The Legend Thief (8 page)

The wind dragged the Fog through the forest, thinning it and spreading it out for miles around. From the growth of moss on the trees, Sky knew he was heading north. He'd contemplated circling back to follow the trail of wax and feathers and, presumably, the shooter, Fred, and the Marrowick, but he'd given up the idea, fearing that the Darkhorn might have the same thought.

Besides, an injured hunter hid somewhere to the north, judging by the trail of blood. This hunter and the other- the shooter-hadn't tried to kill him or they'd both be at Arkhon Academy right now getting treated for Bolger venom. They'd defied Morton's orders. That meant one or both might be potential allies against Morton, should Sky's plan fail, and against Bedlam. Or, they might just kill him while trying to kill each other. Either way, they were up here for some reason, and he meant to find out why and how Fred and the Marrowick were tied up in all this.

Still troubled by Nikola but not sure what to do about it, Sky closed himself off completely to the Piebalds to prevent the Darkhorn and Bedlam from tracking him so easily. He left the swamps behind, moving deeper into the unknown. Without the Piebalds guiding him, he felt exposed and traveled more slowly than he liked, fearing what he'd encounter. Here, the forest thinned and the ancient trees grew taller and broader and somehow more disturbing-the angles wrong, bent and twisted.

Following the trail of blood, he circled around a massive hole that seemed to go down forever. He passed a row of barrows-dark burial hills-and black trees that sent shivers through him.
As
he continued on, the land, if possible, became even more wretched than the swamps. The numerous crags became pitted and charred and jutted from the earth like a long-forgotten palace or the remains of a swallowed city. Dozens of black streams raced between the rocks, some continuing southwest to join the rivers and swamps, others disappearing into the cracks and gaping holes, great waterfalls of darkness falling into nothing.

Ancient trees grew tall and few, their black branches long and spread out, wrapped together like fingers high above him.

He had never had the time,
nor
the inclination, to explore this dark and dangerous wasteland. He didn't want to explore it now, but instinct and a certain morbid curiosity were driving him on. Who were these two hunters and why were they here in the Sleeping Lands?
And why now?
Once again, he thought the timing wasn't a coincidence. Bedlam's army was on its way to destroy Exile, the foreign hunters were here to stop Bedlam, and these two hunters were somehow involved. Everything seemed to revolve around Bedlam, and Sky suspected that Bedlam's arrival was somehow driving these two hunters as well.

Of course, the real question was: Why had Bedlam come to Exile in the first place?

Sky had read about Solomon and Alexander's heroic capture of the terrible monster Bedlam at the beginning of
The Edge of Oblivion.
He remembered reading about how Bedlam was plotting to destroy the hunters, and how Solomon and Alexander pleaded with him to change his ways. Bedlam had refused and sworn that he would reclaim his father's throne and wipe the hunters from the face of the earth before making all people bow to him. Then, he'd attacked Solomon and Alexander on the spot. They defended themselves with their shimmering blades, while begging Bedlam to give up his mad quest. Finally, with no other options, Solomon and Alexander had wrapped Bedlam in threads of light and trapped him in an unbreakable shell-the Chrysalis. They promised him that one day, when his heart was pure and filled with
love,
he would emerge like a butterfly.

It was the beginning of the Edgewalker Wars. The rest of the book detailed the brutal wars and how Solomon tracked down and killed every last Edgewalker.

Of course, Alexander and a few other chroniclers had written the book, and as Sky had learned last year and numerous times since, hunters lied. It was quite possible that nothing in the story was true, in which case Sky had little to go on to figure out why Bedlam had come to Exile. Clearly Bedlam hated the hunters and had every intention of destroying Exile; one didn't bring an army to make friends. At the same time, there were relatively few hunters in Exile. If Bedlam had just wanted to kill hunters, he could have gone anywhere, such as the Academy of Legend Chase had mentioned. Whatever and wherever the Academy of Legend was, it sounded like a good place to start. They had to have more hunters there, based on how many they'd sent to Exile.

But Bedlam had chosen to attack Exile first, and that meant he wanted something here, something more than just to kill hunters. If Bedlam somehow knew about Solomon taking the Arkhon's body-a secret known by almost no one-then he could, feasibly, have come for revenge. Bedlam would have to hate Solomon more than just about anyone, besides maybe Alexander, who had died centuries ago due to an unfortunate sword through the neck from an unknown assassin. But if Sky were trapped, the first thing he would do was free
himself
, especially if he had failed to take control of the one person-namely him-who could have given him an advantage.

But to free himself, Bedlam would have to escape an unbreakable Chrysalis, and to do that, he'd have to have a pure heart filled with love.

Sky laughed.

Even as a small boy, he had thought the idea was not only cheesy, but completely ridiculous: If Bedlam's mind and body were trapped, how could his heart ever change? But there had to be some way for Bedlam to free himself. It was the only reason for coming to Exile that made sense.

Sky could only hope that the hunter he was tracking knew more about it than he did.

As he came around an immense, sharp-edged crag, he found an inscription beside a narrow gap:

Grove of the Fallen,

Chosen of the First

No slowly seeping poison

taints
their morbid thirst.

Disturb their slumber

-
disregard
this sign –

and
join them six feet under,

with
maggots in thy mind

Feeling anxious, Sky walked through the narrow gap and clown a steep path. Gray-and-black rock towered over him on both sides, growing taller the farther down he went until he was hundreds of feet below the highest point.

His Pounder hand-cannon
was
busted, his Jumpers empty, and he'd used up his last can of Fog. The protective Shimmer would recharge
on its own
eventually, but, at best, he had one or two zaps left. If this place lived up to its engraving, he was destined for brain maggots.

