The Infernal Lands (The Aionach Saga Book 1)

by J. C. Staudt

Ellicia had scrambled backward into the depths of the crevice and was looking on in horror as the sanddragons crowded in. “What should we do?” she asked, a tremor in her voice.

  “I don’t know. I never thought there’d be so many.” Daxin gave the loop that had held his skinning knife a habitual fondling and confirmed it empty. The shotgun was in his bag beside him, the saddle behind that. The frame of wooden poles where Ellicia had hung out his hood-scarf and tunic was gone. His mare was only a few fathoms away. If he could calm her down and get her to come to him, maybe they could get out. But with the rain still coming down outside, leaving now wouldn’t do him any good. As much as he hated to admit it, letting the sanddragons eat their fill of horse meat might be the thing to make them leave.

  They began to hear the sounds of the other villagers’ terror; an initial barrage of frightened screams had faded to a murmur of frantic whispers and mewlings. Daxin’s mare was sidling along the back wall now, wading chest-deep, eyes still white with fear. Daxin slipped his bandolier over his bare shoulders and dragged out his shotgun. He slid his fingers over the grip, feeling the comfort of the oiled ironwood beneath his fingers.

  “Are you gonna use that thing?” Ellicia wanted to know.

  “Get as far back as you can and cover your ears. These are hand-loaded rounds. This thing could blow my face off if I packed one of them wrong.”

  “Oh, Luther. Be careful.”

  The mass of tarragons had dispersed. Some were slithering out of sight toward the other end of the crescent-shaped strip of land. Daxin could hit more than one with a single shot, maybe, but at this range the wounds were less apt to be fatal. He raised the gun and sighted down the barrel, considered warning the others before he pulled the trigger, but then thought better of it. More shouting would only create more confusion.

  Holding the gun in both hands, heart throbbing in his chest, he took careful aim and shut his eyes. It was worth being less accurate if it meant keeping his eyesight. So much for his ears, though; the echo in here was going to be excruciating.

  The gun chugged and kicked, the sound more deafening than he’d imagined. The villagers gave panicked shouts, the lizards hissed, and Daxin’s mare spooked and plunged through the deep water toward land. A sanddragon on the shore snapped at her, sending her splashing backward the way she came. The lizard looked too afraid of being trampled to follow her into the water, if indeed it could.

  One of the sanddragons in the path of Daxin’s shot was squirming, and blood was trailing from holes in the neck and leg of another. Daxin flicked the lever and fired the second barrel. There was a flash so bright he could see it through his eyelids. The kick was even stronger this time, but when he opened his eyes, the gun hadn’t burst, and there were more bleeding sanddragons.

  He snapped open the breech and yanked out the spent shells, nervous hands fumbling with the hot brass. The shells fell to the water and floated, and he replaced them with two more before the last tendrils of smoke had cleared. There was chaos in the cave; the mare’s fearful sloshing below and the sanddragons’ wounded thrashing and a flurry of women’s screams coming from another alcove. Daxin saw the reason for the screams before he could fire again—two men inching along the narrow crescent. Biyo and Eivan, cutlass and knifespear, poking and jabbing with the points of their weapons to keep the sanddragons back. Both men were so afraid, Daxin could see them trembling across the distance. Coff it, you idiots. There’s no need for this. One of you is as brave as the other is stupid, he wanted to say. “Get back,” was all he managed.

  Biyo gave him a weak smile and waved by peeling a few fingers from his white-knuckled chokehold on the cutlass. Daxin snapped the breech closed and raised his gun just as half a dozen more sanddragons detected the two men and started over toward them. Daxin squeezed off the first round, flicked the lever, and followed up with the second, not stopping to see what he’d hit. The cave echoed and left his ears ringing louder. It was as if someone had begun to blow a whistle behind his skull with no intention of stopping. The air was so smoky now that he could only just see the sanddragons hissing and flailing about on the shore.

