“If we get through it,” Isaac corrected me. He took my hand.
I looked at Sebastian.
He stared at us for a moment like we were crazy people—which, by most people’s standards, we were—then shook his head. “Age has robbed me of the resiliency of youth, Jessica. If I went with you I would only slow you down.”
Firmly I said, “I’m willing to chance that.”
I could see indecision in his eyes. He’d never promised to go into the Badlands with us, I reminded myself, only to come this far and consider it. Would he back out now, and leave us to go on alone? Finally he sighed. “God’s blood. If you two disappear I’ll be the only one left for the Soulriders to question. I suppose even El Malo is preferable to that.” Despite his offhand tone, the message in his eyes was clear: I will help protect you as long as I can, but even I have my limits.
“Do you still have the stealth fetter?” Isaac asked. “That would help us get away from the tour group, at least.”
“That expired some time ago, I’m afraid. Recent events have been . . . unusually demanding.”
“All right,” I said. “So we do it the old fashioned way.” I looked around the observation platform to confirm that we were the only ones there. We were, but that was no guarantee one of the Soulriders wouldn’t come back at any moment to see why their prey was lingering. I took a few deep breaths, muttered a quick prayer, and started to climb over the railing. Isaac followed suit. After a moment, Sebastian did as well.
Sorry, Tommy. Looks like you’re not going to get that postcard after all.
17
EL MALO
TERRA PRIME
JESSE
WE MOVED AS QUICKLY AS WE COULD, anxious to get far enough that we could no longer be seen from the tour route. It was dangerous going. The closer we got to El Malo the worse visibility got, and since the last thing we wanted was to rush over the edge of the cliff in our haste, we were soon reduced to a snail’s pace, edging forward step by step as we tested each stretch of ground before committing to it. The closer we got to the cliff’s edge, the more loudly the wind roared, until talking at a normal volume was impossible. Periodically the delusional aspect of El Malo would make the ground seem like it was bucking and heaving, and no matter how much you told yourself that it was only an illusion, it felt so real you had to struggle to walk steadily. At one point I looked back and all that I could see was sand, which in a way was good; no one on the tour path would be able to see us anymore. As far as the Soulriders knew, we had just vanished. But I felt disconnected now, as if the world we’d left behind had ceased to exist. Our universe had been amputated.
We managed to find the edge of the escarpment safely, and stood on the very last bit of solid land, sand-laden winds whipping past our faces. The slope before us wasn’t vertical, but it was hellishly steep, and I couldn’t see more than ten feet down the face of it. We’d packed supplies to camp in the wild if we had to, so we had rope, but there was nothing to tie it onto; if we descended, we’d have to do so free style.
I looked at Isaac, and he nodded grimly. Sebastian mouthed, Are you sure? With a weak smile I shook my head: No.
I went first, lowering myself backward over the edge of the cliff, and Sebastian and Isaac did the same a few feet from me. There were horizontal ridges eroded into the sandstone that could be used as footholds, but they were shallow, and it took all my concentration to stay on them. I discovered it was nearly impossible for me to maintain a firm grip on the rock; my hands slid off as if it was slick with oil. With a sinking heart I realized the tour fetter was probably causing that problem, as it tried to keep my skin from coming in contact with any sand. I had to force my fingers into the rock, digging them into whatever small depressions I could find, fighting the effect of the fetter to maintain my grip.
Now that we were inside El Malo the wind was ten times as fierce, and the updraft along the cliff face threatened to tear us loose at any moment. My stomach scraped against the gritty slope as I inched slowly down it, trying not to let the wind get underneath me. The sound of the gale was so loud that I could not have heard my companions if they had screamed, and visibility was so bad that although I could still see them, everything else around me was just a red haze.
There was no going back now, whatever happened.
We climbed down for so long that my arms began to ache, my hands were scraped raw, and the roar of the wind in my ears made my head feel like it was going to explode. I remembered what Sebastian had said on the tour path, about his no longer having the resilience of youth, and I felt guilty that I had dragged him down here. But there was no stopping now. I tried to estimate how far we had to go, but though I knew the measurements of the slope from my topographical map, those numbers were an abstract thing, disconnected from reality. I had no idea how far we had come or how much further we had yet to go.
Suddenly I felt something strike the back of my hand. Startled, I looked down and saw a small red drop, like a spot of blood. Then, while I watched, another appeared beside it. And another. There were drops striking the back of my head now, and I remembered the viscous downpour in the Weaver’s compound. That rain hadn’t been real blood (we figured that out later from the stains it left behind) but this rain sure looked like it. I carefully lifted a hand to my mouth, hesitated a moment, then touched my tongue gingerly to one of the drops. It tasted like blood.
