‘I care about you, sister.’ Tormalin suddenly felt very tired, and he had a long walk to find shelter before nightfall. He wished that she’d never followed him out here, that her stubbornness had let them avoid this conversation. ‘But no, I don’t care enough to stay here and watch you all die. I just can’t do it, Hest.’ He cleared his throat, trying to hide the shaking of his voice. ‘I just can’t.’
A desolate wind blew down the thoroughfare, filling the silence between them with the cold sound of dry leaves rustling against stone. For a moment Tormalin felt dizzy, as though he stood on the edge of a precipice, a great empty space pulling him forward. And then Hestillion turned away from him and walked back to the carriage. She climbed inside, and the last thing he saw of his sister was her delicate white foot encased in its yellow silk slipper. The driver brought the horses round – they were restless and glad to leave, clearly smelling wolves nearby – and the carriage left, moving at a fair clip.
He watched them go for a few moments; the only living thing in a dead landscape, the silver branches of Ygseril a frozen cloud behind them. And then he walked away.
Tormalin paused at the top of a low hill. He had long since left the last trailing ruins of the city behind him, and had been travelling through rough scrubland for a day or so. Here and there were the remains of old carts, abandoned lines of them like snake bones in the dust, or the occasional shack that had once served visitors to Ebora. Tor had been impressed to see them still standing, even if a strong wind might shatter them to pieces at any moment; they were remnants from before the Carrion Wars, when humans still made the long journey to Ebora voluntarily. He himself had been little more than a child. Now, a deep purple dusk had settled across the scrubland and at the very edge of Ebora’s ruined petticoats, the Wall loomed above him, its white stones a drab lilac in the fading light.
Tor snorted. This was it. Once he was beyond the Wall he did not intend to come back – for all that he’d claimed to Hestillion, he was no fool. Ebora was a disease, and they were all infected. He had to get out while there were still some pleasures to be had, before he was the one slowly coughing himself to death in a finely appointed bedroom.
Far to the right, a watchtower sprouted from the Wall like a canine tooth, sharp and jagged against the shadow of the mountain. The windows were all dark, but it was still just light enough to see the steps carved there. Once he had a roof over his head he would make a fire and set himself up for the evening. He imagined how he might appear to an observer; the lone adventurer, heading off to places unknown, his storied sword sheathed against the night but ready to be released at the first hint of danger. He lifted his chin, and pictured the sharp angles of his face lit by the eerie glow of the sickle moon, his shining black hair a glossy slick even restrained in its tail. He almost wished he could see himself.
His spirits lifted at the thought of his own adventurousness, he made his way up the steps, finding a new burst of energy at the end of this long day. The tower door was wedged half open with piles of dry leaves and other debris from the forest. If he’d been paying attention, he’d have noted that the leaves had recently been pushed to one side, and that within the tower all was not as dark as it should have been, but Tor was thinking of the wineskin in his pack and the round of cheese wrapped in pale wax. He’d been saving them for the next time he had a roof over his head, and he’d decided that this ramshackle tower counted well enough.
He followed the circular steps up to the tower room. The door here was shut, but he elbowed it open easily enough, half falling through into the circular space beyond.
Movement, scuffling, and light. He had half drawn his sword before he recognised the scruffy shape by the far window as human – a man, his dark eyes bright in a dirty face. There was a small smoky fire in the middle of the room, the two windows covered over with broken boards and rags. A wave of irritation followed close on the back of his initial alarm; he had not expected to see humans in this place.
‘What are you doing here?’ Tor paused, and pushed his sword back into its scabbard. He looked around the tower room. There were signs that the place had been inhabited for a short time at least – the bones of small fowl littered the stone floor, their ends gnawed. Dirty rags and two small tin bowls, crusted with something, and a half-empty bottle of some dark liquid. Tor cleared his throat.
‘Well? Do you not speak?’
The man had greasy yellow hair and a suggestion of a yellow beard. He still stood pressed against the wall, but his shoulders abruptly drooped, as though the energy he’d been counting on to flee had left him.
‘If you will not speak, I will have to share your fire.’ Tor pushed away a pile of rags with his boot and carefully seated himself on the floor, his legs crossed. It occurred to him that if he got his wineskin out now he would feel compelled to share it with the man. He resolved to save it one more night. Instead, he shouldered off his pack and reached inside it for his small travel teapot. The fire was pathetic but with a handful of the dried leaves he had brought for the purpose, it was soon looking a little brighter. The water would boil eventually.
The man was still staring at him. Tor busied himself with emptying a small quantity of his water supply into a shallow tin bowl, and searching through his bag for one of the compact bags of tea he had packed.
‘Eboran.’ The man’s voice was a rusted hinge, and he spoke a variety of plains speech Tor knew well. He wondered how long it had been since the man had spoken to anyone. ‘Blood sucker. Murderer.’
Tor cleared his throat and switched to the man’s plains dialect. ‘It’s like that, is it?’ He sighed and sat back from the fire and his teapot. ‘I was going to offer you tea, old man.’
‘You call me old?’ The man laughed. ‘You? My grandfather told me stories of the Carrion Wars. You bloodsuckers. Eatin’ people alive on the battlefield, that’s what my grandfather said.’
Tor thought of the sword again. The man was trespassing on Eboran land, technically.
‘Your grandfather would not have been alive. The Carrion Wars were over three hundred years ago.’
None of them would have been alive then, of course, yet they all still acted as though it were a personal insult. Why did they have to pass the memory on? Down through the years they passed on the stories, like they passed on brown eyes, or ears that stuck out. Why couldn’t they just forget?
‘It wasn’t like that.’ Tor poked at the tin bowl, annoyed with how tight his voice sounded. Abruptly, he wished that the windows weren’t boarded up. He was stuck in here with the smell of the man. ‘No one wanted . . . when Ygseril died . . . he had always fed us, nourished us. Without him, we were left with the death of our entire people. A slow fading into nothing.’
The man snorted with amusement. Amazingly, he came over to the fire and crouched there.