The grass on either side was as high as an elephant’s eye. We could see blue sky above us, and exactly as far along the path as the next curve, which could have been any distance away, because there’s no perspective in an unbroken green trench. We’d been traveling on this road most of the day, and passed only one old man and a couple of cows, but now we could hear what sounded like a large party approaching us, not far off, perhaps two hundred yards away. There were men’s voices, a lot of them, footsteps, some dissonant metal drums, and most disturbing, the continuous screams of a woman either in pain, or terrified, or both.“Young masters!” came a voice from somewhere near us.I jumped in the air and came down in a defensive stance, my black glass knife drawn and ready. Josh looked around for the source of the voice. The screaming was getting closer. There was a rustling in the grass a few feet away from the road, then again the voice, “Young masters, you must hide.”An impossibly thin male face with eyes that seemed a size and a half too large for his skull popped out of the wall of grass beside us.
