by Jeff Minerd
“Run, human, run!” Zeelak shouted over his shoulder.
By the time Brieze reached the base of the tooth, her heart pounding, the Gublins had already scaled it and were looking down at her, urging her to climb. Gublins can climb anything made of stone as easily as most humans can walk up a flight of stairs. She looked up at the vertical rock face above her and saw very little in the way of hand- or foot-holds that would support her. She made a half-hearted attempt at a climb, then dropped back down to the ground after scaling only a few feet.
“Why are we doing this?” she called to them. “I don’t see what the problem is.”
“Look!” Zeelak shouted, pointing out into the valley.
She looked, and saw something strange. Out in the distance—it was hard to tell exactly how far in the foggy, featureless landscape—the sand was seething and rippling as if something were moving just underneath the surface.
Moving toward her. Fast.
She made a real effort to climb this time, clawing at the rock, forgetting to make sure her footing was firm and to use her legs to push herself up. She lost her grip and fell, cutting up her knees and chin as she slid down. She hit the ground feet first and fell onto her back. She struggled to right herself. Her heavy pack held her down. She heard the sound of an immense slithering through the sand, growing louder.
“The weak human can’t climb!” Zeetog shouted.
“Leave it for the Sleepers,” Zeefor said. “If it satisfies them, we can save ourselves!”
But Zeelak had already uncoiled one of the long, sturdy lengths of rope they carried. “We have offered her our service. She is bound to us. Help me bring her up.” He tossed the rope down to Brieze, who’d managed to get back onto her feet. She grabbed the rope and hastily tied it around her waist. She gripped it tightly with both hands. She felt something—some things actually—worming their way up her legs. The Gublins pulled, and her feet lifted off the ground. Gublins are not just faster than humans, they are stronger too, despite their spindly appearance. Three of them pulling on the rope hand-over-hand yanked Brieze to the top in a matter of seconds.
As they lifted her over the edge and deposited her on the wide, flat summit, she felt something biting at her legs, right through the sturdy fabric of her trousers. There were things crawling on her! She yelped and slapped at her legs until they were all dead. There were half-a-dozen of them; the vanguard of a much larger group. She picked up one of their crumpled, twitching bodies between a thumb and forefinger and studied it.
It was a fat black worm-like thing, a couple of inches long. Segmented like a centipede but without any legs. Its tapered body appeared to slither through the sand. It clung to her fingers with fine, prickly hairs. Serrated, scissor-like mandibles stuck out from its head. Brieze’s legs were on fire where they had bitten her. She flicked the thing over the edge.
“What are they?” she asked. “I didn’t think anything lived down here.”
“The Sleepers do,” Zeelak said. “They can lie dormant for years, even decades, until they smell blood. Then they awaken, and won’t sleep again until they have eaten.”
“Can they climb up here?”
“No. They do not leave the sand.”
“So, we’re safe now?” Brieze shrugged off her pack. The flat summit seemed spacious enough for them to stay there comfortably. “We can wait up here until they go away?”
“No,” Zeelak said. “They won’t go away. One of us must die.”
As Zeelak stitched up Zeefor’s foot with a needle and thread, he explained the situation to Brieze.
The Sleepers lived in huge colonies made up of thousands and thousands of individuals. They were intelligent, seeming to share one group mind, and they acted as one organism. They would have followed Zeefor’s blood trail. They knew their prey was trapped atop the tooth. Already, they would have surrounded its base.
Brieze looked out over the edge. The sand below burbled and rippled.
Now, the Sleepers would wait, Zeelak explained. They could wait a long time. Long after the four of them starved to death atop the tooth and their flesh had turned to dust, the Sleepers would still be waiting. The creatures might go dormant, or semi-dormant, but their senses would be heightened, sharply focused around the base of the tooth. If anyone tried to climb down and escape by foot, they would be attacked the moment they touched the ground. The Sleepers’ countless, tiny, ravenous jaws could strip a full-grown Gublin down to the bone in a matter of minutes.
