Their pace slowed considerably, but so far they weren’t entirely crippled by the act of sabotage. “Come take the rudder for a minute, Will.” Kate said. The lake was scarier than the river of blood. Scarier than fighting a dragon. She could see a way out there. A narrow way out, but a way out nonetheless. And maybe the river could have swallowed them up and killed them, but the lake of fire was truly frightening. There was no way to survive it without the boat. And if their sail was fully destroyed, what then?
Will hobbled to her side and took the wheel. He looked weaker than before, but he had to do it. “Thanks. I’m going to try to tape the sail back together. Hopefully it’ll only take a minute.”
“I’ve got this, Kate. Don’t worry about it.” Will assured her.
Kate took off her pack, set it down to search for a spare shirt and the first-aid tape. That was when she noted a puddle beneath her boots.
Shit.
For a moment she wanted to sit down and cry, overtaken by despair and the unending challenges. She was exhausted mentally, emotionally, and physically. What more could she endure? Why not give up? There was no hope. None. Nada.
She held back the tears and raised her chin and saw Will staring at her, his blue eyes narrowing. “Kate,” he said and his voice was the sound of desperation. “Don’t give up now. We’ve come this far.”
“The boat is melting,” she said, her voice sounding dead, even to her. She squinted to hold back the burning in her eyes.
“This is Cipher’s game,” Will said, quietly. “He lets you get ahead a little, but somehow pulls you back down just when you think you’re winning.”
Kate nodded. “That’s right. That’s how it feels. Like I can’t win. I—I have nothing left, Will. I’m tired, bone-weary, I swear I feel like my fingertips are bleeding, like I’ve worked them to the bone. I haven’t slept in days, I’m hungry and thirsty. What more can I give?”
“That’s just it, Kate, we’re winning this time. Beating Cipher. Because of you. You’re the key. We can’t give up because we have to give everything to win.”
“Maybe so,” Kate said. “But I’m so tired.” She shrugged and felt herself swaying as her knees threatened to give out.
“Patch the sail, Kate. I’ll steer. Just focus on the small triumphs,” Will said, straightening his ugly shoulders. He had one arm, was trapped in the body of a mud-beast, but when he stood up tall, his blue eyes flashed and Kate found a reservoir of strength just from that look.
The boat was melting, the sail was torn, and Will had just one arm, but they’d go on. Kate knew she couldn’t give up. Wavering was only human. But so was never giving up.
She got the tape and a spare shirt and lowered the sail as Will steered them toward the sun.
30: An Ominous Cloud
Kate got the main sail down and lined up the torn material. She used what little tape they had left to mend the tears and patch the hole from what the dragon took with it. Her shirt was a stretchy, wicking material, and maybe that would be bad for a sail, but it was all she had. As much as she could, Kate doubled up the tape. It was first-aid tape, not something that could withstand much pressure.
Will kept them on a straight course, but with one of the sails lowered, he had to fight the rudder more than normal. Kate heard him grunting quietly every time a gust pushed them.
Finally it was done and she raised the sail. It was a simple process, since there were only two, the large aft-sail and the smaller sail. What was damaged was the main sail. Raising it took her just a minute. “Here goes,” she said, crossing her fingers. If the wind was too strong, it might just open the seams and rip through it. The wind could be powerful.
“Kate!” Will shouted, suddenly. She pulled her gaze from the striped sail with its bright red patch. “I can see the shore.” Will’s blue eyes danced and he grinned. She thought it was a grin, anyway.
“Thank heavens,” she said, turning to the front of the boat. The sail billowed out as it caught a breeze. The boat surged forward with the sudden gust. Kate held her breath as she watched and waited.
Ahead the black shore loomed between the changing tide, vanishing when it rose and surged and then coming into view when it dropped.
Kate sloshed through the rising water on the floor of the boat and went to Will’s side. He moved aside sluggishly. That was the only indication she had of how fatigued he’d become from fighting with the rudder. She swallowed back questions about his strength. She prayed silently that he’d last as long as necessary to get him back to Earth. She held onto visions of him hanging out with her in her bedroom, going for coffee, driving up the canyon with the wind in their hair. It would be so great. So great.
