Companions on the Road by Tanith Lee

Author:Tanith Lee [Lee, Tanith]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, General, Science Fiction
ISBN: 9781473206236
Google: BN0nBQAAQBAJ
Publisher: Orion
Published: 2014-11-27T05:00:00+00:00

Havor opened his eyes to a dawn sky netted with cobweb clouds, the sun a decaying rose behind them.

He was very cold, very cramped. He had slept deeply, and the heaviness of that sleep was still on him. The fire was out.

He rose stiffly, stretching, not aware yet of anything wrong, or any expectancy that it should be so. Then, as he bent to kindle a flame again among the wood, he noticed that Feluce was gone.

He turned at once to look at the Chalice, and saw it filling the sack, as before. He saw Feluce’s blanket on the ground where he had rolled himself in it. The three horses waited, shivering, where they had been tethered.

Havor trudged across the broken paving to one of the many huge rents in the mansion’s sides, and stared out. Unbroken snow, packed hard, black bone woods. No smoke, no noise, no speck of life.

Havor came back and stood by the grey dead fire. After a time, he called, “Feluce!”

Somewhere old timber cracked in the cold. Nothing else answered him.

Havor crossed the gaping, characterless expanse, picking between the holes and the jagged debris where the roof had come down. He went through a place where there had been double doors, and, beyond, the floor was thick and winking with a tiny crushed glitter of coloured glass.

It had been a banqueting hall, he saw; he noted the long, metal table, twisted from the heat of the fire. A huge beam had fallen across it.

There was an arch in the wall, and after that a piece of a room, opened above and on two sides to the biting winter day. In the middle of the floor lay a stagnant shallow pool, the water scaled over above with a crackling greenish ice, though near the pool’s lip the ice had been broken and scattered.

Havor went close, and looked down.

He looked through murk and shadows and ice and stray reflections of the sky, straight into a pair of wide-open eyes.

A deadly sick realisation gripped Havor, like a fog in his throat and brain.

Feluce lay under the pool, which had been just deep enough to drown him. And, as Havor gazed down into that fixed, returning gaze, something stirred a little, coming to the surface. A handful of hair, a long, golden, shining eddy, turning now on a small wind-created current.

I am next, then, Havor thought. And fear, the expected guest, came through the open door, into his mind.

He went to the horses and mounted the black, leading the other two as he had led Kachil’s yesterday. The wind blew claws, but he scarcely felt them. The Chalice jolted at his knee, hanging from the saddle.

Half a mile from the ruin he looked back, over his shoulder, along the way. There was something there, a shadow-shape, a reflection, a cloud.

Alone, he still had company on the road. Would have it till he died.

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