“They will only truly sleep again if they feed,” Zeelak said. “Therefore, we must play the game.”
“The game?” she asked.
“We will draw lots to see which one of us will be sacrificed to the Sleepers so the others may live.”
“Well I’m not playing any such ga—”
Three Gublin swords sang free of their sheaths and pointed at her throat before she finished the thought. She blinked, stunned by the sheer speed of it. She’d seen Gublin swordplay before, but she’d forgotten how inhumanly fast they really were.
“You are bound to us,” Zeelak said. “The rules are very clear. You will play the game, or you will be the one we feed to the Sleepers.”
Brieze nodded. She couldn’t think of any other response with those swords pointing at her.
The Gublins sheathed their swords. Zeelak produced a leather drawstring bag and four small, round, polished stones—three white and one black. The Gublins used such stones for many of the games they played, most of them more pleasant than this one. He showed the stones to all of them, placed the stones in the bag, and shook it. “Now we choose,” he said.
Gublins have strict rules about rank and seniority. The rules required Zeelak to choose first. Then Zeetog, Zeefor, and finally Brieze, who was the lowliest member of the group. Zeelak reached into the bag. He had a three out of four chance of drawing a white stone. He did.
“Now Zeetog,” Zeelak held the bag out to him. Zeetog reached in. He had a two out of three chance of drawing a white stone. He did. But he didn’t smile at his good luck. He looked anxiously at Zeefor, who was his cousin and friend.
“Now Zeefor,” Zeelak held out the bag. Zeefor reached in. He had a fifty-fifty chance of drawing a white stone. The outcome of the game would be decided by his draw. Whatever stone he got, Brieze’s stone would be the opposite. She wouldn’t need to draw herself.
It was not Zeefor’s lucky day. He drew the black stone.
He stared at it for a while, rolling it between his fingers, his lips twitching. Then he hurled the stone away with a snarl and backed away from the others, putting a hand on the hilt of his sword. “I won’t be sacrificed when we have a perfectly good live human here that will do the trick!” he said.
Zeelak put his hand on the hilt of his sword. “The rules are very clear,” he said. “You played the game. You drew the black stone.”
“You’d sacrifice me, one of your own clan, instead of this human?”
“You are shaming yourself and dishonoring us all,” Zeelak said. “Gather up your courage and do what needs to be done.”
Zeefor drew his sword. “You want my life? Come get it if you can.”
Zeelak drew his sword. “You sadden me, cousin.”
They crouched into fighting stances.
“Wait!” Brieze said, finding her voice. “There has to be a better way.”
Zeelak spoke through clenched teeth. “Unless you can conjure up one of your airships and fly us far away from here, silly human, this is the only way.”
The thought smacked her in the center of her forehead.
“Wait!” she said, “I can do that. I can do exactly that!”
SEVENTEEN
It was a cold and clear-skied morning when Tak and Jon approached the Wind’s Teeth. They gleamed in the light of the newly risen sun like something out of a dream, left over from the night before. Their sharp peaks rose so impossibly high into the sky, it looked as if they reached the pale crescent m
oon that hung above them. Their crystalline flanks sparkled. They managed to look utterly beautiful, quietly menacing, and not-quite-real all at the same time. They reminded the boys that they were very far from home, in a part of the world that was wonderful and wild, and definitely dangerous.
Tak whistled in awe. “Look at ‘em,” he said. “They can’t be that big. They make the Highspire Mountains look like dunghills. I mean, just look at ‘em.”
Jon was looking—with wide eyes. He stood in the bow of the Arrow, gripping the foremast tightly with one hand, as if he were afraid the Teeth might somehow snatch him right off the deck. He was in all likelihood the only living person from Pinemont ever to see the Wind’s Teeth. The lumberjacks of Pinemont were not voyagers. The farthest any of them usually journeyed was the two-day trip across the Ocean of Clouds to the Dragonback Mountains, to log the pine forests there. But they told stories about the Teeth on Pinemont. Stories about monsters that lurked within them. Stories of malevolent winds that played deadly tricks. Jon was a brave boy, even recklessly so. He’d happily take on ten men with his axe if the need arose. But his courage vanished completely in the face of the Teeth.
