by Angus Watson
You’re one of the squad sent by Berlaze.
The creature’s face twisted in satisfying puzzlement.
Yes. Berlaze sent us to find out what was happening at The Meadows and to stop it.
What did you find?
Why should I tell you?
Because I saved your life.
The squatch grunted.
Two of us were burned to death by spinning columns of fire that travelled faster than we can run. More were killed by creatures that I’d never before seen nor heard of. There were flying, screaming beasts, scorpions the size of hills that sprayed geysers of venom from their tails and crushed buffalo with their claws, and more–each more bizarre and dangerous than the next.
The squatch loosed the final rope and tossed it aside.
Five of us saw the pyramid in the centre of The Meadows. It is where the evil comes from. We waited for dark and tried to approach, but it is encircled by monsters for miles around. All my fellows were killed. I lost my arm to the claws of one of the smaller creatures and fled. I have been running east ever since, avoiding humans who would kill me. The humans who remain in the west are as aggressive as the monsters, although rather easier to kill. These ones who would have murdered me waited like cowards until I was asleep, then trapped me.
Paloma picked up one of the discarded ropes. It was good and would come in handy so she began coiling it, walking towards the squatch.
You’re lucky I happened along, she thought.
Yes, I am. But are you?
She stopped and looked at the sitting squatch. That was definitely a smile, and not a nice one. She tensed to run but her head was filled with the most dreadful pain.
She dropped to her knees as the squatch stood.
He raised his arm, claws out.
“No!” shouted Freydis from across the river, “she saved you!”
The only good human, thought the squatch, is a dead human.
He pulled his arm back to strike. There was a soft zip followed by a thwunk as an arrow pierced his eye. He crumpled.
Paloma closed her eyes. The pain in her mind was hateful, but it was ebbing. She swayed and shook her hands as if she was shaking water from them. It seemed to help.
She opened her eyes to see Sitsi pulling her arrow from the squatch’s eye. The archer glanced at her, then returned to her task.
“I’m sorry,” said Paloma.
“I’m disappointed,” said Sitsi. “You promised—”
There was a rumbling and the ground began to shake. Paloma ran back to the river intending to return to Freydis, but saw Keef halfway across the Red River in his canoe with Freydis kneeling up in the prow. Keef was paddling to stay in the centre of the channel, which was as good a place as any during an earthquake.
The rumbling and shaking stopped, but they heard the long, loud roar of a rockslide further south and all around them smaller stones were still skittering down slopes.
Sitsi appeared at Paloma’s shoulder. “Shall we go back to our canyon?” she asked.
Chapter 21
Whitecap
Sofi Tornado flew high over dark green forests and light green clearings. The land looked like the jungles of her youth, but the air was fresher, hotter and dryer, tinged with a floral scent rather than reeking of decay. It felt like she’d been flying high above the land all her life, yet she knew that Moolba had murdered her only moments before.
She stretched her arms to slice satisfyingly through the whooshing air, then righted her course. A glance left and right confirmed what she’d known. Her arms were wings.
She felt the familiar desire to hurt and kill. The end of her long, brown wings ended in splayed, individual feathers. So she’d died and returned to life as a whitecap eagle. She could have been a slug or a rabbit or a toad, so eagle was more than acceptable. Hard to beat, in fact.
It was odd that she’d joined the eagle mid-life, though. Souls were meant to enter bodies at birth.
Even more at odds with the Calnian conception of afterlife was that she could remember Moolba killing her, and everything before that, as if she’d gone to sleep and woken as an eagle. Animals were not meant to remember their previous human lives. It was clear that they didn’t, otherwise everybody would be hassled by animals the whole time. Sofi pictured a racoon scrabbling up to a hut window and barking I’m your mum.
Her thoughts were interrupted by voices far, far below. Her alchemically enhanced hearing still worked, then. Or maybe eagles had great ears too.
“We shouldn’t be doing this. We’ll get caught,” said the first voice. His whining tone reminded her of Finnbogi the Boggy when they’d first met him.
