She'd signed the paper and they'd know it. She did not know if they'd believe it or if they'd act as she'd asked them in the letter. If any of them would. But they'd know it and they'd talk and it was all she could do. For she could only cover so much ground and now they could double it and that was something. She did not know how swiftly it all had to be brought to an end and she'd learned that in times like that it was best to assume it was already too late and to act that way and then you could never be wrong.
Even if it was too late and all was already lost.
When he'd disappeared down the road and she could see him no longer she gathered up what little she had and looked again and then turned and went up through the cedar and spruce and into the low mountains on that bed of needles, dried and dead and brittle, where the wolf had run in silence.
Chapter Eighteen
I
Juoth sat looking at her and she at him. Or at least she looked at something within him. A vacant stare that focused on nothing. Eyes open and blinking slowly and her whole face around them lax. The color still not fully returned. As if in her her heart was but a feather and could move only so and the blood sluggish and hardened in her veins. Thinning now as she warmed. Her light hair hanging down about her shoulders and the thin dress. Lips pale white.
Other than the blinking she did not move. Had not even sat of her own accord but was only now propped up against the pile of blankets and bedrolls because he had set her that way. Unable to look at that dead face with blinking eyes as she lay on her back with her limbs loose.
Her chest rising, falling. A meager tide in perhaps some world other with a moon too small. The thinnest sound of her breathing only when he was close and it was very quiet. If the fire rose at all in the wind he did not hear her and did not know if she breathed.
It was the morning after her awakening and behind them stood the mound of loose dirt piled upon her brother. He had beat out his last with his eyes in his hands, clenching and opening and clenching those fingers. Not saying a word but his jaw working and one hand reaching for her. Tracing across her cheek a thin streak of blood. And when he died Juoth had finally been able to stand and move him away from the fire.
And then he had sat all night staring at this girl. Brack had looked at her a short time and said nothing and gone back to sleep. Risen before dawn and put on his sword and looked at the horse and the city. Juoth had nodded to him.
“Find me,” he'd said.
“I will,” Juoth had said. Looking not at him but at the girl. “I will.”
And Brack had left. The rising of the dead perhaps not of consequence to him or at least a thing he could stomach. Juoth had waited for him to say something about it but he had not and had ridden on toward the city, toward that one thing that devoured his entire world. The smoke still rising there as if it would never cease. Perhaps the earth itself burning in endless torment. The dragon's fire a rage that could never be quenched even when all tinder was gone for it burned the very soil and could turn the whole world to ash if given the time to do so.
A charred world of the dead; a glass sky in which dragons were legion, wheeling on the hot wind of this corpse of a planet.
The eyes were in the air, he thought.
He had not slept himself and had worked all night digging the grave. The endeavor giving him just that much distance from her and all she was and if he was lucky drowning his screaming thoughts in the soil itself and he worked at it until he felt he could not dig anymore and it was not as deep as he wanted but he did not know if that depth existed as a thing that could be reached and so he settled for rolling the mutilated body in and throwing on top of it three boulders. The work of moving them end over end making his legs and chest burn but he knew he'd never sleep another night in his life if he didn't and so he threw them in and heard the bones breaking and then covered it all with dirt. Mounding it under that cold moon until he was a broken man and then sitting again to look at her.
Thinking should he be digging another grave or should he have cast them into the same. So that someday they would be dug up and thought to be lovers and perhaps tales would be written and no one would know the horror that they had truly been.
But he had not.
He spoke to her then and she said nothing. Greeting her in the tongue of the islands and the one here. Trying a word from the mountains he had heard and did not know what it meant.
Slowly she blinked and sat with that stillness about her. He thought perhaps she was holding herself up but then he thought she was still propped like some doll against the bedrolls.
He could kill her, he thought. Any time he liked. He could kill her with his sword and bury her and no one would know for those within any distance of this place shorter than a day's ride had been killed already and what was one more dead among the many? Brack would perhaps ask and he would tell him some story. It would be no more than saying she'd collapsed and died after all.
Died again.
He stood then and looked at the city. They had half the burden now but no horse and it would be a long distance. If they were to do it in a day they would have to start early and walk late and even then they may just be to those burned farms and fields outside of the walls when night fell. But they would not make it that far if they did not start now.
He went to her and stood close and walked around behind to see if she was holding herself up and cursed and spit. Looking once more at the mountains and thinking he had no part with this grandson or anyone else and then he cursed again and reached down and took the girl under the arms.
There was no weight to her and he stood her up and put his arm around her back. She did not move to support herself but her legs seemed to hold slightly and he thought maybe she could walk. He bent to pick up the bedroll and his face brushed that torn and bloodied dress and only then did he realize that the smell of rot was gone.
II
They walked like two chained in some ancient misery. Perhaps having been cursed by a witch or a god with its dying breath to toil under the sun as one animal forever, the trials of life before them for some past slight they were unable to remember. Walking these two in grass and dirt toward that pillar of smoke and the smell of it in the air always.
