The Unfinished Land

Exodus

VALDIS ROUSED from a numb dullness. Sleep for an Eater was never simple or easy. Her rest was hardly rest at all, in fact, and sleep very nearly impossible, fired as both were with vivid flashes from the lives of others—key moments of love and violence, disappointment and revenge, betrayal and injury, but also discovery and knowledge—a strange and broken sampling of humanity’s best and worst.

How long Valdis had been on the isle, she did not know, did not remember—so crowded was her memory with the lives and times of others. But there had once been awful tides and mountainous waves, and a battered longship had been caught in the island’s gyre, and she could still recall, in a dim and childish way, the soaked and agonized faces of a man and a woman. They must have been her mother and father. Their ten-year-old daughter had been injured by a storm-loosed sail and would soon die, and they had convinced a carl to take them north, at risk of being caught in the legendary tides, in hopes of finding this misty shore and leaving her here to die, if need be… Or not to die, but to be found. Given freely to be raised by those of the island, for it was said there were people here who never sickened, never died, but benefited from the charms of witches and magicians and devils—or were themselves witches, magicians, and devils.

And so those Norse voyagers had left their daughter on a misted shore, and she had not died. She had been found. A one-time mother had somehow recovered from centuries past enough kindness to lift up the limp girl, whose time had run dreadfully low, down to minutes or less—and had named her Valdis, which some said meant Dead Girl, and others said, meant Saved from Valiant Death.

The one-time mother had summoned another, much older than she, who had vast stores of life, to donate time and something resembling health to the girl, in exchange for her fealty.

Her dwelling was no sort of home for a living woman, made as it was of sticks and leaves pressed into banks of crusted ice. But for an Eater, it was enough. Her skin did not require softness nor any sort of luxury. Her hair kept itself clean without attention, as did her clothes, which were woven of threads secreted by the large, jointed, and heavily armored creatures that dined on the trees above the Ravine. She required no warmth, and could in fact wander through snow and ice without freezing her bare feet or blanching arms and fingers that were already pale. Hel had designed Eaters to be free of such concerns, that they might focus on all they saw around them—generally at night, for they seldom went out by day.

But now she felt a connection. One was near who could all by himself make her travel by day. The feeling caused a diamond light to grow in her deepest thoughts that had until now known only shadow. On the southwestern shore beyond Zodiako she had ministered to him, connected with him…

And now it seemed arrangements were being made for them to meet again. Great change was vibrating up and down the Ravine.

She pushed up from the litter, slowly and deliberately brushed herself, emerged from her cubby, and climbed steps hand and foot up the rugged icy slope. The walls of the Ravine were lined with doors cut from stone, or shaped from ice and frozen mud… and out of these doors crept many Eaters, little more than shadows.

The shortest paths out of the Ravine lay along the slowly flowing river at its bottom. Often in the night Valdis had watched Eaters glide the length of that river, trailing ribbons of dim green light, dipping hands and kicking feet to raise frozen walls for their dwellings or sculpt strange shapes for amusement.

Some of the more ancient and ornate creations rose like bird wings to direct a northerly wind along the bottom, tuning its steady sigh into a ghostly dirge. These wind-song blades, on close inspection, revealed veins of blood and even, in their fogged depths, frozen bodies from Eater wars fought ages ago. Now Eaters rarely fought each other, as the Travelers and high ones they served mediated their darker and more violent tendencies. Valdis liked neither the bird-wing shapes nor their history. There was not much about being an Eater that she did like.

She had conveyed some of these truths to the boy while she ministered to him on the beach. Guldreth and Calybo had told her she could, that she should, so minister—but only to the boy. Would the boy understand, or would he be repulsed? She had touched such life in him, such warmth! And such a complexity, not quite the reverse of her own inner echoes, but more direct, more useful.

And still…

He had no time in him.

The Eaters that had left their houses formed processions that moved both south and north, along paths carved in rock and ice, up and down the Ravine. The last of the daylight was of no concern to them, apparently.

A number of beings seldom seen, leftovers from Crafter dreams only vaguely unleashed, were moving out ahead of the Eaters. The worm-like servants, however, had been left behind and peeked from many doors, dark eyes glinting like bubbles on a pond, crickling in alarm and waving their feelers. Those winged creatures who flew messages and warnings from the caverns beneath the northern fortresses made their escape just below the arched trees, buzzing and whirring, then wheeling north like an uncertain cloud of bats in the silvery light of the gathering evening.

She could feel the unity that radiated from all, and though none had struck a tocsin or conveyed instruction, she knew she must leave as well. If the Eaters departed, the Ravine would go back to its natural state, and the water locked up in the walls, the houses and sculptures, the historic wing-song graveyards, would melt. That flood would carry both the corpses of servants who could not fly, of those who would not leave, and the old sourness of Eater persuasion—a nasty vitriol.

Her appointed companions—Widsith and the young man, Reynard—were at the south end of the Ravine. She knew this much and little more.

She followed the trail that flanked the left side of the river and as she walked tried to utter a prayer to Odin, but the words would not form and her lips seemed to freeze. She had no such freedoms here.

On the boat, he could not pray, either.

He had no time.

Now her mouth felt dusty-dry.

She had not felt fear in hundreds of years. But now arrived the one thing that could even in her situation inspire fear.

Hope.

Valdis’s eyes were clear jade green, and by evenlight, it was difficult to know where her lids ended and eyes began. She turned those eyes on a large, dark figure that rose up behind her—then she stopped on the path and stood aside.

“Pardon, milady,” spoke a deep voice.

And a giant passed her by. It was Kern, who along with Kaiholo, and at times the Pilgrim himself, served Guldreth.

She followed his massive shadow.