"Quiet."
Kup heard Kraft give the order. Unlike his usual conciliatory manner, his voice was as blunt and hard as a blade Kup had never seen before. He had heard Kraft use that forceful tone only briefly during the questioning in the Salt Tide District.
Kup obeyed instinctively, falling silent as he watched William's steps at the head of the line and adjusted his pace to match. He had already seen what happened when he took Kraft's serious instructions lightly. The lesson had sunk in deeply enough that he wouldn't need to learn it twice.
Following Kraft's example, Kup quickly glanced back. In that brief look, he saw only the flickering torchlight illuminating the bearer's face in shifting patches of brightness and shadow. Darkness followed close behind as he moved, keeping a distance of exactly five steps.
The thick darkness behind them was like the tide in the Salt Tide District—a murky, opaque fluid that buried sharp shell fragments and fish bones beyond sight. Anyone walking through it might step on one, and a few days later the wound would fester and turn pus-filled, bringing on a fever that consumed the whole body.
Before that experience, this had been Kup's deepest fear. He could never understand how a tiny cut from something in the murky water could prove fatal.
Putting the two together, he noticed a startling similarity. The group was now inside another, even larger expanse of murky darkness, with no idea what lay beyond the light of their two torches.
The hills he was tired of seeing were just like the ground near his home. But once swallowed by the darkness that had poured in from the sea or sky, filling every gap, they had changed from familiar terrain into something wholly unknown.
Something had changed in there,