The Unfinished Land Read online

  “Someone hath added decorations,” Kaiholo said doubtfully, and batted aside a hanging, curling shape like a small blue monkey, but with wide, glowing eyes and a grim, gaping mouth.

  Reynard was alarmed. “What are those? More servants? Why do they not flee as well?”

  Hundreds dangled from long threads attached high in the gloom, twisting slowly and illuminating with their pale beams the sandy road, uninterested in the visitors below—or anything else.

  “Monkey lights,” Kern said. “They have been here for as long as I. Someone doubtless strung them to light a better path, as it is dark in these caverns even for Eaters. They fear nothing and do not eat.”

  “Fine servants!” Kaiholo said. “Would any object if we take a few with us?” He bravely grasped one of the small creatures and perched it on his shoulder. It did not bite or protest, and its eyes pointed ahead. He tugged on the strand that attached it to the ceiling, saw it was dry and dead—more like a rope—and reached up with a knife to cut it. The creature remained quiet, so he took another and placed it on his other shoulder, then cut its cable as well. “I will light the way!” the tattooed man said. “Anybody else want to host?” The others declined. He patted the head of his left-hand monkey. It briefly closed its wide bright eyes.

  Soon they were beyond the hanging menagerie. Kaiholo’s pair provided all the light they needed as they moved forward. They rode now on a gray sandy floor, as if a river had once flowed through the Ravine, debouching at the cavern’s exit. To the echoing, sandy scuff of the horses’ hooves, they rode on for some hundred more yards, all the time accompanied by a musical dripping and a suffocating awareness of the great massif of stone above.

  For a few dozen yards they passed what might have been the bones and spine of a great monster—until Reynard pointed out that this was the wrecked hull of a ship. “How did it get here?” he asked. “How old is it?” Nobody knew. Kern said this was the first time he had seen it. Reynard leaned to run his hand along one of the ribs. The Eater horse looked back at him. As instructed, Reynard looked away. “Very old,” he said. “Not so much wood as marble.”

  “I do not doubt the abilities of Crafters to put things where they wish, and take them from whenever they wish—even the beginning of time,” Kaiholo said.

  “The end of the cavern is not far,” Kern observed. “I can see it, like a single lantern.”

  This time the light was true. They emerged under bright sun and a cloudless sky. Kaiholo gently lowered his monkeys to the sandy ground. They blinked, then crawled back into the cavern. “Obedient,” he observed.

  Valdis watched them without expression.

  “We are out of it,” Widsith said. “Thanks to whatever God you please.”

  With bored grace, their Eater mounts climbed the rough lava slope that led up from the cavern. Ahead spread another wall of forest, or perhaps jungle. Reynard did not recognize any of the trees.

  Valdis pointed that way. “A cross-trod lieth beyond that forest,” she said.

  “I have never gone so far,” Kaiholo said.

  “I have,” Kern said. “But I saw no signs of humans or others. Certainly no Eaters.”

  “You would not see them when they pass,” Valdis said.

  “Do you see them?” Reynard asked her.

  “Yes,” she said.

  “Came they this way?”

  “Both ways,” she said. “They are all gone now.”

  “Even Calybo?” Widsith asked.

  “Even him.”

  Kern hmmed softly. He studied Reynard riding beside Valdis, stiff in his saddle, as if escorting a maiden—a strange sight indeed, given that Valdis looked even more like a ghost in light of day and hardly seemed to burden the horse.

  But Reynard saw that she cast a dark shadow.

  Old Ice and Two Trods

  * * *

  ON THE EDGE of the forest, a dense wall of dark green, Valdis pulled back on her horse, wheeled it halfway around, and said calmly, “Flood is here.”

  The men looked at each other, hearing nothing, but the horses, without guidance, broke into a run, then stopped abruptly and spun to face the cavern. Reynard held on as best he could with neither saddle nor stirrups. The rumble grew to a roar, and a frothy tide of sour grayness, higher than the horses’ withers, rushed around them. Reynard clung to the short mane with both his hands and all his strength, and felt his horse flinch in pain as chunks of ice and pieces of branch and smaller rocks struck legs and belly, and then, as all their horses shrieked, larger stones and even boulders.

