D:L&L - Part 20 | Narrator: Taste of Bones
It was coming; she could taste it on the wind. It tasted like smooth steel and fresh snow slush. It tasted like oil and rust and burning rubber. It tasted like muddy water and grease. It screamed in the valley below.
Or it was just the howling of the wind, she assured herself, climbing the black cliffs and whistling through the empty corridors of Kiamo Ko. The thing – it was too far away to scream itself, so it had sent the wind to howl its agony, to wail its lament. It was lost, she knew – searching, wanting, needing, aching for a something, a something it could not find. It was empty inside, but driven.
Usling leaned up on her toes to peer out over the crude stone of the parapet. Somewhere out there, she thought, it was coming. She ducked as another brutal blast of icy wind licked the east face of the fortress, then she pulled the thin shift around her bones, and she shuffled across the rough floor to the steep steps. She stopped at the top of the winding stair, hunched over nearly double, and lapped the air again – oil and rust. It was coming.
She took the steps carefully, her eyes wide in the impenetrable dark of the secret passage. Her hands knew the precise location of the catch, and the door swung open easily. She stepped into the small chamber, lurching quickly clear of the door as it closed and became one with the wall again. It had caught her foot once, and she was sure she would have gnawed it off if the broomstick hadn’t been within reach. Every time she stole through to the hidden stair to the high tower, she relived that moment and glanced at the broomstick – it would never leave its spot again, no matter how much dust gathered.
Inside, out of the driving wind, the chamber was warmer, but Usling’s bones needed more. It was dark now, and the thing was still some way off. She could risk a fire – the black sky would hide the smoke; the wind would drive it down the cliffs and away from the approaches of the castle. They wouldn’t find her. They would never know she was here, she assured herself, if she was careful. A little fire wouldn’t hurt, and it would do her bones good, she thought, so she set about the kindling in the hearth and mumbled a short word and watched the flames lick up blue and yellow and red.
Nearby, she could see her bounty laid out on the rotting table: two small rat bodies, their heads and tails neatly removed, skewered and waiting. She’d caught them in the morning, stunned them with a word. Then she’d scrubbed the rough fur off with her sharp rock, the same one she used to remove the heads and tails. It would have been so handy, she thought once again, to still have the knife, but she wasn’t going to venture down into the castle proper again to get it. What she had found there…what she had found there!
Usling shuddered and focused on the meat. The skewers she arranged neatly over the hearth and already the warmth of the fire and the savory aroma of the meat had begun to fill the small room. She licked her thin lips and pushed her stringy gray hair from her face with a wrinkled claw. She grabbed the small bag from her pocket and squatted in front of the fire. Another look – she needed to see it again. The signs had been right. She’d tasted it on the wind – the thing coming here. But what was it? What would it do? Would the dark places in the castle destroy it? It couldn’t know what was lurking there, could it?
She shook the bag and then spilled its contents. The bones clattered onto the stone floor, bouncing off her toes and coming to rest in a pattern that was at once familiar and yet wholly unexpected. So that was it then, she thought. The bones were always right. The bones had never lied to her, and now they were telling her that she was about to face the thing she feared most.
