The horse raised his head, peering. Indeed, above a jagged sawed tooth of stone, four slightly separated fingers thrust monstrously into the air. One could imagine the rest of the hand, a right hand, palm forward, thumb jutting to the north, the whole conveying the word “stop” as clearly as though it were being shouted.
“It’s only one big tower,” remarked Abasio, who had taken the halt as an opportunity to pee into the brush at the side of the road and was now rearranging his clothes. “One big one with five smaller ones at the top. No one knows if the architect intended it to look like a hand or whether it just turned out that way.”
“Unfriendly, either way,” said the horse around a succulent tuft of grass.
“Not according to what I hear,” Abasio replied, making a quick circuit of the wagon to be sure all the baskets, pots, and vats were tightly attached. Usually they hung loosely, the whole equipage jangling like a kitchen in a high wind. Coming through the king’s lands and those of Hulix, his stepson, horse and driver had chosen quiet. “The Duke of Wold is said to be a good, kind, and honorable man, though a very sad one.”
He climbed into his seat once more and they proceeded westward along a road that continued to edge upward wherever the terrain made it possible. Below them, on the right, the water-filled fjord had grown too wide for a bowshot to be of any consequence; on the left, the mountainside into which the road had been cut became steeper. By late afternoon, they rounded a final corner and moved out from among the trees onto a flat, square monolith half a mile across. Abasio leapt down to inspect the vaguely rectangular outcropping beneath them, like some monstrous gravestone. They had entered a third of the way down the eastern side of the rock. The high point was ahead, a little to their left, the southwestern corner, buried in the mountain, and from there the massive pavement sloped diagonally all the way to the northeast corner, which was marked only by a cluster of small tiled roofs, wavelets shuddering along their eaves. A good bit higher and farther west, a shabby cluster of newer buildings crouched uneasily beside a floating pier where a dilapidated ferry teetered on the wavelets, certainly empty, perhaps abandoned.
“Krakenhold,” said Abasio in some wonder. “I thought it was larger.”
“It was larger,” the horse snorted. “The larger part is now drowned. I don’t see anything on the other side.”
Abasio stared slit-eyed across the water. “That’s Ragnibar Fjord, and there used to be something called Ghost Isle on the far side. Evidently it’s drowned, too. There’s still the ferry, though, so there must be somewhere on the far side it can tie up.”
A line of ashen clouds edged across the western sky; the northern shore, if there was any, lay very low upon the waters. Abasio kicked at the black rock beneath them: basalt, virtually immune to the elements. The western edge plunged into a vertical wall, blocking any farther travel to the west. Anyone going on from here would have to go north on the ferry or south, where a narrow, topless tunnel had been cut through the jagged upper edge of the tilted slab they stood upon.
“I was told about this,” Abasio remarked, striding toward the cut, horse and wagon following. “It’s called the Stoneway. It seems to have acquired a few more stones along the way, fallen from the mountain.” He went ahead, kicking small rocks away from the wheels and protecting various items of the wagon’s paraphernalia that threatened to be brushed off by the uneven walls on either side. “The woman who first built Woldsgard had it built. Her name was Lythany. She was Huold’s daughter.”
“That would be Huold the Heroic.”
“Very probably.” Abasio stopped for a moment, looking at the tool marks on the sides of the cut, following their lines upward to the sky, considering the work involved, the years it must have taken. The shadowed, stony pipe itself would be well lit only when the sun was directly above, though it rose steeply into sunlight at the far end. Several hundred paces later they rattled across the last of the rock and emerged onto a gravel road.
“Grim in there,” said Abasio, not looking back.
“Blood in there,” replied the horse. “People died making that cut.”
“Dwarves, do you think?”
The horse shrugged and rested his chin on the man’s shoulder when Abasio came forward to assess the view. Mountains closed from either side behind them. They stood at the narrow end of a widening green valley that fell away into the distant, hazy south. With Abasio walking beside him, the horse tugged the wagon into easy, downslope movement. Several chattering streamlets trickled toward them, joining at either side of the road into brooks plunging away to the south. Before the sun had sunk much farther the right-hand stream had found a rocky culvert and ducked under the road to join the left-hand stream, which gradually became a modest and rather talkative river. The great hand they had seen earlier, somewhat less forbidding when seen from the side, was surrounded by greenery and its fingertips were identifiable as the conical roofs of five separate towers. Within another hour, as the sun dipped behind the mountains, they approached a rustling crowd of fruit trees behind a low stone wall, the tree shadows mottling the roadway before them.
“Apples,” said the horse, breathing deeply and approvingly. “I smell apples!”
Directly before them a particularly old and massive tree leaned across the wall, and Abasio pulled gently on the reins as they approached it.
“Hello,” he said to the tree. “What are you doing there?”
A brown branch uncurled itself and peered at him between two lower limbs. “Watching.”
“Not for me,” Abasio said. “I didn’t even know I was coming.”
“I was watching for what I was waiting for.” The small brown person uncoiled herself further and stepped
