A b e l
I WILL OFFER UP A BRICK
TO THE BACK OF YOUR HEAD, BOY
The worst of it had been the blood.
All the dead Abel had seen, all those countless muddy bodies, had not been so visceral as this. The drowned might well have been sleeping, but for soaking hair and empty eyes, peaceful as Ophelia as she drifted between the banks.
Not so the maze.
That had been a butchering, a slaying by a lion’s jaws. The blood had been abundant on Raum and the dead man and on the unicorn queen, too, and in the work that had followed Abel had been spattered and streaked with it like new and savage art.
It had taken so very long to wash off.
Now he blinks against the low glare of the sun, and when he closes his eyes it still shines crimson through the butterfly-thin of his lids. It is strange to him that he can be so much further from the sun, here in the flat dead-desert heat of Solterra, and yet the heat here is simmering, far beyond the Arma’s autumn coolness. Already he misses the mountains, the way they framed everything, the way he never lost his sense of direction between their sharp rise and the gleam of the sea.
Everything here looks the same. But it is not an easy, safe sameness; it grinds at him like sand beneath his eyelids, like the sand he licks now off of his teeth. Abel has been scouting, familiarizing himself with this hot and empty land, has been eavesdropping. But now he is weary, and his coat is slick with sweat and wind-flung sand, and he is thirsty. A few others are around, here on the outskirts of the city, but they all watch him like vipers, though they have no reason to suspect such a lean and dead-eyed boy of anything.
Solterra had its orphans, too.
Anyway, he does not blame them for their distrust, their jackal’s suspicion. Abel is a doubter, too.
Still, when he sees a girl not far off from his own age he shifts his path to cut off her own, and stops her with a low nicker. For a moment he regards her, but he does not note the way her eyes are as dead-dull empty as his own. Light shifts through the clear faint blue of her horn but to him it is only something more to splinter the sunlight to pierce him. Abel does not like being drug out into the light.
“Where can I find water?” he asks her, and for all his love of Denocte and her changing mountains and changing sea his expression far more recalls the Moors: flat and endless and devoid.
x | x
