A b e l
I WILL OFFER UP A BRICK
TO THE BACK OF YOUR HEAD, BOY
There is a singing, a humming, a wailing that fills up the whole desert.
At first Abel thinks that he is going mad. It must be a curse from Caligo or from Solis - for surely he has sinned against both. Or perhaps it is only a result of his own grief, his own black and bloody hands, a pearl of sin that grew and grew into a black stone that sits in his mind and drags him down. It would not surprise him, to be cursed or to be mad.
It is not until he is nearly to the canyons that he remembers the stories of the Mors’ singing dunes. He’d thought them no more than the fairy-tales of Denocte - witches in the mountains, mermaids in the sea. Now, with a last bleary glance at the dunes falling away behind him, he shivers to think that those must be real, too.
And then he steps into the pathway that cuts through the canyons and he is swallowed up by silence.
But the wailing still echoes in his heart, in his blood. It beats with the words of the Ghost’s letter, ordering him to destroy the food stores of his home. It is winter, and the land is still recovering from saltwater floods and long-ago dragon-fire; to burn the food is to sentence the people to starve. His people, and Raum’s.
Dread fills up the hollows of his bones, sinks low his soul. He does not know the three he is to meet, but he distrusts them (he distrusts everyone, even himself). But he knows Denocte well, knows every shortcut and shadowed alley, knows the rounds of the guards and the ones easy enough to bribe.
Already he is walking down those paths in his mind, as his hooves echo on the red stone of the canyon. There is no wind here, and no shadow in the flat winter sunlight; it is an alien world, a tan and crimson tomb, ragged monoliths for long-dead gods.
At last he finds the cave, a yawning mouth with cool stale breath. He is the first to arrive and he stands just inside the black of the place, breathing slow, tense with disquiet, his heart closing up like a fist, like a dead baleful winter sun.
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