Naomi gave up her meditations and rested her head against his shoulder. With no lights aboard the beetle, they became a mass of shadow and metallic glints, Wesanin tirelessly guiding number “7” after number “9”.
Scorio couldn’t sleep.
The sun dipped toward the horizon, dwelled there for hours in an orgy of vermillion and purple clouds, then revived itself and began to rise.
A sharp whistle cut the air, causing those yet slumbering to raise their heads, and Scorio sensed more than saw half their contingent peel away to head toward the east. Those would swiftly lose Plassus’ enhancement, but were close enough to their destination that it wouldn’t matter.
Half a day of riding remained. Scorio’s face felt weathered, his skin dusty, his hair thick and woolen, his lips dried out, his mouth pasty. The wind never ceased to toss and rush by.
Two-thirds of their Bronze eggs had been fed to number “7”, and it sped on tirelessly. Wesanin swapped places with Rharvyn for a few hours, sleeping under a thin linen sheet, then rose to resume piloting.
The desert itself was changeable. Gone were the high white dunes that they’d spent the first day racing through. Now they subsided, half the height, and tinged with sprays of gold and even metallic green that gave them an otherworldly beauty. Occasionally they even broke out into great open hardpans of crusted minerals that glimmered and glittered as the beetles raced over them, shallow swales and bubbling pools of oil breaking the monotony. For a while a great feathered serpent followed them high overhead, its scales translucent so that its innards pulsed and worked in eerie visibility, but then it turned and fluttered away, deeper into the desert.
Word was passed back: one hour left to go. Taron had explained the plan: they’d hobble the dunerunners ten miles away from the towers, and move forward cautiously till they were within a mile. There they’d hide out, hidden by Great Soul powers, until the word came from Moira that the LastRock strike had begun. At that point the company’s would stream forward, splitting up to hit their designated targets at the last, and give ferocious battle in the hopes of tying down the fiends who might otherwise race to LastRock’s succor.
But more than that.
They were to deliver such a blow that the Blood Ox would be drawn out of power in such outrage that he’d discard his usual caution to wreak violence upon their ranks, and in so doing, expose himself to the arriving Imperators.
If everything went according to plan.
Then the sand began to boil.
The dunes writhed as craters birthed themselves from below.
Number “9” skittered up the side of a dune, slowed, then leaped back down to the trough.
“Tokalauths!”
Everybody roused themselves. All around Scorio Hearts ignited. Wesanin was wrestling with the reins and shouting as their dunerunner panicked. Naomi rose into her Nightmare Lady form, tail lashing, and Scorio assumed his own scaled one, his innate power and lethality giving him scant comfort as the desert around them bloomed fiends.
They were as big as three men laid head to foot, segmented bodies rimmed with hundreds of slashing legs, their bodies ranging from black to dark purple with blushing glows of crimson down their undersides. Slender feelers waved in the air like whips about their heads, which were birthed straight from a nightmare, huge compound eyes the size of Scorio’s head embedded beneath a red crown of bone ridges, with serrated pincers the length of his arm clacking laterally about their mandibles.
Tokalauths, like centipedes birthed in hell.
They came up from below and reared to a height of some eight feet, the rest of their bodies whipping around in the sand behind them, legs whirring, feelers dancing as they oriented on the beetles.
But so many.
They filled the trough between the dunes, emerged from the sides of the dunes themselves.
Penaela’s sun appeared between the two beetles, immediately causing a dozen Tokalauths to writhe and dive back under the sand, but then the sun disappeared as if she’d changed her mind. Fyrona began lancing the sand with sheets of black fire, while Galvon threw wall after wall of shudder force down from the beetle’s side. Rharvyn swayed as he held on to one of the awning’s pilons, eyes wide as his fist filled with fire, and dozens of other Great Souls threw their attacks at the sands below.
But still the Tokalauths came. The sand simmered as if at a low boil.
The Nightmare Lady let out a war cry and leaped down from the palanquin, disappearing into a rising bank of fog even as she fell. The Shadow Petal was already down there, darting between the fiends, and a second later Merideva and Ursan leaped down as well.
Scorio flung himself off the bucking beetle, extending his wings and soared out over the fiends. The Bronze mana in the air was writhing, and he set to pouring it directly into his Heart as he summoned his flame form, inhaled it, then strafed down the trough and breathed black fire over countless fiends.
Tokalauths burned, their exoskeletons blackening and shattering, eyes bursting, legs crisping.
Seized by an impulse, Scorio rose above the dunes and took in the immediate landscape.
Horror squeezed his heart in its cold fist.
The desert was alive with Tokalauths. Everywhere he looked he saw their centipede-like forms, all of them speeding and undulating toward the dunerunners who milled and circled in small islands cleared by Great Soul powers.
But not just Tokalauths. He saw tribes of Okozs pounding toward them, groups of a hundred or bigger, organized by the hues of their hides, the Tokalauths parting before them, some diving down into the sand to avoid being crushed.
And a third kind of fiend, lithe, muscular, whip-lean and fast. Racing along on all fours, blurringly fast, built like racing hounds but as large as a yearling bull, the Angrath were fleet shadows converging on the beetles by what looked like the thousands.
Scorio couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t process what he was seeing. An ocean of fiends was washing toward them, the desert before and to the east completely alive with pincers, burning eyes, talons, and whipping tails. The dunes were carpeted.
And every single one was converging on the beetles.
“Retreat!” Scorio dove back down, pumping his wings for an added boost of speed. A blast from Rharvyn flew through the air to sail fruitlessly out into the incoming army. “Back! We need to get back!”
But the dunerunners had finally snapped out of their placid complicity. Rearing and bucking, luggage and barrels jostling and swaying violently in their nets, they pranced and sought to get away from the Tokalauths that snapped at their legs. Wesanin was wrestling with the reins to no avail, pulling the beetle’s horn around, but it ignored his urgings, its back bulging, palanquin rising and falling as the huge straps strained.
The area around them went glassine, Tokalauth legs suddenly scrabbling without finding purchase, and the fiends slid down the sides of the dunes to pile up in the trough where they wrapped around each other, forming balls of death as their legs and pincers fought for purchase on each other’s hides.
Scorio caught a glimpse of Kelona gripping a palanquin pole, form radiant gold, but she was pointing up, up above Scorio and screaming something, a warning -
Scorio furled his wings and rolled, turning over even as he fell away and to the side just as a fluid alien shape dove through where he’d been a second ago, praying mantis pincers snapping closed in the air like death scythes. It was at least a dozen feet long, its upper half vaguely humanoid, its legs separating into toothed tentacles that bunched up and then elongated rapidly again, sending the fiend shooting through the air. Its skin was mottled gray and dusty orange, its face a featureless fist where the long muscles of its back and shoulders wrapped up over its crown and seemed to plunge into where its eyes should have been, but it had a maw, and this spread wide in a frustrated shriek as it came around.