Chase the Morning

I stumbled back, sickened, deadly afraid, and something clattered underfoot. Jyp looked up – and then threw himself away with a yell as a long blade flashed into the light, hissed across the air where he had been. He vanished into the shadows, and suddenly they were alive with jostling forms, with trampling feet. Hands grabbed at me, a grip that slipped and instead threw me crashing back against the door – saving me, as another tongue of metal sang in front of my face.

I was free. So I ducked down, grabbed the sword I’d tripped over …

I didn’t even think of that. I didn’t think of anything. Perhaps I screamed; I remember a scream, and there’d been no other voices. But what I did do was fling myself aside, away, towards that line of light and through it, an instant before heavy bodies hurled against it slammed it at my back. And then, staggering on the step, I ran away.

I just took to my heels. It wasn’t blind panic, if there is such a thing; I knew what I was doing, selfish and ashamed. I wasn’t going for help, or anything like that; I was running in deadly fear. It was like trying to scale the side of a collapsing pit, crumbling under me. The clutch of those hands in the dark had ripped away any self-control I might have had, laid bare the sheer animal. I was running to save me. It was just some mad quirk that sent me in the wrong direction, away from the car, down towards the shadows of the docks and the nightbound ocean beyond.

And even as I ran, the door crashed open again behind me. I looked back, and there was no stopping then. Three figures, huge and lanky, came bounding out in the hazy lamplight, long coats flying, and after me in an instant. And in the hand of each there gleamed no mere knife, but a great broad swordblade, dully glinting.

Then I definitely yelled; and I ran all the harder. But it seemed to me that the shadows drew back, would not touch me, refused to hide me; and my pursuers loped long-legged at my heels. Out of the street’s end I bolted, chest bursting, and turned right because that was the nearer side, onto what was only half a street; on my left it fell away to a gleam of open water. I had run out onto the wharfside itself. But what I saw in that water stopped me dead as little else could, shaking with a fear far greater than any those pursuing figures could inspire. In that awed moment I forgot them completely.

Only by that starlit gleam was the water visible, a pool of blackness turned suddenly to a mirror of black glass, gently rippling. It was the image in that mirror that held me spellbound, a web of black lines, a thicket of leafless thorns. In utter amazement, all else forgotten, I lifted my eyes, knowing what the shadows had been hiding from me, what I would now see.

I knew, yet I was not ready for it. The thicket was a forest; a forest of tall masts, of tangled rigging and stern spars crossing the night. To either side they stretched before me, as far as my eyes would reach, stark against the stars, high and magnificent. The docks that only an hour or two earlier I had seen stand empty and forlorn were now thronged with many tall ships, moored clustered and close. So many they were, so high they stood, that sky and sea were all but blotted out. The pool I saw gleamed through the gap between a reaching bowsprit and a high-transomed stern. I may have heard the crash of feet behind me, but hardly noticed it. I was confronted with a wonder wider than my mind could take in, a towering glimpse of the infinite. Like the wind off the ocean it shook me, chilled me, showed me how vanishingly small I was, and all my concerns. I knew only too well it was no illusion; it was I who felt unreal. Where something like this could happen, fear seemed irrelevant.

Until the last moment, when the clatter of boots became too loud to ignore, and I heard the panting breath of my pursuers. Then, agonized at my own stupidity, I turned to bolt again; too late. A hand plucked at my sleeve. I tripped on a loose stone, spun around and crashed down on my back. Hard boots stamped painfully down on my arms as I struggled to rise. Winded, helpless, I wheezed for breath. Their long faces bent over me, silent, expressionless, leaden and grey in the faint light. A swordtip glinted, a great broad cutlass-thing, looking rusty and pitted and not very sharp. It swung idly back and forward before my eyes, so close it parted the lashes; then it went swinging up for a great slashing stroke. The animal kicked out in me again. I filled my chest with one fiery, sobbing breath, and screamed for help.