The Wicked Day by Christopher Bunn Page B

a moment, it seemed as if something stirred beneath their flat surface. Curiosity.
    Jute heard the clicking sound again. It sounded like small stones knocking together. And then he saw the source of the noise. A rusty rope of iron lay around the thing’s neck. Skulls hung on it, the size of a man’s head but looking as tiny as children’s baubles in the shadow of that great head. They stared at Jute with their empty sockets and grinned at him with their toothless jagged jaws. Every once in a while, the skulls stirred on the iron strand and knocked against their neighbors.
    “You are strange, boy,” rumbled the creature. “There’s something old in you. Older than your simple flesh. But not as old as stone. No. Not as old as stone. Your bones’ll still make my bread. I’ll grind ‘em into flour. Seven wizards came creeping to these heights to try my hand and they all ended on my spit. Heroes with their bright swords. They died in my dark hall and I ground their bones to make my bread. I roasted ‘em. Meat and bread. You’ll taste just as well, boy.”
    “Heroes,” echoed a skull. At least, to Jute’s horrified eyes and ears, that’s what seemed to have spoken. “Heroes. Why, I was one of ‘em. Head full of sunlight and dreams.”
    “And me,” chimed in a nearby skull. “I was a hero.”
    “And me!”
    “Don’t forget me,” said a skull. It twisted on the iron strand and Jute could hear the grate of metal against bone. “I was a hero as well. I’d a horse and a sword.”
    “You’d nothing,” sneered the skull beside it. “Can you remember a single thing in that empty head of yours? You’d a nag and a broken blade that did better service chopping firewood than necks. You were better as bread.”
    “Weren’t we all,” said the first skull. But then it laughed, and it bared its jagged jaw at Jute. “It ain’t the bread that’s important, boy. It’s the teeth that bites it. He chews, he does, like boulders smashing on boulders. Got quite the gnashers, he does.”
    “Quiet,” said the creature, and the skulls fell silent, though Jute could feel their eye sockets staring at him. The figure stared down at Jute, not moving or blinking.
    “Fine as dust,” said the creature after a while.
    Then the massive head turned toward Declan.
    “What have my dogs brought me?”
    The voice came alive with sudden hate, though it still whispered in tones so quiet that Jute had to strain his ears to hear.
    “Farrow. . .”
    The enormous bulk of stone shifted one step forward. The face lowered until it almost touched Declan’s, but the man did not move. He hung there, apparently lifeless and insensible. The skulls clicked together in excitement.
    “I had three sons. Three sons of stone I raised on this mountain. The wind wore away the crags and time wore away the sons of men into countless generations of death. But my sons grew strong. I fed them on blood and flesh and the bread of dead men’s bones. We lived on this mountain when the Rennet River was birthed high in the peaks, when the deep springs dug their way up into the light, when the river flowed down into the plain below and carved its valley to the accursed sea. We were old then, my sons and I. This land was ours. Ours, from the cold crags where the dragons sleep beneath the ice to the sands blowing in the south. Even to the shore we held sway, though there were eyes in the sea always watching. I hate the sea.”
    The ogre paused and Jute thought he saw the thing shiver. The smallest of trembles, like an earthquake so slight that it might have been no more than the ripple of grass on a hillside, so slight that only a mouse would have pricked his ears at it.
    “The sea,” said the ogre, not even looking at Declan anymore. “Wearing away my stone without my leave. Stealing it from me and grinding it into sand. May the darkness take the sea. All of Tormay was mine, and yet it is stolen away in little bits. Licked away by the sea, worn by the wind,