Not wanting to think it, but unable to stop herself. Perhaps he didn't even know she was gone yet. All this running in secret just time wasted when she could have been on the road and riding hard for hours.
But that was already gone. If she'd thrown it away and it killed her then she'd already done it and she was dead. Little reason for the dead to dwell on their own deaths.
She closed her eyes, listening for the guards. Wondering if the horse was truly on the other side or if she would run out and find that he'd been caught and killed and his head twisted on a spike and no horse there at all. Her son waiting with his sword drawn and bloody. But she swallowed it because she had to and then she opened her eyes and trotted for the gate.
Not fast enough to draw eyes. But fast. Feeling each footfall. Pushing on the balls of her feet in the loose dirt and the falling dark. Listening for the guards above her and hearing nothing, every step so damned loud.
She went through and the horse was there. She stared at it for a moment and then looked around for him and didn't see him. Just the brown horse standing in the mud with a worn saddle and the reins down and wrapped about a post. Looking at her with huge glass eyes. Behind it the river moved in the red sunlight and the ripples broke that tapestry of blood and carried it down and away from this city of stone and iron and war.
Chapter Sixteen
He woke the next morning and the city was burning. The smell of it in the air and over everything a light haze and he drug himself cursing from his bedroll. The others still sleeping and the morning barely new with the sun cracking the horizon. He threw aside the blankets and took his sword from the belt strapped to the horse as he stumbled shirtless to the top of the hill where he could see out over the plains. Sweating and freezing both over scars and grime.
It was far off and still he knew the whole city was ablaze. A smoking crater across that grass sea with the dead billowing up as ash. The flames around the base churning and licking at wood, straw, cattle and men. Burning and melting the stone itself. Above, the smoke rising in an endless dark line into the cloudless sky until it was lost in the remaining night, some vile hangman's noose about this city and choking the life out of her as those within died in the streets.
The dragon had come in the night and it was gone now. This not a fire that needed any longer to be stoked. A blaze caught full and raging on its own. About the city a ring of fire slowly spreading away as the grass caught and that outer circle of dark smoke, thin and unforgiving.
He could hear nothing for it was too far. It was like watching something burn that was not real. At this distance the movements slight and everything like a painting or a mosaic or some infernal tapestry etched and hung upon the wall to celebrate a death long over. A peaceful, motionless death. But the smoke was all about them and the horses were prancing and there was nothing in the world more real to him in that moment than Cabele burning to the ground in dragonfire.
Juoth and the boy rose alike and came to stand next to him and he said nothing and held the sword in his hand with the tip pointed not at the ground but down along the hillside and toward that far-off grave of fire and ash. Muscles taut, both arm and sword like stone, as if he were some vengeful statue looking out over a world it must and would bend to its will even if that stone had to be washed in blood for it had an unquenchable thirst and nothing in this world or the next could hold it back.
The boy said something then and Brack did not know what it was and did not look at him. Juoth was silent for he knew dragons and there was nothing to say. He stood waiting and would move upon the next order but Brack did not know what to give and finally he turned and stalked back to the horse. Grabbing it and pulling himself on.
He looked at Juoth. “Get everything and then come. You'll find me there.”
“You can't fight it alone.”
“No one else can fight it now.”
“Brack.”
A silence. Brack did not think of putting away the sword but pulled the horse around on its own twisting neck. Feeling the weight of that steel in his hand.
“It's waiting for you to ride to the city,” Juoth said. Handing up his bag, his clothes, his belt.
“You think I don't know that?”
“And if it comes?”
He scowled and it was the first thing that had passed across his face since he woke and smelled the smoke.
“Then I'll kill it,” he said.
He rode hard and he did not see that which he passed. Going fast over the rise in the dust and smoke and the horse not yet breathing hard. On down that slope and into the grass sea and the city like a smoldering beacon ahead of him in the waxing light that drew him onward. A carrot perhaps, but one he welcomed and would not shy from. He leaned down low on the horse and pushed it and the animal responded both to that and his body itself, the beating of his heart and the sound of his breath and it ran hard for him with the yet unburned grass flashing around its legs.
Seen or not, the world passed about him and the charging horse. A thin river with black stones that they crossed by fording and the hoofs beating in water only ankle deep. A copse of trees and in the center of them what had once been a dwelling and was now rotted wood and nothing. All fallen in on itself. The remnants of a road leading away and then swallowed by the plains. Farther on a scattering of small creatures with long necks and legs and thin bodies covered in fur, all standing at the sound of the horse and then running in great confusion to burrow into the dirt.
He left the old road behind, for it moved in a serpentine way through these plains. Sweeping long and wide to the east before coming back. Brack knew he would meet it again before he reached the city but he did not need it and he prayed with every hoofbeat that the horse would not find a crevice or stone to turn its foot and leave him there running like a man lost. But to take the road would have been more time and he did not have it and he could smell in the smoke the dead of the city burning.
All this a funeral pyre left for him. The sole guest invited and asked to speak over them all and commit them to some world other.
He whispered to the horse as he rode. Asking it to go faster and pleading with it and talking to it to keep calm. Saying things that had no meaning but in such a way that they pushed animal and rider in their headlong flight. Raising his own head to look at that towering pillar that guided him, smoke rolling from earth to sky, and then looking down to the endless earth that was all the same and gave no reprieve.
He could smell the smoke here but again he was smelling the keep where he had seen her last and the dead there and listening to that horse rising on its hind legs and screaming in the yard. Smelling also the fires long dead that he had seen in his life and knowing what they meant. Always the death and destruction the same and so very complete.
These memories a curse he'd always bear and no choice in it. As with many curses and certainly with the worst of them. He would not let it consume him—he could not—but he let it push him as he had all his life.
The city did not seem to change and the horse's sides became wet and lathered and his own also. Each time he looked up the world storming by in perpetual motion and still that city so far off as it burned. Smoke all he could see and the fire now just low and consuming the little that was left. He looked back only once and could tell the distance he had gone but it was the damned plains and they swallowed everything and made distance maddeningly nothing at all. He could have traveled all his life or mere minutes and the city would look the same as it died before him.