“Can you stop ruining the mood?” said a more confident sounding man. “This is an adventure. Try to be more of an adventurer.”
“It’s all right for you, you’re used to being in danger,” replied the whinger.
“That’s the point! We’re not in danger. We’re having an adventure. Look at it that way and you’ll start enjoying yourself. And you’ll be much less of a drag to others. And we’re not in danger, anyway. Even if we were, you’re not going to help by complaining the whole time. All that’s going to do is ruin my fine mood. So stop, please.”
“Nobody’s allowed in The Meadows!”
“Exactly! So who’s going to catch us?”
“Not who. What.”
“You mean the Warlock Queen?”
“Don’t say her name!”
“She has been dead for centuries.”
“Spirits don’t die.”
“We’ve got this far, haven’t we?”
“She’s luring us in.”
“Oh, for the love of all that’s good, I wish I hadn’t brought you.”
“I’ll wait here then.”
The adventurer sighed. “I’m sorry. It is a bit scary perhaps. But do try to buck up. I need your help and you really will be a lot happier if you try to enjoy it. And so will I.”
“Well, try being nicer.”
“Oh, by my uncle’s shiny helmet… I’ll be nice if you stop whining. Deal?”
“But we’re in terrible danger!”
“We are not. Let’s just climb in silence, okay?”
“Okay.”
Sofi flicked the end of her wings and swooped. Swooping was good. Light flickered off the back of a fish in a pool a long way below. She felt an urge to dive and kill it but resisted. So she still had her hearing, and now she had eyesight like Sitsi Kestrel, which made some sense for an eagle. But was she actually dead? She didn’t think so any more. She was pretty certain she knew what was going on, and she was happy to go along with it.
She glided over a broad clearing busy with enormous, long-horned buffalo and other oversized and strangely horned grazers.
Up ahead, protruding from the lush land and rapidly growing bigger, there was a smooth-sided, black pyramid. Sofi’s suspicions were confirmed. She was flying over The Meadows, towards The Pyramid, tomb of the Warlock Queen. She’d thought that The Meadows was an ironic name, or at least an exaggeration for a patch of green next to an oasis in the desert. It seemed, if anything, “The Meadows” was underplaying it. “The Jungles” would have been more apt.
Two men were climbing the sides of The Pyramid. One was bulky and shaggy maned, wearing tattered leathers. The other had short hair and was dressed in freshly laundered cotton.
The men disappeared into an entrance three-quarters of the way up the black, new-made mountain.
I’ll follow them in, Sofi thought, diving down. Fifty paces off she found herself backing her wings. She didn’t want to go inside The Pyramid. She felt very strongly about it. It was not a good place.
No matter, she thought. I’ll wait.
She returned to the pool with the fish, caught it and ate it, then amused herself by diving at the enormous mammals and making them stampede.
“I told you it was dangerous,” she eventually heard.
She flew up to see the two men emerge from The Pyram
id, carrying a wooden box.
“Yeah, sorry. It was a bit tougher than I thought,” said the shaggy haired one. He’d lost his leather shirt and was bleeding from several cuts.
His companion was more badly injured. He was limping and his white cotton shirt and trousers were stained almost completely red.
“We’ll never make it to Wormsland!” cried Short Hair. “The Warlock Queen will—”
“We have to. Buck up. Once we get the coffin there and unleash its magic, nobody will be able to hurt us.”
“She’s coming. She’ll catch us and—”
“Will you please try to look on the bright side for once?” asked Shaggy Hair as they set off carefully down The Pyramid’s side, carrying the coffin between them. “The coffin’s lighter than we thought it would be. And we’re alive.”
“Bright side!” wailed Short Hair. “Bright side! Do you know how much blood I’ve lost?”
“No.”
“Well, neither do I. But it’s a lot! I could die any moment and the Warlock Queen—”
“Will you shut up about the Warlock Queen? Those were ancient traps that attacked us in there, nothing more. If the Warlock Queen was up and active and could have stopped us, she would have done way back, when we walked into The Meadows. She died hundreds of years ago. She has no power now.”
