Encouraged by sharp yips from their masters, the garau lumbered to their feet, snorting plumes of hot breath into the dawn chill. Frost clung to the most sheltered spots, but the cold would not last. As soon as the sun hit the sand, the world would go from ice house to furnace.
The modalmen would loose their hounds next. Rel wanted to be mounted before they did that. Groaning, he hobbled off to fetch Aramaz. The mauve dracon was pegged out away from the garau at Shkarauthir’s insistence. Packs of wild dracons hunted garau in the modalmen’s country, said Shkarauthir, and though the garau tolerated the dracon during the day, at night Aramaz’s scent made the beasts skittish.
The dracon was alternately pacing about and preening his arm feathers, a sure sign of impatience. The long, sparse plumes on his head rose in greeting and he bobbed his head.
“Morning, Aramaz,” said Rel. He checked the creature’s reptilian hide for sores and lice before retrieving the saddle from nearby and slinging it over Aramaz’s back. A dracon saddle was a complicated thing to set correctly. Rel was glad he did not have to work around a muzzle, hobble, claw sheaths and the tail-brake he had used back in Karsa. Karsan sauralier training dictated a dracon be rendered harmless when not being ridden to war. There were good reasons why the dragon-kin were not used as civilian mounts in the west. But Rel had learned from other cultures more accustomed to living with dracons, and was at last comfortable around Aramaz while his natural weapons were free. The dracon had developed a good bond with its master. Nevertheless, Rel was careful, and he left the steel scythe blades that fitted over Aramaz’s claws sheathed on his saddle.
Aramaz skipped sideways as the weight of the saddle went on, but soon settled. He croaked happily as Rel ducked under his neck, giving the dracon a scratch before belting the chest piece in place. Another strap went around the base of the tail, and a girth belt around Aramaz’s belly. Rel adjusted the saddle until he was happy with the fit and Aramaz ceased fidgeting. Finally, he slung his bed roll over the back of his saddle in front of the empty javelin holders, and placed his saddle bags over the dracon’s shoulders between his pairs of primary and lesser, secondary arms.
“See?” said Rel, scratching Aramaz under the chin. “I didn’t even notice your murder claws today. I am now almost completely sure you won’t tear out my innards if I look at you funny. I must be going native.”
Aramaz rattled his throat and shook out his head.
Rel placed his hand on the saddle pommel and one foot in the stirrup. He glanced back, to where the modalmen were raising a cloud of dust in their haste to break camp. They were setting the hounds loose. Not a moment too soon.
“No chance of a hot breakfast today,” he complained.
Aramaz screeched.
“Yeah, I know, no food for you today either. Sorry. I suppose it is getting close to your feeding time.” Rel hoped they reached the moot soon. Dracons only had to eat a few times every month, but became dangerous if starved.
Rel wheeled the dracon about. It pranced into what was left of the camp. The modalmen were meticulous in their tidying, cleaning away every evidence of their presence, burying their fires and their dung.
“Small one!” boomed Shkarauthir from atop his garau. “You are ready?”
Rel was annoyed at being referred to as little and small by others. Zhinsky had done the same, although in the case of the modalmen he admitted it was warranted. He must have looked like a child to them. “I am.”
“We are near. Brauctha’s clan will be close to the moot, so we may ride hard. Stay by me!”
Rel grinned. “We won’t have any trouble keeping up,” he said. “Will we Aramaz?”
Shkarauthir laughed. “We shall see!” he said, and let out an ululating call. The modalmen mounted their huge steeds, many vaulting onto their backs.
Waving his hand around and turning his garau about, Shkarauthir led the way out of the ruined barracks and back into the endless, gleaming Black Sands. The party broke into a lumbering gallop.
Within moments they had left the city behind them. Rel looked back. All he saw was desert, as far as the eye could see. He doubted he would be able to find Losirna again.
