by L. S. Kyles
Chapter 24
Brine pushed his hand through the next curtain of tongues and felt nothing but air. He stood there for a moment, groping at the darkness and moving his hand back and forth, but his fingers continued to meet only the night.
Another clearing, he thought, experiencing only a minor pang of dread as he leaned forward and chased his arm through the thicket. As much as he hated the feel of the tendrils on his face and neck, he had learned to hate the clearings even more. They simply were not safe.
Brine had realized this after cutting through the fifth or sixth opening in the lesser boles. By that time, he had lost his initial head of steam and was no longer running. His pace was little more than a brisk walk and he had ample time to reflect upon the precarious nature of the clearings; Namely, the complete lack of cover.
In the pitch blackness of the clearings, there weren’t any tongues or boles or lesser boles to hide his movements. There was only him and his elderly companion stumbling through the gloom, his hands thrust out before him, his heart banging in his chest.
Brine stilled his movement in the tongues and listened to the sound of a human voice drifting through the boles. It was so faint, so diffuse with space, that it sounded like a whisper, and had Brine not heard the sound up close (on several occasions and from several different throats), he might have thought it was a whisper.
The faraway sound faded to silence, then resumed in a stutter, the unmistakable sound of someone moaning in pain.
See, he told himself, feeling better about his chances. He’s still out there. Still alive.
As grisly as the screams were (and they were grisly, truly blood-curdling), they did not register in Brine’s ears on an emotional level. They were audible stimuli to be processed and interpreted and ultimately used. In this instance, they were the used to measure time, the equivalent of a human hourglass hissing in the distance.
He listened a moment more—there were no prizes for being first, especially if the bole-beast had a friend—and pushed his head through the last of the tendrils. The limp warm curtain slumped to either side of his cheeks and ears and his eyes bulged at what they saw.
The empty space on the other side of the curtain was much larger than any he’d encountered, much, much larger. In fact, by definition alone, the area beyond the tongues could not be considered a clearing. A clearing implied that flora was the norm and that an absence of flora was occurring, but there wasn’t any flora beyond the tongues, not this time.
Brine panned his head from one side to the other and gaped at the emptiness before him. It stretched as far into the distance as his eyes could see, and knowing his blasted eyes, it actually reached much farther than that, nothing but flat black sands and wide black skies.
Cautiously, not wanting to jinx this provision from God (what else could this be?), Brine lifted his gaze to the sheet of silky midnight and blinked at the twinkling stars.
I can see, he thought. I can actually see.
He might have smiled at this, but his face was still numb with shock. Instead, he stood gawking like a fool and wondering when it was he had been so pleased to see one of his Maker’s creations.
He supposed there could have been such a time, way back when he was a child and discovering the wonders of the constellations for the first time, or maybe when he’d first arrived at Valley Rock and he and Miriana used to sneak into the cool of the desert with their warm smiles and trusting hearts…but he doubted it.
He began to wriggle against the tendrils, eager to push his way through to the safety beyond, and then stopped. He was struck suddenly by a single paralyzing thought: Where exactly had this virtual oasis come from?
He remembered clearly the stories Reets had told, the blood-drenched tales about trackers and hunters dragging their naked forms from boles of the Harriun. He remembered, as well, the maps from the royal library. Neither of these made reference to a vast clearing in the middle of the wilderness.
He frowned at the place and gradually drew back. Perhaps the boles that once grew here had withered and died, but more than likely the human accounts of the region were simply in error.
Seeing how no cartographer had ever set foot in the Harriun—scribing their impressions of the wilderness from their journey along its rim—the interior details would have come from the handful of survivors who’d crawled their way free, and if they had never made it this far…
They would have never seen!
This thought was, quite possibly, the most enlightening and depressing that Brine had ever experienced. He (Brine the Book-Smart, A.K.A. Brine the Learned) was now standing somewhere that no other living human had ever stood.
He cast another look around the smooth and flat of the desolate sands, his puzzled frown becoming a grimace. All of a sudden, he wanted to find the Lathians.
He began to wriggle through the tongues once more and again came to a breathless stop, another nerve-wracking thought hammering at his brain: What if the Lathians weren’t up here? What if they had veered east or west as Brine and Godfry ran due north? What if they’d been killed?
Brine shrank back inside the tongues. He and Godfry had lost track of the mercenaries a league or so back. He had no reason to believe they were up here now. He hadn’t been able to hear them over the pummeling of the tongues against his head and he wasn’t able to see them through the gathering gloom of nightfall. He had run, and run hard, and he had not spared a lot of time worrying about their guides.
Until now.
He glanced in the direction of his sandals and wondered if he should search the ground for boot-prints in the sand. Back when the screaming and running began, that idea had never occurred to him. That idea had been swallowed whole by the raw panic that gripped his body.
If I did that now, he wondered, thinking back to his sightless trek through the Harriun, I wouldn’t be able to see anything. And even if I could, he added, I’d have to backtrack to where we’d split from the main group.
