The Vault of bones

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‘The moon was very bright, so bright that the feathery leaves and umbels of the water dropwort under which I lay painted my body with crisp, trembling shadows. Spiders were busy looping their silk between blades of iris, and each new strand blazed like the trail of a falling star. I raised my head and breathed in the clean, sweet scent of the plants. Something flopped wetly in the shallows of the river, and my head cleared. The river. It stretched away from me, straight as a blade of damasked steel, towards the dark hump of the city that squatted away to the north. I stood up lazily, only to be startled by a mighty confusion of noise: I had roused a heron, and, screeching, he blundered into the air, clapping his wings hollowly. The river broke into a ferment of colliding ripples.

I had fallen asleep, that was obvious. Had I been fishing? I could not recall, although I must have had something more than water to drink for my thoughts to be so muddled. I would have to dodge the Watch to get back into Balecester, and I had to be back before dawn: Magister Jens began his class promptly after Vespers, and to be late meant a tongue-lashing in his excruciating Swabian-tinged Latin. I looked around for a bag or a fishing-pole, but could see nothing in the flattened greenery. I had left a man-shaped dent in the tall grass. The dew was already settling, and I found I was soaking wet. My head was cold, and I was brushing the dewdrops from my tonsured pate when an awful peal of thunder shook the ground beneath me and the distant, shadowed city burst into a great roil of fire. A fountain of destruction it was, too bright to look at, brighter than burning pitch or the fire of the Greeks, that burns even on water.

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