Ruins of Camelot (33 page)

"Thanks, Featherbolt," she sighed, smiling.  "You saved me the best bits, didn't you?  The head and the tail."

She could not bring herself to eat his offering, but it was a close thing.  If she did not find food tomorrow, she may indeed be happy to consume a mouse head.  She shuddered, and yet her stomach growled eagerly at the prospect.

She slept.

Hauntingly vivid dreams visited her that night.  She dreamt of Merodach in his stronghold surrounded by the corpses of those she loved.  Darrick was there, pale and bloody, as was Rhyss, looking pathetically emaciated in her bridesmaid dress.  Gabriella's mother lay in a dried pool of black blood, her eyes open, horribly empty in the darkness.

Worse, her father was there
as well
, impaled by a rusty sword.  Next to him was Sigrid and the Little Prince, laid out on the floor like cordwood, dead but not buried, never buried.

Goethe was there as well.  His body was propped upright against a pillar.

Merodach grinned and stalked through this, laughing to himself.  He paced over the dead bodies, nearly stepping on them or kicking them aside as he passed, and Gabriella tried to shout out to him, to beg him not to hurt them any more.

They're already dead!
she tried to scream through sealed lips. 
Please, don't hurt them any more!  Let me come to them and take them away and honour them with a decent burial!  Please!

But the madman did not hear her.  He paced endlessly, humming thoughtfully and drumming his fingers on his short beard, and every time his shadow passed over those pale faces, Gabriella cringed with helpless misery, unable to look away but horrified to watch.

And then Goethe began to move.  He was dead, and yet he pushed himself fully upright, standing independent of the pillar he'd been leant against.  His eyes did not look at anything, but they turned towards her blankly.  His lips peeled back in a parody of a smile, showing rotten teeth and black gums.  His right hand raised jerkily, like the arm of a string marionette, and then dropped clumsily to the sword on his wasted hips.  It missed, jerked again, and then gripped the hilt.  Slowly, the corpse withdrew the sword from its scabbard.  The blade was tacky with dried blood.

Goethe's body began to walk.  It was a thoroughly inhuman walk, each step a different length, the feet slapping bonelessly to the ground.  The head lolled, still grinning.  The sword raised into the air.  He was going to dismember the bodies for no other reason than Merodach's black amusement.

Or perhaps that was not his intent at all.  Perhaps he had much worse in mind…

Gabriella tried to scream through the layers of sleep.  She switched on the frozen ground, kicking off the cloak she had covered
herself
with.  Featherbolt awoke.  He withdrew his head from beneath his wing and peered at his sleeping companion.  She moaned and tossed by the light of the goblinfire, her hair falling over her face.

"No…," she muttered.  "No, Goethe.  Get out of the black light.  You're just a shadow, a shade.  You're dead.  Don't…"  She shifted plaintively, her moans growing panicked, her voice clearing, turning gradually into shouts.  "No, Goethe!  It is Merodach!  He dabbles and despoils!  Don't make them puppets of the black light!  No! 
NO!!
"

And yet she did not awaken.  She rolled fitfully onto her side and let out a long, diminishing moan.  Tears wet her cheeks.  Shortly, however, her restlessness subsided.  Her breathing became even again.  The tension leaked out of her sleeping face.

Featherbolt watched this intently.  He hopped closer, moving into the light of the fire, and stood near Gabriella's shoulder.  The dream had spent itself for now.  He clicked his beak and shook his feathers.

He did not sleep for the rest of the night.

In the morning, Gabriella dug in her pack, seeking any crumb of food that might be left.  She found the acorns that she had tucked away earlier, the ones that had come in the mysterious pile of berries.  She ate them.  They were extremely tough and tasted like mouldy parchment, and yet her stomach attacked them eagerly.  A small surge of energy fanned out in her veins, making her feel slightly light-headed.

She turned the energy towards walking.

The sun burnt through the clouds as it rose, turning the snowy hills into a sparkling tableau.  Gabriella crossed this doggedly, aiming for the distant mountain peaks.

Her mind wandered.  Daydreams of her youth preoccupied her for unknown lengths of time.  In them, she thought of her mother.  Gabriella was a small child sitting on her mother's lap and listening to stories.  Her mother turned the pages of the storybooks, and the colourful drawings seemed to come alive.  Happy green dragons flew off the paper and carried her away, lifting her into gold-rimmed clouds and warm, blue skies.  Her mother's voice followed her, telling the tale, and Gabriella realised that she was remembering the sound of her mother's actual voice, something she believed she had long ago forgotten.

Her feet plowed onwards, drawing troughs through the snow, and Gabriella came back to herself as if from a long distance.  There were tears standing in her eyes.  Hunger was making her faint, and the faintness was taking the form of delirium.  She did not fight this.  The visions were better than the constant trudge of her footsteps or the frustrating monotony of the snowy hills.

The mountain peaks remained as far away as ever.

"I have to make it," she panted to Featherbolt as he wheeled overhead.  "I have to stop Merodach.  If I kill him, it will be over.  His armies will stop.  Camelot will stand.  Everything will be saved.  Everything will be saved…"

She repeated the mantra to herself, forcing herself onwards, defying the growing weakness of her body.  Time was running out, she knew.  Merodach's armies may well have already reached Camelot.  If she did not find the warlord and kill him very soon, then all would be lost.  Darrick and Rhyss would be unavenged, and those that remained would be hunted down and killed.  Camelot would fall, and everyone she loved would die.

