If I Pay Thee Not in Gold

by Piers Anthony

  Then she laughed. “And nothing at all may happen. After all, remember how the Pacha avoided the tunnel on their side. Probably the creatures here will do the same.” Still, caution was best. Whatever a group was prepared for, never happened. Or so it was claimed.

  Nothing leapt on them in the dark, nor was there anything lying in wait at the mouth of the tunnel. Xylina counted her blessings, and gathered her men into a defensive position around the tunnel entrance, while she and Ware surveyed the lay of the land.

  Under a cloudless blue sky, the sun shown down upon them with a great deal less heat than she would have expected. An odd kind of mist rose in the distance: a mist, or a heat-haze. She could not really make out anything that was more than a couple of leagues away. There could have been mountains out there, or oceans, or nothing at all.

  Directly before them was a large expanse of white sand, sloping slightly downward. To either side, this empty sand began at the foot of the Thorn-Wall, and continued for some five or six hundred cubits before the signs of life began. They stood on a rock shelf that extended into the sand from the tunnel entrance, like a kind of stage.

  To Xylina, this empty stretch was all she could have asked for. Nothing could approach them without being seen. The only drawback was that they could be seen as well, by anything watching for prey. On the other side of this open stretch was a brownish-black area that was covered in sand with rocks heaving up out of it, and dotted with odd and twisted growths, all in a rainbow of colors.

  “Does this look familiar?” she asked the demon. It would be a good thing if Ware only knew what to expect here.

  Ware eyed the stretch dubiously. “No,” he replied. “And do not be deceived by this apparent emptiness. Remember what I told you about illusions. There could be creatures creeping up on us at this very moment.”

  She glanced at the shimmering sand with alarm. That had never occurred to her-but an illusion of emptiness would be just as much an illusion as the vision of a monster.

  “The trick is that they cannot eliminate all signs of their passing,” Ware continued hastily, and the men looked about them and formed a defensive square, without needing to be told to do so. “We would hear them, or see their tracks on the sand. Or if they were buried beneath the sand, we would see the sand itself moving-”

  “Like that?” One of the men exclaimed, and pointed off to the right.

  Instantly they all followed his pointing finger. There, in the middle distance, the sand was pushed up in a growing ridge, approaching them with the speed of a trotting horse, as if there were some land of giant mole burrowing beneath it. A mole as large as one of the wagons, from the size of the mound being created.

  Xylina felt her breath stopping in her throat, and the men swayed back an involuntary pace, closing their square.

  It-whatever it was-was coming toward them, but not directly; unless it changed its course, it would pass about halfway between them and the place where the rocks and strange, multi-colored growths began.

  “What is it?” Xylina whispered.

  “I don’t know,” Ware replied, also in a whisper, “but it may be sensitive to vibrations. Don’t move-and keep the animals from stamping their feet, if you can.”

  Somehow the animals seemed to realize the need for quiet; the entire expedition froze in place, and not even the mules lifted a hoof. The creature beneath the sand continued on its way, lifting the sand between them and the rest of the world, then passing on, and out of sight. The sand slowly subsided in its wake, until it lay flat again, as if it had never been disturbed.

  Xylina breathed a sigh of relief, and the men relaxed. All but Faro, who peered off after the creature with a frown. He was the first to speak.

  “We still have to cross that open stretch,” Faro pointed out. “There maybe more of those things-whatever they are. Or that one might come back.”

  True enough. Xylina nodded, and closed her eyes for a moment, thinking. They had to cross it-but not necessarily on the sand.

  She opened her eyes again, and examined the stretch of empty sand between them and the rocks. It would be folly to cross on the sand-but there was no reason to. Not while her powers were strong.

  She had seen no weakening of them, despite the distance from Mazonia. Ware said that all magics worked equally well here. Well, now was the time to test that. She pursed her lips thoughtfully, gathered her powers about her-and raised her hands to conjure.

