The horses’ shod feet struck the top of the buried lava rube like drumsticks striking a gong. Most often the sound was muted, but occasionally, as they crossed a particularly reverberant space, the earth shivered around them with deep bell sounds, an enormous tolling, as though for some creature long dying or just dead. Bane was not normally fanciful, but even he was struck with the similarity of the sound to that of the bells of the Panhagion, which tolled away the old year at the festival of the Tipping.
None of them were sorry when the stony way ended. They turned to the side for a brief time and picked up another stone-floored path, almost like a road, this one completely muffled so that the hooves made no more sound than on any paved surface. Bane, staring at his surroundings, such of them as he could see in the moonlight, thought the lava trail was extremely roadlike. The dirt at either side of it was pushed up, like a curb, as though something huge and wide had moved this way, displacing the earth as it went. Several places along this track Bane found large, oval pieces of something, like enormous fingernails.
They rode for some hours, dismounting as needed to relieve themselves and once to eat food from the saddlebags and drink from the flasks. When dawn came, Ashes turned aside from the trail he’d been following, hobbled the horses and let them browse while he slept, leaving it to Bane and Dyre whether they followed his example or not.
The boys were unusually quiet, somewhat awed by the silence of the forest. House Genevois had always been clattery with boys, and they had spent their childhood on the farm where there was constant cackling of poultry, the low or bleat of livestock, the chatter of people. Here was no sound at all. The night had been windless. They had crossed no streams. No bird had cried, no small beast called, no large beast threatened. Sleep eluded them, and they dropped into uncomfortable slumber only moments, so it seemed, before Ashes roused them again.
When they remounted, the silence was still unbroken, and even Ashes looked around himself with a certain wariness.
“Is it always this still?” asked Bane, in a throaty whisper.
Ashes shook his head, his eyes swiveling from point to point. “No. Usually there’s animals making noises. I don’t like this quiet. It could mean Joggiwagga about.”
“What?” grunted Dyre. “What’s Joggi whatsit?”
“Very big and nervous and dangerous,” murmured Ashes.
“Did Joggy whatsit clear the road along here?” Bane asked. “Something big came along these tops. The dirt’s all pushed back. And there’s funny pieces of stuff.”
Ashes swallowed, his nostrils pushed together, then said, “No. That wasn’t Joggiwagga. Those things are scales, and they came off another … another thing entirely.”
“Something big?”
“Big, yes.”
“Never seen any really big wild thing,” opined Dyre.
His father retorted, “You boys favored little things, didn’t you? Well, the one that made this trail is a lot bigger than the little critters you hunted for fun while you were at Dutter’s.”
“How’d you know?” asked Bane, astonished. “Never told you!”
“You don’t need to tell me anything, boy. I know everything there is to know about you from before you was planted to the breath you just took. I know all about your hunting trips.”
“Ol’ Dutter, he said even if we killed something, he wouldn’t let us keep any hides.”
“No. That furry thing you hunted—there was lots of them when we first landed, and we hunted ‘em for fur, but the Timmys, they won’t let you keep any part of an animal here. Well, except for the littlest ones, birds and fish and mousy things. The only way to keep hides from anything bigger than that is put ‘em in a safe, put the safe in a metal-lined room, then send them off world as soon as maybe, the way we used to. Dutter knew that. He wanted no trouble with Timmys.”
“Like to see the Timmy could take something from me,” muttered Bane. “Like to see ‘em try.”
Ashes didn’t reply. They had come to the end of the network of level lava trails they’d been following for hours and were now climbing onto the flanks of the ancient calderas that stretched in an unbroken range stretching south from the shore of the Jellied Sea, and perhaps beneath it, for all anyone knew. The day wore itself out in ascents and descents, in long traverses across sliding scree, ending at evening on a shadowed ledge that darkened as the sun set.