More snow?
The sunlight dimmed as white flakes drifted down to the deck. Kheda tasted sulphur that had nothing to do with the Zaise's lost cargo and realised this was a fall of ashes from a burning fire mountain. Ash fell thicker and faster and drifted around their feet, stirred by a hot breeze. Stones began falling, as riddled with holes as a sea sponge. Cinders dropped from the grey clouds, glowing red. Kheda saw one strike Velindre's shoulder.
She didn't even flinch as the ember burned a dark score in her tunic.
The noise far inland sounded like the worst thunders of every rainy season that Kheda had ever known all recalled together. The lightning that ripped through the massive black clouds grew ever more violent. Close at hand, silent spheres of phosphorescence blinked around the Zaise's mastheads before vanishing as suddenly as they had appeared.
The ship twisted this way and that as the sands and silts of the river mouth convulsed. Kheda looked up to see that the sky was black as ink, as if night had driven out the day. The air was stifling, poisonous. His chest burned with it. Red light rippled along the sooty pall of the clouds.
On the deck between the two wizards, answering scarlet fire blazed in the gem. The rumbling in the far distance rose to a deafening pitch as the shoreline's paroxysms lifted the Zaise upwards. The ship shivered from stem to stern, assailed by brutal pulses of air. Spars split and crashed to the deck while such ropes as remained were ripped from the masts.
Far inland, one of the mountains threw up a flaming column of white-hot rock to rip into the swollen black belly of the cloud. A second eruption followed, and a third. The clouds blazed.
The ruby egg exploded in a coruscating flash. Kheda screwed his eyes shut, blinded with tears. He didn't dare let go of the mast to try clearing his vision. Blinking and gasping for breath, he tried desperately to see what had befallen the wizards.
Velindre lay sprawled in the thick layer of ash coating the deck, her legs twisted awkwardly beneath her. She was bleeding from countless gashes, lacerated by razor-sharp shards of the shattered gem. Her eyes were open,
staring unmoving. Naldeth was slumped on his side, his head hidden in his outstretched arms. His hands had taken the brunt of the explosion, the bones of broken fingers white in the uncanny half-light. Blood glistened where his torn tunic revealed his pale flank.
'Are they dead?' Risala cried.
'I don't know.' Kheda didn't think he could prise his own hands from the mast and he certainly wasn't going to risk losing Risala as she clung to him with her one sound hand knotted in the cloth of his tunic.
He watched gold and scarlet torrents pouring from ragged craters in the distant mountains. The forests were burning, flames spreading even faster than the molten rock. The ash was still falling. Now, wholly unexpectedly, rain began falling with it. Soon the deck was coated with a thick layer of gritty mud. Kheda shifted his feet and found that the stuff was hardening with horrifying speed.
'If they're not already dead, Velindre and Naldeth will suffocate under this.' He had to shout to make himself heard, even with Risala inside the circle of his arms.
'Will we be any safer in the stern cabin?' she screamed back.
Kheda's throat ached with the effort of replying. 'There's nowhere else to go.'
Summoning up all his courage, he wrenched his fingers apart and let go of the mast, immediately clamping one hand around Risala's sound wrist. Slipping and stumbling, sick with terror, he forced his way across the deck. Risala struggled along with him. As he bent to grab the front of Velindre's mud-caked tunic, Risala twisted her one good hand free of his grip and reached down for Naldeth's outstretched arm. Somehow between them, they dragged the comatose wizards into the stern cabin.
Leaning against the cabin door to force it shut, they clung together. As the storm of fire and air and the earth's
convulsions assailed the ship, they were shaken from side to side, buffeted by bundles of clothing and bedding tossed all around them. Hard-edged objects anonymous in the darkness struck more painful blows. Rocks or other things entirely thumped against the deck and sides of the ship, making the whole hull resound like a drum. The noise was deafening, the fear incapacitating. The ground shook and shook again, unceasing.
It was some moments after the tremors stopped before Kheda actually realised that the Zaise had come to rest. The planks sloped beneath him at an ominous angle and the loose items that had been thrown around the cabin slid down to the floor. He found he was shaking from head to toe, aching with bruises, the pain of his wrenched shoulders indescribable. All was silent.
'Kheda?' Risala's whisper was shockingly loud in the darkness.
'Here.' He held her tight.
'Where are we?' A spasm of coughing racked her.
Kheda's own throat was burning in the acrid air. Finally convincing himself that any sensation of movement was no more than an echo in his shocked mind, he forced the stern cabin's door open. He had to push hard against the setting slurry of ash-laden rain still clogging the deck.
The Zaise was wedged between two sandbanks, the channels all around choked with ash and debris. There was no sign whatsoever of the muddy river's flow.
Kheda looked over his shoulder at Risala. 'Are they still alive?'
'I think so,' she said shakily. She was kneeling between the two wizards, bent with her ear over Velindre's mouth and her fingers pressed to the pulse in Naldeth's neck.
'We won't get out of here without them.' Kheda surveyed the flood plain as best he could in the dim light. While the air was hot and foul and the grasslands were
ablaze, there was no immediate sign of a torrent of molten rock pouring down the valley to consume them. There was no sign of any other living creature.
Risala sat back on her heels. 'Then all we can do is wait.'
Kheda leaned his forehead against the frame of the door. 'Will you ever forgive me for agreeing to come here?'
'I hardly think you're responsible for this catastrophe.' Risala looked at the comatose mages with fearful awe. 'Do you think they will wake up?'
'I have no idea,' Kheda said helplessly.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
The old woman sat in the shade of the swollen-bellied tree on the edge of the plateau and looked down the steep slope towards the river. Only now there was a steadily swelling flood spreading over the burned plain. She looked out towards the sunset shore where the land had raised itself up in broken sharp-edged ridges that now blocked the river's meandering path to the boundless water. But the waters still flowed from the hills inland, and with nowhere to go, the flood was now reaching the nut-tree thickets in the ravine. The trees were dying anyway, smothered by the black mud that had rained down. The open expanse where the swollen-bellied trees stood was strewn with the oddly light stones that had fallen from the sky. Down below, the valley was rank with a smell of decay that grew stronger day by day. The air hummed with the drone of the clouds of biting insects that were hatching in the stilled waters.
She sat still and quiet, the breath catching in her aching chest. Sharp-tailed red flyers wheeled through the clouds of insects, gorging themselves. Down on the flood's margin, she could see brown and pink waders probing the turgid waters with their long beaks. Closer to hand, she saw a striped lizard nosing among the sodden remnants of the grasses. It had found some carrion, its tail lashing enthusiastically as it gorged.
Had it found one of the men still missing from the village? So many had gone with the strangers on the day
the world had changed so utterly. If they hadn't returned by now, surely they must be given up as lost? The old woman looked up at the sky. Where were the beasts? The men who had made their way back to the village had spoken of a fearsome creature of red and flame joining forces with the black beast from across the river. Yet a day for every wrinkled finger on one of her hands had passed now and there had been no sign of any great beast, of any hue, not even one flying overhead.