And still he kept on. There had been many a ride like this in his life and he knew that the thing was not to look at the end but to find a place between. A standing boulder in the grass that he could find a quarter of an hour later by his side. A glint of water off a pond that he could mark as it went by. A small cluster of homes and fields where men and women and children stood holding their scythes and hoes and rakes and axes and looking up at him as he went through with mouths gaping and one woman raising her hand to him as he paid her not a second glance.
In that way, the distance would pass. The gnawing feeling that he was still as far away as he had ever been would leave.
But he could not do it. He had eyes only for Cabele and the smoke and flame that she was and every time he looked up he looked at her alone and she burned to nothing while he watched.
They came upon the body of the horse when the sun was straight above them and the day very hot. The body covered in white foam and lying on its side in the tall grass. He got down and touched its neck and went around in front and looked at it and then looked back at the boy. The boy said something that was not a word and looked at him as if it were. The girl strapped behind him. He stood for a short time next to the horse and looked out into the plains to see if there was anything to see and then he climbed back up and all three went on again.
Always in his head now this swirling storm. Once as a boy he had gone to the cliffs. This in the old days and before it all and he had stood alone on the rock that ran along the top of the cliff. Seven hundred feet below the sea breaking against that same rock. Layers and layers of it with different colors and broken lines in it and all piled and moving down to the ocean where more rock fell away under a sea dark and fast and broken with crashing waves of white ice.
A storm had come from far off and he had watched it come. The dark banks of clouds growing and swelling and the thin wisps of fog moving before them. Seeming to pull the storm forward as if drawn by the ghosts of horses. The reins snapping in the wind. All around him the temperature falling so quickly he could feel it and his skin puckered and shivering and then the clouds breaking. With neither thunder nor lightning. Just an endless outpouring, a torrent as the dark hearts of those clouds wound themselves together in a blotted sky.
He had stood there as the rain fell about him cold and bitter and looked down into that sea and felt the same way he felt now. The world around him moving and threatening to pull him under and he would not let it. He had run for a time after the horse died and then he could not and he had fallen and stood and now he walked on legs shot through with pain. The sword strapped again to his back and the city burning before him.
Those clouds now the twisting smoke. The ghosts of those it had slaughtered.
He stopped then and closed his eyes. He could feel his heart beating in a way it had not for so long and within him the boundless rage. Wanting to open his eyes and throw himself forward and scream at it to come down on him, to try itself against him. Perhaps he would die and there was no difference in it. He would rather fight it and be killed and his body torn open or burned or consumed than this endless dance.
But he stood. Arms shaking in the haze. Chest moving like a bellows. And when at last he opened his eyes the rage had solidified and sharpened and he began to walk again. Still the same distance between him and the city, but a distance he felt now that he could cross.
For it must be there, and it would wait for him, to make him the end of this hunt. And he would be. For one of them would die and either way he would be the end.
He cursed it then in a language he had forgotten, and he walked on. There was no pain and no world and nothing but that shrouded city and the beast that must be straddling its heart, crouched on twisted claws and its eyes burning as it stared out to the plains and waited for him. For what was to be and had always been since they two had begun to move about one another. Hunter and prey indistinguishable. Only in their meeting their true roles shown for what they were.
Until then each something else to the other, until flame and steel and fate lay bare that which already existed in that hidden realm where only time moved and ages passed in all directions and history and future the same. In that place all knowledge. But they here could only find it in one direction and moved as slaves to find out what end awaited them.
They found him where the old road came back across the plains and ran its way through his path. Here it was thicker and paved with old stones and the mud of years between them and he was kneeling on one of those stones as if beseeching some god he did not name and holding his sword now in hand and looking at the city.
Juoth dismounted and went to him. It was late afternoon now and they had ridden the whole day. He knelt beside him and Brack at first said nothing and would not look away and only at last did he turn.
“It's too far,” he said.
“I know,”Juoth said. He did not look at the city but felt that it could burn forever and it would never go out. The smoke still billowing upward.
He'd thought the whole time that they would come across people who had fled. Mothers and children and merchants and farmers. Archers and soldiers and perhaps knights who had stood to fight and then seen the thing wheeling in the sky and lost their nerve and turned and fled. For against some things a man could stand and against others he would do nothing but save the one life he had. A dragon was eternally one of those others.
At least it was for most men.
Brack tried to stand and could not and Juoth held the water up for him and helped him drink. He needed more than they had, and food as well, but mostly he needed rest. But he drank and it was something and then he could stand. The boy got down off the horse and took the body of his sister down after him. Juoth looked at him closely and he looked all right. He laid the blankets out and began to gather wood for the fire. In the plains the sun a long time going down but they would camp where they must.
Looking back he could see the line where they'd come down. Only now a distance of any size, any consequence. Halving the distance between the mountains and the city, as the farmer had said. All around them the dry grass and now before them the stones of the old road and if he laid down he could look along it and it went straight all the way to the gates of the city.
Or where there had been gates. What stood there now he could not imagine to be more than ash.
It took some time to get the fire going and when he did at last it was dusk everywhere and the smoke had made it come early. Sinking everything into an unnatural dark. He had once before seen a city burn like this and it had not been from a dragon but the smoke was the same. The way it was everywhere. Men had left that countryside because of it and never returned.
The campfire guttering in the splintered wood. They had with them more of the dried meat and he took it out and handed it to each and they all ate. The boy sitting with the girl's wrapped body at his side as if she were a bedroll. When he handed the boy his food their fingers met and the boy's were very cold. Colder than they should have been even at night and without a fire.
“There's a ripping,” the boy said.
He looked at him and then looked away and cursed and looked back.