Грег Бир - The Unfinished Land

“Where did you hear this?” Reynard asked.

“From Yuchil, who tended her.”

Calafi danced closer. “I have a fate as well,” she said.

“Do you know what it is?” Reynard asked, his voice cracking.

Calafi turned to him with a sad glower. “No. But I know why thou art called fox-boy.”

“Why?” Reynard asked.

“Perhaps thou wast once a fox! Thou barkest like one.”

Then she laughed and ran off.

Something whirred in the air. Kaiholo and Kern hunched their shoulders and looked up. Calafi, close to Nikolias, cried out and fell to her hands and knees.

Nikolias crouched, and they all saw in the dawn light shadows flitting high west to east across the rugged land.

“They are here!” Kern shouted, his voice like a great horn.

Kaiholo said, “I do not feel them!”

“Nor I,” Widsith said.

Neither did Reynard.

The eastern brightness above the waste, many miles off, was broken by dozens of wide, winged shapes, swooping and diving: more drakes than Reynard had ever seen, even during the first battle of Zodiako.

“They are not ours! They are death,” Calafi wailed. “They bring death! My head hurts!” She wrapped her arms around her chest, and Nikolias clasped her and folded her in his cloak.

Valdis studied the sky in all directions. “They are not ours,” she agreed. “They seek vengeance against those who killed their masters.”

“That must mean the armies of the Sister Queens are near,” Nikolias said. “Just beyond the waste, or nearer still.”

“And being chivvied and reduced day by day,” Kern said.

WITHOUT HORSES or the wagon, they crossed over the uneven and dusty boundary of the chafing waste. Kern and Kaiholo soon lost sight of the wheeling drakes, but knew how to maintain a course, and so they led the way, followed by Widsith and the rest, and trailed, as usual, by Valdis, who did not seem at all comfortable in the daylight glare.

“We cannot tarry,” Nikolias said. “Nothing lives here long.” He explained there was no water on the waste, neither wells nor rivulets, despite occasional bursts of rain. The strange and powdery soil sucked up all moisture and would leave them with only what they caught in their caps or sucked from their capes and clothes. “We must cross within a day,” he concluded.

“There are prints everywhere,” Kern said.

“The Queens’ armies hoped to cross the waste with slaves?” Kaiholo asked.

“The Sister Queens never conversed with Travelers, except to kill them. They have never been here before, and know not the land,” Nikolias said.

“And what do we know?”

“Almost as little.”

Now they came upon many killed in the panic when the troops were attacked by drakes the day before. Bodies both of captors and captives appeared, first scattered, then in groups: elders, then women, amid signs of desperate struggle. Those soldiers, men of youth and strength, killed by the drakes, were obvious. But many more had died as well.

Widsith and Kern walked from corpse to corpse, joined by Kaiholo and then Valdis, who paused on the edge of a hecatomb of hundreds of dead, some still clutching the swords they had apparently wrested from their captors. Among them were soldiers in unfamiliar livery and armor, four or five of the city’s occupants to each soldier—all dead.

“The army tried to kill their captives as they fled,” Widsith said. “The servants stood their ground.”

“They had no choice,” Nikolias said.

Reynard felt a dreadful sadness. He thought again of England under Spanish threat, town streets filled with murder and fire.

From here on, they spoke very little, but within a few hours, as the dusk was falling again—the island’s time being always uneven and unpredictable—Kern observed that they were only crossing part of the waste, a chord across the circle, as it were, and he predicted that meant they would soon come upon another krater—and likely another krater city.

Clearly discouraged by their surroundings and prospects, Widsith asked, “How do we know that city is not also empty, or that it hath anything from which we can learn?”

“The waste hath ever been a changing feature,” Nikolias said. “Perhaps more so now. Its masters dead or injured, it trieth to delude any who cross.”

Look as hard as they could, they saw nothing rising above the indistinct horizon.

The group, enveloped in starlit night, relied on Kaiholo’s sense of direction and ignored the vague shapes of the many bodies, except for Widsith, who was searching for Spaniards. Reynard lost sight of Valdis but stumbled on regardless, following the Sea Traveler, and for some reason trusting him.

Within an hour, a new, sallow green light as faint as marsh glow appeared on the horizon, and as morning arrived, through a low silvery fog, another city came into view—a ring of towers, very different from the caged seed structure. The green glow came from within the ring.

Kern said, “Decay. Vast decay, and not of human bodies.”

“An Eater hath died,” Valdis said, taking shape beside them.

The glow grew brighter as they closed the distance, until they had crossed the chord and were once again in the vicinity of a great krater and the city that, at least in the past, had served its occupant.

“Every city had pride in its Crafter,” Nikolias said, “and built itself unique.”

The city now before them consisted of a circle of seven great erections, like cathedral towers, but where the towers in England rose straight, these faced inward and leaned toward an empty center, arching over the krater as if about to fall.

Between two of the towers, the group stood on the rim of a sere field covered with burned stubble. Kern stooped to feel the dry grass. The earth beneath the stubble felt warm. The air felt warm, with little sun to warm it. “Nothing hath been grown here in years,” the giant said. He rose and walked over to a lone and crumpled man’s body. “And yet there was reason to make war.”

Cautiously, they advanced. On the rim of the krater—not very different from the first they had seen, and source of a twisted pillar of cloud—lay many more dead, Travelers of the krater city and soldiers from the armies of the Sister Queens. The latter had died both in pitched battle and under the claws and jaws of drakes—and four of the vengeful drakes remained as well, two stuck by bolts from crossbows, and two more dead but without apparent wounds.

Kaiholo knelt to study the closest, holding his nose against the smell. It was missing several of its limbs. Its carapace and head were wrinkled and yellow, and the edges of its wings were badly worn. Valdis joined him. “Their vengeance done, their season is over,” she said, and lifted the wing’s chipped edge.

“Not good for a cloak,” Kaiholo said. The stench of death both human and insect was thick in the air.

“A day, maybe two, since the battle,” Widsith said.

Valdis rose and turned to the south. A hundred yards off, five figures emerged from the gate of the nearest tower. The rippling heat of the land beneath the sere grass distorted and camouflaged them, but Reynard saw they were all dressed in dirty brown, carrying swords, bows, and pouches slung over their shoulders.

Widsith cried out in surprise as they came near enough to see faces. “You were the ones on the waste!”

“And we are not alone,” said Maggie. Despite her years, and her limp, she seemed as strong as her yew bow, and wore the outfits they all wore—the leather of blunters. Nearly all the blunters from their first meeting on the beach of Zodiako were here. “My daughter is in that leaning tower.” She pointed over her shoulder at the edifice from which they had emerged. “Dana hath questions that need to be answered. She will find us soon.”