Everyone – almost everyone – panicked.
Screaming, shouting, they trampled their way toward the exits. The death-stone began to spin, shooting off bolts of flame. Wizards jammed the major exits, pushing, jostling, clawing for freedom.
Hearst swore.
'We'll never get out!' he said. 'This way!' cried Miphon.
And, running, he led the way to a squeeze-gap in the wall behind the throne. They forced their way through the gap, breaking out into a deserted corridor.
'Follow me!' shouted Miphon.
And fled, the others hot behind him.
Blackwood and Hearst had no idea where Miphon was taking them. He led them through twisting corridors, down stairways, over bridges, until ahead they saw daylight. They came out onto a low battlement where.the air was hot, hot and gasping. A sea of flame lay beyond the battlement: the flame trench, Drangsturm. Looking across the flame trench they saw the barren countryside of the Deep South, habitat of the Swarms. The heat so distorted the air that the countryside wavered like an unstable mirage.
'Where now?' said Hearst, sweating.
'This way,' said Miphon, hoping he remembered correctly.
He led them through an archway then down stairs 485 spiralling into darkness. Only an occasional ochre firestone lit their panting shadows. Then they saw light. Daylight! A gateway! Running through the gateway, they gained the open air.
They had exited from the castle at the western end of Drangsturm. Here a buffer of basalt rock, two hundred paces wide, separated the flame trench from the waters of the Central Ocean. The buffer was guarded only by a low parapet: it was designed as a killing ground in which wizards could destroy any attack by the Swarms.
'Come on,' said Miphon, taking a few steps toward the buffer of basalt rock.
'You're crazy!' said Hearst. 'We can't go south! We'd die!'
From behind them came a deep, prolonged roar of falling masonry.
'The death-stone's destroying the castle,' said Miphon. 'But hundreds of wizards will escape. How many-friends do you think we've got among them now?'
'We are doing well,' said Blackwood. 'First Veda, now this.'
'The Deep South is dangerous, but it gives us a chance,' said Miphon. 'To stay here is certain death. So follow me!'
And, having little option, they did.
CHAPTER FIFTY-SEVEN
Morgan Gestrel Hearst, warrior of Rovac, woke from sleep and for a moment thought he was in hell. The ground shook; the air roared with dull, continuous thunder; the sky was suffused with the colour of blood; above him loomed a monster with huge underslung lobster claws. The monster had eight legs.
For a moment – and he suffered a lot in that moment – he stared aghast at what he saw. Then he remembered.
Of course.
Hearst lay back, breathing in the smell of cinnamon. He was in the transparent chamber of a keflo, a creature of the Swarms. The red glow filling the chamber was partly from the clouded sky, lit up by the blaze of the flame trench Drangsturm, which was responsible for the thunder and vibrations, and partly from the fireball where the Castle of Controlling Power was melting down.
Hearst remembered how Miphon, quite calmly, had led them into the Deep South, saying the Swarms kept clear of the castle because of Southsearcher raids and the powers of wizards. Toward evening, they had sighted the tall minar housing a colony of keflos; Miphon had led them inside at night, when the keflos were asleep. Finding the hatchery, they had killed embryonic keflos. Miphon had dissected certain sacs from the limp dead bodies; smearing themselves with the contents of these sacs, they had given themselves an odour much like cinnamon.
The keflos, so Miphon said, recognised each other by smell. The Southsearchers used tricks such as this to penetrate the kefio colonies; safe inside a keflo minar, they would not be bothered by any other creatures of the Swarms.
Come morning, they would find out if Miphon was right. How did he know? Hearst suspected Miphon had been a Southsearcher before he was a wizard – but Miphon did not choose to talk of his past. Looking at the monstrous beast bulking over him, Hearst wondered if it really would spare him when it woke. He had his doubts: but there was nowhere to run to. All he could do was trust.
After a while, he went back to sleep.
When Hearst woke in the morning, the keflo was gone. He had expected something that large to make enough noise to wake him when it moved. Miphon and Blackwood were gone. Where? Perhaps the keflo had eaten them – yet surely, if it had started eating people, it would have had appetite enough for three.
Through the transparent curve of the keflo chamber, Hearst studied the landscape. A few keflos were out and about in the countryside. From this height, they looked like discs, for their legs, jaws and organs of sense were slung beneath their domed and multicoloured carapaces. Keflo shell, a valuable product, was traded along the Salt Road; Hearst could see that keflos would not stand much chance against determined Southsearchers.
About three leagues to the north-west was a glowing mass of slag: the molten remains of the Castle of Controlling Power. The death-stone, which still blazed amid those ruins, had melted the ground around till it ran like lava. Clouds of steam were billowing up from the ocean.
'Good morning,' said Miphon, entering the chamber. He held a collection of little sacs.
'More perfume?' said Hearst.
'Yes,' said Miphon. 'For those who don't want to be eaten.'
'What's there for us to eat, while we're on the subject?'
This,' said Blackwood, coming into the chamber and dropping an armful of eggs. They bounced.
Hearst, picking one up, found the skin hard and flexible.
'These are keflo eggs,' said Miphon. 'Properly nourished, they develop into the embryos we killed last night and that I've been killing this morning. I think -'
He was interrupted by an explosion which set the chamber shaking. To the north-west, steam was rising, not just from the ocean, but from Drangsturm itself.
'There's a breach from the ocean into Drangsturm,' said Miphon quietly.
When the sea entered a small flame trench like the 'steamer' on the southern border of Estar, the water seethed and boiled. But, when hitting the superheated rock of Drangsturm, cold seawater exploded instantly into steam.
Another explosion shook the world.
Hairline cracks crazed the transparent surface of the keflo chamber. Out on the plain, the foraging keflos stood quite still. High in the sky, flung by the explosion, huge chunks of rock turned lazily in the sunlight. A massive rock, big as a house, crashed to earth near the minar. The floor shook.
'The end of the world,' said Blackwood quietly.
'Maybe,' said Hearst, cutting open one of the keflo eggs. 'But let's not die hungry. Dig in.'
So they breakfasted on raw keflo eggs – which were a thick dark rubbery green, hard work for the jaws. As they ate, the ground near Drangsturm split open. Cracks extended for a league north and south. Flame surged into the cracks as the walls of the flame trench began to collapse.
'Look,' said Blackwood.
They saw, dimly through the crazed walls, a Neversh 489 wheeling high in the sky in the distance, circling the area of devastation. An updraft from the flame trench caught it and flung it upwards, out of sight.
'The Skull of the Deep South will know,' said Miphon. 'The Swarms will start to march. Soon. Today. They'll forge around through the sea – or their legions will labour rocks to bridge the ruins of Drangsturm.'
There was no stopping it.
They would march north. All of them. Stalkers, keflos, Engulfers, Wings, tunnellers, green centipedes, the Neversh, the blue ants and the others. Hell-creatures from the worlds of nightmare, smashing their way through human civilizations, hunting, catching, killing, eating.
'We have to stop them!' said Hearst. 'If we can get a death-stone, we can stop them!'