“Pass through quickly, find Valdis, find Kaiholo, speak one last time with Guldreth before she leaveth—at her request, to see you, boy—and take Eater mounts from the caverns below the fortress,” Kern said, looking warily side to side. “Then ride to find the trod and the Travelers we need.”
The high doors in the walls were growing fewer, the walls wider, and the river had lost its upraised blades. The arched trees overhead were thicker, but had fallen in several places.
“We are in the lair of creatures that bring food and water for Eaters—more than humans can supply, and more suited to Eater tastes. Servants of a sort,” Kern said. “I wonder they have not already departed, with their masters!”
“Are they dangerous?” Reynard asked.
“No,” Kern said, “but they do not like disturbance.”
What little Reynard could see of their surroundings through blood-dimmed eyes was a half-circle of ice-rimed pillars, and draped between them, what looked like inverted tents or cocoons. For a moment, Reynard wondered if this was a rookery for drake nymphs, but out of the pendant hammocks peered pale, dusty faces with tightly slitted eyes and open beaks, like recent fledglings. Each was the size of a small dog, and a few poked gray, knobby wing-shins above their beds.
Reynard looked with suspicion on the draped sacks and their inhabitants. “What sort of birds are these?” he asked.
“Not birds,” Kern said.
Widsith said with a lip-curl of distaste, “Nor are they bats.”
“Do they bite?”
“No,” Widsith said.
“Yes,” Kern said.
Reynard’s scalp was still dripping blood. Kern raised his hand, then ventured off a ways and returned clutching a handful of moss, which he applied to Reynard’s wound. “Hold that, young human,” the giant instructed. “We need to clean you before your audience.”
They heard a squeaking cry. A small, squat, bird-faced gray figure, having flapped down from its sling, stumped on folded wings toward them, gripping between shoulder and head a leather bucket sloshing with water, which it offered to Kern with a gnarly whistle. Then the creature swept up a three-fingered foot and demonstrated what the giant was to do with the bucket. Kern took it and before Reynard could react, upended it over him. The water stung like lye soap, and he feared it would put out his eyes, but instead it sluiced his scalp and cleared his vision, and between the moss and the liquid, his bleeding finally stopped.
Widsith took him by one elbow, and they walked on, passing between the pillars into a wide space flanked by ragged glacial walls. The mottled, marbly whiteness rose hundreds of feet on either side to dark stony scarps fringed with dense-packed lines of forest, many of the trees having toppled. Reynard lifted the moss from his scalp and looked up.
“Kaiholo!” he cried.
The tattooed man emerged from deep shadow and tipped a salute. “The high one demands our presence,” he said. “Well, some of us. After this day, I’ll be of no use to her. As for the Pilgrim—I cannot speak for his welcome. Follow me.” He led them on and around the fallen trees.
“Are Crafters gods or humans?” Reynard asked, curiosity pushing through propriety, considering where they were. “Of this world, or makers of tools?”
“I was told by a drunken Traveler, in a tavern long ago,” Kaiholo said, “that they be human neither in shape nor demeanor, but possess some powers found in gods. Before his fellows gathered him, he explained that long ago, at the invitation of Queen Hel, Crafters traveled from afar… But from whence, he did not know. Nor did the others.”
“Not gods, and not the Queen of Hell’s children!” Reynard exclaimed, angry at the possibility he was being teased.
“He is deluded on Hel and conflates,” Widsith said to Kern.
“Make no such mistake when you meet the Travelers,” Kern said. “They know the truth. Crafters assume their own mantles, and press the krater cities around the waste to serve their eccentric needs, and for these circumstances, and these failings, we on this and six other islands, I think, all live.”
The tattooed man now focused his attention on Reynard. “Boy, some claim thou herald’st great change.”
“I do not feel it,” Reynard said.
“Guldreth so informed me—just an hour past,” Kaiholo said. “She hath abandoned drake hunting and the southern shore, and makes her way to a chamber in the high maze of the old fortress. Now all is muddle in the krater lands, and she prepareth to join her kind and escape.”
“Escape where?” Widsith asked.
Kaiholo shrugged. “She confideth not.”
Kern looked back along the declivity, toward the hollow in the fall of ice. “Let us move on. Best be swift.”
The northern third of the Ravine had been overgrown centuries past by mats of vines like no growth Reynard had ever seen—strong enough to hold trees that had toppled from the steep sides. The trail they followed twisted among great columns of stone spaced like struts in broken wagon wheels. These held back crushing and groaning walls of melting ice that released pools and swirls of their own fog. They saw their way only by cold, scattered stars peeking through the mats. Kern, Reynard, and Widsith hewed close to Kaiholo. But they moved too swiftly in the darkness for the boy, and he stumbled often over roots and stones.
By the time they reached the end of the path, the roof of vines had been ripped open by the fall of several of the largest trees, and now, eyes adapted to the starlit dark, they saw a high, wide wall of close-hewed and fitted stone—a wall that must have once been interrupted by hundreds of windows that were now, along the lower reaches, chocked by flat, ugly bricks, as if, for those inside this wall—this advanced face of an unlikely fortress—the gloom of the Ravine was still too bright. Narrow steps had been thrust into the wall, crumbling and cracking the stones. Anyone who dared to climb was protected only by a winding, crumbling balustrade of woven wicker, following the steps in their jagged, back-and-forth ascent like some prodigious basket-snake.
Reynard kept close to Widsith, who followed as Kaiholo and then Kern began their climb. He paused and reached for what he thought were flowers growing around the wicker.
“Do not touch,” Kern cautioned. “Many biting things here.” He opened one hand to show scars on a palm.
Reynard withdrew his fingers. Small and brilliant red even in the shadow, the flowers resembled little sprouts of flame rising from circlets of blue petals. At the nearness of his fingers, they withdrew like anemones on a tidal beach and chirped like crickets, taunting him.
“She collects Crafter refuse,” Kaiholo said, and showed scars on his own palm—unmarked by tattoos. “Fascinated by all things Crafter!”
“Plans for creations never approved,” Kern added. “Undeveloped or forgotten schemes. Ephemera. Things that know not any way home, nor whether home awaiteth. She arrangeth them like a gardener, even here. As for those devilish, nipping flowers—they came here as seeds carried by strange clouds from the krater lands, falling in muddy rain.” Kaiholo looked up at the narrow holes in the thick canopy of vines. “Best avoid such rain, or you will be crusted like a reef.”
After they had all passed, the flowers slowly reemerged and shivered.
The first flights of steps took them, slowly and cautiously enough, to a wide indented cleft. From here, more steps forked like lightning ascended to a few open porticoes, which passed through roofless walls and led to more staircases halfway up this next prodigious, sealed-off facing.
Even this high above the blocks of melting ice, the air burned and clogged Reynard’s nose with the pervasive odor of an unholy, devilish chill.
Beyond the masonry walls, more steps now became apparent, climbing to a wide parapet just beneath a half-dome inset with a frieze of mosaics whose subjects Reynard could not discern from this vantage.