“Then why?”
“Because that's what he is.” He grabbed the saddle and Juoth reached down and clasped his forearm and pulled him up onto the horse. They were heavy but the horse did not flinch. “He's just playing with me. He's toying. He wanted me to see it.”
They rode then in a long silence over the snow and ice. The way back infinitely longer than the way there and riding under stars like chips and shards of broken glass strewn about the sky. Clear and brittle and endless. The sound only of the horse's hooves crunching in the snow and their own breathing, their breath and the horse's rising in clouds in that stark air. He touched his beard and it was full of snow and each hair turned white with frost as if he were carved whole from this landscape and would melt with the coming sun.
Once they stopped and he went to the side of the trail and he was sick and then he got back on the horse and they rode on.
When they at last came to the town it was not a town anymore but just blackened beams and stones on dirt dry and crumbling. The snow and ice here burned away in a terrible patch around the town. Not a building standing and all of the rubble reduced to near nothing and a little smoke still rising faintly.
The dead were little better. A scorched skeleton lying in the path with nothing human left, just bones and some of those melted on the ends and smooth as glass. Two more behind it. A skull leaning against a pile of stones near what had been the inn. Riding past he could smell it even in the cold air. A tangled dress and two legs and on the other side nothing but blood and the top of the girl gone.
The blind man lying in the middle of what had been the bar, the instrument clutched in his hands. Perhaps having played to the end. His body burst and split.
He got down off the horse and he walked through this carnage and he did not want to look and he did anyway. In it the only blessing that it had been a small town and so the number of the dead wasn't what it could have been and that a small blessing indeed. He went on down the street and past piles that had been homes, barns, sheds, and then he came to a place he knew and he stopped and closed his eyes and then turned slowly to look at it as the horse stood behind him.
It was only bones and it could have been anyone's bones and they were charred black from the flame with the white showing through. Those old teeth. The eyeless sockets. Arthritic fingers now twisted one last time. All about the body the house gone and all in it a choking pile of ash swirling in the mountain wind.
The tea kettle alone and lying on its side and cracked like the helmet on those gold coins and just as empty.
He knelt on the warm stones and felt the dark thing inside of him bloom and surge and for just a moment, he let it.
Chapter Seven
She paused at the ends of her chains, clutching the gaps between the bricks, her bare toes dug in below her. Breathing in that dust and mortar and blood with every gasp. The window still high above as she scaled the wall and the ground of this prison more than her own height below her feet.
Here, as far as she could continue her climb. For the chains held her fast and all of this climbing for that infernal sun meant nothing as she had known it would when she started. The nights and days and weeks wasted. Briefly she lowered her head against the wall and cursed herself and then began to climb back to the floor below.
That floor of cold and damp. How much more of that she could take before something in her mind snapped with a soft click and she was no longer herself, she did not know. Not as much as she hoped, surely. She stepped down onto it and shivered and listened to the chains clink down around her feet and leaned back against the stone wall. Fingers and toes throbbing.
The carved stone ladder could reach to heaven itself and she could not climb it as long as she was chained in hell.
She sat and looked at the chains around her hands. They had been also about her feet when she arrived here and since the guards had stopped. Perhaps too lazy to hook them up over and over, perhaps content after all this time that she would not and could not escape. Either way, only her hands remained bound and she closed her fingers like folding a glove and pulled the manacle up toward her wrist and felt it cut into the skin.
Her hand small and withered with the lack of food, the time. But not small enough. She closed her eyes and pulled and felt her skin slide over the slick bones and still it was not enough. Released the chains and sat back, a thin line of blood running down from the base of her hand, hot and dripping.
They weren't chains she could take off without the key. In that it was simple.
A shuffling sound from the far darkness. In those early days she had risen and stood her ground, ready to fight for her life or call out or do anything at all. Now she barely turned her head toward the sound of her unseen companion. Lost there in these dank shadows.
“Talk to me,” she said.
It did not respond and never had. The sound of bare feet on the stones. The silence again.
“Talk to me.”
Then, from deep off in the darkness, a soft voice. More a whisper than anything truly spoken, but enough in this silent hole in the silent ground. A hissing voice coming through broken teeth. “Talk to me.”
She sat looking and did not move. All this time pleading and yet getting what she asked for was somehow more terrifying than the persistent quiet and shuffling feet. The slurping sound as it fed. She could feel her heart in her chest and she wiped the palms of her hands on her rough clothes. Feeling a slight shake there.
“Who are you?”
Again, that voice coming back, soft and broken: “Who are you?”
For a moment she had the horrifying thought that there was nothing in here with her at all and there never had been and it was her own mind, just her mind bending and breaking and splintering. Splitting up as he wanted it to. Breaking free of that grounded reality and leaving her here in the dark, talking to herself and answering herself and shadows moving behind her eyes alone. Sanity a slithering thing slipping away through her fingers.
And then he came out of the shadows. Standing far across the room with his back hunched and a hand to his face. The edges of him still fading into the blackness so she could not fully tell his size. His hair knotted and thick on his head and in his face, the hair of one down here for many years without it ever being cut. The canvas clothes the same as hers, though older and spotted and worn and covered in grime.
He stood for a long moment facing her in this silence and darkness. He was not chained but the manacles hung from his wrists and feet. Links trailing away and the ends twisted. This the sound as he moved. He looked once at the door and then back at her.
Finally, she found her voice: “Who are you?”
He did not answer, but just cocked his head to the side and looked. Then tipped it back to crack his neck, then looked again. His hand still covering his face.
“Come forward.”
“Come forward,” he said. Appearing to think it over, to consider. At last stepping forward just one step, then two. Pausing there and looking long at her. Stepping again.
She let him come and she did not speak. Afraid that if she said anything he would turn and flee back into the dark and it would be months or years before she saw him again or this would be the end of it entirely. The way she watched a deer in the field as it ate an apple and looked around from the base of the tree and saw her standing there in the tall grass, thinking if it should run or eat, tail twitching, and then carefully ate again.
So he came until he stood not ten feet from her and would come no more.
She could see now that his face was scarred. Two long puckered scars, so white against his dirty skin, running from scalp to chin. A third on his forehead near the hairline. Two others disappearing beneath his hand, their true impact unknown. Perhaps more in that ragged beard, though it was wild and full enough to cover them. Age spots along his arms and his fingernails grown yellow and long. He blinked at her and stood with his back still hunched but also looking as if he may flee.