by Rance » Mon Oct 07, 2013 2:59 am
She said nothing.
Minutes passed. An hour. The Sun kept beating down upon them, a late summer swansong for the heat -- the warmer season's autoelegy. He may have had the taste of ashes in his mouth, but she had the discontent of bile in hers, a nausea that she had to fight back as he apostrophized. She was absent, not in body, but in conscience -- she worked the thread along the branches, tying it when its tension became too great, all the mechanical acts of a girl who thought she was doing some good, some helpful deed.
You were supposed to stay Wynsee. You had seen everything. You had cared.
Sometimes her collarbone still burned with phosphorescent heat when she remembered the brooch -- Rhaena's brooch -- she used to wear. Occasionally she turned her head and looked upon the creases and bends of the labyrinth behind them, wondering if she would see Cherny there, resplendent in ringed mail; sometimes, she spied a glimpse of Catch's striking platinum hair over the hedges, but it was never anything more than an illusion of the Sun, a trick of the mind. Noura was a trampled shadow and Niall's body was a rotten corpse stuffed beneath the tangled gutters beneath the hedgerows.
There is blood on your hands, some your own, some not.
Golben stank -- the leady, prying odor of old gore, the acrid reek of feces. The spoor of the dead. Bodies reduced to their base parts, nothing more than leather and bone. Mildew. Mold. Rot in her nose, calcified just inside her nostrils.
(There was nothing more than hedgerows here, so many of them, planted equal spaces apart and all shaped and cut just so, green soldiers with green shields that would wither and die come the new season and then maybe they could burn it, maybe they could burn this place and Giuseppe in it and watch as the whole pit filled with flame, choking away all the bad memories in a swath of greasy woodsmoke--)
"Stop talking," she stammered -- I chose you for a reason but you ever disappoint -- as the spool of thread slipped from her fingers and she strode forward, not further into Golben but toward the Black Man. His words got louder, clogging her ears and nostrils, blurring her eyes with tears, strangling her. Patchwork skirts flared around her legs and tangled in her piston-knees.
Palms were out, black with sweat and smeared with red from her broken nose.
"Stop talking," she breathed, reaching for him.
The seamstress' digits pried at his sleeves, at his shirt, trying to turn him, a force in her hands that was both desperate and necessary and natural. The girl didn't realize she was screaming, sobbing so hard that her stomach lurched and her throat burned with ashes too--
Cherny was a frozen image, his falchion already falling, the blood suspended in the air like hovering rubies. Niall's spine was an opened fillet, cut too deep, cut too precisely by the boy's blade for life to persevere.
Catch stopped calling her Miss, looked upon her with Black Smoke roiling in his eyes, the lunatick on paper now because what had he to trust in her anymore, no more ganorlesh, no more anything--
"Stop talking. Stop talking. Stop talking!" she bellowed, trying to push Giuseppe against one of the hedges, her lips parted enough that little strings of saliva stretched like ribbons between them. Her gloved fist fell as a hammer, a sloppy strike that wanted to break into his chest and shatter everything, everything, everything.