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.
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.