The thing that looked like a rocky outcrop turned out to be the remnant rim of an ancient crater and he climbed onto it gratefully, glad to be away from the sucking sand. Moments later, he topped the rise and felt his stomach descend to his boots.
Below him was a nightmare scene. The crater formed a natural amphitheatre. What he’d taken earlier to be a single campfire now turned out to be several, casting a dull red glow that illuminated the area all too clearly. The ground was a seething mass of vaettirs, crawling in absolute silence around a creature that could have come straight out of Stephen King’s head. It was as pale as the vaettirs themselves, but easily larger than ten of them put together, a monstrous maggot with mandibles, antennae and claws. It pulsed visibly as it lay like a beached whale in the centre of the amphitheatre.
Henry stared blankly, trying to remember if he had ever seen anything so repulsive in his life. He prayed this wasn’t – simply couldn’t be – Lorquin’s draugr, but somehow knew it was. At first, the vaettirs seemed to be milling round it aimlessly; then he noticed patterns of behaviour. Some of them carried handfuls of a soft, waxy substance that they pushed into the draugr’s mouth. The giant creature made no attempt to attack them, but chewed like a contented cow.
Other of the vaettirs seemed to be cleaning the draugr’s huge nocturnal eyes. They brought bladders of some liquid, probably water, and poured them onto what looked exactly like sea sponges, which they used to wipe down the great orbs at irregular intervals.
Henry watched the feeding and the cleaning for some time before he noticed that a small group of vaettirs, whose skins seemed to have taken on a pinkish hue, were clustered at the rear of the draugr, gently massaging its abdomen. Moments later the body convulsed suddenly and a glistening sac discharged from under the creature’s tapering tail. The vaettirs swooped on it at once and carried it away triumphantly. The draugr had laid an egg.
The whole process was both repulsive and fascinating, like a nature documentary about insects on TV. In fact, now he thought about it, Henry suddenly realised he was watching something like the workings of an anthill. The draugr was the vaettirs’ queen!
He was jerked out of his reverie by the cooing of a nightwent.
Henry went cold. When he’d agreed to this mad mission he’d imagined himself chased by a handful of vaettirs, which was scary enough. But what was down there was more than a handful. There had to be fifty or a hundred vaettirs, at least. Lorquin couldn’t possibly expect him to call that lot down on his own head. And nobody could expect him to survive if he did.
The cooing came again.
They wouldn’t all chase him anyway. That was a colony down there. Even if he jumped up and down and waved, they wouldn’t all chase him. Some would be sent out to investigate, like soldier ants. The rest would continue to service their queen. Which wouldn’t be any good to Lorquin at all. Not that the boy would ever kill a thing the size of the draugr anyway, but if he tried, his chances of getting away alive were absolutely zero with dozens of vaettirs around. So it made more sense for Henry not to move upwind and let some vaettirs chase him. What he needed to do was give young Lorquin a stern talking-to, like an elder brother, and show him how stupid this whole escapade was. And if it really was tribal policy to send children out to kill monsters surrounded by monsters, then he’d jolly well have to go back with Lorquin to his tribe and show them how stupid…
The cooing came a third time and now the nightwent was sounding distinctly impatient.
The trouble was, he didn’t know where Lorquin might be hiding now. The bird sound floated on the air as bird sounds do, without the least indication of where it came from. And if he didn’t give the kid the big-brother talking-to, he was just the sort of plucky youngster who might take it into his head to attack the entire colony. Henry almost groaned aloud. If he diverted some of the vaettirs, it would make things a little better for Lorquin, even though the whole thing was still a suicide mission. But if he didn’t do anything at all, maybe Lorquin wouldn’t attack the draugr, in which case they were both safe and could creep away quietly and he could give Lorquin the talk.
Henry heard the cooing again. This time it definitely came from somewhere below him. Lorquin was moving towards the vaettirs. Henry actually did groan aloud now, but the sound made little difference. Lorquin had left him no choice. As usual.
Henry climbed to his feet and made a stumbling run upwind. Below him, he could see heads jerk up as the vaettirs caught his scent. Some might chase him, some might not. Either way, he’d probably be caught. It didn’t matter now. Like much else in his life, the whole thing was a mess.
‘Hey you!’ Henry screamed down at the milling vaettirs. ‘Come and get me!’
Fifty-Five
It occurred to Blue eventually that she might have made a bad mistake. Despite the southward-pointing carriage she had the uncomfortable feeling that she might as well be lost. The device was a small, one-person self-propelled chariot with an adjustable canopy for shade. In deference to the way the citizens of Buthner felt about magic, its motive power was clockwork: fifteen minutes’ hard work with the crank handle each morning and it would trundle along happily for the rest of the day: not fast, but with a steady pace that ate up miles. But its most impressive aspect was the life-size figure at the back. By means of ingenious gearing Blue couldn’t even begin to understand, its outstretched arm always pointed southwards, as a guide to the way home.
With crumbling slabs of compressed food and a vast supply of dehydrated water tablets, she could survive in the desert for months, but it remained a problem nonetheless. The wilderness was, quite simply, immense, far larger than she’d ever imagined for all the Arcond’s talk of it taking up four-fifths of the country’s land surface. Worse still, it was absolutely featureless. She’d been travelling for almost three days now and every single moment of the journey was the same as every other. Around her stretched the plain of sand, a waterless ocean that reached the horizon in every direction, a mind-numbing expanse of eternal dunes. If the Arcond was right about his ancient ruins, she had spotted none of them. Worse, there was not the slightest sign of nomads.
What if she never found them? What of Henry then?
So far she had been travelling directly north, deep into the heart of the desert. But that had been an arbitrary decision. Madame Cynthia could tell her no more than she had already done. Mr Fogarty was dead: no new visions would be forthcoming, nor any half-forgotten details of his old ones. She was alone, without guidance, and nothing was working out!
The thought was tinged with guilt, something that had been growing in her for days. Perhaps Pyrgus and Madame Cardui had been right all along. Perhaps if she hadn’t interfered, they would have rescued Henry by now and saved the Realm from the plague. Perhaps the future she’d propelled them into held no hope of happy endings. Perhaps she should have minded her own business!
On impulse, she pulled the carriage round so that it was no longer heading due north, but northwest. One direction was as good as any other and so long as the figure pointed, she would be able to find her way out of the desert eventually.
The impulse made no difference. For close on half an hour, she travelled through the endless sands. Blue jerked the carriage round again, more sharply this time. It was a random movement, but a glance at her pointing figure showed she was now travelling due west, towards the setting sun. Travelling west through an unbroken sea of sand.
She thought of stopping to eat something, although she was far from hungry. Madame Cardui had warned her she must eat and, more importantly, drink at regular intervals to ensure she maintained her strength. The trouble was, her compressed food tasted musty and her dehydrated water tablets, while they maintained the fluid balance of her body, did almost nothing for the dry mouth and constant thirst. She decided to eat when the sun finally set, then perhaps press on just a little further before it grew fully dark. She pushed the handle of the carriage listlessly, then caught sight of something on the eastern horizon.