Calafi danced around them, chanting her nonsense, looking more and more like a witch, and while small, not all that young. But she might have been distracting from their fear or anger.
The reduced group followed Nikolias down the rugged trail. “We will avoid the krater,” he said.
“Dig deep, fox-boy,” Widsith warned in a low tone, leaning close. “They need to be assured.”
“I have nothing to give them!” Reynard cried. “Why did you find me, why did you save me?”
“I saved you to save myself,” Widsith said, then fell back that the boy might simmer his anger alone.
But Kaiholo, looking ashamed, took his place and walked beside him for a few minutes. “I do not question thee,” the Sea Traveler said. “I question this place, and all it asketh of us, and all it bringeth.”
“Why did they not defend their city?” Reynard asked. “It was beautiful here!”
“Signs of the island’s change might have overwhelmed.” Kaiholo shook his head forlornly. “What was left to them? A dead Crafter? What work was left to them, and what were they willing to die to defend? Perhaps they were waiting for us. Or you.”
“Myself, who knoweth not my use, my quality or strength? I fear I have none!”
“And yet, thou hast been judged by those who should know—Guldreth, for one.”
Reynard gritted his teeth. There was nothing he could say—the Sea Traveler was trying to smooth the waves between them, but that magic was not natural for him.
“Others judged you. Maeve and Maggie—and Dana. Anutha even saved thee a drake. She said that thou hadst a fate, a place in the great map of this island… In its last days.”
“Where did you hear this?” Reynard asked.
“From Yuchil, who tended her.”
Calafi danced closer. “I have a fate as well,” she said.
“Do you know what it is?” Reynard asked, his voice cracking.
Calafi turned to him with a sad glower. “No. But I know why thou art called fox-boy.”
“Why?” Reynard asked.
“Perhaps thou wast once a fox! Thou barkest like one.”
Then she laughed and ran off.
Something whirred in the air. Kaiholo and Kern hunched their shoulders and looked up. Calafi, close to Nikolias, cried out and fell to her hands and knees.
Nikolias crouched, and they all saw in the dawn light shadows flitting high west to east across the rugged land.
“They are here!” Kern shouted, his voice like a great horn.
Kaiholo said, “I do not feel them!”
“Nor I,” Widsith said.
Neither did Reynard.
The eastern brightness above the waste, many miles off, was broken by dozens of wide, winged shapes, swooping and diving: more drakes than Reynard had ever seen, even during the first battle of Zodiako.
“They are not ours! They are death,” Calafi wailed. “They bring death! My head hurts!” She wrapped her arms around her chest, and Nikolias clasped her and folded her in his cloak.
Valdis studied the sky in all directions. “They are not ours,” she agreed. “They seek vengeance against those who killed their masters.”
“That must mean the armies of the Sister Queens are near,” Nikolias said. “Just beyond the waste, or nearer still.”
“And being chivvied and reduced day by day,” Kern said.
The Second Krater City
WITHOUT HORSES or the wagon, they crossed over the uneven and dusty boundary of the chafing waste. Kern and Kaiholo soon lost sight of the wheeling drakes, but knew how to maintain a course, and so they led the way, followed by Widsith and the rest, and trailed, as usual, by Valdis, who did not seem at all comfortable in the daylight glare.
“We cannot tarry,” Nikolias said. “Nothing lives here long.” He explained there was no water on the waste, neither wells nor rivulets, despite occasional bursts of rain. The strange and powdery soil sucked up all moisture and would leave them with only what they caught in their caps or sucked from their capes and clothes. “We must cross within a day,” he concluded.
“There are prints everywhere,” Kern said.
“The Queens’ armies hoped to cross the waste with slaves?” Kaiholo asked.
“The Sister Queens never conversed with Travelers, except to kill them. They have never been here before, and know not the land,” Nikolias said.
“And what do we know?”
“Almost as little.”
Now they came upon many killed in the panic when the troops were attacked by drakes the day before. Bodies both of captors and captives appeared, first scattered, then in groups: elders, then women, amid signs of desperate struggle. Those soldiers, men of youth and strength, killed by the drakes, were obvious. But many more had died as well.
Widsith and Kern walked from corpse to corpse, joined by Kaiholo and then Valdis, who paused on the edge of a hecatomb of hundreds of dead, some still clutching the swords they had apparently wrested from their captors. Among them were soldiers in unfamiliar livery and armor, four or five of the city’s occupants to each soldier—all dead.
“The army tried to kill their captives as they fled,” Widsith said. “The servants stood their ground.”
“They had no choice,” Nikolias said.
Reynard felt a dreadful sadness. He thought again of England under Spanish threat, town streets filled with murder and fire.
From here on, they spoke very little, but within a few hours, as the dusk was falling again—the island’s time being always uneven and unpredictable—Kern observed that they were only crossing part of the waste, a chord across the circle, as it were, and he predicted that meant they would soon come upon another krater—and likely another krater city.
Clearly discouraged by their surroundings and prospects, Widsith asked, “How do we know that city is not also empty, or that it hath anything from which we can learn?”
“The waste hath ever been a changing feature,” Nikolias said. “Perhaps more so now. Its masters dead or injured, it trieth to delude any who cross.”
Look as hard as they could, they saw nothing rising above the indistinct horizon.
The group, enveloped in starlit night, relied on Kaiholo’s sense of direction and ignored the vague shapes of the many bodies, except for Widsith, who was searching for Spaniards. Reynard lost sight of Valdis but stumbled on regardless, following the Sea Traveler, and for some reason trusting him.
Within an hour, a new, sallow green light as faint as marsh glow appeared on the horizon, and as morning arrived, through a low silvery fog, another city came into view—a ring of towers, very different from the caged seed structure. The green glow came from within the ring.
Kern said, “Decay. Vast decay, and not of human bodies.”
“An Eater hath died,” Valdis said, taking shape beside them.
The glow grew brighter as they closed the distance, until they had crossed the chord and were once again in the vicinity of a great krater and the city that, at least in the past, had served its occupant.
“Every city had pride in its Crafter,” Nikolias said, “and built itself unique.”
The city now before them consisted of a circle of seven great erections, like cathedral towers, but where the towers in England rose straight, these faced inward and leaned toward an empty center, arching over the krater as if about to fall.
Between two of the towers, the group stood on the rim of a sere field covered with burned stubble. Kern stooped to feel the dry grass. The earth beneath the stubble felt warm. The air felt warm, with little sun to warm it. “Nothing hath been grown here in years,” the giant said. He rose and walked over to a lone and crumpled man’s body. “And yet there was reason to make war.”