He cocked his head to the side just slightly. “Who?”
“I don't know his name,” she said.
“The person you met with?”
They always fall.
“No,” she said. “In my cell. The old man in my cell. He didn't know.” The flames roaring up the stake as she closed her eyes, the girl no more than a blackened skeleton bound in chain, her arms thin and withered and her hair gone, her head wreathed in flame but still screaming. Somehow still screaming.
He looked at her in some way she had never before seen and in his eyes moving the lights of confusion and humor and a terrible and scorching hate, a boiling beneath the skin, something in him that could not be quelled. Opening his mouth and then closing it again and shaking his head.
“The man in your cell?” he said. That twisted scowl of a grin coming back to his lips one last time. “What man? There was no one in your cell. You'd been alone in there for two years.”
Chapter Twenty-Four
She was on fire. He ran to her and the ends of her hair were burning as she lay in the smoke and dust and he threw himself on top of her. Smothering it with his body. The pain in his ribs. Even with the dead dragon and the destroyed city, still smelling that burning hair. Then pulling himself off and rolling her over.
Her eyes wide open. He thought for that one moment that she was dead, this last of his children. She could have been killed a thousand ways in that fall and he thought she was dead and pale and a horrible fury broke in his chest and then she blinked. Once, then again. Opened her mouth with blood on her lips and closed it again and just the faintest sound of her breathing.
He picked her up and carried her, stepping past the severed head of the beast. Its great body lying still and crumpled next to it and those eye sockets like ripped holes in the air leading to the darkest night in some other lost world, everything torn away now and the fire inside dead and even the black blood slowing. A dead thing as he'd seen it before and now dead again.
Juoth stood with the dust and smoke swirling around him in the field. He hadn't stayed where Brack told him but he also wasn't a hunter and he hadn't reached them before it died. The girl behind him in the shroud of smoke. They appeared out of that air like some beings of the dusk with the city behind. He walked past them with Kayhi in his arms and they said not a word and fell in and followed.
He could feel her breathing now, but it was shallow, shuddering. He reached down as he walked and brushed her dark hair back out of her face and the blood from her lips, but the hair fell back and the blood returned. And he knew that something deep within her was broken.
This city not yet dead. He went in wordlessly through the main gate where it hung open. People prying themselves from the battered world within. Stepping out of rubble, climbing out of holes. Falling back from him, peasants and soldiers and lords alike. Most staggering past with a stunned, exhausted gait, covered head to toe in dust and ash, walking past without seeing him toward that still beast in the field. To see this thing that had fallen on them from the wild, in the blackness a screaming nightmare, a bloodsoaked horror. Now a slaughtered husk of a being, the flesh still warm.
The furnace still smoking in its chest.
No one came within ten feet of them, the crowd moving as he walked through. Not looking at any of them. Down the wide gray brick road that ran through the heart of this place. On all sides the switchback steps rising to the top of the wall where archers and spearmen had made their stand and died. Ahead the temples and towers and these great buildings rising out of a sea of stone. Everything here made of brick and stone and very old, built in the days when men knew dragons were in the air and knew also how timber burned below them.
He walked toward the temple, for it was the only hope. He didn't know what god it was meant for but he had been in a hundred cities and more and he knew there was nothing else. If no one there could save her then she was already dead and there was nothing to be done for it but going back to the dragon and tearing it into so many pieces no one would ever find them all.
Reaching down again to wipe away the blood. Watching it bubble slightly between her lips. Wiping it again.
The doors of the temple were closed as he walked up, heavy black iron doors with stars and serpents forged into them. Twenty feet tall and not nearing the top of the temple itself, where it rose into a flat plateau and then four spires, all identical. Two women coming up from the side, around the corner, and stopping when they saw him. Falling back and into this desolate crowd. Looking over their shoulders as they went.
He did not say a word, but the door began to swing open with the faint sound of chains. Each door ten feet across and opening into the temple, a sliver of pure darkness appearing between them. Then, dancing on the iron itself, the flicker of torchlight.
A man stepped into the gap when it was two feet wide, and the doors stopped. The man was old, his hair stark white, but he had no beard. His face like wrinkled leather left in the sun and his eyes so dark in contrast to all else about him. Wearing a simple white robe and holding in his hand a small silver dagger.
He looked at Brack, his eyes strong and alert and never leaving Brack's face, not for the crowd or for a glimpse of the dragon beyond the wall. Then he turned slightly aside and held out the arm with the dagger into the dark heart of the temple.
“Bring her,” he said.
They went inside and the temple was a maze of black steps leading up and down and iron rails, all cast in that orange torchlight. A long thin passage running forward, perfectly straight, and far down an open space with a raised dais. But the priest motioned to the side, to a long staircase without a railing, and began ascending.
Brack followed. Behind him, the doors started to close again, though he could not see the chains or what it was that moved them. He could just hear the sound of those chains somewhere within the walls.
They went up the stairs until they were high enough that a fall would kill any of them but Brack, all trailing in a line with the dead girl between them and Juoth at the end. Glancing back over his shoulder at the doors, looking just once over the edge of the staircase.
When they reached the top it was not the end, but just the bottom of a spiral staircase, made of iron. Sheer vertical. Rising up fifteen feet through nothing at all, just blackness and air, and then going through a round opening in the stone ceiling. The priest began going up and they followed.
As they went through, the stone surrounded them on all sides, but with space between it and the staircase. More torches hung on the walls, far enough out of arm's reach that he didn't know how they lit them or changed them, but they were new and burning all the same. The feeling of it disorienting as they went around more times than he could count. Rising in this upright tunnel of stone and firelight. Finally coming out at the top and stepping into an open chamber.
Here in the heart of the spire it was all white marble. The floor, the ceiling, the walls. The frames of the windows on either side; the pedestal for the bed under the nearest window. That bed draped in white sheets and furs, the pillows as pure white as snow in the mountains where men couldn't reach. Next to the bed a small hearth and a fire burning and sunlight falling in through both windows.
“Put her here, Ironhelm,” the priest said. His voice holding no age at all.
“She's bleeding,” he said. Suddenly feeling the ash and dirt and blood covering him as they stood in this place that looked entirely untouched.