Ruins of Camelot (36 page)

The chorus of laughter died away.  Before her, Brom rose up again to his full height.  He was more than a foot taller than she and twice as wide.  His eyes did not leave hers, nor did his smile falter as he stepped directly in front of her.  The stench of death was thick around him.  He raised a callused hand and traced his fingers down the angle of her cheek, drawing a dirty line in her own fresh blood.  She flinched away but could not escape his presence.  The pain in her arm was breathtaking.

Brom drew his hand back from her face, showed her the blood that coated his fingers.  Slowly, deliberately, he licked her blood from his fingers.  He closed his eyes slightly and moaned with pleasure.

"Out here, Your Highness," he said, breathing down into her face like a lover, "there is a much
different
command.  I think you shall learn it well… in the short time you have left."

They hauled her behind the catapult, which was itself pulled by a pair of chortha.  A length of rope bound her wrists before her, attaching her to the rear of the war machine and yanking her mercilessly forwards.  The pain in her forearm had become a deep ache, throbbing so hard that she felt it in the veins of her neck, saw it in the corners of her eyes.

The dragon was dragged along as well.  Still imprisoned in nets, thrashing uselessly, it was pulled bodily over the rocky snow by a team
of
chortha.  They snarled and gnashed at their harnesses, struggling with the massive weight.  The awful men whipped the beasts with studded chains, ripping hanks of fur out with each strike.

Fortunately, the troop was not far from their camp.  They clambered up a jagged rise and over its ledge, and Gabriella saw the small valley below them.  It was almost perfectly round, ringed with sharp outcroppings of rock and nestled firmly at the base of Mount Skelter.  The Theatre of the Broken Crown was filled with ranks of rough soldiers, makeshift tents, and smoking campfires.  On its furthest edge, a small citadel stood.  It looked like an overgrown chess rook, made of grey stone and marked only with arrow slits.

The catapult picked up speed as it rocked down the inside slope of the valley.  It jerked Gabriella forwards, making her stumble and eliciting a cry of agony for her broken forearm.  As the caravan entered the camp, soldiers stopped what they were doing to watch.  Gabriella avoided their gaze, but felt their eyes crawling over her unabashedly.  The grounds of the enemy camp were mashed to mud and streaked with puddles.  Smoke rolled between the tents, pressed to the ground by the strange atmosphere of the natural depression.  Large, bloody racks of meat turned slowly on iron spits over greasy fires.  Gabriella shuddered as she looked at them.

She had intended, once she caught her breath, to demand to know what the horrible soldiers meant to do with the dragon.  Now she suspected the ugly truth.  They meant to eat it.

Finally, nearing the centre of the camp, the catapult jerked to a stop.  Brom approached, his feet squelching on the mucky ground.  He unsheathed his sword with a flourish.  Gabriella tried not to flinch as he swung it over her.  There was a hard thunk of metal on wood as his blade cut Gabriella's rope free of the catapult.  He caught the end of it, turned, and gave it a yank, pulling her forwards.

"Stop!" she gasped, slipping on the mud, but it was no use.  He led her down a swampy aisle between two canvas tents.  She tripped over one of the tent's long, wooden stakes and stumbled to the mud, but Brom did not break his stride.  He yanked her forwards almost effortlessly, and Gabriella screamed for her tortured arm.

She was heaved into a larger tent.  As soon as the shadow of it fell over her, the smell of death, fetid throughout the entire camp, became a noxious reek.  Gabriella sucked in a lungful of it involuntarily and wretched.

Brom dropped the rope, and Gabriella collapsed to the floor of the tent, gasping.

For a long minute, there was silence, punctuated only by the ragged tide of Gabriella's breathing as she recovered herself.  Finally, she pushed herself up onto her knees.

The tent was large but very dark.  Complicated shapes loomed—a chair, a table, a rope hung with thick, wet hanks of animal skins and furs, other things that, for the moment, Gabriella could not comprehend.

And Brom.  He stood near the entrance, barely a silhouette in the darkness, his arms dangling loosely at his sides, his tangle of beard bristling.  He was staring at her motionlessly.

Gabriella mustered her resolve and took a deep breath.  "Let me
go
!" she rasped furiously.

Brom did not reply, nor did he move.

Gabriella pulled at the ropes twined about her wrists but immediately collapsed in anguish at her poor broken arm.  Tears of anger and frustration welled in her eyes.  She pushed herself onto her knees again and glared up at the dark figure.

"Take me to him," she seethed through gritted teeth.  "Take me to Merodach.  He will wish to see me.  I am the Princess.  I demand an audience."