  The mists of her powers gathered out over the sand, taking shape, solidifying in place. Gray mist, which formed into gray stone, heavy and substantial. First, she created pillars of stone in pairs, rising up from the sand, pillars that were much wider at the bottom than at the flat tops. Once she had those in place, she conjured a single slab of material, curving up over the sand, supported by the pillars, running from just below their feet to the other side of the sandy expanse.

  The men murmured to one another as the mist rolled up and over the tops of the pillars, leaving the bridge in its wake. She made the surface rough, so that the feet of men and beasts would not slip on it. For safety’s sake, she made the material, which was neither wood nor metal nor stone, but an amalgam of all three that only conjuration could produce, strong enough to bear the weight of all of them at once.

  Then she looked at them all, and nodded once. She needed to give them no other orders. Faro pointed to the men nearest the end of the bridge, and waved at the other side.

  Two of the men ran lightly up and over the conjured bridge, and took their places at the other end, bows out, and arrows nocked and ready. They might have rehearsed this a thousand times, so quickly did they obey Faro’s silent commands.

  “Wagons next,” said Faro. The men parted, giving the wagons enough room to pass between them, and the drivers snapped their reins over the mules’ backs, rolling out onto the surface of Xylina’s creation. The mules obeyed- but slowly. They did not entirely trust this bridge, and went forward only after they had tried each foothold carefully.

  Xylina kept watch to the right for any more telltale burrows in the sand; Ware watched to the left. Faro urged the men on in hoarse whispers, as if he feared that the sand-creature might hear a shout. She held her breath, for she was not as confident of her conjuration as she tried to appear. Her creation might not stand if one of these unknown creatures burrowed beneath a support, or even struck one.

  The sun beat down upon them without mercy; there was no shade, here on this side of the Thorn-Wall. The air was so dry she had not noticed the heat at first-now it was obvious that they would not have been able to stay here for very long without serious damage from the heat. Already Xylina felt sweat trickling down her back, and beading up on her upper lip; she licked her lips and tasted salt-crystals. In just that short a period of time, the sweat had evaporated, leaving behind the salt. They would need real water, and lots of it, if the rest of this strange region was as dry and hot as this part.

  She glanced back from time to time, keeping track of the expedition’s progress. The first wagon made it across her bridge without incident; as it reached the end, the second was in the middle of the bridge, and the third just beginning the journey. She couldn’t help wondering about the noise of their progress. Every hoofbeat echoed hollowly upon the material of the bridge, and how far would the sound travel? Could a creature that lived under the earth hear things above it? Would the vibration travel down the stone and into the sand?

  The second wagon reached its goal, and at that moment the third was halfway there. Nervous now, Xylina waved orders to the men to begin the climb; she and Faro and Ware would bring up the rear. Obediently, and nervously, they began to trot up the slope of her creation, crowding behind the wagon. But the slope was steep; they had to fight their way up it, just as the mules had.

  The wheels of the third wagon had touched the earth on the other side, when one of the men on the top of the bridge cried out wordlessly and pointed in the direction the unknown creature had gone. Whatever he was pointing at
had frightened him witless; he was white and shaking. Xylina looked, but saw nothing.

  That didn’t matter. Xylina did not need to know what he was pointing to: it was trouble and it was probably one of the sand-creatures. A moment later, before she even had a chance to react, she saw the mounding earth approaching, and at a much faster speed than it had come the first time. The sand-creature, or one like it, knew they were here, and was coming for them.

  With a curse, she urged her mule onto the bridge; it scrabbled up onto the slope with clattering hooves, its ears laid back, but perfectly willing to move. Faro’s was right behind her, and Ware’s stallion ahead of her. The men scrambled to get off the bridge and out of the way.

  Ware shouted to the drivers to take the wagons deeper into the rock-and growth-covered landscape on the other side. “Move those wagons out of here!” he called, his voice somehow amplified and carrying above the sounds of panicked shouting, mules braying, and running feet. “We don’t know how far in it can go!”

