“I’d imagine that the idea of stairways and villages originated with That-Called-the-Vlagh,” Red-Beard suggested. “In a peculiar sort of way, it’s been behaving much like a fisherman. It baits its hooks with stairways and villages.”
“And we’re the ones who took the bait,” Rabbit added. “Now we’ve got to find some way to break that thing’s line.”
“Can anybody think of some way we might be able to flush those snake-men out of those burrows?” Gunda asked. “Water, maybe, or possibly smoke?”
“That might be a possibility,” Narasan agreed. “Smoke would probably be better. Even if it doesn’t kill them, it’ll reveal the locations of their burrows.”
Just then there was another of those deep booming sounds coming from deep within the earth, and the shuddering of the ground this time was more violent than it had been the previous time, and large boulders, unseated by the earthquake, came rolling down the sides of the ravine.
There was a sudden, deafening crash of thunder and a brief, blinding light. Then Veltan was there. His eyes were wild, and his face was deathly pale. “Get up out of this ravine!” he shouted. “Your lives are in danger!”
“What’s the matter?” Commander Narasan demanded.
“Move, Narasan!” Veltan shouted. “If you stay here, you’ll die! Run! And when you get up to the rim of the ravine, pull your people back until you’re at least five miles back up into the mountains! You’re standing right in the middle of the most dangerous place in the world! Get out of here just as fast as you can!”
From deep within the earth there came another series of sharp cracking sounds, and the ground beneath their feet began to shake again, but this time it convulsed so violently that it was almost impossible to remain standing.
Then, from off to the east there came a sound that went beyond sound, and a vast pillar of smoke and debris shot miles up into the sky.
“Fire mountain!” Red-Beard exclaimed. “Run!” He spun and ran up the riverbank.
“Now!” Longbow said sharply as the shuddering of the earth beneath their feet subsided. “Run before it starts again.”
With Hook-Beak in the lead they splashed through the shallow stream to the other side of the river, even as Commander Narasan and Red-Beard scrambled up the riverbank toward the south bench.
“Rabbit!” Sorgan said sharply when they reached the north riverbank. “Scamper up to the bench just as fast as you can and tell all those men who were following Ox to get up to the rim of the ravine before the sides collapse and bury them alive!”
“Aye, Cap’n,” Rabbit replied, already running.
Hook-Beak, Keselo, and Longbow had just reached the north bench when the ground began to shudder violently again.
Longbow looked up the slope. “This way!” he told Hook-Beak and Keselo, already running toward a large boulder jutting up out of the center of the bench.
Rocks were rolling and bouncing down the north side of the ravine to spill across the bench in a thunderous landslide. The three men huddled behind their protective boulder, listening to the sharp crashing sound of large rocks slamming into the other side of their shelter.
“What were Veltan and Red-Beard talking about, Longbow?” Hook-Beak demanded. “What’s a fire mountain?”
“It’s a mountain that spews out melted rock,” Longbow explained. “I’ve seen a couple of them up in the lands of Old-Bear’s tribe.”
“Rocks don’t melt, Longbow,” Sorgan scoffed.
“They will if the fire under them’s hot enough,” Longbow disagreed, “and melted rock will run downhill just like melted ice will.”
The trek up to the rim of the ravine involved a series of short dashes from one slightly protected spot to another, with short pauses during the recurring earthquakes to permit the accompanying landslides to rush past.
Keselo was winded by the time they reached the rim, and he paused to catch his breath.
“Great gods!” Sorgan gasped, staring toward the east in stunned disbelief.
Keselo turned and saw dark smoke boiling up out of the twin mountains that formed the gap. Then there came another earthshaking explosion, and sheets of flame came spewing out of the two peaks in twin geysers of liquid fire, reaching up and up toward the sky and spattering the sides of nearby peaks with globs of molten rock.
“Run!” Sorgan bellowed to his men. “Get back away from the edge!”
The Maags were all gaping at the explosion at the head of the ravine.
“I said
run!
” Sorgan roared. “Run or die!”
Keselo leaned out over the edge to look briefly at the ancient ruin just below. A fountain of fire came spurting out of the hidden cave mouth, and it blasted the walls and towers far out over the river. The molten rock poured down the steep slope, and a vast cloud of steam boiled up into the air when the liquid rock reached the brook.
Keselo bolted, running as hard as he could toward the nearby mountains.