“Thanks for steering,” she muttered and smiled. She knew it was weak, but it was all she had. She searched his blue eyes and saw her own Will there, buried in the clay of the mud creature. “I think we’re going to make it.”
“Because of you. You genius woman,” Will said, ambling aside. He crossed his arm and hugged his torso.
“Is it hurting?” she asked, looking out at the shore, which was only about a five hundred yards away, she guessed.
“No, it’s fine. I’m fine,” he reassured her. He leaned his back against the transparent side of the boat, slumping just a bit.
“I’m just hoping against hope that the sail will hold.” She shook her fist at it in her best impression of Homer Simpson and said, “Hold, damn you, hold.” Will chuckled. Kate glanced at him and saw, instead of the monstrosity Cipher had created, the man from her dreams. He was still the mud-monster, but she saw what she knew he was.
Soon just fifty yards remained. Kate shifted and felt the water slosh around her calves. They would make it, they had to make it. The lake of fire heaved and hissed around them, the walls of the boat dripped like her windshield back home during a rainstorm. Kate’s heart pounded. The thought of being consumed by the angry fires of the impossible lake ate at the fringe of her consciousness. She batted it away with a nudge this way and that way with the rudder. So this had been the dragon-rider’s plan: to cripple their boat till it melted. It never meant to capture them, just to maroon them until the lake claimed them. The thought sickened her.
Twenty-five yards. The sides of the boat were nearly gone. Just a thin crust separated their feet from the fiery lava.
Twenty yards. The sail billowed against a toothpick of ice that was their mast. They skimmed the surface on a cookie sheet. Nothing protected them.
Fifteen yards.
Ten.
“Kate, get on my back. Now!” Blue eyes flashed. His voice was surprisingly strong.
There was no way. It would kill him.
“Not a chance,” Kate said, clenching her teeth.
“The bottom’s about to go, Kate. Do it! Now!”
“It’ll kill you!”
“I’m a creature of Chthonos. My body can withstand it long enough to get to shore. Trust me, Kate! Now!”
Her fingers clenched the wheel. It burst, suddenly, and slipped around her fingers like a popsicle in the desert sun. She grabbed her pack and jumped onto Will’s back just as the tenuous crust of glass and ice split open and vanished in a gurgling hiss.
“Arrrggghh!” The cry of pain ripped from him as he struggled through the shallow fire up to the shore. He carried Kate far from the seething lake and then fell to his knees in the charred rock and sand. They both fell over, huffing and puffing in relief and fear.
“Are you OK?” Kate asked, rolling to her side and searching his strange face.
He blinked at her, a hideous creature with a human soul looking out from deep blue eyes. “Think nothing of it,” he answered.
Overhead the dragon keened. Kate looked up, her pulse galloping, expecting to see it coming for them. Instead it flew back toward Necropolis.
“Going to tattle, I bet,” Will said.
“I somehow doubt its just heading back for tea.”
“It’ll return with reinforcements. We killed one. They
won’t make that mistake again.”
“There’s just one more disc left. From Leonardo. Let’s go. Don’t want to make stopping us easy for them, right?”
Will heaved a sigh and began to get up. Kate understood his weariness. The only thing keeping her going was the knowledge that stopping meant dying. She would not die for this. That would be too easy. No. She was determined to live.
***
A dark, brooding mountain loomed forlornly in the distance. This was the last obstacle to getting off of Chthonos, Kate knew. Leonardo’s words had been, “Nothing much, just a windy mountain. The blue disc will help you get to the top.” Her feet seemed lighter with every step. They were almost there! Almost done! Visions of Will restored to his earthly body carried her along. Exhaustion seemed to strip away in layers the closer she got.
“That doesn’t look good,” Will said, expressing his doubt about finishing what they’d started.
“Piece of cake,” Kate answered playfully. “Don’t try to pull an ‘Oh, I’ve only got one arm,’ excuse on this one. We all know you don’t need two arms to hike.”
