ICO: Castle in the Mist (6 page)

A woman from the village arrived, breathless, calling for him. The hunter who had taken a fall several days before had just passed away. The elder’s heart sank even deeper, and the lines in his face hardened so that he looked more like a statue carved from stone than a man of living flesh. How easy it would be if only his heart would turn to stone as well.
To stone. All to stone
…

Toto sat astride Arrow Wind, gaping down at the scene below him.
That’s why nothing moves.

Even the flag flying from the hall had been frozen in mid-flutter.

Toto urged Arrow Wind down the mountainside and rode directly through the city gates. The horse walked smoothly with Toto gripping the reins, but Toto no longer rode gallantly. He crouched low against the horse’s back, clinging to its living warmth for encouragement.

The world around him was petrified and gray.

The people in the streets around him had been frozen in time. Some pointed toward the sky, others ran, holding their heads in their hands, while still others held their mouths open in soundless screams. Toto wondered how many years they had stood there like this. When he reached out hesitantly to touch one, it crumbled into dust beneath his fingertips.

Arrow Wind whinnied and Toto steadied his grip on the reins.

No matter which turn he took on the winding streets, people turned to stone awaited him. At first, he tried to believe that these had all been created. Perhaps someone important from the capital had crafted a sculpture of an entire city here for some purpose beyond Toto’s comprehension. They had made countless statues—entire houses—and encircled the grim tableau within a wall when they were done.

But why would they do that? Was the city a decoy of some kind? Toto nodded, pleased with his theory.
It has to be that.
When the enemy saw a city full of people unprepared, men without helmets, with bundles on their backs, leading children by the hand, people carrying baskets and fetching water, they would be tempted to attack.
And then—

Toto’s imagination failed to produce the second phase of the strategy. It also struck him as odd that the statues would be crying and shouting and obviously fearful if they were intended to appear an easy target. And nothing explained why so many of them were pointing upward, toward the western sky.

Toto was not the brightest boy, but he had a keen eye for detail, and everything he saw undermined his attempts to remain calm. The looks of abject fear on the faces of the stone people. Hands raised as though to ward off the fast approach of…something. Lips shaped around cries of despair when there was no longer time to escape.

He reached the entrance to a street where a pile of barrels sat, one stacked upon the other. Toto stopped. Dismounting, he reached out to touch one of the barrels, and its surface crumbled like a castle of sand. Craning his neck, he saw a figure behind the barrels—a boy about the same height as he, cowering. Fragments of the crumbled barrel dusted his stone hair.

The boy was smiling.

Toto understood instantly.
He wasn’t hiding from whatever it was everyone else had been looking at—he was playing hide-and-seek.
Whatever happened to the people in this city had happened so quickly, he hadn’t even had time to realize that he was about to die.

Reluctantly, Toto admitted what he had known for some time already. This city was no grand work of sculpture. This was the reason why the mountains in the north were forbidden. This was the curse of the Castle in the Mist.

The master in the castle was capable of dooming an entire walled city in the space of a breath.

This was what Ico had seen. This was what he meant by “trouble,” why he was so determined to sacrifice himself for the village.

Arrow Wind gave a light whinny and rubbed his nose on Toto’s shoulder. Toto stood, rubbing the horse’s neck, unable to take his eyes off the stone boy. At the end of the street, he saw a stable. The horses were still inside, their manes a uniform ashen gray. Toto was acutely aware of Arrow Wind’s warmth beneath his hand, the softness of his mane, and the musty smell of him. He pictured Arrow Wind turning to stone, a cold gray like the other horses.

Arrow Wind whinnied louder, his front hooves lifting off the ground. Toto pulled on the reins and looked up at him, when he spotted something in the western sky—something that shouldn’t be. It was a thin black mist, or perhaps a distant swarm of insects. As the mist drifted closer, it began to coalesce into a shape. He saw a broad forehead, the straight bridge of the nose, and flowing black hair. Finally, he saw a pair of eyes.

It was a woman’s face, covering the sky above him.

Toto heard a soundless voice.

Who are you?

