CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
In Which the Appetite of Dragons Is Tested
The wind no longer whistles, but shrieks. It’s no longer cold, but deathly frigid. The rain no longer spatters, but fires down frozen from the heavens like a hail of meteorites. The ice melts swiftly, but so powerful is the wind that when a squall has passed, the sodden clay of the ground is dried in minutes, and peels away in crumbling sheets. As a result, the Blood Mountain Pass is a mess of sucking mud and stinging grit, with no sign of the pavement that once adorned it.
“I see the way now,” Radmer had said to the waking men. “If we hurry, we may yet miss this morning’s rain of stones.”
But had they? Would they? Overhead, the sky is a deep shade of gray-green that Bruno has never seen before. Still, despite the obscurants in his way—the dust and hail, the unruly clouds themselves: he can see structure in this unending storm. It’s a squashed toroid, a stretched donut, an elongated treader wheel nearly a hundred kilometers wide—nearly two hundred kilometers north to south—hovering flat against the landscape. And at half the footprint of the Imbrian Ocean, that’s a sizeable blemish for a world barely forty-four hundred kilometers around! On Earth, the equivalent storm would cover the whole of Greenland, or Europe from Gibraltar to Sardinia to the ports and vineyards of Bordeaux.
“When the pillar buckled and the neutronium plate slipped,” Radmer calls to him from two treaders over, “the gravity in this hex dropped by nine percent. It doesn’t sound like much, but it created . . . this. The low-pressure system might be circular if not for the Blood Mountains on the west and the Johnny Wang Uplift on the east, squeezing it, pushing it north and south in a big oval.”
While still piloting his treader, Radmer attempts to gesture his way through the half-shouted explanation. “Now that you’re here, you can see it: the air rushes in along the ground, and then suddenly it weighs less. More importantly, all the air above it weighs less, so there’s less pressure holding it down. It wells up. Then it hits the tropopause and flattens out, rolling back the way it came and then cooling and sinking, condensing out moisture. It’s a big, rolling ring, like a stationary smoke ring, except that Coriolis forces—weak as they are—pull it around into a cyclone. Add the turbulence and static of air passing through these mountains, and you’ve got a real mess!”
Indeed, the Blood Mountains are lower than the Sawtooth, but every bit as jagged. This world simply hasn’t had time to wear them down. And thanks to grit and sleet and the occasional uprooted shrub, Bruno can see the turbulence they create: crack-the-whip sheets and rolls of whirling air snapping off every peak, slicing through every valley. He hasn’t seen lightning yet, but the air is sharp with the tang of ozone.
“Are we going to survive this?” he asks casually, raising his voice above the howling wind.
“Most groups turn back around at this point,” Radmer answers. “Some vanish, or return at half-strength. Some probably find their way in and then die of starvation, rather than brave the tornadoes again. Only Zaleis the Wanderer has been to the eye of the storm and back, and lived to tell the tale. And he started with a group of five.”
Then, in a more personal tone, “How are you holding up?”
“Well enough,” Bruno says, not sure how else to answer.
“Sore?”
A barking half laugh. “No! Victims of explosive decompression are sore. I’m, well, there isn’t quite a word for it. The body hurts badly, but the real wounds are in the soul.”
“I could’ve told you not to try that,” Radmer chides. “Especially not before a big push like this. People end up in Special Care from that shit. Some of them permanently. You wouldn’t blow out an airlock and call it training. You wouldn’t smash your treader into a wall and call it training. If you survive, yes, you’ll have learned a thing or two. But there are better ways. All practice—especially repetitive—involves the brain stem. It has to!”
“He did all right,” Natan says, with a bit of warning in his tone. “I’ve seen better on the first try—I’ve seen a lot better—but with years of practice he could be one of us.”
Bruno has lived long enough to recognize this as high praise indeed. But he can also see the truth in Radmer’s criticism; blindsight is a shortcut, for people whose lives are miserably brief. The effect is real, yes: he can feel a new strength, a new swiftness in his limbs. They have a mind of their own now—quicker and surer than his own, yet subordinate to him. With practice, he could summon or dismiss it at will.
But with longer practice—decades, centuries—he could achieve a comparable grace without the . . . side effects. A little slower, a little smarter, a lot less damaged inside. “Disfigured” is the word that springs to mind, when his mind considers its own sorry state. The drugs have done something to him, something bad. Prolonged abuse of them would create . . . well, Dolceti. Violence addicts. Affable men and women with a zest for life, but a strangely sterile view of death and fear and pain, and no hope for a normal existence. In their own way, the Dolceti are as different from human beings as the Olders themselves. Bruno can appreciate that now. And fear it.
“He’ll be all right,” Natan says.
“Better than all right,” Zuq echoes.
But their definition of “all right” clearly differs from Bruno’s own. If he were going to live forever he’d probably feel a bit cheated, like he’d lost a finger and could never grow it back. As it is, with this sense of welcome doom hanging over him, he’ll simply accept the scar, and the costly insights that come with it.
To Radmer he says, “It’s no wonder you wanted Dolceti for my bodyguards. Who else would be brave and stupid enough to follow you into that?” He nods toward the pass ahead, where a trio of dust devils are whipping together into a single large vortex.
