The Unfinished Land

Under and Out

THEY WALKED ALONG the base of the fortress, looking for an entrance to the caverns beneath. “The air smells sick,” the tattooed man said, and spat.

Through sun scattered by high vines and trees, looking into what passed for morning here, the Ravine’s shaped ice walls were growing spiky. A sheet broke away from the far reaches of the fortress and collapsed with ponderous grace, grinding and crashing. The echoes ran south along the Ravine, and then returned in a rough staccato chorus.

Kaiholo said, “Soon the Ravine will flood, and that flood will carry the rotting bodies of creatures too afraid to leave. Let us not be among them.”

They came upon a high, dark entrance, half hidden by old masonry. Kaiholo entered the cavern. Kern and the rest followed—all but Reynard.

“Thou hast a stubborn face,” Widsith said in passing.

“I would understand what my use is to them, to any of you!” Reynard said.

“The boy doth grow a beard,” Kaiholo said cheerfully, as if none of what they had seen, or were experiencing, mattered. “Let us train up like mules—arm to shoulder, the giant at the rear!”

“Boy, go or stay,” Widsith said, exasperated. “Thou wilt learn more if thou goest, and if thou stayest, likely die.”

Reynard returned his piercing look, then took up behind Kern, until the giant stepped aside and let him and Widsith join the line as Kaiholo had suggested. Guided by the tattooed man, who spun his orb but seemed to already know these caverns well, they walked along in gray-lit murk for hundreds of yards, then saw a faint gleam ahead.

“More ice,” Kern said, pointing to the right-hand side of the cave. “It is still thick here.”

“And still alive with Eater power,” Widsith said.

“There is a brighter block ahead,” Kaiholo said.

The block was a pure, clear sheet of smoothed ice, veined in both snowy white and ethereal blue. Through a particularly thin and transparent spot, they made out a moving shadow—face rippling but clear enough. The face frowned and vanished.

The strangely beautiful shade who had leaned over Reynard suddenly reshaped in front of them. Though dressed in a shimmering, diamond-marked fabric, she did not seem to wear it with conviction.

“Guldreth hath loaned her a shift,” Kaiholo whispered to them.

“Drake wing?” Reynard asked.

“No,” Kaiholo said. “She is not that far above the mud.”

Valdis spoke in a voice soft as a passing breeze. “Guldreth doth command me. I am to deliver this human child to the proper Travelers, who will take him to the krater lands. We will meet them at the join of two great trods. She telleth me they expect him.”

Reynard could not keep his gaze off the Eater’s pale features, her sea-foam flesh and deep-set green eyes that flickered like lanterns in a huge black room. He could not decide whether she was terrifying or beautiful, but one thing he felt, beyond any doubt, was that she was neither young nor old.

“The cross-trod nearest to the northern end of the Ravine is already halfway to the krater lands,” Kern said.

“Thou hast been there?” Widsith asked.

“I have so ventured.”

Valdis’s whispery voice took on a deeper timbre. “The Ravine is draining. Our path will be crowded with spirits and frightened beasts. We must move quickly. Eater horses are fast, and do not always kill the humans they carry. The stables are just north of here.”

They walked in deep gloom for a time, Valdis leading the way. She did not need a spinning lamp.

The roof of the cavern rose to an echoing emptiness. Ancient stone pillars, dark purple lava bricks, and what looked like intricately figured ivory or bone, emerged from the gloom and defined a stable, a dim line of stalls in which Eater horses stood very still, eyes closed as if asleep. Valdis opened the gate and led them through. “I will choose a horse for each of you,” she said, and looked to Kern. “Even you. Once assigned, do not try to put a rope on your mount, or look it directly in the eye.”

Reynard counted all the animals he could see. The stable housed at least ten, sleek and fine of form, their coats like wet velvet, black or gray. Valdis spoke, and the animals opened their eyes and raised their heads. She then led them one by one out of their stalls. Not themselves Eaters, they nevertheless reacted to the humans with a proud disregard that persuaded Valdis to take each aside and whisper in its ear. At her words, they uttered high, piercing cries, not so much whinnies as like the sounds made by swifting owls and other hidden night creatures.

She matched the giant with a great draft horse, a mare, the largest Reynard had ever seen, bigger even than the ones that had drawn the great Traveler wagon back in the woods near Zodiako—but black as pitch and with amber eyes. “This is yours,” she said to Kern. “I hope you can control her.”

“I will try, O mistress,” Kern said, and stood by the mare’s flank.

“Move over there,” she instructed, and the giant guided the horse to just outside the gate.

Valdis now brought forward a horse with ornately marked haunches—a combination of branded scars and shaved hair. “This is for you,” she said to Reynard. Lacking stirrups, he could only haul himself up by holding on to a hank of mane and swinging his legs over, as he had done in his uncle’s shop, positioning horses to be shod. He sat up straight on the mare’s back, legs gripping her cold ribs, and wondered who had marked her—and when. Was she meant to survive magic, curses?

Valdis led a third horse to Kaiholo, a slender mare with a strong but nervous gait. She now pointed to Widsith, and he stepped up to the pale gray gelding she had chosen for him, the shade of an early dawn, with eyes the color of a sunrise cloud. “This was one of Guldreth’s prizes. She hath no need of it now.”

“Did these animals ever cross the chafing waste?” Widsith asked.

“They have,” Valdis answered.

“A boy in the village was kicked by one,” Widsith said in an undertone to Reynard. “He hath a bottle containing the dust, which doth sparkle and give visions.”

“Are we to go there?” Reynard asked.

“Mayhaps,” Widsith answered.

With all but her mounted, Valdis walked back into the stable to bring forth her animal, a stallion black as the walls of the cave. His eyes were black as well. He was difficult to see at all. Valdis mounted him as if taking flight. She then issued a thin whistle, high and sharp as a needle, and the remaining horses kicked and reared, and then ran out of the stable and toward the northern exit.

“They run as if—” Kaiholo began, but cut himself short when they heard a great rushing sound and hundreds of bat-like animals flew over them on stubby wings, brushing the cavern’s roof—ignoring the riders below, but making great haste to leave.

Kaiholo grimaced. “Little time. Let us move! Unlikely we ever return.” Valdis now whistled softly, and all the horses paced north with fluid grace.

Reynard looked back at Valdis, but turned away when she seemed to notice. Despite his fear, he felt a strong curiosity about what she knew of him, and he of her, and how she—if she was a female, still—would travel in daylight, beside humans. And he was curious about her story, if she had one, if she remembered—and perhaps it was best that she did not.

The glow that Reynard had thought might be daylight was deceptive. They passed into a narrower cavern hung with many creatures that themselves supplied the light. The running horses had long since passed, leaving prints in the sandy floor.

“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.