North Dark | Chapter 21 of 21
His wooden mask, sawn in two, lies on the floor. He lifts it up, fits the pieces back together, returns the mask to his face.
The dog teams are strapped and loaded with burdens of medicine, coffee beans, blocks of fat, dry grains, campstoves, tools, crossbows and bolts. Otherwise, the company of immunes outfits themselves in the clothes of their captors. Heavy cloaks and parkas, layers of goosedown, blankets, hoods, boots, greaves and snowshoes.
Two Crows watches everyone gather themselves and prepare to leave. Some of the men stand grouped near an old man.
“What is it?” Thrall asks them. “What’s wrong?”
“He’s not coming with us,” one of the men says, nodding toward the old man kneeling in the snow, staring at the ground. It is the dog man.
Two Crows understands. They will not let the dog man leave and they will not let him live. Two Crows looks to Thrall.
“Step away from him,” Thrall says.
The men look at one another, and after a moment, leave the dog man’s side.
“Stand up,” Thrall says.
The dog man will not lift his eyes from the ground. His face reddens. He knows everyone is watching him. Slowly, bones creaking, he climbs to his feet.
Thrall looks out at all the immunes. “He didn’t use his horn when he had the chance. He didn’t give us away. And now we’re free.”
No one responds.
“The slate is clean,” Thrall says, and walks away.
The crowd looks at one another, not at the dog man, and slowly they disperse.
Before they all set out, Two Crows returns alone to the chamber in which he was first held. His wooden mask, sawn in two, lies on the floor. He lifts it up, fits the pieces back together, returns the mask to his face. He rips some stiff and filthy material from the collar of a dead guard and uses it to tie the pieces of wood to his head.
“Why haven’t you killed him yet?” Obsidian says. “Go! Make your move now!” He shoves Two Crows hard in the chest with both hands.
Two Crows stares at Obsidian’s black, ghoulish face. He is a creature of stoneflesh, a standing halfgiant. Not one ounce of him human.
Obsidian sneers in frustration and whips a steely hand across Two Crows’ face. He drops to the ground and Obsidian hoists him up by his shoulders. Growling, he throws Two Crows into the wall, upsetting a shelf of IV bags and coils of tubes. Two Crows will not fight back. His injured, broken body falls entirely limp as the volcanic creature batters him with openhanded blows to the head and face. Obsidian piles atop him and closes his frozen fingers around his throat. Two Crows recalls, vividly, a moment of fevered, anguished life: he once throttled his own father like this. Two Crows pushes Obsidian aside, remembering how he himself was once pushed from his father’s body. Two Crows had reached into the fire and struck Treesplitter with what he had found there. Obsidian now reaches back a sharpcut glacier of a hand and swings it across Two Crows’ face, driving him across the room and to the floor. Obsidian rises and stands over the broken mess that is Two Crows and says, “You have no choice in this. You must kill him.”
Sobbing tearlessly, breathing pained and halting breaths, Two Crows concedes: I will.
The crowd of immunes waits by the gathered teams of sled dogs. They are all ready to head out into the night. All eyes are upon the man called Thrall. Two Crows sees very clearly that everyone here is entirely dependent on him. And once they set out, they will be infinitely more so. When they are adrift in a winter world without boundary or direction, they will have no other leader, no other hope, but the man who can untangle the riot of stars, who can look at other worlds and use their signs to navigate his own way on this one. If he were to go down, then so would each soul here, without exception.
Two Crows sees this and understands, vividly, that to murder Thrall would be to also kill every one of the immunes’ number. He sets off with them into the wild.
They walk slowly off the mountain and mush for nights on the open tundra, contending all the while with icy wind and raw air. They pass nothing but dead wildlife which they collect and eat over campfires in the daylight. No birds fly overhead and nothing moves on the landscape in any direction but for the windy blue snakes of air, eeling and twisting like phantoms on the rim of the visible horizon. They do sight a small ragged group of Maunders on the tundra, but they run away needlessly. With little frequency, the immunes pass by the curled and contorted bodies of dead men and women. Dressed in winter gear and dusted in snow, they look only like grotesque sculptures on the tundra floor. Every face a tumorous knob of ice. Every finger outstretched toward the glow of stars as though in accusation.
Finally, they come upon a meltwater river and, under Thrall’s direction, they cut trees and build a number of rafts and oars. They set the dogs loose to run alongside the river. The immunes travel downstream for three full days before they abandon the crafts and walk into a town ravaged by plague and emptied of real life. They sleep in beds. For some of them, it is the first bedsleep they have had in years.
At a late hour, Two Crows walks the street lined with frozen corpses as though he were touring a gallery of haunted sculptures and falls to his knees under the moonlight. He weeps, thinking of his father, his brothers, all that he has lost and how twisted this unrecognizable wretch that is his life has become.
