and i know that a rider will come

=

The sky was white, and the alchemist a smokewisp of insubstantial black against it, drifting solitary over gray pavement like a heat shimmer in Winter. From far away, it looked as if he didn't touch the ground; from farther away, he could hardly be seen at all.

He reached a murder of thirteen crows arrayed starkly on a power line; he'd followed the ragged whispers of their voices here, and here, he stopped, black-gloved hands in his pockets, head upturned. In the dead silent season, thirteen pairs of little red eyes stared silently down at their audience, one pair of yellow eyes and ten pairs of spectral ones, veiled.

And the alchemist, frankly, spoke to the birds, his voice white-cloud flat and pallid as the sky. "Thirteen is gone," he told them. "As you love the others, look over her."

There was no sentiment to the tone; it was neither an instruction nor a plea. All of the notes and rhythms that could have imbued the prismatic cello concerto of the alchemist's voice with such things had been sent out, were stalking somewhere like a pale child among the annals of the world.

The birds tilted their heads, clacked their black beaks in voiceless congress. They stirred their feathers, but did not speak. Deliberation, perhaps, and the alchemist, who wore his aura like a pair of black wings, didn't move, either. The unseen communicated with one another far more deeply than the stark objects in this tableau.

"...And my Dalton girl," the alchemist added, and now he smiled, a vaguely genuine expression. Companionable, somehow, private. Abashed, laid low, the sort of expression he'd never dare show before any other than a murder of silent birds. It was like an admission, it ached like a confession, and his yellow eyes stole their way sidelong down the empty road.

Did the birds... laugh? Stirred the feathers at their napes, and one fanned his tail, another beat its wings, a little ripple of something traveling along the line arrayed on the electric wire. But they remained largely restful, still intent on him, their stirring hadn't translated into flight, as if they were waiting for one more item.

"Mercedes," the man said, and the flat, lowland winter breeze whisked gravel softly across the street behind him. The birds raised their voices at that, a solemn, ragged music, a moment of chatter in which they echoed one another, and when they were finished trumpeting their judgment, it seemed they fixed all of those little red-violet eyes more intently on the alchemist than before.

The alchemist continued, "I think... I want you to bring me to her."

The crows stared. Late day, it seemed, began to stain the horizon line with fluid violet, the color of a bruise, the darkness of heaven, and the man's shoulders tightened, loosened, he looked down and then leftward, his lips unguarded, his breath unvoiced for a moment, mouth open for a moment in naked uncertainty.

Raw weakness.

"I need --" he began, and the word need from his mouth was as rusted and ragged with disuse as the voice of the crude crows. But they didn't join him in hoarse call; they listened. They stared.

"I need..." Pause. "Something. I can't --"

Can't, as forbidden as sin, and they sharpened their eyes on him, the dangerous razors of their hungry beaks, suddenly desirous of the softnesses of his eyeballs, his tongue, the marrow of his bones, and Brande closed his lips around the word, sharply.

"That's all," he told them, and as if in response to a gun report, the thirteen exploded in unison from the power line, spreading ragged black feathers against the white, calling a harsh chorus that reverberated across the sky, and Brande, stark figure in the middle of the street, remained where he was, watching them rise to circle him, hungrily.

When he was certain they were departing and not descending on his still-living flesh, he went back home.

--
May the good luck come on you
While you’re sitting on a dead log
Waiting for the damn rider
Riding on a damn dead horse
For when the rider comes
It may be a little late to take back the ring
From under the black cross