The Unfinished Land Page 31

  He looked from his own eyes now, leaving for the moment the drake to make its own decisions.

  Nikolias walked beside Andalo, while Widsith stayed close to Calafi and Reynard, and Kern followed them at a couple of paces, so close he could almost reach out to them. These people, his partners in this story, were taking him to that covered place, and they were more than hinting that they could push him into closeness with a Crafter, perhaps not a god, though capable (Reynard might concede this) of creating out of nothing a creature such as himself—but a creature from the stars, from the places studied (or that would be studied) by the man with the plumed hat, or known somehow through other than human experience to the man who cast a white shadow.

  “The Queens have sent their last force,” Widsith said, seeing through his drake’s eyes. Reynard switched his awareness again and saw it as well—a divided force of perhaps two hundred warriors, mostly men, coming at them from both sides as they approached the walls of the city, hoping to cut them off, perhaps kill rather than capture.

  Taking vengeance for those who had already died in so many actions around the island.

  But the drakes were already sweeping in from above these warriors, braving bolts from more than a dozen crossbows, falling and grabbing with their spiked, razor-sharp legs and scissor-gripping talons, pulling up and carving one after another, while the Queens’ warriors shouted and screamed, and finally stopped trying to reach them or block their way—

  And the dregs of the Sister Queens’ armies broke and ran.

  This part of the war seemed to be over.

  The Change

  * * *

  REYNARD LOOKED DOWN on the city, on the circular whorl of its houses and streets, and was reminded of the spin of hair on a baby’s head—another memory, specific and real!—but his insect side saw paths of flight over competing drakes searching for mates.

  Two great roads divided the city. The drake’s eyes saw this quartering in its own way, ignoring the straightness as irrelevant, its attention moving sometimes to the sky, sometimes back to the ground—but keeping the horizon always level, angling its head to keep a stable reference to all its twisting, to the stimulus of air passing right wings and left, fore wings and aft.

  His drake angled to grab a hapless gull, which it brought to its jaws and devoured on the remainder of its descent.

  In the insect’s extraordinary vision, wide and tinted with colors he had never seen before, Reynard observed that the city had nearly emptied, and its last inhabitants, the servants of the last Crafter, gathered around the great dome that covered, he presumed, a krater.

  But now dusk crossed the sky like a blindfold and he saw only through his own eyes. Kern and Calybo protected his sides as they advanced along the straight road through the city to the center.

  A gate of beams carved from thick black wood had been propped open, as if awaiting visitors. This gate led them into an inner sweep of the spiral, and finally to the way that led straight to the krater.

  To the west, the dense low clouds were parting.

  Reynard’s drake finished its descent and landed on a tiled rooftop to his left, a few dozen yards ahead of Reynard, while four other drakes landed on other roofs, and one in the middle of the street, all spreading wide their stained-glass wings and staring down on the visitors with eyes the color of emeralds, topped with dark ruby, glinting in the revealed light of the setting sun.

  Dark fell slowly.

  Kaiholo whispered something to Kern. From the shield blow, his head was still bandaged.

  “Neither we nor the drakes can see the center,” Widsith said to Reynard. “Canst thou?”

  Reynard looked over the rooftops, beyond the drakes. “Ropes of fog,” he said. “From here, they cover something large and high—like the seed city, but split in four.”

  “You see through the fog!” Kaiholo said.

  Kern shook his head. “I see nothing but fog.”

  Reynard could still feel his drake’s strange hunger, like a cord blazing down the middle of its body, a hidden fuse—not just for food, but for any challenge. Drakes lived for battle, among themselves and whoever threatened their partners. They fought for mates to the death at times—and finished their seasons with their beautiful wings tattered, ripped, and chewed . . .

  And this they knew. This they foresaw. And they did not care. For none survived more than one season, once they rose from the waters and split their cases and dried fresh new wings in island breezes. Reynard felt a sudden sadness at their necessity and passion.

