He would join his companions and their hapless predecessors not in crossing the surrounding sickly, bloodless terrain, but in becoming a part of it.
Always dispute what is happening around you, his father had told him. Never, ever, stop questioning everything and anything, even that which you perceive to be indisputably and undeniably real, for reality can play all manner of unpleasant tricks on the cocksure. Ehomba had grown up skeptical and politely suspicious of the world around him. As he was now.
Think! he screamed at himself. What has happened here? What is happening here? Ahlitah saw a herd of prey animals, and the salt became prey animals. Hunkapa Aub saw himself reflected in the salt, and the salt became his reflection. You see your family, the thing you most want to see.
But Simna ibn Sind had walked off toward a salt castle. Other travelers and animals could have wandered into this ghastly place and become embalmed by the salt, creating so many of the strange and now ominous formations surrounding him. But a castle couldn’t just pick up and move. Therefore what they were seeing was being drawn, had to be drawn, from the hidden places of their own minds. Simna might dream a castle full of willing concubines, but he would want to take possession of the castle first. So the salt had, by inimical magicks unknown and unimaginable, risen up from the lake bed, precipitated out, and formed itself into a small castle for him to inspect. If he entered it fully, Ehomba sensed, his friend would never come out.
Reaching down to scratch an itch, his fingers came away with tiny white grains beneath the nails. Employing every ounce of energy and every iota of determination he could muster, he wrenched himself away from the heart-rendingly realistic figures of his family. As he did so, a cracking sounded beneath his sandals as he broke free of the encrusting salt that had already begun to crawl up his legs. He was free again, but for how long? And what of the fate of his friends?
No! he shouted silently. He had not brought them this far to lose them now, so near to their goal. Realizing that the nearly empty bottle of oris musk would not be enough to shatter the saline illusions the accursed landscape had precipitated around his friends, he fumbled anew with the contents of the backpack. But what could he possibly use? There was nothing, nothing he knew of that was stronger or had a more powerful effect on the living than oris musk.
No, he thought as he stopped digging through the jumble at the bottom of the pack. That wasn’t true. There was something more powerful. Furthermore, he had plenty of it.
Slinging the pack around to where it rested comfortably against his shoulders once again, nestling against the twin scabbards, he unlimbered his water bag and tucked it firmly beneath his right arm. It was nearly full, brimming with the stuff of life hard-won in sinister Skawpane. Carefully he removed the stopper and let it dangle by its cord from the lip of the bag. The contents sloshed gently in response to his actions.
Turning his back on his imploring but inanimate family, he walked up to where the black litah stood frozen in the midst of suffocating halite. Taking careful aim with the mouth of the bag, he brought his right elbow and arm roughly against his side, squeezing the bag sharply. Water sprayed from the opening to drench the big cat. It struck his mane and shoulders, ribs and legs. It got in his eyes and nose.
For the first time in many long moments, Ahlitah blinked. Thanks to the water that had gone up his nostrils, this was followed by a sneeze of truly leonine proportions. Running down his flanks, the precious water dissolved away the salt. Even as the big cat was cleansed, fresh salt was trying to precipitate out around his feet, to make its way up his legs and trap him anew.
Shaking his head, the litah sent a shower of sparkling halite crystals flying in all directions. “What happened?” Wrinkling back his lips as only a big cat can do, he spat disgustedly to one side. “What have I been eating?”
Ehomba pointed out the places where the uncannily saiga-shaped lump of mineral salts showed claw and tooth marks. “Everyone likes a little salt with their meal, but there are limits. While you were trying to eat the salt, the salt was starting to eat you. It was not meat that was salted—it was your thoughts.” Steeling himself, he turned and gestured in the direction of the three sculpted figures of his family. Now that he was fully conscious of the slow, terrible death they symbolized, he was able to look at them more clearly and see them for what they really were. This time they looked less like Mirhanja and his children than they did like three small pillars of accumulated whiteness.