“But her dead child does?”
“You are such a downer. We need to get the coffin to Wormsland and combine the magic—”
“So you say but how do you know if—?”
He was interrupted by a low rumble.
The two men stopped, looked all around and then at each other. They were halfway down The Pyramid.
It was shaking.
Shaggy Hair hefted the coffin onto one shoulder and the two of them sprinted headlong down the steep side. Short Hair tripped almost immediately and bounced the rest of the way down in a flailing, limb-snapping tumble. Shaggy Hair somehow kept his feet.
Short Hair crumped to earth and lay in a dead looking pile. Shaggy slowed his run, looked back at his probably dead companion, then ran off westward into the trees, coffin on his shoulder.
The great black pyramid continued to rumble. For a while Shaggy was hidden by trees, but soon he came out into a clearing, now jogging. The giant grazers scattered as he pounded between them. At the end of the clearing he slowed to a walk, turning to see if he was being pursued. The Pyramid had calmed and nobody was following.
It took him several hours to reach the edge of The Meadows, scale a shoulder between two mountains and head eastward into the arid desert that surrounded the lush jungle.
Sofi, flying high above, had seen and heard what she needed. Shaggy had stolen the dead Warlock Queen’s child and taken it to Wormsland. So, annoyingly, Olaf Worldfinder had been right about a child being involved. Surely their quest was now to retrieve the child and take him home?
She flew around wondering why Moolba had strangled her, and how she was going to get back.
She tried spooking the large herbivores again, but the fun had gone out of it. Now she knew what it was, she wanted to return to her human body and get on with the quest.
When Shaggy and the coffin were a speck on the horizon and Sofi was contemplating catching another fish just for something to do, The Pyramid began to rumble again, this time much more loudly. The dreadful sound swelled from a rumbling to a scream. She flew back to investigate.
She was perhaps a mile away when the world to the west suddenly blazed blinding white. She recovered her eyesight in time to see the jungle and grasslands evaporating in a wall of shimmering light that was heading towards her at tremendous speed. She backed her wings.
Too late.
A blast of searing heat struck her and sent her tumbling. She fell and fell, then hit something with a shocking crunch. She’d landed on the branch of a tree. She grabbled the trunk with her talons.
She lay, breathing hard, eyes screwed shut against the heat and the agony, unable to move. She’d never known pain could be like this.
She opened an eye.
She was folded over a branch on the only tree left standing for miles around. She tried to use her wings to rearrange herself but that didn’t work, because one of them was now just a bloody shard of bone.
Somehow, knowing that increased the pain.
Travelling north to Calnia as a child, Sofi’s captors had stopped with a tribe that ate no animal flesh. They maintained that animals could feel pain, so it was wrong to hurt them. Sofi had wondered about it for a while afterwards, then reached Calnia where the point was moot. The Calnians were so keen on causing pain to humans that nobody considered giving a crap about animal suffering, but every now and then Sofi had wondered if animals did indeed feel pain.
And now she knew. She nearly passed out–she wanted to pass out–but she willed herself to remain conscious because a woman was walking towards her from The Pyramid. She had Mushroom Man features–her skin was pale, her hair blonde and her eyes blue–but she was dressed in the white cotton shirt and trousers of a desert dweller.
The Warlock Queen–it had to be her–raised her hands. Around her, the earth and felled trees rolled and shifted, then erupted and coalesced into twisted creatures. Most fell back to the ground, flailing. Some crawled on. A six-legged, hairless dog leaking green goo from every orifice, ran ahead westward, past Sofi’s tree and on. Presumably, it was pursuing Shaggy. It didn’t get far before it, too, collapsed.
