“You’ve ridden one?” asked Scorio.
“Bunch of times. They’re sweethearts. Calm, dependable, fast. Long as you keep them drunk on mana.” Rharvyn clapped Scorio on the shoulder and pushed past, moving toward the entry gate. “You’ll see.”
Scorio exchanged a glance with Naomi and entered the corral. Dozens of the huge beetles were being outfitted, and members of their company were already climbing the rope ladders or simply leaping up to the palanquin on top.
Taron stood to one side, Fyrona making marks on a scroll as different gear was brought in. “Scorio! We leave within the cycle. Get a seat up front. You don’t want to be at the back when the dunerunner gets moving.”
Scorio nodded, and with Naomi warily moved round the back of the dunerunner. It was completely still, indifferent to the loads being lashed down on its shell. They climbed the rope ladder and reached the top. Some twenty feet off the ground. The palanquin was sturdily built but cramped; four benches ran down its length, each long enough for five, with the outer two designed so that your feet hung out into the air.
A handful of other Great Souls had already claimed their spots, so Scorio and Naomi set their packs in the netting just behind the pilot throne and sat.
The corral was filled with shouts, boisterous laughter, and Great Souls bidding each other goodbye. Wordless, Scorio and Naomi watched as hundreds upon hundreds flooded in, mounting their beetles and taking their places.
The air was charged. Plassus came by with his entourage. He stopped at each company, conferred with the Pyre Lord in charge, moved on.
“He doesn’t look depressed,” said Naomi softly.
The Charnel Duke let out a belly laugh and shook a finger warningly at a sheepish looking Pyre Lord Scorio didn’t recognize.
“An act?” Scorio leaned forward, chest against the narrow plank that ran down the length of the palanquin and acted as a railing.
“Or he’s made his peace with death,” said Naomi.
“That, too.”
Members of their company boarded their beetle and number “9” just next to them. Wesanin fussed below, clearly in charge of number “7”, checking everything, calling out for anything that was missing, cursing at every delivery that failed to live up to his standards. More water barrels were rolled in and lifted into place. Another six glowing Bronze eggs were found, and only then did Wesanin declare himself content and climb up the beetle’s face, using its horns for handholds and swinging up to sit in the pilot’s chair at last.
Taron hugged Fyrona and leaped to stand on one of number “9’s” horns. “Here we go, Company 16!! Who’s ready to end this war?”
The Great Souls let out a halfhearted cheer, and Taron leaped up to number “9’s” pilot chair and settled in.
The other beetles were rousing themselves, fully loaded with warriors. Plassus was on a particularly massive black specimen that was banded with crimson, and this one maneuvered its way first out of the corral and onto the packed sands.
What followed was careful jostling and patient negotiating of traffic as the other beetles streamed out after him. Soon some twenty dunerunners were arrayed in a rough arrow, with Plassus at the tip.
No speeches. The Charnel Duke raised his fist, gave a wordless yell, and Scorio’s heart leaped at the sound, so full of defiance and savage fury that it seared the air. Wesanin pulsed mana into the beetle, and it lurched forward, its huge, segmented legs working as it skittered lightly across the sands, indifferent to the huge load it carried.
Scorio swayed back and forth, and twisted to watch the war camp fall away. It was half-torn down already, with those behind preparing to set out for Vermina’s wing that would attack the far side of the Triangle.
The dunerunner raced along the trough between the dunes, and to Scorio’s surprise it kept accelerating. Soon the arid air was gusting by, drying what little sweat the sun had elicited, and the rise and fall of the fiend’s gait began to feel familiar.
Scorio couldn’t help it—he grinned at Naomi, who, to his delight, grinned back.
And that’s when Plassus activated his power and spread it across their entire phalanx of dunerunners.
Having reached what looked to be their maximum pace—perhaps the speed of a galloping horse—Scorio felt a wave of potent power sweep over them all, enveloping the beetle, the palanquin, its passengers, and somehow they went faster.
The beetle’s legs flickered as it raced along, tireless and unperturbed, with number “9” up ahead, barely churning up dust as it sped along. Another came behind, part of another company, and occasionally they rose up to cross a dune, the whole palanquin lurching violently to one side then righting and dipping down the other, revealing the twenty or so beetles that were coursing across the desert in a swarm.
After a while the more experienced Great Souls relaxed; Rharvyn lay back and dropped a hat over his face, while a handful of Flame Vaults made a big show of going to sleep, as if this expedition were nothing special. Nyrix and Penaela focused on a chess game, each piece sporting a peg at its base which slotted into a hole, and Naomi closed her eyes so as to resume her attempts at mastering the Delightful Secret Marinating technique.
For his part, Scorio couldn’t quite get over the feeling of delight and awe at speeding through the Bone Plains on the back of a dunerunner. His favorite moments were whenever they crossed a dune’s peak to the next valley over, for then the entirety of the Bone Plains would reveal itself, an endless labyrinth of serpentine ridges that ran toward the horizon, with the occasional geographic feature capturing his attention: a ruined fortress listing over on its side and seeming to be carved out of a single vast boulder that had been tossed into the sands; a forest of iron spears rusted to deep brown that ran for a mile, each almost forty yards tall, angled toward the south as if flung from miles away a century ago; a huge archipelago of floating sandstone coral about which flitted thousands of tiny fiends of endless variety that seemed to prey on each other and dart about the floating reef.
The hours crawled by. Wesanin occasionally climbed down to fetch a glowing egg larger than his chest, and this he would carry to the beetle’s head and jam down on a great hollow spike that emerged from the dunerunner’s face and through which it would drink the Bronze.
Water was served every hour, with warm carafes of tin passed down with cups attached by tiny chains; it tasted silty and metallic, but Scorio always drank at least three or four.
There was no sign of their stopping. The plan, he knew, was for their wing to race through the entirety of the day, and come dawn of the next morning half their number would peel away to move toward a great hive that was located just a hundred miles short of LastRock itself. Two hundred Great Souls would position themselves to assault this bastion of the Blood Ox’s fiends.
Company 16 and the remaining part of Plassus’ army would move to within forty miles of LastRock and, there, position themselves to strike at a series of shattered towers that had stood along the edge of the Bone Plains since time immemorial. They’d been left empty during Jova’s previous tenure as the Lady of LastRock, but the fiends had made of them a place of power, and it was said that tens of thousands of their number dwelled in the ruined buildings and the endless rooms that were tunneled into the rock beneath them.
It felt a dream. Swaying, rising and falling as the dunerunner all but flew along the desert, Scorio felt himself adrift from his own reality. The sky darkened and meals of cured meat, iron bread, and hard cheese were served. People went to the bathroom off the back of the cargo platform at the beetle’s rear, with those too squeamish to do their business in plain sight climbing down under the palanquin’s level to do so in privacy.
The wind made conversation impractical. Most people dozed, others meditated, and Nyrix endlessly challenged different people to games of chess. People tied themselves to their seats by means of leather straps and fell asleep, their heads lolling from side to side, or simply lay down between the benches, arms crossed, and allowed the vibrations of the beetle’s endless coursing to lull them to sleep.