Wizard (34 page)

On balance, he feared buzz bombs more. Perhaps when he saw the wraiths, he would change his mind.

“They live under the sand,” Cirocco was saying. “They can run or swim or something, under the sand, and do it about as fast as I can run on the ground.

“Their existence is fairly precarious since water is poisonous to them. I mean, if it touches their bodies, it kills them, and it doesn’t take much to do it. They’d die on a sunny day if the humidity were much over forty percent. The sands of Tethys are bone dry in most places because the heat from below blasts the water right out of the ground. The exception is where Ophion goes under the sand. It flows in a deep bedrock channel, but it still pollutes the sand for ten kilometers in every direction as far as the
wraiths are concerned. So all of Tethys is divided into two totally separate tribes of wraiths. If they could ever meet each other, they’d probably fight to the death because they’re always fighting even in the smaller divisions that are marked off wherever water flows in times of flash flood.”

“Then it does rain here?” Robin asked.

“Not a lot. Say once a year, and just a trickle. It would have killed the wraiths long ago, but they can grow a shell and hibernate for a few days when they smell it coming. That’s how I talked to one; I came in here during a storm and dug one up and put him in a cage.”

“Always the peacemaker,” Gaby said with teasing affection.

“Well, it was worth a try. The thing about this route is that the mountains are pretty dry right now. The highway, as it happens, closely parallels the path of Ophion under the desert.”

“That was no accident, believe me,” Gaby said. “I thought it made as much sense as keeping to the high ground when going through a swamp.”

“Yes, that’s true. The point is, we might meet some wraiths up here. I’m hoping the cloud cover will keep them down, but I don’t know how long it will last. The good news is that they seldom band together in groups larger than about a dozen, and I think we have enough hands to fight off an attack.”

“I should have traded my gun in on a water pistol,” Robin said.

“Were you making a joke?” Hautbois asked, digging into her left saddlebag. She came up with two items: a large slingshot and a short tube with a handle and trigger and a pinhole in one end. Robin took it, squeezed the trigger, and a fine stream of water squirted from the end and sailed ten meters before hitting the sand. She seemed delighted.

“Think of it as a flamethrower,” Cirocco suggested. “You don’t have to be accurate. Shoot in the general vicinity and fan it around. Even a miss will hurt them, and enough shots will put water vapor in the air and drive them back underground. And don’t shoot it anymore now,” she said, hastily, as Robin squeezed off another shot. “The bad news is that there are no springs in Tethys, and what water we use in battle will be water we won’t have to drink later.”

“Sorry. What’s the slingshot for?” Robin was looking at it eagerly, and Chris could see she wanted to hold it and give it a try.

“Long-range stuff. Water balloons. You put one of these into the cup, pull back, and let fly.” Cirocco was holding something the size of a Titanide egg. She tossed it to Chris. When he squeezed it gently, a trickle of water ran into his hand.

Valiha was looking through her saddlebags, too. She removed a slingshot and a short club, which she stowed in her pouch, and another water pistol, which she handed to Chris. He looked at it curiously, trying to get the feel of it, wishing he could shoot a few practice shots.

“The sling takes skill, which I have,” Valiha explained. “Do as the Wizard says, do not be too selective in your targets. Just shoot.”

He looked up and saw Cirocco grinning at him.

“Feeling like a hero?” she said.

“Like a little boy playing at being one.”

“You’ll change your mind if you ever see a wraith.”

“I never said it worked all the time.” Cirocco put her hands on her hips and scanned the sky again, with no better result. Gaby watched her, feeling for the first time in years that irrational desire for the Wizard to make something happen. It did no good to know that Cirocco’s powers did not work that way. She wanted her to make it
rain
.

“She said she’d provide cloud cover,” Gaby pointed out.

“She said she’d try,” Cirocco corrected. “You know Gaea can’t control every detail of the weather. It’s too complex.”

“So she keeps saying.” Seeing the look on Cirocco’s face, Gaby kept the rest of her remarks to herself.

“We haven’t seen any wraiths yet,” Robin said. “Maybe the clouds were enough to scare them off before they broke up.”

“They’re probably down deep in the sand,” Hautbois agreed.