He half-turned and pretended to look behind him to the south. Was he really going to march back into the lightless terrain of the creature he had fled?
He turned back to the mini-desert and decided he was not. Whatever awaited him up ahead, it could be no worse than the nightmare he’d left behind. But just to be sure, he ran his eyes along the sands one more time.
Before him, the bole line on his right, slightly darker than the twinkling skyline, ran in a straight line as far as his ruined eyes could see. The rim on his left, however, bowed up to the north like the edge of a great black lake. He followed the bole-line for a time, realized it was doing him no good, and shifted his eyes to the center of the desert. It was there he made his find.
The thing in the middle of the sand looked like an enormous upside-down spike, the flat of the thing resting on the horizon, the tip of the thing rising to poke the sky. Brine guessed there were details to the landmark, but he could not see them. To him, it was just an inverted cone of darkness silhouetted against the stars.
He scrunched up his face at the base of the spire (it sort of looked like a spire, like those atop the towers of Castle Arn) and searched the surrounding sands for the rest of his party.
He didn’t see anyone to either side, no tiny black specks outlined by the lighter darkness of the sky, but that didn’t mean they weren’t there. If he gave up on finding something every time his eyes told him it wasn’t there, he’d never get anywhere in life.
They’re there, he told himself. They’re there. I just need to get closer.
He began to wriggle through the tongues for a third and final time and was aware of a tingling along his spine. He ignored the sensation and chalked it up to a battle of wills between two sections of his brain: His forebrain driving him to the pinnacle in the distance and his hind brain reminding him that he’d be an easy target once he left the boles.
Endeavoring to assist the forebrain, Brine told his hind brain that the real reason for his survival had
nothing to do with cover and everything to do with Owndiah.
It was an outright miracle that Brine and Godfry had not been taken. They were, no doubt about it, the slowest members of the Leresh Company, maybe the slowest members of the human race. He could remember sprinting through the tongues and lesser boles (Godfry’s sleeve clutched tightly in hand) and thinking, We’re next! We’re next! It’s going to take us next!
By all accounts, they should have been. The monster had been snatching men ever since the flight began, streaking out of the boles to either side, slamming into them like a blob of black tar—Brine still hadn’t managed to glean any physical details other than shape—and then carrying them up the trunks.
As startling as the process was, Brine always felt a selfish sense of relief each time it was over. He, like the rest of the fleeing men, had picked up on the creature’s pattern: A man was plucked from the herd and dragged into the canopy, that man screamed bloody-murder for a time and went still, the pattern began anew.
Brine didn’t know if the bole-beast was skinning them alive or chewing off their hands, but it didn’t really matter. All that mattered was the squealing. So long as there was squealing, he and Godfry were safe.
Brine made another involuntary pause and waited until he could hear the distant, airy shrieks of the latest victim. They were still there—still grating on his nerves like an onion grater on the backs of his hands—so he drew a deep breath and pushed ahead.
On the other side, he made another quick look to the spire for meandering black specks, then shoved his arm back through the tongues. He felt around for a time, padding his way from tentacle to trunk and back again, then finally met with a swell of crinkly facial hair. He moved his hand to the left of the beard and grabbed the fabric of Godfry’s robes.
He gave the fabric a yank and Godfry emerged from the flora, straightening his robes and brushing his beard against his chest.
Brine craned his head in the direction of the screams and tried to determine how much vitality the screamer had. It was difficult to say at this distance, but he didn’t think the man would last until they reached the pinnacle to the north.
“Come on,” he whispered, turning to the flat and sandy landscape. “We have to hurry.”
Taking no notice of the admonition (or simply not hearing it), Godfry lifted his bushy head and panned it very slowly from one side of the moon-bathed sands to the other. Even in the darkness, Brine could see his eyes swelling with delight.
“Oh, thank goodness,” the old man said, his tone almost reverent. “I couldn’t have done with much more of that.” He raised his walking stick and scratched it against his chin.
Brine grabbed him by the sleeve and began leading him across the miniature desert. “We’re not out of the Harriun,” he whispered.
Behind him, stumbling along at the end of his aching fingers, Godfry said, “What’s that, now?”
“The Dead Lands are a three days walk through the Harriun,” Brine said, quoting some statistic he’d once read. No one had ever traveled through the Harriun, but plenty had traveled around it. Most of these adventurers had been titans, but their journals were reliable. “I don’t know what this is,” he continued, “but it isn’t the Dead Lands.”
Godfry staggered on for a time—Brine could practically hear the wrinkles on his face scrunching as he processed—then said, “Not the Dead Lands, you say?”
Brine studied the flat of the horizon on either side of the needle-like structure. He still didn’t see any dots milling about the thing, or even the orange flare of a campfire, but he knew the Lathians had to be there.
“No,” he said, his voice flat as he spoke. “This is not the Dead Lands.” His pace slowed as he thought he spied a flicker of movement to the left of the spire, then picked back up as the flicker refused to return. “I think it’s a provision.”
