Esme crawled backward. She pressed herself against the carved balusters of the bridge and watched Mihai. He was standing with his hands on his hips, slowly looking around. A cold wind whipped his hair into his eyes and impatiently he pushed it back. There was a look of ill-concealed horror on his face and Esme looked to see what he was seeing. The bridge they had landed on spanned the space between two tall crags of rock. Worn stone steps spiraled up and around the towers and disappeared into passages, and glassless windows revealed barren rooms inside. There were many such crags rising like stalagmites from the shadow-shrouded depths of a long ravine. They tapered up to conical spires, ridged like animal horns, and they tapered downward too as if they had grown up from the blackness below on long stone stalks, dangerously delicate.
This landscape looked as if it had been disgorged by the mountains themselves, as if it were the earth's own elemental imitation of the castles built by men. It was an otherworldly place and Esme felt a tingling of recognition at odds with her awe for its alien strangeness. "Where are we?" she asked Mihai.
He turned sharply and gave her a penetrating look. "I think you know," he said.
And she realized she did. "Tajbel," she whispered. The word formed on her lips like something she had always known.
"What's left of it," Mihai said, and Esme read shock in his eyes. He turned in a slow circle and murmured words that Esme had heard Mab speak. "Avo afritim. Bless and protect us."
Even she could sense that something was wrong here. The citadel seemed deserted. Cold wind coursed among the spires but made almost no sound. A drapery of vines claimed the bridges and chasm walls, and in many places the finely carved stone was crumbling away. One whole bridge had collapsed into the black, leaving only a few feet of stonework on either side, like walkways to nothingness. "Who lives here?" Esme asked. "Where are they all?"
Mihai didn't answer. He suddenly tensed and tilted back his head like a predator scenting the air. Then his eyes widened and he spun toward Esme, dropping to a crouch and shooting out one hand to grab her ankle and drag her to him. It was all one fluid motion, and Esme cried out, startled, and tried to twist away. But before she even knew what was happening, Mihai had hooked one arm around her waist, too tight, and hoisted her off her feet. She saw a blade glint as he drew a knife from some hidden sheath, but she hadn't even time to gasp before he leapt with animal grace up onto the narrow balustrade of the bridge, upon which he balanced with Esme still in his grasp.
She started to struggle but then a smell of rot hit her, and an arm, thick, white as fish, scab-pocked and horrifically long, swung up from beneath the bridge to pummel the stretch of railing against which, a second earlier, she had been leaning. The whole bridge trembled and the balusters shattered like icicles. Blunt, clawed fingers scrabbled through the shards, searching, searching for flesh. For Esme.
Finding nothing, the beast swung its other arm onto the bridge and hauled itself up into the light of day. Esme gasped. Its eyes bulged and glowed yellow over a flat nose, little more than slits on a nub of dead-looking flesh. Its whole squat head appeared to be no more than an anchor for the massive bones and muscles required to work its jaw. Esme watched in horrified fascination as its mouth opened huge to reveal rows of flat, worn teeth and a gullet wide enough to swallow animals whole. It bellowed and Esme heard herself shriek. Holding her, Mihai backed up along the railing, graceful as a cat, and the beast shambled after them.
"What is that?" she asked urgently.
The bridge shuddered again and Mihai swung to look behind him, spinning Esme in an arc that revealed to her a panorama of Tajbel's bridges one after the next all through the long ravine. She gasped. From beneath each bridge she saw them coming, scrambling. Up from the blackness, arm over long arm, quick and desperate, coming. They were sickly white, their skin stretched taut, cheeks and guts sunken to hollows. They were starving, Esme realized, their huge jaws gaping as if hoping someone might toss something in. Behind Mihai another had pulled itself onto the bridge and more were coming after it, crushing the fine stone balusters in their haste.
Again, frantic, she asked, "What are they?"
Mihai glanced at her, taking his attention from the beasts for just an instant to study her. His eyes were narrowed, one eyebrow raised in a question. Only after he turned away again did he say, under his breath, "I don't know. She would never tell."
"She -- ?" Esme started to say, but she lost her breath when a beast lunged at them. Mihai swung his blade and severed the monster's hand from its wrist. Black blood pulsed from the stump but the beast hardly seemed to notice and kept coming.
For fourteen years the beasts had had to fend for themselves, and they had not fared well. When the cats were all gone, they'd breached the forest to hunt, but their putrid scent had chased away all prey but the sick and weak. They'd grabbed at fish in the stream; they'd resorted to cannibalism.
The scent of blood temporarily diverted the other oncoming beasts from Mihai and Esme, and they went for their wounded fellow. Beast against beast they clashed, crazed. One knocked another off the bridge and it wailed as it fell, a long, fading ululation unpunctuated by any thud or rock slide from below. The cry just faded as if the chasm had no bottom. Jaws gaped and fingers reached as the beasts came at Mihai and Esme from both sides.
More came. Too many more.
There sounded a great crack and the bridge lurched. It dropped a foot and Mihai kept his balance, but then it started to break apart beneath its load and crumble away into the abyss. Esme squeezed her eyes shut and screamed, but her voice was lost in the roar of the collapsing bridge. Behind her shut eyelids she imagined the blackness of the chasm rushing up to swallow her and she thought of Mab back in London, alone, and she knew her mother wouldn't survive losing her. She felt a terrible surge of anguish and then, at once, she realized she wasn't falling. Mihai's arm still held her so tight she could barely breathe, and she wasn't falling. She fluttered open her eyes. The bridge and the beasts were gone -- there were plenty more, to be sure, and they were still coming, but that danger seemed distant now. The bridge she had stood on had fallen away, and those beasts with it.
In Mihai's grasp, she was floating. Stunned, she looked up at him.
He was whispering fiercely and without pause. His Druj eyes looked almost white in the gloom as he stared straight ahead, whispering his magic. He and Esme drifted through the air and Esme's heart thudded in her chest, her mouth hanging slack in amazement. Beasts grunted and swung along the walls of the ravine, trying to reach them. Mihai carried Esme across the chasm on gliding steps. It was like flying.