A Different Kingdom(111)

To the south, beyond the black crag the Horseman's Castle occupied, there was a white country of windscoured buttes and escarpments rising ever higher until at the end of sight the moon set alight the far shapes of mountains, snow-covered, sharp as horns. Even at this distance he could feel their height and coldness. Thousands of feet of barren, ice-bitten stone extending like some savage barrier along the south of the world. He knew now why some of the forest people believed them to be the rim of the earth with nothing but a star-filled gulf beyond them.

The castle overtopped him, towering and dark. He was nearly there, and his strength was almost finished. Pausing, he saw that there was a rime-white road leading around the circumference of the crag, winding like a helter-skelter until it disappeared far above.

He groaned. His injured arm had lost all feeling up to the biceps, but his broken ribs were protesting incessantly and the raking clawmarks of the wolf were oozing blood. Blood that was crystallizing even as he stood. The cold had deepened. It was a raw, numbing thing that ate towards his marrow. He could no longer feel his feet and he could sense tiny ice particles crackling in his nose.

'Jesus,' he stuttered, shuddering. He had not expected this.

Had he really seen Cat in the wood or had it been his own fancy? He looked up at the winding road ahead.

Can't—can't do it.

He was shoved forward roughly—he distinctly felt a pair of hands in the small of his back—but when he spun round there was nothing there. He cursed rabidly.

'All right! If that's what you want then I'll do it!'

And he started stumbling forward up the last, spiralling road.

He was swearing and mumbling as he went, trying to talk himself up it. But the steep incline and the bitter cold stole the breath from his lungs after a while so that he was wheezing and panting for breath, and he was clenched into silence. Stopping once to spit out the phlegm that was crowding the back of his throat, he saw it land dark and clotted on the snow and knew that his wayward ribs had punctured a lung. But still he battled upwards. There was nowhere else to go.

He slipped on slick stone and fell, his head cracking on the ground. The darkness whirled in on him and for a while he had the strangest sensation: that he was warm and beside the kitchen range at home. The heat was glowing over him and warming his toes. His shudderings eased. But the woodsman part of him would not let him rest. Hypothermia, it said. Get up. But it was not his own voice telling him that.

He opened his frost-whitened eyelashes to see Cat leaning over him. She was dressed only in the white shift he had first seen her in, but she did not seem to feel the cold.

He smiled. That white shift. She had worn it for so long. It looked like a hospital shift, the type they gave out to expectant mothers. He wondered why he had never noticed that before.

She was looking at him mutely and he sighed.

'All right.'

He wriggled to his hand and knees, then to his feet. There were white blotches on his fingers and the back of his free hand. God, he was tired.

'Damn you, Cat.' But he lurched onwards nonetheless.

It seemed as though he had been travelling for many hours, but there was no lightening of the sky to the east, no sign of the dawn, and as far as he could see the moon had scarcely moved. There was no Great Bear in this sky to tell the time by. He wondered if the Horseman was keeping the land in shadow to impede his climb. Or maybe his sense of time was awry. Everything else was.

And he was there.

Just like that. He wheezed a chuckle that turned into a bloody, agonized cough.

The castle walls reared up black and shining before him ¬fifty, seventy feet maybe, with not a joint or crack or squeeze of mortar to be seen. There were cobbles underfoot—the snow was a white skim here, no more—and a cold wind winnowed the crag around him, He was too far gone even to shiver.

A gateway yawned, black and high.

There was a dry moat, cut like a dark chasm in the very rock of the hill. Spanning it was a crumbling stone bridge that led to the gaping portal. Like the bridge at home, he thought. A doorway. He knew he must go through it, and knew also that he had to be swift, for life and consciousness were ebbing away. His body was hardy and stubborn yet, despite the years of abuse; but he was human, after all. Mortal.

He staggered through the gateway.

'Cat! Are you here?'

Vast buildings reared up around a huge courtyard. There was a barbican behind him with pointed towers, then a broad walk into the square. A well was in the middle, broken in on itself.

The buildings were in ruins, walls fallen in, roofs gaping, slates and rubble littering the cobbles along with the rotted ends of once-mighty oak beams. Michael scuffled through the detritus of centuries as he walked. Broken swords, fragments of chain mail, bones and skulls. Earthenware and copper pots, glinting trinkets that caught the moonlight and sparkled icily. All strewn across the cobbles like rice after a wedding. Derelict. The place was empty.