Maggie coughed, hit the throttle, and the airbike whipped through the night, raising a cloud of ashes as it roared down the empty streets. Here and there on the ground, Orick could see blackened skeletons of small gnome-like humans among the ash, many still wearing their mantles, some holding weapons. It looked as if they had been caught and burned in the midst of a battle. There was no clothing left on the skeletons, no flesh on the ebony bones.
There were no lights in any window, no footprints among the ashes. The world was dead, uninhabited, and by the smell of the air, perhaps uninhabitable.
As bad as the air was, a certain heaviness fell upon Orick as well, as if he weighed more here than he had elsewhere. Upon reflection, he realized that he had felt somehow lighter and stronger upon Cyannesse, but had not noticed it then.
As they hurried forward, Orick saw a corpse on the ground, half covered with ash. Its arms were curled close to its ribs, as if the person had died protecting some great treasure. Orick almost called for Maggie to stop, but as the airbike rushed over the corpse, scattering ashes, Orick looked back. In its hands, the corpse held the bones of an infant.
“What happened here?” Orick bawled, the air burning his lungs.
Maggie shouted back, horror in her voice. “Someone released a Terror on this world.”
“Did you know about this?”
“Veriasse told me that the people here were fighting the dronon.”
“You mean the dronon killed them?”
Maggie shrugged.
The headlights on the air bike cut a grim alley through the darkness, and Maggie soared over winding roads through a maze of stone buildings. Up ahead, the lights shone over a pair of footprints in the ash.
Someone had lived through this catastrophe. Maggie veered to follow the trail a short way. After two blocks, they came to a dead end in an alley. There, lying in a heap on the ground was the corpse of a small man, his mouth open and gasping. Above him on the wall, he had scratched a message in the ash: “We have won freedom, not for ourselves, but for those who shall follow after.”
Maggie stared at the message a moment, then hit the bike’s thrusters and rode away. The airbike raced through the city, left the sprawling wastes. The countryside was no better. Fields and crops had been transformed to blackened ash. On the outskirts of town, they saw a red light up the road ahead, and Orick’s heart lifted a little, hoping that someone perhaps had survived this devastation.
Instead they came upon a vast machine, a walking crablike city with eight legs and hundreds of gun emplacements sprouting from its back and head. In one lonely turret on the head, a red light gleamed like a malevolent eye. The machine reminded Orick of some giant tick, bristling with strange devices, and Orick knew instinctively that the dronon had created the thing-for no human would have built such a monstrosity.
“What is that?” Orick shouted to be heard above the roar of the airbike, hoping that Maggie’s mantle would give them some clue.
“A dronon walking fortress. They built them on their home world to carry their young during their migrations.”
“How long must we endure this?” Orick asked. “I can hardly breathe.”
“We’ll get out fast,” Maggie wheezed.
“Maggie, can the Terror still hurt us?”
“If it were going to burn us up,” Maggie said, “we’d already be dead by now.”
After that, they did not speak. Maggie revved the thrusters, giving the bike its full throttle, and they plowed ahead. It took a great effort to breathe. Orick began gasping; his lungs starved for fresh air. He felt insufferably hot, and the world began to spin. He feared that he might fall from the bike, so he clung to Maggie. She reached up and patted his paw, comforting him. Orick closed his eyes, concentrated only on breathing. He tried holding his breath to save his lungs from the burning air, but then he would become dizzy and have to gasp all over again.
It became a slow torture, and he kept wishing that he would faint, fall from the bike and just die in the ashes.
They crossed a long bridge over a lake, and muddy ash floated on the water, creating a thick black crust. The water bubbled. Dark billowing clouds obscured a pale silver moon, and ahead was a black wall of rain. Orick imagined how the air would be cooler and fresher there in the rain, imagined tasting the water on his tongue. But they hit the wall and found that the sky rained only ash.
An hour later, they reached another gate, and Maggie got out the key, pressed some buttons until the gate glowed a soft orange, the color of sunset, then she gunned the thrusters and the airbike plunged through the white fog found between worlds.
At first Orick wondered if it would stay white forever, for the cool fog gave way only to more white mist, but then they were roaring down a snowy mountain trail through the mist, passing between large pillars of black rock.
As soon as Maggie saw that it was safe, she turned off the thrusters. The bike skidded to a halt. Maggie crawled off, fell to the ground gasping and coughing, trying to clear the foul air of Bregnel from her lungs. Orick climbed off, fell to the ground. Bears rarely get sick to the stomach, but Orick found that the brief trip through Bregnel had left him both wrung out and positively ill.
He lay in the snow and vomited, and though it was freezing, he could not muster the strength to move. After twenty minutes, Maggie got up, rubbed herself.
“Are you all right?” Orick asked.
She shook her head. “That air was too foul. Another few minutes, and I would have fallen off the bike. I’m not sure I could have gotten back up.”
Orick understood. He felt grateful to be alive and offered up a silent prayer of thanks. When he finished, he asked, “Where are we?”
“A planet called Wechaus,” Maggie answered. “I didn’t get time to ask Veriasse about it. He said there was some danger here, but the only gate to Dronon is here, somewhere on Wechaus.”
“Are any towns nearby? Someplace we can get a bite to eat, a beer maybe?” Orick looked about in the fog. If a bear could eat rocks, he’d never fear starvation on this world, that much was certain. But other than the rocks, Orick could not make out any sign of trees here, just a few small bushes.
Maggie shook her head. “I’m not sure. We still have some food in the pack. If my guess is right, we should be four or five days ahead of Gallen and the others. I thought we could find a place to stay, then follow them to the Dronon gate.”
Orick looked around. It was getting darker out, and he could not see far. He wondered about things: right now, back in Tihrglas, he and Gallen were most likely lazing about at John Mahoney’s Inn in Clere, drinking a beer and dreaming about tomorrow, totally ignorant of Everynne or the Maze of Worlds. At the same time, he and Gallen were on the planet Fale, trying to rescue Maggie from Lord Karthenor. In a couple of days, he would reach Cyannesse, and he didn’t know when he’d be on Bregnel. Somehow, the idea that he was simultaneously mucking about on at least three different worlds at once left him shaken, and if they kept walking through the Maze of Worlds, things would get even more confusing.
It all seemed sacrilegious, as if they were playing with powers not meant to be comprehended by either men or bears. It reminded Orick of an incident when he was a cub. He and his mother had gone hunting for nuts and had climbed to the top of Barley Mountain. There, under an evergreen, they sat munching at pine nuts and looking out over mountain peaks that seemed to go on forever, fading to blue in the distance. To a small cub, it seemed as if they were viewing infinity, and Orick had asked his mother, “Do you think I’ll ever get to see what’s on the other side of all of those mountains?”