The Last

  “Urgit fa golen

  Fa meer distay

  Urgit na golen

  Ik teer begray.”

  Suddenly a trail of glittering silver light appeared on the floor. We watched in amazement as it snaked around the tables to the bar, where jugs and bottles were arrayed.

  The line of light raced up the wall. It stopped at what looked like a simple piece of paneling, no different from the wood that covered most of the room.

  Renzo headed over and studied the panel. From his pocket he drew a short steel tool, flattened on one end and hooked on the other. He dug the flattened edge into the paneling, pried it loose, then pulled it away completely, using the hook end.

  There, behind the panel, was a space. And in that space were elaborate drinking chalices, along with little bottles of rare spices and pepper. The hidden wealth of the inn’s owner.

  “You practice theurgy,” Khara said to Renzo.

  “It’s useful in my line of work,” he replied.

  “Not—” Khara began, but Tobble barreled into the room at that moment.

  “Fire!” he gasped. “To the south!”

  “It could be campfires,” Khara said.

  Tobble shook his head. “No,” he said. “This fire moved. It was like someone cracking a whip of flame.”

  We were gone from the village within five minutes, all hope of a good night’s rest gone.

  The Knight of the Fire lived.

  55.

  Northward

  Renzo proved useful—even Khara had to admit that. He knew the countryside in ways that we did not.

  In time we reached the cold and misty coast, which we continued to follow north.

  “I’ve never heard of islands that move around on their own,” Renzo said as we made our way through a stand of trees.

  I reluctantly showed him my drawing.

  “This is what you people have to go on?” Renzo laughed. “A drawing? A drawing of a legend?”

  “You’re welcome to go another way,” Khara said.

  “Oh, but you’d miss me,” Renzo replied. “Besides, I’ve already gone one round with Mr. Flames and Armor. I still stink of smoke.” He combed his fingers through his scruffy hair. “Look at the state of my beautiful locks, all frizzled at the ends!”

  The coast was not quite as desolate as the road had been, since no one thought the Murdano, should he form an invasion force, would come that way. Still, we found a fishing village that showed signs of having battled a pirates’ raiding party. The men all carried homemade weapons, flails, billhooks, and clubs with protruding spikes.

  It was true, as the Murdano had said, that these northern lands were ravaged by pirates and bandits. But it was also true that on the rare occasions when soldiers passed this way, they preyed on the people almost as harshly as the raiders.

  “What is north of here?” Khara asked a bent old man repairing his fishing nets beside a tumbledown wooden pier.

  “North?” He shook his head. “Those are wild lands full of vicious beasts, both human and not. You don’t want to go north, young master. There’s only death to find there.”

  Behind us, the Knight of the Fire.

  Ahead, bandits and fell beasts.

  A treacherous trek ending in almost certain disappointment.

  The mood darkened and weighed heavily on me. This was my quest, after all. The others were only there to help and protect me. Me, an endling at the end of the world.

  I reminded myself that Araktik had believed the rumors about more dairnes. But putting hope in a rumor, especially one believed by a crazy, evil human, was hardly a reason to trudge onward each day.

  The coast grew rockier, with tall cliffs cut by a multitude of rivers and streams that made deep channels into the earth and spilled over the cliffs in glorious waterfalls. We rode along those cliffs, hundreds of feet up, seeing nothing of humankind, or indeed of any of the governing species, except for ospreys and other fish-eating raptidons.

  With each hour, each day, the world felt emptier, wilder, farther away from the world we’d known. Eventually we saw no villages, inhabited or abandoned. There were occasional fishing camps each with a shack at the base of a cliff, but these, too, were empty.

  The weather was bitter and threatened to grow colder. The wind blew constantly from the sea, and the few trees we saw were gnarled and leafless. We were in a land of bare hills and stark stone, fields of gloomy saw grass and shallow meres. A bleaker landscape I could not imagine.

  “Why would any species migrate in this direction?” I asked aloud.

