Aenir (5 page)

After a few hours of steady walking, Tal had left the grasslands behind. Possibly they had been moving the other way as well, all the time. In Aenir it was hard to be sure.

The grass ended in a completely straight border that stretched as far as Tal could see to the north and south. On the western side it was grass, on the eastern, a strange desert of red sand and spiky blue crystals that grew up in columns, looking from a distance almost like trees.

The major difference was that the crystals were very sharp, and they seemed to be carnivorous. At least, there were scraps of flesh and skin hanging off many of the "plants," and all of them were surrounded by rings of broken bones.

Tal gave each crystal plant a wide berth. As far as he could tell, they couldn't move, but he didn't trust them. They might be like the trees of the forest where he'd arrived and would move when it suited them.

As he walked farther into the desert, it got much hotter. The crystals shone more brightly, with a hypnotic glare. This was how they caught their prey, and Tal had to stop himself several times from walking into one of the plants. He wished for his old shadowguard. It would have shaded his head from the sun, and shielded his eyes. But the shadowguard was gone, back to living its life as a growing Dattu.

Then Tal remembered that he did have a companion that could shade him. He stopped and looked up. Adras had been trailing behind, quite high up. Now he was nowhere to be seen. But he wasn't too far away. Tal could feel his presence, a connection between them. He recognized it as being like the link he'd had with his shadowguard.

"Adras!" Tal shouted. His voice was hoarse. He'd drunk from a small stream that morning, but had been wanting another drink for some hours. This desert was much hotter than it had any right to be.

Adras did not answer his call.

Tal called again, and listened. There was a faint boom up ahead, a rather pathetic thunderclap.

Tal sighed and began to slog toward the sound, carefully winding his way between the crystal plants.

A few hundred stretches farther on, he came to an oasis in the blue crystal desert a patch of more usual earth, with a small bubbling spring surrounded by a stand of tall, thin trees with greenypurple fronds.

Adras was hovering above the spring, sucking up moisture. A thick column of vapor spun out of the spring and into his open mouth.

Tal hurried down to get a drink. There might be something to eat, too, for the trees had fruit between the fronds.

There was also fruit on the ground. Tal had a drink, then picked up a piece of fruit and examined it. It had a hard skin, but was soft and pulpy inside. He had seen such fruit before, though only in baskets brought to the Chosen Enclave. His mother had called it cakefruit, cut it into slices, and cooked it in the oven.

Tal couldn't do that here, but he did roast the fruit with a beam of hot white light from his Sunstone, until the pulp browned. Eating it brought back memories of better times, when his family was all together and the worst thing Tal had to worry about was going back to a new term at the Lectorium.

Tal spat out the last mouthful of cakefruit. He didn't want to remember any more. It was too dispiriting to think about his family and their troubles. He had to focus on the immediate objective.

"I have to find the Codex," he said aloud.

Above him, Adras nodded his head, but did not stop soaking up water vapor. The desert had been hard on the Storm Shepherd. He had shrunk to three quarters his normal size in the dry air. Now he was intent on taking in as much water as possible, to last him till the cooler night.

"It's better that Milla left," Tal added. He was looking at Adras, but he was really talking to himself. "It makes everything more… I don't know… straightforward. I mean, she didn't want to find the Codex, really. She just wanted to know about Aenir to tell that weird old woman."

Adras stopped taking in water vapor long enough to burp. Then he started sucking again, his powerful breath twisting the water into vapor and up into his mouth.

"Beautiful," said Tal. "You're a big help." Despite the heat, now at its most intense, Tal didn't want to wait. Every minute spent in the oasis was time lost. Anything could be happening while he sat around eating cakefruit. To Gref, or to his mother.

Anything.

"Come on," he said. But he had only gone a few stretches from the shade of the trees when the heat from the sand burnt through the soles of his shoes, sending him hopping and swearing back to the pool.

"Too hot to travel," said Adras, yawning. "We should wait till it cools off."

"I guess so," said Tal reluctantly. He inspected his boots. He hadn't noticed before, but the morning's trek through the strange desert had burned several holes through the hide. They were Icecarl boots, built for ice, not burning sands. "We'll have to make up the time tonight."

Adras nodded.

Tal put his back against one of the trees, looked up to make sure that no cakefruit was likely to fall on him, and closed his eyes. He wouldn't sleep, he vowed. He'd just think everything through. Finding the Codex was the first step, but there was a lot more to think about.

"How do I find the Codex?" he mumbled to himself. Did he just keep on walking east till he fell over it?

Tal knew it wouldn't be as easy as that. He would rest now and save his strength. Then he would walk all night. He'd make up the lost time. He had to.

But the sun was very hot, even in the shade of the cakefruit trees, and Tal's thoughts drifted off into dreams.

He slept, even when the breeze came up and cake-fruit dropped with soft plopping noises all around him.

He slept on, even as something slithered down the trunk of the cakefruit tree above him. Something long and scaly, though very flat and thin. It had thousands of tiny hooked legs. They rippled under it, each hook digging out minute flecks of bark as it made its circular way down and around the trunk.

It had two heads at the end of its ribbonlike body. They were of unequal sizes. The smaller head had a bulbous cluster of eight multifaceted eyes, and two jointed tendrils that quested ahead. The other head was twice as big. It was all mouth, currently shut.

The thing seemed in no hurry. It moved steadily down, until it was right above Tal's sleeping head. The tendrils from its small head brushed his hair, and the eyes glittered as it measured up the Chosen boy.

Then its mouth began to open. At first it didn't seem possible that it could open wide enough to do Tal any harm. But the lower section of the thing's head continued to open wider and wider, the mouth spreading back well past the second head, into the creature's body.

It didn't have any teeth, but an ugly green spit began to drip from the back of its throat.

