After flowing down the river for some time, Robin was able to stand at the top of the canyon and look down at where she had been. As in Rhea, river pumps were responsible. They had made two difficult portages, during which Robin had bettered her mountaineering skills. The buzz bombs had made the highway too dangerous since the road was through the tableland to the north, too open to attack. They were thankful for the sheer protecting cliffs even as they struggled up them.
In all, it took three hectorevs to get out of the canyon. It was their slowest progress to date. The fresh fruits that had formed the more appetizing portion of their meals were no longer to be found. They subsisted on dried provisions from their packs. There was still game to be taken. At one point, when they found a plateau rich in small scaly ten-legged creatures, the Titanides killed more than a hundred of them and spent three days preserving them with smoke and curatives obtained from leaves and roots.
Robin had never felt stronger. She had found to her surprise that the rugged life agreed with her. She woke up quickly, ate a lot, and slept well at the end of the day. Had it not been for Psaltery's death, she thought she might actually have been happy. She had not been able to say that for a long time.
It was oddly disorienting to see Ophion stop at the edge of day, but that is just what it did. At its eastern end it emptied into a small brown lake known as Triana, and it did not come out the other side. The river had been the constant factor in their journey so far; they had left it only to skirt the pumps. Even Nox and Twilight were just wide places in the river. It felt like a bad omen to Robin.
That omen was as nothing to the sight that confronted them as they paddled their reduced fleet to the Trianan shore. It was a boneyard. The skeletal remains of a billion creatures littered the white sand beach, made great still waves and dunes, heaped into rickety golgothas. When they gained the shore, they stood in the shadow of a single bone plate eight meters high, while beneath their feet they crunched the ribs of creatures smaller than mice.
It looked like the end of all things. Robin, who did not think of herself as superstitious, could not shake a feeling of foreboding. She seldom noticed the pale texture of Gaean daylight. Everyone spoke of the "perpetual afternoon" that prevailed in the wheel; Robin had as often been able to imagine it as morning. But not here. The shores of Triana were frozen at an instant just before the end of Time. The heaped bones were the necropolitan skyline of death, set in the vast brown desert of Tethys.
She recalled something Gaby had said, likening Ophion to a toilet. It certainly looked that way from Triana. All the death of the great wheel had come to rest on the shores of the lake. She almost said something to Gaby, stopped herself just in time. Psaltery would probably end up here.
"Feeling bad, Robin?"
She looked up and saw the Wizard facing her. She shook herself to get rid of the sense of melancholy that had stolen over her. It did not help much. Cirocco put a hand on her shoulder and led her down the beach. A few weeks ago Robin would have rejected the gesture, but now she welcomed it. The sand was as fine as powdered sugar, pleasantly hot between her toes.
"Don't let it get you down," Cirocco said. "This isn't what it looks like."
"I'm not sure what it looks like."
"It's not Gaea's waste bin. It is a graveyard. But it's not the end of Ophion. The river flows underground and comes up on the other side of Tethys. The bones are brought here by scavengers. They're about half a meter long, and one form lives in the sand and another in the lake. It's a complex story, but it boils down to, neither type can get along without the other. They meet here at the shore to exchange gifts, mate, and spawn. It's a common pattern in Gaea."
"It's just depressing," Robin said.
"The Titanides love it. Not many of them get here, but those that do take lots of pictures to show the folks back home. It is kind of pretty, if you can get used to it."
"I don't think I could." Robin wiped her forehead, then removed her shirt and went to the water's edge. She soaked it, wrung it out, and put it back on. "Why is it so hot here? The sun isn't enough to heat your skin, but the sand's blazing."
"It comes from below. All the regions are heated and cooled by fluids running underground. It's pumped out to the big fins in space to be heated on the sunside or cooled on the darkside."
Robin looked at Cirocco's browned face, at the tanned skin on her bare arms and legs. She recalled that the body under the red blanket that was apparently the only article of clothing she owned was just as brown. But damn it, it looked like a tan, and it had been bothering her for weeks now. Her own skin was as milky white as the day she arrived.
"Are you and Gaby naturally dark-skinned? You don't look it, but I can't believe you got that tan in here."
"I'm a little darker than Gaby, but she's as light as you are. And you're right, the sun didn't do this. Maybe I'll tell you about that someday." She stopped walking and looked to the east. There was a break in the high bone cairns, and it was possible to see a range of low hills several kilometers away. She turned and called to the group, which Robin was surprised to discover was more than 200 meters down the beach.
"When you get the boats broken down," Cirocco shouted, "join us over here."
In a few minutes they were gathered around Cirocco, who squatted on the sand and used her finger to draw a long map.
"Phoebe, Tethys, Thea," she said. "Triana." She stabbed a small circle, then drew a series of peaks just east of it. "The Euphonic Range. To the north of them, here, the Northwind Range. Out here by itself, La Oreja de Oro." She glanced up at Chris. "That means 'Ear of Gold' and there's the possibility of a quest there, if you're interested. Otherwise, we won't be going near it."
"Not interested," Chris said with an amused smile.
"Okay. To the east-"
"Don't we get to hear the story?" Robin asked against her better judgment.
"No need for it," Cirocco said. "The Ear of Gold can't possibly concern us unless we go there. It's not a mobile threat, like Kong." While Robin wondered if she was being toyed with, Cirocco was drawing a long line of peaks, from the north to the south, cutting across the width of Tethys.
"The Royal Blue Line. Somebody was in a poetic frame of mind, I guess. They do take on a blue tint when the air is right, but they're pretty dull mountains for the most part. Some rocky cliffs, but if you go up the southern slopes down here, you can walk from one peak to the next without much trouble.
"The road goes northeast from the lake, through the big space between the Northwinds and the Euphonies, which is called Tethys Gap." She looked up, deadpan. "Or, as it's sometimes called, Orthodontist Pass."
"Except we agreed not to use that joke anymore," Gaby said.
Cirocco grinned. "My apologies. Anyhow, through the gap the road goes due east over a lot of very gradual up-and-downs, passes the central cable, through the Royal Blue Line, and so on to this lake with the slanted cable in the middle, known as Valencia. As, yes, it is sort of orange-colored."
"With a very long stem," Gaby put in.
"Right. Well, that wasn't one of my names." She straightened, slapping sand from her hands.
"Frankly," she said, "I don't know what's the best thing to do from here. We originally planned to follow the road and not worry too much about the sand wraiths, but now that we've-"