Tak close-hauled the Arrow’s sail so the ship drifted slowly on the current. The winter chill reddened his cheeks and nose. A light snow fell, catching in his hair, which had grown back to its usual shaggy state. He pulled his cloak more tightly around himself and sat on one of the thwart benches. He opened his father’s logbook and unfolded the map. Tak senior had gone through the Teeth with a convoy of merchant ships. He had marked the entrance to the middle passage on the chart, noting its precise latitude and longitude. Of their passage through the Teeth, he wrote: Entering them was like leaving this world entirely. The wind was rough, and constantly changing direction, but other than that we had no trouble. Captain Ekstrom is a veteran of many passages. I swear he can smell the wind changing.
Jon sat on the bench across from Tak, facing him.
He cleared his throat.
“Why haven’t we turned north,” he asked. “To go around them?”
Tak didn’t answer. He sat hunched over the map, tracing a route with his finger. He felt a strange sense of satisfaction at being the quiet one for a change. He said nothing because he could see Jon was afraid of the Teeth, and he knew the things he was about to say would make him very unhappy.
Jon tried again, as if he could get the answer he wanted to hear—desperately needed to hear—by asking a different question. “How long will it take,” he growled, “to go around them?”
“It would take two weeks,” Tak said. “If we flew around them.”
That if hit Jon like a punch to the gut. It made his legs go weak and shaky. “If…?” he gasped. “If…?”
“It’ll take one day to go through,” Tak said.
“I’d rather get there two weeks later than not at all.”
Tak held up the logbook. “My father’s convoy made it through without a hitch. His notes say it was incredible. Most ships pass through without a problem.”
“Key word there is most,” Jon crossed his arms. “Why risk it if we don’t have to?”
Tak realized that he and Jon were having a conversation. An actual back-and-forth conversation. Fear had loosened Jon’s tongue. Tak wished it could be happening under better circumstances. And he knew it would end soon, because he had a trick that would make Jon agree, but it was a low dirty trick. Tak knew he would hate himself for it, and Jon would hate him too.
“Are you scared?” Tak asked. “If you’re too scared, just say so and we’ll go around.”
Jon clenched his jaw and fumed. Admitting to fear was simply not allowed among boys and young men in the Kingdom of Spire. It was an unwritten rule, but a powerful one, drilled-in at an early age. Jon wanted to do it, the words were right there at his lips, but he couldn’t. Instead, he snorted like a rhinoceros and spit a huge gob of phlegm over the side. He would have like to spit it in Tak’s face. His expression made that abundantly clear.
“Screw you,” he said. “Do what you want. I don’t care.”
Tak felt awful. But the ploy worked.
Flying through the Wind’s Teeth in the Arrow made Tak feel like a gnat gliding through a dense forest of bizarre, white-trunked trees. Once they were far enough inside that the Teeth appeared to close in behind them, the wind became eerily calm. But Tak heard it all around them—moaning and muttering, whispering and snickering. He gripped the tiller with a sweaty hand, and his feet squirmed on the wing flap pedals. He checked his lifeline. Jon checked both of his lifelines—he had attached not one but two to his belt. Then he resumed his two-armed death grip on the aft mast. He faced forward so that Tak, who was sitting in the stern, couldn’t see he was squeezing his eyes tightly shut.
They hit a pocket of turbulence—a hole in the wind that dropped them twenty feet like a stone before the air caught them again. Tak lifted off his seat, then came down on it hard, jarring his teeth. Jon’s feet left the deck. He made a strangled sound in the back of his throat. He lost his grip on the mast and tumbled to the deck. The Arrow bounced and rocked, its sail flapping in agitation.
“Are you all right?” Tak asked.
Jon didn’t answer right away. Instead, he crawled on his hands and knees to a storage compartment and fished out a coil of rope. He used it to lash himself to the aft mast, winding it in tight turns around his body again and again, from his knees to under his arms. He tied the rope off with a sturdy woodsman’s knot.