Toto remembered playing once with Ico in a cave near the village. They had gone deeper than any of the other kids dared and discovered an underground pool. The water was as clear as crystal, and a faint light glowed at the bottom. Ico and Toto threw stones into the pool. The echoes of the splashes reverberated off the walls of the cave, followed by another splash and another echo. They kept tossing stones until the echoes overlapped one another, making a strange music that sounded almost like a vesper prayer. That was what this voice reminded him of—though the woman’s face hung in the sky, her voice seemed to echo from the depths of the earth. Or maybe she was speaking directly into Toto’s soul.

Who are you? Why are you here?

The woman’s lips twisted like pennants in the wind.

Intruder.

Now Arrow Wind reared and shook his mane, and the reins slipped from Toto’s hand. Before he could regain them, the horse galloped off madly.

“Arrow Wind!” Toto screamed after him.

The horse kicked his way through a crowd of stony faces. In the sky above, the woman turned her gaze to follow him. Lips of black mist pursed and she blew a gentle breath.

Toto felt an icy wind blow over his head. The breath swept down the street, catching Arrow Wind in an instant and wrapping around his beautiful chestnut coat. Toto watched as his bushy tail, his hind hooves, his legs, and finally his back and mane turned to gray.

Arrow Wind’s scream ended abruptly; he was frozen in stone, front legs rearing up, hooves inches away from another of the stony city dwellers.

Toto’s breath stopped.
Arrow Wind—

“No!”

A scream ripped from Toto’s throat and he started to run.
I have to escape. I have to get out of this place—away from her. I have to get out of here alive, back to my village.

Toto ran in a daze. He did not dare look behind him, but he could feel that face floating there in the sky, giving chase, the same way he understood without looking that the face was
smiling.

He pushed down a crowd of stone figures in his way, leapt over the fragments, and rounded a corner. A woman carrying a basket of ashen flowers crumbled into pieces at his feet when he slammed into her on the other side. Coughing from the dust, Toto ran even faster. If only he could reach the city wall, the gate where he had entered.
Which way was it? Right, left? Where am I?

He felt a frigid breeze blow over his head, and a scream rose in his throat as he tripped and fell to the ground. Just ahead he saw the yawning door of a house, propped open by a stick. The inside was darker than the street, but still that same uniform gray. Everything within had been turned to stone as well.

Another breeze raced overhead, and Toto dashed into the house. As he darted through the door, something hit his leg and crumbled with a loud noise—a chair or a person, he wasn’t sure. Daylight streamed in through the window. Toto crouched low, crawling through the rooms of the house. Out of the corner of his eye, he caught a glimpse of the dark swirling mass of the woman’s face outside the window. It warped as it moved, swelling first, then thinning into a line, speeding after him like an angry swarm of wasps.

Toto shoved aside the rubble in the room with both hands, reaching a patch of wall beneath the window. He slumped, back to the wall. He was out of breath, and his heart felt like it might leap out of his throat.

The face made no noise when it moved. In that, it was different than a buzzing swarm of insects, and it made it difficult for him to get up after he had found what felt like safety against the wall. What if he risked a peek outside only to see that face filling the sky, those dark eyes staring straight at him? He wished he had some way of guessing where it might be.

A tear fell from his cheek—apparently he had been crying with fright, though he hadn’t noticed until now. Toto forced himself to steady his breath, and rubbed his face with his hands.

He took a look around the room.

A table carved from what had once been wood stood by his feet. There was a round cushion on the floor and a chair lying on its back. Everything was the color of ash. A tapestry hung on the wall opposite the window, the sort that was a specialty of Toksa’s weavers. He could still make out the design: an intricate depiction of the sun and the moon and the stars wheeling through the sky. Though it was drab now, Toto could imagine how it once looked, sparkling and bright—a masterpiece. The fabric would have been soft, yet weighty, the luxurious threads plush against the skin. Now it was more like a thin slice of dry, crusty bread stuck to the wall.