  He looked down the road and saw, at a cross-street to the spiral, the broad stub of a candle burned almost to the ground. This drew him away from thoughts of his drake to the King of Troy, whose season, though much longer, seemed to have also passed.

  “Where is it, magician?” he murmured. “Where is your bone-wife now, and what is she doing?”

  Kern and Kaiholo walked alongside Reynard and Calafi, protecting them all, and Andalo incidentally.

  Kaiholo frowned and backed away as the great Eater appeared. Andalo kept the horse from rearing, and brought it under control, while Calafi laughed.

  Calybo seemed more solid and present than ever, and this made him, to Reynard, even stranger and more frightening—like a masque in a village play, a demon’s masque. His face swept up on one side, then on the other—as if presenting different emotions on different faces, or even different ideas about faces—a masque made for different times.

  “Some Crafters must see the stars to make their worlds,” the Eater said. “This may be one. The tower is a tunnel to the sky.”

  As if in response, the twists of grayness tied themelves in knots like those they had seen before, painful to trace. Reynard could feel a kind of wind pull him in and up toward the knots. Following those knots, he thought, trying to undo them, could cost one his very soul.

  Which, he realized, was why the drakes had descended to the rooftops and all faced away from the city’s center.

  Calybo said, “There shall be newness here for the last time. Servants are angry at the end of their usefulness. But they still have tasks—final tasks. And one such is to arrange the last disks around the compass points of the krater, that they may be finished—the last effort of these islands, and filled with the last faces from the soulstone mines. Now we see.”

  Calafi gripped Reynard’s arm. “I think thou art a brother,” she said, and grinned up at him.

  The Crafter’s Lair

  * * *

  TTHE FORTRESS that lay over the krater revealed a plan like unto the markings they had seen in other kraters on the way here, empty kraters, including the one that still contained the shrouded body of a Crafter. The fortress supported a cleft tower, like a great stack over a forge, a tower likely open to the sky and the stars, and was surrounded by a great outer wall interrupted by arched openings of dense black stones.

  Each opening seemed to lead down a hallway, and none led down the same hallway.

  “Seest thou the way of it?” Calafi asked Reynard.

  Reynard said, “A maze, I think, like the labyrinth that held the Minotaur.” Behind them, a furtive group of twelve men and women, dressed in black-and-white-checked robes and high caps, brought forward four disks and stood, waiting to be given permission by someone, or something, to enter the fortress.

  “And where dost thou get that notion?” Calafi asked, her voice high and childlike, but also cutting like a blade.

  “From memories not my own,” Reynard admitted. “From Valdis, perhaps.” He turned his head to find her.

  Valdis stepped closer, hands held out as if measuring and judging a great force. “Not my gift,” she said. “Some other’s learning, or maybe it came with the Crafter’s work.”

  Reynard looked back to the ring of fine black sand around the hard rim of the krater, like the lip of a great bowl that carried a meal none dared eat. He could not see Widsith, could gain no reassurance that the Pilgrim had told him the truth. Reynard felt a vibrati
on that squeezed his heart and made it falter in his chest, that bunched the muscles of his stomach and made him wish to throw up—and filled his arms as well, making him shake as if with palsy.

  Calafi looked toward the wall and the nearest arch. “This Crafter is still alive.”

  Reynard agreed.

  “But failing,” Calybo said, and made his face clear to Reynard.

  “I see only darkness in those doors,” Andalo said.

  The checked servants carried a disk forward and placed it into a groove before the archway. They then bowed and approached Calybo, and spoke to him in whispers—doubtless one of the few times they had ever addressed an Eater.

  “Thou wilt pass through,” Calybo said to Reynard and Calafi. “There is a last play, and the disk will lead thee to its heart—and protect ye against truths too strong. I will go with ye.”

  “Who am I?” Calafi asked. “Who are you? And who are we?

  “We are the next.”