  The horses did not resist the flow, but stampeded to keep up with it, and right alongside them flew or swam creatures he had never seen before—nightmare creatures, furred snakes with great fangs and huge red eyes, winding around or climbing over spinning chunks of melting ice, hissing and screeching, gripping the horses’ legs or biting at them to hold on, as the flood bounced riders and horses from trees and rocks hidden in creepers.

  Reynard thought he saw, over the neck of his animal, a gargoyle or something like it—a hippogriff, perhaps, though he had seen such only once, spouting rain off the roof of an Aldeburgh church. The creature, trying to stay above water on its spread wings, already half drowned, stretched its head up, gave him a beseeching gape of its beak, and went under.

  They had no choice but to go with the flood into the trees.

  Reynard heard Widsith call his name just as something wrenched him about. He let go of the mane and tumbled into the water.

  Separation

  * * *

  HE IS HERE!”

  “Where is the Pilgrim?”

  “I do not see the Eater!”

  These voices sprang up around him, muffled by water in his ears. He tried to open his eyes, but the lids were stuck together by mud. Someone helped him roll onto his back, and he coughed up sour water and what few things he had eaten in the last twelve hours. When he tried to sit up, Kern was there to help him, calling out to Kaiholo. More water splashed on his face, but this felt different, fresh and cool, unlike the melted ice from the Ravine. Soon he had wiped his eyes and pried them open. The day was blurry and overcast but still bright.

  “Where are the horses?” Reynard asked, and managed to get to his feet. Surprisingly, he was not terribly bruised, though he had bumps on his cheek and brow. He was covered in sticky mud, as were the tattooed man and the giant.

  “Two are over there,” Kaiholo said, pointing to a gap between two large boulders. “Maybe they were lifted and dropped by the flood.”

  “I see not Widsith nor Valdis nor th’other horses,” Kern said. He was worse off than Reynard, face covered in dirty blood and both eyes nearly swollen shut. But he walked bravely and called out for Widsith and for Valdis.

  “Is the Ravine empty?” Kaiholo asked him.

  He nodded. “It must be. It sloped this way, down to the caverns. Everything flowed to this end.”

  Reynard walked toward the gap between the boulders, to see how wide it was, but Kern stopped him. “The horses are afraid,” he said. “They will not let me get near them.”

  “Are they injured?”

  “Likely.”

  He thought of the furred snakes biting and hanging on. “We have to see to their wounds! Horses are delicate, tossed like that, and where are we if they die?”

  Kern agreed. “But do not go near them. Let them come to us!”

  Reynard picked his way around the boulders and through the debris, pausing only once to examine a dead thing he found wrapped up in a deadfall of logs and broken branches—a thing with a bony crescent for a head, a long gray body, and many, many legs. He made a disgusted, frightened sound and pulled back to take a different path.

  Up a brushy slope, away from the tangles of sticks and dead things, Reynard looked for another way between the boulders and found a roundabout path over a clump of solidly nested rocks of all shapes, some of them curious indeed—as if the exit from the Ravine had hosted tribes of sculptors or Medusas. He worked to
the crest of the conglomeration and peered into a gap in which the two Eater horses were stamping and making their strange night sounds, though subdued and weary. He clucked and called to them. They alerted but did not stop pacing. They seemed stuck and unable to find their way out of the hollow, which worried him. Had they been lifted and deposited, as Kern guessed? If so, they might be badly hurt and beyond his means to save. But still, he slowly descended the suggestive rocks and finally stood on one edge of the gap, arms at his side, keeping still and quiet. He glanced over his shoulder. The closest space between the big boulders took a lock-and-key curve, which made it difficult to see any exit. It was just wide enough to squeeze a horse through—but no horse would willingly make that journey without guidance, he thought.

  Finally, one of the horses—it was Kaiholo’s mount, and the other was his own, with its curious patterns—sidled up to within a few paces, shivering and desperately unhappy. Reynard had nothing to offer and kept his hands by his sides, head bowed, the picture of quiet calm and he hoped familiarity, though they had not been together long.

