind as he had come, unarmed.

He made his unsteady way down the rope ladder. It had been easy going up. It was much harder going down, because his legs were shaking.

When he was on the ground, Christian scanned the gloom and then began to move across the face of the hill, toward the flight of rough stone steps. A black silk ribbon caught his eye, and he knew he was not turned around.

He had hiked far enough to work up a good sweat when he heard shouts and a sound like a herd of ponies running through the trees. Not a dozen feet away, he saw a pair of fauns dart through the shadows. One carried a curved blade. The other had what looked like a throwing bolas, a mass of hanging leather straps with stones tied at the ends.

The faun with the scimitar leaped a fallen trunk, scrambled with the vitality of a stag up the hill, and bounded out of sight. The one with the bolas followed for a few yards—then caught himself and looked down the hill, fixing his gaze on Christian. The faun’s leathery, scarred face was set in an expression of haughty contempt. Christian screamed and fled down the slope.

The trunk of a tree rose out of the darkness, and Christian slammed into it, was spun halfway around, lost his footing, and fell. He rolled. His shoulder struck a sharp stone, and he was spun again, continuing to tumble down the incline, picking up speed. Once it seemed his whole body left the ground in a spray of dead leaves. At last he struck hard against another tree and was jolted to a stop against it. He found himself in the bracken at the bottom of the hill. Just beyond the ferns was a mossy path and the river.