They heard the sound of battle long before they could see anything. Screams reached Farid’s ears, cries of pain, and the whinnying of horses, shrill with fear. A moment came when the Prince signaled to them to go more slowly. A few more paces, bending low, and the ground in front of them dropped steeply to the road that ended, many miles farther on, at the gates of Ombra.

Dustfinger made Farid and Roxane get down on the ground, although no one was looking their way. Hundreds of men were fighting among the trees down below, but there were no robbers among them. Robbers do not wear shirts of chain mail, breastplates, and helmets decked with peacock feathers, they seldom have horses, and never coats of arms embroidered on silken surcoats.

Dustfinger held Roxane close when she began to sob. The sun was sinking behind the hills as the Adderhead’s soldiers cut down Cosimo’s men one by one. It looked as if the battle had been raging for a long time; the road was covered with dead bodies lying side by side. Only a small troop was still on horseback amid all this death. Cosimo himself was among them, his beautiful face distorted by rage and fear. For a moment it looked almost as if those few mounted men would be able to carve themselves a breach in the enemy ranks, but then Firefox came among them with a company of men gleaming like deadly beetles in their armor. They mowed down Cosimo and his retinue like dry grass as the sun sank right behind the hills, as red as if all the blood that had been shed was reflected in the sky. Firefox himself struck Cosimo from his horse, and Dustfinger buried his face in Roxane’s hair, as if he were tired of seeing Death at work. But Farid did not turn his head away. His face unmoving, he looked at the slaughter and thought of Meggie – Meggie, who perhaps still believed that a little ink could cure anything in this world.

Would she believe it if her eyes saw what his were seeing now?

Few of Cosimo’s men survived their prince. Barely a dozen fled into the trees. No one went to the trouble of pursuing them. The Adderhead’s soldiers broke into cries of triumph and began plundering the corpses like a flock of vultures in human form. They did not get Cosimo’s body, however. Firefox himself drove his soldiers off and had that beautiful corpse loaded onto a horse and taken away.

“Why are they doing that?” asked Farid.

“Why? Because his corpse is the proof that he really is dead this time,” said Dustfinger bitterly.

“Yes, he is indeed,” whispered the Black Prince. “I suppose you think yourself immortal if you’ve come back from the dead once. But he wasn’t, any more than his men, and now almost all the people of Lombrica will be widows and orphans.”

It was many hours before the Adderhead’s soldiers finally moved away, laden with what they could rob from the dead. Darkness was coming on again when silence fell at last among the trees, the silence that is felt only in the presence of Death.

Roxane was the first to find a way down the slope. She was no longer weeping. Her face was fixed and rigid, but whether with anger or pain Farid could not have said. The robbers hesitated before following her, for the first White Women were already standing there among the dead.

Chapter 65 – Lord of the Story

Iron helmets will not save

Even heroes from the grave.

Good men’s blood will drain away

While the wicked win the day.

– Heinrich Heine, “Valkyries”

Fenoglio was wandering among the dead when the robbers found him. Night fell, but he did not know what night it was. Nor could he remember how many days had passed since he rode out of the gates of Ombra with Cosimo. He knew only one thing: They were all dead. Minerva’s husband, his neighbor, the father of the boy who had so often begged him for a story. All dead.

And he himself would very likely have been dead, too, if his horse hadn’t shied and thrown him.

He had crawled away into the trees, to hide there like an animal and watch the slaughter.

Since the departure of the Adderhead’s soldiers he had been stumbling from one corpse to the next, cursing himself, cursing his story, cursing the world he had created. When he felt the hand on his shoulder he actually thought for a moment that Cosimo had risen from the dead yet again, but it was the Black Prince standing behind him.

“What are you doing here?” he snarled at him and the men with him. “Do you want to die, too?

Go away and hide, and leave me in peace.” He struck his brow. His damned head that had invented them all, and with them all the misfortune they were wading through like black, stinking water! He fell on his knees beside a dead man whose open eyes were staring at the sky, and blamed himself furiously – himself, the Adder head, Cosimo and his haste – and then suddenly fell silent when he saw Dustfinger standing next to the Prince.

“You!” he stammered and got to his feet again, swaying. “You’re still alive! You’re not dead yet, even though I wrote it that way.” He took Dustfinger’s arm and clutched it tightly.

“Yes, disappointing, isn’t it?” replied Dustfinger, shaking off Fenoglio’s hand roughly. “Is it any comfort to you that no doubt, but for Farid, I’d have been lying as dead and cold as these men?

After all, you didn’t foresee him.”

Farid? Oh yes, the boy plucked by Mortimer from his desert story. He was standing beside Dustfinger and staring at Fenoglio with murder in his eyes. No, the boy really did not belong here. Whoever had sent him to protect Dustfinger, it hadn’t been him, Fenoglio! But that was the wretched part of the whole business! With everyone interfering in his story, how could it turn out well?

“I can’t find Cosimo!” he muttered. “I’ve been looking for him for hours. Have any of you seen him?”

“Firefox has had his body taken away,” the Prince replied. “I expect they’ll put it on public display so that this time no one can claim he’s still alive.”

Fenoglio stared at him until the bear began to growl. Then he shook his head again and again. “I don’t understand it!” he stammered. “How could it happen? Didn’t Meggie read what I wrote for her? Didn’t Roxane find her?” He looked despairingly at Dustfinger. How well he remembered the day he had described his death! A good scene, one of the best he’d ever written.

“Oh yes, Roxane gave Meggie the letter. Ask her yourself if you don’t believe me. Although I don’t think she’ll feel much like talking at the moment.” Dustfinger pointed to the woman walking among the corpses. Roxane. The beautiful Roxane. She bent over the dead, looked into their faces, and finally kneeled down beside a man whom a White Woman was approaching. She quickly put her hands over his ears, bent over his face, and gestured to the two robbers who were following her with torches in their hands. No, she would certainly not feel much like talking just now.

Dustfinger looked at him. Why that reproachful expression? Fenoglio wanted to snap at him.

After all, I invented your wife, too! But he bit back the words. “Very well. So Roxane gave Meggie the letter,” he said instead. “But did Meggie read it?”

Dustfinger looked at him with great dislike. “She tried to, but the Adderhead had her taken to the Castle of Night that very evening.”

“Oh God!” Fenoglio looked around. The dead faces of Cosimo’s men stared at him. “So that’s it!”