  Kern perched near the top of the pile, also quiet.

  “Can they get through?” Kaiholo called from the other side. Kern hushed him.

  “That must have been frightening,” Reynard said to the pair. “It scared me, but I am a lot smaller.”

  The horses watched him, cross-wove in their pacing, and showed the whites of their eyes—more a golden yellow, actually—as if they were considering stamping him.

  He wished Valdis were here to advise him—or warn him not to try!

  “We can get ye out of here, but it will take some squeezing,” he told them, and walked slowly around them, then stepped into the gap as the horses watched, without ever meeting their eyes—as Valdis had advised. “See? I can do it. I think thou canst get through as well, and there is more room on the other side—and maybe food.”

  Kern squatted atop the rocks, still silent.

  “We all need to eat,” Reynard said. “And I would like to see to thine injuries. Thou hast blood on thy hock. And thou hast a gash on thy withers. Pretty deep, I think. Come here and let me look, and then let us go through.”

  His calm speech and steady demeanor seemed to be wearing down their resistance. His own horse came up within a stride and lowered its muzzle, then shoved it into his cupped hand.

  “Good,” Reynard said, and turned to the other animal. “And what about thee? Kaiholo, come down and join us.”

  “There is another horse out here!” Kaiholo called. “I think it is Valdis’s.”

  “Your friend doth await thee,” Reynard murmured, stroking the muzzle and underjaw.

  Kaiholo entered the gap and stood aside when his horse stamped and snapped, not yet ready. “They seem to favor thee, Fox,” he said ruefully. In time, paired with their riders, the horses calmed and finally seemed almost placid as Reynard pulled and cajoled them through the gap, one at a time. The fit was tight for Kaiholo’s animal, but he seemed ready to leave, and made it through quickly, maneuvering the double bend as if it were a common thing, then stood shivering, nostrils flaring at all the strange smells—and at more debris and strange bodies caught in the lower scrub trees beyond. Now Kern brought up Valdis’s mount. The horses greeted each other with whickers and tail flicks and laying their heads close, like all horses Reynard had ever known. They had been Eater horses for all their lives, Reynard guessed, and might be used to strange sights, but seldom anything like this. Reynard himself couldn’t even put a name to most of the dead creatures.

  Kern left the group and walked to the left into the shady woods, then returned. “There is a notch or break over that way. Let us see what is on the other side. The horses will warn us if it is not to their liking.”

  “What if it is not to our liking?” Kaiholo asked. “What if it is dead wood all the way?”

  “It is not,” Kern said.

  “You have been here?”

  “And beyond. I told you, giants have privileges. I need to find my horse.”

  “And we need to find Valdis and Widsith,” Reynard said. They guided the three horses toward the notch, then led them right through a thinning patch. The darkness beyond was slowly revealing a slope, and perhaps fifty yards up the slope, above the flood, dead trees that had not been painted with mud.

  But before that point, the crest of the flood had delivered a sad sight—Kern’s mount, the huge draft horse, lay dead in a patch of debris, head almost doubled back and limbs twisted.

  Kern spent a few minutes with the corpse, which Reynard found touching. The giant then rose.

  “Let us find the others,” he said.

  “I wish we could have gone around the coast,” Kaiholo said. “The sea is much friendlier to my people, even with its hungry beasts.”

  Reynard looked at the two and saw they were near the end of their wits, beyond exhaustion and demoralized. He remembered his mother and father and their ways of dealing with travail in themselves and others. They would always speak of family, and origins—of the things people were most proud of. “I am told of Land Travelers and Sea Travelers,” Reynard said. “They draw great ropes of words across land and sea. But who travels the sky?”

  “Ah—those be the birds!” Kaiholo said, perking up at least a little. “The feathered ones take their songs to both land and sea and carry many secrets, if thou couldst only listen.”

  “I’ll listen,” he promised, but there were no bird sounds in the trees—and none of the larger trees were in the least like those he had seen in England. The branches took spirals and spread great leaves and small, or bundles of reddish needles, or bluish thorns.

