The Ventifact Colossus (The Heroes of Spira Book 1) (44 page)

Sorent, Veloun, and Corlea all stared at him agog.

“Do you have a better idea?” he asked them.

They did not.

“Then take us closer,” said Corlea.

Ernie directed the carpet straight at the head of the approaching colossus. The beast was still serving to distract the parts of his mind that would otherwise be succumbing to his acrophobia, so that was good. The colossus was on a course aimed directly for Arrowshot Tower; was it simply going to where the horn had been winded? Would it stop there? Or maybe that was where, according to Romus the Mad, it would call the other turtles from the desert and lead its slow but inexorable world-crushing march.

There was more missile fire in the vicinity of the head, as bowmen on the ground aimed for the turtle’s eyes. Many of the arrows didn’t climb high enough, and those that did had lost some of their force to the pull of gravity. Some missed their target and ricocheted from the monster’s rough hide with a percussive plinking. A few stuck in its skin, but harmlessly. A scattering of arrows did strike the eyes, but none of them found purchase, as a thick translucent membrane covered the creature’s banquet-table-sized eyeballs. The barrage of tiny sticks didn’t appear to cause the turtle any discomfort, let alone discourage its advance.

Ernie edged the carpet closer. The Ventifact Colossus was moving towards him much more quickly than he had anticipated. Its head rocked slightly as it lumbered along, and what seemed like a smooth motion from far off was revealed as a brisk bobbing and swaying up close. The slightly upturned nostrils were enormous, but landing the carpet, or even hovering nearby so the Stormknights could leap into them, was going to involve some delicate and precise maneuvers. Behind him the Stormknights were uttering oaths of disbelief that anything could be so huge. The turtle’s face was a wall of mottled brown-green skin, with features so large they hardly registered as parts of a living thing. Its lipless mouth was parted ever so slightly, which meant they could have flown into it with a dozen feet of clearance above and below.

“There won’t be any light in there,” said Veloun. “And there’s no way a torch or lantern will stay lit.”

She was right; the nostrils were gaping black pits. Ernie shuddered to think of what it would be like inside the head of a Ventifact Colossus—dark, hot, damp, with ropes of mucous and eventually veins and blood and Pikon only knew what else. Would there even be enough air to keep the Stormknights alive, once they had slashed their way in deep enough?

“I have a solution,” called Ernie. “My friend—”

Another gargantuan foot smashed down onto the city, and the head lurched forward. Ernie frantically expressed a desire that the carpet move backward, and it obeyed instantly, though not before the bouldery nose of the Colossus had clipped the rug’s front fringe.

“Pikon’s flapjacks, that was close! I only have two of these, so you’ll have to share.”

This was a dangerous moment to test whether he could steer Vyasa Vya
with only one hand gripping the tassels, but Ernie had no choice. He shrugged his pack from his shoulders and fished around with his right hand until he found his two illuminated coins.

“Take these. They don’t need air, and they won’t burn your hand.”

Veloun and Corlea each took one and stuffed them into pockets.

“Are you ready?” Ernie asked.

“How could we be?” asked Sorent. “You are asking us to leap into the nose of the most monstrous being ever to walk upon Charagan! But our readiness does not matter. We are Stormknights, and guarding the kingdom is—”

“Yes, we’re ready,” said Corlea. “Move us closer, Ernest.”

Now Ernie had to focus, to block out the distractions of occasional arrows hissing past, of his passengers shifting their bodies around as they prepared to disembark, and of the fact that he was less than fifty feet away from something that could breathe him in by accident. But once most of his concentration was dedicated to the finer points of piloting, the carpet reacted more strongly to every mental hiccup and second guess. Vyasa Vya
tilted and bucked as he overcorrected, shifting sideways and then backward as Ernie tried to avoid crashing into the hillsides of the turtle’s cheek ridges. And as his control of his cloth rectangle wavered, he panicked. This wasn’t fair! His shoulders weren’t broad enough for this responsibility. It should be Tor up here, ferrying these passengers of destiny…but then, Tor had likely given his life so that Ernie could have this opportunity. He shook his head. Focus!

