The second wagon reached its goal, and at that moment the third was halfway there. Nervous now, Xylina waved orders to the men to begin the climb; she and Faro and Ware would bring up the rear. Obediently, and nervously, they began to trot up the slope of her creation, crowding behind the wagon. But the slope was steep; they had to fight their way up it, just as the mules had.
The wheels of the third wagon had touched the earth on the other side, when one of the men on the top of the bridge cried out wordlessly and pointed in the direction the unknown creature had gone. Whatever he was pointing at had frightened him witless; he was white and shaking. Xylina looked, but saw nothing.
That didn't matter. Xylina did not need to know what he was pointing to: it was trouble and it was probably one of the sand-creatures. A moment later, before she even had a chance to react, she saw the mounding earth approaching, and at a much faster speed than it had come the first time. The sand-creature, or one like it, knew they were here, and was coming for them.
With a curse, she urged her mule onto the bridge; it scrabbled up onto the slope with clattering hooves, its ears laid back, but perfectly willing to move. Faro's was right behind her, and Ware's stallion ahead of her. The men scrambled to get off the bridge and out of the way.
Ware shouted to the drivers to take the wagons deeper into the rock-and growth-covered landscape on the other side. "Move those wagons out of here!" he called, his voice somehow amplified and carrying above the sounds of panicked shouting, mules braying, and running feet. "We don't know how far in it can go!"
Now there was no order to their retreat; it was something of a panicked rout. The drivers whipped up the mules, who were not loathe to move; they rolled their eyes and brayed, but threw themselves into the harness to haul the wagons over the smaller rocks and deeper into what Xylina hoped was a safe zone.
If the different color of sand meant that the sand-creature could not come there, they would be safe. If not-
First they had to get off the bridge! For the moment, that was all that mattered; Xylina's mule strained beneath her, sweat streaming down its sides, panting with exertion. The men on foot scrambled over the opposite side of the bridge and down onto the rocks, just as the three riders crested the top of her creation. Xylina dared a glance to the side, and her heart nearly stopped when she saw how near the mounding sand was.
She laid her whip along the mule's withers, heedless of how he got to the other side so long as he did so. "It's coming!" she screamed to the other two. "I think it's going to ram-"
The mule slipped, his haunches slinging sideways-but he sensed the nearness of danger, and did not stop for a second. They were nearly off the bridge, their mounts scrambling for a free space among the fleeing men. And at that precise moment, whatever it was beneath them reared up.
Something as white and glistening as the sand rose nearly the height of the bridge; sand poured from it in a cascade, and the dogs in the last wagon shrieked as if they had been disemboweled. The white shape, still clothed in sand, rammed into the middle pillars of the bridge.
She never really saw what it was or anything other than that vague white shape: only flying sand and something huge. But there was no doubt of the result.
The bridge shuddered, sending all the support pillars tumbling with an avalanche-roar, and then fell over sideways. The crash nearly deafened them all, and the dogs howled again, yet were too panic-stricken to flee the shelter of the wagon. As they cowered behind a bale of supplies, another cresting wave of sand reared up and fell down over the toppled bridge, and engulfed it. There was a grinding noise, and the sand where it had been churned wildly in a kind of whirlpool.
Xylina's mule had fallen to its knees, and she had been thrown against the saddlebow, knocking the breath out of her. She somehow managed to stay in the saddle; she was afraid that the mule might freeze in terror, but it wanted no part of whatever was underneath that churning maelstrom, and it staggered to its feet without any undue urging on her part. It bolted to the hoped-for safety of the wagons, in company with every other member of the expedition. By the time Xylina reached the wagons and dared to look behind her, the last pillars and the ends of the bridge were sinking into the sand, as if they were being pulled down by something beneath the surface.
But whatever it was did not venture into the area of the black sand and rocks.
When they were certain it was not going to follow them, they were able to collect their scattered wits and breath. With a feeling of awe and amazement, they watched while it finished the work of demolishing the bridge, then turned and churned off back the way it had come.
The new zone seemed free of hazard, and extended for some distance. The mist remained, however, obscuring whatever lay beyond this zone. Although Xylina and Faro strained eyes and ears, and Ware made whatever arcane efforts were possible for demons, they were unable to detect any invisible threats. That left only the visible ones, and there did not seem to be anything large enough here to count as such. What life moved and crawled through here was all small. There might be snakes, scorpions, or some kind of equivalent, but there was little cover to hide them, and they should, by all rights, be easy to avoid.
This place looked rather like an odd rock-garden, in fact, and not like anything natural at all. It was full of strangely shaped boulders, collections of stones, and rock formations, none of which looked as if they belonged here, or matched the brown-black sand beneath them. These stones were of so many different kinds of rock that Xylina could not imagine how they had all come to be here. Some even looked as if they had been freshly chiseled from an alabaster cave: huge icicle-formations of stone, gleaming pale and wet in the sunlight, thrusting upwards from their soft beds of dark sand.
The stones were bewildering shades of color, everything from the red-orange of the Pacha country to the black of obsidian flows. There were huge boulders of green marble beside rough slabs of blue-gray slate; broken sandstone tumbles, water-smoothed quartz, and monoliths of granite. Schist and gneiss, porous limestone and chunks of coquina. And yet their variety paled beside that of the strange growths that flourished among them.
Nothing stood taller than Xylina’s waist, but she had never seen plants like these, not even in Sylva. At least the things growing in Sylva looked like plants. Most of these didn't even come close.
There were lacy red fans spread out to face the sun, and low green mounds with a structure so like that of a brain that she had to look twice to be certain that it was nothing of the sort. There were stick-like trees with no leaves at all, and a bright purple color. There were bristly growths, covered in thick needles, in every shade of pink and yellow imaginable. Mosses and lichens in rainbow hues clung to the sides of rocks and sprouted from cracks and niches. A wide grass with wavy leaves grew wherever there was shade, and a yellow-green plant that looked exactly like a deer's antler's grew in the sun between the rocks. Other plants, rosettes of fat, waxy leaves, or long sword-like, thick stalks, sprouted at the bases of boulders.
Among these rocks and growths crawled creatures like slugs, only these were slugs the size of a hand and covered with ruffled membranes of bright red and acid yellow. The slugs shared their domain with brilliant golden, webless spiders with fat hairy legs and bodies like saucers, and with attenuated blue stick-insects as long as Xylina's forearm, that stalked about with an unsteady and uncertain gait. There were also armored creatures to which Xylina could not assign a species: eight-legged plates with eyes on stalks, something that looked like a rabbit with a mounded and articulated coat of armor covering its back in place of a fur coat, and things that looked like upside-down cups with four little feet. There were plenty of ordinary insects, too-or at least, Xylina thought they were ordinary, until she swatted a fly and saw that it had no head that she could find, no eyes and no mouth. There was nothing larger than a rabbit; nothing that looked big enough to be a hazard to the party.