Gaby said nothing. Instead, she reached into Hornpipe’s saddlebag and took out a bladderfruit the size of a baseball.

The group was at the end of the foothills leading to the eastern slopes of the Royal Blue Line. Not far to the east was the central Tethys cable, and barely visible beyond it was the fine line of the Circum-Gaea Highway. A last outpost of naked rock formed a wide bowl filled with sand just in front of them,
its rim submerged in several places.

Standing on Hornpipe’s back, steadying herself with a hand on Cirocco’s shoulder, Gaby lobbed the bladderfruit in a high arc that brought it down in the center of the bowl.

The results were dramatic. Nine lines quickly diverged from the point of impact. There were humps at the heads of the lines and shallow depressions behind them that quickly filled in with sand. The humps moved as swiftly as cartoon gophers under a suburban lawn. In a few seconds there was no sign they had been there.

Cirocco had risen to her knees when the missile hit the sand. Now she slumped back to a sitting position.

“What do you want to do?” she asked. “Head on west to Thea?”

“No. I’m sure you recall who wanted to do this and who wanted to stay home.”

“And drink,” Cirocco added.

Gaby ignored it. “I’d look silly advising you to skip Tethys after all the time I spent convincing you to come here at all. Let’s see what we can do.”

Cirocco sighed. “Whatever you say. But look out, everybody. I want the humans watching the air. Titanides, keep an eye on the ground. You can usually see a spurt of sand before the wraiths come out onto the surface.”

* * *

When Robin was nine, she read a book which had made a lasting impression on her. It was about an old fisherwoman who, alone in a small boat, hooked a huge fish and battled it for days, through storms and high seas. It was not so much the struggle with the fish that had frightened her. It was the evocation of the sea: deep, cold, dark, and unforgiving.

She thought it odd that she had not recalled the book while crossing Nox or Twilight. It seemed even stranger that she would think of it now, in broad daylight, crossing the arid desert. Yet the sand was
a sea. It undulated in broad waves. In the distance, some atmospheric effect made it shimmer like glass. And beneath its surface were monsters more terrible than the old woman’s fish.

“I just thought of something,” Cirocco said. She was riding alone on Hornpipe, followed by Robin on Hautbois and Chris and Gaby on Valiha. “We should have gone north to the road, then back west to the cable. It would have been a shorter distance over dry sand.”

Robin recalled the map Cirocco had drawn. “But we would have spent more time covering flat ground,” she said.

“That’s true. But somehow I’m more worried about wraiths than buzz bombs.”

Robin did not say it, but she was, too. Though she was supposed to be scanning the sky, her eyes were constantly drawn to Hautbois’s hooves as they kicked up the loose grains of sand. She could not understand how the Titanide could bear it. Her own toes curled in her boots in sympathetic horror. Any moment now some hideous mouth would appear and engulf the Titanide’s forelegs. Except Cirocco had said the wraiths had no mouths, eating by directly ingesting through their crystalline carapaces. They did not even have faces… .

“Do you want to go back and do that?” Gaby called out.

“I don’t think so. We’re about halfway there.”

“Yeah, but we know there aren’t any wraiths back—”

As soon as Gaby stopped shouting, Robin’s heightened awareness told her that something was wrong. She had a pretty good idea of what Gaby must have seen, and it took only a few seconds of scanning the near side of the five-meter dune behind them to find the telltale grooves in the sand, deep in front, trailing away like the tail of a comet. She saw a dozen of them, then realized that was only one of five or six groups.

There was no need to raise an alarm. Robin saw Cirocco standing on Hornpipe, facing backward. Valiha increased her pace until she was beside Hautbois and Robin. Gaby was passing bladderfruit to Chris and Valiha.

“Hand me one of those,” Hautbois said, and Robin did, feeling the Titanide increase her pace. For the first time on a Titanide she felt some of the bouncing associated with horseback riding.

“Hold your fire for now,” Gaby said. “That’s as fast as they can move, and we’re staying ahead of them easily.”

“That’s easy for you to say,” Valiha said. Her mottled yellow skin glistened with foamy sweat.

“It’s time to switch,” Hautbois said. “Valiha, give me Gaby for a while. Robin, you move to the front.” Robin did as she was told, noting that she would be sandwiched between Hautbois and Gaby and, though it was painful to admit it, not objecting at all. The unseen wraiths frightened her more than anything she had encountered in Gaea.