The Warlock Queen reached Sofi’s tree and looked up. The mad pain in those eyes made Sofi forget her own for a moment. She saw a vision of a boy. A little boy, maybe six years old, with tousled brown hair and bright blue eyes like his mother’s. The Warlock Queen had been woken when the men had taken him and she yearned to have him back. More than that. She wanted him alive again. For that to happen, she would need her child’s corpse and a live boy. A live boy who looked just like hers, six years old with wavy brown hair and bright blue eyes.
Finally, Sofi understood why Ottar the Moaner was vital. First, they had to retrieve the coffin. Then they had to take it, with Ottar, to the tomb of the Warlock Queen, where she would take Ottar’s body for the soul of her dead son. Did Yoki Choppa know? Did Ottar himself know that he was going west of west to die?
Part Two
Desert
Chapter 1
Lizard Netting
Sofi woke with a shout.
Moolba was sitting on the cot, watching her. It was early morning. She touched her neck. The chief’s daughter stood. Sofi readied herself.
“Drink this,” said Moolba. She held out a cup.
Sofi didn’t take it. “What happened?” she asked.
“The vision quest drugs were in the stew. You fell unconscious soon after finishing it, then murmured for the rest of the day and into the night. You shouted at first light. You paled and your pulse weakened so much I was about to intervene, but then it strengthened. You’ve been muttering and jerking about ever since.”
“I see.”
“What did you find?”
“I have to get back to the others.” Sofi stood. The room swayed.
“They’re fine,” said Moolba. “You need to sleep. Everybody sleeps after a vision quest. And you should drink.”
Sofi took the proffered cup and sniffed it. It smelled like water. She downed it.
“Take my bed,” said Moolba, pointing to the cot. “I’ll find somewhere else. I’ve been awake all night watching you.” She headed for the window that served as a door, then turned. “Unless…?”
Moolba looked at the cot, then at Sofi.
Sofi felt the corner of her mouth rise in half a smile.
The smaller woman walked back and looked up at the captain of the Owsla. Her sad eyes sparkled and her lips were plump.
Oh, why not, thought Sofi.
Sassa Lipchewer was playing a game of catch with Ottar, Chogolisa and Thyri. She wasn’t enjoying it. She’d rather have been sitting down. However, Ottar was laughing and
shrieking as if the game was the greatest thing that had ever happened to anyone, so she soldiered on.
Cloud Town’s construction and cliff cleft situation were amazing, wonderful and magnificent, and the elegant Mindful and teeming Landfolk were a fascinating spectacle. Then, once you’d got over all that, Cloud Town reminded her of when she’d been snowed in for three moons with only her parents and her brother Vifil the Individual for company (Vifil, of course, had spent the whole time doing his own thing).
She couldn’t practise archery in such a populated place; the Mindful were all too busy to have a conversation and the Landfolk wouldn’t talk to her. It would have been too much of an imposition to ask them to run her up to the mesa top in a basket so she could fire a few arrows and, besides, she didn’t want to be too far from where Sofi was having her vision quest. If that’s what she was doing. They’d guessed that it must be. Wulf was a little piqued that Sofi had gone on the quest without giving him the chance. Sassa was very glad she had.
She hoped that Sofi Tornado was all right and asked Tor to protect her. But she was glad it wasn’t Wulf.
At lunchtime the subservient Landfolk brought them food. Sassa was spooning the final mouthful of their excellent ragout when Moolba appeared, followed by Sofi.
Both women looked tired, happy and flushed, as if they’d just woken up. Actually, they looked like they’d just had sex, but Sassa put that down to the vision quest.
“Did you find what we’re looking for?” asked Chogolisa.
“Yes,” said Sofi. “We leave tomorrow.”
“Where to?” asked Erik.
“Wormsland.”
“That doesn’t sound so great,” said Thyri.
“Actually, it’s an amazing place,” Moolba reassured her. “It’s named for a large number of rock formations shaped like worms with their backs raised. Arches, in other words. It’s striking and beautiful.”
Thyri raised a nostril that seemed to say she’d seen plenty of striking and beautiful, thanks, and was not impressed.