by Dante King
I looked out over the spreading vista; barren, yes, but beautiful too.
“Entering the unknown via the air like this,” Hana said thoughtfully, “is different to doing it terrestrially, do you not think? You get to see the potential new light that is about to enter your life from a bird’s eye view. That light, that adventure, is simply waiting out there for us to grasp it, and all we have to do is reach for it. The only thing anyone is ever fighting is themselves and their obstinacy or fear to throw themselves into some new exploit!”
“Mike!” Renji suddenly called from where she was soaring on my right-hand side. “Mike, look down there! What do you make of that?”
I looked to where Renji was pointing. Far below us, and a little to the southeast, was a convoy of about a dozen large black specks surrounded by maybe thirty little black specks.
I squinted.
“Looks to me like a caravan of some kind,” I said.
“That would make sense, Mike,” Noctis said. “In a land as parched and sandy as this, travelers who go on foot would need to go from one watering place to the next if they hoped to get across the rolling dunes alive.”
“What do you want us to do about them?” Tamsin asked me.
“Do about them?” I replied. “Nothing. They’re not our concern. Fly on and leave them be.”
Our path of flight took us over the caravan so that I was able to make the specifics out a little more clearly. The enormous wagons were pulled across the sand on wide sled runners, rather than wheels, which made sense to me. While the size of the wagons being pulled was impressive, they were nothing compared to the things doing the pulling.
They were massive elephants the size of houses, or so they looked to me. Huge and dusty brown, they must have been terribly powerful because the wagons themselves were heavily armored to protect them from whatever it was that might fancy stealing them. Every now and again, one house-sized beast would give out a low trumpeting below and shake its enormous head from side-to-side. Unlike an elephant, these gigantic creatures had their ears folded over their heads so that they were protected from the harsh rays of the sun.
We passed a couple more of these caravans in the space of the morning. They were scattered about the landscape, looking like creeping insects from the height we were traveling. Each convoy was heading in the same general direction.
“No doubt to one of the water sources that Noctis mentioned, Dad,” Brenna explained telepathically.
It was when we were soaring over the fourth of these wagon trains that we witnessed the ambush.
With a kind of weird sudden, inexorable slowness, the sand beneath the fourth caravan started to stir and shift.
“Mike,” Tamsin said, “are you seeing what I’m seeing?”
“Yep,” I said.
“That does not bode well to me,” Renji said.
“Nope,” I agreed.
“Shall we get down there?” Tamsin asked me.
The sand was drumming now, dancing like the water on the back of an alligator when it’s calling in the mating season.
“Yeah,” I said, “let’s go. I think those travelers are going to need our—”
A massive sand-worm creature emerged out of a giant sand dune like a leviathan from the depths of the ocean. It was a slithering mass of shining beige skin and dull bristling hairs from which tons of sand cascaded as it burrowed up into the air. It must have been three stories high lying down and gave off a reek like fresh ass and old scallops. It must have been about four-hundred feet long and weighed as much as a couple of Airbus A380s. At one end, which I hoped was the mouth, was a hole filled with foul jagged teeth that looked like they rotated somehow.
“Goddamn… And I thought the English had bad teeth,” I breathed.
Chapter 5
Despite not having any visible eyes, or any other distinguishing feature bar the cavernous mouth, the worm exuded an almost palpable air of malevolence and predatory rancor.
Hana, Tamsin, Renji, and I dropped from the air on our three dragons like a trio of hunting hawks. The great swaying sausage of the worm’s body pulsated, its mountainous muscles shunting back and forth under the thick, impenetrable-looking skin. Within its giant mouth, filled with teeth as yellow as old ivory and sharp as steak knives, ropes of milky saliva dripped and dangled.
“All in all, I’d say that thing is as ugly as they come!” Tamsin cried.
The desert worm reared up with a slowness that was terrible to behold. Below it, the caravan was breaking formation, as every person tried to head for a safety that didn’t exist in that open wasteland. The wagons and the giant elephants that towed them were moving ponderously this way and that, the massive beasts of burden goaded to greater speed by the whips of their drivers.