  Valdis seemed to flow up beside them, like a shape of smoke, but then looking very much, Reynard thought, like the young Viking girl she had once been. “We will share,” Valdis said. She put one hand on Reynard’s shoulder, and the other on the girl’s head. Looking into the girl’s radiant face, and upon Valdis’s night-dark features, Reynard felt his indecision and fear fade.

  Andalo brought forth a pile of sticks and bones, donated perhaps by the servants, which he laid before Nikolias. As the second candle took its wick and made a greater brightness, a ragged figure in tatters of old muslin came forward, barely recognizable as a female conjure-shape. It reached down with stick arms and pulled up from the bones and pieces of wood another like itself, and Nikolias removed the fine cloak from his shoulders and draped it around the new construct, which suddenly filled out like a woman, with long hair and fine limbs and a lovely face that glowed in the light of the candle which gave it time to do its duty.

  The last servants of the Crafter, who had performed menial duties and sacred duties for who could say how long, had arranged themselves around the krater structure and its tower, most kneeling, some in ornate robes standing, hands over their heads, staring inward and paying no attention to the newcomers.

  Nikolias rode his horse forward. One of the servants swung her head to see him, but otherwise did nothing—did not rise from her knees, did not speak.

  “They are all Travelers,” Nikolias said. “They have been here, all their generations, since Hel brought the Crafters down to the chafing waste.” He drew himself up straight in his saddle, then nodded to Reynard and threw a kiss to Calafi. “Yuchil and I wish you all triumph,” he said. “That Travelers may continue to carry languages and tales, and to sustain gods, heroes, and mortals for all time to come.”

  They stepped toward the wall, the disk, the archway. Kern and Kaiholo and Valdis stood beside the disk. Kaiholo made a motion with his hand. Reynard would have to stoop to fit his head through.

  The interior of the disk was still dark.

  “It is solid,” Reynard said. “I would not break it!”

  “Stroke the upper rim until it sings,” Calybo said. “I will follow.”

  Calafi curtseyed like a princess and stood beside the newest bone-wife, whose own thin voice now carried to their ears—and though feminine, not unlike the voice of the King of Troy.

  “I will go before all and make certain,” the bone-wife said. “I’ll be first and test the airs, little such as I breathe, but as I do not have eyes, mine eyes will not fail, and as I have not a mind, my mind will not fail, and I’ll let ye know whether the Crafter is prepared for the line to come to it before it dies.”

  “Rub the disk,” Calybo said.

  Reynard held out his hand and stroked the top of the disk, rubbing with two fingers. The sound was muted and blunt. He then touched his fingers to his tongue, moistening the tips, and tried again.

  With a slight pressure, the disk began to vibrate, then to sing!

  “It is opening,” Calafi said. “Can I try next time?”

  The bone-wife shivered away some leaves and dust, drew tight her black garb, stooped very low, and entered the disk first. Reynard kept rubbing as Calafi passed through, and then Calybo, and finally, Valdis.

  When the Eaters passed through, the disk’s tone changed.

  “Keep to the left at every turn,” Kern advised Reynard. “Many such mazes are in the histories of the giants, and that is always the way to the inner chamber.”

  “Many times I have riddled mazes with Asian emperors,” Widsith said.

  “Many times?” Kaiholo asked.

  “Three times, actually,” Widsith said. “And each time, I failed. A poor Minotaur!” He gripped Reynard’s free hand and squeezed. “I envy thee, fox-boy.”

  The drakes left behind sang a sad humming noise and shifted on their perches, making roof tiles fall to the ground and shatter. Their connection with their masters was now ending, and they wished only to fly off and die on the southwestern shores.

  Andalo took another candle from Gareth, lit it, and handed it to Reynard, who now passed through, following Calafi, and heard a rustle of sticks.

  The Line Passes

  * * *

  THE BONE-WIFE STOOD in silhouette before them, sticks visible through the gap in the coat. Beyond her, the dark outer wall of the maze gleamed with veins of green fire.

