Грег Бир - The Unfinished Land

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.

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 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.