They spent their first night ashore in three weeks.
In the dusk, by the snapping fire, Rowan studied her copy of the chart of the land past the Dolphin Stair, laboriously comparing it to the smaller version she had drawn in the first pages of her fresh logbook. Should she lose her copies, she did not want to depend on memory. She found nothing to amend but still repeated the action obsessively, until she was stopped by the distinct feeling that she had done all this before, under other circumstances—
Of course: at the Archives, when she and Bel were preparing to depart for the Outskirts. When she had made all the preparations possible; when, nevertheless, the amount of unknown contingency still remained too large to be comfortable with, and she had continued to feel that, somehow, there must be more she could do.
Her mouth twisted. She ordered the charts, slipped them into their tubular case, packed them away in her backpack.
Across the fire, the other steerswoman was involved in her own pursuit: with paper, pens, and ruler, Zenna was calculating the size and strength of the underwater dams that surely must delineate each edge of each step of the Dolphin Stair. The numbers had become huge; she was working now in compressed notation. She turned a moment, to shout out behind her, “Oh, loyal crew, your captain is definitely not going to spend her time tending this stew!”
Steffie emerged from gloom at the water’s edge, looking sheepish. “Sorry.” He came to the fire, where a small pot was bubbling. He dutifully stirred the contents with a well-worn and half-burned wooden spoon, but again and again he turned back to glance toward the water. Catching Rowan watching him, he said simply, “It’s so beautiful.”
Rowan nodded, hugging her knees against the chill. In the dimming light, the top ledge of the stair, thread-thin, seemed to hang suspended between two blue worlds: the deep shadowy blue of the dimly moving sea and the flat, featureless gray-tinged blue of the sky.
She felt that another such line existed, invisible, that she would cross in the morning. She had gone into strange lands before in her life, but this time it would be with no companion, no friendly guide, no person who knew more than she. She had only the map, and more often than not, its notations were mere indications; what they referred to remained to be discovered.
Steffie began clearing the area around the fire to a wider expanse, preparatory to spreading the bedrolls. Zenna idly assisted him and was about to toss a handful of pulled dry grass onto the fire. Rowan stirred from reverie, her attention caught by the resinous scent. “Don’t do that,” she said. “That’s blackgrass. Burning it will send out very unpleasant fumes.”
Zenna looked more closely at the twisty weeds in her hand. “You didn’t mention fumes.” Rowan had briefed her on the commoner Outskirts plants and animals, on the assumption that similar conditions might obtain in the area of this anchorage.
“They’re only dangerous if you burn great amounts.” And slowly poisonous if handled constantly for days on end, she reminded herself; and useful to rid clothes of infestations of fleas …
To Rowan’s eye, this area was a milder version of the Outskirts, oddly mixed with Inner Lands life. The blackgrass was familiar, crowding around the freshwater stream that descended the hill at the back of the cove. She had found no lichen-towers, not even the small ones usually indistinguishable from stones in streambeds; but they propagated by a spreading underground root system, while blackgrass had airborne seeds.
Contiguity, she thought, and access.
The blackgrass did not approach the sea edge itself; normal Inner Lands sea oats grew in the pocket marsh where the stream’s water commingled with the sea waves.
The rocks of the shoreline were encrusted with mussels— Inner Lands. Tanglebrush nestled in the damp crevasses of the rocks above the shore— Outskirts.
In the Outskirts, there was very little coexistence of the different lifeforms. Here, the difference must have something to do with the sea, or with the absence of the redgrass veldt.
Something nagged at her mind. She could not pin it down.
Above, the first stars were appearing, and to the east, the Eastern Guidestar. Rowan found herself gazing at it; and although she was not aware of any particular thought about it in her mind, the expression she felt on her face seemed to be one of distrust and suspicion.
Zenna was watching her. “Suppose it sends down that heat again?” Steffie looked at Zenna in surprise, then up at the Guidestar, then at Rowan.