Another leg came down with a noise like thunder, and once more the head shot forward. He was too close! Ernie yanked the tassels sideways in desperation, trying to nudge the carpet’s position so it would wind up in the left nostril.

He almost made it. The end of the Colossus’s septum crashed into the carpet, sending Ernie sprawling onto his back. With no one holding the tassels the rug defaulted to hovering and was simply pushed along by the inexorable bulk of the turtle’s nose.

But the Stormknights had been ready. They leapt from the carpet even as it folded and spun. Ernie sat up in time to see Veloun jump cleanly into the nostril, vanishing into its darkness. Sorent landed against the nostril’s lip, legs dangling, but his hands grabbed something inside the nose and he pulled himself up.

Corlea Turtlebane missed entirely, thumping against the cliff wall that was the skin between the turtle’s nostrils. She scrabbled frantically for purchase even as she slid down. Ernie lunged for the tassels but knew there was no way he could swoop down in time to catch her. It was nearly two hundred feet to the city below, a fall that would be impossible to survive.

“Ernest!”

Ernie grabbed the tassels and went into hard reverse. Below him Corlea had grabbed onto an arrow that was lodged in a seam of turtle skin. She dangled by one hand, legs kicking. The arrow was bending.

You are destined for great things, Ernest Roundhill.

The voice of Old Bowlegs came to him again, even as he banked the carpet downward.

It is not ability you lack, or character, or intelligence. It is only confidence. But I cannot give you that. You will find it, probably in the most unlikely of places.

If the nose of a gigantic turtle was not the most unlikely place on Spira right now, Ernie couldn’t imagine what might be. He forced his heart from his throat and back into his chest, executed a perfect plunge-and-spin maneuver, and brought the carpet directly beneath Corlea’s waving feet. The Stormknight dropped down behind him, after which Ernie again backed up before there was another accident.

“It will be easier if you jump down from higher up,” he said.

Corlea’s face was pale, her lips trembling, but she nodded.

As Ernie brought the carpet up and around, a cone of radiance shone from inside the left nostril…a good sign. “I’ll stay up here,” he told Corlea. “After you three have killed this thing, get back down to the nose and I’ll pick you up.”

“You are a man worthy of Werthis,” she answered. “Whatever happens this day, you are a hero, Ernest.”

She jumped from the carpet and landed cleanly in the nostril. Ernie steered Vyasa Vya
up and out, until he was a hundred feet or more above the top of the wandering island the colossus carried on its shell. Then he released the tassels and flopped down on his back, trying not to hyperventilate and praying that his heart wouldn’t spontaneously combust from overwork.

For two minutes he lay there, panting, staring up at the sky. It was strange, looking at so much open space after the Ventifact Colossus had dominated his field of vision these past few minutes. (Gods, but it felt longer!) He closed his eyes and tried to pretend he was dreaming, but as he listened to the sounds of chaos from far below, worries crept into his mind.

What if there was no direct passage from the nose to the brain? Its skull must be three feet thick; the weapons of the Stormknights would never be able to crack a hole through it. Would they suffocate? Would the turtle simply sneeze them out, a titan’s bellows launching them like grains of soot into the air? And how big was the brain of a Ventifact Colossus? Ernie had been assuming it filled up most of the head, but then animal brains were proportionally smaller, weren’t they? What if the turtle’s brain was only the size of a wine barrel? Would the Stormknights find it, or even recognize it if they did? And just as chickens could dash about in a panic without benefit of a head, might the turtle keep on stomping even if its brain was chopped to bits?

“Have faith in Eddings,” he told himself.

Ernie rolled over until he could peek down over the edge of the carpet. Directly below was the thrashing tail, still leaving a wide swath of destruction. Many buildings had fallen merely from the tremors produced by the weight of the turtle’s steps. And of course there were the footprints themselves, deep as wells, giant holes in the earth filled with the city’s remains.