More drops were falling now, splattering down on the three of us, streaking the surrounding rock with crimson. If this rain started to come down with anything near the force of the Weavers’ rain, descent would become infinitely more dangerous. I tried to move more quickly down the slope, but almost lost my footing as a result and had to force myself to keep to a more cautious pace. The slope was quickly becoming slick with blood, and rain splashed in my eyes, making it difficult to locate footholds. I had to feel around for support, but though my toes found a promising crack, I couldn’t anchor a foot in it. As I struggled for balance my fingers began to slide from the rock; everything had become so slick that there was no traction to be had anywhere. To my horror, I felt myself slipping. Desperately I flattened myself against the slope, hands splayed out like a lizard’s, fingers digging into every notch or groove they could find. But it wasn’t enough. My right foot slid free of the rock, forcing me to shift my weight to the left, which in turn skewed my balance so that I lost that foothold, too. Suddenly I was sliding—then falling—ridges of rock buffeting my body as I grasped for any handhold that I could use to stop my fall, or at least slow it.
I could sense the ground rushing up at me though I could not see it, and when my legs finally hit bottom I tried to go with the impact and roll, rather than snap all the bones in my legs. Even so, I hit the ground so hard that the breath was knocked out of me. For a moment it was all I could do to lie there, praying that nothing was broken, sputtering as blood rained down on my face. A moment later a dark shape emerged from the sand cloud overhead, heading straight toward me; I managed to roll out of the way just in time. Isaac struck the ground with a gut-wrenching thump, then lay face down and silent. As I tried to rouse him I saw Sebastian descending; he alone had managed to maintain his grip.
“Isaac!” I called his name even though I knew it would do no good; it was impossible to hear anything over the wind. “Wake up!”
He coughed as he slowly lifted his head from a puddle of blood rain, then winced and grabbed his side. I prayed that he was just badly bruised and that nothing had been broken. Sebastian offered a hand to help me up, and I helped Isaac in turn, and somehow all three of us managed to make our way back to the slope, which we leaned against for support while trying to catch our breath.
No longer were we standing in a world that we recognized, but in a landscape so alien that the human mind could barely make sense of it. The crimson rain was falling in sheets now, and everything within sight was coated in it. A few meters ahead a stream was
forming, and it grew broader and deeper as we watched, its viscous current flowing like syrup over the ground. Soon it might be too deep to cross.
This is only a border phenomenon, I reminded myself. Once we got past this, the terrain would be flat, with no more need for climbing. We can do this.
I looked at Isaac; with his hair soaked in blood and his hand gripping his side he looked like a gruesome accident victim, but he nodded. Whether he was really okay, or just understood that we had to keep moving even if he wasn’t, I didn’t know, and didn’t want to know. Stopping was not an option.
Slowly we began to inch forward, moving directly away from the rock wall in order to head west. Every step was a test of balance on the slick ground, and when we got to the newborn river—now ankle deep—the current was strong enough to nearly knock us off our feet. Suddenly my foot shot out from under me, and I went down with a splash. A small red creature scuttled out of the water and across land, quickly disappearing from sight. A lizard? It was gone too fast for me to be sure. Then another appeared, and another. Now frogs were emerging, dozens of them. Hundreds of them. I got back up and we tried to keep moving, but the little creatures were all over us now, and I had to fight the reflex to swat at them each time they touched me, possessed by mankind’s instinctive horror of small icky things.
We managed to get across the river somehow, and onto solid ground again. I looked back at the cliff to make sure we were still headed in the right direction, but it was already invisible, masked by a torrent of crimson rain. The fetters that protected us from the sand did nothing to protect us from the downpour, and I had to hold one hand over my eyes as we moved forward, to keep the blood rain from getting in them.
Suddenly I felt a stinging pain in my arm. I thought that maybe one of the lizards had bitten me, but when I looked down I saw a large wasp had landed on my sleeve. Another one landed right next to it and immediately stung me through my shirt. Shit. I shook my arm to throw them off, cursing, but there were more coming now, and they started settling on other parts of my body. We must have disturbed a nest somewhere nearby. Each sting was like fire injected into my veins, and I wondered how many I could endure before their venom overcame me. Sebastian and Isaac were similarly outnumbered, and since the swarm seemed to be coming from one particular direction, we started running the other way. They followed us, stinging us on every inch of our bodies as we ran, until my flesh felt like it was burning and my vision began to blur. I knew that this many stings could kill a person, but we had no way to defend ourselves, could only try to escape the swarm before the wasps pumped a lethal amount of venom into our veins. We splashed through thick red blood puddles until our lower limbs were soaked in the stuff, staggering in pain. Still the wasps kept coming; whatever we had done to piss them off, they were clearly not in a forgiving mood.
Finally, though, the cloud of angry insects thinned a bit. We staggered a few hundred feet more, and then they were gone. I fell to my knees in exhaustion, my head swimming. My body felt like it had been stabbed by red hot knives, and God alone knew what would happen when all that venom spread through my body. But for now, at least, I was alive, and the wasps were gone. I felt a nudge on my arm, and turned to find Isaac holding a canteen out to me. I took it and drank deeply, which made me feel a little steadier, but as I handed the canteen to Sebastian I saw that my exposed skin was covered in angry red boils. My companions were in no better shape, their faces covered in red pustules. But that was not the worst of it.
We didn’t know where we were.
The realization seemed to come to all three of us simultaneously. In our wild flight from the wasps we’d lost all sense of direction, and now all we could see was crimson rain on every side. The ground was completely awash, so we didn’t even have the bloody river to guide us; everything looked the same now, one featureless, directionless hell. I looked upward for guidance, hoping the position of the sun would tell us something useful, but what little light was seeping down through the storm was so diffuse that we had no hope of telling what direction it was coming from.
