That the land was dying was plain to see. The questions that had to be answered now were how, and why.
“Could this be another way the disruption of Essence in the region manifests itself?” Halthak asked.
“I do not know, but I doubt it,” Amric said with a slow shake of his head. “These symptoms do not match those of the forest, where life is maddened and twisted but not drained like this.”
“I must concur,” Bellimar said. “The magic in the region is rising out of control, strengthening magical effects and causing chaos through the agitation of all things that are linked to Essence. This would seem to represent the opposite. It does not match the pattern.”
Valkarr grunted, frowning down from the saddle at the barren ground beneath his mount’s hooves. “The earth dies,” he said. “Just as it did beneath the flesh of the black things we fought in the forest.”
Amric felt a chill, recalling how the flora had wilted and died wherever even a severed piece of the creatures came to rest for any length of time. It strained coincidence to believe that there was no connection between nearing the source of the foul creatures and encountering this widespread effect.
Syth was scanning the bleak horizon with a look of dismay upon his face. “Even if the flesh of these creatures is toxic, could they have done all this merely by walking around?” he asked in a dubious tone.
Bellimar shook his head. “I do not see how, unless there are unimaginably vast multitudes of them. To cause devastation at this level by tread alone would take more than seems possible, more than could be concealed. But we still do not know their source yet, and I think that might yield the answer.”
Thalya sat her restive mare with a drawn expression, her green eyes roving from Bellimar to the seemingly boundless wasteland ahead. Amric tried to guess at her thoughts, but her stony expression yielded no hints. He swung into the saddle of his bay gelding and wheeled it about to face the group.
“Either way, we must be getting close. We continue south.”
They rode on into the wasteland with the somber afternoon sky turning slowly above them. The terrain grew even more bleak, the remaining signs of plant and animal life becoming rarer with each passing hour. Stark outcroppings of sun-bleached rock knuckled their way through the sweeping dunes, and the ground around them seemed to peel back in aversion. The southern road became an ephemeral thing, a tentative strand of hard-packed earth winding through the parched land; it would come and go in glimpses, swept under by the wind-blown sands as often as not. Amric had begun to believe they would see no other creature in this desolate sea when they crested a ridge and caught the first distant signs of motion. At first he thought the shimmering waves of heat clinging to the ground were playing tricks upon his vision, but the more he stared, the more he realized what he was seeing. He brought the column of riders to a halt and pointed.
A group of a dozen or so dark figures was running over a faraway swell of sand, moving together with tireless purpose. As they watched, a second group of tiny, indistinct figures appeared over another hill, and then a third. The creatures were all headed north, toward them. Amric turned and led the way back behind the ridgeline. They left the remains of the highway and rode west for a time. As they threaded along the hills, the terrain offered occasional views of the progress of those they sought to avoid. The creatures did not appear to have noticed them over the yawning distance, as they continued on their respective paths to the north as if on a shared mission. Amric turned the group and headed south once again, deeper into the wasteland.
Over the next several hours, they were forced to change course many more times. Each time they reached a summit, they were greeted by the sight of more and larger packs of the black creatures skittering across the hills. It became an increasing challenge to avoid them, requiring the riders to weave back and forth in an ever more erratic pattern. On several occasions, the creatures passed close enough to the riders that Amric, lying flat upon the hill separating them, could pick out details of their ebon flesh and the tattered cloth wrappings dangling from their limbs. As with the ones they had faced before, these seemed to be modeled after various races, like animate statues cast of some lightless material in the mold of the peoples from far-flung lands. He saw the forms of humans and slender Elvaren, stout Duergen and heavyset beast-men, the bird-beaked men from some deep southern clime whose nation he could not recall, and even an occasional Traug. He saw countless others too far away to discern, but their shapes and sizes proclaimed their diversity. At one point he was convinced he saw the tail and lean, broad-shouldered build of a Sil’ath, but it was too far away to be certain and the figure was quickly lost to sight behind the hills.
Amric ground his teeth in frustration at the pace of their progress. It seemed for every mile they struck further south, they spent as much or more effort in backtracking and sidestepping to avoid detection. Sooner or later they would be unable to avoid a conflict, and if the creatures had any way to signal each other over even moderate distance, the riders would soon find themselves thoroughly overwhelmed. Even if they did manage to win free, the creatures would be alerted to their presence, which would only make it more difficult to traverse this harsh wasteland unmolested. Casting a scathing look at the darkening heavens, he began to search for a suitable place to camp and wait out the night.
There had been precious few candidate locations on the journey here. Little more was offered than the lee of a coved hill or a scraggly copse of trees here and there. He preferred something far less visible and exposed to attack, here in the midst of hostile territory. They could turn west and head out of the desert and toward the coastal road, the same road that had brought him and Valkarr to this region, but it was a good half day’s ride in that direction and would of course cost them the same amount of time on the morrow to return to this point. No, it had to be something close, and soon.
They veered to the southeast, avoiding two more groups of the black creatures running north with mile-eating strides. The ground became harder in vast, bare patches, as if the capricious winds had worn enough of the sand away to expose the ribcage of the land. The obscured sun began its preamble to setting, tinting with a rosy glow the whole of the sky to the southwest, where the cloud cover was most thin.
As they cautiously peered over another rise, Amric saw a huge, conical structure rising from the earth and forming a sharp silhouette against the pale sands in the distance. His skin prickled the instant his eyes fell upon it. It did not look man-made, and yet its shape was too symmetrical, too purposeful, to have been crafted by nature’s hand. His eyes narrowed, straining against the fading light and the blur of the miles that separated them from the edifice. Tiny shapes scurried up and down the sloping sides of the thing like a swarm of black ants.
Amric clenched his jaw. They had found the hive of the black creatures at last.
Valkarr gave a low hiss and pointed eastward. With an effort, Amric tore his gaze from the nest and followed the Sil’ath warrior’s gesture to see a huge tumble of rock jutting up from a rolling hill to the east. A narrow, chiseled path ascended to the top, and the ground fell away almost vertically on the other sides. Amric nodded his satisfaction; this would do very well. He took another sweeping look over the dunes, checking the movement and positions of the scattered packs of black creatures, and his eyes lingered again on the upraised nest. Then he swung his bay gelding back down the hill and around its base, wending toward the peak Valkarr had spotted.
It took the better part of an hour to reach it without exposing their profile along a ridgeline. Amric and Valkarr dismounted at the foot of the crag and, leaving the reins of their mounts with the others, began to climb the crumbling path up its side. The carved channel looked water-worn, which seemed incongruous with their desert surroundings, but Amric had to remind himself that this area had not always been so arid. The horses could be led up this path, he decided, but it would be a slow and noisy ascent. Anything lurking at the summit would be alerted by the clamor, and it would be best to ferret out such surprises beforehand.