I wonder how long the city has been like this. How long has it been since the city was last alive?
A perfectly shaped fruit sat next to him on the floor. Its skin was unblemished. He touched it gently with one finger, and the surface crumbled, leaving a round impression in the shape of his fingertip. He grabbed it and squeezed as hard as he could; the fruit disintegrated into a fine gray dust that ran between his fingers.
In time,
Toto thought,
that’s all that will remain of this place. Dust.

As Toto took another shuddering breath, he noticed something—a pair of eyes near the floor on the other side of the room. They were looking in his direction. Gradually, he made out the form of a slender person, with the long hair of a woman, lying on her side. She had fine features and lay with her right ear against the ground. Her shoulders were hunched and her legs were bent at the knees, as though she had been cowering in a chair. Even in stone, the supple lines of her shape, like the branches of a willow tree, were beautiful.

Her eyes were open wide in a stony stare. She almost seemed to be smiling at Toto. Perhaps she was someone’s mother or sister. He wondered what her last words had been—what she had been thinking when she died.

“I’m sorry,” Toto whispered, covering his face with his hands. He began to cry.
I never should have come here. I shouldn’t have set foot in this place. What a fool I am.

He sobbed out loud now, unable to restrain himself any longer, and his shoulders heaved. The motion must have disturbed the wall behind him, for he heard a loud noise and the sound of something crumbling. Toto jumped to his feet and looked to see that a pole holding the window shutters open from the outside had fallen and collapsed into dust.

On his knees now, Toto shuffled away from the window. He saw the face flying through the sky, drawn by the noise. Toto’s stomach did a somersault.

She’ll find me!

There was no escape outside. He considered moving into another room. He could see a doorway, but a large cupboard had fallen over in front of it, and he didn’t think he’d be able to climb over in time. He looked around for any other exits.

Toto spotted an opening in another wall. He moved, quick as a woodland hare, dashing through the opening and then falling headfirst. As he began to tumble, he realized he was on a staircase leading into a cellar.

At the bottom, his head hit a wall, sending stars through his vision, and he heard an incredible crashing noise from above. A moment later, the light coming in through the doorway at the top of the stairs dimmed.

Toto sat up and looked around in the meager light. Where he had rolled through the cellar, things lay broken, just like the fruit upstairs.

I’m trapped...

Toto looked up at the thin ray of light shining through a hole in the rubble above. It looked like pieces of the house had fallen over the top third of the stairway. He wondered if he might be able to clear it out by hand.

But if I go up there, that monster will be waiting for me.

Toto turned back to the darkness of the cellar. The chilly air and dusty smell were the same as they had been above. It seemed large for an underground room. Maybe that meant another exit.

Toto began to crawl along the floor, searching. His hands met only the cold stone beneath him. He groped toward the right and found another wall. He pried at it with his fingers for a moment, then stopped.

Wait, that’s not a wall. It’s a piece of furniture. It’s divided into sections—and there’s something inside.

In the darkness, Toto’s face took on a serious, grown-up expression—the kind he’d never shown to anyone before, not even Ico. He began probing the cavity intently with his fingers, feeling the shapes of the objects, tapping them lightly with his fingers. He wrapped the tips of his fingers around one.

It moved and fell into Toto’s hand. He picked it up carefully and brought it into the light at the bottom of the stairs.

It was a book. He had found a bookshelf.

Of course the book was stone. He couldn’t open it, and his fingers left small indentations in the cover. In the dim light it was hard to make out the words, but he could see enough to tell that they were written in unfamiliar letters.

Toto was reminded of the bookshelves in the elder’s house. He and Ico had been scolded once when they snuck in to take a look. In that house, every part of the wall, save the door itself, was covered in books. The book of stone he held in his hands now looked a lot like those in the elder’s study.

Maybe this place was a study too? He wondered if the master of this house had been an important person like the elder. A scholar of ancient wisdom. Toto tried to be careful, yet even steadying his grip on the book made it break and crumble. He laid it gently on the floor and resumed his search, sweeping across the ground with his hands. Toward the back of the room it was so dark he couldn’t even see the tip of his own nose. Still, he was able to discover that three of the walls here were bookshelves, all filled to overflowing.