There was an undeniable ritual aspect to the arrangements, but it was no ritual the steerswoman recognized.
The condition of the bones puzzled her. In some individuals, most bones were broken, especially ribs and long bones: thighs, shins, and arms. Two of the skulls had been reconstructed from crushed fragments, now held together with clay.
In others, the bones were clean, unmarked, and their former owners apparently healthy and not elderly. The cause of their deaths was not evident …
But the spray from a demon would not melt human bones.
The remains interred nearest the entrance were of a woman apparently near Rowan’s own age. She seemed to have warranted special care, her bones arranged in her allotted space with an almost obsessive precision. Only she retained a possession from her former life: on top of the overlapping pattern of ribs lay a rope bracelet of complicated knotting, such as sailors made in their idle hours—
Rowan had a sudden vision: a ship, swept by the currents up to, onto, over the Dolphin Stairs themselves, and falling, shattering in the churning water—
And the people: some drowned, some dead of injury, and some few surviving … for a while.
A fragment of information presented itself: Among Janus’s own people in the upper Wulf valley, it was believed that the dead remained interested in the living world and wished to observe it from the afterlife.
The steerswoman carefully replaced the skulls she had moved, setting each one face-out at its own tiny window, and closed the crypt.
Janus’s mapped route lay directly along the beach, and at first Rowan followed it exactly. Presently, she altered her plan, for two reasons: first, the dry sand shifted beneath her feet with each step, making walking more tiring; and second, the beach began to stink.
Every seashore had its odor. Persons who lived by the sea either ignored what others called a stench or, like Rowan, grew to positively enjoy it. The scent had pleasant associations for her, and whenever she approached the sea from a distance, her heart would lighten and she would feel a happy thrill when the first wind-borne hint of it reached her.
This was different.
She noticed it first rising from the occasional bit of unidentifiable sea wrack, borne in by the waves and stranded by the ebbing tide. Soon, there was more.
Foot-wide, jagged black fronds glistening with sour-smelling blue oil; yellow hollow spirals wafting up a strong scent that somehow made her think of new-broken rock; red chitinous pentagons, weirdly regular in shape, ranging from the size of her thumbnail to the size of her hand. These last, when overturned by her toe, revealed broken stubs of jointed legs, an abdomen of overlapping plates.
None of them any animal or plant she knew or knew of.
She left them behind; but there were still more ahead. Other offal joined them: rotting debris once alive, now existing apparently only in order to foul the air.
Wondering if it were normal for this new sea to wash up such great amounts of dead matter, Rowan incautiously kicked aside a helmet-shaped green sphere.
The helmet moved, but the former inhabitant, unfortunately, did not. It lay there, yellow, wet, rotting, and emitting a truly horrific odor that seemed to actively clamber up Rowan’s nostrils, find a home somewhere behind her eyes, and there apparently attempt to expand—
She fled the water and took refuge in a stand of stunted sea oats, their sweet green scent almost painful in the wake of the helmet creature’s stink. Rowan resisted, then succumbed to a fit of retching.
She walked behind the dunes for the rest of that day and for the next; but the following day with the breeze suddenly fresh, she wandered down to the beach before breakfast and found it pristine, marked only by the swirls of colored sand: gold and black, like the markings on a sleeping tabby cat.
The change was eerie, even more unnatural than the offal. But by noon, when she reached the next cache, some litter had returned, in what struck her as a more normal amount: bits of this strange sea’s strange plants; coral-like twigs; the odd pentagonal shell, hollow and scentless.
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She reached the first numbered site; reached it and passed it before she realized she had done so. She paused at a field of boulders, and in confusion pulled out her map.
The boulders were very clearly marked, definitely just beyond the location of site one. Rowan looked back, scanned the landscape. There was nothing remarkable.
The locations numbered one through three had been crossed out on the chart. Something had interested Janus here initially, if not ultimately.
The steerswoman doubled back, circled and searched, and eventually ended at a field of sandy hummocks. She had noticed them on her first pass and had thought little of them. But when she entered the field and stood in its center, she saw what she had missed before.
It was a village— or had been, once.
Five clear paths joined together where she stood. Between the paths, five clusters of sand piles stood, obviously marking the former locations of structures. Of the structures themselves, nothing remained.
Rowan approached one of the groups, prodded the sand with her foot. No wood, no brick. No pot shards. Not a scrap of cloth, not a nail, no single sliver of glass.
Far too clean. Unnaturally so. Had Rowan arrived here a year later, or even six months, the sand itself would have been dispersed by wind and rain, leaving no hint at all of the former inhabitants.
A departure both impossibly complete and apparently inexplicable.
Standing in the center of the former village, Rowan closed her eyes and listened intently.
No sound of demons. The steerswoman left the silent ruins behind and returned to the shoreline.
Strange; but whatever had caused the villagers to leave, and however brief their dwelling here, they must have been very resourceful indeed. Wresting a living out of so difficult a country—
So extremely difficult a country. Rowan stopped short and stood surveying the landscape.
No greenlife was present, none whatsoever. She had not noted its passing; she noted now its utter absence.