  “The airs are suitable,” she said. “This way!”

  Reynard lit the new candle with the stub of the old, and proceeded, Calafi close behind . . . and the Eaters on each side, as if to protect them.

  They followed the bone-wife to the right, then took the first left turn into the krater’s winding stone maze.

  Reynard held out the candle, but it gave little light. And then, the flame turned greenish, and while it still burned, produced no heat, and cast only its own kind of darkness.

  They were in a realm of shadows, and this seemed to suit the Eaters. Reynard could not see them, only their outlines against the fairy lights that drifted now and then through the corridors and around the bends.

  “Why go through the disk?” he asked Calafi in a whisper.

  She shook her head. “I thought you knew!”

  Valdis said, “We are in the Crafter’s last working, and when we are done here, we will pass through the disk again.” There was hope in her voice, but Calybo said nothing.

  The deeper they went into the maze, the more the fairy lights resembled childers—but taking on the characters of male or female, their faces acquiring features as well, and growing in number. The corridors were thick with gently glowing figures.

  “We stop here for a moment,” Calybo said.

  Calafi watched the glowing childers with a happy smile. “Was I one of those?” she asked. Nobody could answer. Nobody knew. Reynard wondered as well.

  “They gather to act on a Crafter stage,” Calybo said. “I have seen them around the western shore, during storms at sea, and windy days on land—blowing through the forests, immortal until they are cast in a new story.”

  They had again turned left, and now came to a divided chamber where one side was stacked high with granite slabs, and the other with disks upright on racks, like dishes set out to dry. The bone-wife gestured for them to move forward. Childers flowed from the slabs, until the chamber was uniformly brilliant, as if bathed in bright sun, and they could hear distant voices, perhaps singing, perhaps just expressing marvel.

  “Do not look into the disks,” the bone-wife whispered. “We are too close to where they were made. And you are already in the only creation you need.”

  She walked ahead, the hem of her robe swishing back and forth, and Reynard saw what might have been an ankle peeping out from that hem—but it was only the knob of a stick. She stopped them once more, then guided them around another corner, left again—Reynard had lost track of how many times they turned. They were caught up in the flowing currents of childers, all headed into the turn, gently making their own sounds, but then the four heard anoth
er sound from within a deeper chamber—a sound like rushing water in a great cavern.

  The bone-wife pointed to Valdis, Calafi, Calybo, and Reynard. “You will go on, those who have their own roles to play,” she said. “And once you go, I’ll perform my last act of magic, then collapse, and the King of Troy will find his peace. He bids you now farewell.”

  Valdis and Calafi took hands and walked into the next passage. Calybo held out his hand for Reynard. The Eater’s eyes grew into distant caverns, showing a single star—

  Calafi tugged Valdis after her and offered him her other hand, insisting, grasping, squeezing.

  And Reynard was not afraid.

  He took Calybo’s hand.

  He had a sense of what might happen next.

  And so did the strange girl.

  “ ’Twill be fun!” she said.

  They now strung out in a line, hand to hand, and entered the biggest chamber yet—topped by a great darkness, an ill-defined space filled with swirling lights that illuminated nothing in this world and cast no glow on the center of the krater, the center of the bowl that served up history . . .

  And madness.

  Reynard saw the Crafter. It had no eyes, yet he was sure it saw all. It possessed no limbs, yet spun away great ropes of gray mist that rose high into the tower—mist made of childers, Reynard thought, but could not be sure of anything. He looked up beyond the ropes of mist . . . and saw a brilliant green star framed by the opening at the top of the tower.

  “We have stored up all our time waiting for you,” Calybo said. “Valdis, touch the young one. Young mistress, touch Reynard.”

  “I have him,” Calafi said.

  Now Calybo raised his head like a wolf, and howled forth that dreadful sound Reynard had heard on the beach when the great Eater, just beneath the stars, had renewed the Pilgrim after his long voyage.