The pillars of creation

Her heart galloped yet faster. Her breath caught against her ragged pulls, like silk catching on dry skin. With her wide-eyed gaze locked on the dead soldier's face, she pushed with her feet, scuttling back across the gravel.

She was being silly. She knew she was. The man was dead. He wasn't looking at her. He couldn't be. His stare was fixed in death, that's all, like her stringer of dead fish-they weren't looking at anything. Neither was he. She was being silly. It only seemed he was looking at her.

But even if the dead eyes were staring at nothing, she would just as soon that they weren't doing it in her direction.

Jennsen.

Beyond, above the sharp rise of granite, the pine trees swayed from side to side in the wind and the bare maple and oak waved their skeletal arms, but Jennsen kept her gaze fixed on the dead man as she listened for the voice. The man's lips were still. She knew they would be. The voice was in her head.

His face was still turned toward the trail from where he had fallen to his death. She had thought his lifeless sight had been turned in that direction, too, but now his eyes seemed to be turned more toward her.

Jennsen curled her fingers around the hilt of her knife.

Jennsen.

"Leave me be. I'll not surrender."

She never knew what it was that the voice wanted her to surrender. Despite having been with her nearly her whole life, it had never said. She found refuge in that ambiguity.

As if in answer to her thought, the voice came again.

Surrender yourflesh, Jennsen.

Jennsen couldn't breathe.

Surrender your will.

She swallowed in terror. It had never said that before-never said anything she could understand.

Often, she would faintly hear it-as if it were too far away to be clearly understood. Sometimes she thought she could hear the words, but they seemed to be in a strange language.

She often heard it when she was falling asleep, calling to her in that distant, dead whisper. It spoke other words to her, she knew, but never so as she could understand more than her name and that frighteningly seductive single-word command to surrender. That word was always more forceful than any other. She could always hear it even when she could hear no other.

Her mother said that the voice was the man who, nearly Jennsen's whole life, had wanted to kill her. Her mother said that he wanted to torment her.

"Jenn," her mother would often say, "it's all right. I'm here with you. His voice can't hurt you." Not wanting to burden her mother, Jennsen often didn't tell her about the voice.

But even if the voice couldn't hurt her, the man could, if he found her. At that moment, Jennsen desperately wished for the protective comfort of her mother's arms.

One day, he would come for her. They both knew he would. Until then, he sent his voice. That's what her mother thought, anyway.

As much as that explanation frightened her, Jennsen preferred it to thinking herself mad. If she didn't have her own mind, she had nothing.

"What's happened here?"

Jennsen gasped in a cry of fright as she spun, pulling her knife. She dropped into a half crouch, feet spread, knife held in a death grip.

It was no disembodied voice, this. A man was walking up the gully toward her. With the wind in her ears, and the distraction of the dead man and the voice, she hadn't heard him coming.

As big as he was, as close as he was, she knew that if she ran, and if he was of a mind, he could easily run her down.

CHAPTER 2

The man slowed when he saw her reaction, and her knife.

"I didn't mean to give you a scare."

His voice was pleasant enough.

"Well, you did."

Although the hood of his cloak was up and she couldn't see his face clearly, he seemed to be taking in her red hair the way most people did when they saw her.

"I can see that. I apologize."

She didn't slacken her defensive posture in acceptance of the apology, but instead swept her gaze to the sides, checking to see if he was alone, to see if anyone else was with him and might be sneaking up on her.

She felt a fool for being caught by surprise like that. In the back of her mind she knew she couldn't ever really be safe. It didn't necessarily take stealth. Even simple carelessness on her part could at any time bring the end. She felt a sense of forlorn doom at how easily it could happen. If this man could walk up in broad daylight and startle her so easily, what did that say of her hopelessly extravagant dream that one day her life could be her own?

The dark rock wall of the cliff glistened in the wet. The windswept gully was deserted of anyone but her and the two men, the dead one and the one alive. Jennsen was not given to imagining sinister faces lurking in forest shadows, as she had been as a child. The dark places in among the trees were empty.

The man stopped a dozen paces away. By his posture, it wasn't fear of her knife that halted him, but fear of causing her a worse fright. He stared openly at her, seemingly lost in some private thought. He quickly recovered from whatever it was about her face that so held his gaze.