The Book of Lost Things(66)
Roland dismounted and walked to where David sat, leading Scylla behind him.
“Things have not been the same with us since that foul little man dragged you beneath the ground,” said Roland. “I think I may have some inkling of what he said to you about me. My feelings for Raphael are mine, and mine alone. I loved him, and that is all anyone needs to know. The rest is no business of any man’s.
“As for you, you are my friend. You are brave, and you are both stronger than you look and stronger than you believe yourself to be. You are trapped in an unfamiliar land with only a stranger for company, yet you have defied wolves, trolls, a beast that had destroyed a force of armed men, and the tainted promises of the one you call the Crooked Man. Through it all I have never yet seen you in despair. When I agreed to take you to the king, I thought you would be a burden on me, but instead you have proved yourself worthy of respect and trust. I hope that I in turn have proved myself worthy of your respect and trust, for without it we are both lost. Now, will you come with me? We have almost reached our destination.”
He extended his hand to David. The boy took it, and Roland raised him to his feet.
“I’m sorry,” said David.
“You have nothing to be sorry for,” said Roland. “But gather your belongings, for the end is near.”
They rode for only a short time, but as they traveled the air around them changed. The hairs on David’s head and arms stood on end. He could feel the static when he touched his hand to them. The wind blew a strange scent from the west, musty and dry, like the interior of a crypt. The land rose beneath them until they came to the brow of a hill, and there they paused and looked down.
Before them, like a stain upon the snow, was the dark shape of a fortress. David thought of it as a shape rather than a fortress itself, because there was something very peculiar about it. He could make out a central tower, and walls and outbuildings, but they were slightly blurred, like the lines of a watercolor painting made on damp paper. It stood at the center of the forest, but all of the trees around it had been felled as though by some great explosion. Here and there David saw the glinting of metal upon its battlements. Birds hovered above it, and the dry smell grew stronger.
“Carrion birds,” said Roland, pointing. “They feed upon the dead.”
David knew what he was thinking: Raphael had entered that place, and had not returned.
“Perhaps you should stay here,” said Roland. “It will be safer for you.”
David looked around. The trees here were different from the others he had seen. They were twisted and ancient, their bark diseased and pitted with holes. They looked like old men and women frozen in agony. He did not want to remain alone among them.
“Safer?” queried David. “There are wolves following me, and who knows what else lives in these woods? If you leave me here, I’ll just follow you on foot anyway. I might even be useful to you in there. I didn’t let you down in the village when the Beast came after me, and I won’t let you down now,” he said with determination.
Roland did not argue with him. Together they rode toward the fortress. As they moved through the forest, they heard voices whispering. The sounds seemed to come from within the trees, emerging through the openings in their trunks, but whether they were the voices of the trees themselves or those of unseen things that dwelled within them David could not say. Twice he believed that he saw movement in the holes, and once he was certain that eyes had stared back at him from deep inside the tree, but when he told Roland, the soldier said only: “Don’t be afraid. Whatever they are, they have nothing to do with the fortress. They are not our concern, unless they choose to make themselves so.”
Nevertheless, he slowly withdrew his sword as he rode and let it hang by Scylla’s side, ready to be used.
The forest was so thick with trees that the fortress was lost from sight as they passed through them, so it came as something of a shock to David when they finally emerged into the blasted landscape of fallen trunks. The force of the explosion, or whatever it had been, had torn the trees from the ground, so that their roots lay exposed above deep hollows. At the epicenter lay the fortress, and now David could see why it had appeared blurred from a distance. It was completely covered by brown creepers that wound around the central tower and covered the walls and battlements, and from the creepers emerged dark thorns, some easily a foot long and thicker than David’s wrist. It might have been possible to attempt to climb the walls using the creepers, but make even the slightest misstep and an arm or a leg or, worse, the head or the heart would be impaled upon the waiting spikes.
They rode around the perimeter of the fortress until they came to the gates. They were open, but the creepers had formed a barrier across the entrance. Through the gaps between the thorns, David could see a courtyard, and a closed door at the base of the central tower. A suit of armor lay upon the ground before it, but there was no helmet, and no head.
“Roland,” said David. “That knight…”
But Roland was not looking at the gates, or at the knight. His head was raised, and his eyes were fixed on the battlements. David followed his gaze and discovered what it was that had gleamed upon the walls from a distance.
The heads of men had been impaled upon the topmost thorns, facing out over the gates. Some still wore their helmets, although their face guards were raised or torn off so that their expressions could be seen, while others had no armor left at all. Most were little more than skulls, and, while there were three or four that were still recognizable as men, they looked as though they had no flesh left on their faces, just a thin covering of gray, papery skin over the bone. Roland examined each one in turn until, at last, he had stared into the faces of every dead man upon the battlements. He looked relieved when he was done. “Raphael is not among those that I can identify,” he said. “I see neither his face nor his armor.”