Rowan shook her head. “There’s no way to be warned if it does. There’s no way to tell by looking at it; it could be doing so at this very moment, directed at some other part of the world.”
“Heat means light,” Zenna replied.
“Not always, apparently.”
“It makes no sense.”
Rowan’s mouth twitched. “Magic.”
Steffie stirred the stew. “Got to be some way to tell.”
“No.”
Rowan had come to understand that the Guidestars were actually objects, and that they moved as the world turned, at the same pace, and so only seemed to stand still in the sky; in fact, the concepts, when they first occurred to her, excited and pleased her. They made sense. They were new knowledge.
But that the Guidestars could do such evil was, to Rowan, a particular and disturbing betrayal. The more she considered it, the more unstable the world seemed. Our ancient allies: servants of evil.
A servant does what its master commands.
The original intent of the heat from the Guidestars was beneficial; but that remained an idea difficult to sustain, slipping away when she did not focus on it. The fact that the Outskirts must shift eastward ahead of the Inner Lands seemed logical; but the fact that it needed the intervention of magic to do so was somehow wrong— although she could not see why.
There was something behind this that she was not seeing.
The group ate their stew in silence; the evening grew toward night. “Let’s put the fire out.” A precaution only; Rowan doubted that any goblins would haunt so damp an environment.
They planned to sleep in shifts, with Rowan taking first watch, so that she might sleep undisturbed afterward and be fresh for her travel the next day. Steffie and Zenna would have their own duties: They must work to repair the ship and lighten it further, and more intelligently, for the return trip. Rowan had allotted them three weeks in which to accomplish this. It was the shortest amount of time she might be expected to reach and return from site four, assuming no delays at all.
She had also firmly instructed them to sail back to Alemeth without her if she had not returned in six weeks.
Steffie covered the fire with sand, and he and Zenna wrapped themselves in blankets, lying down close by the fading heat of buried coals.
Rowan remained sitting, her cloak about her, the rising stones behind her, and the cove before her, where Janus’s nameless ship stood on the water. Beyond, the sea roiled faintly, as if to shapes moving beneath. More stars arrived, seeming to coalesce from the pearl gray of dusk, with the continual roar of the Dolphin Stair coloring the air like the sound of the stars themselves.
And an odd thought came to her, and it expressed itself to her as: In the absence of humankind.
Wizardly magic destroyed the dangerous life on the blackgrass prairie. In the wake of that destruction: the Face, and later, the veldt. Then, Outskirter life and ways destroyed the veldt, clearing the way for the greenlife of the Inner Lands to spread.
Human actions, all— even the magic.
What might the world be like, in the absence of humankind?
Perhaps like this, everywhere. Perhaps nothing like this. Perhaps stranger.
She tucked her hands under her arms and sat wrapped in her cloak, with the cooling earth beneath, the cooling air falling from above, and the chill sight and sound of the stars all around her.
31
For two days, Rowan doggedly clambered down the jagged cliffs beside the stair.
She coughed and spat almost contin
uously, breathing a mist so thick she felt she was inhaling water: the spray of the eternally falling Inland Sea. Its thick salt tang burned her throat and made her tongue raw; she soon tied a large kerchief around her mouth so as not to drown in the open air.
She heard no demons, and would be unable to, if one were near.
But these crags and upthrusts and shattered boulders must surely be as daunting to a demon as to a person; and the immense roaring of the stair must overwhelm their seeing ears as a person would be blinded gazing at the sun. She thought they would not come here. And the mist itself would hide her from any human eyes.
The mist became fog, thickening as she descended. The cliffs were a vague gray mass to which she clung, suspended in whiteness, with all the world reduced to the stone above that her hand had just released, the boulder below that her cautiously searching foot had just located.
Night fell at noon, when the sun passed the upper edge of the Dolphin Stair. The steerswoman ate a cold meal, rested, and later slept tucked into a stony niche, wrapped in layers of cloak, blanket, and oilskin tarp.