Where scrub pine and beach plums should stand, now only tanglebrush and some strange, taller blue-leaved bushes, entirely unknown to her.
No sea oats, but maroon-blossomed spike-grass.
Not cutgrass but the new variety of blackgrass, fat-leaved, unmoving in the light breeze.
No sign of humans; no sign of life that would support humans. There seemed no place for people here.
Rowan made her way slowly to the water’s edge, slipped out of her pack, clambered onto a boulder that thrust itself up out of the shallow surf. She looked down.
No seaweed, no crabs or mussels. Instead, a collection of lithe, pale blue rods that writhed blind heads just beneath the surface, in motion completely independent of the waves’ action. Their lower bodies descended in the clear water to terminate among angular black crystal encrustations.
Rowan captured a passing stick of tanglebrush driftwood, used it to prod at the crystals; the blue rods startled, then communally twisted and knotted themselves around the stick, which Rowan was forced to abandon to them.
She stood. She gazed out to sea for some minutes.
Even the sea seemed strange to her; as well it might, being an entirely different sea. That wave, for instance, breaking far out against a submerged sandbar; who knew what distance it had traveled? Who knew how far away lay this ocean’s other shore?
Who knew, in fact, if it even possessed one?
And in a single, elegant movement of thought, so graceful it astonished Rowan herself, the steerswoman created in her mind both the largest map she had ever conceived and the smallest, simultaneously.
The largest was of the world itself, whose shape and size she knew from the secret and intimate interplay of mathematics, but which she now seemed to see whole, all open sweep beyond all horizons, curving to meet itself at the other side, complete, entire— and huge, so huge.
The smallest map was, to scale, that
part of the world known by humankind.
The smallest map was crowded; the greatest, nearly empty.
And there, just outside the smaller map, the steerswoman with casual precision marked her own position, as if with a bright, silver needle; and she saw and felt the greater map rock, turn, orient, descend (or ascend, she could not tell which), approaching, adjusting and finally matching, point for point those distant cliffs, those nearer hills, this shoreline, this rock-strewn beach, the spray-splashed boulder on which Rowan stood, wet to the knees, arms thrown wide, head tilted back, breathing salt-tang air, and laughing for wonder.
Two days later, in the evening, she reached Site Two. She moved with caution; the shoreline had evolved into a marshy estuary, and she had certain experience with such areas in the Outskirts. She did not care to meet a mud-lion.
Janus had indicated the best route across the uncertain terrain, and Rowan was required to swing slightly north and then west. She approached the site from the east, sunset dazzling her eyes, the sky above her a raddled pink expanse of herringbone clouds.
Ahead, silhouettes: rounded shapes taller than she stood, clustered. She sidled through clattering tanglebrush, found a path on dryer ground, and entered the village, walking where many feet had walked before her.
Abandoned— but far more recently than Site One. And she could see now why so little had remained there.
These dwellings were mere mud huts, the most primitive she had ever seen. Without maintenance, weather itself would eventually reduce them to hummocks of dirt.
In most, the process had already begun. Of twenty-five huts, only a few possessed intact roofs. Rowan approached one, peered into a door that was a mere open oval in the face of the hut.
Light in the back, a series of canted parallel slits at the level of Rowan’s waist, emitting pink-gold lines of sun. Useless as windows. Likely designed purely for ventilation.
Rowan set her pack on the ground outside and entered cautiously, uncertain of the state of the domed roof. She paused, letting her eyes adjust to the gloom.
A second door, leading into an adjacent hut, whose own street exit spilled a hazy oval of pink light on the floor. And across that hut, another internal door, visible as a mere darker shadow on the shadowed wall.
A sociable people, apparently. Rowan decided to like them.
She crossed into the second hut, paused before the access to the third.
Dark, there. Walls and roof had collapsed, reducing the room to a lightless and crumble-walled vestibule. But the previous occupant had been less fastidious than his neighbors. Something on the floor just inside—
She did not need eyes to identify it; touch told her immediately. She pulled it out, sat on the floor in the last spill of pink light.
A talisman.
But not like her own not like any of the other such objects in Janus’s room. A short column, flared at top and bottom. Its colors were blotched dark and light, its surface an etched network of tiny hexagons.
Her own talisman held magic, magic that affected demons— and so must this one. Someone with knowledge of demon magic had been here.
Janus. Or … one of Slado’s minions?
Or perhaps the wizard himself?
Outside, in the falling night, sounds were suddenly sharper, clearer: the clack-clack of a trawler, a chorus of whistle-spiders, hawkbug chirr, tanglebrush clatter, the wind, the sea.
No demon-voice. No human sounds.
She carried the new object out into the open and stood, gazing about at the shadowy dwellings.
So clean, so utterly empty. It would take time to collect every possession. If it had been demons that drove the people from their homes, surely they would have fled quickly, left something behind.
And where were the fire pits? Where were the chimneys? The grain stores, the pens for animals?
And had the people truly owned so little that each and every item could be carried away during their escape?
Or had they, in fact, any possessions at all?
Rowan took one blind step backward, another.