“I’m glad my crippled state gives you comic material.” He sounded sulky.
“You’ll get a new body. Your old one. A better one. And we’ll go back to Earth and you’ll be fine. You’ll even be reunited with your missing arm, I’m sure of it.”
“What makes you so sure?” Will asked, giving her a sideways look.
“Just a feeling.”
“If—if that happened, you’d be with me? You’d say goodbye to Ty?”
Kate didn’t hesitate. “Of course.”
“What if I was old?”
“Well, how old? I mean, like my grandpa’s age? Or like ten years older than me?”
He laughed and the sound refreshed Kate’s spirits, even though deep inside, a new worry had formed. What if he was old? How would she feel about that? And how could she even know until it happened? The possibility scared her. She had a sudden image from Harold and Maude, the scene where Harold was in the garden with Maude. Could Kate conceivably break the mold and tether herself to a seventy-year-old man?
“Either, I guess.” Will shrugged his good shoulder, a movement that looked strange and lopsided on a creature with only one arm.
Another story came to Kate’s mind—an old Seinfeld episode when Elaine dated Owen March, a respectable writer in his seventies with gray hair. Kate grinned remembering the jokes about young Elaine dating the older man. “I guess that would depend on how vibrant you are, to paraphrase a Seinfeld episode.”
“Seinfeld?”
“A TV show. It was on after you died. Don’t worry about it,” she said with a wave of her hand, changing her mind about trying to explain the show to him. How do you explain a TV show about nothing?
Flaming trees populated the terrain around them. Kate was familiar with this aspect of Chthonos by now, but it still made her blood curdle. The slope of the ground increased and Will began to stumble over his feet. Kate glanced at his legs absent-mindedly and then blinked, holding back a cry of shock. His feet were charred from the lake of fire—that was expected and she’d noticed as much when they first began crossing the alluvial fan. What she didn’t plan on seeing was the decay of his oozy, brown and gray flesh around his feet.
She swallowed and looked away. What was happening to him?
The slope increased and Kate’s breathing became labored. She licked her lips—her mouth was as dry as a convection oven. She paused and wiped perspiration from her brow. The profuse amount of sweat alarmed her.
“I need a drink,” she said, slipping out of her backpack. She unclipped the sword and opened her pack. “You need any?”
“Save it for yourself, but thank you, Kate. You’ve been so good to me. So kind. I almost feel as though I don’t deserve it,” Will rasped.
“Pish posh,” she said. She swallowed the last drop of water and knew that if she didn’t get off Chthonos soon, she would succumb to dehydration. The tiny amounts of water she’d had could hardly be enough. Thinking of it, she became aware of a dull pounding at the base of her skull. It echoed painfully through her bones and behind her eyes. Like a hangover. It was a bad sign of her dehydrated state. If only she’d taken one of those white stones Leonardo possessed that had refreshed her. As she shoved her empty water bottle back into her pack and began to zip it up, she heard a faint keening on the dry breeze and looked up. Back the way they’d come a black cloud had formed and was billowing toward them. Kate squinted. No. That’s not a cloud. It was a mass of dragons racing toward them.
“Crap,” she cursed, turning to see how much further it was to the mountain. Two hundred yards at least. She looked back toward the cloud of dragons. Black, gray, and red dragons flapped huge leathery wings, each downward thrust bringing them closer in leaps and bounds, covering great distances in very little time.
They’d never make it to the mountain before the dragons were upon them.
Will stood with his back to her, looking defeated in the slump of his shoulders and tilt of his lumpy, bald head. “I don’t believe it,” he said softly, awe filling his voice. “He’s unleashed his entire legion of dragons on us. Why? What does he want with us? Is this pride? Or is it more?” Will turned and regarded her with thoughtful eyes. “Is it you?”
Kate had no time to answer. She’d reopened her pack and pulled the last disc out. She stared at it. Blue and white, like a flattened Earth. The white seemed to move as though alive, as though mist before a wind. She ran her thumb across its smooth surface. “The last one. I don’t know what it is, but it should help us to the top of that mountain,” she said, tilting her gaze up at the mountain. Dark clouds swirled around the top. Lightning flashed continuously, perpetually, as though warning off curious hikers.
