Chapter Seventeen The Records and Findings of Benedict Castor the First #3
It was afternoon. We’d been jostling in the carriage and reading for two hours and I’d lost my patience ninety minutes ago.
“Listen to this tripe: ‘The sprite exceeds even its own oddity; it hardly ever breeds. Rarely in any hamlet have I observed mating habits, newborn creatures remaining young for a long while—indeed I have reason to believe the life cycle of a sprite is triple, or perhaps even quadruple, that of a human.’”
“What’s he doing, tromping around, looking for a pair of rutting sprites?” The gargoyle made a face. “Bit of a pervert, this king.”
I flipped through twenty more pages, then ten more.
“Wait.” I turned back six pages. There, in delicate inky lines in his book, an enormous beast was drawn.
An ox. Its body was long and wide and, from what I could tell, made of stone.
Bromegrass and gowan flowers grew from it.
Its tail was that of a snake—it had claws as well as hooves.
Its eyes, pale and entirely without pupil, were just like the gargoyle’s and mine. Stone.
Der ewige Mond.
I pointed to the passage beneath it. “What do you make of this?
‘The sprite dies like any animal slain, but does not suffer decay, nor does it rot or become food for other sprites or a home to maggots. Indeed, if left to rest (not commonplace in hamlets that burn their dead), the sprite lays heavy upon the earth, slowly succumbing to grass or rock or water. It sprouts gowan flowers from its body and, simply put, becomes the very landscape upon which it fell.’
“Bizarre,” I muttered.
“Keep reading,” the gargoyle said.
“‘Stranger still, the sprite leaves no skeleton behind. Indeed I have dug, searching moorland and woodland, beaches and muddy ravines, for bones that are not there. Once, I found a water sprite with a blade in her stomach. She’d crawled onto the embankment and died under the generous shade of a great oak. I buried her where she lay and came back a full year later to a meadow of gowans. But the great oak! It was dying. I dug beneath the gowans and found no bones—all that was left of the sprite was a stone. It had crushed several of the oak’s roots, depriving the tree of water.
Limestone, it was. Heavy and hard and without flaw—just like that which sits on the tor. ’”
I looked up at the gargoyle, lifting—straining—to understand a truth that lingered just out of sight. “The story always seems to return to one place, doesn’t it? It always returns to the tor.”
He nodded solemnly.
The carriage rumbled, jolting, the road growing rockier.
When I looked out the window, the entire caravan was shrouded in mist, heavy, dense, bleak.
It stole our noise, our vision; I could barely see the next knight, riding ten paces next to us.
I jostled, listening for signs that we were drawing closer to the Peaks—for the lulling sound of the Tenor River—but I never heard it. The air was too thick.
Another violent jolt shook the carriage. We came to an abrasive halt. “Maude?”
The door ripped open. Maude’s face was pinched. “We broke a wheel. There’s a cart ahead. Come on.”
The gargoyle and I spilled out of the carriage and were immediately swathed in grayness. Beyond, I could hear the knights and their horses, their shapes reduced to eerie silhouettes in the thick blanket of mist. Maude led us to the cart, and I handed the gargoyle in.
Something the size of a dog whipped by my legs.
I jolted, but the creature had already disappeared into the mist.
Up ahead, a horse screamed. A cracking, groaning sound seeped through the heavy air. Knights began to shout. I heard the word I always did when the sound of steel, of swords being drawn, filled the air.
Sprites.
Maude drew her axe. “Get in the cart,” she told me, peering into the gray landscape. The cracking sounds had grown louder, and with them, the heavy knell of footsteps. Something was out there in the mist.
Another creature whipped by me, blowing cold air in my face. Then another—then ten more. I held in a scream and clung to the cart.
Craggy hands. Jagged teeth. Gray textured skin that might be mistaken for shale. These were sprites that lived high in the mountains. The ones I’d seen in the Ardent Oarsman’s castle.
And they were running. Fleeing under the cover of mist, going west, back from whence we’d come.
A moment later their footsteps quieted, and the air went still. Maude’s blade hadn’t fallen on a single sprite—none had attacked. We stared at each other, the bewilderment on her face matching my own. “Where are they going?”
She shook her head. “I don’t know.”
On we traveled. But the path to the Fervent Peaks had changed since I’d last traversed it. There were holes in the road. Dark, yawning chasms that opened into the ground, crumbling and wildly unstable.
“Watch it!” I heard a knight call from the mist ahead. A second later, Maude jerked the reins, the cart barely avoiding a collapsing gap in the road.
Cloying apprehension nestled into my chest.
“Look,” called the gargoyle. “There’s a bit of clear sky ahead.”
We chased it for the next hour, several knights patrolling for sprites. There were times we had to abandon the road altogether, rolling over chunks of rock and fields to avoid more collapsing holes.
Slowly the mist began to dissipate, the evening sky a haze of purple, the road finally clear. We all looked ahead, the knights cheering—then going immediately silent. Maude gasped, and I put a hand to my throat, staring up at seven jagged mountains ahead.
Only there were no longer seven of them. There were six. The Fervent Peaks, Traum’s proud, indefatigable mountain range—
Were crumbling.