The twin eruptions continued for the rest of the day and on through the night. Hook-Beak’s forces gradually gathered together on the steep north slope of a nearby mountain, quite obviously in the hope that the mountain might shield them from the molten rock still spewing out of the twin mountains at the head of the ravine. Along toward morning, Ox, who’d been out gathering the straying Maags who’d survived the encounter with the snake-men and the sudden violent eruption, came wearily up the slope. “This was about as many as I could find, Cap’n,” he reported. “I’m pretty sure there’s more of them, but they’re probably
way
back in the mountains by now.”
“Did you come across any of the snake-men?” Sorgan demanded.
“Not so much as a single one, Cap’n,” Ox replied. “Since they ain’t none too smart in the first place, I’d say they probably tried to hide out in them nice safe caves and tunnels and burrows, and those are the
last
places anybody with any brains wants to be along about now. I’d say that the war’s over, Cap’n. All our enemies just got theirselves tossed into the cooking pot.” He frowned slightly. “I really hate to see all that fresh-cooked meat go to waste, but I don’t think I’d care much for fried snake.”
“I could probably get along without it myself,” Sorgan agreed with a grin. “Look on the bright side, though, Ox. As hot as rock has to be to start melting, all those dead snakes are probably way overcooked.”
“There is that, I suppose,” Ox conceded.
Longbow was standing off to one side, and he motioned to Keselo and Rabbit and led them some distance away from Sorgan and Ox. “Zelana wants to speak with us,” he told them quietly.
“It’s quite a long way back to Lattash,” Rabbit protested.
“She came up here,” Longbow explained. “She’s waiting back in the forest just a little ways.”
“How did she get word to you?” Keselo asked. “You’ve been right out in plain sight ever since we came up out of the ravine, and I didn’t see a sign of her.”
“Longbow and Lady Zelana can talk to each other without anybody else hearing them,” Rabbit explained. “A lot of that was going on in the harbor at Kweta when Longbow and I killed off some Maags who were trying to steal the cap’n’s gold blocks. That was a wild night, let me tell you.” Then Rabbit looked sharply at Longbow. “How far down the mountains will that melted rock go?” he demanded.
“Probably all the way down to Mother Sea. Why?”
“Won’t that destroy Lattash?”
“Probably, yes. I think Chief White-Braid’s tribe might have to find someplace else to live.”
“Probably so, but Lady Zelana has her gold stacked up in that cave just outside of town, and if this liquid rock happens to run into her cave, the gold will melt and get all mixed up with the rock, and the cap’n won’t get paid, will he?”
“Quit worrying so much, Rabbit,” Longbow said. “Zelana’s probably already moved her gold,” He looked around. “She’s right over there in that clump of trees. Let’s go see what she has to say.”
Zelana and Eleria sat side by side on a moss-covered log in the center of a clearing in the middle of the grove. “Is everybody all right?” Zelana asked as Keselo and Rabbit followed Longbow into the clearing.
“As far as we know, they are,” Longbow replied. “Did your younger brother happen to remember to warn Sorgan’s cousin Skell? Sorgan’s been worrying about that since yesterday.”
“Veltan warned Skell on his way up here, Longbow,” Zelana said. “Tell Sorgan that he worries too much.”
“Your younger brother cut things a little fine, Zelana,” Longbow declared. “He should have warned us earlier.”
“That was Yaltar’s fault,” Eleria told him. “I think his volcano got away from him. Vash tends to overdo things now and then.”
“Who’s Vash, baby sister?” Rabbit asked.
“Did I say Vash?” Eleria asked. “I meant Yaltar, of course.”
“Yaltar was angry, Eleria.” Zelana excused Veltan’s little boy. “Those caves and burrows took us all by surprise, and Yaltar doesn’t like surprises, so he overreacted.”
“Then the earthquakes and all of that melted rock were sort of like Eleria’s warm wind?” Rabbit suggested.
“My wind wasn’t nearly as nasty as Yaltar’s volcano, Bunny,” Eleria sniffed. “Boys are so noisy. They just have to show off when they do something.”
“His liquid rock did seal up the Vlagh’s caves and burn up all the snake-men in the burrows, baby sister,” Rabbit reminded her. “We were in a lot of trouble before those twin peaks up at the gap exploded.”