“Shit,” answers Radmer.
The vortex whirls straight down the pass, straight toward the riders.
“The dragon!” someone calls out, in mingled worry and glee. “The Shanru Dragon! See the mark she leaves! The dragon’s tail upon the ground!”
“Get down!” Radmer calls out. “Get off, get into the ditch!”
But the Dragon of Shanru is swift, and falls upon the treaders before all the riders have dismounted and fled. One Dolceti is pulled right off his mount, and another is whisked from the ground, and both are flung high into the air, twirling and tumbling, and then dashed against the cliff wall high above. Their bodies fall, limp and lifeless, against the cliff’s sharp crags.
Bruno, who reached the ditch in time, feels the tornado pass right over him with no worse effect than a sandblasting, a slam against the ground, a breathless moment of popping ears and eyeballs bulging against tightly closed lids. The Dragon’s shriek and chuff are deafening, and then they’re gone, and for his fallen comrades Bruno momentarily feels only a deep contempt. Because they brought it on themselves. Because they stopped to look at the vortex bearing down on them, when they should have dropped and crawled.
“Fools,” he mutters under his breath. And only then thinks to feel ashamed.
Soon there is lightning crashing all around, and except for the occasional errant gust, the shrieking wind is firmly at the riders’ backs. The Dolceti are more careful on the Dragon’s second visit, suffering no additional casualties, but after the roadway’s third scouring Radmer proclaims, in a voice barely audible above the storm, “These twisters are dropping down into the pass from above! Bigger every time! Our luck won’t hold; we’ve got to seek higher ground!”
“The treaders won’t climb these walls!” Bordi says. “Too steep, too pointy!”
“I know; we’ll have to leave them behind!”
“Are you insane?” someone asks. But Radmer just looks around at the Dolceti, his expression answering the question for him: No, just desperate.
“This moment had to come! Sooner or later, we’ll have to press forward on foot. The question is, how many people do you want to lose before we try it? Load up your packs, everyone! Food, water, bivvies, nothing else. Oh, and weapons!”
Well, obviously, Bruno mutters, in a voice even he cannot hear.
In another three minutes they’re all scaling the canyon wall, following Radmer single-file along the uphill slope of jagged basalt layers, like arrowheads sprouting from spearheads sprouting from swords and fallen, leaf-shaped monoliths. The points and edges have been sandblasted dull—no one seems in danger of cutting off a hand or foot—but with even a minor fall the jags are sufficient to snap a human spine, to stave in a skull, to shatter a leg and leave its owner stranded. There could be little doubt that the group would press forward, leaving any such unfortunates to their fate. Except for Bruno and Radmer, of course; they would be rescued at almost any cost. But that was hardly fair, for they were as close to unbreakable as a human body could be made.
There had, of course, been even ruggeder body forms out in the colonies—trolls and whatnot, shot through with diamond—but they had sacrificed their softness, their sensitivity, their very humanity. And although many such creatures had returned from the stars in the gray days after the Queendom, none had survived even into the Iridium recovery that preceded the Shattering. One by one they’d succumbed to disease, to old age, to the gloom of loneliness, and their genomes had rarely bred true. Even the Olders bore mortal children, yes? When they bore children at all. In the colonies, and indeed in the Queendom itself, the art of reproduction had decoupled itself from any natural biology. And it suffered grievously, when those technical crutches were kicked away.
Still, nature is clever where the propagation of species is concerned, and a love of breeding can welcome many a wayward subspecies back into the gene pool. Whether by chance or by design, these “humans” of Lune are a clever synthesis of the many human-derived forms Bruno recalls from those days. And they are human, far more than they’re centaur or angel or mole. As such they’re frail, and he fears this terrible country may be too much for them.
For that matter, it may be too much for Olders, else Manassa would be more than a half-believed legend. Had only one person truly made it there and back in one piece?
A message crawls back along the line, shouted from man to man over the howling of restless atmosphere: “We don’t dare climb to the top of the ridge. The winds are fiercer up there, and we’d be a prime target for lightning. We’ll proceed about two-thirds of the way up the canyon. Move cautiously. Step on the big rocks, not the small ones; they’re more stable.”
Bruno sends his own question up the line: “How much farther do we have to go?”
A minute later, the reply comes back: “Two full kilometers to climb, across ten horizontal. After that it’s downhill into Shanru Basin. But the winds will keep getting worse until we cross the eyewall, twenty kilometers from here!”
Ah. Well, here’s another great surprise, another place Bruno never imagined ending up. The benefit of a long life, yes: a large number of very large surprises. Moving glove-over-glove and boot-over-boot like this, across jagged, icy rocks, they’ll be lucky to manage a kilometer an hour. And what sort of shape will they be in when they finally burst through into clear air? What if they have to fight? What if they have to think?
