And as the featureless days wore away, and the mammoths grew steadily more weary and cold and hungry and thirsty, darker doubts gathered.
It seemed audacious, absurd, for her to lead her mammoths across this high, silent, dead place. Perhaps it was simpler to suppose that the fault lay in her own head and heart, and not in the world around her. Perhaps she was leading these mammoths — not to salvation — but to their doom.
But then she would think of the dried mud and bones around the ponds of the Gouge, and the wide salt flats that bordered the Ocean of the North. This world was indeed changing for the worse — she was right — and she must continue to confront that truth, and she must gather her strength of body and mind, and work to bring these mammoths to safety, as best she knew how.
One evening, as the dark drew in, Icebones hauled her weary legs up the shallow rim of yet another crater. She was limping, favoring her damaged shoulder, where pain still stabbed.
She reached the summit of a low, eroded rim mountain — and found herself facing a surface so smooth and flat she wondered briefly if it might be liquid water. But her nostrils were full of the tang of red dust. And as she looked more closely she saw rippling dunes, like frozen waves, and sharp-edged boulders littered here and there. There was no motion, no ripple, no scudding wave: this was a lake of dust, not water, and a faint disappointment tugged at her.
Thunder stood beside her. "How strange. The other wall of this crater is buried."
Icebones saw that it was true. The smooth, flat lake of crimson dust washed away to the south, submerging the crater’s far wall. Perhaps this crater had formed on a slope, and had been partly buried when the dust gathered. Further away she saw fragmentary ridges and arcs poking out of the dust field: bits of more drowned craters. But the dust sea did not extend far. Beyond the submerged craters was more of the broken, jumbled, very ancient landscape they had become used to.
She raised her trunk and sniffed the air. It was dry, cold, and it smelled of nothing but iron dust: no moisture, no life. "This raised ridge is not a good place to find water."
"We need rest," Thunder sighed. "Rest and peace, even more than we need food. Let us stay here until morning, Icebones."
Icebones understood: at least here on the ridge no walls of rock loomed around them. Under an open, empty sky, creatures of the steppe could rest easy, if hungrily. "You are right," she said. "We should call the others."
Night fell quickly here. Shadows fled across the broken land, and pools of blackness grew and merged, as if a tide of dark was rising all around them. The stars burned hard in the blackness, not disturbed by a wisp of mist or a scrap of cloud, and the silence stretched out into the dark, huge and complete, as if concealing greater secrets.
A mammoth broke from the group and padded to the edge of the crater-rim ridge. Though Thunder was just black on black, a shadow in the night, Icebones could smell him.
Trying not to disturb the others, who were clustered around the snoring calf, Icebones followed him.
Thunder held his trunk high in the air, peering over the dust-flooded crater. She stood beside him, trunk raised and ears spread, listening.
…And now she thought she heard a thin, high scraping, like the scrabbling paw of some tiny animal, coming from the surface of the dust sea. It was very soft, so quiet she would never have noticed it if not for the high, lifeless stillness of this place. But in the silent dark it was as loud to her as the bark of a wolf.
The scratching vanished.
Then it returned, a little further away.
She rumbled, "Perhaps it is a lemming."
Thunder said bluntly. "No lemming hops from place to place over great bounds as this invisible scratcher does."
The two mammoths waited on the ridge, side by side, as the night wore away, and the invisible scratcher drifted, seemingly at random, around the dust bowl.
And when the first bruised-purple light began to seep into the eastern sky, they saw it.
An immense sac hovered in the air, just above the dust. It was like the skin of some huge fruit. At first it was pitch black, silhouetted against the dawn sky. It trailed a tendril, more pliant than the branch of a willow, that coiled on the ground like the trunk of a resting mammoth. But as the sac drifted, the trailing tendril scraped along the ground, making the scratching noise she had heard.
Thunder said, "Is it a bird?"
"It’s no bird I ever saw. Look, it has no wings, although it flies… I think it is floating like the feathers of a molting goose, or as seeds are blown on the breeze."
"What mighty tree will grow when that vast seed falls?"
Now pale dawn light diffused over the dust pool and shone into the heart of the sac, making it glow from within, pink and gray. The floating thing was made of some smooth shining translucent substance, Icebones saw, but it was slack and loose, like the skin around the eyes of a very old mammoth. And its trailing tendril dragged something knotty and silver across the dust, exploring like a trunk, leaving a shallow trench.
Now that the light was striking the sac it was starting to swell and rise, its surface unfolding with a slow, rustling languor. The silver knot scraped over the dust as the tendril slowly uncoiled.
"Perhaps it rises in the day and flies on the wind," Icebones mused. "And then it sinks at night and scrapes its silver fruit on the ground."
"But it has no bones or head," said Thunder. "It cannot choose where it travels, as a mammoth can. It is blown on the wind. What does it travel for? What is it hoping to find?"
Icebones blew dust out of her trunk. "That we will never know—"
The sea’s placid surface erupted before them. Dunes flowed and disintegrated. A great black cylinder rose, and dust fell away with a soft rustle all around.
Icebones stumbled back, and she made to trumpet a warning. But so profound was her shock at this sudden apparition that her throat and trunk seemed to freeze. And besides, what warning could she give.
The cylinder of black-red flesh, twisting out of the dust, was crusted with hard segmented plates. At its apex was a nostril, or mouth: a pit, black as night, lined with six inward-pointing teeth. Dust was falling into that gaping maw, but whatever immense creature lay beneath the surface seemed indifferent. The great mouth folded around the lower portion of the floating sac. Huge, sharp teeth meshed together with a noise like rock on rock, and the sac’s fabric was ground apart effortlessly.
Then the vast pillar twisted and fell back into the dust. It sank quickly out of sight, dragging half the sac and the trailing cable with it.
There were no ripples or waves. The dust ocean was immediately still, with only a new pattern of dunes left to show where the beast had been. The severed upper half of the sac drifted away, tumbling, on breezes that were gathering strength in the morning air.
For heartbeats the two mammoths stood side by side, saying nothing, stunned.
"It was a beast," said Thunder fervently.
"Like a worm. Or a snake."
"Do you think the Lost brought it here from the Old Steppe?"
"I don’t think it has anything to do with the Lost, Thunder. Did it smell of the Lost — or any animal you know? Did you see its teeth?"
"They were very sharp and long."
"But it had six: six teeth, set in a ring." Just as the footprints she saw in the ancient outflow channel had had six toes. Just as the creatures buried in the rock floor of the Nest of the Lost had six leaves and limbs and petals…