There was nothing to look at but Brindle, who was occupied with cleaning his underside with a thick pink tongue.
Ha! Don’t lie, old knight. You’re hardly defenseless or you would have caved to me by now and relinquished this agonizing stalemate. Tell me then, where is this soft point? Where ought I to send my next barb? What pity shall I twist and ply you with until you beg for merciful relief?
Well. I guess that explained a few things. Their battle was not settled. At any moment, I might find I had only my former paladin superior following beside me … or I might find I must contend with a newly escaped demon. He’d made vows to me … but I couldn’t rely on that.
Have no fear of my valor. I will stay the course.
I wanted to sigh. But what would be the point?
Instead, I packed camp, tended poor Halberd, who liked the snow no better than I, ate a meager breakfast of a small handful of oats, and offered a piece of jerky to Brindle, who snapped it up in a bite and nuzzled my hand for more.
“You’ll have to hunt on the way,” I told him sternly while I rubbed behind his ears. “I’m low on supplies and have no way to get more.”
Brindle put his nose to the ground and made a solid job of sniffing anything available before making his mark on a fallen tree. It was hard to believe that such a very doggy dog could be anything else.
My side ached, and I possibly should tend it, but I hadn’t been warm in days, not even with the tiny cook fires I was kindling, or the quilt, or the cloak, and I didn’t want to take off even one layer of clothing if I didn’t really have to. Besides, my orders said no delays.
By the time I had everything packed, Brindle was dancing back and forth across what I could only guess was the trail. I hoped he was right. It would be enormously embarrassing to have to confess to my superiors that I had been misled by a demon.
I rested one hand on the head of my dog as the wind tore at my long, loose hair and my tattered cloak and tabard. The land behind me was all I’d ever known. The land ahead, a crooning mystery.
It was maybe an hour after we set out that the fog began to lift, and by the time it was clear enough to see, I drew Halberd up in shock.
We were moving through a forest, alright, but not a forest of trees. The land here was strewn with ancient grave markers — the type I’d only ever seen when Sir Branson drew them in the dirt for me during a lesson.
Yes. Gravebars, he said now in my mind as I swallowed. They used to decorate them with dangling strings of bones sometimes.
The uprights were tall and carved precisely of stone that was probably older than anything I’d ever seen, barring the bones of the earth herself. At least two-thirds of the lichen-etched markers had been pushed over — all in the same direction, I noted — and some crumbled to chunks of rock or even nothing more than a depression filled with broken debris.
As if the ice slid across them and tumbled them. Which, obviously, it did.
But then why were any still standing?
Let some things be a mystery.
I didn’t like unsolved mysteries.
Then life will be difficult for you. How grand.
I rode between the denuded grave markers, Halberd’s hooves squishing into pale sod as the snow quickly melted to rubble-strewn pools. Everything had gone grey. Sky. Markers. Path. I misliked it. It made this place feel dead.
I almost felt relief when I stirred up a flight of crows. They screamed their annoyance as they launched into the sky. Something lived, at least, though they’d find little carrion here so soon after the Rim moved.
I looked around me nervously. This world had been thickly encased in blue ice not a turning of the moon ago. Did that mean that even now, the Rim was moving somewhere to the south, eating up lands we would not hear were gone for many months and — possibly — trapping the people of those lands in place, dead, yet preserved in grisly perfection?
It’s not our problem one way or another. The sun rises and sets over the plane of the earth. Beneath us, the great depths of hell lie cold and uncomprehending in the darkness beneath the earth.
I waited to see if there would be more “wisdom.” There was not.
Blessedly, the fog cleared quickly, revealing a trail beat into the long, damp grass where about a dozen horses had recently passed, and since it was well-trampled and clear, I kicked Halberd into a solid pace and called to Brindle to follow. We covered ground as quickly as it was possible to cover it.
The graveyard was dotted with pools of standing water and it was not long before Brindle was dripping with it, shaking it from his coat and running impatient loops around me.
Was it possible that the ice rim had melted rather than withdrawn?
It doesn’t melt. It doesn’t scrape the land either. It simply moves in ways known only to those not mortal. Fancy you thinking otherwise. Magic is magic, girl. The sooner you accept it, the sooner you can use it.
I made a sound of annoyance at the back of my throat. I was not fond of mysteries.