“Just a second,” Gaby said. Ignoring her own order, she turned around and lobbed a bladderfruit into the path of one approaching group of wraiths. They sensed it while still fifty meters away. Some swung wide to avoid the poisonous area, while others vanished entirely.

“That’s got them,” Gaby said with satisfaction as she landed on Hautbois’s back. She settled in behind Robin. “The ones that disappeared went deeper in the sand, but that slows them down a lot. They can only move at top speed near the surface, where the sand is looser.” Robin looked back again and saw that the ones which had swung wide were only now resuming the chase, far behind the vanguard.

“How about it, friends?” Cirocco said, addressing the Titanides. “Can you keep up this pace until we reach the cable?”

“It shouldn’t be any problem,” Hornpipe assured her.

“Then we’re all right,” Gaby said. “Rocky, you’d better throw a small bomb ahead of us every few minutes. That ought to scatter any ambushes.”

“Will do. Robin, Chris, stop looking at the ground!”

Robin forced herself to look at the sky, still painfully clear and fortunately empty of buzz bombs. It was one of the hardest things she had ever done. It could not have been harder if her own feet were touching the hated sea of sand; like a backseat driver reaching for an imaginary brake, she found herself
lifting her feet in an effort to make Hautbois step more carefully.

The group had crested a dune and was starting down the other side when Cirocco called out a warning.

“Hard right, people. Hang on!”

Robin put her arms around Hautbois’s trunk as the Titanide dug her hooves into the sand, heeling over almost forty-five degrees as she turned. The ride was definitely getting bumpier as Hautbois began to tire. Robin caught a glimpse of a commotion at the foot of the dune, saw several of the telltale trails as wraiths fled from the bladderfruit that had suddenly exploded in their midst. A stream of water came from behind her, angled left, sizzled when it hit. There was a fountain of sand. For a moment a supple insubstantial tentacle writhed in the air. Where the water touched it, the thing hissed and shed glass scales that turned slowly in the low gravity. Robin freed one hand and took the butt of her water pistol in the other, peering around Hautbois’s broad shoulder. She squeezed the trigger and sprayed what turned out to be a harmless patch of desert.

“Save it,” Gaby cautioned. Robin nodded quickly, mortified that the gun was shaking in her hand. She hoped Gaby couldn’t see it. Gaby’s voice was calm and controlled and made Robin feel ten years old.

The Titanides had made a wide circle around the nest of wraiths Cirocco had exposed; now they were back on course for the Tethys cable. Robin remembered to look up at the sky, saw nothing, looked back at the sand, once more forced herself to look up. She did that for an hour while the cable base grew no closer. Finally she asked Gaby how long they had been running.

“About ten minutes,” she said, and looked behind them again. When she turned back, she was frowning. On the crest of a dune five or six hundred meters to the rear Robin thought she saw a wraith track. It paralleled the imprints of the Titanide’s hooves.

“They’re still back there, Rocky.”

The Wizard looked, frowned, then shrugged.

“So? They can’t catch us if we keep going.”

“I know. They must know that, too. So why do they keep coming?”

Cirocco frowned again, and Robin didn’t like that. Eventually Gaby reported she could no longer see the pursuers. Though the Titanides were tired, they agreed not to slacken their pace until the cable was reached.

Hautbois topped the final giant dune before the cable. Ahead Robin could see the land rising unbroken. She estimated the distance to the welcoming darkness between the strands at about a kilometer.

“Buzz bomb to the right,” Chris called out. “Don’t go down yet! It’s still a long way off.” Robin found it, banking around the eastern side of the cable, perhaps a thousand meters high.

“Back over the dune,” Cirocco ordered. “I don’t think it’s seen us yet.”

Hautbois wheeled, and in a few seconds the seven of them were prone together on the far side.

All of them but Robin.

“Get down, you silly idiot! What’s the matter with you?”

She was on her knees, leaning forward, her hands almost touching the sand.

She could not make them move. The sand seemed to writhe before her eyes. She could not make herself reach out and touch its loathsome heat, could not press her belly to it and await the arrival of the wraiths.