We were lost.
I saw Sebastian rummaging in his bag, and to my relief he pulled out a small compass. Cupping his hand over it to protect it from the rain, he waited for the needle to settle. But it never did, just kept circling. After a few seconds he shook it, and this time the needle stopped, but if he moved the compass it changed direction and then stopped again. He tried a few more times with increasing desperation, but each time the result was the same. The compass wasn’t working. We were lost, hopelessly and irrevocably lost, with no way to figure out what direction we had to go in to escape this hell. And moving forward without that knowledge could bring us back to the cliff face, which we could never hope to climb in this deluge, or send us walking down the miles-long length of El Malo until sheer exhaustion claimed us.
I lowered my head, wiped the blood from my face, and tried not to let despair overwhelm me. There had to be a way out of here. The avatar girl wouldn’t have shown me the way if there wasn’t. Unless she was what Sebastian had once suggested—an adversary, not a friend—and her intent all along had been to lead me to my death. By causing me to die in this place, she guaranteed that the Shadows could not get hold of my corpse to use in their necromancy.
I’m sorry, I thought to the others. Guilt was a knife blade through my heart. Sorry I brought you here to die.
Suddenly something struck me on the head, hard. I reached up to feel the spot and was struck on my hand, then on my head again. It felt as if someone was raining down rocks on us. They were striking the ground on all sides of us, most disappearing with a splash into the crimson river, although a few landed in places shallow enough that I could see their upper surfaces gleaming whitely. Ice. They were ice. Glistening chunks of hail, with thin streaks of blood rain webbed across them, like the vessels in a human eye. The Badlands were stoning us to death.
Suddenly Isaac got to his feet. I looked up and saw him peering into the rain, his hands cupped over his eyes to protect them. He spoke a few words, but I couldn’t hear what he was saying. Was he trying to talk to Jacob? The ghost had been so terrified of this place earlier that I’d assumed he’d stayed behind. Even if he was with us, I wasn’t sure what he could do to help us.
Isaac looked at us, then pointed into the rain. Mustering what little strength I could, I struggled to my feet. Any direction was better than no direction. We staggered across the featureless landscape, flesh throbbing from all the wasp stings, poison surging through our veins. The hailstorm intensified, pelting us with lumps of ice so large that one of them nearly knocked me out. Isaac stopped us a few times and peered into the depths of the storm again before signaling us to move on. God alone knew where he was leading us, but if we didn’t reach safety soon we weren’t going to make it.
Suddenly I saw something so startling and wonderful that all other concerns were forgotten. A point of light was shining weakly through the rain, right ahead of us. What could it be but the sun? We began to stagger faster in that direction. At one point I fell and pain shot through my knee, but that didn’t matter. Just ahead of us was an end to this nightmare, and all we had to do was get there before this place murdered us.
And then suddenly the rain was gone, the hail was gone, the wind was gone. I fell to the ground and found it solid beneath me, blissfully dry. I looked at my hands and there was no blood on them, no boils, no wasp stings, only the normal bruises and scrapes one would expect from a bad fall. It had all been an illusion, the madness of El Malo possessing our minds. I was so furious I wanted to scream, and so relieved I wanted to cry.
It really could have killed us, I told myself. If we’d given up hope and surrendered to the illusion, we all would have died. That much was real.
“Jessica.” Sebastian’s voice was tense. “Look up.”
I did so, and saw six men on horseback arranged in a semicircle around us. They were wearing ble
ached animal skulls as masks and were pointing weapons at us, miniature crossbows that they held like pistols. I couldn’t see their faces because of the skull masks, but from their posture I had the distinct impression they were not happy to see us. Very not happy. Like, about-to-fire-their-crossbows-at-us not happy.
Shit.
18
EL MALO
TERRA PRIME
JACOB
RED. RED. Everything was red. Red sky. Red ground. Red gale winds sweeping across a barren red landscape. Ripples of red pain vibrating through the air, echoing the last thoughts of everyone who had ever died here. Disembodied voices screaming in crimson agony.
Even by the standards of the dead, this was a terrible place.
Jacob could see that Isaac was growing weaker by the moment. The other humans didn’t matter to him, but the thought of what would become of him if the young necromancer died filled him with terror. Right now Isaac was the only thing anchoring his ravaged spirit to the world of the living, allowing him to maintain some semblance of humanity. Without that anchor he would have nothing left to keep his identity intact. The few fragments of human memory he still possessed would be dispersed upon the wind like scattered leaves, and he would finally meet the fate that the Shadowlords had intended for him: total annihilation.
Don’t die! He hovered over Isaac in panic, desperate to do something to help him. Don’t leave me! But Isaac couldn’t hear him in this terrible place, and Jacob could do nothing but watch in helpless misery as the three humans fled from dangers his dead eyes couldn’t see, as they beat at their own bodies to drive off an unseen threat. Whatever nightmares the three of them were fleeing were invisible in the realm of the dead; how could Jacob help them if he didn’t even know what they were running from?