Walking her own horse with the rope in her hand and the burns from that rope all up her palm and her feet aching and the horse just a day from its own death. Coming to a long stone bridge carved over a river by the Old Ones, an ancient thing that supported itself somehow and needed no pillars and which looked as if it could crumble and fall into the river at any moment but which had stood there in steadfast strength longer than any of the cities she'd ever seen. And all along the underside of that bridge gibbeted men and women in their hanging cages, some sitting in silence and others lying with their hands stretching between the bars and one with his head through and the skull gone and fallen a thousand feet into the crashing river below, for they were all dead and just husks of people now in their rotting clothes and parchment skin.
She had to stop then on the wall and she did and breathed in deeply and when she let it out again the world was at peace. A fragile thing, that. The blossoms in the apple trees and the ivy growing up and spinning itself around the tower and the stone shingles. The women talking beside the stream and a child naked and running in water clear and flowing. A man sitting on a fence and looking out on a field burning only with the setting sun and between his teeth chewing a long piece of dried grass and at his feet his son looking up at him and then turning to find a piece of grass of his own.
All this and no one thinking of war and feeling that this world they lived in was so firm and secure, like a thing carved from stone. Hewn into ironoak.
But in truth all of it as fragile as the ice early in the year when it was black and glass as far as could be seen and the water still moved below it and it called out, groaning long and loud as it shifted.
Smiling, she looked to the side and the buildings of the town and heard her dead father speaking to her. When did you start thinking like this, he asked. Grinning and turning in his old hands an old pipe and packing it with a thumb. Shaking his head and looking away and then looking back to grin at her again.
And then she remembered his death and the sound of it and her smile faded. The world falling again into this new darkness.
She blinked twice before it caught her and forced herself on and around the next corner of the wall and she found it there, that window with batwing shutters and above it white words in old paint turned to dust and it was not where she'd thought it would be at all and looking at it she felt then weak and old. This a kingdom that had once been hers to rule standing on these same walls with her dress blowing behind her in a restless autumn wind and thousands at arms in formation below her and now she did not know it as she should.
She closed her eyes for a moment and when she opened them she felt almost herself again and she turned to walk back to him. Inside her, something growing and changing. A child with a great and terrible hunger. A child with teeth and eyes of fire.
Chapter Ten
It was in the early morning under a rising sky of clear blue so dark on the edges it neared some color unnamed that could swallow all within it that they came to the fence and the remains of the cattle. They'd found a second horse at a small cabin on the edge of the forest with only a dead man to inhabit it and they stood them both now near the treeline for a quarter of an hour and did not speak and Brack smelled the blood on the wind and looked out over the field. The hour of waking birds but not a sound from them nor the fluttering of wings. Not even the circling as there should have been of vultures and carrion birds in that open sky. At last he looked at Juoth and nodded and they rode down with the brittle grass breaking under the horses' hooves and went to a place where the fence had fallen and rode into the field.
Most of the cattle were in pieces. One halved entire, the head and chest remaining and all else gone. Torn skin, scattered entrails. Others just raked to death. One lying on its side with its glassy eyes wide and no wound upon it at all. But dead just like the others.
It was worst in the center of the field. There the bodies had been dragged and it had stopped and eaten. Sitting beside this pile of slain cattle and bending to reach with that serpent's neck and holding them down with a claw and pulling with smoking teeth until part came away and then straightening to chew, eat, consume. Then bending again to its task.
Brack got down from the horse and Juoth stayed mounted and looked always at the sky and the horizon lines. They had been riding now for weeks and they operated like this without speaking to one another but each knowing what the other would do and how it should be done.
He did not have to go up to them to know what had happened, but he did it all the same, for he was a hunter and he knew thoroughness was the heart of his craft. Many thought the bones of hunting were aggression or luck or some otherworldly ability to kill that other men lacked, but he knew it was just seeing the details and being careful and taking your time. Going over everything in this meticulous way. For all of the signs to point you to a kill were always there and the only difference on any hunt was that some men found them and others did not.
It had killed a hundred head but only eaten perhaps a dozen. A few blackened and charred but most eaten raw. The bones snapped in half; when wolves ate, they left on the bones the marks of their teeth and those could be seen still years or decades later and the kill thereby identified. When a dragon ate there were never such marks for it destroyed the bones or ate them as well. But the snapped pieces, shattered like the branches of a dead tree, were all he needed.
“How old?” Juoth asked from the horse.
“Three days, maybe. More likely two.”
“We're getting closer.”
“I know.” He raised his head to scan the sky and there was nothing and in that also he knew they were close.
This was the fourth such slaughter they had found. One of sheep and now three of cattle. In the first the farm had also been burned and there were a man's bones in the field and the remains of three people in the house. The man had been holding a short hooked sword like the officers in the last war had carried for ceremonies and the blade had melted and twisted and then set again, as if cast into some hellish blacksmith's fire with no care to the result.
That first killing ground they had found two weeks back and it was all old and the animals still living had returned. By the second, they'd halved the distance, then made up another day by the third, losing time as they came out of the alpine fields and into the valley country when a storm swept up against the wall of mountains and pinned them for half a week.
But always they marched closer and soon they would be upon it.
The path had been predictable as he'd feared and this wasn't really hunting, not the way he'd hunted elsewhere. The beast was heading for the cities of the plain and Kayhi and it was moving slowly so that it could feed. If it wanted it could have crossed that great distance in days, flying so high that its huge bulk was nothing but a speck in the sky and its heat couldn't be felt, but it did not. For it knew that what it sought would not escape it and it preferred to move at leisure and with much rest and sustenance. An arrogance in that.
Brack stood back and looked out to see if the carnage spread and it did not. Either this had been the herd entire or the rest had run. Then in the far distance he saw a horse and rider coming down the dirt road and the dust rising up around him and he went back and got on his horse and wheeled it around to wait.
At last the man neared and drew the horse up a hundred yards from them and looked at them and then slowly came forward. He was unarmed as far as Brack could tell and wearing the rough clothes of a farmer and old boots made from leather and tough and probably worth as much as his horse. But in this work a necessity.