Inkspell

36. SCREAMS

The White Women were still there. Resa didn't seem to see them anymore, but Mo felt their presence like shadows in sunlight. He didn't tell her about them. She looked so tired. The one thing that still kept her going was her hope that Dustfinger would soon arrive – with Meggie.

"You wait and see, he'll find her," Resa kept whispering to him when he shook with fever. How could she be so sure? As if Dustfinger had never let them down, never stolen the book, never betrayed them… Meggie. The need to see her once again was even stronger than the enticing whispers of the White Women, stronger than the pain in his breast… and who could say, perhaps this accursed story might yet take a turn for the better? Although Mo remembered Fenoglio's preference for unhappy endings only too well.

"Tell me what it looks like outside," he sometimes whispered to Resa. "It's ridiculous to be in a whole different world and see nothing of it but a cave." And Resa described what he couldn't see – the trees, so much taller and older than any trees he had ever set eyes on, the fairies like swarms of gnats among the branches, the glass men in the tall bracken, and the nameless terrors of the night. Once she caught a fairy – Dustfinger had told her how to do it – and took it to him. She held the little creature in the hollow of her hands and put it close to his ear, so that he could hear the fairy's chirping, indignant voice.

It all seemed so real, however often he told himself it was made of nothing but paper and ink. The hard ground where he lay, the dry leaves that rustled when he tossed and turned in his fever, the bear's hot breath – and the Black Prince, whom he had last seen in the pages of a book. Now the man himself sometimes sat beside him, cooling his brow and talking quietly to Resa. Or was it all just a fevered dream?

Death felt real in this Inkworld, too. Very real. It was strange to encounter death here in a world out of a book. But even if the dying was made only of words – even if, perhaps, it was nothing but a game played by the letters on the page – his body thought it was real. His heart felt fear, his flesh felt pain. And the White Women had not gone away, even if Resa couldn't see them. Mo felt them near him, every minute, every hour, every day, and every night. Fenoglio's angels of death. Did they make dying easier than it was in the world he came from? No. Nothing could make it easier. You lost what you loved. That was death, here as well as there.

It was light outside when Mo heard the first scream. At first he thought the fever was taking hold of him again. But then he saw from Resa's face that she could hear it, too: the clash of weapons and screaming. Cries of fear – death cries. Mo tried to sit up, but the pain pounced on him like an animal digging its teeth into his chest. He saw the Black Prince standing outside the cave, his sword drawn; he saw Resa jump up. Fever made her face blur before his eyes, but then Mo suddenly saw another picture: He saw Meggie sitting in Fenoglio's kitchen staring at the old man in horror as, full of pride, he told her of the fine death scene he had written for Dustfinger. Oh yes, Fenoglio liked sad stories. And perhaps he had just written another.

"Resa!" Mo cursed the way his tongue felt, heavy with fever, "Resa, go and hide – hide somewhere in the forest."

But she stayed with him as she always had – except for that one day, the day when his own voice had banished her.