She awoke to pink light, a solid, perfect, endless pink the exact color of wild rose petals. A lovely color; half asleep, she could not resist reaching out into it. It remained insubstantial, the length of her arm fading in fog, her fingers completely invisible.
The pink slowly shifted to gold as she breakfasted, and the gold to white as she repacked her gear. She donned her pack, turned, and descended again, her back to the pure, empty white, her face to the jagged tumbles of gray and black stone.
She found level ground abruptly when, standing on what seemed a secure place, her foot could discover no edge to work around or clamber over. Wiping condensation from her face, Rowan stood and turned into the whiteness. Now her feet searched forward, long testing reaches, and she moved on like a blind woman.
When the sound of the stair began to be behind her, when there were no shadows of boulders about her, when her feet found few stones in their path and her boots sometimes sank in sand, the mist began to clear. It did not part but lessened, lifted, coalesced; and at last the sun appeared, high above and faintly blurred.
Rowan slid out of her pack and sat on it as she rested, sipping from her water sack.
Ahead, the shoreline curved toward the south, defining almost a third of a full circle, ending in a rocky spit. Haze erased far details and paled colors close by: a watercolor landscape of gray-blue sea to Rowan’s right, pale blue sky above, faded gold and gray distances. Behind, the last step of the stair cut the sky, a white wall of falling water.
Rowan had the eerie feeling that she was surrounded by a landscape wholly imaginary. To dispel the sensation, she reached down to scoop up a handful of the stony sand.
Red-black pebbles, damp sand grains of both golden brown and black, and as many shells and shell bits. Here, the characteristic violet and white of Inner Lands clams; here, too, the fractured black and blue of mussels; but there— what shell would carry a combination of green and pink in tiny alternating trapezoids? These last became smaller fragments under the slightest pressure of her fingers, and dry dust at the slightest bit more.
She brushed her hands together: green and pink ghosted away like smoke; violet and white tumbled to the ground. The steerswoman closed her eyes and listened.
The endless sound of the stair, now quieter; the slap of small waves against stone; the sudden cry of a gull, sharp, like a little knife of sound.
No sound of demons, no voices or footsteps of humans.
Rowan opened her eyes. She rose, slapped sand from her pack, swung it on, and strode away down the misty, rocky shore.
She was several days travel away from site Four, where Slado’s presumed residence, with its presumed attendants and servants, was located. Still, Rowan might expect to encounter people, or see signs of them, fairly soon. Who knew how far Slado’s people might range? She must be cautious.
But as well as danger, people represented opportunities. She might learn from them more of what to expect when she reached Slado’s keep, perhaps enlist an ally. Without more knowledge, she could form no plans.
But she discovered that, unless she consciously made an effort, she stopped anticipating human beings. The land felt empty to her, in the way that the area beyond the Outskirts proper had felt, when she had traveled there.
It must be the presence of Outskirts lifeforms that inspired the feeling. But this shore was not Outskirts.
Tanglebrush climbed the lee of the dunes she passed, but Inner Lands cutgrass dwelled on the crests. Common sea oats grew here, too, but they had acquired strange companions; knee-high, fat-leaved black fronds with finger-shaped yellow seed heads crowding greedily around the standing water. Rowan decided that they were a coastal relative of the blackgrass that covered the prairie beyond the Outskirts, out on the Face.
Past the spit, a true beach appeared, an expanse of gold and black sand sorted and arranged into dizzying interlocking curves that marked the leading edges of past waves. Rowan took a moment to adjust her eyes to the striped ground, stepped onto it cautiously. Beneath her feet, the sand was merely sand, harder close to the water. She continued on.
She passed an object half buried in the sand: a huge, sinuous animal skeleton, nearly twenty feet long, seeming to consist entirely of ribs and vertebrae. The bones were black, their surfaces slightly wrinkled. Shriveled, as a demon’s own cartilaginous bones might become, exposed to months of sea air. Rowan hoped that this great creature had posed no danger to humans while alive.