  Biyo and Eivan lunged forward, taken by a sudden surge of confidence. Daxin’s volleys seemed to have served only to encourage them. He busied himself reloading, then batted a hand to clear the smoke as the two men clashed with the slithering mass of lizards. Where Biyo was cautious and deliberate, Eivan was aggressive and quick with his makeshift spear, gritting his crooked teeth as he slashed in and drove the point home again and again. The big lizards didn’t go down easily, and soon the two men were finding it tougher to hold their ground. There was nowhere Daxin could aim without the risk of hitting them, so he drew the machete and slid forward until he was dangling by the meat of his buttocks.

  Facing even a single sanddragon was folly, he knew. Facing a dozen through a pool of caustic groundwater was far beyond that. He let a moment pass, giving himself the opportunity to heed his better judgment and listen to that voice in his head again. You’re being a jackass, it told him. Biyo and Eivan were done being heroes, it seemed; they were backing away now, the advancing green tangle craving after them. In that instant Daxin hated them both, if only because putting themselves at risk had made him consider doing the same. It was Biyo he was worried about; Biyo was the one the villagers would miss if he were to fall prey. Eivan could make a meal of himself for all Daxin cared, though his heroism had curbed Daxin’s distaste for the moment. He cursed their ignorance, wondering how they’d survived in the Skeletonwood for so long without him.

  Daxin let himself slip off the ledge before he was sure he wanted to, bending his legs to cushion his fall without letting his head go underwater. When he stood, the water rose to his sternum, cold and murky, and he felt his bare feet sink into an inch of sludge. Shouting every insult he could think of, he raised his arms and clanged the machete blade against the gun barrels as he made his way toward shore. A few sanddragons broke off their pursuit of Biyo and Eivan, and stood guarding the shoreline like inanimate gargoyles, venomous saliva dripping from hungry jaws.

  Daxin’s skin was tingling by the time he’d risen to his thighs, his stomach the color of a lightburn. He stood less than two fathoms away from the shore, close enough to get a good look at the damage he’d done. A number of the sanddragons had sustained significant wounds, but few seemed to have been hampered by them. When the first sanddragon leapt into the water and began to swim toward him, the heroic surge that had gotten him off that ledge became a wave of regret. Stupid really must be contagious, he thought, and he had to laugh at the absurdity of it all.

  Daxin could hold his own in a fight, but he was no warrior—not like his brother. From time to time, he still marveled at his escape from Vantanible’s men that day in the scrublands. It seemed so long ago now, and he had only gotten more worried about Toler finding him every day since. If the eye wound he’d given his brother hadn’t killed him, it had made him angrier—that much he could guess with relative certainty.

  Half a dozen sanddragons stood on shore waiting for him, staring at him and flicking their tongues as though they were playing audience to his performance. He loosed the first barrel in the direction of the nearest lizard’s head. With his left hand, he hacked at the one swimming toward him, making clumsy splashes until he connected with two consecutive blows. The first crashed through the middle of the dragon’s skull, leaving a gash from nose to crown; the second cut it through the eye and dislodged its jaw by the tendons. The sanddragon writhed, then grew listless, and began to sink.

  The sanddragon he’d shot gave a furious twitch before it slumped and lay still, its head bleeding and full of holes. The others crowded around it, flicking their tongues and sensing the end of its life. As Daxin stood watching, they began to devour their dead cohort, hinging their jaws at grotesque angles to rip away chunks of flesh with their fangs. Daxin didn’t remember reading that they were cannibals, but he was glad for it.

  There was no time to let
his sickened relief sink in; Eivan and Biyo were still being hunted, the dead sanddragon having lured away scarce few of their pursuers. They’d run out of room to flee and were stabbing frantically at the oncoming mob, their courage dissolving with each inch of ground they lost.

  The tingling in Daxin’s legs was verging on pain now. He whistled for his mare, and climbed onto her back when she came splashing over. She was unbridled, so he took her by the mane and gave her a gentle easing in the direction he wanted to go, avoiding the feeding sanddragons for a berth further up the shoreline. He’d never fired a shot from this horse’s back before, but judging by the way she’d spooked earlier, he thought better of it.

