While Kettricken and I were speaking, Kettle went to decide it for herself. I saw Kettricken’s eyes widen, and turned to look back at the dragon, fearing it was awakening. Instead I saw Kettle place her withered hand on the creature’s still brow. Her hand seemed to tremble as she touched it, but then she smiled, almost sadly, and stroked her hand up the spiraling horn. “So beautiful,” she mused. “So cunningly wrought.”
She turned back to us all. “Mark how last year’s vine twined about her tail tip. See how deeply she lies in the fallen leaves of a score of years. Or perhaps a score of scores. Yet each tiny scale still gleams, so perfectly fashioned is she!”
Starling and Kettricken started forward with exclamations of wonder and delight, and were soon crouched by the sculpture, calling each other’s attention to crafted detail after detail. The individual scales of each wing, the fluidly graceful looping of the tail coils and every other marvel of the artist’s design were admired. Yet while they pointed and touched so avidly, the wolf and I held back. Hackles stood up all along Nighteyes’ back. He did not growl; instead he gave a whine so high it was almost like a whistle. After a moment, I realized the Fool had not joined the others. I turned to find him regarding it from afar, as a miser might look on a pile of gold larger even than his dreams. There was the same sort of wideness to his eyes. Even his pale cheeks seemed to hold a rosy flush.
“Fitz, come and see! It is only cold stone, carved so well as to appear alive. And look! There is another, with the antlers of a stag and the face of a man!” Kettricken lifted a hand to point and I glimpsed yet another figure sprawled sleeping on the forest floor. They all departed the first effigy to regard this new one, exclaiming anew over the beauty and details of it.
I moved myself forward on leaden feet, the wolf pressed tightly to my side. When I stood next to the horned one, I could see for myself the fuzzy sac of spiderwebs affixed in the hollow of one hoofed foot. The creature’s ribs did not move with the pumping of any lungs, nor did I feel any body warmth at all. I finally forced myself to set a hand to the cold, carved stone. “It’s a statue,” I said aloud, as if to force myself to believe what my Witsense denied. I looked around me, past the stagman that Starling still admired, to where Kettle and Kettricken stood smiling by yet another sculpture. Its boarlike body sprawled on its side, and the tusks that protruded from its snout were as long as I was tall. In all ways it resembled the forest pig that Nighteyes had killed, save for its immense size and the wings tucked close to its side.
“I spy at least a dozen of these things,” the Fool announced. “And, behind those trees, I found another carved column such as we have seen before.” He set a curious hand to the skin of the sculpture, then almost winced away at the cold contact.
“I cannot believe they are lifeless stone,” I told him.
“I, too, have never seen such realistic detail in a carving,” he agreed.
I did not try to tell him he had misunderstood me. Instead, I stood pondering a thing. Here, I sensed life, but there was only cold stone under my hand. It had been the opposite with Forged ones; savage life obviously motivated their bodies, yet my Witsense regarded them as but cold stone. I groped for some sort of connection but found only the odd comparison.
I glanced about me but found my companions scattered throughout the forest, moving from sculpture to sculpture, and calling to one another in delight as they discovered new ones under clambering ivy or engulfed in fallen leaves. I drifted after them slowly. It seemed to me that this might be the destination marked on the map. It almost certainly was, if the old mapmaker had had his scale correct. And yet, why? What was important about these statues? The significance of the city I had seen at once; it might have been the original habitation of the Elderlings. But this?
I hastened after Kettricken. I found her by a winged bull. He slept, legs folded under him, powerful shoulders bunched, heavy muzzle dropped to his knees. It was a perfect replica of a bull in every way, from its wide sweep of horns to its tufted tail. His cloven hooves were buried beneath the forest loam, but I did not doubt they were there. She had stretched her arms wide to span the sweep of his horns. Like all the others, he had wings, folded in repose on his wide black back.
“May I see the map?” I asked her, and she started out of her reverie.
“I’ve already checked it,” she told me quietly. “I am convinced this is the marked area. We passed the remains of two stone bridges. That corresponds to what is shown on the map. And the marking on the column the Fool found corresponds to one you copied in the city for this destination. I think we are on what was once the shore of a lake. That is how I’ve been reading the map, anyway.”
“The shores of a lake.” I nodded to myself as I considered what Verity’s map had shown me. “Perhaps. Perhaps it silted in and became swamp. But then, what do all these statues signify?”
She made a vague gesture around at the forest. “A garden or park of some kind, perhaps?”
I looked around us and shook my head. “Not like any garden I’ve ever seen. The statues seem random. Should not a garden possess unity and theme? At least, so Patience taught me. Here I see only sprawled statues, with no sign of paths or beds or . . . Kettricken? Are all the statues of sleeping creatures?”
She frowned to herself for a moment. “I believe so. And I think that all are winged.”
“Perhaps it is a graveyard,” I ventured. “Perhaps there are tombs beneath these creatures. Perhaps this is some strange heraldry, marking the burial places for different families.”
Kettricken looked about us, considering. “Perhaps it is so. But why would that be marked on the map?”
“Why would a garden?” I countered.
We spent the rest of the afternoon exploring the area. We found a great many more animals. There were all kinds and a variety of styles, but all were winged and sleeping. And they had been here a very long time. A closer examination showed me that these great trees had grown around the statues, the statues had not been placed around them. Some were almost captured by the encroaching moss and leaf mold. Of one, little remained to be seen save a great toothed snout projecting from a boggy bit of ground. The bared teeth shone silver and the tips were sharp.
“Yet I found not a single one with a chip or a crack. Everyone looks as perfect as the day it was created. Nor can I decide how the colors were put to the stone. It does not feel like paint or stain, nor does it appear weathered by the years.”
I was expounding my thoughts slowly to the others as we sat about our campfire that evening. I was trying to work Kettricken’s comb through my wet hair. In the late afternoon, I had slipped away from the others, to wash thoroughly for the first time since we had left Jhaampe. I had also attempted to wash out some of my clothes. When I returned to camp, I had found that all of the others had had much the same ideas. Kettle was moodily draping wet laundry on a dragon to dry. Kettricken’s cheeks were pinker than usual and she had rebraided her wet hair into a tight queue. Starling seemed to have forgotten her earlier anger at me. Indeed, she seemed to have forgotten entirely about the rest of us. She stared at the flames of the campfire, a musing look on her face, and I could almost see the tumbling words and notes as she fit them together. I wondered what it was like, if it was like solving the game puzzles that Kettle set for me. It seemed odd to watch her face, knowing a song was unfolding in her mind.
Nighteyes came to lean his head against my knee. I do not like denning in the midst of these living stones, he confided to me.