They found him before they reached the cathedral. Not inside it. Not among the survivors at the gates. Not even in the small village at the foot of the cathedral hill. They found him halfway down the road, where the lane began to climb out of the lower farms, and the finding of him was the first piece of news Darklume had given them that was not already filtered through the careful hand of Silas Grimshaw's pen.
He was a man perhaps forty years old, barefoot, walking without seeming to notice that he was walking. He had been bleeding, in the sense that there was blood on him, but the blood was old and dried in flat brown patches and the cuts that had produced it were not the kind of cuts that fight made. They were the kind of cuts that running through the wrong sort of country made — branch-scratches, thorn-scrapes, the long small tearing of a body that had been forcing itself through hedges and undergrowth and had not paused, at any point, to choose its path. His shirt had been torn open at the shoulder. His belt was missing. He carried no satchel, no waterskin, no tool of any kind. He had emerged from the country to the west of the road, and he was moving away from the cathedral, and he had not looked up at the column when the column appeared in front of him.
Hold the column. Two men forward. Slow. Don't surprise him.
Two soldiers moved forward, slowly, the way men move toward a half-broken horse. The man on the road did not see them. He was looking at his own feet. He continued to walk toward them, in the small uneven shuffle of a body that had been told to keep going and had forgotten the reason. When the older of the two soldiers reached out and took him gently by the upper arm, the man came alive all at once, in a single wrenching motion, the way a body comes alive when it has been only half-asleep and the half that was asleep has been startled out of its hiding place.
He screamed. It was not the scream of a man in pain. It was the scream of a man who had recognized something, and the recognition had cost him whatever piece of his composure had still been functioning. He pulled away from the soldier's hand and went down to one knee in the dirt and threw his other arm up across his face, as if he expected to be struck, and the words that came out of him then were not orderly.
No. No. No, don't touch me, don't touch me, don't —
The soldier, to his credit, did not let go and did not press harder. He waited. The other soldier knelt at a careful distance and held his hands up, palms forward, and spoke in the slow flat voice the kingdom's soldiers were trained to use with field casualties.
Easy. Easy. We're Krypton. We're soldiers. You're safe. Look up.
The man did not look up. He was breathing the kind of fast shallow breaths that ended in a faint after a minute if no one slowed them, and he was muttering, in the same small reflexive way, a single repeated word that Ryder did not catch until he had moved up the column and crouched, himself, beside him.
Don't — don't — they were calling me. They were calling me. Don't touch me, they're going to — they were calling —
Raven came up the column without hurry. He stopped at the edge of the small kneeling group and did not crowd the man, and he did not crouch — Raven did not crouch in the field — but he made himself, in the only way he knew how, a presence the man could find at the level of his own face if he looked.
Look at me. I am the senior officer here. Nothing on this road will touch you. Look at me.
The man looked up. His eyes were not empty. That was the first thing Ryder catalogued, with a small inner relief — there was a person inside the body. Whatever had happened to him at the cathedral, he had escaped it with himself still inside himself. The eyes that found Raven's were not the eyes of an empty soldier. They were the eyes of a man who had seen something the world had not prepared him to see, and who was carrying, at the moment, the full weight of having seen it without anyone to share the weight with.
The looking lasted for a long breath. Then the man's face did the thing Ryder had seen in the forest, in the soldiers, in too many faces in the past month. It collapsed inward by a fraction and recognized something. Not Raven. Something on Raven, or in him, or behind him.
You're too late.
He said it the way one tells another man that the meal he has come for has already been eaten. Ryder felt the sentence land in the column behind him, in the small involuntary sound a soldier makes when bad news arrives in front of him in plain language.
What happened at the cathedral?
The man looked at Ryder. He laughed. The laugh was a thin dry sound that came up out of him as if it had been waiting in his chest for a place to be put, and the wrongness of the laugh was not in the laugh itself but in the relief of it — he was relieved to be telling someone, and the relief was a worse register on his face than any of the previous registers had been.
You didn't see it?
No one answered him. Ryder felt the column's silence behind him like a pressure on his shoulders.
The man looked around at them. He looked at the soldiers. He looked at the armor and the swords and the formation. He looked at Raven, and at Ryder, and at the two riders behind Raven, and his face, in the next several seconds, made a series of small private adjustments that Ryder would think back to for the rest of his life. He was, in the way of a man who has run far and has only now discovered that he is in front of an audience, calculating what his audience would be willing to hear.
Then he chose a sentence and gave it to them. He gave it plainly, without preamble, in the dry open voice of a man who had decided the audience was going to have to hear the worst part first.
I saw my grandfather stand up out of his grave and try to kill me.
The column heard him. Ryder heard him. Raven heard him, and Raven's face did not change, because Raven's face was the kind of face that did not change, and yet there was, in the quality of the not-changing, the smallest possible adjustment — the kind a man makes when a hypothesis he has been carrying privately has just been confirmed by a stranger he had not planned on meeting.
A soldier in the second rank scoffed under his breath. He did not mean for the scoff to carry. Most scoffs of that kind, in a column of trained men, did not carry past the soldier on either side. This one did. The country was too quiet. The lane held the small sound and lifted it the small distance it needed to travel, and the man on the road heard it.
Grief does that. Makes them see —
I buried him.
He said it on a single breath, and the breath had run out by the second word, so that the word him came out small and shaking and very firm. He was not arguing with the soldier. He was answering a question the soldier had not had the dignity to actually ask. Grief does that, the soldier had said. I buried him, the man had said back. The exchange contained an entire epistemology, and Ryder, who had been raised by a careful mother and educated by careful priests, recognized it as such, and he did not look at the soldier in the second rank, because he did not want, in front of his Major, to do what his face wanted him to do.
The man went on. He went on more quietly.
He didn't walk wrong. That's the part you have to understand. He didn't shamble. He didn't drag his foot. He didn't act as if something else was inside him. He walked the way he walked in life. He had a bad knee. He limped on the left. He limped on the left when he came up the path. I knew the limp. I knew it. He looked at me the way a man looks at his grandson when he hasn't seen him for a year. He knew me.
He took a breath that did not steady him. It went on going.
And then the priest tried to stop him. And then —
He could not finish the sentence. He did not need to. Raven, who had been standing very still through all of it, lifted one hand and gestured a soldier forward with a waterskin, and the soldier brought it and held it for the man until he had drunk what was offered. The man drank. He sat down in the dust of the road. He did not get up again on his own.
Lieutenant. Two men carry him. Gently. Behind the column, not in it. Get him to the gate alive. We'll hear the rest of it inside.
The two men gathered him up between them. The column began to move again. Ryder did not look back at the place on the road where the man had been kneeling, because he did not, this time, want to see whether anything had been waiting in the country at the edge of the lane to watch the conversation.
He could feel, through the discipline of the march, that something had been.