The Vorrh

anonymous, they are intolerable.
    Four weeks later, she had settled with her sight. All available tests had been completed, and it was unanimously agreed: she had excellent and enduring vision.
    With the help of various companions, she spent two of those weeks visiting the city she knew so intimately, adding colour, shape and tone to its sound and texture. She stared for hours at the faces of her friends and the few of her family who were left. The new details were catching up and beginning to make sense. Only her dreams remained slow and auditory; the pictures came, but would not attach properly, flopping and draping over the hard skeletons of sound and becoming transparent. It would take a year for them to solidify into trust.
    She redecorated her splendid house. She gave all her old clothes to the poor, and went on a lavish spending spree to dress her body in the rich colour and sumptuous design of her wildest imaginings. She burnt her white sticks, unceremoniously, in the gardener’s fire, the sweet scent of leaf smoke disguising their brittle stink of anguish. And then she focused her zeal on finding him – to become his devoted acolyte, or to make him her own.
    * * *

    His jaw was sewn back on. Tufts of greasy twine stuck out of it in all directions. It no longer moved, and he could not chew or talk. But that could all be fixed later; now, he just had to stay sharp, and kill the Bowman before he ever touched another arrow.
    Tsungali waited before the bridge and the mill, high in the rocks, where he had been before. He knew his prey had to come this way to find passage through the damned forest. He held the Enfield in an awkward grip. The first arrow had severed three of the tendons in his right arm, so that two of his fingers no longer worked with any predictability. But this time, he would make no mistake: a closer shot, backed up by the stump-barrelled shotgun, would finish the job.
    He had not dared show his wrecked face at the inn; he wondered if those other assassins still lurked there. He knew they would come running at his shots, and in his present weakness those jackals might even take his quarry away, claiming the kill as their own. He did not have the agility for a silent kill, or the strength to fight off three or four strong and armed assailants; all he had was time and cunning, so he laid traps around his planned killing zone, and waited.
    It wasn’t long before his attention was rewarded, but he had not expected to see two men walking together. They came along the river road arm in arm, a little tipsy and unsure of foot, one black man and one white. The white man was talking loudly, his associate appearing to nod in approval. Neither carried weapons.
    Tsungali had never seen his target clearly, could not know the details of his face or dress. But he knew him to be a loner, and unlikely to be in cahoots with this drunken Negro, so he did not make the shot or stop them on their way to the inn.
    They passed below him, and he carefully, quietly stood to catch a glimpse of their faces. He instantly recognised Tugu Ossenti, and the expression on his face revealed that he was not drunk, but grievously hurt. He looked at the loud, laughing face of the white man and saw no mirth: it was a face that could not be, a face that he knew too well. He saw the bow, concealed behind his back, and swung his shotgun down onto the ill-matched pair, sending a loose skree falling in his tilted swivel. As he fired, the white man lifted Ossenti like a puppet, raising him up by his armpit, where the dagger had pierced and guided his pretend drunken walk. The black man screamed before the first barrel removed the back of his head, the second crashing into his broad back. The white man shrugged the twitching carcass to one side, and tucked himself swiftly beneath the rocky shelf where Tsungali stood, out of his sight and out of the reach of his gun.
    After the booming roar, the valley fell quiet. Birds stopped singing and the breeze held its breath. A door banged somewhere in the mill, and another figure scanned the scene for the next move, before retreating to a safer, hidden place. All stayed motionless until nightfall, then evaporated into the dark, skins crawling with potential attack. Their next meeting would be in the forest: it had been inevitable all along. Nothing could deflect the viciousness of its defined fate.
    * * *

    Ghertrude had returned to 4 Kühler Brunnen first. She’d expected him to be there already