Chapter 25: One Story, Three Mouths

Three sets of footprints were coming up the cliff road in that winter grey, barely minutes before dawn. One man was standing at the top of the slope, arms folded, watching them climb.

Haaland saw him from a hundred paces down and knew how the next few days were going to look like. He had the rest of that frozen slope to think about it, with his legs burning and the sky going bright behind the towers.

They had been clever about the sneaking out. Yet they had taken too long, and they had not been half as clever about the sneaking back in.

"Long walk," the man chuckled, when they crested.

"It was," admitted Oddr as they kept walking.

The man stood up and stood tall to seem threatening, however, he didn't try to stop them. There was no need. Somebody had definitely noticed the three empty beds at night, the news will have spilled all over the camp before the sun was properly up.

There was no sleeping after what they'd seen.

The moment they arrived to camp Haaland immediately parted ways and went to gather his own. He called them to the far fire while the light was still thin.

The goatherd. The brothers off the fishing crew. A dozen more.

Then he told them the truth.

All of it.

The notes written in charcoal. The shore at dusk. The dragon coming down out the gap between the stars. The pale horned creature that stepped off its shoulder and how they talked the entire night.

How it had sat on the rocks with its knee up and answered every question they put to it, and burned their raft for reasons it explained, and how it had not made an attempt to hurt them.

That the thing they had all been afraid of, this night spawn, was just a gods-damned boy.

Haaland was not a talker, that much was true. He said things way too flat and direct and in the strict order they happened, which was completely wrong in this situation. Halfway through it he understood, with a slow sinking in his gut, that it was not landing.

He could see it happening in front of him.

The dozen faces doing the same small thing at the same time. A tightening around the eyes. A kind of careful indecisiveness.

The look men put on when they have decided to stop arguing with somebody they care about.

So he went at it harder, which was a mistake. He gave them the details. The exact words. The way the creature had counted its reasons off on its fingers.

The details didn't make it better.

The more of it he told, the less it sounded as an actual retelling of events. They didn't believe, they thought he was pulling their ass.

Shit.

"It is true," Oddr rasped, interrupting Haaland. "Every word of it. I was there. It is precisely as he tells it."

"So was I," nodded Emerald.

Sadly, their words changed little if nothing all.

Haaland saw that too. He had been fairly certain that if the three of them together would be enough to convince them: in any court in the world three witnesses agreeing is the end of the matter.

And yet the goatherd was looking at the fire and not at any of them, one of the brothers had his arms folded, and the silence had gone thick.

"You were all there together," somebody spoke at last, apologetically. "The three of you. All alone. In the the middle of winter, at night."

There it was.

From their perspective it was three people who left camp together, spent a night together, gods knew where, and came back with the same impossible story...

Had they gone insane?

They exchanged some more side glances between themselves and shifted uncomfortably. It was the woman with the boy of six, she got to her feet and said it quietly, "You went out at night. To the thing that burned our only way of escape. And yet you came back talking for it."

There was a silence.

"Yes.", Haaland nodded.

"Then I have nothing to say to you."

She walked off, and others went away not long after. The fire cracked. Nobody filled the silence.

"Well," said Oddr eventually, pulling at his beard. "That went about as well as I expected."

"You could have warned me." he hissed.

"I did try. You have a habit of running at walls, Haaland. It is one of your better qualities. It's also hilarious."

The old man leaned over and patted his arm, entirely unbothered.

"You cannot hand a man a truth of that size and expect him to swallow it whole. It is too heavy. Perhaps give them the small end of it first and let them work up to the rest."

"I will note it for next time," Haaland snickered, and rolled his eyes.

"Also, do not look so wounded Haaland. They are not calling you a liar."

Oddr held a wrinkled hand out to the coals.

"They are calling you a man who has been got at. Which, from where they are sitting sort of makes sense to do."

By midday Rum had been told everything he needed to be told, and by the afternoon he had decided what it meant.

He stood up on the broken plinth at the edge of the plaza with the grey light behind him and was careful and reasonable about all of it. Or he did a good imitation of a man being careful and reasonable, which came to be the same thing.

"Nobody is calling them traitors," he argued, and let it hang long enough for everyone to hear.

"I want that plain. Haaland has bled for this camp. Oddr has kept half of you alive with roots and good advice, and the girl is merely a child."

Murmurs.

"But they went out at night to meet the devil that burned our last road home. You have all seen what it does. Some nineteen armed men died on that beach, butchered, mauled. It is a beast, a monster, an abomination."

He let that sit.

"And now three of our own creep off to it behind our backs, and come back with its words in their mouths."

Another pause, longer.

"That is not treachery, I'm not saying that. It's just what it does." His gaze settled on her, "It got the girl on the shore the first day. Now it has three."

He never once used the word. He did not have to.

Rum was enjoying this.

He stood up there with a hundred faces listening to him, his shoulders laid back and his voice pitched exactly right. Haaland had spent enough years living on earth to know what game he was playing.

