Not Spiral, though. She started trotting to and fro, lifting her head and raising her fine tusks so they shone in the unnatural light.
As the true dawn approached, Icebones heard the pad of clumsy footsteps. It was Chaser-Of-Frogs.
In the pink-gray half-light the Swamp-Mammoth stood before them, her stubby trunk raised. Her barrel of a body was coated in mud that crackled with frost, her breath steamed around her face, and her broad feet left round damp marks where she passed. "Are you ready? Urgh. Your dung stinks."
"The food here is bad for us," Autumn growled.
"Just as well you’re leaving, then," Chaser-Of-Frogs said. "Go drop a little of that foul stuff in the Pond of Evening, will you? Hey! What’s this?"
Woodsmoke had run around to Chaser-Of-Frogs’s side and was scrambling on her back. He was taller than she was. He already had his legs hooked over her spine, and he was pulling with his trunk at the sparse hair that grew there. "I am a Bull, strong and fierce. What are you? If you are a Cow I will mate with you."
"Get him off! Get him off!" Chaser-Of-Frogs turned her head this way and that, trying to reach him, but her neck was too rigid, her trunk much too small.
Autumn stalked forward and, with an imperious gesture, wrapped her trunk around the calf and lifted him up in the air.
Woodsmoke’s little face peered out through a forest of trunk hair. "I want to mate with it!"
Chaser-Of-Frogs growled and backed away. "Try it and I’ll kick you so hard you’ll finish up beyond the next pond, you little guano lump."
"He’s only a calf," Breeze rumbled.
"I know. I’ve had four of my own. Just keep him from being a calf around me."
Icebones said gravely, "We saw the lights. The Nest of the Lost. We need your guidance, Chaser-Of-Frogs. Please."
Chaser-Of-Frogs growled again, but evidently her dignity wasn’t too badly bruised. She sniffed the breeze. "Let’s go. We must keep up a good pace, for there’s nothing to eat in there. But keep this in mind. Whatever you see — there’s nothing to fear."
And, without hesitation, she set off across the swampy ground to the east.
Icebones, suppressing her own uneasiness, strode purposefully after her. She could hear the massive shuffle of the mammoths as they gathered in a loose line behind her.
The mammoths followed the bank of the canal. The waterway arrowed straight east, so that the rising sun hung directly over the lapping water, as if to guide their way.
The Gouge here lacked the tidy clarity of its western sections. The walls were broken and eroded, as if they had been drowned beneath an immense, catastrophic flood. The floor terrain was difficult, broken land, littered with huge, eroded rock fragments or covered in steep dust dunes.
But the land close to the canal was leveled: as smooth as the surface of Chaser-Of-Frogs’s mud pond.
"I’ve heard of this place," said Autumn. "Once mammoths were bound up with rope, and made to pull great floating things along the length of this shining water."
Icebones rumbled uncomfortably. She sensed that even Autumn missed something of the certainty of those days, when the Lost ran the world and everything in it.
There was movement on the canal’s oily waters. Thunder backed away from the water’s edge, perhaps recalling the whale that had come so close to taking Shoot in the Ocean of the North.
But this was no whale. It swam over the surface of the water, a massive straight-edged slab. It had no eyes or ears or trunk or feet. Huge slow waves trailed after it, feathering gracefully.
Autumn growled to Icebones, "It is obviously a thing of the Lost. And, look — it has a shining shell, like the ice beetle in the crater."
The huge water beetle drifted to a halt against the canal bank. A straight-edged hole in its side opened up, like a mouth, and a tongue of shining material stuck out and nuzzled against the land. Then the beetle waited, bobbing gently as the waves it had made rippled under it, and its carapace glistened in the dusty sunlight.
Nothing climbed aboard the beetle, and nothing came out of its mouth.
After a time the beetle rolled in its tongue, shut its strange mouth, and pushed its way gently further down the canal. After a time it stopped again, and Icebones saw that once more it opened its mouth, waiting, waiting.
Chaser-Of-Frogs growled, "Every morning it is the same. This water-thing toils up and down the canal, sticking out its tongue. This is the way of things here. Everything you see will be strange and useless. Nothing will do you harm. Come now." She stumped on.
They followed, walking beside the shore of the canal, while the waves of the beetle slowly rippled and subsided.
Soon they approached vast spires, slender and impossibly tall, taller than the greatest tree even on this tall planet. The gathering sunlight seeped into the spires, so they were filled with glowing pink light.
As they approached these glittering visions all the mammoths grew perturbed.
When Icebones looked into a spire she was startled to see another mammoth gazing back at her: a somewhat ragged, sunken-eyed, ill-fed Cow staring back at her from the depths of a glimmering pink pool. The mammoth had no smell and made no noise — for it was herself, of course, a reflection just as if she was staring into a pool of still water. But this "pool" had been set on edge by the strange arts of the Lost, and its strangeness disturbed her, right to the warm core of her being.
Woodsmoke came running from between his mother’s legs, trumpeting a shrill greeting. He ran straight into the shining wall and went sprawling, a mess of legs and trunk. Mewling a protest, he got up and trotted back to the wall. He raised his trunk at the mammoth calf he could see there, and the other calf raised its trunk back. With a comical growl, Woodsmoke tried to butt the other mammoth, only to find himself clattering against the wall again.
He might have kept that up all day, Icebones thought, if his mother hadn’t come to tuck him between her legs again.
"I am bigger than him. Did you see? My tusks were bigger than his. He was frightened of me. He ran away."
"Yes. Yes, he ran away."
There were buildings all around them now, of all sizes and shapes and colors, all characterized by hard, cold straight lines. And there were tall angular shapes, like trees denuded of their branches. These "trees" had a single fat fruit suspended from their top. Many of the fruit had fallen and smashed, but from others an eerie yellow light glowed, perhaps the source of the light Icebones had observed during the night.
The trails between the buildings were littered with red dust, and as the mammoths passed, their feet left clear round imprints. Many of the buildings showed signs of damage, their walls broken by huge rough-edged holes. In corners of the great avenues there were heaps of debris, branches and dust and bones, smashed up and dumped here as if by some great storm. It was evident that this place had been abandoned for some time.
Icebones was aware of Spiral’s growing, silent dismay; she would not find the Lost here.
Suddenly, from all over the Nest, boxy beetles came scurrying.
The mammoths stopped dead, and Breeze trumpeted alarm.
The beetles began to rush from one silent building to another. A mouth would open in the hide of a beetle, and another would open to greet it in the gleaming side of the building, and the beetle would wait — just as the water beetle had waited by the side of the canal. But nothing came to climb into or out of the beetle, no matter how long it waited. At last the beetle would close itself up again and scuttle off to its next fruitless rendezvous.
As suddenly as it had begun, the swarm of beetles thinned out. The last beetles shut their mouths and hurtled off out of sight.