“If you don’t do it now, you never will. This is your last chance.”
Thrall builds a small campfire in an empty alleyway. It is very late and very dark. He and Two Crows sit beside it, in silence, staring at the rippling white fire and the reflected white light of it flapping like sheets on the brick walls of the buildingsides.
Finally, Thrall says, “Have you always been mute?”
No.
“You probably have a long story to tell.”
Two Crows scratches the skin above his lost eye.
After a long period of silence, Thrall speaks again. “I had a wife. She was taken from me… Made into a slave. That is why I do what I do.”
Two Crows stares at Thrall for a long time. He reaches down into the snow and draws a star with his finger.
Thrall looks at the star and then back at Two Crows, he says, “I was made into a slave as well. My keepers put me to work on a boat. They taught me to read the stars so I could navigate other ships… find other slaves. They shouldn’t have taught me star reading; I used it against them, crashed their boat and escaped… I’ve been traveling for years… looking for my wife.”
A blow of wind moves the fire, trembling and dimming the light.
“A world this cold…” Thrall says, “it shows you what we’re capable of.”
The fire snaps and spits and that is the only sound.
At first bleary light, Two Crows works the edge of obsidian from his mask and fits it into a stalk of oak, fashioning a short spear similar in length to his old fire iron.
He walks the township until he spies Thrall, alone, readying the dogteams. Two Crows moves toward him, weapon in hand.
Thrall looks at him and nods. “We should be ready to leave soon.”
Two Crows nods.
“How’s the chest? And the wrist?”
Two Crows flexes the muscles in his arm. He will drive his weapon into Thrall’s throat.
Beyond them, a musher travels on the tundra, coming through a swirl of snow and light. He rides toward them both; he is coming into town. The musher pilots a team of dogs, twenty animals strong, their tongues awag. His long cloak flaps behind him. An expensive poleaxe stands strapped to his back. He wears goggles, a hood, a belt of knives across his chest. This is a man asking for war.
The musher is Ramscoat, Two Crows’ eldest brother.
He rides up to Thrall and Two Crows and stops his dogs. He steps off the runners, approaches the men, and lowers his goggles. “Hallo,” he says, cheerfully.
Thrall nods.
Ramscoat looks at Two Crows, does not recognize him beneath the wooden mask and the mask of injuries, then looks again at Thrall. “You all are the first people I’ve seen in days. You’re not sick?”
“No,” Thrall says. “You either?”
“No. Immune. I’m looking for my brother, a man of twenty. He’s injured and probably does not speak. If he’s even alive.”
Thrall looks at Two Crows, then back at Ramscoat. “I haven’t seen him.”
Ramscoat looks at Two Crows. “What about you?”
He shakes his head no.
“Do you not speak?”
Thrall says, “He doesn’t. Never in all his life. This is my brother.” He looks at Two Crows.
Two Crows looks at Thrall. Ramscoat looks at Thrall also.
“All right,” Ramscoat says. “Good luck to you both.” He returns his goggles to his windburnt face, steps back onto his sled, shouts the dogs forward and rides further into town.
Once Ramscoat has passed beyond earshot, and silence and wind fill the air again, Two Crows looks at Thrall. He opens his mouth and with a tortured, scraping voice that he has never heard before, says, “Thank you.”
It is not many days later when Two Crows is awakened at night by the sound of a beast lumbering in the woods. Two Crows opens his tent flaps and stares out into the darkness with his one functioning eye and spies some enormous, shadowed creature wrestling with itself in the snow. All of the other tents in the camp are still. No one else hears the movement out there. In the starlight, there is little to see at first, but after a long moment spent in focus he is able to discern a strong, muscled lifeform, skinned in reflective glass, black as obsidian, twisting and rolling in the snow and dirt. Growling, the creature stands, unfolds itself, and though it is not a man—was never a man—it walks upright into the darkness and merges with it. The glint of reflected light blinks out. Wolves howl.
Alone, Two Crows leaves his tent and walks down through the woods. The moon is very low in the sky. At a place in the wild, he kneels down and listens to the early squawk and natter of birds and feels in his humming bones that some incredible burden has been lifted from him. He kneels and cries into the heels of his hands.
The dog teams back at the immunes’ camp stir and bark. They are ready to move on. Soon, the company of immunes, led by Thrall, this new brother, will leave and Two Crows will be among them—one of a new family, one among a new, heartstrong tribe. He does not know where they will go or what the remaining, unspent portion of his life will be, but he knows that after accidentally crushing one home, he has accidentally found a new one. He listens to those dogs through the dark trees. He listens to their bark and huff: the noise of blood, energy, future. He stands, inhales the cold wild air, and follows their sound.