“Silence, maggot!” commands Natan. Bruno senses him whirling past in a blur of flesh and wood. Crack! Cracrack! The two of them come together and then separate, come together again.
“Ako’i! Attack! Both of you maggots, come, hit me. As hard as you can!”
Bruno does as he’s bid, and amazingly enough manages not to injure himself or Zuq in the process.
Still curious even in the face of this terrifying blindness, he asks, “Is this right? Is this the training?”
To which Natan just laughs. “Old man, this is the stretching exercise. The training doesn’t start for another fifteen minutes, when your drugs is more than a whisper in the blood. Now shut your hole and fight like a Dolcet Barney.”
“Ah,” Bruno gasps, and blocks a string of five blows.
Chapter Twenty-One
in which the appetite of dragons is tested
The wind no longer whistles, but shrieks. It’s no longer cold, but deathly frigid. The rain no longer spatters, but fires down frozen from the heavens like a hail of meteorites. The ice melts swiftly, but so powerful is the wind that when a squall has passed, the sodden clay of the ground is dried in minutes, and peels away in crumbling sheets. As a result, the Blood Mountain Pass is a mess of sucking mud and stinging grit, with no sign of the pavement that once adorned it.
“I see the way now,” Radmer had said to the waking men. “If we hurry, we may yet miss this morning’s rain of stones.”
But had they? Would they? Overhead, the sky is a deep shade of gray-green that Bruno has never seen before. Still, despite the obscurants in his way—the dust and hail, the unruly clouds themselves—he can see structure in this unending storm. It’s a squashed toroid, a stretched donut, an elongated treader wheel nearly a hundred kilometers wide—nearly two hundred kilometers north to south—hovering flat against the landscape. And at half the footprint of the Imbrian Ocean, that’s a sizeable blemish for a world barely forty-four hundred kilometers around! On Earth, the equivalent storm would cover the whole of Greenland, or Europe from Gibraltar to Sardinia to the ports and vineyards of Bordeaux.
“When the pillar buckled and the neutronium plate slipped,” Radmer calls to him from two treaders over, “the gravity in this hex dropped by nine percent. It doesn’t sound like much, but it created… this. The low-pressure system might be circular if not for the Blood Mountains on the west and the Johnny Wang Uplift on the east, squeezing it, pushing it north and south in a big oval.”
While still piloting his treader, Radmer attempts to gesture his way through the half-shouted explanation. “Now that you’re here, you can see it: the air rushes in along the ground, and then suddenly it weighs less. More importantly, all the air above it weighs less, so there’s less pressure holding it down. It wells up. Then it hits the tropopause and flattens out, rolling back the way it came and then cooling and sinking, condensing out moisture. It’s a big, rolling ring, like a stationary smoke ring, except that Coriolis forces—weak as they are—pull it around into a cyclone. Add the turbulence and static of air passing through these mountains, and you’ve got a real mess!”
Indeed, the Blood Mountains are lower than the Sawtooth, but every bit as jagged. This world simply hasn’t had time to wear them down. And thanks to grit and sleet and the occasional uprooted shrub, Bruno can see the turbulence they create: crack-the-whip sheets and rolls of whirling air snapping off every peak, slicing through every valley. He hasn’t seen lightning yet, but the air is sharp with the tang of ozone.
“Are we going to survive this?” he asks casually, raising his voice above the howling wind.
“Most groups turn back around at this point,” Radmer answers. “Some vanish, or return at half-strength. Some probably find their way in and then die of starvation, rather than brave the tornadoes again. Only Zaleis the Wanderer has been to the eye of the storm and back, and lived to tell the tale. And he started with a group of five.”
Then, in a more personal tone, “How are you holding up?”
“Well enough,” Bruno says, not sure how else to answer.
“Sore?”
A barking half laugh. “No! Victims of explosive decompression are sore. I’m, well, there isn’t quite a word for it. The body hurts badly, but the real wounds are in the soul.”
“I could’ve told you not to try that,” Radmer chides. “Especially not before a big push like this. People end up in Special Care from that shit. Some of them permanently. You wouldn’t blow out an airlock and call it training. You wouldn’t smash your treader into a wall and call it training. If you survive, yes, you’ll have learned a thing or two. But there are better ways. All practice—especially repetitive—involves the brain stem. It has to!”
“He did all right,” Natan says, with a bit of warning in his tone. “I’ve seen better on the first try—I’ve seen a lot better—but with years of practice he could be one of us.”
Bruno has lived long enough to recognize this as high praise indeed. But he can also see the truth in Radmer’s criticism; blindsight is a shortcut, for people whose lives are miserably brief. The effect is real, yes: he can feel a new strength, a new swiftness in his limbs. They have a mind of their own now—quicker and surer than his own, yet subordinate to him. With practice, he could summon or dismiss it at will.
But with longer practice—decades, centuries—he could achieve a comparable grace without the… side effects. A little slower, a little smarter, a lot less damaged inside. “Disfigured” is the word that springs to mind, when his mind considers its own sorry state. The drugs have done something to him, something bad. Prolonged abuse of them would create… well, Dolceti. Violence addicts. Affable men and women with a zest for life, but a strangely sterile view of death and fear and pain, and no hope for a normal existence. In their own way, the Dolceti are as different from human beings as the Olders themselves. Bruno can appreciate that now. And fear it.
“He’ll be all right,” Natan says.
“Better than all right,” Zuq echoes.
But their definition of “all right” clearly differs from Bruno’s own. If he were going to live forever he’d probably feel a bit cheated, like he’d lost a finger and could never grow it back. As it is, with this sense of welcome doom hanging over him, he’ll simply accept the scar, and the costly insights that come with it.
To Radmer he says, “It’s no wonder you wanted Dolceti for my bodyguards. Who else would be brave and stupid enough to follow you into that?” He nods toward the pass ahead, where a trio of dust devils are whipping together into a single large vortex.
“Shit,” answers Radmer.
The vortex whirls straight down the pass, straight toward the riders.
“The dragon!” someone calls out, in mingled worry and glee. “The Shanru Dragon! See the mark she leaves! The dragon’s tail upon the ground!”
“Get down!” Radmer calls out. “Get off, get into the ditch!”
But the Dragon of Shanru is swift, and falls upon the treaders before all the riders have dismounted and fled. One Dolceti is pulled right off his mount, and another is whisked from the ground, and both are flung high into the air, twirling and tumbling, and then dashed against the cliff wall high above. Their bodies fall, limp and lifeless, against the cliff’s sharp crags.
Bruno, who reached the ditch in time, feels the tornado pass right over him with no worse effect than a sandblasting, a slam against the ground, a breathless moment of popping ears and eyeballs bulging against tightly closed lids. The Dragon’s shriek and chuff are deafening, and then they’re gone, and for his fallen comrades Bruno momentarily feels only a deep contempt. Because they brought it on themselves. Because they stopped to look at the vortex bearing down on them, when they should have dropped and crawled.