THEY RODE FAST, caution abandoned. Garau looked slow, but once they got going they moved quickly. There was no reason to hide their presence any more, and the modalmen allowed their mounts their head. They ate up the miles rapidly. Giant clouds of dust rose from the garau’s pounding feet. Rel had never seen them move at a full gallop before. The ground shook and he grinned. Aramaz was much faster than the garau. He kept pace with them easily, falling into the strutting, quick-legged stride he could maintain for days.
“How far?” yelled Rel up at Shkarauthir.
“A hundred leagues. We will arrive in two days!” the modalman called back.
“We’ll never make a hundred leagues in two days!”
“Now we need no longer hide, we travel the Road of Fire!” shouted Shkarauthir. “You see before, when we rescued you!”
Rel had seen the modalmen emerge from thin air to slay the hounds about to kill him, a move that had risked exposing them to their rivals, so Shkarauthir had explained.
“We are all connected to the Otherland, that the Road of Fire cuts in a burning line,” he shouted down from his mount. “Only sometimes are its paths open to us. Last night I had a dream that the way is open again, so we ride beyond the Earth into places outside this sphere! A shortcut!”
“And what about them? The Giev En? Will we meet them on the road?”
Shkarauthir shook his head. “They have too many wagons, too much Forgetful cargo. The road is narrow. The Forgetful might not survive. They go the slow way. Maybe we arrive before them! Ha!”
“Hey!” Rel yelled over the pounding of heavy feet. “I am of the Forgetful, right? What about me? Will I die?”
“I said last night you might. You might not. It is all in the hands of the One.”
“Perhaps I should stay here, on this Earth.”
“Perhaps you should. Then you can die for certain.”
How narrow is the road? Rel wondered. And in what way is it dangerous to people like me? The Otherlands could be anything, one of the heavens or one of the hells, or some other place entirely.
He was about to find out.
The garau moved in a deafening stampede. Their riders seemed inconsequential, the beasts were in control, thought Rel, not the modalmen. They snorted and lowed, grunting with the effort of running. Sweat lathered their hides, its foam collecting in the deep patterns all over their bodies.
Just when Rel thought the garau could not possibly run faster, the patterns in the hides of modalman, garau and modalhound alike glowed with fierce light, shifting from a delicate blue to a steady, unvarying red. The colour bled from their bodies, making trails in the air. The light of the sun weakened until the red outshone it. There was a shift in Rel’s perception, and everything was moving as if arrested. He saw the garau’s six feet striking the floor in precise patterns. Aramaz’s plumage fluttered in the wind of his gallop with unnatural slowness. The modalmen looked like vivid sculptures. His own motions were likewise sluggish, though his thinking was not. He felt the first stirrings of panic, for the body is the smallest prison of all to be trapped within.
The modalmen were shouting, their voices horrible, low moans. A dazzling light burst into being over the desert ahead, its rays moving slower than arrows, so that Rel could track the progress of each beam. The light flickered languidly and became a sphere that collapsed with a boom Rel felt rather than heard. In the sphere’s place was a black circle wreathed with slow fires. All this took forever, so long Rel lived his life through, or so it seemed.
Time snapped back to its proper speed unheralded, nearly causing Rel to pitch from his saddle. He had no time to react after he corrected his slide; the modalmen plunged right into the black circle, vanishing as surely as if they had passed through a wall of liquid ink.
Aramaz followed right after them in spite of Rel
’s shouts to halt.
REL BURST INTO a landscape he could hardly comprehend. A bright road that seemed to be made of stretched, golden flame, headed in a dead straight line into the infinite distance. A cage of streaking light separated the road from a darkness more utter than any night. But though terrifyingly deep, the dark aether was not empty, but full of sights.
Strange lands whipped by him. Whole worlds wheeled onward, spinning rapidly on their axes. Upon the surfaces of the largest he saw tiny cities and strange creatures reproduced with a model maker’s skill. Other things rolled through the dark, some so bizarre he had no names for them. Some he recognised at the last moment as everyday objects magnified to a massive scale. The aether flashed away, and they were chasing clouds across a pink sky. That was replaced in its turn by ocean shallows teeming with giant armoured fish, then an endless night full of stars, and another flash and another as varied realms slipped past, fast as a river flowing down a fall.
