The Dread Majesty banked as it slid out of the Iron Weald’s valley. Scorio reached out with his senses and saw why: the Iron mana, so dense in the Iron Weald, flowed out from a great cloud of supple Bronze that seemed to hesitate just shy of the broken cliffs.
The Dread Majesty immediately began to rise as it floated into the Bronze; the aerate bones strained against the hull, causing the deck to groan as if it had sailed into and up the curvature of a huge wave. The pilot directed powerful amounts of mana into the sails, cunningly adapting and using different masts at different strengths so that the ship flew, tilted to port, like one of those wild men who’d tame a great wave with a hand-carved board of wood.
Who was it that had told him once that the aerate bones were too reactive for Bronze? Scorio couldn’t remember, but the evidence was clear: if they hadn’t swung around right at the edge of the Iron Weald, they’d have soared ever up and into the clouds. Higher and higher, perhaps, till the ship’s deck was vertical.
As it was they scudded along the face of the roiling banks of Bronze, moving radially along the outer edge of the Iron Weald.
Fascinated, Scorio watched the mountain range pass by and a new Iron Weald valley open up to port.
The tension on the ship heightened; with the Telurian Band hard at starboard, the war against the Blood Ox felt viscerally more imminent. The veterans chose to remain below decks, while those new to this depth of hell remained at the railings.
Scorio quickly abandoned port for starboard, and there spent the day watching the Telurian Band scroll by in all its toxic glory. The sun never set; it would dip toward the horizon, darkening the clouds and casting a butcher’s pall over the land, but rise again before sinking, as if it had changed its mind. High up into the sky it would climb, the hues lightening in turn to gold and egg yolk yellow, then after a half-hour at its meridian it would drop once more.
The Petrified Forest was a constant for the first few hours, but then they reached a huge crescent moon of a lake that stretched like an ocean toward the distant southern horizon, and when they sighted its far shore the stone trees failed to resume.
Instead, they saw a mountain range draw closer, an endless series of undulating peaks.
“Look,” said Scorio, leaning forward and shielding his eyes. “Somebody’s built something along the top.”
For evenly spaced towers followed the range’s outline, an endless series of phalanges that ran like a gigantic fence or some other manner of obscure construction.
“Nobody built that,” said Naomi, straightening from where she’d been leaning. “That’s a spine.”
“Spine?” Scorio went to scoff then stilled. The spikes that jutted into the air looked tiny from this distance, but they had to be forty or fifty yards tall. The range curved toward them, and the face of one mountain had fallen away to leave behind a great cliff. Down the length of this range of sheer rock he could see the hints of what might have been ribs, buried deep in the rock.
“What?” He gazed up and down the mountain range’s length. It stretched from horizon to horizon. “What kind of fiend…?”
The scale of the dead monster terrified him. A World Worm, perhaps?
On they sailed, the Telurian sun making it feel as if they existed in a never-ending fever dream of a day. The spine range diminished and fell away, and Scorio and Naomi descended to sleep in their hammocks.
Unrested, uneasy, they awoke they knew not how much later and rose again to observe the Telurian Band.
The same majestic, endless skies, the same endlessly unfurling clouds, the same richly gradating hues. Lakes without end, some massive, others like interlinked puddles that extended around the mountains and mesas. Occasionally, great clouds of carnivorous-looking insects would rise from the plains to shadow them, each the size of a pony, four-winged, their legs ending in grasping pincers, their heads blind and composed of hooks and fanged maws. Their swarms were often hundreds strong, and they filled the air with a terrible, tooth-jarring buzz that drove most below decks.
Scorio watched them, and couldn’t deny a morbid, mad curiosity as to what would happen if he took to the air in his scaled form and flew into their midst, breathing flame.
But the insectoid fiends never drew too close. Eventually, they left the last swarm behind, and a shout of excitement sounded from the prow.
Scorio and everyone else pushed to the fore.
Rapidly approaching was a great wall composed of giant, weathered boulders. Some were merely the size of houses, others the size of Bastion itself. They lay in a toppled line as if sprinkled by Acherzua herself, piled atop each other but forming a distinct and oblique line that speared toward the heart of the Telurian Band, disappearing into the distance.
Beyond the cyclopean wall extended a glimmering wasteland of pale sand, endlessly sinuous dunes aligned with the flow of mana from south to the north.
“Is that…?” asked Scorio.
“Yes,” said a Great Soul to his side, tone soft with resignation. “The Bone Plains. Follow that wall all the way to its end, some two hundred miles away, and you’ll find LastRock and the Blood Ox.”
Scorio shivered. The sands looked bleak and desolate, devoid of geography, an endless expanse of dunes that stretched beyond the wall as far as the eye could see.
Their battlefield.
Chapter 31
The whale ships descended as best they could, but the mana was too buoyant. It took the Charnel Dukes and Blood Barons creating voids around the ship for them to drop sufficiently close to the floor to lower anchors.
From there everyone slung packs over their shoulders, climbed down over the hull to the ropes, and set to climbing down the last fifty yards.
Scorio spurned the lines. Perhaps a third of the Great Souls present were capable of descending under their own powers, and this they did, leaping overboard, turning to smoke, summoning spirits or monsters to ride, or simply flickering out of sight.
Scorio balanced perfectly on the wooden railing and gazed down over the camp. It was painted in the red hues of a near sunset. From the memories of his past life, from his time as a commander of his own rebel force, he’d come to sense something of how army camps should be arranged; he expected meticulous rows, orderly tents, a sense of an organism, united, created, functional.
Instead, he gazed out over a sprawling morass of haphazard tents, rough stone buildings, tunnel mouths and cargo depots. Chaotic, ragged, ungoverned. Fires burned fitfully here and there, surrounded by knots of people, and at the far edge of camp he saw a corral of giant beetles, each the size of The Sloop. Their carapaces gleamed metallic green, but they were clearly domesticated. None of them fought their constraints, the straps and ropes that were lashed around their bodies.
Beyond them, beyond the rough camp that seemed to have fetched up like flotsam upon the beach that was the edge of the Iron Weald, stretched the Bone Plains. The tops of the wavering dunes cast sheer shadows across the landscape, so that the entirety of it was a sinuous contrast between black and dull red sands.
A bad presentiment filled Scorio. Despite the glad shouting from below, despite the catcalls from Great Souls as they cheered or mocked each other on the way down, Scorio couldn’t help but feel uneasy about the rough camp, the hundreds upon hundreds of upturned faces, the desperation that filled the air like a metallic tang.
Scorio ignited his Heart, waited for Naomi to wrap her arms around his neck, then simply stepped over the edge of the railing and fell.
The wind rushed about them, his stomach rose to plaster itself against his lungs, and then he extended his wings and caught the air, immediately cutting away into a curving glide.
There were too many others descending in equally interesting manner for his wings to merit attention. Everybody was gathering right below the ships into a milling crowd, the veterans calling out and mingling with the standing army, the newer arrivals uncertain, clustered together.