Kern warned, “We should take deeper cover.” The horses recognized their alarm and kept quiet as they all sought to hide in a thick brake below the crest of the hill.
Kaiholo silently made his way through the brake to examine a hollow in the ridge beyond.
“Someone’s looking for us,” Kern guessed, dropping to a squat. “Not anyone we wish to meet, I trow.”
Kaiholo returned a few minutes later. “There are bodies,” he said. “Men. Not Spaniards. Nine or ten at least. I did not tarry to count. Judging by their kit, I think they are folk from the eastern shore. I do not know why they have come all the way here. But they did not find what they wanted. They are dead.”
“What killed them?”
“I would say a great Eater. They have been sucked down to the last instant.”
Tying the horses, Reynard and Kern took the path Kaiholo had found and came to a shadowed silver waterfall and a trickle of stream from a shelf along the higher ridge. Here, lying half in, half out of the stream, like soft and slumbering stones, lay nine men… or what had once been men. One was having the hair on his careless skull parted by the fall. The others were nothing but bones draped in pallid wet skin.
Kaiholo stepped into the stream and knelt beside the closest. “Scouts or pickets. Too many, I would say. Could point to a greater march. Mayhaps they were deceived and drawn here.”
Reynard thought of the way the King of Troy had deceived the Spanish.
Kaiholo fingered the corpse’s jerkin, cut and stitched from a finely tanned skin—not unlike those worn by the blunters. The rest of their kit consisted of thick trousers and sturdy leather boots, and each still carried a pair of good swords, one short and one long. One—the poor wight enjoying a perpetual shower—had a musket slung on his shoulder. None showed wounds. They had simply been drained of time.
Reynard moved closer to examine the swords of the nearest. “No thievery!” he remarked, but there was more than a touch of fear in him as he sensed a swirl of breeze, here in this hollow that likely shielded them from moving airs. If one was drained of all time, could that possibly leave a ghost? “I thought most of the Eaters had departed,” he said, his tongue almost as dry as it had been on the wreck of the hoy.
“Valdis?” Kaiholo asked Kern.
“I have never so measured her abilities.”
“Then Calybo!”
“Possible. If he hath stayed behind, it is to protect something of great value to those just beneath the sky.”
They pondered this for a moment.
“Maybe they seek the boy,” Kern said. “Maybe they found Widsith and questioned him.”
“He would not speak of me!” Reynard insisted.
“Thou dost not know the ways of Annwyn,” Kaiholo said. “Kings and heroes will all talk under the ministrations of the doctors of the Sister Queens.” He held up his hand at the boy’s further objections.
“We lose ourselves in questions we cannot answer. If these be scouts, and they surely have that look, there are many more soldiers and retainers out there. Perhaps an army, or at least a great war party. Let us keep away from the broader and easier paths this new group will likely follow.”
They moved up the ridge to a shelf that did not look as if it had been traveled recently. Here the forest’s strange corkscrew trees produced thin foliage and thinner branches, the wind making them dry-rustle.
“The trods cross about twelve miles beyond the next wrinkle in the island,” Kern said. “There are great wrinkles and small, and still finer ones. They come and go at the behest of the Travelers.”
“They can do that?” Reynard had seen a trod being laid out back near Zodiako, but still could hardly credit his own eyes.
“Like making a bed,” Kern said, and spread his hand along an imaginary counterpane. With pinching fingers, he appeared to pick and flick a tuft from the unseen blanket.
“Then they know magic?” Reynard asked, lost in a boyish hope for wonder, which suddenly, as he realized how that sounded, drew out a blush.
“They know wrinkles,” Kern said. “Ask the Sea Traveler how he flattens waves.”
Kaiholo blew out his nose, offering neither answer nor argument, and pointed the way. Kern touched Reynard’s shoulder and pointed to the tattooed man’s horse. They were not riding, they were leading, but all three horses were now energized by the presence of something they were first to sense.
“Likely the other horses,” Kern said. “And maybe their riders.”
Old Things Have Their Day
THE LEDGE THAT abutted the ridge was ancient indeed, as was the ridge itself—one of the great vertebrae of the island that formed five spines, all of which were known to the geographers of the Travelers, so Kaiholo asserted—though he knew little about them himself. “I know the oceans and the way the island shapes weather out to sea,” he said primly. “Less the land. Kern must know the land.”
“I have been to the cross-trod, but not much around. These spines are ancient, however, and I have heard they are covered with trails. Those change year to year, as Crafter plans spill out and over.”
“Then what goes truly back to the beginning?” Reynard asked.
Kaiholo studied a muddy stretch. He rose and pointed to the distinct mark of a hoof. “Someone’s been by here, or at least a horse,” he said.
Reynard took a look. “It has been shod recently,” he said. “I think Widsith’s mark is on it. It is a Spanish horse.”
“Doing what, and doing what here?” Kaiholo asked. “Are the Spanish all over this island now?”
“Most are dead,” Reynard said. “There may be forty or fifty left.”
“Are the Travelers seeking them, too?” Kern asked.
“They could have Valdis and Widsith,” Kaiholo said. “It seems word hath spread about their value… And thine, fox-boy.”
Reynard looked uneasily along the ledge. “This taketh us inland, doth it not?”
“Once it did. Toward the crossing of the trods,” Kern said.
“And toward a Quarry of Souls,” Kaiholo said. The others looked at him. “Guldreth spake of it, and so hath Calybo.”
“I have never been there,” Kern said.
“What is that?” Reynard asked.
“It is where faces and manners are seen in old rocks by experienced Travelers,” Kern said. “They are quarried and made available to imprint childers, and those cast in Crafters’ designs.”
“If we move along this ledge, is that our next destination?” Reynard asked.
“Likely,” Kaiholo said.
“Would those of Annwyn want to go there?”
“Not to the Quarry,” Kaiholo said. “It is been dormant for centuries, played out, some say. And Travelers do not favor those who work for the Sister Queens, their servants or their allies. A contentious bone in a great skeleton of resentments.”
“Who would be willing to bargain for us?” Reynard asked, a dark thought forming. Could he trust Kaiholo, could he trust Kern? So far, all they had done was guide him to where those he knew sought his protection had vanished.
“Dost thou mean to ask, who would pay?” Kern said.
“Who would pay?”
“Opposition to the wishes of the Travelers doth demand a rare currency. Strategy and weapons, mayhaps.”
“Are the Sister Queens fighting the Crafters?” Reynard asked.
Kern and Kaiholo looked at each other. “Perhaps that is the way of it now,” Kaiholo said, “but I fear the results! We have long served those just beneath the sky, and the Sister Queens do not.”
They walked along, but found no more hoof prints or other spoor. The corkscrew trees and shrubs here were thin but grew fast, like weeds, as if they feared all might soon end.