  “Most of the animals in the Viagatto head inland, away from the direction we’re heading,” said Khara. “They stop at a massive wetlands area. A rare lichen grows there that they feed on. At least, that’s what scholars say. No one is really sure.”

  “So they travel half the world to eat some moss,” Renzo said. “Brilliant.”

  “And to breed,” Gambler added with the hint of a smile.

  “I wonder where the butterbats go,” I said, thinking suddenly of Maia, that day at the mirabear cave. It seemed impossibly long ago.

  “I don’t think anyone knows, Byx,” Khara said.

  After a steep one-hour climb, we reached a point where we could clearly see the massive, pine-forested mountain chain, the Sovo Ridge, that separated Nedarra from Dreyland.

  “What do we know of Dreyland?” I asked Gambler as we surveyed the scene.

  “Very little,” Gambler admitted. “We know—I should say we believe—that it contains other governing species. And there are many creations of evil theurgy: monsters, golems, creatures of ice that move like men.”

  Tobble’s eyes went wide. “Ice creatures?”

  Gambler nodded. “It’s said that a wizard rules Dreyland.”

  “Why does the Murdano wish to make war on them?” Tobble asked.

  “Because humans are strange,” Gambler replied.

  I caught a whiff of smoke at the same time Gambler did. We turned to see that the fishing camp we’d passed just hours before had burst into flames. A pillar of smoke rose into the sky, gray joining gray.

  We moved, it seemed, almost constantly. The Knight of the Fire kept us focused on that goal, though we had not seen him in some while, but in this spare and increasingly unpopulated territory, we found little to eat. The supplies the Murdano had given us had either been consumed or lost in moments of panic. Now and then Khara, Gambler, and Renzo would go off in search of food. Generally they came back with far too little or nothing at all.

  Once Dog raced off, snuffling the hard ground, and returned minutes later with a measly ice rat, mangled and drool-covered.

  “What a fine specimen you’ve brought us, Dog,” Renzo said. He had a tendency to praise the mangy mutt to excess.

  Renzo reached out to accept the bloody mess, but Dog had other ideas. He loped over to me, tail thrashing, and dropped the rat at my feet.

  “It’s a gift,” Renzo said. “He wants to be friends.”

  I looked at the rat, which was crawling with maggots, and kicked it aside. “I’m not that desperate,” I said.

  “You could at least thank him,” Renzo admonished. “You’re practically brothers.”

  I gave Dog a halfhearted pat on his head. He retrieved the rat and carried it proudly, dangling from his mouth, for several hours.

  The horses were ragged. We, too, were ragged, and no matter how disciplined we were, each day we covered less distance than the day before. Each night, after we’d found a hidden place to camp, we saw fire in our wake. I hoped these distant fires were not more innocents being tortured for news of our passing.

  As if that weren’t enough, more danger lay ahead. The closer we came to the frontier, the more we began to see evidence of troops heading north, no doubt the Murdano’s invasion forces. In their wake they left scattered trash, discarded crates, cold remains of campfires, the occasional dead horse left to bloat by the side of the road where it had fallen.

  “Are you cer
tain we’re headed in the right direction?” Tobble wondered one night as we rested. “And how will we know when we’re close?”

  I had no answers. None of us did. Our only plan was to keep following the coast northward.

  We decided to make camp where we were. No one could move another foot. We built a pitifully small fire in the lee of a bluff where we hoped the glow would not be seen by our relentless pursuer. A brew of herb tea and bitter-tasting roots was our supper, and would be our breakfast as well.

  I woke in the night, stomach whining, and climbed to the top of the sheltering bluff. It wasn’t too tall, maybe three times Khara’s height. I’d hoped to see whether the knight was closer, but thick fog had crawled in from the sea, obscuring the world and softening the moon to a fuzzy orb, like the last days of a dandelion.

  Tobble appeared, and I reached down to help him up. “Couldn’t sleep, Tobble?”

  “My stomach won’t let me,” he answered.

  “Mine, either.”

  “Byx . . .”

  “Yes?”

  “Have you thought about what to do when we find the floating island and your lost colony of dairnes?”

