The Vault of Bones Read Online Free Page A

else helped me to an outer chamber and sat me down, brought me wine, took a wet towel and wiped Anna’s blood from me. They talked to me as men talk to animals, soothing, empty words, and I did not listen, but stared at the plaster of the walls while my thoughts thrashed like a rabbit flayed alive. Horst came in, and Zianni, and many others of the Cormaran, some angry, some weeping, some merely dumb.
    'It must have been a destrier’ said Horst to Gilles. 'A war-horse. Patch said it took her with its forelegs - no untrained beast would do such a thing! Well, have you ever heard of it? I know: I have ridden those creatures into battle. An ill-tempered riding horse will kick out with its hind legs, yes, but ... Christ. Some knight's battle-shy mount, I'd guess. Those creatures should never be taken out in the common street. I'd like to find the fool..
    There was a man’ I started to say, but I trailed off, for the fellow with the scar had not been looking at Anna, not been waiting for us at all, and in truth I had all but forgotten why we had even returned to the Blue Falcon, for now I felt night falling upon me. Except it was not dark, it was a silvery, cold oblivion, drowning me like quicksilver. When at last the Captain came for me I rose like a man in heavy iron mail and plodded after him, each footfall a labour.
    Anna lay there on the bed we had warmed for each other just yesterday, dressed in white linen. Tall candles burned at each corner, the flames invisible in the sunlight. Her face was covered with a square of white muslin, and her brown hands were folded on her belly and held a golden cross. Pavlos the guardsman knelt at her feet, his face buried in the coverlet. He was weeping, and I saw he had torn his clothing. Like a man drugged with henbane I walked, infinitely slowly, through the empty light, until I could see the outline of the face beneath the cloth. With numb fingers I tugged it away.
    One eye was still open. It jutted from its distended socket, an obscene thing, an abomination. The terrible bruise on her cheek and temple had turned a dark, turgid red. Tendrils of black hair pushed from beneath the white strip of cloth that bound her jaw and clamped her mouth into a disapproving line. Gently I placed my fingers upon her cold lips and tried to form something I recognised, some illusion of Anna, of her smile, but they sullenly reset themselves. I bent and kissed them anyway, eyes closed to block out the terrible white orb.

    The Captain was pressing something into my hand. I looked down: it was a thick plait of black hair, tied with thread of gold, no bigger than my thumb. But it glistened with the oily sheen, the crow-shine, the dark light that always hung around Anna: her own stormy nimbus.

    I tried to pull the cloth back over her face but one of my fingers brushed her eye, and at the touch of it I came undone. I tried to gather her rigid form into my arms but whether I did, and what I did after I cannot tell, for I do not remember. There is a memory of a terrible sound that perhaps tore itself from me, and a confusion, as comes with a dreadful, racking fever, and then nothing. I will relate what came to pass in the days that followed, but it will be a cold telling, for I was not really present. Everything had become a grey blur. Anna’s strange letter was put away with her things and I forgot that it had ever existed. I walked and talked, but my soul had followed Anna down through whatever appalling drift had engulfed her and I had no more life in me than does a revenant.
    We buried her in the Church of Saint Faith Under Saint Paul's. Cormaran gold bought the services of a reluctant, hand-wringing priest, for only the communion of money could induce the Church to treat the mortal remains of an unwed, schismatic woman with any sort of deference. The only mourners were the Cormaran’s crew, but even so the little church, which stands in the shadow of the great, ugly cathedral, was full. The Greeks could