Then the desert worm fell, mouth first, onto one of the wagons. There was a huge spray of sand as the wagon and its luckless elephant and driver were engulfed. Then the worm sank slowly out of sight beneath the quivering sands.
“Holy shit, that’s fucking nuts!” I yelled.
With the disappearance of the worm, I thought that it might be a good idea for us to figure out a game plan should it come back. It had, presumably, just gobbled up an entire wagon and house-sized elephant, but for something the size of that worm, it probably would have counted as little more than a snack.
“Game plan?” Tamsin said. “How’s this for a game plan, Mike? We fucking kill that thing!”
“It lacks refinement,” Hana said in my ear, “but I think that will be our best course of action. Besides, we have no time to come up with anything better.”
“How’d you figure that?” I asked.
Hana pointed at the surface of the desert, some two-hundred feet from where the worm had just performed its duckdive-cum-faceplant.
“Fuck it, that’s the plan we usually go with anyway, isn’t it?” I said.
With the speed of thought, I willed Noctis into my Head, Chest, and Right Arm slots.
In the blink of a dragon’s eye, I was wearing my Onyx Armor; the sleek, black armor that absorbed kinetic damage dealt by my enemies and transformed it into offensive chaos magic, which I could then handily fire at a chosen target through a conduit set into the breast plate. Protecting my head was a semi-translucent helmet styled somewhere between a motorcycle helmet and a medieval jouster’s lid. It came with a totally clear visor, which faded out to a smoky finish in my far peripheral, and a slight deadening of my hearing.
A silver blur in the corner of my vision told me that Hana had drawn her sword. I could just make out the sound of the bearmancer chanting under her breath too, though whether she was praying or readying a spell was beyond me. She was speaking in her own language for one, and the helmet hindered my hearing too.
A couple of seconds after Hana and I had made ourselves ready, the worm burst back out into the light of day like a maggot burrowing out of the heart of an apple. Sand poured from its flanks like sea water from the deck of some vast vessel. Once more we were hit by that appalling stench, as if the thing had been chowing down on smashed assholes on toast instead of the wagon and elephant super-combo.
“Attack at will!” I called, and willed Brenna into a dive.
Shit, but that Ice Dragon could move!
Hana clung onto me with both hands, and I felt her drawn sword hit me in the back of my helmeted head.
“Get me down there!” Hana ordered in my ear.
I knew better than to argue the merits of that idea with her.
I swept in low over the worm’s ginormous back, from the tail end, and Hana sprang away. As Brenna metaphorically hit the gas, Hana fell away from us. Just before she landed on the broad segmented back of the worm, she summoned her war-bear Bearne and landed neatly astride him. Then she set off at a gallop toward the desert worm’s head end.
Trying to make sure that the worm didn’t realize that it was carrying a passenger, I had Brenna rip low over the worm’s head. Glancing back over my shoulder, I saw that the thing’s
great maw was opened wide, revealing those rows and rows of teeth that disappeared back into its glistening throat as far as I was able to see.
“Note to self,” I muttered, “do not fall in there.”
Even as close as I was to the stinking fucker, I could not see any eyes, though the worm must have seen me. It drew in a deep, slow breath, an inhalation of such power that I actually felt my long brown hair pulling backward at my scalp.
Brenna did not falter, though, even when the worm let out a rattling, gurgling, belching roar of annoyance. Clearly, dragon as she was, she wasn’t one to be put off by some foul, rank son of a bitch yelling throatily in her face.
Instead, she pulled up into a vertical rise, allowing me to let loose with a barrage of palm-sized Shadow Spheres.
The magical orbs of silver-black Chaos Magic, smacked along the worm’s hide, vanishing a few of the wrist-thick hairs here and there, but otherwise doing nothing at all.
“Didn’t think so,” I muttered, gritting my teeth. “It’s just too fucking big. Too fucking magical just to be vanished.”