  He reloaded, then dismounted on a vacant patch of land and emptied both barrels into the pile of cannibalistic sanddragons. You’re as big a fool as these two, he scolded himself, switching to his machete. He chose his targets as he ran, foreseeing every slash and cut before it happened. The distance proved to be too far and his timing too late, however. The sanddragons had struck both men about the legs numerous times with teeth and claws by the time Daxin entered the fray. He danced around them, hacking at heads and necks even as Eivan fell against the cave wall and Biyo stumbled down onto one knee.

  Daxin kept at it until the great lizards began to turn on him; many were wounded, but more than one was still too many to face by himself. As the ravening dragons began to clamber over cutlass and knifespear, Daxin knew there was nothing more he could do for them. Across the way, the cannibal sanddragons were losing interest in the corpse and wandering away from it. Daxin heard their guttural noises behind him as he fled back along the narrow strip of land and leapt to horse. His mare splashed into the deep water, but this time the sanddragons didn’t stop when they reached the shore. They were diving, flinging themselves forward with powerful forelegs and slithering through the water like slow green missiles.

  When he reached the ledge, Ellicia lay curled into a ball at the back, staring through wide eyes as Biyo and Eivan’s screams rang through the cave.

  “Come with me,” Daxin said, tossing his bags and saddle over the mare’s back and cinching the straps tight.

  Ellicia cowered and shook her head.

  “You have to come now,” Daxin said, holding his hand out to her.

  She didn’t budge; she only sat watching through eyes bright with dread, as the bodies glided through the water, cold green scales run through with muddy brown.

  Daxin checked the lizards’ approach and knew it was time to go. His legs were as red as beets and he could still hear the rain coming down in sheets outside, but he hadn’t been bitten, and neither had his mare, as far as he could tell. “If you won’t come, then you must stay there,” he told her. “They can’t get to you as long as you stay there.”

  He hesitated, perhaps a second too long, deciding between gallantry and self-preservation. He wanted to tell Ellicia everything, but the time for that had passed. How could he even begin to explain that he wasn’t who he said he was? How could he tell her where he was going? And what would she do if he told her the reason why? There was no time for any of it, so he spurred his mare and trudged along the wall until the water was shallow, forcing the swimming sanddragons to alter their course. He emerged onto the shore, skin sore and dripping, and forged a path over a bare section of beach. The predators were swimming too slowly to catch up.

  Daxin ducked down and hugged his mare’s neck as she squeezed through the entrance passage, slipping and sliding up the mud-stained slope all the way to the surface. Rain was still falling on the above-world, but the worst of the storm had passed to the south and been swept out over the Horned Gulf. Daxin donned his leathers, for what meager protection they offered him from the rain, then rode hard. He tried to convince himself there was no way he could’ve stayed, and he knew it was a lie. It would’ve been suicide, and his horse was too important to sacrifice; he would never make it where he was going on foot with a bad ankle. But how would that have sounded, telling Ellicia he cared more about a stupid animal than about her and all the people in Dryhollow Split?

  Daxin fled across the Skeletonwood until he found a cranny beneath a high rock that was large enough to shelter beneath. There he raised a tarp and set out the few containers he had that were strong enough to collect water without breaking down. The rain had eaten his underclothes to rags, and his mare’s flesh looked as if someone had been scrubbing her with a hard pumice stone instead of a brush. When he ran a hand over his scalp, the hair came away in long gray strands.

  The ground was too wet to lay on, and it was too wet for a fire, so he made a passable seat out of his saddle and saddlebags and spent the night drifting in and out of sleep. There were brief moments of dream in which he heard Eivan and Biyo screaming, their voices shrill with terror. They pleaded with him for help, but his body was paralyzed with fear and he could only watch as the lizards devoured them. He saw more sanddragons tearing apart his brother’s corpse, but when he rushed in to save him, Toler only looked up at him with vacant black pits where his eyes should’ve been. Toler’s voice came through the empty holes, though his lips never moved. She left you, Daxin’s brother told him. She left you. Poor Dax. You’re looking so thin and gray these days, and she left you. Then Toler began to scream, that same haunting, voiceless sound Daxin had caused with his skinning knife that day in the scrublands.

  In another dream, there were people starving on the high rock above where he’d made his camp, flood waters rising all around them. He took aim and shot each of them, one at a time, and watched them fall into the water, where Toler and his shepherds swam like carnivorous fish and pulled them under.