Thinking this, using it like a whip on her weary body, Gabriella trudged onwards.

Another night.  Another spate of fever dreams.  And yet, at dawn, she forced herself to continue on.

"He said that I would make it," she breathed, stumbling forwards through the snow.  "Coalroot.  Said I would confront Merodach.  It was… it was my destiny, he said.  I won't starve.  I won—"

She fell forwards into the snow, and did not know it.

Sometime later, Featherbolt was nuzzling at her, pecking gently at her ear.  The warmth of his feathers was pressed against her cheek.  Her other cheek was numb with cold, packed into the snow.

She groaned and pushed herself to her knees.  Her eyes felt gummed shut with ice.

"Featherbolt," she whispered, rubbing her face.  "What happened…?"

He screeched, and she finally forced her eyes open.  She looked around and saw the falcon standing on the pale haft of her driftwood torch.  Its blunt end was buried in the snow.  The goblinfire had been snuffed out.

"Oh no!" she moaned pathetically, reaching for the pale wood.  She picked it up, peered at its end.  The wood was completely unmarked, cold as bone.  "No… no…," she repeated, scolding herself.  "How could I have been so careless?"

Featherbolt jumped into the air and landed on her shoulder.  He pressed himself against her cheek, as if urging her onwards, but Gabriella merely stared at the cold torch in her hand.  It had become a symbol of her quest.  It was hopeless.  Regardless of what Coalroot had said, she would die on the steppe, starved and frozen stiff.

She dropped the torch and sat back on her haunches.  For several minutes, she merely watched the declining sun, chilled so deeply that she no longer even shivered.

Then, simply because she did not know what else to do, she struggled to her feet.  Slowly, haltingly, she began to walk again.

The sun lowered until it kissed the western horizon.  Gabriella's shadow stretched beside her like an arrow.  Featherbolt launched from her shoulder and soared up into the copper glow of the sunset.  He would find his own dinner and bring her back half of it.  This time, she knew she would eat it if she could.

She trudged onwards.

There was a flicker of movement in a nearby strand of bushes.  Gabriella saw it and stopped abruptly, scanning the shadows.  The tawny flank of a large hare could be seen through the frosted grass.  Its ears were perked upright, and its beady eyes were turned towards her, watching her brightly.

Gabriella barely allowed herself to breathe.  There was no chance she could catch the hare, of course.  It would bolt at her slightest movement.  Still, her stomach growled audibly, painfully, at the sight of it.

She couldn't help herself.  She began to creep towards it, biting her lip with concentration.

The hare watched.  When she had approached it enough that her shadow moved over the bushes, it leapt.  One bounding jump took it out of the weeds and onto the snow of the receding slope.

"Wait!" Gabriella exclaimed desperately, halting and raising her hands, palms out.

Amazingly, the hare did.  It stopped a safe distance away, turned, and stood up on its hind legs, its nose twitching.

Gabriella inched forwards.  Her breath came in shallow pants.  "Please do not go," she pleaded.  "Please, just… just wait…"

The hare watched her intently as she crept closer.  She hunkered low, trying to make herself small.  With deliberate slowness, she reached up and touched the sigil that hung at her throat.  She resisted the urge to sob with desperate frustration.

"Just wait," she breathed faintly.  "Do not run…"

The hare's nose twitched.  Its eyes tracked the motion of her hand as she touched the sigil, felt its secret warmth.  Gabriella was nearly close enough to leap upon the creature.  Only two more steps… one…

The hare twitched, spun on the snow, and bounded away.

Gabriella watched this, her expression unchanging, her fingers still touching the falcon sigil.  The sound of the hare's movements receded into silence as it crested the next hill, leaving only its tracks in the snow.

Slowly, Gabriella lowered her hand.  Her strength left her, and she fell ponderously to her knees, and then forwards onto her face.  She tried to crawl, pulled herself nearly to the top of the next slope, and then failed.

The wind blew over her, carrying tendrils of snow.  It felt so very good just to lie down.  She barely even felt the cold any more.  Behind her, the sun finally dipped below the horizon.  The world turned deep blue, tinged with bronze.

A ripple of disturbed air buffeted Gabriella, but she didn't look up.  Perhaps it was Featherbolt returning with a scrap of rodent.  She waited.

Instead of the soft nuzzle of his wing on her cheek, however, the ground shuddered with a series of surprisingly heavy thumps, emanating from the slope directly ahead of her.  A gust of warm air blew back over the hillside, riffling the icy grass and lifting the hair from her brow.

Gabriella attempted to raise her head.  Something very large loomed before her, making a huge, dark blot against the snow and sky.  It was approaching slowly, raising and lowering its great, clawed feet, shuddering the ground with its weight.

He's tracked me all this way,
she thought blandly. 
He's come to devour me in my weakness.  Let him.  Let him eat me and be done with it…
  Then from another, fevered part of her mind:
Perhaps it is the storybook dragon from my daydream.  Perhaps he has come to spirit me away to happy clouds and warm sunlight…

A low, gurgling growl arose from the depths of the beast's throat.  The strength of its exhalation blew over Gabriella's face.  It stank of rotten meat and chemical.  She felt its shadow move over her, heard the subtle scrape of its leathery skin.  Its jaw creaked as it opened wide.