Widsith had slept in another rug and did not break a deep silence, as if still waking from a fraught dream, contemplating his doom, and that approaching right soon, in his opinion. Reynard, on the other hand, had reacquired, after the plain of jars, a kind of curiosity for what lay beyond the pass. He tried to get answers from Calafi, asking her what, if anything, she had heard from other Travelers—or had sensed on her own. But she only waggled her head, tossed her red frizzled hair, and danced to music he could not hear; and soon he felt a growing apprehension, that he might see all there was to be seen, and understand none of it! For no one, not even Nikolias, seemed inclined to prepare him in any way. Maybe they were simply as ignorant as he was himself. But surely when they had delivered stories before, they had interacted with those of their people assigned to receive them and carry them farther! Maybe they wished for him to innocently view what they themselves were so seldom allowed to see: whatever lay beyond the pass, down the smooth road. They would not even respond to his questions about how often they had been here before.
Bela and Sany and a warrior whose name he did not know talked as they doused the fire. Sany seemed to have Moorish roots. Bela, like many of the Travelers, hailed from the mountain countries in the eastern continent. Reynard stood a few yards away, listening to their mix of Rom and a pidgin of Tinker’s Cant that seemed more eastern than Irish. They paid him no attention. “Papa is putting us all in danger, with the Eater here,” said Bela, who sported only two knives and one short sword. Bela called Valdis a Verdulak.
Sany murmured, under his breath, “An ifrit, a ghroul.”
Yuchil’s strong-armed assistant, whom they called Sophia, shook her head. “She is no danger to us.”
“Why say that?”
“Because she doth serve the paynim,” Sophia said. “She taketh from them, and giveth to them as well. But she dothn’t serve Travelers. We are not of the pact.”
“ ’Tis not always true,” Yuchil said. “I suspect some of our people have here made deals with Calybo, to live long enough to understand the Crafters.”
The assistant did not disagree, but her expression was sour.
Andalo, cleaning and sheathing all his knives and two swords, said, “All is changing. No one is here to take our deliveries! Hel is no longer with us.”
“Hel hath not been with us for most of time,” Yuchil pointed out. “What matter to mortals?”
They saw Reynard’s attention and turned away, walking around the wagon.
“Hath the Eater returned?” Nikolias asked.
“I watch,” Calafi said. “She hath not.”
Nikolias walked off with a shrug to urge the men to finish grooming and feeding the horses. Reynard walked over to where Widsith was shaking off the last of his deep sleep. The Pilgrim did his best to ignore all attentions and company, and did not even look his way.
Last Roundabout
THE LATER MORNING was only a little brighter than the night, but they pushed on through the pass until they came to a wider spot between the walls. Here, the wagon-rutted path circled a single jagged pillar. Widsith and Reynard and two of the warriors went around the pillar and came upon a perfectly smooth causeway through the last of the great rocks, paved evenly with hewn stone.
“Do we stop here and wait longer?” Kaiholo asked.
Yuchil and Nikolias again conferred. Nikolias shook his head adamantly, but the woman seemed to win their debate, so he returned to the others and said they had no choice. “We go where we have never gone before,” he explained. “Because we are not met, nor given signs. Next will be the outermost cities of the krater lands, where many Travelers are said to dwell and serve the Crafters. But all now is uncertain.”
The wagon wheels and the horse hooves were equally unsure on this smoothness, and more than once the wagon slid sideways and had to be corrected with careful management of reins and horses in harness.
The other Travelers were gloomy, contemplating what they might find ahead, and disliking going where they might not be at all welcome.
Finally, a far misty landscape became visible—a wide valley into which the pass debouched. A few miles away, another ridge, central to the valley, as thin and sharp as a knife blade, interrupted the lowering cloud. Reynard could almost make out more shapes this side of the ridge, rounded and tall and huge, but obscured by thick mist.
Calafi ran ahead a few dozen yards and then returned with her widest gap-toothed grin. “A city in the form of a grand seed!” she called. “Flowers and stalks make caged seeds! This is like those, but great.”
Yuchil clucked and got down from the wagon. Calafi danced forward, spinning, sashaying, and curtsying, as if introducing them all to unseen hosts. As well, she raised her hands into the air, fingers curling inward as if waiting to hold an apple.
On one side of the great blade of rock—also banded red and black—were what the girl had described as a great caged seed, and Reynard soon saw her description was apt. The structure hugged the near slope of the blade and rose almost as high as the ridge itself. It most resembled the late summer curled nest of a hedgerow wild carrot or cow parsley, with a protective outer basket of wood or stone, he could not tell which, though how stone could be worked so fine and delicate and yet remain strong, he had no notion. Within the up-curving frame of the basket, houses as big as manor estates were mounted on cross-works of beams, connected by stairs and ladders and held together in part by a thick tackle like the ropes of a great-masted ship. It all looked so absurdly fragile that a typical coastal winter storm might have toppled it and blown out its dwellings like thistledown.
Nikolias and Andalo guided the wagon across the last of the hewn road, onto another stretch of mud and broken cobbles, covered with puddles and now trackless. Reynard rode alongside Widsith.
Facing the mud, Calafi had stopped her skipping dance and now walked quietly beside the lead riders, making gestures with arm and fingers, as if trying to find a way to describe in a secret alphabet what they were seeing. She squinted up at Reynard.
Widsith rode with his eye on the valley, the blade-ridge, the curled structure emerging from the late morning shadow of the opposite side of the ridge.
In less than an hour, the wagon rolled into the shadow of the great basket, while the murky sun split its light along the ridge, falling on a stone and wood stockade that surrounded the city and the inmost fields.
“It is deserted,” Nikolias said from behind.
“Or worse,” Kaiholo added.
The fields were untended, overgrown, and the outer small hamlets of stone and mud-brick houses, within the stockade and spaced beyond it, were demolished and burned.
“No dead, no living,” Kern said.
Widsith rode along a dry gravel pathway that seemed to point toward the distant rising cloud.
“These gardens were once magnificent,” said Yuchil. “But now they are just sticks and dead soil.”
Reynard could not take his eyes away from the great ribbed and vaulted edifice. The ribs could have been crafted of either wood or stone—or wood made stone! Raised on the flats of Southwold, having known only shingle-stone and driftwood buildings, separated by narrow lanes and fields crossed by mazes of hedgerows, the thought of life in such a topsy-turvy structure was inconceivable. For one thing, the stairways had no rails! Monkeys might ascend and descend, or leap from rope to road, or from strut to beam to strut—but anyone else, it seemed, must live in constant fear.