The Dark Remains - Mark Anthony [32]
A faint sound reached Durge’s ear—a soft scrabbling—and he came to a halt. He peered into the dimness, but though his eyes remained sharp, he could not make out a thing. Still, instinct told him he was not alone. His rough hand slipped to the knife at his belt.
“Show yourself, shadow,” he said.
A faint noise drifted on the air—like mirth, or perhaps like a song—and the hairs on Durge’s arms stood up. Was it the ghosts again, returning to remind him of what never could change? He took a step backward. As he did, something dropped down from the rafters and landed with a plop before him, looking like nothing so much as a great, gangly spider—a spider clad in green, with jangling bells on his cap and pointed shoes.
Durge let out his breath and let go of the knife. In a way he had been right; it had indeed been a ghost stalking him, only this was the still-living kind.
“Out of my way, Fool,” he rumbled.
Tharkis hopped from foot to foot, tapping the tips of his spindly fingers together, his perpetually crossed eyes looking at Durge in alternation.
“Where are you going, dreary old knight?
Do you not have a dragon to fight?
Did the beast hear you sneaking
From your bones and joints creaking,
And spread its wings and take flight?
“Or is there another reason you’re here?
More than a beast—a thing that you fear.
Can eyes of blue and hair black as night
Be harder to bear than a dragon’s bite?
Yes, flee from what you hold dear.”
Durge felt anger set fire to his veins, but he clenched his jaw and forced his blood to cool. It was Master Tharkis’s game to get a rise out of others, and Durge did not intend to hand him a victory. A king he might have been, but Durge knew things changed—that people changed. All Tharkis was at present was a nuisance.
“I said out of my way, Fool. Do not think I won’t remove you from my path if need be.”
Tharkis trembled in mock apprehension, the bells of his costume jingling. “Oh, dread knight, please spare me do—for news of your quarry I bring to you.”
Durge frowned. He knew it was dangerous even to listen to the fool’s words—they were crafted to baffle and befuddle—but all the same the question escaped him.
“What quarry do you mean?”
Tharkis grinned, displaying rotten teeth. “The spiders of course—the weavers of webs. Has the moon lady not sent you to follow their threads?”
“What do you know of that? Were you there in the library, listening to us?” Durge advanced, fist raised. “Tell me, Fool, or I’ll throttle it out of you.”
Tharkis scampered back a step. “No, no, fearsome knight, I heard not a thing. There’s no need for Fool’s poor neck to wring. But I know things, I do—I cannot say how. They come to me sometimes. They come to me now.”
Durge lowered his fist. Something about the fool altered even as he watched; the mad grin faded from Tharkis’s lips, and his wandering eyes grew distant.
“What do you mean, Fool? How do you know things?”
Tharkis pressed his thin body against the stone wall. “I think … I think it is part of what was done to me.” He licked his lips, whispering now. “There’s so much—it’s all right there. I can see everything. The eyes … the eyes are in the trees, and the shadows are reaching out for me. I fall, and my horse runs, and I run … but the shadows are too swift. They have me.”
Durge stared at the fool. Only dimly did it register on him that Tharkis was no longer speaking in verse.
The fool coiled his bony arms around his skull. “There’s too much, too much. I can see everything that happened, but it’s all in pieces, like a thousand broken mirrors I can’t put back together. Only the rhymes … only the rhymes make sense. Only they fit together. The shadows are in my head.…”
Tharkis went stiff, his mouth opening and closing like a fish on dry land. Durge hesitated, then reached out for him.
A bony hand batted him back. The fool sprang away in a neat flip. His crossed eyes were bright again, and his grin had returned, splitting his gaunt face from side to side.
“You can’t catch me, my