Revelation proved sanguinary for Ahlitah as well. “I can’t believe I was chewing so single-mindedly on that.” His snarl of antipathy and contempt echoing across the lake bed, he brought one massive paw around in a great arc and decapitated the nearest formation. Lumps of shattered salt went skittering across the hard, crusty ground.
“Bring your water.” Ehomba spun on one sandaled foot. “We have to free the others.” He stamped down heavily as he walked. “And keep moving. Do not linger too long in one place. As swiftly as the salt distorts and affects your mind, it also clutches at your feet.”
It took the contents of an entire water bag and part of another to free the hulking Hunkapa Aub from his saline entombment. When confronted with the reality of his mirrored self in salt, he could not be dissuaded from pushing it over. It smashed to bits, leaving a pile of salt rubble where moments before had stood a perfect likeness of the shag-covered man-beast.
Continuously brushing salt crystals from their arms and legs, they hurried on to the knoll of salts that had assumed the guise of a small castle. Breathing hard, Ehomba slowed before the sculpted entrance—but of his good friend and companion there was no sign.
Scratching ceaselessly as he fought off the persistent salt, Hunkapa Aub turned a slow circle. “Not see friend Simna.”
“I don’t smell him, either.” Head back, the black litah was sniffing repeatedly at the air. “Between the new dampness and the old salt it’s hard to scent anything else.”
“Keep trying.” Grateful for the moonlight, Ehomba strained to see through seams in the salt formations. They appeared to be taunting him, mocking his efforts to penetrate their encrusted secrets, laughing silently from origins he preferred not to contemplate.
His eyes widened slightly as he realized what must have happened. Whirling to face the blocky, crenellated formation once more, he aimed the water bag he was holding and directed Hunkapa Aub to do likewise with his. Bereft of hands, Ahlitah could only look on and watch.
Water gushed from the mouths of both bags to play over the flanks of the consolidated castle. Minarets dissolved into soggy lumps, and then the lumps themselves became components of thin briny rivers that flowed down the flanks of the formation. Turrets and spires sagged and crumbled, melding into the walls as they liquefied beneath the soaking assault.
It took more of their supply than the herdsman cared to think about, but halfway into the castle they finally caught a glimpse of Simna ibn Sind’s backpack. Still riding high on the swordsman’s shoulders, it gleamed dully in the moonlight. The surrounding, enclosing salt imparted a sickly blue cast to the exposed portions of his skin.
Moving closer and wielding the shrinking water bags like firearms, Ehomba and Hunkapa Aub dissolved the salt from around their friend’s encrusted body. He had been completely entombed. Salt plugged his ears and formed a crust over his eyes. But his nostrils were still unblocked, though barely, the advancing salt having been held back by the moisture breathed out by his lungs.
Stiff and unbending, his body was dragged out into the open air and laid gently across Ahlitah’s back. Lying him down on the ground was not contemplated, as it would just be returning him to the grip of the relentless, inimical salts. Water from still another bag was poured over him, drenching his body and clothing, soaking his face. When he finally revived, the herdsman did so sputtering violently and shaking his head.
Sitting up, he wiped animatedly at his face and took a long, deep breath. “What happened? I feel as if I’ve come back from the land of the d
ead.” Rising to his feet, he suddenly pointed and yelled, “That cursed castle tried to kill me! It grabbed me and tried to suffocate me!”
“Salt you down is more like it.” Careful to keep moving his feet and arms, Ehomba proceeded to explain. “I think that if we had been five minutes longer in melting you out, the salt would have filled your nose and stopped your breathing. And your heart.”
Wiping at himself as if he had just emerged from hiding in the depths of a cesspool, the swordsman found himself prone to a momentary case of the shakes. He was prepared to face death, had been ever since he had taken up the sword, but suffocating alive was among the least pleasant ways imaginable for a man to expire.
“Away from this place,” he declared with a sweep of his arm. “Let’s get away from here.”