He supposes at first that the final hours will be the hardest, but then he begins to suspect that nothing could be worse than the battering they’re receiving right now. The wind here carries not only dust and grit, but occasional bursts of sharp gravel as well. Dragon or no, Bruno is nearly ripped from the rock face many times by errant gusts. Dragon pups? At other times he’s slammed against it, until his skin is raw and his bones are aching inside their carbon-brickmail sheaths. His arm screams where the robot’s sword cut it; it has healed, yes, but it will never be the same.
But the trudge goes on and on and on some more. The sun must be well up into the sky by now, but here beneath the roiling thunderheads it’s dark as dawn and gray as a Fatalist ghoul. No more messages are passed. Even thoughts are drowned out by this unending noise.
When they reach a flat, minimally sheltered area and the line around him begins to break up, Bruno at first worries that they’re going to lose somebody. Single file, people! he thinks at them furiously. But then, as the Dolceti get their bivvy rolls out, he understands: they’re stopping to rest. Not to eat, certainly not to cook, but to huddle together in a miserable mass. One guard manages to lose his bivvy into the wind, and ends up curled in with Mathy, the surviving Mission Mother.
Bruno manages to hang on to his own, although its tent top rips as he’s climbing in, and finally tears away altogether. It scarcely matters; the freezing rain finds its way in horizontally under the rock shelf, under the tents, and soaks all the bags anyway. Fortunately, the material they’re made from seems to retain its heat even when wet. Resting here seems a laughable concept, like falling asleep in a barrel rolling down a jagged slope, but incredibly, Bruno remembers nothing after that frazzled thought.
Nothing, that is, until the firm hand of Radmer shakes him awake. His eyelashes are partially frozen together, but he forces them apart and sits up. Radmer—looking miserable as a scarecrow, with icicles hanging from the chin strap of his helmet—says something to him which he can’t make out. He answers back with something even less coherent. But all around him the Dolceti are packing away their bivvies, and he must do likewise. To stay here would mean certain death.
Soon they’re on the move again, and Bruno can’t guess what time of day it is, or how far they’ve come, or how much longer they have to go. Indeed, his mind can scarcely grasp these concepts at all; the world is reduced to wind and pain, to slow, careful movement between the rocks. When he closes his eyes—and he closes them often now, against the frigid sting of wind and sleet—he still sees rocks. These are his thoughts: rocks, and more rocks, and the occasional step or grasp to carry him from one to the next. Time has no meaning at all.
Still, there does come a point where he notices they’re going downhill. This by itself is not unusual, for the pass snakes up and down many times as it rises through the mountains. But the trend is down now. They’ve passed the summit, and are on their way down into the Shanru Basin. They have reached the halfway mark. Which only means that the worst is still to come.
Of the terrible hours after that, Bruno later remembers nothing at all. His first clear memory is of the eyewall, which resembles a tornado, except that it’s so large—fifteen kilometers large!—that it appears flat, like a genuine wall. It’s so tall that it seems to have no structure at all, no top, no twist or curl. It’s just a straight, opaque, heaving wall of flying debris, from dust and fines to sharp rocks the size of his head. Blowing up, more than laterally. Is this the main source of the region’s gravel rains?
He notices another thing as well; the wind has changed somewhere along the way. No longer frigid and damp, it’s now warm and very dry. He can no longer blink his eyes; they’ve dried open in a crust of mucus. When did that happen? In fact, the air grows warmer with every step. The eyewall itself must be as dry and hot as an oven; he can feel the heat radiating off it. From friction? From the sudden compression of unwilling air against the storm’s unyielding center? Certainly, the sound of it is louder than anything Bruno has ever experienced. Like an ongoing explosion, the eyewall is a vertical slice of hell. How deep can it be? How long can a human survive all this?
“Are we going through there?” he shouts to no one. And of course they are. Where else is there? Even staggering like drunks, what other chance or choice have they got?
Blast.
And somehow they do get through; Bruno will later remember the experience like a nightmare: in fragments. Smashed against a rock, then clinging desperately to it as he’s lifted off his feet! Smashed against the ground, then scrabbling for something, anything, to grab on to as the vast suction takes hold of him. A dizzy airborne moment and then, miraculously, a hard landing on his knees. That’s all. He later suspects that he managed to close his eyes, and in fact had them closed the whole time, for the memories are visceral rather than visual.
In any case he emerges onto a plain of sand, beneath a sky so blue and bright it seems to burn his optic nerves. The sun hangs over the eyewall’s far side, illuminating the storm’s interior like a vast, spinning paper lantern.
He staggers forward, becomes aware of a figure ahead of him, a figure behind. He wants to rest, to drink a sip of water and then collapse into a dreamless coma. He doesn’t care if he ever awakes. But there’s brick-sized debris raining down all around him, so he staggers on a little farther, a little farther. The bedrock beneath his tattered boots gives way to dirt, and then to sand that feels as soft and cool as a wellstone bed.
Finally he comes to a gathering place, a hollow in the sand where raggedy human beings have accumulated. He throws himself down among them and takes that longed-for sip of water. Another person plops down beside him, and then another. And there must be some part of his brain that remembers thought, remembers mathematics, for he takes in the scene with a glance and says to himself, “Our twenty Dolceti are down to just ten. We’ve lost six more along the way.”
It’s his last thought for a long, long time.