  I sighed. “Oh, Tobble, you know how unlikely that is, right?”

  “But it could happen,” Tobble insisted. “The only thing is, well, aren’t we leading the knight straight to them?”

  It was not a new thought for me. In fact, it had tortured me ever since we’d left Saguria. The knight had eliminated the Pale Guard, but in many ways the Pale Guard had been our protectors. They, at least, had no orders to kill us, though they did have orders to exterminate all but a handful of any dairnes we might conceivably encounter.

  The Knight of the Fire seemed to have his own plan. We’d outwitted him and evaded him, and he did not like it. He’d tracked us over many leagues and was perhaps no more than half a league away, in spite of his slow horse and our careful attempts to hide when we needed to rest. He would not be giving up now.

  “What choice do we have?” I asked. “If we turn back, the knight will kill us. If we stay here, we’ll either starve or the knight will kill us. If we go forward, we may find nothing, and then we will either starve or the knight will kill us.”

  “Well, that’s a gloomy assessment,” Tobble said, trying for a light tone and failing.

  “If we go forward and we do find dairnes, they will at least have food. And perhaps even a means to fight.”

  I stopped myself. It seemed a ridiculous fantasy. Now I wasn’t just imagining a colony of dairnes, I was imagining that they could take on and defeat one of the most terrifying humans in existence.

  The breeze picked up, tearing rifts in the fog. I peered toward the south, searching for telltale flame. Nothing.

  “Look!” Tobble cried, gesturing northeast.

  I followed the direction of his gaze and saw two . . . three . . . four fires, far off in the distance.

  “Khara!” I called.

  She was with us in a few seconds. We pointed, and she looked for a long time before turning to us with an unlikely grin on her face.

  “Those are not the knight’s fires. Those are tended fires for cooking or drying meat. That, my friends, is Zebara.”

  56.

  Zebara

  I had by this time become much more knowledgeable about human dwellings. I had been to the isle of Ursina and to Saguria. I had passed through towns and villages. I had seen the evidence of human ingenuity.

  And then I saw Zebara.

  In this nearly treeless land, humans had constructed buildings from mud bricks, buildings shaped like a half of a melon, round on the top, with a single low door and a narrow window. Smoke rose from holes cut in the roofs of these primitive huts.

  The whole port village seemed haphazardly designed, homes and shops all willy-nilly with nothing but mud between them. A central lodge, still with an arched roof but much longer, sat near the middle of town. It was festooned with antlers from verdelk, wolf pelts, and the bleached bones of great fish.

  It was clear that boats were more important by far to the villagers than homes. Dozens of boats crowded the narrow harbor: fishing craft, swift-rowing smuggler crafts, and at least one Nedarran pirate ship. Outnumbering these still-useful boats by ten to one were beached boats, shambling wrecks with fallen masts, many draped with frayed rope ends and scraps of ancient sails. Everywhere were crude racks made to dry nets, and wide fire pits over which strings of fish smoked.

  As usual I assumed my “dog” identity, a ruse that was harder to pull off with an actual dog in our company. We were met with open curiosity and little hostility from the townspeople, a dirty, scowling, dangerous-looking bunch. I saw many humans with forehead brands of T for thief, S for smuggler, and P for poacher, and many with ears cut off, and sometimes hands or legs. A surprising number of Zebarans wore hooks for hands or pared-down tree stumps for legs.

  Branding, Khara explained, was the gentlest punishment handed out in Nedarra; a second offense would get you garroted. For piracy, the punishment began with mutilation and got rapidly worse.

  Zebara was a dark and frightening place, but in some ways I welcomed it. If any bunch of humans was desperate and dangerous enough to give a Knight of the Fire second thoughts, it was this collection of criminals and renegades.

  With some of Renzo’s money, we bought some dried fish and ate it in the open, wolfing it down and following it with gallons of spring water to dilute the cloying salt flavor.