His companions needed no urging. The matter of their suddenly and severely depleted water supply, which they had worked so hard to obtain in Skawpane, was not mentioned. Commentary was unnecessary. Having utilized the greater portion of it to free themselves from the grasp of the alkaline prison, it would now have to be rationed severely, and quickly replenished. In the waning moonlight, the silhouette of the Curridgian escarpment loomed before them more meaningful than ever.
There would be water there, Ehomba knew as he moved forward at the run. The snowy peaks promised as much. The only question was, how high up and how far back would they have to go to find it?
Behind them, fantastic contours and extravagant shapes stood silent sentinel over the salt plain. They did not move, and none uttered so much as a whisper. Rising from pools of rapidly dispersing and evaporating water, crystals of halite and gypsum sparkled like diamonds as they precipitated out of the chloride-heavy solution. In most places such a wealth of crystals would have been zealously guarded and protected, for salt was necessary to the perpetuation of life.
Only here, in this forsaken and barren place between mountain and misery, had it turned deadly.
XIX
The Drounge
It did not know how old it was. It did not know where it came from; whether mother and father, egg, spore, seed, or spontaneous generation. It could not remember when it had begun or how long it had been wandering. It did not know if there were others of its kind, but it had never seen another like itself. It knew only that it was in pain.
For as long as it could remember, which might very well be for as long as Time was, it had been so. Without any specific destination in mind it had wandered the world, its only purpose, its only motivation, to keep moving. It sought nothing, desired nothing, expected nothing—and that was what it got. On its singular plight it did not speculate. What was the use? It was what it was, and no amount of contemplation or conjecture was going to change that. To say that the Drounge was resigned to its condition would be to understate the situation grossly. Alternatives did not and had never existed.
There wasn’t an antagonistic particle in its being. By the same token, it was too compassionate to be friendly. Where possible, it kept its distance. When contact with other living things was unavoidable, as was too often the case, it rendered neither judgment nor insensibility. It simply was, and then it moved on.
Most creatures could not see the Drounge so much as sense a disturbance in their surroundings when it was present. This was to the benefit of both, since the Drounge did not especially want to be seen and because it was not pleasant to look upon. Occasionally, the sharp-eyed and perceptive were able to separate it from its surroundings. Whenever that occurred, usually in times of stress or moments of panic, screaming frequently ensued. Followed by death, though this was not inevitable. Murder was the farthest thing from the Drounge’s mind. When life departed in its presence, apathy was the strongest emotion it could muster. How could it feel for the demise of others when its own condition was so pitiable?
For the Drounge was a swab. It roved the world picking up the pain and misery and wounds and hurt of whatever it came in contact with. A vague amorphous shape the size of a hippopotamus, it humped and oozed along in the absence of legs or cilia, making slow but inevitable progress toward a nondestination. It had no arms, but could with difficulty extrude lengths of its own substance and utilize these to exert pressure on its surroundings. Other creatures, unseeing, often ran into it, giving rise to consequences that were disastrous for them but of no import to the Drounge.
Open, running sores bedecked its body the way spots adorn a leopard. Scabs formed continually and sloughed off, to be replaced by new ones ranging in size from small spots to others big as dinner plates. They were in constant lugubrious motion, traveling slowly like small continental plates across the viscous ocean of the Drounge’s body. Foul pustules erupted like diminutive volcanoes, only to subside and reappear elsewhere. Cuts and bruises ran together to comprise what in any other living being would have been an outer epidermis.
None of this unstable, motile horror caused the Drounge any discomfort. It did not experience pain as others did, perhaps because it had never been allowed to distinguish pain from any other state of being. For it, it was the way things were, the circumstance to which existence had condemned it. It did not weep, because it had no eyes. It did not wail, because it had no mouth. Though capable of meditation and reflection, it did not bemoan its fate. It simply kept moving on.