Rum was a viper who had never been anything, discovering he could be everything.

If only he lies his way to what he desires.

Rum had the weapons. Every blade off the slaver crew, stacked and counted and handed out by him. He assigned the hunts. On thin days he decided who ate first, and he was fair about it in a way everybody was bound to notice, which was the entire point.

Small tyrannies. Every one of them defensible on its own.

He needs it, Haaland thought, standing at the back of the crowd with his arms crossed.

Gods help us. He needs the thing to be a monster, or he is only a grieving man in rags like the rest of us.

That evening the two camps did not share the fire together. From then on, they stopped sharing altogether.

The sky went pale white just a few days later.

It came from the ice walls of the far north. A long low shelf of cloud with the sea under it gone white from edge to edge. The gulls came inland, all of them in the span of a few hours, in a great ragged panic, flying the wrong way over the ruins.

Oddr was the first to notice something was wrong.

"Everybody into the caves," the old man almost shouted, it was near enough an order, he was moving faster than Haaland had ever seen him move. "Wood inside. Food inside. Water inside. People inside!"

He meant the caves under the eastern slope, and everybody knew which he meant, because there was only one place on that plateau anybody ever called the caves.

They were not caves at all, properly speaking. They were the cellars of the dead city — cut stone, squared and pillared and roofed, running back into the hill under the eastern terraces in chamber after chamber, with mouths on the slope wide enough to drive a cart through. Whoever had built the place had put its winter under the ground. A hundred freed slaves had spent a month walking past those mouths and had not once gone in, because they were black inside and nobody knew how far they went.

Somebody started to argue about the halls. They had roofs. They had walls. They had doors that shut.

"Stone holds heat," Oddr said, and did not stop walking. "Nothing we have built does. Move."

Word went to the other camp too. Haaland carried it himself.

However, Rum's people were up in the north forest hunting and word did not not reach them in time. The blizzard came in before dusk.

One moment the light was failing and the snow was coming sideways in handfuls.

The next there was no world at all past the length of an arm. Only a howling white nothing that took the towers and the plaza and the sky and swallowed the lot of it.

The cold stopped being weather, it became an animal that seeped through your the gaps on your furs, and past your skin and deep into your shivering bones.

Out in the ruins it was taking the shelters apart. Gaps opened in walls that had not had gaps in them that morning, and the wind went through the stone rooms all night looking for something to be warm.

In the caves it was a slower thing. It came in a little way and then stopped, the way water stops, and never quite got to where they were sitting.

They had not gone far in. Nobody wanted to. Eighty-odd people were crowded into the first two chambers behind the mouths, close enough to the entrances that a man could still see the difference between the dark of the storm and the dark of the hill, with the fires set almost in the openings so the smoke could find its own way out. The rock over their heads was cold to touch and gave nothing back to the weather at all.

And all night the blizzard screamed past the mouths of those caves and not once got in.

Then they started counting people.

Sixteen in the hunting party.

Five children.

Five children who had sneaked off to the bays after shellfish late in the afternoon and told nobody, because they had done it half a dozen times that week and nothing had happened.

Shit.

The camp came apart. The mother of the middle one had to be held.

Men went for the ropes and the torches, Haaland was among the first of them, up through the mouth of the cave with a line over his shoulder and he was about to go out into the blizzard when Oddr stopped him, shouting into his face over the gale of winds.

"You cannot see your own feet, Haaland! You will get a dozen paces and go off a cliff!"

"They are children, Oddr!", he roared back.

"I know what they are!" The old man's voice cracked. "I know what you are, you are no use to them dead on the rocks, and neither is any other man here!"

It was the truth of it. Every one of them knew it.

Not with a blizzard as this one. There was nothing in those caves that could go out into that and come back.

Nothing human.

Haaland stood in the mouth of the cave with the rope still over his shoulder and the wind taking the skin off his face, and did the worst thing, which was stay under the rock, a coward.

He counted, counting was the only thing left that he could do.

He was working out how long the children had.

He had seen men freeze before. He knew the math of it the way he knew the weight of a sword. A grown man, dressed for the weather, out of the wind and with the sense to sit still, might last four or five hours in this.

A child in rags, soaked to the knee from wading the shallows after shellfish, would not last half of that.

Yet he could do nothing, the white had come down over the bays before dusk.

It was long past dark now.

They must be dead by now. Frozen to death on this weather. While he stood in this doorway with a rope on his shoulder and did nothing at all.

Behind him the mother of one of them was still praying and mumbling all the words wrong.

Somewhere in all of that, while the whole camp crowded together in the firelight under the rock and argued about ropes and foolishly and uselessly prayed for those kids, nobody noticed the girl.

Emerald took a fur.

She took a torch, she took a long breath, and she stepped over and around a great many people in the firelight and walked straight out of the mouth of the cave into the white while everyone else was still arguing.