  Now there was no order to their retreat; it was something of a panicked rout. The drivers whipped up the mules, who were not loathe to move; they rolled their eyes and brayed, but threw themselves into the harness to haul the wagons over the smaller rocks and deeper into what Xylina hoped was a safe zone.

  If the different color of sand meant that the sand-creature could not come there, they would be safe. If not-

  First they had to get off the bridge! For the moment, that was all that mattered; Xylina’s mule strained beneath her, sweat streaming down its sides, panting with exertion. The men on foot scrambled over the opposite side of the bridge and down onto the rocks, just as the three riders crested the top of her creation. Xylina dared a glance to the side, and her heart nearly stopped when she saw how near the mounding sand was.

  She laid her whip along the mule’s withers, heedless of how he got to the other side so long as he did so. “It’s coming!” she screamed to the other two. “I think it’s going to ram-”

  The mule slipped, his haunches slinging sideways-but he sensed the nearness of danger, and did not stop for a second. They were nearly off the bridge, their mounts scrambling for a free space among the fleeing men. And at that precise moment, whatever it was beneath them reared up.

  Something as white and glistening as the sand rose nearly the height of the bridge; sand poured from it in a cascade, and the dogs in the last wagon shrieked as if they had been disemboweled. The white shape, still clothed in sand, rammed into the middle pillars of the bridge.

  She never really saw what it was or anything other than that vague white shape: only flying sand and something huge. But there was no doubt of the result.

  The bridge shuddered, sending all the support pillars tumbling with an avalanche-roar, and then fell over sideways. The crash nearly deafened them all, and the dogs howled again, yet were too panic-stricken to flee the shelter of the wagon. As they cowered behind a bale of supplies, another cresting wave of sand reared up and fell down over the toppled bridge, and engulfed it. There was a grinding noise, and the sand where it had been churned wildly in a kind of whirlpool.

  Xylina’s mule had fallen to its knees, and she had been thrown against the saddlebow, knocking the breath out of her. She somehow managed to stay in the saddle; she was afraid that the mule might freeze in terror, but it wanted no part of whatever was underneath that churning maelstrom, and it staggered to its feet without any undue urging on her part. It bolted to the hoped-for safety of the wagons, in company with every other member of the expedition. By the time Xylina reached the wagons and dared to look behind her, the last pillars and the ends of the bridge were sinking into the sand, as if they were being pulled down by something beneath the surface.

  But whatever it was did not venture into the area of the black sand and rocks.

  When they were certain it was not going to follow them, they were able to collect their scattered wits and breath. With a feeling of awe and amazement, they watched while it finished the work of demolishing the bridge, then turned and churned off back the way it had come.

  The new zone seemed free of hazard, and extended for some distance. The mist remained, however, obscuring whatever lay beyond this zone. Although Xylina and Faro strained eyes and ears, and Ware made whatever arcane efforts were possible for demons, they were unable to detect any invisible threats. That left only the visible ones, and there did not seem to be anything large enough here to count as such. What life moved and crawled through here was all small. There might be snakes, scorpions, or some kind of equivalent, but there was little cover to hide them, and they should, by all rights, be easy to avoid.

  This place looked rather like an odd rock-garden, in fact, and not like anything natural at all. It was full of strangely shaped boulders, collections of stones, and rock formations, none of which looked as if they belonged here, or matched the brown-black sand beneath them. These stones were of so many different kinds of rock that Xylina could not imagine how they had all come to be here. Some even looked as if they had been freshly chiseled from an alabaster cave: huge icicle-formations of stone, gleaming pale and wet in the sunlight, thrusting upwards from their soft beds of dark sand.

  The stones were bewildering shades of color, everything from the red-orange of the Pacha country to the black of obsidian flows. There were huge boulders of green marble beside rough slabs of blue-gray slate; broken sandstone tumbles, water-smoothed quartz, and monoliths of granite. Schist and gneiss, porous limestone and chunks of coquina. And yet their variety paled beside that of the strange growths that flourished among them.