Unable to alter its condition, it had long since become indifferent to the aftermath of its passing. As well to try to change the effect of the sun on the green Earth, or of the wind on small flying creatures. Incapable of change, it felt no culpability in the destruction of those it came in contact with. It was not a matter of caring or not caring. A force of one of the more benighted components of Nature, it simply was.
It did not matter what it encountered. Large or small, the consequences were similar, differing only in degree depending on the extent and length of time that contact was made. The Drounge acted as a sponge, soaking up the world’s injuries and pain. And like a sponge, when something made contact with it, it leaked. Not water, but hurt, damage, wounds, and death. The process was involuntary and something over which the Drounge had no control.
Why it kept moving it did not know. Perhaps an instinctive feeling that so much pain should not long remain in any one place. Possibly some atavistic urge to seek a peace it had never known. Survival, reproduction, feeding—the normal components of life did not drive or affect it. Staring relentlessly forward out of oculi that were not eyes in the normal sense, but which were misshapen and damaged and bleeding, it existed in a state of perpetual migration.
Gliding over a field of grass, it would leave behind a spreading swath of brown. Fire would have had a similar effect, would have been cleaner, purer, but the Drounge was a collage, a mélange, a medley of murder, and not an elemental. In its wake the formerly healthy green blades would quickly break out in brown spots. These would expand to swallow up the entire blade, and then spread to its neighbors. It was not a disease but an entire panoply of diseases, a veritable deluge of afflictions not even the healthiest, most productive field could withstand. After a few days the formerly serene grassland or meadow would stand as devastated and barren as if it had been washed by lava.
Sensing solidity, a herd of wild goats brushed past the patient, persistent Drounge as it made its way northward. Tainted blood and other impure drippings promptly stained their flanks. Some hours later, their thick hair began to fall out in ragged clumps. One by one they grew dizzy and disoriented, dropping to their knees or keeling over on their sides. Tongues turned black and open lesions appeared on freshly exposed skin. Pregnant ewes spontaneously aborted deformed, stillborn fetuses, and the testicles of rams shrank and dried up.
Eyes bulging, black tongues lolling, the toughest and most resilient of them expired within a day. Vultures and foxes came to feast on the dead, only to shun the plethora of tempting carcasses. Something in the wind kept them away despite the presence of so much easy meat. It was a smell worse than death, more off-putting than disease. The fennecs twitc
hed their astonishing ears as they paced uneasily back and forth, keeping their distance yet reluctant to abandon such a tempting supply of food. Vultures landed near the bodies, fanning the air with their dark, brooding wings. Accustomed as they were to the worst sort of decay, a couple took tentative bites out of the belly of a stinking ram.
Within minutes they were hopping unsteadily about. Feathers began to fall away. The hooked, yellow beak of one bird developed a spreading canker that rotted the face of its owner. Within an hour both hardened scavengers lay twitching and dying alongside the expired goats.
Enormous wings spread wide as the survivors took to the air. For the first time in their relentlessly efficient existence, they had encountered something not even they could digest. The foxes and hyenas slunk away as if pursued by invisible carnivores armed with immense claws and fangs. Only the insects, who could sustain the losses necessary to make a meal of the deceased, found the ruminant desolation to their benefit.
Field or forest, taiga or town, it was all the same to the Drounge as it proceeded on its never-ending march. What happened when it passed through a city was unpleasant to the point of becoming the stuff of nightmare legend. Some called it the judgment of the gods, others simply the plague. All agreed that the consequences were horrific beyond imagining.
People perished, not in ones and twos or even in family groups, but in droves. Symptoms varied depending on what afflicted part of the Drounge each encountered. Wounds refused to heal and bled unstoppably, until the unfortunate casualty shriveled like a grape left too long in the sun. Lesions blossomed like the flowers of death until they covered more of a sufferer’s body than his skin. The daily clamor of the community; the give and take of commerce, the fluting arpeggios of gossip, the chatter of small children that was a constant, underlying giggling like a symphony of piccolos, was entirely subsumed in shrieks of pain and wails of despair.