Will straightened to stare at the towering mountain, squaring his shoulders. “This is it, Kate. Our swan song and we’ve nothing left to lose.”
“Can you make it? Your feet . . . “
“Don’t worry about me,” he growled firmly in that bestial voice, not even checking to see what she was referring to. “I’ll make it or die trying.”
“That might be what happens,” Kate muttered. She kept the disc in one hand, strapped the sword back on, and hefted her pack onto her back with a grunt. She hated the thing by now, though it had saved her in many ways. It was heavy. Her shoulders and collar bones were chafed from where the straps rubbed against them—normally not a problem because she wore a shirt. But it was too hot for that here.
A chorus of cries rose from behind as the legion of dragons closed the distance on them. She shuddered. Kate knew they wouldn’t make it, especially not after the precious moments they’d lost as she got the last disc out. But they had to try.
She moved to Will’s side—the side with an arm; she sighed thinking of it like that—and the charred dirt crunched beneath her feet. She took his hand in hers and they set off at a trot. Will moved in a lope, like a wild animal, and Kate resisted pulling him faster, knowing he was probably giving everything he had. She swallowed a surge of bile down at the touch of his warty, grainy fingers. It was like gripping an animated clump of roots in her hand.
It’s Will. It’s him, and I love him.
The slope of the terrain changed slowly at first from a gentle rise with the flaming trees around them, into a vicious slant. If Kate fell, she’d have a hard time stopping. Nearby gnarled, black trunks snapped and cracked with their foliage of flame, growing out of the side of the mountain at bent angles, reaching toward the dim sun that seemed to call to them in shades of flame like their own. Ahead of Kate and Will a roar began, quiet at first, but with each faltering upward step it grew in size, the volume soon drowning out all other sound. Kate checked over her shoulder. The dragons were right behind them. Tips of wings slanted backward as their altitude lowered, bringing them closer to the elevation of Kate and Will.
Kate gasped and scrambled up the slope, moving between house-sized boulders covered i
n ash and char, spread out like they’d been deposited by a massive volcano. They didn’t speak—they had no breath for it. Soon the dragons lowered themselves around Kate and Will as they hid amongst a field of enormous rocks. They ducked into an overhang between a boulder and the searing ground as three dragons settled upon surrounding rock perches, shrieking primeval cries. They loomed, looking down like gargoyles. Kate’s breath came in panicked bursts that she could hardly contain. Will crouched beside her, appearing worse than ever. His face seemed to droop. His bright blue eyes were half covered by tired, slanting eyelids.
“We’re finished,” Will said, sadly.
Kate started, surprised to hear defeat in his voice, almost believing him. She shook her head. “No. No way. We’re almost there.”
“Where?” Will asked bitterly. “There’s nothing there. This is all an illusion. Like an oasis in a desert. We’re trapped. If we don’t surrender and let them take us back to Necropolis, they’ll kill us. I’m almost dead anyway. I’m burned, broken, armless.”
“But would you? Would you just go back to Cipher and keep living on this god-forsaken planet?”
“Kate, I’m—I’m so sorry. You’ve done so much for me. And now I know I haven’t been worth it.”
“Bull crap, Will. I’m sorry, but that’s bull crap. We’re not giving up. I’m not, at least.”
It was only then that she looked toward the mountain peak to determine how much further they had to go that Kate noticed a strange threshold. It was like a curtain of wind and it was just beyond the furthest dragon—a dark gray one with red-gold eyes. These dragons had no riders and they seemed to be waiting out Will and Kate, as though knowing which of the two parties—human or dragon—would win a standoff.
Kate exhaled a long, deep breath. “Will,” she whispered, pointing. “Look.”
He turned his tired eyes and saw what she referred to. “What is it?”
“I don’t know. Wind? Like a tornado?”
A Boat Made of Bone (The Chthonic Saga) Page 37