“Don’t talk to me,” he said, clamping his eyes shut again. “Tell me when it’s over.”
Tak was about to try to say something encouraging or comforting to Jon when his attention was diverted—he saw something that couldn’t possibly be real.
His father, Taktinius Spinner senior, stood in the bow of the Arrow, facing him. He wore a sweat-soaked nightshirt that hung to his knees. His hair was matted and sweaty, his eyes red-rimmed and wild-looking. Neither his nightshirt nor his hair stirred in the wind as they should have. His father looked as surprised and mystified to see Tak as Tak was to see him. Tak senior looked around, and realized where they were, in the Wind’s Teeth. He looked back at Tak and shook his head in warning. He waved his arms and said something that Tak couldn’t hear. But the message was clear—go back!
Tak blinked and shook his head, and the vision was gone.
At that moment, the Arrow’s sail luffed and chattered.
Tak felt the pressure drop in his ears. He heard the approaching roar.
The wind attacked them.
A rogue current hit them head-on with gale force. A wall of wind lifted the bow of the Arrow and turned the ship completely upside down, tumbling it end-over-end. Tak was hurled from his seat in the stern out into the sky—but his lifeline held. It yanked on his belt so hard the breath was squeezed out of him. He and the Arrow whirled around and around, connected by the slim tether. Things were happening so fast, he couldn’t make sense of what he was seeing. He caught flashes of things—ropes whipping back and forth, the sail tearing away from its yard, Jon still tied to the mast, his red hair flying. Jon was screaming a scream that had started deep and throaty, but rose to a shrill squeaky shriek.
The wind played with them the way a cat plays with a mouse, batting them this way and that. But all the while the current carried them back the way they came. It carried them right to the edge of the Teeth and spit them out the way they’d come in. Once free of the Teeth, the current spent itself and the Arrow stopped tumbling. It ended up completely capsized, upside down. Tak dangled from his lifeline below his ship, nothing beneath his feet but empty sky and the clouds that blanketed Etherium’s surface far, far below.
He looked up.
Jon was there, not far above him. Still tied tightly to the aft mast. Upside down. His shaggy red hair dangled in the wind. His eyes were open now. His arms were crossed, and he was glowering at Tak. Glowering hard and accusingly.
He channeled a lo
t of anger into that look.
“Okay, okay,” Tak said. “We’ll go around.”
Tak righted the Arrow without too much difficulty. He’d done it many times before. It was a matter of climbing up the lifeline hand over hand, standing on the underside of one of the wings, gripping the keel, and leaning and rocking until the ship flipped over right side up. Tak helped Jon untie himself. Jon did not thank him for the help. He went immediately to the side storage compartment where his axe had been stowed to retrieve it, letting out a relieved sigh when he found it still there, cradling it in his arms. Tak frowned. He was hoping the axe might have gotten loose, as it always seemed to do, and fallen out of the ship. No such luck.
The boys looked over the ship for damage. They didn’t find anything too serious. The sail had torn in places, a few lines and stays had snapped; nothing that couldn’t be fixed in short order with the tools they had on hand.
Except for one very important thing.
The water casks.
All but one of them was gone.
The casks on the deck of the Arrow had been lashed tightly to the gunwales, the sturdy ropes run through brackets mounted there. When Tak tied up the casks, he’d only thought about keeping them from getting loose and sliding or rolling around the deck. He hadn’t considered the possibility the ship might be turned upside-down and tossed around by a malicious wind. When that happened, all but one of the heavy, five-gallon casks had wiggled free of their bonds. They were long gone. The loops of rope that had held them lay slack upon the deck.
The boys made some quick calculations. If they went on half-rations of water, two quarts a day, they had enough to last ten days. If they went on quarter rations, they could stretch that to twenty days possibly. The problem was, they were smack dab in the middle of nowhere. The Eastern Kingdoms were more than a month away, and it would take the same amount of time to get back home. They’d be without water for at least ten days, and the longest a person could survive without water was three. Four tops.