  They climbed the slope above the Ravine’s wash and stood atop a low hill, in the shadow of a ridge that stretched from the inner ring of mountains to the shore.

  “The horses must eat. There be no grass or herbs or suitable leaves here,” Kaiholo said, and then raised his head, alerting at a noise. Kern heard it as well.

  “Is that Widsith?” Reynard asked.

  Kern warned, “We should take deeper cover.” The horses recognized their alarm and kept quiet as they all sought to hide in a thick brake below the crest of the hill.

  Kaiholo silently made his way through the brake to examine a hollow in the ridge beyond.

  “Someone’s looking for us,” Kern guessed, dropping to a squat. “Not anyone we wish to meet, I trow.”

  Kaiholo returned a few minutes later. “There are bodies,” he said. “Men. Not Spaniards. Nine or ten at least. I did not tarry to count. Judging by their kit, I think they are folk from the eastern shore. I do not know why they have come all the way here. But they did not find what they wanted. They are dead.”

  “What killed them?”

  “I would say a great Eater. They have been sucked down to the last instant.”

  Tying the horses, Reynard and Kern took the path Kaiholo had found and came to a shadowed silver waterfall and a trickle of stream from a shelf along the higher ridge. Here, lying half in, half out of the stream, like soft and slumbering stones, lay nine men . . . or what had once been men. One was having the hair on his careless skull parted by the fall. The others were nothing but bones draped in pallid wet skin.

  Kaiholo stepped into the stream and knelt beside the closest. “Scouts or pickets. Too many, I would say. Could point to a greater march. Mayhaps they were deceived and drawn here.”

  Reynard thought of the way the King of Troy had deceived the Spanish.

  Kaiholo fingered the corpse’s jerkin, cut and stitched from a finely tanned skin—not unlike those worn by the blunters. The rest of their kit consisted of thick trousers and sturdy leather boots, and each still carried a pair of good swords, one short and one long. One—the poor wight enjoying a perpetual shower—had a musket slung on his shoulder. None showed wounds. They had simply been drained of time.

  Reynard moved closer to examine the swords of the nearest. “No thievery!” he remarked, but there was more than a touch of fear
in him as he sensed a swirl of breeze, here in this hollow that likely shielded them from moving airs. If one was drained of all time, could that possibly leave a ghost? “I thought most of the Eaters had departed,” he said, his tongue almost as dry as it had been on the wreck of the hoy.

  “Valdis?” Kaiholo asked Kern.

  “I have never so measured her abilities.”

  “Then Calybo!”

  “Possible. If he hath stayed behind, it is to protect something of great value to those just beneath the sky.”

  They pondered this for a moment.

  “Maybe they seek the boy,” Kern said. “Maybe they found Widsith and questioned him.”

  “He would not speak of me!” Reynard insisted.

  “Thou dost not know the ways of Annwyn,” Kaiholo said. “Kings and heroes will all talk under the ministrations of the doctors of the Sister Queens.” He held up his hand at the boy’s further objections.

  “We lose ourselves in questions we cannot answer. If these be scouts, and they surely have that look, there are many more soldiers and retainers out there. Perhaps an army, or at least a great war party. Let us keep away from the broader and easier paths this new group will likely follow.”

  They moved up the ridge to a shelf that did not look as if it had been traveled recently. Here the forest’s strange corkscrew trees produced thin foliage and thinner branches, the wind making them dry-rustle.

  “The trods cross about twelve miles beyond the next wrinkle in the island,” Kern said. “There are great wrinkles and small, and still finer ones. They come and go at the behest of the Travelers.”

  “They can do that?” Reynard had seen a trod being laid out back near Zodiako, but still could hardly credit his own eyes.

  “Like making a bed,” Kern said, and spread his hand along an imaginary counterpane. With pinching fingers, he appeared to pick and flick a tuft from the unseen blanket.

  “Then they know magic?” Reynard asked, lost in a boyish hope for wonder, which suddenly, as he realized how that sounded, drew out a blush.