Still, Brom did not move.  Gabriella's fury boiled over at him.  She thrashed to her feet and flung herself at his silhouette.

"I… demand… an
audience
!" she shouted, and kicked at her captor.

His fist moved as if of its own accord, catching her just below the jaw.  She tumbled backwards, gasping, sure that the beast had crushed her windpipe.  She blinked past a dizzying wave of greyness and rolled onto her side to catch her breath.

Behind her, a shuffle of fabric sounded.  There was a flash of firelight and a rabble of voices and then darkness again.  Amazingly, without a word, Brom had left.

Gabriella rolled back towards the entrance again, straining her eyes in the dimness.  Two shadows could be seen on the flaps of the tent's door.  There were guards outside of course, each one nearly as tall and vicious as Brom.  There would be no escape that way.

She cast around in the gloom, weak with pain, barely breathing for the thick stench of the place, and her gaze fell upon the mysterious mass she had seen earlier.  It looked familiar, although she could not quite place where she had seen anything like it before.  She crept towards it in the darkness, hissing through her teeth at the pain of her arm.  The stink seemed to be coming from it.

With a wave of horror, Gabriella realised what it reminded her of.  It was like the mound of carcasses heaped in the corner of the dragon's cave.  Only this mound was rather smaller.  And it was not comprised of dead beasts.

Human corpses were piled like rag dolls, most stripped to bare bones streaked black with rotting tissue.  The hands, feet, and heads, however, still bore flesh and skin, as if whatever had consumed the bodies had not wished to waste time on such sparse meat.  Shoes and sandals adorned some of the feet.  Rings glittered on some of the fingers.  A shock of bloody red hair was evident near the edge of the pile.  Gabriella did not wish to look any further, and yet she could not tear her gaze away.  Her eyes widened in the darkness, taking in the hideous sight.  Surely, this was what was to become of her.  Brom was that most awful of all possible villains.  He was an eater of the dead.

But it was worse even than that, and Gabriella knew it.  It was as if Brom himself was dead and yet animated, his corpse haunted by something otherworldly, sustained only by the consumption of more death.

Gabriella shuddered violently.  It was completely insane of course.  It could not be true.  But then she remembered the beast riders that she had encountered earlier in her journey, remembered hacking the arm from one of them and it not even slowing down.  Its eyes, when it had reared on her, had been milky white, utterly blank.  And the severed arm had continued flexing… flexing…

"No wonder Father's army could not defeat them," she said to herself, and her voice was a high tremolo of horror.  "How can you kill something… that's already dead?"

And then, like the final, most devastating blow, Gabriella realised what she had been looking at all along.  It glittered before her, loose on one wasted, pale hand.  It was a gold ring.

It was the mate of the one on her own finger.

"No!" she moaned desperately.  She pushed herself forwards, willing it not to be what she knew it was.  The hand was slender but strong, the fingers curled gently, palm up, as if offering a gift.  The ring was unmistakable.

"Darrick," she sobbed, reaching her bound wrists forwards and touching the cold, pale hand.  "No!  No, no, no…," she repeated helplessly, shaking her head and closing her eyes.  In the darkness, she pressed her hands into his, tried desperately to remember what it had felt like when his fingers were warm and strong.

She could not.

For several minutes, grief swallowed her up.  Nothing else mattered.  She sobbed into the dirt of the floor, still resting her hand in his dead palm.

And then, finally, the pain of her body merged with the agony of her heart and overwhelmed her.  Darkness fell upon her, seamlessly and heavily, and for a long while, she knew no more.

She came back to herself slowly.  She was lying on a dirt floor, surrounded by darkness and the stench of death.  But more nagging even than that, something was tickling her hands.  She moaned and stirred, and a busy squeaking chitter caught her ear.  It was very near.

She startled and thrashed to her knees.  When she opened her eyes in the dimness, she could just make out the shape of a large rodent in the darkness.  It had retreated from her and now stood near the mound of dead bodies.  It was, of course, a rat.

Gabriella shuddered violently.  She hated rats.

"Go away," she hissed at the thing.  It flinched but did not run.  Gabriella raised her bound wrists to shoo it and then stopped.  The thick ropes were frayed into tufts of loose fibre.  They were nearly broken through completely.

The rat had been gnawing her free.

She shuddered again.  She really did hate rats.  And yet…

She lowered her wrists gently towards the ground.  The rat watched this with its beady, black eyes.  Then, haltingly, it moved forwards again.  After an anxious moment, it darted towards her hands.  Gabriella tensed with loathing and clenched her eyes shut.  The rat's tiny, cold feet clambered over her fingers and the backs of her hands.