The thing shifted a little to line Tal up better, and then slowly began to lower its jaws down over his head, as the green drool spread across his scalp.

Tal awoke to the sound of strange rumbling, and a sun that was low in the sky. He sat up a little straighter and scratched his head. Something sticky came off on his hand and Tal jerked his fingers back down to look.

"Errrch!" he yelled, and stood up. Some disgusting tree sap or something had dropped on his head while he was asleep. He rushed over to the spring and washed his hand off, then stuck his head in and gave that a good wash as well.

The level of the spring had sunk a good hand's breadth, and it was easy to see where it had gone, and where the strange rumbling sound was coming from. Adras was floating just above Tal's head, snoring. He had taken in so much water he was a fat butterball of a cloud, all fluffy white, without a streak of the lean, mean darkness of a storm.

"Call yourself a Storm Shepherd!" said Tal, but he didn't say it too loud. He could hardly blame Adras for falling asleep. He was disgusted that he had himself, though they probably would not have been able to set out any earlier anyway.

Mind you, he thought, it was lucky nothing happened. Aenir was not a world where it paid to sleep unguarded.

He was just thinking that when he saw the hideous creature with two heads. It was on the ground only a few stretches away, wriggling toward him, a trail of the hideous green slime dribbling from its mouth.

Tal raised his hand and focused on the Sunstone. He would blast it with a Red Ray of Fiery Destruction.

The Sunstone flashed red and began to shine. But before the Red Ray was complete, Tal blinked and lowered his hand.

The grotesque two-headed worm or snake or whatever it was had left a trail of its own bright saliva in particular patterns. It had scribed a whole series of characters onto the ground under the trees.

Tal stared at the writing. At first he couldn't work it out. Then he realized that he was looking at everything upside down. So he walked around, taking care to give plenty of space to the two-headed snake, which was still writing.

There was the letter C again, and an arrow pointing east. But there was also a picture of something. A key, Tal thought. And then several letters, which spelled out H-A-Z-R-O-R.

"Who are you?" asked Tal, talking to the snake. "How do you communicate through creatures?"

The snake twitched and began to drip another letter onto the ground. Tal walked a bit closer, keen to work out what the letter was going to be. It looked like the first part of a C.

He was only a stretch away when there was a titanic explosion of air. Tal was thrown backward and a great spray of dirt shot into the sky, accompanied by pieces of two-headed snake.

"I got it!" roared Adras, punching the air with one huge cloud-fist. "I've saved you!"

Tal picked himself up and counted to ten. Adras was worse than Gref. At least Gref knew he was annoying when he interfered with whatever Tal was doing.

"Why did you do that?" Tal asked slowly, when he could get the words out without screaming.

"It was a Two-Headed Gulper," said Adras, as if that was explanation enough. "Lucky I was keeping an eye open."

This was too much for Tal.

"You were sound asleep, you idiot!" he shouted. "And it was writing me a message. A message from the Codex!"

"It wasn't a Two-Headed Gulper?" asked Adras innocently.

"Yes, it was," agreed Tal. "But it wasn't… I don't know… being one right at that second."

"What have you done to your hair?" asked Adras, tilting his puffy head to one side as if he couldn't work it out.

"What?" asked Tal. "What?" "Your hair," said Adras. "It's changed color."

Tal forgot about telling the Storm Shepherd exactly how stupid he was and rushed over to the spring. But it was bubbling too much to be a useful mirror.

"Green," added Adras. "In streaks."

Tal touched his hair again. It seemed all right, but when he pulled out a few hairs they were bright green.

As green as the saliva of the Two-Headed Gulper, he realized. It must have been dripping on his head, just before it was taken over or whatever the Codex did and made to write the message.

He looked back at the tree where he'd been sleeping, and saw the pattern of the Gulper's clawed feet heading down, and a few patches of green on the bark just above where his head would have been.

"I feel sick," he said suddenly.

Adras watched in total puzzlement as the boy staggered over to another tree and threw up. It seemed rather an excessive reaction just because his hair had changed color. Storm Shepherds changed color all the time.

When Tal had stopped being sick, he turned back to Adras.

"Adras," said Tal. "I think it's time we set down some rules. First of all, you must not go to sleep when I am asleep. You must keep watch."

"But I feel sleepy when you're sleepy," answered Adras. "Because we share a bond."

"I am the Chosen," ordered Tal. "You are my Spiritshadow. Or you will be. You must obey."

"Why?" asked Adras. "Why shouldn't we work things out together?"

Tal stared up at the sky. This was not how he'd imagined dealing with his own Spiritshadow.

If only Milla hadn't interrupted him back at the Hill, he would have bound this hulking great creature properly. Now Tal had given away his shadow, instead of using it to secure absolute obedience.

Adras mistook Tal's silence for some sort of sulk.

"Well, if that's the way you want it," he said, "I'll sleep when you're awake. I'll sleep now."

"No!" exclaimed Tal. "We need to keep moving. The sky is clear I'll be able to see well enough to find a path through the crystals."

"But where?" asked Adras. "To find Odris?"

"No!" said Tal. "We've been over that. The Codex at least I think it's the Codex - has sent me another message."

He frowned, thinking about the arrow, and the pictures of the key and the letters that spelled out "Hazror."

"We will head east, and there is somewhere called Hazror, where we will look for a key," Tal announced confidently. It was important to sound in charge in front of a wayward servant. He'd learned that as a child, instructing Underfolk.

He didn't feel confident, though. What if he'd got the message totally wrong?

"Hazror?" asked Adras. "Haze-roar?"

"Yes," said Tal. "Do you know anything about it?"

"I know something about a creature called Hazror," said Adras. His chest turned dark and stormy and lightning flashed at his fingertips. "Enough to know that we don't want to go anywhere near him."