He finally released Vika’s shoulder, and she his as they straightened. He could tell by the look on her face that she had experienced the same thing he had coming to this brooding, reddish, windswept world. He let his hand drop away from Sang.
He leaned toward Vika and whispered, “What colors do you see?”
She looked around. “Everything looks red. At least my outfit fits right in.”
Richard nodded. “That it does.”
As he looked around, he could see from the clouds between the reddish rock formations that they were someplace high. Over the edge, down below them, the ground was obscured by the rolling, roiling clouds drifting swiftly by the high place where they were.
“Come,” Sang said to them. “We must get away from this dry place before the others come.”
He turned and made his way between some of the surrounding rock formations. They were striated in layers of different colors of dark brownish reds and looked like the wind had eroded the soft rock, making smooth, round depressions and curving edges. It was disorienting to look at.
Richard could see by the clouds down lower that they were high up in some kind of desolate, mountainous terrain. There was absolutely no vegetation. He remembered Sang saying that it was a dry place. The wind carried a lot of moisture and made a ghostly moaning sound through the strangely shaped rock formations. Apparently, the air, as damp as it was, was not damp enough for the Glee.
Trying to focus his eyes in this reddish world was giving him a headache. The sand he and Vika were on was the least red thing he could see.
“This is my home world,” Sang said as he waved an arm, urging them on, “the home world of the Glee. We have arrived safely. Now we need to get down out of this place.”
53
“Where is the device?” Richard asked, grabbing Sang by his arm before he could leave. “Is that it?”
Sang stopped and looked across the sand to what Richard was pointing at: something that definitely did not belong in this strange, windblown landscape of organic shapes.
There, across the way on the edge of the sand, stood a square piece of stone, each side about the length of his arm from his shoulder to his fingertips. It wasn’t tall. It wouldn’t quite come up to his rib cage. The top was slanted, so that if you stood before the stone at the edge of the sand on the other side, you would have been able to have a good look at that slanted top, but Richard couldn’t see it from where he was.
The stone looked smooth, but not smooth in the same way the sculpted rock all around them was smooth. This thing was absolutely square and straight on all sides. And while it was smooth, it was not polished like so much of the stone in palaces.
With everything some shade of red it was hard to tell what color it might actually be, but Richard thought it would be dull gray in his own world. There were markings all over the stone. He was too far away to know what kinds of markings they were, but he could see that they covered the entire stone.
Richard wondered if he should draw his sword and destroy the device before the goddess could send more Glee to his world.
As if reading his thoughts, Sang was gesturing urgently. “Hurry. We must get away from this place for now and get to those who side with me, against the goddess. I told them about you and said that I was going to see if I could get you to come back with me. They will be waiting.”
Richard and Vika followed Sang as he rushed off between the labyrinth of smooth, flowing shapes of the towering rocks surrounding the white sand. Once they were through the meandering gaps in the rock walls, the descent rapidly became steep. There was a path of sorts between the standing forest of rocks, at times with crude steps cut into the soft rock.
Below them, Richard could see a thick blanket of clouds covering the ground far into the distance.
As they moved down from the place with the device that sat at the edge of the area of sand, they gradually descended into that dark reddish cloud. As the visibility grew less and less, it was similar to moving down into clouds below high places in the mountains in Richard’s world, and having those clouds turn to a dense fog once you were inside them. It was the same here, except the fog was a dirty reddish color.
The farther down they went, the wetter the air became with mist. At some point, the mist turned to drizzle. Even before the drizzle, the heat and humidity had Richard’s shirt soaking wet.
Vika unbuckled some leather straps so that she could open her outfit at the neck. This was definitely not a place to be wearing leather, although the red fit right in. In fact, the red leather stood out brightly in the murky red world.
Sang looked relieved when they finally got into the heavier drizzle. He used his wrists to rub the water collecting on his arms around on his body, seeming to luxuriate in the wetness that he had missed for so long. He looked back at them and drew his lips back to show his teeth.
Vika glanced at Richard, wondering what it could mean.
“I think he is showing us a smile,” he whispered to her.
She gave him a look of silent incredulity.
If it really was a smile, it was about as grotesque a smile as he had ever seen.
After about a couple hours of moving quickly down slopes of loose scree that slid out from underfoot, over ledges and down through canyons of towering rock walls, and then over yet more rock, but this time harder and more jagged, they emerged from the bottom of the cloud cover into a strange, wet-looking world. The ground for as far as Richard could see was relatively flat. The only mountainous area was behind them, as was the one they had just climbed down from out of the clouds. Haze and drizzle made the visibility toward the horizon poor, but he didn’t see any hills or mountains off that way.
There was scattered, low vegetation among open swampy areas, and there were a lot of rather tall plants that resembled lush ferns. Mostly roundish rocks, most small, covered much of the ground where there wasn’t the water or areas of the low vegetation. Among those small rocks were a few smooth, round rocks no bigger than about the right size to sit on. The rocks covered most of the dry areas above the water. In fact, they littered the ground endlessly. Some of the expanses of water in the distance looked larger, but most of the water nearby was in patchy areas much like the swamps he had seen before, but without the trees.
In the distance were peculiar trees with long, crooked, bare trunks. High up each tree had a single, dense clump of leaves. Widely spaced here and there, the trees seemed to march across the landscape beneath the cloudy red sky. They were the strangest-looking trees Richard had ever seen. None, though, were very close.
Flocks of birds moved through the air like current in a raging river. As some swept down closer, he could see that they weren’t actually birds. They were large bats flying in colonies.
As they reached the bottom of the climb, Sang walked right into the first body of water he could get to until it was up to his neck. Richard could see several snakes writhing just below the surface of the water. Sang stretched out and swam for a bit, as if to refresh himself.
“Sang! There are snakes in the water!” Vika called out in alarm.
Sang kept swimming for a moment before turning back to them. “Don’t worry. The snakes are friendly.”
“Friendly? What if they bite you?” she asked.
“They eat small insects. They don’t bite us and they do not have venom, like the snakes in your world. The only animals that sometimes cause harm to us are the boars. They are big and mean, and sometimes even kill Glee.”
“Boars?” Richard asked. “You mean you have wild boars?”