Further along, she spotted what seemed a human-made object; she snagged it as she passed and examined it as she walked: a coarse, stiff fiber mesh, perhaps part of a sieve …
Presently she stopped and studied it more closely.
The tiny strands were hollow. Toward the center of each, dark color showed through the pale substance, like old, dried blood within.
As she walked on, she tried to imagine what sort of sea creature this might have been. She failed.
Less than eight miles from the foot of the Dolphin Stair, Janus’s map notated a location, with a small, unlabeled x, one of the series of such that appeared intermittently across the route through the four numbered sites. Analyzing the distances involved, the depicted terrain, and considering Rowan’s suspicions about encroaching Outskirts-type life, Rowan and Zenna had decided that the marks indicated staging points, likely including caches of supplies and food. At the first of these, Rowan planned to make camp that evening.
She did find a food cache; she also found a crypt.
She was some time recognizing it: a cairn, larger than that covering the food cache. Rowan at first assumed it to mark a second cache.
She also found an old shallow fire pit and a clear area between it and a tall dune. If Janus had used fire at night, either he had avoided attracting goblins by sheer luck, or the creatures did not inhabit this area.
It was autumn. The night would be chill. By the dictates of their natural life cycles, the goblin jills would now be dead, the mated jacks jealously patrolling their egg caches, unmated jacks wandering solitary.
Rowan did not doubt her ability to dispatch a single goblin jack— and did not doubt that any demon-voice would wake her instantly.
She lit the fire, took her dinner of dried fish and bread beside it as the sun set, then took out her logbook, pen, and ink and made her daily entries. This task she completed very quickly.
Above her camp, the stars above were clear, as sharp and bright as on a winter’s night. There, the Eastern Guidestar; there, the Western.
Friends of the traveler, reliably giving direction; friends of the farmer, telling the season by what stars lay behind them in the evenings. Timekeepers, winking out in turn, as each passed into the world’s own shadow.
The steerswoman regarded them; and they, she knew, regarded her. The Guidestars watched, heeded commands, undertook actions— behaved, in a way, as if alive.
Her face tilted up, Rowan wondered: H
ow alive? She knew they made records of events. Did they ponder the events they saw, did they speculate? In the times between enacting the commands of their masters, did the Guidestars dream?
The idea disturbed her.
The fire writhed its flames upward; the dunes around her lit intermittently, flashing in her peripheral vision.
She was tired, body and mind. She must rest. She rose and went to bury the fire.
Motion. She turned.
Nothing, and then a flicker: shadows shifting among the stones of the second cairn, responding to the moving flames. In one dark hollow between two stones, something white flicked in and out of visibility, illuminated and darkened.
Rowan stood and scanned the night beyond her small circle of light, found it impenetrable. She listened: insect noises, some of which she recognized from the Inner Lands, some from the Outskirts; the snap of the fire; and the pause and rush of breakers. Nothing else.
She pulled a small branch of burning driftwood from the fire and carried it to the pile of stones. Moving it back and forth, she tried to elicit the flicker of white again.
In a gap between rocks, she saw darkness and, peering closer, whiteness. She pulled out two stones that seemed designed to be pulled.
Inside, a human skull gazed out at her emptily.
Rowan quickly drew back and as quickly recovered and leaned forward again. The superstitions of her childhood had long been supplanted, and she had only a moment’s distress.
Rowan considered. Then she opened the crypt further.
There were several individuals interred, all of them bones merely, with no clothing, no remnants of flesh. Perhaps they were very old.
But humans had been here. A good sign.
Closer examination must wait until daylight, Rowan decided. She returned to the fire, doused it with sand, and wrapped herself in her bedroll.
She returned to the crypt as soon as the light permitted. There was dew; and a trace of fog.
She pulled out more stones and found the bones inside neatly stacked, in a rather specific arrangement: long bones outlining a square, smaller bones within, each obviously representing an individual. The skulls were separate, lined up around the walls of the structure, each one facing a small chink in the wall. There were seven persons altogether.
The Lost Steersman (Steerswoman Series) Page 35