The caravan didn't leave through the main gate. Elara used the Service Pass to access the Gully Port, a narrow exit used for salt waste.
The air here was foul, thick with the smell of sulfur and wet stone, but it was the only way to bypass the main Church checkpoint.
Kai walked twenty paces ahead of the lead horse. He didn't carry a lantern. He relied on the dull orange pulse of the Mark under his bandages to light the way.
The ground was soft, covered in a layer of grey silt that muffled the sound of the wagon wheels.
"Stop," Kai said, raising a hand. His voice was low, barely a whisper.
The wagons groaned to a halt. Elara leaned forward from the driver's seat, her hand on her crossbow.
"What is it?"
Kai pointed to the road. The grey silt was gone. For a stretch of ten feet, the path was paved with black feathers.
They weren't scattered; they were laid out in a perfect, overlapping pattern, like the scales of a fish.
Joram, the guard, shivered.
"Maybe it is a boundary? Like a warning?"
"It's a trail," Kai said. He knelt, his fingers hovering just an inch above the feathers.
He could feel the cold radiating from them; a dry, soul-sucking chill.
"He's not behind us anymore. He's leading us."
A sound drifted through the gully. It was the sound of a bell-a thin, silver chime that seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere at once.
Clink. Clink. Clink.
The horses began to foam at the mouth. Their eyes rolled back, showing the whites. They didn't scream; they just stood there, paralyzed by a fear that went deeper than bone.
"Miri, get in the middle of the salt-bags," Kai commanded.
He drew The Scourge. He didn't light the blade. He needed to save his fuel. He looked up at the rim of the gully.
The Shepherd of Crows stood there. He wasn't a monster of flesh and teeth. He was a tall, thin silhouette wrapped in a cloak of shifting black feathers.
He has no face; only a mask made of polished white bone, shaped like a bird's skull.
The Shepherd held a long staff with silver bells tied to the top. He tilted his head, the bone mask catching the faint orange light from Kai's shoulder.
He didn't attack immediately. He simply pointed his staff at Kai, then at the road ahead.
"He wants us to follow," Elara whispered.
"He's driving us toward the Dead woods," Kai said. He gripped his sword hilt, the leather wrap biting into his palm.
"If we go where he wants, we are dead. If we stay here, he will harvest us one by one."
Kai didn't look back at the Shepherd on the ridge. To look was to acknowledge the fear, and fear was fuel for the Void Beasts.
He grabbed the lead horse's bridle. The animal's skin was cold; the dry, dead cold of a cellar.
"Elara, give me the Spark oil," Kai said.
"We only have three jars left," she whispered, her hands white as she gripped the wagon rail.
"If we use it now…"
"Give it to me," Kai interrupted. "Or we won't live long enough to need the other two."
She handed him a heavy ceramic jar. Kai uncorked it with his teeth, spitting the wood shard into the grey silt.
The oil smelled sharp, like lemon and turpentine. He poured a thick line of it across the path of black feathers, cutting the trail in two.
He pressed his thumb against the Fire Mark on his shoulder. He channelled it into a single focused spark at his fingertip. He touched the oil.
Whoosh.
A wall of orange flame snapped upward six feet high. The black feathers beneath the fire didn't burn like normal bird feathers; they shriveled and screamed.
A high-pitched, metallic screech echoes through the gully, as if the ground itself were in pain.
The silver bells on the Shepherd's staff stopped chiming. The silhouette on the ridge tilted its bone mask.
It seemed surprised or as surprised as a thing of shadow could be. It hadn't expected the bait to strike back at the ritual.
"Move the wagons! now! " Kai roared.
The fire provided a moment of true heat. The horse's eyes cleared, the paralysis breaking as the smell of the Spark oil hit their nostrils.
Joram cracked the whip, and the wagons lurched forward, racing past the burning line of feathers.
As Kai ran alongside the wagon, he looked up. The Shepherd was gone from the ridge. A second later, a swarm of crows, hundreds of them, burst from the mist above.
They didn't caw. They flew in total silence, their wings beating a heavy, rhythmic thrum that sounded like a drum made of skin.
"Into the tunnel!" Kai pointed toward a drainage pipe at the end of the gully.
It was cramped, barely wide enough for the wagons, but it was made of reinforced Halo Stone.
A crow dived forward. It hit the wooden roof of Miri's wagon with the force of a thrown rock. The wood splintered.
Kai leaped onto the back step of the wagon, swinging The Scourge in a vertical arc.
He didn't hit the bird; he swung in the air, the sheer weight of the swing creating a pressure wave that tossed the next three crows aside.
"Inside! Everyone inside!" Kai shoved the last guard into the darkness of the pipe just as the sky turned black with feathers.
He stood at the entrance, his back to the tunnel, his blade held low.
The Shepherd appeared twenty paces away, standing in the middle of the gully.
The fire Kai had started was dying, but in its flickering light, Kai saw the Shepherd's hands. They weren't hands. They were long, pale bundles of quills that twitched with every chime of the bells.
"You are a long way from the deep Void, bird man," Kai grunted. "What brings you here?"