Juoth had wondered why there had not been more of them on the road, and now he knew how quickly the dragon had fallen on this place. Some had tried to flee and made it no further than this town. No doubt in the mad rush others had stormed for the walls and the archers, thinking they could live in the city. Instead giving the dragon all it wanted. Cowering together to burn as one.
Maybe some had lived. The dragon had come for the city, and maybe some had run from the outskirts of the town, running through the fields, and escaped the eternal wrath of these oldest gods. With a tale they could tell for the rest of their lives. But not many. Most had died here as it came for them, lighting a torch like a lantern to draw ships to the shore. Their bodies just fuel for what it wanted.
The walls loomed and they began to pick their way through the rubble. The girl could not do it and it was slow work as he helped her through. Lifting her light body up in both arms to set her past some of the larger stones. Stopping many times to look at the way through and the rockfall maze before them and to find a path. At the end, they would have to climb a pile of stones as tall as a house to summit what was left of the wall and he did not know how they would do it.
For the gate itself, twisted and battered as it was, had been locked from the inside. When those walls still stood. Whoever locked it a damned fool for a dragon could fly and had no use for walls or gates as he beat his way through the air and the smoke, but it was locked all the same. He could see the iron bar through the gate and all about on both sides the piles of bodies.
On the outside those who had been screaming to get in as they burned. Then, as the dragon perched on the wall and turned his fire to the inside, those already in had run back to this gate of the dead, trying to flee and knowing how little their city meant when it mattered most. All on both sides seeking what the other had and all dying as the dragon howled on the wind.
They reached the bottom of the mount of broken stones and he looked for the first time at the sky. The smoke still rose around them, but it was not as thick as it had looked from the road. It was just so much that was smoldering, but the fires were dying out. He looked up at those stones and turned to her.
“Can you climb?”
He could not mistake it this time; she looked at him. The two of them with their eyes locked and at long last something in those eyes. Not a fire but a spark. A bit of life or knowledge. Her face still, but not in the flat and lifeless way it had been. A stillness and calmness.
She did not speak and gave no indication she knew what he'd said. But he was only holding her by one shoulder and she was standing steadily on her own and she was looking at him.
He looked back at her and slowly his hand fell to the knife on his belt. Fingers wrapping around the black bone handle, so familiar. Drawing it and feeling the island steel move against the leather as it came free. A knife that had taken more lives than he could count and would claim another with this abomination before him. This thing that could not and should not be.
And then he looked back at the city wall, and Brack was standing there atop the rubble. His face covered in dirt and ash and mud. One hand out to hold himself up against the broken wall. His sword unsheathed and in his hand, the blade glinting in the light of some unseen fire beyond the wall.
“She's not here,” he said.
Chapter Nineteen
She came to the hill above the town and looked down on it in the early morning light. Higher here as the hills began to swell toward the mountains and the air crisp. The town laid out in the valley and a river that twisted through the land. The timber homes all on the cliffs and hill faces as they wound through the forest and followed the river. A dozen hills or so, all connected and laid out and visible to her from this stone outcropping with the cedar trees at her back. She could smell the smoke from their fires and see it rising toward her in the air.
It had been just two days walking once she found the road and followed it, not staying on that road but tracing its course fifty yards off in the forest. Slower there, but it meant she was always hidden and nothing could come up behind or before her without her knowledge and she had seen no soldiers or horses. At times tempted to go back to the road, but she'd lived this long by ignoring those temptations and she'd stayed in the forest.
Now, the road before her fell down through the trees and into the town and she could see it. Logs laid into the track at the steepest places and all else dirt and stones exposed. People moving down there in the dawn. Men walking with axes to the forest and others in the terraced fields and still others at a far-off mill on the river that was itself hundreds of yards below the town and very small with the water wheel turning.
She looked at it for a long time and then she went down the road to it. A few men passing her in the other direction. A woman with a mule and a cart and a small child in the cart with dirt on his face who smiled at her as she passed and she smiled back and then wished she had not and kept on.
She didn't come to the edge of it for there were not edges to towns like these. No lines and flat areas where the town could run to some barrier either natural or of its own creation. Instead she just came around one bend and there was a home and behind it a stable with another mule and then around the next bend two more. Then a small shop for a blacksmith and him standing in the yard with a hammer in one hand and scowling at the ground for no reason she could ascertain. Then she went down a steep drop on those half-buried logs that had seen travelers unknown and around another bend and then there were homes and shops on both sides and the road widening out and the sound of water and visible down at the end of this street the river rolling by in the early morning light.
A cart came up behind her and passed and this one was empty and she looked back and down each street. Here it forked and ran off behind her and everything nestled close to the river where the ground was flat. But down on either side she could see the land dropping or turning into the other hills and the rest of the town laid out like this. The whole village a long and serpentine thing moving with the river and the hills. It would take longer to walk one end to the other than most towns she'd ever set foot in, but there would only be a tenth of the people scattered thusly in the forest.
She used to wonder in towns like this what made a man stop. And who he was, the first through here. Who sat his horse in a formerly empty place where it would be hard to live and said this would be the place and began to build his home. And others with him. Though farming here meant terracing the land and water meant backbreaking work walking it up the hills and the homes had to be built with stilts on the front or the hill dug out behind to make them level.
But she had seen it all over the world. In stone and ice and desert and jungle and water itself. Man would live where he wished and he would live everywhere. Hard as it was and the world brutal and unforgiving, he would live. There was no place yet she had found this not to be true and she did not think she would.
She walked down the road and felt them looking at her and went into the first place she could. Knowing they did not know her but they knew she was someone else. In places like this everyone was known and she could not stay. For they would remember her when the soldiers came and it would always be like this until she was in a city where she could be lost and only then would she be safe.
The building she'd chosen was an inn of sorts. On the bottom a wide open room with long tables and off on the far side a door and stairs and above the rooms. A fire burning in the stone hearth on the end of the room and another near the back. The smell of smoke but more so the smell of food. Some sort of bread and coffee and meat and eggs. A few who had stayed at the inn sitting at the tables and talking and others walking in the front to take their food in bags and leave with it for what the day held. In the morning and midday this a place for food and at night she could imagine ale and beer and whiskey and music and voices.