“No.”
“You will never see her then.”
“Are you threatening me?”
Dvorak sighed and his overcoat shivered with the blades of a hundred knives.
“You will come with me.”
“You’ve already said that.”
“Then you will not come?”
“No.”
Dvorak punched Dradin in the stomach. The blow felt like an iron ball. All the breath went out of Dradin. The sky spun above him. He doubled over. The side of Dvorak’s shoe caught him in the temple, a deep searing pain. Dradin fell heavily on the slick slime and glass of the cobblestones. Glass cut into his palms, his legs, as he twisted and groaned. He tried, groggily, to get to his feet. Dvorak’s shoe exploded against his ribs. He screamed, fell onto his side where he lay unmoving, unable to breathe except in gasps. Clammy hands put a noose of hemp around his neck, pulled it taut, brought his head up off the ground.
Dvorak held a long, slender blade to Dradin’s neck and pulled at the hemp until Dradin was on his knees, looking up into the mottled face. Dradin gasped despite his pain, for it was a different face than only moments before.
Dvorak’s features were a sea of conflicting emotions, his mouth twisted to express fear, jealousy, sadness, joy, hatred, as if by encompassing a map of the world he had somehow encompassed all of worldly experience, and that it had driven him mad. In Dvorak’s eyes, Dradin saw the dwarf’s true detachment from the world and on Dvorak’s face he saw the beatific smile of the truly damned, for the face, the flesh, still held the memory of emotion, even if the mind behind the flesh had forgotten.
“In the name of God, Dvorak,” Dradin said.
Dvorak’s mouth opened and the tongue clacked down and the voice came, distant and thin as memory, “You are coming with me, sir. On your feet.”
Dvorak pulled savagely on the rope. Dradin gurgled and forced his fingers between the rope and his neck.
“On your feet, I said.”
Dradin groaned and rolled over. “I can’t.”
The knife jabbed into the back of his neck. “Soft! Get up, or I’ll kill you here.”
Dradin forced himself up, though his head was woozy and his stomach felt punctured beyond repair. He avoided looking down into Dvorak’s eyes. To look would only confirm that he was dealing with a monster
“I am a priest.”
“I know you are a priest,” Dvorak said.
“Your soul will burn in hell,” Dradin said.
A burst of laughter. “I was born there, sir. My face reflects its flames. Now, you will walk ahead of me. You will not run. You will not raise your voice. If you do, I shall choke you and gut you where you stand.”
“I have money,” Dradin said heavily, still trying to let air into his lungs. “I have gold.”
“And we will take it. Walk! There is not much time.”
“Where are we going?”
“You will know when we get there.”
When Dradin still did not move, Dvorak shoved him forward. Dradin began to walk, Dvorak so close behind he imagined he could feel the point of the blade against the small of his back.
The green light of the moon stained everything except the bonfires the color of toads and dead grass. The bonfires called with their siren song of flame until crowds gathered at each one to dance, shout, and fight. Dradin soon saw that Dvorak’s route—through alley after alley, over barricades—was intended to avoid the bonfires. There was now no cool wind in all the city, for around every corner they turned, the harsh rasp of the bonfires met them. To all sides, buildings sprang up out of the fog—dark, silent, menacing.
As they crossed a bridge, over murky water thick with sewage and the flotsam of the festivities, a man hobbled toward them. His left ear had been severed from his head. He cradled part of someone’s leg in his arms. He moaned and when he saw Dradin, Dvorak masked by shadow, he shouted, “Stop them! Stop them!” only to continue on into the darkness, and Dradin helpless anyway. Soon after, following the trail of blood, a hooting mob of ten or twelve youths came a-hunting, tawny-limbed and fresh for the kill. They yelled catcalls and taunted Dradin, but when they saw that he was a prisoner they turned their attentions back to their own prey.
The buildings became black shadows tinged green, the street under foot rough and ill hewn. A wall stood to either side.
A deep sliver of fear pulled Dradin’s nerves taut. “How much further?” he asked.
“Not far. Not far at all.”
The mist deepened until Dradin could not tell the difference between the world with his eyes shut and the world with his eyes open. Dradin sensed the scuffle of feet on the pavement behind and in front, and the darkness became claustrophobic, close with the scent of rot and decay.
“We are being followed,” Dradin said.
“You are mistaken.”
“I hear them!”
“Shut up! It’s not far. Trust me.”
“Trust me?” Did Dvorak realize the irony of those words? How foolish that they should converse at all, the knife at his back and the hushed breathing from behind and ahead, stalking them. Fear raised the hairs along his arms and heightened his senses, distorting and magnifying every sound.
Their journey ended where the trees were less thick and the fog had been swept aside. Walls did indeed cordon them in, gray walls that ended abruptly ten feet ahead in a welter of shadows that rustled and quivered like dead leaves lifted by the wind, but there was no wind.
Dradin’s temples pounded and his breath caught in his throat. On another street, parallel but out of sight, a clock doled out the hours, one through eleven, and revelers tooted on horns or screamed out names or called to the moon in weeping, distant, fading voices.
Dvorak shoved Dradin forward until they came to an open gate, ornately filigreed, and beyond the gate, through the bars, the brooding headstones of a vast graveyard. Mausoleums and memorials, single tombs and groups, families dead together under the thick humus, the young and the old alike feeding the worms, feeding the earth.
The graveyard was overgrown with grass and weeds so that the headstones swam in a sea of green. Beyond these fading statements of life after death writ upon the fissured stones, riven and made secretive by the moonlight, lay the broken husks of trains, haphazard and strewn across the landscape. The twisted metal of engines, freight cars, and cabooses gleamed darkly green and the patina of broken glass windows, held together by moss, shone especially bright, like vast, reflective eyes. Eyes that still held a glimmer of the past when coal had coursed through their engines like blood and brimstone, and their compartments had been busy with the footsteps of those same people who now lay beneath the earth.
The industrial district. Dradin was in the industrial district and now he knew that due south was his hostel and southwest was Hoegbotton & Sons, and the River Moth beyond it.
“I do not see her,” Dradin said, to avoid looking ahead to the squirming shadows.
Dvorak’s face as the dwarf turned to him was a sickly green and his mouth a cruel slit of darkness. “Should you see her, do you think? I am leading you to a graveyard, missionary. Pray, if you wish.”
At those words, Dradin would have run, would have taken off into the mist, not caring if Dvorak found him and gutted him, such was his terror. But then the creeping tread of the creatures resolved itself. The sound grew louder, coming up behind and ahead of him. As he watched, the shadows became shapes and then figures, until he could see the glinty eyes and glinty knives of a legion of silent, waiting mushroom dwellers. Behind them, hopping and rustling, came toads and rats, their eyes bright with darkness. The sky thickened with the swooping shapes of bats.