  Nothing stood taller than Xylina’s waist, but she had never seen plants like these, not even in Sylva. At least the things growing in Sylvalooked like plants. Most of these didn’t even come close.

  There were lacy red fans spread out to face the sun, and low green mounds with a structure so like that of a brain that she had to look twice to be certain that it was nothing of the sort. There were stick-like trees with no leaves at all, and a bright purple color. There were bristly growths, covered in thick needles, in every shade of pink and yellow imaginable. Mosses and lichens in rainbow hues clung to the sides of rocks and sprouted from cracks and niches. A wide grass with wavy leaves grew wherever there was shade, and a yellow-green plant that looked exactly like a deer’s antler’s grew in the sun between the rocks. Other plants, rosettes of fat, waxy leaves, or long sword-like, thick stalks, sprouted at the bases of boulders.

  Among these rocks and growths crawled creatures like slugs, only these were slugs the size of a hand and covered with ruffled membranes of bright red and acid yellow. The slugs shared their domain with brilliant golden, webless spiders with fat hairy legs and bodies like saucers, and with attenuated blue stick-insects as long as Xylina’s forearm, that stalked about with an unsteady and uncertain gait. There were also armored creatures to which Xylina could not assign a species: eight-legged plates with eyes on stalks, something that looked like a rabbit with a mounded and articulated coat of armor covering its back in place of a fur coat, and things that looked like upside-down cups with four little feet. There were plenty of ordinary insects, too-or at least, Xylina thought they were ordinary, until she swatted a fly and saw that it had no head that she could find, no eyes and no mouth. There was nothing larger than a rabbit; nothing that looked big enough to be a hazard to the party.

  She, Faro, and Ware traded glances as the party got back into their accustomed marching order. Ware shrugged, and Faro shook his head. It seemed fairly obvious that neither of them knew what to make of this place. Well, neither did she.

  She looked back at the smooth sand where the bridge had been. There was no going back, that was for certain. Not that she had ever expected that choice.

  With a resigned sigh, she gave the order to move forward.

  The sun continued to shine down upon them, but now the mist that rose ahead of them seemed to be hazing the sun over as well. It was not quite so hot, and the light had a kind of
shifting quality, as if there were ghostly shadows passing overhead constantly. That made Xylina uneasy, but when nothing came of these odd shades, she ignored them. The going was a lot harder than it looked; the wagons were not built for this kind of uneven ground, and there were places beneath the sand where wagon-wheels lodged without warning. Often, they had to stop and lift a wheel over a particular obstacle. She tried to gauge their progress, and finally guessed that by the time they reached the place where the mist began and the terrain changed again, it would be near nightfall.

  So far, only the land itself seemed to be fighting them, she thought, wondering if this was luring her into a feeling of relative safety that was in no way justified. Still, this was enough. They couldn’t go more than three lengths without getting stuck.

  But her suspicion proved to be correct. It was at one of these halts, as the men struggled to pry one of the wagon-wheels from between two rocks where it had gotten stuck, that the seemingly harmless landscape revealed another of its perils.

  This was the first time they had come so near one of the purple stick-trees, for Xylina had simply not cared for the look of them. Once again, the men heaved at the wagon to get it out of a crevice between two boulders, and as the wheel finally broke free, one of the men scrambled back to within a few paces of the thing.

  Xylina did not even see a movement; one moment the man was laughing and joking with his fellows, and the next, he was screaming in agony. A long purple tentacle coming from the top of the “tree” tried to drag him into the grasp of several more emerging from the ends of the branches.

  The man who had been caught was clearly in terrible pain, and not just screaming from fear. The other slaves were equally divided between running to his rescue and backing away. The tentacle was wrapped several times around the man’s waist and arm, trapping his sword against his body. The men going to his rescue eyed the other tentacles, eagerly waving, as if the tree was hoping they would come within reach. One dashed forward to slash at the tentacle dragging the captive in, but his sword simply bounced off, leaving the tentacle unharmed.