I banked hard right, or at least Brenna did, which was a fine bit of flying as it turned out because the worm had a trick up its… ass. Its rear end twitched and heaved and then a bunch of the thick hairs, each at least three inches in diameter and about two yards long, were flung out in all directions.
With the aerial agility of a goshawk, Brenna weaved through the barrage of flying, spiky missiles, as I held on and let her do her thing. I watched as one of the flying missiles arced down and impaled a man running for his life across the sand, skewering him like a gory humanoid shish kebab.
While Brenna and I were otherwise engaged, the worm slithered and dragged and heaved itself toward the closest wagon to it, radiating that unmistakable aura of malice ahead of it in waves.
Its slow, seemingly unstoppable progress was arrested for the few moments when Renji dropped out of the air and used her Metal Stars spell on it. Bursts of metallic stars apparated and swirled around the djinn’s silver haired head and went whipping out to meet the target. Zooming around the worm like a blizzard of shrapnel propelled by magic, the stars sliced deep gouges in the flanks of the worm.
The worm gargled a gross, saliva-filled roar at Renji, but before it could fling more ass spines in her general direction, its attention was caught by Tamsin executing a flawless corkscrew on the back of Fyzos.
Fyzos skimmed along the desert worm’s right side and let loose with an eruption of dragonfire from his mouth. The dragonfire was a barely discernible burst of pale yellow and did not burn so much as punch through the thick skin of the worm, ripping it up.
Tamsin, clinging onto her mount with her strong thighs, then pulled Fyzos into a swift about turn and flew back down twisted rent that her dragon had just made in the worm’s side. She unsummoned her dragon, and her spear materialized in her hand, the spear that I had seen her use to devastating effect on countless foes. She dropped right in front of me, balancing on the snout of my dragon.
Muscles bunching in her back, shoulders and neck, Tamsin lobbed the spear into the exposed flank of the desert worm and then used her magical spell on it to rip it free of the wound. She did this in rapid fire, so that the worm’s side was punctured and torn in the same way that a piece of cloth was under the ministrations of a particularly violent sewing machine.
The worm thrashed in what I assumed was pain and anger and, maybe, a little bit of fear too. There can’t have been too many things in that desert that could have bested a monster of that size and strength. Not usually at any rate.
Not ever being one to pass up an opportunity to capitalize on an enemy’s weakness, I slotted the mana of Garth, my Pearl Dragon, into my Left Arm slot. A harpoon was fired from my open palm, a long length of pale pink thaumaturgical chain streaking out behind it. The hook of the harpoon embedded itself in the edge of one of the gashes that Tamsin had made, and Brenna helped me rip the wound wider.
I was expecting a gratifying gush of hot blood to pour forth—the color of radioactive goo maybe, or pus yellow. At first, I thought that was exactly what had happened, though there was no gush but only a few big black drops that welled from the wounds to drip down the flanks of the worm.
Then, I realized that, instead of large globules of shining black blood, what I was actually seeing was…
“Beetles?” I said, confusing etching my words.
“Parasites,” Noctis said.
How he knew that bit of information didn’t matter. What mattered was that there were horse-sized scarab beetle things squirming out of the desert worm’s wounds.
“Shit, they’re heading for the worm’s back!” I said aloud.
“Mike,” Renji called, “have you seen those damned things?”
“There are giant beetles where there should be blood, how am I not going to see that?” I called back.
“Hana!” Tamsin yelled helpfully, pointing at the bearmancer.
Hana was currently up near the very tip of the head end of the worm, hacking and digging and slashing with her sword at the desert worm’s gargantuan head. I guessed she was trying to dig her way all the way to its brain, if it had one. Even with her recently acquired extra strength, which she had taken on after the Transfusion Ceremony, she was struggling to get through the thing’s hide. Bearne was helping her at her task, ripping and tearing at the foul flesh and hide of the worm with his shovel-sized paws and razor claws.
Neither of them were facing in the right direction to see the oncoming half dozen giant scarabs, with their powerful jointed legs and clicking pincers.