“Behold!” proclaimed Shkarauthir; the sound of the garau’s feet was quiet in that place, and Shkarauthir no longer needed to shout. “The Road of Fire. Do not stray past its edge, no matter what you see.”
“What are these places?” called Rel, as amazed as he was frightened.
“These are the endless worlds, where once our masters walked. They are forbidden us. The road does not go to them, only through. Modalmen walk only on this Earth. Do not look too closely at the beings you see, lest they look back at you!”
Another flash, and they raced through a giant room lit by long, narrow suns. An enormous man in a white surcoat bent over the road, eyes large as lakes peering at them. Rel yelled at the sight, and spurred Aramaz to go faster.
“Do not be afraid!” said Shkarauthir. “None one can touch you while you are upon the road. Shut your eyes if you are scared, but you shall miss wonders! Stay on the road!”
A world of gold. A sea of diamond. A prairie of blooms over which rose an enormous, striped world. They flashed by one after the other, faster and faster, until they came and went so quickly Rel got only the briefest glimpses of them, and then they became blurs too rapid to process.
They burst through a sheet of lightning, and over a land that made no sense by earthly standards. The ethereal shades of men and women crowded leaden city streets, winding their way from bone-covered plains to turn vertically upward and run into mazes of tenements that hung like stalactites from the sky.
Another flash. A black circle flexed itself into existence across the road.
“We leave!” whooped Shkarauthir. “Onward, onward!”
The modalmen band rushed through the second circle as they had the first. Rel took a leap of faith, following them.
A forest of leafless trees rushed at him. Aramaz’s feet smacked hard into black sand and he pushed off to the left, almost tipping Rel from the saddle in his bid to avoid a trunk.
The garau were not so nimble, and slammed into the trees with devastating force, shattering them into pieces. A frantic horn blew, and the modalmen drew up their charging beasts in skidding stops that ploughed furrows into the ground. They scattered, split into a ragged mob by their chaotic return to Earth, if they were indeed upon the Earth.
Aramaz dodged the trees, and jogged to a huffing halt. Rel turned him about to rejoin the others.
The trees were petrified, jutting out of the desert as if placed there by a sculptor. Many had been broken into chunks of rock by the arrival of the modalmen. A thick, chill mist hung around the trees, cutting visibility down to a hundred yards or so and giving the forest a graveyard’s air.
One garau was dead, impaled upon a stony branch. Another rolled around in agony, screaming, tangled in the remains of the tree it had collided with; its back was broken and the four back legs were limp. Its rider lay not far away, dead or unconscious. Rel sat, helpless to assist the giants as they went to the aid of their comrades.
Shkarauthir joined Rel. “The Road of Fire is a perilous route. We can never know exactly where we shall regain the Earth,” he said. “This is the forest of Chel, slain with the rest of these lands long ago. It is a deadly barrier to those emerging from the Otherlands close to the citadel.”
“Were we supposed to come here?”
The modalmen were regrouping, bringing their mounts into formation. The fallen modalman was getting groggily to his feet. The second without a garau helped him.
The injured garau let out a shriek as it was speared through the heart. The cessation of its cries brought only momentary relief. The suffocating quiet of the mist was worse, in its way.
“The One decreed we arrive here, and so here is where we have arrived. The death of two mounts is a price worth paying for fast travel,” said Shkarauthir.
He pulled hard on his reins, bringing his garau around. “We must go now. These lands are dangerous, even to us, and we have fifty miles yet to go.” Shouting in his own tongue, he gathered his clan to him. The unmounted modalmen doubled up with their friends, and they rode away.
They left the dead animals behind.