On the other side of the gap, he found himself standing in front of a strange grove. Sheer gray-and-black cliffs, spattered with waterfalls, surrounded the grove entirely, with a few gaps leading out. Lush white trees covered in sparkling leaves and twinkling blue fruit lit up the grove-its very beauty making Sky leery, and reminding him of why he hated botany: Things that looked that good were never that good.

The trail of blood he'd first noticed near the swamps had long since disappeared, but the injured hunter was in a hurry and sloppy, leaving Sky plenty of tracks to follow. He crept into the grove, staying as far away from the trees as he could. Fireflies of all colors darted here and there, and eerie green moss rustled on tree trunks and slunk across earth and obsidian like slugs. He passed odd, bright, bell-shaped flowers and silvery grass that hummed in the wind like an eerie choir. Golden reeds strummed together like cellos, and the trees swayed and whispered until the grove was filled with haunting music.

Sky felt his tension and anxiety slip away, little by little.

The air felt cleaner here, the night brighter, his heart more hopeful. Glancing down, he was surprised to find his Hunter's Mark warm and glowing, the light in the Mark mingling with the light in the grove. The light seemed to move through him, washing away aches and pains he didn't even know he had, and others he was all too aware of. He wanted to be wary-to watch for the traps that must be lying in wait-but for the first time in nearly a year, he felt something he'd almost forgotten....

In the ghostly melodies of this unnatural grove, he felt
peaceful.

He pressed his fingernails into his Eye of Legend, the pain helping him focus. Now wasn't the time to get all peaceful; this place was dangerous. If he didn't pay attention, the only peace he would find would be the eternal kind.

In the center of the grove, Sky came upon a clearing and an enormous stone statue, easily a hundred feet tall, of a woman rising from the earth. Ivy shrouded the lower half of her body as it twirled out of the ground like a sickly gray beanstalk.

Her left arm and part of her face had sloughed off and Sky could see the remains strewn across the smaller monuments, statues, and graves that surrounded her, many of which had been crushed to rubble. Her right hand was stretched out in front of her, hovering over the statue of a kneeling man. On her palm, Sky saw the Hunter's Mark.

He crept forward, feeling more and more confused. He'd seen a lot of things in the last year- man-eating pumpkin patches, aggressive pine trees, hardened desserts, even a half man, half manatee (a Humanatee) , not to mention a crazy janitor with a Doritos bag on his head-but he'd never dreamed of a place like this. Everything else was so horrible, so nightmarishly awful, but this ...
this
... was
wonderful-mindblowingly
creepy, yet magical at the same time.

Phineas had once told him that there was no such thing as magic, just some
very
misunderstood natural forces. But as Sky looked up at the statue, and heard the symphony of the grove, and felt the light and warmth flowing through him, he couldn't help believing that maybe Phineas had gotten it wrong; maybe there was no such thing as natural forces- just some very misunderstood
magic.

Sky passed by the woman's giant stone sword, still clasped in her broken left hand, sitting atop a row of crushed monuments. The blade shimmered strangely as moonlight reflected off particles of precious metals locked within. He remembered reading about such blades- the real blades, not this stone replica. Shimmering blades, they were called, the swords of the Hunters of Legend, like those Solomon and Alexander had used to fight Bedlam in
The Edge of Oblivion.
Phineas had even carried one, a blade that now sat, Sky supposed, in the belly of the Jack.

Sky recognized many of the names etched into the monuments and graves, Hunters of Legend whose stories he'd studied for as long as he could remember. Nathaniel the Noteworthy,
who'd
shared delicious toast with Samuel the Simpleton while searching for the Tourmaline of Foresight.

And Gladys
Goodright
, the first (and last) hunter to fall in love with a Humanatee.
He passed the gaudy tomb of Esteban, a hunter so vain he believed other hunters should recognize him from a single name. The fact that it was true had annoyed Phineas to no end, Sky remembered with a smile. And Studious Kelp,
who'd
cornered the poultry market in London to stop a
Satyrn
invasion-an invasion that Studious invented in order to corner the poultry market in London.

He passed other hunters, too,
real
hunters of the heroic kind.

Portense
Happenstance, who brought light to the
Morospawn
giants under the sea and found the cure to Creeper
venom
. And Frederick von
Gooseburg
, who gave his life to protect an insignificant village from a cadre of fellow hunters who wanted to destroy it for its wealth of Gilead root.

Sky shook his head in amazement; there were far more bad hunters than good, and even the good ones he'd worshipped as a boy, such as Solomon Rose, hadn't turned out so great. Morton Thresher was another raging disappointment, if Chase was to be believed. Sky found it hard to fathom that one of his idols wanted him dead. With the Hunters of Legend set on killing him simply because of what he might become, Sky found it hard to imagine any of them as heroes. Were any of the stories true? Were there any heroes left?

As Sky rounded the sword, the statue of the kneeling man came into view. Sky guffawed. A stone cloak rested on the man's shoulders, hood down, with a giant rose carved into the back, making it obvious who it was supposed to represent.

Solomon Rose.

The statue lorded over the other monuments, second in size only to the statue of the woman. Solomon had a chiseled jaw and ski-jump nose and looked young, barely out of his teens. He knelt piously under the woman's outstretched hand-directly under the Hunter's Mark-signifying, no doubt, that he was much cooler than everyone else. Solomon leaned on a shimmering stone sword like the woman's, a knight pledging himself to his liege lord. But who was the woman?