The Unfinished Land

A Quarry of Souls

THE LEDGE GOT wider and the growths on it even thinner until the weeds and tendrils of creeper vanished entirely and left clumped dirt and bare rock, scraped and revealed as if by a giant harrow.

The horses were still interested in something ahead, and eager to move on, but Reynard could not hear or see anything that encouraged him.

“We are on the edge of the quarry,” Kaiholo said. Kern nodded agreement. “Could be nothing more.”

“What sort of stone?” Reynard asked.

“Old,” the giant said, “even for the Tir Na Nog,” and they let the horses walk faster.

In an hour they found the greater ridge had curved and cupped a long valley, within which churned thick white mists like steam in a cauldron. The ledge had offered up a strangely clear and smooth road into this valley.

“This must have once been an important trod,” Kern said. Kaiholo kept his silence as the ledge road led them deeper into the cauldron and through the mists. Soon they saw rockfaces with clear signs of having been worked—flat faces edged around by chisel marks from where great sheets had been split away. Shards of stone littered the base of each face. The grayish depressions where soaked wooden wedges had swollen and split the blocks and sheets were obvious even to Reynard, who had once visited a limestone quarry with his uncle. He had been twelve when his uncle had been called to repair sledges and replace oxen traces.

Kaiholo and Kern seemed too quiet.

“It is just stone,” Reynard said.

Kern looked away. “Mayhap we were all of us found here,” he murmured. “On that, I seek no final answer.”

Kaiholo pulled up beside Reynard. “There is a slab ahead that showeth polish. It might have been worked but spoiled before delivery.” They rode along the road until the slab rose above them, a span of golden-brown granite shot through with strange, sky-colored crystals—the top of the slab towering thirty feet above the road, its width at least fifty feet.

“Who would have carried this?” Reynard asked. “No wagon, and no team of oxen!”

Kern said, “I have heard that some of my people used to work these quarries. Given giants, they would need no oxen.”

“Could they carry a monster block like this?” Reynard asked. Kaiholo also seemed curious about Kern’s answer.

“Perhaps,” the giant said.

“How could any human woman have survived such a romance?” Kaiholo asked dubiously.

Kern grinned and shrugged, and they moved on.

Near the southern end of the quarry, they found stacks of finely cut sheets, some raised up on wooden pallets and shelves. The edges of the slabs and sheets had worn to pebbles and sand in most cases, but Reynard walked before the smooth surface, strangely drawn to the patterns in the stone—to the whorls and brown and gold ribbons that drew out the rock’s long-solid currents.

“Once this lay on the bed of a great sea,” Kaiholo said. “Or so we were told by high ones many years ago.”

Kern countered, “The story I heard was that one of Queen Hel’s servants spent idle hours drawing in a river of rich golden mud, and then tossed flame over the river, boiled it away, and baked the stone hard.”

Kaiholo laughed. “I wonder which story is most marvelous?”

Reynard touched the stone and ran the tip of his finger around a whorl. “It is so like a fine lady’s eye,” he said. “I see an eye here, a face there… and a strange creature over there!”

“Any creatures we know?” Kaiholo asked, and again blew out his nose. “Let us leave this place. I do not enjoy ignorance in troubled times.”

“Is this a krater?” Reynard asked as he climbed back up behind Kern.

“Not as such,” Kaiholo said. “But I have never seen a real krater.”

“Do only Land Travelers cross the island entire?”

“So many questions!” Kaiholo said in pique.

“And so few answers!” Reynard responded in equal irritation.

“Get this boy to his destination before he doth gut us with curiosity,” Kern said.

“But we have to find Valdis and Widsith!” Reynard said.

“Perhaps they will meet us at the trod.” Kaiholo did not sound convinced.

“If the trods still be there,” Kern said.

This prospect made Reynard miserable, as if he was losing yet another family. And that in turn showed him how lost he had become, that he would regard any of these beings as familiar and worthy of trust—even Widsith!

They took the smooth path out of the quarry and found rugged, boulder-strewn grassland beyond. The lands here seemed to share little nature with England or the other places Reynard had seen or heard of. Features were scattered like sketches on an old artist’s table. He had seen one such artist working on designs for a small parish church in Aldeburgh, his table messy with charcoal, chalk, and sheets of buffed skin from old psalters—what he had called palimpsests. “I use them over and over again,” he had said, “for the parish cannot afford any more!” He had lifted his gnarled and bony hands to Reynard’s clear-eyed gaze and chuckled toothlessly. “Soon I’ll join those old skins and be myself scrubbed clean! I await a better artist to sketch me anew.”

Reynard pulled himself out of his reverie to see a large candle burning in the middle of their path. Such a sight by itself meant nothing to him—any strange sight might point only to a nicety of Crafter story. But this candle he knew, by its steady golden glow, belonged to the King of Troy. Neither Kaiholo nor Kern noticed it, and he decided against alerting them, for reasons he could not explain even to himself.

The Eater horses glanced at it in passing, and then turned their heads to look at him with their black and amber eyes, as if accusing.

They all walked on.