THE FOREST EXTENDED over miles of hills, thousands of stone trees standing where they had died in the distant past. The modalmen often talked in their grumbling, singing way on the longer marches, but through the forest they were alert, quiet, with their weapons ready. The hounds fanned out and loped ahead at whistled commands, heads low, padding feet silent on the mist-dampened sand. It was as moist in the petrified forest as it would be in a living wood, but nothing grew there. Grey trunks, black sand, white mist in between. A dead world, stark as a woodcut.
Aramaz sensed something amiss, and was silent. The crunch of sand under the feet of their mounts and their panting breath were quiet noises made intrusive by the silence. Something out there was listening to them.
After several hours of hard riding, the land steepened into a sharp hill that the sand could not cling to. Crags of red rock sliced their way out of the flesh of the Earth. The soil weathered from the bedrock was hardly less treacherous to traverse than the sand, and the party’s progress became laborious. Mist obscured everything more than a few hundred yards away, but the modalmen knew where they were going.
The hill crested without warning, bringing the party onto a shelf cut into the rock. The work of the ancients, made to carry a road whose broken paving snaked off into the murky grey.
Shkarauthir held up a hand. The group halted, facing out. The hounds scrambled quietly onto the road and passed into the centre of the group. Their silence more than their presence made both Rel and his mount nervous. Aramaz shied with a squawk.
“Quiet!” said Shkarauthir. “In this place, mists hold danger.”
They stayed that way for five tense minutes, until a thunderous howling shivered through the mist.
Instantly, the modalmen brought their weapons up. Rel shrugged his carbine off his shoulder. The click of the bullet sliding home into the breech had Shkarauthir shoot him a warning look. Wincing, Rel closed the slot, and drew back the hammer, muffling the snap of the firing mechanism’s engagement with his coat. A garau shifted its weight and huffed. Silence again.
A second howl, much closer this time. A heavy tread followed, and the rasping of feet on stone. Further up the road a giant foot descended from the higher slopes, planting itself carefully in the centre. It was pointed, and hard like a crab’s leg. Three more followed as a gargantuan creature lowered itself onto the road.
The thing was a few hundred yards away. In the mist its silhouette dissolved at the edges into uncertain outline, but Rel saw enough.
From the waist down the creature was an aquatic nightmare. A skirt of restless tentacles waved between four arthropod’s legs, prodding at the ground, snatching up stones and throwing them aside. From the waist up it had a torso reminiscent of a man’s, with a pair of massive arms and heavy hands. An oversized head sprouting a single horn crowned the shoulders. No other detail was visible but these and the size; the modalmen were as small to it as a rat was to Rel, a true giant.<
br />
It stood athwart the road, sniffing the air. Shkarauthir kept his eyes fixed on it, his hand held level out at his side, ready to signal an attack.
The giant hooted wordlessly again, loud as organ pipes, and close enough so that Rel could hear the whistle of air in its throat. It swung its legs over the side of the road, and plunged down the hillside. Giant hands reached up behind it to steady its descent, pulling away part of the road as it climbed down, then it was gone.
They waited a while, listening to its howling draw further away. Shkarauthir whispered something in the modalmen language, then said to Rel, “We, go, quickly!”
They spurred their mounts on down the road. Where the creature had crossed there were puddles of hissing mucous eating into the rock.
Though many of the road’s slabs were displaced by age and parts of the edge had crumbled away down the slope, the road was easy going compared to the sands. They were able to move at speed. Only when they burst from the mist into hot, golden sunshine, did Rel feel safe enough to put away his gun.
Shkarauthir called another halt. The mist formed a solid grey wall behind them. The hill the road cut into was the last of the forest range. Past it, the land stepped up unnaturally quickly into the soaring heights of the High Spine, mountains so tall the peaks brushed the underside of heaven and could not be seen from the ground.
The road wound downward from their position. The forest continued past the edge of the mist, its dead trees almost white in the full light of the sun. In the distance a haze of blue smoke roofed over a valley. The road led into this place as a faint scar on the land dotted with groups of modalmen, and behind the valley, set directly into the sheer face of a mountain, was a bright sliver of reflected light.
The Brass God Page 11