Godfry considered this, then said, “So more walking?”
A little irritated that his teacher had not agreed with his provision theory, or even seemed the least bit interested in it, Brine said, “Yes,” and this time without a whisper.
Godfry said nothing for a time, his crunching footfalls across the sand the only sounds he made, though his very aura radiated disappointment and gloom.
“What about that tower?” he asked. “Could we stop there for a lie down?”
Brine brought his querulous gaze to the thin triangle in the distance. He opened his mouth to speak, to tell the old man that they were indeed traveling to the north and that a lie down was a distinct possibility, then changed his mind at the last moment and said, “It’s not a tower.”
Godfry made a despairing throat noise, his respiration turning ragged. “What is it, do you think?”
Brine paused in his search for the Lathians he could not see and gave the pinnacle another curt appraisal. He was still too achy and annoyed to care about the structure, but at the same time, the closer he came to the anomaly, the more he felt a glimmer of awe trying to work its way through those uglier sensations.
What is it, indeed? he thought.
At first glance, he had thought it to be a mountain of sorts, a spear of basalt tearing free of the sands and thrusting at the night. Now, he was not so sure. Now, he thought it looked strikingly similar to the tapered steeples of a pagan temple, those he had seen in the deserts to the south. There was something manmade about the thing, something about it that just screamed, Hewn from stone!
“Looks like a spur to me,” he said, sounding uncertain. “A rock spur, perhaps.”
“Rock spur, you say?”
“Perhaps,” Brine muttered, feeling an unexplained chill in his bowels, the same kind he felt when staring at vacant buildings and seeing movement in the windows. He lowered his eyes from the structure and focused on the nearly imperceptible sands beneath his feet.
“Not a tower,” Godfry said, his words lacking inflection, his tone sounding perplexed. “If it’s not a tower…,” he trailed off and panted heavily at the night, “…what do you suppose is moving around the bottom?”
Brine jerked his head up and stared at the base of the spur.
“…do you…do see them, Sam’s boy?” Godfry paused to suck wind. “…around the bottom there…?”
Brine did see them, scurrying black dot appearing momentarily on the horizon, then disappearing as you would expect them to, disappearing in the way that things do when they move below the softer dark of the skyline or behind the concealing black of the pinnacle.
Despite the haggard sounds of respiration he heard coming from behind, Brine began to trot towards the movement, his lips mumbling, “Oh, please, please, please…”
As it turned out, the miniscule silhouettes were the missing Lathians. Brine could hear them cursing each other in the distance and, every now and then, he could smell the stink of vine-spit in the sand.
Brine might have been happier about this, but it also turned out that the sprawl of sand was much larger than first perceived. Perhaps it was the darkness skewing his perspective or perhaps it was the thudding of his heart drawing blood from his brain, but the area appeared much greater from the middle looking out than it did from the rim looking in.
Thankfully, the Lathians didn’t appear to be going anywhere. They were milling around the spur, but not away from it, scouring its base and climbing it in places, pointing here and there along the rocks, engaging in heated conversations with their colleagues.
Brine was not privy to much of these conversations, not with his own gasps filling his ears, but from what he could hear of the shouted phrases it sounded as though the Lathians were blaming one another for not finding the hidden quarry. This he gathered from all the shouting and shoving and cursing of one’s mother.
Brine continued to run, but he was no longer confident that joining the mercenaries was his best move. There was quite a bit of animosity being exchanged between them.
He counted the growing specks, now more figures th
an specks, and it occurred to him that they were not only searching for something, but holding down a perimeter. They were sweeping up the side of the spur and around the back, but never moving too far into the desert.
Brine’s blurry gaze began drifting to the east and to the west, the icy centipede on his spine beginning to wriggle anew. What did the Lathians know about this place that he did not? Better yet, what had they seen in these sands to make them cling so closely to the spur?
His thoughts rushed back the tales from youth and he decided that whatever it was couldn’t be good, and since he and Godfry were armed with a wooden flute and paper Wogol, any interaction they had with the thing was sure to be brief and unpleasant.
Ahead of him, from various parts of the towering spire, the fighting men of Lathia ceased their petty quarrels and began screaming at the night.
“South!” they cried. “South side! Somethin’s comin’ on the south!”
Brine tried to shout back, tried telling them that it was only him and his elderly teacher and that they would be no trouble at all now that they were both on their last leg, but his lungs refused the command, his mouth a-gape and his eyes leaking tears.
“Hold,” someone cried. “Hold up.”
Someone else, someone on the right side of the spire, cried out, “It’s the Jashians.”
That’s right, he thought, forcing one foot in front of the other. That’s right. It’s just the Jashians. No need to kill them.
Brine watched the lumpy masses on either side of the spire slowing their blistering sprint. Now, that the aberration had been identified as the annoying Jashians, and not a pernicious organism, it was back to ignoring them again.
Only that didn’t happen this.
As some of the men returned to the spur, Brine saw a few were still coming towards him.