With all but her mounted, Valdis walked back into the stable to bring forth her animal, a stallion black as the walls of the cave. His eyes were black as well. He was difficult to see at all. Valdis mounted him as if taking flight. She then issued a thin whistle, high and sharp as a needle, and the remaining horses kicked and reared, and then ran out of the stable and toward the northern exit.
“They run as if—” Kaiholo began, but cut himself short when they heard a great rushing sound and hundreds of bat-like animals flew over them on stubby wings, brushing the cavern’s roof—ignoring the riders below, but making great haste to leave.
Kaiholo grimaced. “Little time. Let us move! Unlikely we ever return.” Valdis now whistled softly, and all the horses paced north with fluid grace.
Reynard looked back at Valdis, but turned away when she seemed to notice. Despite his fear, he felt a strong curiosity about what she knew of him, and he of her, and how she—if she was a female, still—would travel in daylight, beside humans. And he was curious about her story, if she had one, if she remembered—and perhaps it was best that she did not.
The glow that Reynard had thought might be daylight was deceptive. They passed into a narrower cavern hung with many creatures that themselves supplied the light. The running horses had long since passed, leaving prints in the sandy floor.
“Someone hath added decorations,” Kaiholo said doubtfully, and batted aside a hanging, curling shape like a small blue monkey, but with wide, glowing eyes and a grim, gaping mouth.
Reynard was alarmed. “What are those? More servants? Why do they not flee as well?”
Hundreds dangled from long threads attached high in the gloom, twisting slowly and illuminating with their pale beams the sandy road, uninterested in the visitors below—or anything else.
“Monkey lights,” Kern said. “They have been here for as long as I. Someone doubtless strung them to light a better path, as it is dark in these caverns even for Eaters. They fear nothing and do not eat.”
“Fine servants!” Kaiholo said. “Would any object if we take a few with us?” He bravely grasped one of the small creatures and perched it on his shoulder. It did not bite or protest, and its eyes pointed ahead. He tugged on the strand that attached it to the ceiling, saw it was dry and dead—more like a rope—and reached up with a knife to cut it. The creature remained quiet, so he took another and placed it on his other shoulder, then cut its cable as well. “I will light the way!” the tattooed man said. “Anybody else want to host?” The others declined. He patted the head of his left-hand monkey. It briefly closed its wide bright eyes.
Soon they were beyond the hanging menagerie. Kaiholo’s pair provided all the light they needed as they moved forward. They rode now on a gray sandy floor, as if a river had once flowed through the Ravine, debouching at the cavern’s exit. To the echoing, sandy scuff of the horses’ hooves, they rode on for some hundred more yards, all the time accompanied by a musical dripping and a suffocating awareness of the great massif of stone above.
For a few dozen yards they passed what might have been the bones and spine of a great monster—until Reynard pointed out that this was the wrecked hull of a ship. “How did it get here?” he asked. “How old is it?” Nobody knew. Kern said this was the first time he had seen it. Reynard leaned to run his hand along one of the ribs. The Eater horse looked back at him. As instructed, Reynard looked away. “Very old,” he said. “Not so much wood as marble.”
“I do not doubt the abilities of Crafters to put things where they wish, and take them from whenever they wish—even the beginning of time,” Kaiholo said.
“The end of the cavern is not far,” Kern observed. “I can see it, like a single lantern.”
This time the light was true. They emerged under bright sun and a cloudless sky. Kaiholo gently lowered his monkeys to the sandy ground. They blinked, then crawled back into the cavern. “Obedient,” he observed.
Valdis watched them without expression.
“We are out of it,” Widsith said. “Thanks to whatever God you please.”
With bored grace, their Eater mounts climbed the rough lava slope that led up from the cavern. Ahead spread another wall of forest, or perhaps jungle. Reynard did not recognize any of the trees.
Valdis pointed that way. “A cross-trod lieth beyond that forest,” she said.
“I have never gone so far,” Kaiholo said.
“I have,” Kern said. “But I saw no signs of humans or others. Certainly no Eaters.”
“You would not see them when they pass,” Valdis said.
“Do you see them?” Reynard asked her.
“Yes,” she said.
“Came they this way?”
“Both ways,” she said. “They are all gone now.”
“Even Calybo?” Widsith asked.
“Even him.”
Kern hmmed softly. He studied Reynard riding beside Valdis, stiff in his saddle, as if escorting a maiden—a strange sight indeed, given that Valdis looked even more like a ghost in light of day and hardly seemed to burden the horse.
But Reynard saw that she cast a dark shadow.
Old Ice and Two Trods
ON THE EDGE of the forest, a dense wall of dark green, Valdis pulled back on her horse, wheeled it halfway around, and said calmly, “Flood is here.”
The men looked at each other, hearing nothing, but the horses, without guidance, broke into a run, then stopped abruptly and spun to face the cavern. Reynard held on as best he could with neither saddle nor stirrups. The rumble grew to a roar, and a frothy tide of sour grayness, higher than the horses’ withers, rushed around them. Reynard clung to the short mane with both his hands and all his strength, and felt his horse flinch in pain as chunks of ice and pieces of branch and smaller rocks struck legs and belly, and then, as all their horses shrieked, larger stones and even boulders.
The horses did not resist the flow, but stampeded to keep up with it, and right alongside them flew or swam creatures he had never seen before—nightmare creatures, furred snakes with great fangs and huge red eyes, winding around or climbing over spinning chunks of melting ice, hissing and screeching, gripping the horses’ legs or biting at them to hold on, as the flood bounced riders and horses from trees and rocks hidden in creepers.
Reynard thought he saw, over the neck of his animal, a gargoyle or something like it—a hippogriff, perhaps, though he had seen such only once, spouting rain off the roof of an Aldeburgh church. The creature, trying to stay above water on its spread wings, already half drowned, stretched its head up, gave him a beseeching gape of its beak, and went under.
They had no choice but to go with the flood into the trees.
Reynard heard Widsith call his name just as something wrenched him about. He let go of the mane and tumbled into the water.
Separation
“HE IS HERE!”
“Where is the Pilgrim?”
“I do not see the Eater!”
These voices sprang up around him, muffled by water in his ears. He tried to open his eyes, but the lids were stuck together by mud. Someone helped him roll onto his back, and he coughed up sour water and what few things he had eaten in the last twelve hours. When he tried to sit up, Kern was there to help him, calling out to Kaiholo. More water splashed on his face, but this felt different, fresh and cool, unlike the melted ice from the Ravine. Soon he had wiped his eyes and pried them open. The day was blurry and overcast but still bright.
“Where are the horses?” Reynard asked, and managed to get to his feet. Surprisingly, he was not terribly bruised, though he had bumps on his cheek and brow. He was covered in sticky mud, as were the tattooed man and the giant.