This was no village.
The steerswoman said, in a voice more breath than words, “I’m in a demon hive.”
But no demon-voice here. The whistle-spiders had ceased their farewell to the sun; the hawkbug had settled for the night. The trawler now kept silent vigil on its shoot lines.
Only the wind. Only the sea.
And night falling.
It occurred to Rowan that her own safest and most defensible shelter would be found in one of the abandoned hive chambers. But she could not bring herself to sleep here.
She returned to the shoreline and spent the night blanket-wrapped on a patch of dry ground, watching the stars in their arcing course above the great ocean.
At Site Three, she found a corpse.
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The hawkbugs drew her to it. Rowan saw a dozen of them battling high in the air just past a grassy rise— vying for territory that each considered desirable, abundant with food, and worth the fight.
She found it at the top of the rise: a hive of flesh termites, a long white mound two feet high, five feet in length. In the Outskirts, she had seen many such hives, built on the corpses of goblins. But here it was easy to discern in the crusted white shape the angles of the four knees, the sprawl of four arms.
She listened: no sound of a living demon.
The flying scouts of the hive swarmed the air around the corpse. One lit on Rowan’s arm, and she suppressed the impulse to slap at it. She endured its bite, and it flew off at speed, hurrying to tell its hive that she was inedible.
Rowan gazed down into a little vale below, where a glittering stream meandered to the sea. Nearly a dozen white-shrouded forms lay scattered on the hillside. From intimate knowledge of the life cycle of flesh termites, Rowan knew that these demons had died less than six months previously.
At the bottom of the vale: clustered domes. No motion.
The steerswoman considered the view in silence, then set her pack on the ground, found the gloves stowed in the top, and pulled them on. Carrying only her sword in her right hand and Janus’s talisman in her left, she stepped sideways down the slope.
This demon colony was less deteriorated than the previous. From halfway down the rise, Rowan could see that the domed roofs remained complete; but there was no motion and no demon-voice, which she ought to have heard even from this distance.
She gave another termite nest wide berth as she passed, but was nipped by two of its scouts regardless. And now the air about her was clouded with insects; the termites had been joined by golden gnats, which Rowan also knew were harmless to humans. But they were interested in the moisture in her eyes; the steerswoman waved her sword hilt continually before her face.
Eight groups of five dens. It seemed an unnaturally large number. From her experience and studies, only small creatures tended to live in such large groups.
She came suddenly across another termite hive hidden in the blackgrass and barely prevented herself from stumbling into it. Five scouts immediately tested her; but the workers, disturbed by her proximity, did not wait for word. They crawled from the many exit holes to promenade for her benefit, little abdomens lifted in threatening display.
Rowan snorted laughter at them, inhaling gnats in the process. She spat, then coughed, then spat again.
More scouts lit on her arms; other hives were near enough to be interested. Rowan endured the bites, walked on, was tested again before she went five feet, increased her pace.
The air above the demon colony was thick with flying insects, filled with buzzing and the clacking and chirring of many insect battles. The steerswoman slowed her approach, less convinced of the simplicity of conducting an investigation.
Something moved between two dens; Rowan froze, then relaxed as a knee-high pincer-beetle wandered out. A hawkbug immediately dropped from the sky upon it. A struggle followed, which the beetle won.
From here she could see further i
nto the colony. There were many white-shrouded demon corpses on the ground within and an astounding amount of activity on, around, and over them.
So many termite hives would attract slugsnakes, and harvesters, and trawlers; slugsnakes brought pincer-beetles, some of which could attain truly disturbing size; harvesters and trawlers brought hawkbugs.
Fool-you bugs would lure and ambush hawkbugs. Snip-lizards would burrow under the fool-yous to attack their undefended bellies. Goblins considered snip-lizards to be very tasty and could hear them underground for a remarkable distance.
And this was naming only the creatures whose sight or voice Rowan recognized. What else might be feasting in the colony? Some coastal equivalent of swarmers, perhaps, or even mud-lions, neither of which she cared to meet.
She found she had stopped, standing knee deep in blackgrass, in a cloud of golden gnats.
Investigation was impossible. She might never know what had killed so many demons.
The steerswoman turned back and left the dead colony behind.
Janus’s next food cache had been raided.
Rowan slipped out of her pack and stood surveying the wreckage. Less than a week old.
Only Inner Lands creatures would be interested in food of this kind. Humans, or the animals they brought with them: dogs, cats, possibly escaped pigs.
She picked up an oilcloth wrapper, smelled it: dried meat of some sort, probably venison. The smell was old, but the wrapper might just as easily have been dug from a garbage pit.
She searched. She found the garbage pit, undisturbed. Animals would have gone for the garbage pit, as well.
Rowan loaded her pack with as much unspoiled food as she could find and fit, to make a new cache further on.
It was time to increase her vigilance. She walked more cautiously now, keeping near the dunes, constantly scanning the beach ahead, smelling and tasting the air for a hint of woodsmoke, and listening. For human voices and for demon; she must be alert for both.
The Lost Steersman (Steerswoman Series) Page 36
