The Unfinished Land

The Change

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.