Another minute passed, and another, and the Ventifact Colossus trudged on, step by ruinous step. It was only a few hundred yards from Arrowshot Tower, and Ernie despaired. The Stormknights had failed, probably suffocated, or maybe they were still in the nose, chopping vainly through membranes and other interior bits that were not at all crucial to the beast’s survival.

The thought came unbidden that the kingdom could be doomed by the world’s largest booger. Ernie giggled as he imagined Sorent, Corlea, and Veloun carving through a barn-sized lump of hardened turtle snot, and the sound of his own snigger opened some sort of emotional floodgate that released a torrent of uncontrollable laughter mixed with sobs until tears blurred his eyes and ran down his cheeks.

By the time he mastered himself a minute later, the Ventifact Colossus was standing still. It slowly swung its great head back and forth, but for the first time since it emerged from the Mouth of Nahalm, all four of its legs were motionless.

Ernie sat bolt upright, gripped the tassels, and steered the carpet down and toward the head. As he flew, the colossus took a step
backward
, and its right eyelid drooped and closed. Though Ernie didn’t have any good idea of how to interpret a turtle’s facial expressions, he thought the thing was confused.

Its mouth opened, but no sound came out. Half a minute later its tail stopped swishing and dropped, flattening a row of shops that had miraculously avoided destruction before then. Just when Ernie dared to hope the Stormknights had finished their work, the colossus lifted its front left leg high off the ground, as though it was preparing for a final sprint. But instead of swinging forward, the leg splayed out at an awkward diagonal, and the whole of its body tilted leftward and collapsed.

When the underbelly of the colossus struck the ground, there was a shockwave of rolling thunder, a fast-moving ring of collapsing buildings and gouts of smoke and dust. From the folk who had not yet fled the city, a ragged cheer went up.

The turtle had fallen with its head only thirty yards from Arrowshot Tower. The tower had stayed heroically upright throughout the city’s ordeal, but now succumbed to the force of the beast’s collapse. It buckled and cracked in several places, sending its multi-tiered red stone corpse spiraling downward, splashing the ground with a conspicuously odd pattern of debris.

Only one building had survived between the fallen colossus and the toppled tower, a low white dome made of limestone. A line of a dozen other buildings leading to it had fallen in the final shockwave, but the dome had survived. Did the people who lived or worked there appreciate how lucky they were? One more step and it would have been flattened like the hundreds of others. On the other hand, it was damaged badly enough that it would need to be knocked down and rebuilt anyway, and that was assuming the entire city wasn’t simply evacuated as a total loss. Yes, there were even cracks in the dome’s roof, and red light was slashing upward and out through those cracks like upside-down sunbeams. Was there a fire inside? Had the vibrations from the Colossus knocked over a brazier or—

The dome exploded in an inverted hailstorm of flame and rock, a blazing geyser that roared into the sky. The carpet responded to Ernie’s instinctive flinch, zipping upward a hundred feet as if propelled by a giant spring. Ernie peered over the front of the carpet to see what had happened, and when the smoke had cleared, he just stared, wondering at the sight below.

The remains of the buildings that had fallen last were strewn in a very clear arrangement, like a man standing with his feet together, his arms raised and outstretched. The ravaged dome, its roof caved and leaking plumes of smoke, formed a nearly perfect head for the man. The fallen Arrowshot Tower resembled a crown of red rocks, and from hundreds of feet up looked like flames rising from the smoldering head.

Ernie had seen that figure before.

In Seablade Point. In Hodge’s office. The statuette of the burning man was sculpted in the exact pose as the final pieces of wreckage from the Colossus’s jaunt through Sand’s Edge.

Ernie brought the carpet lower. As the smoke continued to dissipate, details inside the dome became visible. There were a dozen bodies lying amidst the chunks of limestone, each in an orange-red robe, and twinkling in the ashes were hundreds of little red-gold metal pyramids.

Even as his mind assembled the puzzle of what had just taken place, his eye was caught by unexpected movement from the giant turtle’s face. The Stormknights! He had nearly forgotten about them. Out of the black cave that was the reptile’s left nostril, a human hand reached out, coated with yellow-green slime.