The sound was shocking, and horrible. Bone screamed back. The creature thrashed its wings and they stirred up clouds of dust, flicking wet silt across the cavern. It was buried up to its waist, and must have been there for decades since the valley was flooded, hibernating in this dark cave and submerged beneath mud and water.

Decades.

It screeched again, twisting against the confining mud, its shrivelled body displaying amazing strength.

Not my father, Bone thought, and he turned and started pushing his way back through to the first cavern. The screeching followed him. The noise carried a promise of pain. The corpse looked hungry.

One of those others Mohserran shared its space with had wings, always kept tight to its body, almost as if it was ashamed of them. I never asked the gargoyle’s name.

The gargoyle was here, and the werewolf was buried down by the stream. So where was his father?

He burst back into the first cavern and slipped, tumbling down into the channel worn by the stream, the thing’s screaming following him down as if sound itself could clasp hold of him and squeeze, claw through his flesh, crunch his bones.

Sometimes he was afraid of the Kin, but mostly he saw them as the gentle, frightened creatures most of them were.

He had never been this terrified.

As he crawled, trying to stand, something grabbed hold of his left leg. He shouted out in surprise and aimed the torch down. The buried corpse had its hand around his ankle. It was shaking, shivering where it was buried, and silt was falling away from it, uncovering more of its body and face as it turned its head—a creak, a crumple—to look at him with black, oily eyes.

Bone screamed, long and loud, and tugged his leg out of its grasp. He ran along the stream, climbing from the channel and following the footsteps he’d left on his way in. He wished more than ever before to be out in the sunlight, a Grey Man seeking the colour of the world.

As he ran, he saw a shape slip away from deeper shadows ahead of him. It moved in a jerky, uncertain fashion, an ambiguous form given sharp edges.

Just before its pained, mad growls joined the screaming coming from behind him, Bone thought, Father.

12

12

It was the first dead Kin Vince had seen since being trapped in the Fold. He’d witnessed plenty before, and the memories of them would stay with him always. Ballus the mad satyr had murdered so many, and Vince still had nightmares about the old enclosed swimming pool where he’d kept their rotting bodies. His legs were scarred from where Ballus had attacked him with the broken parts of dead creatures, their exotic, unknowable corpses broken down into sad remnants, relics of things that should not be.