She flexed her wings in suggestion, but he shook his head. “I don’t want to tax you unnecessarily. We might need your wings if it comes to a fight or escape—and we don’t know that we’d see anything more from the air than more of this anyway. Can you keep circling?”
Obligingly she paced a slow circle while he focused his eyes, searching for any kind of detail. “Do you see anything besides this black flat and violet sky?”
She shook her eagle’s head. Then cocked it, stilling as if listening to something.
“Yeah, I hear it too.” Straining his ears—wishing his hearing was as keen as his vision or, even nicer, sharp as a shapeshifter’s—he closed his eyes to concentrate on hearing and tried to identify the sound. A lonely rising note. A wolf’s howl. “Rhyian.”
Zeph dipped her beak in confirmation, taking a few steps in that direction.
“Wait,” Jak said. “We need to mark this spot somehow, so we can find the rift again.” But how? A screeching sound caught his attention, and he looked down to see Zeph scratching an arrow into the shining stone surface with her claws, pointed at the rift. “Smart,” he agreed. “Let’s go.”
Zeph bounded into a run.
Riding a lion turned out to be nothing like riding a horse. Jak did his best to move with her instead of fighting the undulating series of leaps, lying as low over her outstretched neck and under her tightly folded wings as he could to cut wind resistance. Leaning to one side, he peered around the side of her neck, scanning the horizon. Still nothing.
Abruptly, the bottom fell out. Zeph screeched in surprise, matching his startled yelp, and her wings snapped out, pumping to change their plummeting fall to a glide. When Jak managed to swallow his gorge again—maybe that massive meal hadn’t been such a great idea—he patted Zeph’s shoulder, the powerful muscles bunching rhythmically as she found steady flight.
“My hero,” he told her, beyond glad he’d been strapped to the harness or he’d have been a goner. “That was an amazing save.”
She rumbled deep in her chest, something between a growl and a purr, a response he could absolutely sympathize with. Glancing up, he took in the parallel straight edges that defined the steep, vertical-sided canyon they’d fallen into, a stripe of empty violet sky beyond. Then, moving carefully, he peered down. The defile was deep and narrow, so much so that the walls appeared to meet at some infinite point of inky blackness that could be the bottom. “Well, this is charming. Do you hear Rhy anymore?”
She shook her head slightly.
“I vote we go back up, then, try to listen for him again. If that howl wasn’t a lure to lead us into this trap,” he added bleakly. Zeph began flying along the course of the defile, her wide wingspan very nearly brushing either side, gradually accelerating and using the lift to gain altitude. She’d been practicing her techniques while scouting and really had gotten impressively good at it. Jak palmed a dagger, just in case, as they reached the surface again. Yes, the riding harness was nice for keeping him from falling off, but mostly he’d wanted to have both hands free.
Nothing awaited them, however, and he sheathed the blade as Zeph landed on the featureless black plain, folding her wings with a relieved huff of air. “Need me to get off so you can rest?” he asked, but she shook her head, canting it in an attitude of listening.
Jak couldn’t hear anything, but waited quietly for her. Finally she clacked her beak in annoyance. “Same,” he replied. “I say we go back to the rift.” She swiveled her head backward to stare at him in patent astonishment. “Working on the theory that the howling was a deliberate distraction,” he told her, “to draw us away from that place.” Glancing in that direction, though he knew it was right there, his eyes still couldn’t pick out the sharp borders of the defile. The black on black blended seamlessly, and he couldn’t fault Zeph for falling into it. He’d have done the same—and he would have plummeted to his death.
Or would be still falling, if the thing had no bottom. Horrifying thought.
Zeph pointed her beak at the sky, then clacked it at the defile, then up again. No, he didn’t like that idea much at all. “You want to use that as a jumping-off point and go up to look around from on high?” he guessed, resigned when she nodded. “All right, if you’re feeling up to it.”
It was worse this time, knowing what was coming. Jak had never minded heights, having been climbing rigging pretty much as soon as he learned to walk. He’d loved hanging out in the crow’s nest, the sense of being on top of the world, alone amidst the perfect circle of sea and sky.
Falling from heights turned out to be decidedly different. Wings spread, Zeph galloped for the edge, and Jak clenched his teeth so he wouldn’t scream unmanfully again. They dropped—but not nearly so far, and she controlled the fall, quickly ascending again.
All the same, Jak did not look down at that infinite vanishing point.
Zeph circled as she pumped higher, and he set himself to scanning the landscape in a standard scouting pattern, essentially running transects with his gaze. From this height, he could pick out the line of the defile more easily. And, he noted grimly, the many more exactly like it. They ran in perfectly straight lines, parallel and perpendicular, forming a massive grid.
“This is so not natural,” he mused, and Zeph clacked in unhappy agreement. Why would something create such a thing? The perfection of the pattern implied an intelligence at work—probably their old friend popping up again—but what could the purpose be? It reminded him of a board for playing a strategy game. Which made them the game pieces, pawns ignorant of the rules. Not a comforting insight.
Off to right, he saw something flutter. “There!” He pointed, and Zeph swiveled to follow the line of his arm. She saw it too, pivoting on wingtip to fly rapidly in that direction.
As they drew near, he could make out a banner of sorts, made of several shirts tied together, flapping as three people held onto one end, signaling them. They looked like regular folk from the Thirteen Kingdoms. “This isn’t the square we landed on, right?”
Zeph shook her head and pointed a paw off to the front and side. Yeah, that was where he thought it was, too. Then, if these were the people from the inn, how did they get onto this square? Because no way could they have crossed those defiles. Unless he was missing something. And he really hated feeling like he was missing something.
Several of them screamed at the sight of Zeph, dropping the banner and huddling together. Zeph landed well away from them as a woman pushed several children behind her and brandished a cast iron skillet. Jak hastily unbuckled himself from the harness.
“It’s all right,” he called in Common Tongue, belatedly wondering if these people were even from the same realm as him. They looked like it, but that didn’t mean anything. He held up his palms in the universal sign of peaceful intentions—he hoped it was universal, anyway—and walked slowly toward them. “We’re friends, here to help you.”
A man stepped forward, meaty fists clenched. “Begone, foul monsters!” the man yelled, face contorted with belligerence and fear. At least he screamed at them in Common Tongue.
Jak could take him out easily with a thrown dagger to the throat, but he left his blades sheathed, palms upraised. “Friends,” he repeated. “Sent by Her Majesty High Queen Ursula,” he hastily improvised, “to rescue you.”