“I’m going!” I cried before I communicated telepathically with Brenna. “Make that wound wider, I think I have an idea for when I get back!”
Tamsin leaped from Brenna’s snout, summoning her own dragon so that it would catch her fall.
Within a couple of wing beats, Brenna had us traveling at least ninety miles per hour. Her angular shape and slick, icy scales meant that she had as little wind resistance as a Formula One car.
Within seconds, we were face-to-face with the worm.
Up close and personal, the monstrous maggot stank even worse; something that I would not have believed possible. It was the sort of stench that you could taste in the back of your throat, that set up shop in the passages of your nose, that imprinted itself in your mind for years to come. It was the sort of smell that would doubtless get into my clothes to such an extent that eradicating it would require a flamethrower, an exorcism, or a long soak in a cesspit or sewage tank.
I dove down toward Hana, just as the first of the scuttling mustang-sized scarabs crested the worms slithering, heaving side and spotted her.
My first Shadow Sphere hit the scarab on the back of its carapace and exploded it into wisps of sweet, sweet nothingness. That was the tester. Up until that point I was half braced to fling myself off Brenna’s back and fight the fucking things hand to claw. I hit two more of the scarabs with consecutive Shadow Spheres.
Before I could nail the other three, Brenna ducked down closer so that she was tighter to the worm’s body. Struck by sudden inspiration, I used my Forcewave spell to blast the final trio of scarabs off the worm’s back. The three giant bugs fell to the desert below where they were promptly crushed into the sand by the desert worm’s thrashing and rolling.
“Hana!” I yelled. “It’s time to go!”
The bearmancer looked up from where she was doing her cranial excavations and saw me hovering in the air a little above her. Then she looked over at the worm’s head.
“Pick me up, will you?” she asked. “I’ll give this repugnant thing another distraction so that the caravan travelers have a better chance of getting away.”
Hana jumped back onto Bearne’s broad back, and the war-bear took off along the top of the worm’s head before I could ask precisely what Hana was planning.
“Women…” I muttered and urged Brenna on.
As Bearne lumbered toward the precipice of the w
orm’s head, Hana leaned down and, with what must have been every ounce of her enhanced strength, managed to carve a gash in its slightly less well protected head. Then, as the worm halted in its movement toward one of the escaping wagons, like a naughty puppy that had been smacked on the nose, Bearne leaped out into the void.
“Fucking women!” I said again, this time with much more vehemence in my voice.
Brenna darted past the stationary worm’s head, heading down to cut off Hana’s freefall. As she tumbled through the air, Hana vanished Bearne back into his crystal, and Brenna zipped under her and caught the bearmancer on her back. Hana landed with a jolt behind me, almost slipped off sideways, before I managed to reach back with one arm and steady her.
“Close call,” Hana said into my ear, in a voice that was tight with an exhilaration that I could well empathize with.
“We’re not done yet,” I growled through a hard, white smile of pure determination.
Brenna swept low over the desert and returned to the place where Tamsin and Renji were continuing their assault on the desert worm’s flank. They had made the wound bigger now, just as I had asked, and Tamsin was taking care of any of the gross subcutaneous scarabs that squeezed out.
Harnessing Noctis’ mana into the Left Arm Slot, I conjured an Entropic Mine into being. The mine was a sort of arcane explosive which, when it was triggered, sucked everything in the nearby vicinity into a vortex and made it implode in on itself. It was, to my mind at least, a localized black hole.
With the Entropic Mine in one hand, I also focused Pan’s mana into Weapon Slot A and my Stormhammer crackled into life in my spare hand. The weapon was a one-handed warhammer that caused localized lightning strikes when you struck an enemy with it. Hoisting it high, I aimed at a fresh gash that Renji had just made, using the power of the storm to blast open the wound. Then, I tossed the Entropic Mine inside the hole.
“Better to be too thorough than not thorough enough,” I thought to the dragons that shared my head, hoping to instill in them a bit of fatherly wisdom. For good measure, I tossed in four more Entropic Mines in quick succession.