The Haruchai did not answer. Nothing in his manner implied recognition—or comprehension.

The upthrust sheets were taller than Stave on Hynyn’s back; taller than any Giant. They reached for the sealed sky as if they had once stood high enough to hold back the heavens; as if eons ago they had formed an impenetrable barrier. Now the Ranyhyn stepped between them, unhindered, and paused.

The riders had reached the ridge of a round hollow like a crater or caldera, although Linden could not imagine what manner of volcanism might have created such a formation. All around the rim rose eroded sheets like weary sentinels, a ragged troop of guards too tired to stand at attention. The caldera itself was so wide that one of the Swordmainnir might not have been able to throw a stone across it. Yet the enclosed hollow or crater was not deep. Indeed, it resembled a basin rather than a pit, with shallow sides and a flat bottom.

This, apparently, was the reason that the Ranyhyn had spent the day running hard enough to burst the hearts of ordinary horses. So baffled that she had no words, Linden stared downward like a woman who had come to the end of her wits.

The bottom of the caldera was filled with piled bones.

They were old—God, they were old! Thousands of them, tens of thousands, lay there as though they had been simply tossed aside; as though the crater were a midden in which every other form of refuse had fallen to dust. Or perhaps Lord Foul’s armies had never bothered to burn or bury their dead. Seasons of sun and weather beyond counting had scalded the bones to an utter whiteness. Under a brighter sky, they would have been dazzling.

Trying to understand, Linden studied them. Her first thought was that they were human; but they were not. She had never seen their like before. Some had curves or condyles that seemed unnatural. Some were far too long or broad to belong to Giants. Some looked like the ribs of animals much larger than Ranyhyn. Among them, there were too many crooks and bends, too many bones that resembled flames, too many wide sheets that might have been the shoulder-blades of hills or the sides of cromlechs.

They could not be what the Ranyhyn had sought in such haste. They could not. They were not merely unimaginably old: they were meaningless. Perhaps this was the graveyard of some species that had gathered together for comfort while it fell into extinction. Or perhaps Lord Foul, for some incomprehensible reason, had discarded his failed or slain creations here. In either case, these bones had no conceivable purpose now. Whatever they had once been, they had become nothing more than the residue of vast time. They might well be as ancient as the gutrock of the Lost Deep, but they were just bones; dismembered skeletons. They remembered only death.