He'd left everything he did not carry on his person. The packs and the other bedrolls and all else. Carrying now only his sword and knife and a pouch with money he could not spend in this dead city. He had carried for a time the girl's bedroll under his opposite arm but it had grown too difficult and he'd dropped it after less than an hour. Not looking back as it disappeared into the barren wasteland.
They walked like this until the sun was up and it was noon and only then did he realize that she was walking also. Not with any strength, but it was more than mere support. She was holding what little weight she had and walking with small and slow steps. Sometimes her toes dragging in the dirt when he walked faster than she could move but trying regardless.
Her face still white and nothing in her eyes. A vacancy there as if all within her had been lost. The skin cool to the touch but perhaps warming.
He slowed and looked at her and she did not turn her head or acknowledge him in any way and carefully he took his arm out from around her back and under her arms and he stepped away. Arms out in front of him, waiting for what would come.
She stood for the shortest time, swaying there on her feet like a solider who had marched a week without sleep or a drunk with more bottles than he could remember. But she stood and she blinked again quickly and for a brief moment he thought her eyes moved, flickering and landing on his own, and then it was gone and she was falling and he caught her. Held her back up and put his arm around her and looked at her for a moment.
Thinking again about the sound of the bones breaking as the rocks fell and if that grave should have held two bodies. If perhaps it should have been him alone walking and going back toward the mountains and to hell with the rest.
But he was a man who knew his debts, even if he
cursed himself for that knowledge. As often he did.
They kept on, this unlikely pair in all their contrast, and the city grew before them. It was a slow growing so that if he watched it come he felt no closer. But if he looked instead at his feet and the road before them and held that long enough, when he looked again to the city the walls were closer and the smoke darker. And he felt they may make that wall in time.
He had not been looking for the dragon because he knew he would be dead if he saw it. Brack with his crossbow and his bloodline could fight it even in the air. At a disadvantage, but he could fight. Here with a sword and a dead girl and a knife, he could not fight. The moment he saw those black canvas wings breaking the sky and heard its screech in the air, it would be too late. He could then do nothing but wait until it was upon them in bone and teeth and fire, or he could draw that knife and slit his own throat and die in the stone road or the dirt they walked beside it.
So he did not look. He had known a long time that death came for all men and he knew it now and if it came, that was just what it was.
They arrived after a time at a sort of trough dug in the ground and muddy water running dark and thick through it. Not wide but stretching away from the road and into a field beside it. Looking out over the field he could see a stone shack a long way off. This trough a channel for water, perhaps leading from some spring he could not see and irrigating the land. In the field what had been wheat or corn. All burned now so it was just black ash and this ash in the water. In that shack a body or two or three all blackened and their eyes boiled. He'd seen it before and would again, but he nodded to himself.
For they were closer now. Always around the cities would the towns grow up and then give way to the farms as they stretched into the country. This the edge of those farms, the outside edge of that wheel of life and this spoke they two traversed.
They kept on and the road improved. The stones wider and better in places and not as likely to trip him up with this girl on his arm and so he moved away from the dirt and into the road again. Walking from one stone to the next and keeping his eyes down. The girl taking her short steps in silence and sometimes catching on the edges of the stones, but walking now as he had never seen her do before.
When he paused, he could hear her breathing even without leaning close. The smell of her just of dirt and grime and blood, but not decay.
They passed in a haphazard order more farms on either side. Most of the fields burned as the fires had spread from the city, but patches standing. Withered corn and dry wheat and low fields of soy. A timber barn near the road just scorched beams, but next to it a small stable seemingly untouched.
He left her standing in the road then and went to the stable and swung open the front door. The smell of hay and horses. But it was empty and the back wall caved in on itself where he hadn't been able to see it from the road. Reins and ropes still hanging near the stalls. He cursed and walked back out to the road and looked at her where she'd stood the whole time and then put his arm back around her and they moved on.
He thought as they walked of the dragon and how it had laid waste to everything they'd touched or known. In some fashion or another, everyone they'd met had died. All about them burned. He could not tell the cause from the effect. Perhaps everything was dead for they hunted this dragon and following a beast like that meant walking through endless fields of destruction. Or perhaps it was killing all about them for spite alone or, as Brack believed, to draw them on and kill them.
But if that was all it was, some predator hunting its hunter, they could have been dead many times over. And still they were alive.
And this girl somehow both. A thing alive and with them in this life, but also dead, yet one more life claimed along this trail that fell before them with a city composed entirely of the dead all that awaited them at its long-sought end.
III
It was growing dark when they came to the streets of the small town that spread out around the walls of Cabele. Some would also call it Cabele but it was not. Just a town of peasants and farmers and beggars on the outside of the city. The stone walls still standing tall beyond it, the turrets and spires of the buildings within. Cabele was nothing compared to the true cities of the world but it had been grand and enormous to those who lived there and would see nothing else in their lives. A bastion of safety and power, now reduced to rubble.