  He was drenched when he woke from the last dream, covered in sweat and rain water and fluid from his red, weeping skin. The sky was still pink with the first pre-dawn light, and the rain had stopped. Without a tunic or underclothes, the leather had stuck to him, and the moisture was making it chafe, so he got undressed and toweled himself off with the robe in his bag.

  Before the light-star was full in the sky, he’d set half a dozen traps within a horizon of his camp and had built a small fire to boil his water and cook the cactus meat he’d harvested. He drank from one of his waterskins until it was empty, then pissed in it. Later he would purify the urine into drinking water, if he ran low.

  Daxin spent the day in the shade while he let his mare graze over what she could find nearby. He stayed there another night and the day afterward, gathering provisions and checking his traps when the heat was low. He set off at dusk on the following day, letting the darkness cover his advance, using the cool of night to conserve his strength. Though his ankle still creaked and his skin was raw and stinging, he was determined that nothing would get in his way this time. When he brought his mare up to speed and the wind was whipping over him, he knew he was finally back on his way toward achieving what he’d set out to do, all those weeks ago.

  CHAPTER 37

  The Blind-World

  The Halcyon was a crippled gargant, laying half-sunken at port with its hull ablaze. Its keel bumped the shoal with each wave as torrents of flame engulfed it. The fire had already taken its toll, though calaihn and ikzhehn alike were still racing about to quell the spreading flames. There was a terrible aching in Lizneth’s head and a coil of sick in her stomach as they set her on the docks; the air felt too hot to breathe, and the planks were hard and unforgiving beneath her.

  Zhigdain, the big-eared gray-and-white, had rushed into the captain’s quarters moments after Curznack left, administering the last two vials of purple liquid to Lizneth and Fane. Then he and the others had carried them off the ship. The venom had inundated Lizneth in waves of increasing severity, so the last few minutes had passed in a blur of half-awareness. She could feel the antidote working now, lifting the narcosis from her like thin layers of shadow.

  “Welcome back to the world, cuzhe,” said Bresh. “We were worried you wouldn’t make it.”

  “She wasn’t so bad off,” Zhigdain sa
id coolly. “The antidote was in her before the venom had a chance to take hold.”

  “You acted valiantly,” Dozhie said, favoring him with a shallow nod.

  “Where did Fane go?” Lizneth asked. Her lips and tongue felt swollen and clumsy, as if they didn’t belong in her mouth.

  “He’s right beside you,” Dozhie said, laughing.

  Fane was, in fact, lying beside her on the dock, his head propped on the same woolen blanket, his eyes fixed on the scuttled boat. His gaze met hers, and the hint of a smile played behind his longteeth. “You ought to be more careful, getting yourself stabbed like that,” he said, grinning weakly.

  “I thought that was the end for both of us,” Lizneth said. She looked up at Zhigdain. “How did you get those vials from Curznack?”

  “I slew him,” Zhigdain said. “I saw you both go into the captain’s quarters while we were fighting Qeddiker. When Curznack came out, I intercepted him at the gangway as he was trying to leave the ship. He was still hobbled from his wounds, and weaker still from the poison you put in him. A bend in his back and too much lag in his step. Otherwise, I’d have been no match for him in a fight. I put my sword through his neck and he died choking on his own blood, if it pleases you to know. He kept trying to speak, clutching at his belt, holding onto it like he thought it would stop him from drowning. You’d told us about the poison, so it didn’t take long for me to connect the pieces. I’m just glad I got to you in time. I don’t know how long it’ll be before the effects wear off, but we should be going now… we’ll help you walk until you’re back to normal.”

  “This venom is strong,” Fane said. “There’s no promising we’ll ever be normal again.”

  “Oh, Fane,” Bresh said. “Must you be so cynical?”

  “A firm sense of cynicism never hurt anyone,” said Fane, smiling through his discomfort. “It’s the secret to happiness, you know. You’ll let yourself believe all kinds of hogwash if you don’t strike every whimsical thought with a good dose of logic. Expect the worst, and today will be the best day of your life.”