“There’s something I don’t quite understand, ma’am,” Keselo said to Zelana. “If you and your family are able to unleash these catastrophes, why did you go to all the trouble and expense of hiring armies to fight this war for you? Why didn’t you just go ahead and deal with your enemies by yourselves?”
“It’s just a little complicated, Keselo,” Zelana replied. “That- Called-the-Vlagh created its servants by the thousands, so they vastly outnumber the people of the four Domains, and they’re very savage. Our people aren’t nearly as numerous as the creatures of the Wasteland. When we learned that the Vlagh was about to unleash the monsters of the Wasteland on our Domains, we knew we were going to need help, so my brothers, my sister, and I went out to other lands to buy that help with gold. We didn’t really understand at that time just how far the Dreamers could go. My family and I are limited by certain constraints. I’m sure that none of
us
could have unleashed that volcano the way Yaltar’s dream did, or caused the flood Eleria’s dream set in motion. Our minds don’t work that way. The dreams don’t
have
limitations, though. They’re based on imagination—or possibly inspiration—not reality.” She paused. “Is this making any sense to you at all, Keselo?” she asked him.
“Not really, ma’am,” he admitted.
“I’m sure it’ll come to you in time,” she said with a faint smile.
“Things got a little exciting there for a while,” Rabbit was saying to Zelana. “We were all fairly certain that we were up against a bone-stupid enemy, but they’re not nearly as ignorant as we’d thought. If it hadn’t been for that fire mountain, we’d have been in some real trouble.”
“It’s easy to underestimate the intelligence of the creatures of the Wasteland, little man,” Zelana replied. “As individuals, they’re stupid beyond belief, but as a group, they have a surprising intelligence. They have many ways to communicate with each other. Some of them speak, but others are more elemental. Unlike you man-creatures, they tell each other everything they’ve encountered, and those who receive that information share it with still others. Everything that any one of them has seen or experienced becomes the possession of all members of the group, and the group is wiser by far than the individual members. The ultimate decisions are made by That-Called-the-Vlagh, but I think that the Vlagh itself is to some degree susceptible to the dictates of that overmind. They will most probably surprise you many times. I know they’ve surprised
me
quite a few times already, and that hasn’t made me very happy.”
“What we really need, then, is some way to disrupt their communication with each other, wouldn’t you say?” Keselo suggested. “Loud noise, maybe, or dense smoke, or possibly odors of some kind.”
“Odors is something we should really investigate,” Zelana agreed. “If something smells bad enough, it might very well interfere with their ability to communicate with each other. I’ll speak with my brothers and my sister about it.” She paused and then moved on. “The servants of the Vlagh have been blocked in my Domain, but there are still three more Domains that need protecting. I’m almost positive that Dahlaine and Aracia will need help as much or more than Veltan and I. What I’m getting at, gentlemen, is that I’m sure that we’ll need Hook-Beak and Narasan for much longer than we’d originally anticipated.”
“I’m not too sure that the cap’n will buy into a long war,” Rabbit said dubiously. “He’ll help Commander Narasan because the Trogites helped us, but that might be about as far as he’ll be willing to go. Once we win Narasan’s war, the cap’n might just decide to take his gold and go on back home.” The little fellow paused reflectively. “We Maags aren’t really all that good at land wars,” he admitted. “All this slogging around in the mud, sleeping on the ground, and eating cold food sort of goes against our grain. We like short, noisy wars that’re over by suppertime.”
Zelana shrugged. “The offer of more gold will probably persuade Hook-Beak that land war’s not really all that bad.”
“Gold’s nice,” Rabbit countered, “but you’ve got to live long enough to spend it. I’m not sure how Keselo felt about what happened in the ravine, but it scared me silly.”
“It sort of made my hair stand on end as well,” Keselo admitted. “I’ve been on the opposite side of the ravine from Commander Narasan for quite some time now, so I’m not exactly sure how he feels about what happened here, but he might be starting to have second thoughts. Those serpent-men who were trying to kill us aren’t intelligent enough to be afraid. Usually, we Trogites feel that a stupid enemy is a gift from the gods, but if the stupidity goes far enough to eliminate fear, it might have caused the commander to have second thoughts about this whole arrangement. A key element in any war strategy is undermining the enemy’s morale. A frightened man will usually just give up and run away. An insect or a serpent doesn’t know
how
to be afraid, though, so many standard Trogite tactics just won’t work.”