He could see the fallen wall as they went down the main street, with small stone and timber homes on either side. This road running straight through the town and to what had been that city's gate. Everything on both sides now collapsed and burned and ruined.
A white sheet waving in the hot wind, one half still pinned to the line, the other half burned off and ragged. A home that had burned from the inside out, the roof collapsed into the house itself as the beams snapped and buckled. A cart in the street and abandoned, facing the city, as if the man who pulled it had been going to the gate to sell his wares and had watched that gate come down.
The dragon had perched there on the city wall, above the iron gate. Juoth could see the slashes in the rock from its talons and the crumbled stone parapets. All about charred the darkest black in both directions, and the whole wall fallen to the right of the gate. The stones cascading out into the street and burying homes and blocking the road like an avalanche or a living glacier not composed of snow and ice but of rock and iron.
A tower had stood near the corner but it was now sheered off, jutting brokenly into the sky. The others still standing, with many burned. Those towers where the archers had stood and tried in sheer terror to bring it down and it had cooked them alive as the arrows fell from its scales.
They kept on down the road, toward that wall. The city silent, a place where nothing moved but the ash swirling in the air and the skittering rats as they feasted on the bodies.
For there were bodies everywhere. In the homes and streets and alleys. In a town hall with the doors torn off and the inside torched. The headless body of an archer lying twisted and so far from the fortifications, thrown from the wall. His arrows scattered about the street where what was left of him had hit the ground and rolled. The blood now hard and darkened around him.
Juoth had wondered why there had not been more of them on the road, and now he knew how quickly the dragon had fallen on this place. Some had tried to flee and made it no further than this town. No doubt in the mad rush others had stormed for the walls and the archers, thinking they could live in the city. Instead giving the dragon all it wanted. Cowering together to burn as one.
Maybe some had lived. The dragon had come for the city, and maybe some had run from the outskirts of the town, running through the fields, and escaped the eternal wrath of these oldest gods. With a tale they could tell for the rest of their lives. But not many. Most had died here as it came for them, lighting a torch like a lantern to draw ships to the shore. Their bodies just fuel for what it wanted.
The walls loomed and they began to pick their way through the rubble. The girl could not do it and it was slow work as he helped her through. Lifting her light body up in both arms to set her past some of the larger stones. Stopping many times to look at the way through and the rockfall maze before them and to find a path. At the end, they would have to climb a pile of stones as tall as a house to summit what was left of the wall and he did not know how they would do it.
For the gate itself, twisted and battered as it was, had been locked from the inside. When those walls still stood. Whoever locked it a damned fool for a dragon could fly and had no use for walls or gates as he beat his way through the air and the smoke, but it was locked all the same. He could see the iron bar through the gate and all about on both sides the piles of bodies.
On the outside those who had been screaming to get in as they burned. Then, as the dragon perched on the wall and turned his fire to the inside, those already in had run back to this gate of the dead, trying to flee and knowing how little their city meant when it mattered most. All on both sides
seeking what the other had and all dying as the dragon howled on the wind.
They reached the bottom of the mount of broken stones and he looked for the first time at the sky. The smoke still rose around them, but it was not as thick as it had looked from the road. It was just so much that was smoldering, but the fires were dying out. He looked up at those stones and turned to her.
“Can you climb?”
He could not mistake it this time; she looked at him. The two of them with their eyes locked and at long last something in those eyes. Not a fire but a spark. A bit of life or knowledge. Her face still, but not in the flat and lifeless way it had been. A stillness and calmness.
She did not speak and gave no indication she knew what he'd said. But he was only holding her by one shoulder and she was standing steadily on her own and she was looking at him.
He looked back at her and slowly his hand fell to the knife on his belt. Fingers wrapping around the black bone handle, so familiar. Drawing it and feeling the island steel move against the leather as it came free. A knife that had taken more lives than he could count and would claim another with this abomination before him. This thing that could not and should not be.
And then he looked back at the city wall, and Brack was standing there atop the rubble. His face covered in dirt and ash and mud. One hand out to hold himself up against the broken wall. His sword unsheathed and in his hand, the blade glinting in the light of some unseen fire beyond the wall.
“She's not here,” he said.
Chapter Nineteen
I
She came to the hill above the town and looked down on it in the early morning light. Higher here as the hills began to swell toward the mountains and the air crisp. The town laid out in the valley and a river that twisted through the land. The timber homes all on the cliffs and hill faces as they wound through the forest and followed the river. A dozen hills or so, all connected and laid out and visible to her from this stone outcropping with the cedar trees at her back. She could smell the smoke from their fires and see it rising toward her in the air.
The Ringed City Chronicles: The Dragon Hunt Page 18