  As we sat in the dirt eating, three men came striding up, looking curious and suspicious. Each was armed with several weapons, including knives, clubs, whale harpoons, and wooden stake-driving hammers.

  “What business have you here?” The one who spoke had a strong accent that made even the Common Tongue hard to understand. He was missing one eye and had filled the cavity with a piece of fine pottery, a glazed eyeball whose sightless pupil aimed eternally to the right.

  “We seek something,” Khara said.

  “What?”

  “We come from the isle of Ursina,” she lied easily. “The great scholars there have sent us on a voyage of exploration to find out the truth of a legend.”

  “What legend is that?” One-Eye asked. His tone was still skeptical, but he had straightened a bit upon hearing that we were from the isle.

  “The ancient texts tell of islands that move on their own. Islands that think. Living islands.”

  The three humans exchanged a look, and my heart leapt. They knew something.

  “What would it be worth to have the answer?” One-Eye demanded.

  Khara held up her hands in a helpless gesture. “As you see, we have nothing to trade.”

  “You have horses,” the man said.

  “They’re not our horses to trade,” Khara said, sounding regretful. “They are gifts of the Murdano.”

  The name did not improve One-Eye’s mood. He spat on the ground. “The Murdano holds no sway here,” he said. “Does he defend us against raiders? No. Does he send a fleet to keep Dreyland pirates from attacking our trade? No. At the very least he could bribe the natites, who could put an end to attacks from the sea. Instead he spends his fortune building an army for a war he’s certain to lose.”

  “Nevertheless,” Khara said, “we cannot trade horses we do not own.”

  “Then I have nothing to tell you.” He hooked his thumbs in his rope belt and put on a stubborn face, though he did allow more than one anxious glance at Gambler.

  “What about information?” Renzo spoke up. “You have information, I have information.”

  “What information?” One-Eye asked. “You first.”

  Renzo nodded, deliberately ignoring a warning look from Khara. “There is a great threat coming your way.”

  One-Eye laughed scornfully. “That’s nothing new. There are always threats.”

  “Not like this,” Renzo said. “Because right now, less than half a league behind us, is a Knight of the Fire. And he is burning everything in his path.”

/>   The mask of indifference disappeared from the three dirty faces. One-Eye drew himself back and made a hand sign meant to ward off evil.

  “That?” Renzo said, mocking his gesture. “That will not stop the knight from burning this village to the ground.”

  “You’ve brought a Knight of the Fire down on us?” one of the other men cried.

  Renzo shook his head. “Don’t be ridiculous. We aren’t worth his time. No,” he said with a sigh, “he’s just out for murder, I’m afraid. He very nearly roasted me, and I don’t even know these people. I’m not from the isle. I”—he waited for a dramatic beat—“am a thief.”

  Anticipating a loud rejection upon hearing the word “thief,” Khara moved her hand to her sword hilt. But Renzo had estimated his audience correctly. They were mildly impressed by “scholars” but considered a thief to be one of them, someone they could trust.

  “Now, I’ve given you good information,” Renzo said. “If you’re wise, you’ll put your boats to sea and hide your valuables.”

  One-Eye nodded. “Aye, that we shall do.”

  “And now your side of the bargain,” Renzo said.

  “I have seen islands that move,” One-Eye said. “Their location is never certain. They can be quick, and when they move, they can keep at it for days without stop, traveling fifty leagues in a week’s time.”

  Renzo grinned. “But . . .”

  “But,” One-Eye continued reluctantly, “I was fishing up near Rebit’s Sound yesterday. By land it’s two, three leagues north, then a short distance down a peninsula to a spot called Landfail. There you should be able to see one of the islands.”

  I could remain patient no longer. “Have you seen any of my kind?”

  One-Eye gaped at me, surprised to hear me speak. He pointed to Dog. “Does that one talk, too?”

  “No,” I said impatiently. “He’s a dog.”

  “Then what are—” One-Eye shook his head. “Oh, never mind. The answer to your question is no, I’ve seen no dogs that speak and walk erect.” Seeing my despair, he added, “Of course, we don’t approach the islands.”