Valdis did not drink from the bag, but squatted by her horse, eyes shut as if asleep—or lost in an Eater’s strange reverie.
“This is the outskirts of the plain of jars,” Nikolias said, “forbidden to all but Crafter servants, and still they do not arrive.”
“Yet none doth challenge or forbid!” Widsith said.
“We must deliver,” Yuchil said grimly.
Widsith gave Nikolias a look almost of resentment, but mostly of fear, and Reynard knew that none of them had ever been this far into the center of the island, or beyond. Silent, questions neither asked nor answered, they surveyed the prospects ahead.
“The horses are brave for us,” Widsith said to Reynard as the wagon rolled on. Valdis passed them. Her form was like a wraith of smoke, but where the light struck her, she glinted, she gleamed. And her eyes in particular seemed to change color, more umber than jade.
Nikolias said, “We have to make way through this place before nightfall. Not even Travelers are free to pass here at all times.”
A flat, arid paleness stretched many miles to the distant peaks and did indeed contain row after row of great black jars, many hundreds of them stretching off to the flank of the dark ridge of rock, one of the radiant mountain ranges that divided the island’s center and embraced the waste. Each jar was surrounded by a rough wooden scaffold that rose to the rim and seemed to afford access to any who would dare climb. Reynard did not think he would be one such.
“Beyond lies the first of the krater cities,” Nikolias said. “Right on the edge of the widest part of the chafing waste. Perhaps the servants will be there to greet us.”
“I doubt it,” Yuchil said, and climbed back into the wagon. Trailed by the warriors, flanked by Kern and Kaiholo, they rolled on toward the next great ridge of rock. Nobody spoke much, and Reynard remounted his horse and watched Valdis do likewise, but with a translucent lack of energy that made her seem more and more like a ghost.
Calafi approached Nikolias. “Valdis doth not like it here,” she whispered.
“We were told to bring at least one Eater,” Nikolias said. “I do not think any of us like it here!”
“Then how rude of them not to meet us!” Calafi said.
“Are Crafters truly buried out there?” Reynard asked Widsith, also whispering.
“So I have been told,” Widsith said.
The road passed through the field of huge jars, on to the ridge beyond. Reynard looked to his right and then his left, trying and failing, mostly, to avert his eyes, not to stare directly at the ancient tombs. The tallest jar, he guessed, rose fifteen yards and spanned the same distance. What would need such a tomb, and why open to the sky? Did they miss the stars? How many were already filled, how many still empty?
They halted as the pass yawned before them, between two rugged walls of gray stone. Nikolias walked up to Widsith and stroked his horse’s muzzle. “Still no one to greet us.”
Yuchil leaned out from behind the curtain that covered the entrance to the wagon. “Are any of the innermost servants still alive?” she asked.
Nikolias made a gruff snort.
The wagon and party soon were lost on the other side of the dusk, right up against night. Reynard wondered how long they had before death or dawn, or worse than one, and never the other.
The Pass
WARRIORS, RIDERS, AND CALAFI followed the wagon down a road paved with wide flat stones, grooved by the passage of other wheels over long centuries, much like Roman roads in England. These grooves, however, came in several gauges, or widths between, showing that even larger wagons had passed many times before. The Traveler wagon rumbled smoothly along in its accepted gauge. And so they proceeded with very little water and no more food up a long rise to the narrow pass, and as it swiftly turned dark, clouds driven and chewed by high, cold winds flowed to wrap the peaks.
They paused again. Reynard’s gaze climbed the walls on both sides, and he saw odd little formations, irregular houses sporting rough entrances, like eyries or extrusions for the benefit of climbers—though not for humans.
Calafi also surveyed these high, empty dwellings. “Others come here to rest, and prepare,” she said, and her wrinkled nose told Reynard she was guessing.
Clearly unhappy, the warriors pulled their coat collars up to avoid the chill wind that now seemed to want to drive them back.
Dark filled the gap.
“We are tired,” Calafi said to Nikolias. “Can we make a fire?”
“I think a fire is needed, if this wind will let it burn,” Nikolias said. And so they gathered shrubs and sticks from between the rocks, which here were banded red and black, while the girl came forward with a thin stone she had found that had markings on it.
“Can somebody read this?” she asked, then held it up. The markings were spirals and wedges, and all who gathered around the wagon and the fire shook their heads but Valdis, who crooked her finger for the girl to approach and bent over to take the stone from her. She held it up as if she could see straight through it. “A spell to bind dreams,” the Eater said.
“What language?” Nikolias asked, but Valdis merely slipped down gracefully from her horse and replaced the stone in the dirt, where Calafi had found it, then walked up to the rocks, where she studied a crevice no one else had seen until now. With a long, studying glance at the others, she ventured into the side passage, leading the shadowy horse after her.
“I did not see that,” Widsith said, standing beside Nikolias.
“None here did,” Nikolias said, touching the rock face with outstretched hands. “And I neither see nor feel it now!”
Calafi made as if to follow Valdis, but also could not find any opening in the banded rock. She patted and danced a little, as if that would open the crevice again, but Yuchil spoke to her sharply and, dejected, she returned to the beginnings of the new camp.
For a time, nobody spoke, but all warmed themselves.
The wind was getting colder, whipping the flames.
“Perhaps she doth flee us, sensing our fate,” Nikolias said.
“Pfaah!” Yuchil exclaimed, then brought up more flat rocks to shield the flames. “I have known many an Eater more honorable than most men.”
“And women?” Nikolias asked, smiling, pitching in with Kaiholo to help.
Yuchil blew out her breath again. “If our way is blocked ahead—and who can say it is not?—then perhaps she seeketh another way.”
Kaiholo was skeptical. “No way out and no way in, I trow,” he muttered. Kern agreed.
“And we all were alert to such,” said Andalo as he nervously fingered the hilt of one sword.
Reynard nodded to him, and he responded merely by staring, then turned away. Bela and Sany seemed even more imperious. This irritated Reynard.
“We should have looked into a pot,” he said.
“Why so?” Widsith asked.
“To see a Crafter. If it is dead, what can it do to us?”
The warriors did not respond, but Nikolias blew his nose into a clean rag. “Push not nightmares, and save thy sleeping soul.”
“But have you ever looked?” Reynard asked.
“No, as I say, I have never been this far. But I heard once from a man who did climb a scaffold. He was ever after laughing mad, and could barely find his supper.”
The First City
THE CLOUDS SLIDING along the heights of the pass were so dense they could not tell the difference between night and morning.
Reynard studied this low, coiled deck for a few minutes before rolling out of his covers and standing. He had slept in a quilted round rug from the wagon, stitched with Arabic words, he thought, but comfortable despite the presence of passages likely from the Moors’ sacred and blasphemous book, and now he handed it back to a plump older girl with strong arms and henna-colored hair, one of Yuchil’s assistants or perhaps her daughters, who, it seemed, rarely left the wagon but followed Yuchil’s orders and found whatever was needed inside to supply their needs. She had not appeared before now. Who else was hiding in that wagon?