Inferno

25

The grey substance that passed for ground had a slight spring to it, and the crimson sky was unwavering.

The Wolverines found it difficult to judge their progress. There was too much uniformity in their surroundings, and no landmarks except for the white structure they were heading towards and the star hanging above it. The place was bright and uniformly lit, but they couldn’t see where the light was coming from. They marched in silence.

Stryke turned to Coilla, walking beside him, and spoke in an undertone. “Think we’re doing right?”

“Do we have a choice?”

He shook his head. “What about Dynahla?” The shape-changer was forging ahead, and out of earshot.

“Don’t know. There always seems to be another twist to him.”

“Looks to me like we’re being led a merry dance. You know I’d go to the end of this or any other world for Thirzarr, but…”

“But is following Dynahla the right way to go about it?”

“Yeah.”

“Again, what choice is there?”

Stryke sighed. He looked back at the column marching behind. “I’ve been neglecting the tyros. I’ll check on them.”

Coilla nodded, and he headed down the line.

Dallog and Pirrak were at the end of the column, several paces to the rear of Wheam, Chuss and Keick, and Stryke came to the trio first.

“All well?” he asked.

“We’re fine, Captain,” Keick replied.

“Though we never dreamed we’d see anything like this when we signed up,” Chuss added.

“Always bet on the unexpected,” Stryke advised.

“It’s incredible,” Wheam said, sweeping an arm at the bizarre expanse they were moving through. “I can’t wait to include it in my epic ballad.”

“Still working on that, eh?”

“When I can. In my head, mostly.” He pointed at the item in question. “I composed some more today.” He reached for his lute. “Perhaps you’d like to-”

“No. We’re in enough trouble.”

He left Wheam looking bereft.

Stryke found Dallog and Pirrak in whispered conversation, which they broke off when they saw him.

“Corporal.”

“Captain,” Dallog returned.

Pirrak gave an edgy nod and said nothing.

“You’re still bunching,” Stryke announced.

“Captain?”

“I wanted the Ceragans mixed in with the band, Dallog, but that hasn’t happened.”

“Aren’t we all Ceragans? Whether native or adopted?”

Stryke wondered if that was a dig. “New recruits, then. They won’t learn the band’s ways from each other.”

“With respect, Captain, you’ve seen how well we work as a unit. It made sense to keep us tight.”

“What doesn’t make sense is disobeying one of my orders.” He cut off the corporal’s response with a flick of his hand. “But I’m not minded to make an issue of it now. We’ll sort this later.” He looked to Pirrak. “You’re not saying much, Private.”

Pirrak fumbled for a reply.

“He’s… shy,” Dallog offered.

“Shy?” Stryke said. “I’ve heard orcs called a lot of things, but never shy.”

“These new recruits are young. They’re far from home. All this is unsettling for them, and it takes them in different ways. That’s another reason I’ve kept us as a unit.”

“The best way to toughen ’em is in the field, with combat.”

“You can’t say we haven’t had plenty of that. And maybe there’s more to come.” He indicated what lay ahead with a nod.

Stryke looked up. The white structure was suddenly and inexplicably nearer, no more than a modest arrow shot away. He couldn’t work out whether the peculiar geography of this place had made it seem further off than it really was, or whether magic played a part in drawing it, or them, closer.

Stryke made his way along the column, passed its head and joined Dynahla.

“What is that thing?” he asked, gazing at the white slab.

“An entrance, to this world proper,” the fetch replied.

“You mean this isn’t it?”

“This is no more than a vestibule. Our real journey begins in there.”

The building, if building was the right word, was an enormous, pure white block, not unlike a giant brick. It was as wide, deep and tall as any fortress they had ever seen, but bore no other resemblance.

Stryke approached it and laid a palm against its surface. It was as sleek as glass and slightly warm. He had no idea what it was made of.

The rest of the band arrived and began their own investigations.

“It’s completely smooth,” Coilla said, running a hand over it. “No sign of joins or seams or-”

“You won’t find any,” Dynahla assured her, “or a door. It’s designed to be impenetrable.”

“If that means it’s supposed to keep us out,” Haskeer declared, “it’s bullshit. This’ll do the job.” He lifted his axe.

“I wouldn’t do that,” the shape-changer cautioned.

Haskeer ignored him, took a swing and struck the wall a hefty blow. The axe rebounded and flew out of his grasp, causing several Wolverines to duck as it soared over their heads. At the same time Haskeer was thrown back, as though hit with a mighty punch. He landed heavily on his rump.

“Meet it with force and it returns that force,” Dynahla explained. “Increase the force and it repays with interest.”

“Now he tells me,” Haskeer grumbled as he got to his feet. His glare wiped the grins off the watching grunts’ faces.

“So how do we get in?” Stryke said.

“I’ll need the instrumentalities for that.”

“You said they don’t work here.”

“They don’t in the sense of taking us somewhere else. But they have other uses.”

Stryke shrugged, got out the stars and handed them to him.

Dynahla slotted them together with such speed and dexterity that the others couldn’t follow. Then he held the assembly of instrumentalities against the wall for an instant before stepping back.

A pair of parallel grooves appeared, working their way up from ground level, about as wide apart as an orc with his arms stretched out. When they got to above the height of the tallest band member they turned left and right, and kept moving until they met, forming an oblong. It had the shape of a door, but no visible means of being opened. Stryke was about to comment on that when it began to change colour. The white turned to grey, and the grey to black. In seconds it came to look like an entrance, albeit to an interior in total darkness.

Dynahla returned the instrumentalities to Stryke and said, “Do you want to go first?”

“How we gonna see in there?”

“That won’t be a problem.”

“You go first then.”

Dynahla nodded. Without hesitation he strode through the door and disappeared from sight.

Stryke hesitated for a moment, decided to draw his sword, just in case, and followed.

He stepped, not into darkness, but full light. That was something he would normally find remarkable, but he was coming to expect the extraordinary.

Dynahla was waiting for him, in a huge square chamber whose floor, walls and ceiling were dazzling white, like the exterior.

“This is big, but not as big as it looked from the outside,” Stryke said.

“No. This is merely a segment of the interior, but it’s the only part that concerns us.”

The rest of the band started coming through, led by Coilla and Pepperdyne. When they were all in, the door returned to white and its outline vanished. Even under the closest scrutiny there was no sign of it ever having been there.

They looked around, not that there was a lot to see. The room was completely empty and unadorned. At its opposite end was another, more conventional looking door. Dynahla made for it, and they all trailed after him.

The door, when they came to it, seemed incongruous. It was made of wood, or something approximating it, and it had a chunky brass handle. Dynahla opened it. Beyond was a tunnel, again white, again brightly lit by an unseen source.

“Now what?” Jup said.

“Not much further,” the shape-changer told him.

He entered the tunnel, Stryke and the rest close behind. As they started to walk, Spurral glanced back. She wasn’t surprised to see that the door they had just used was no longer there.

The tunnel ran straight and level for a distance none of them could estimate. In terms of time, they could have sung perhaps ten verses of one of their marching songs before they came to its end.

“Oh look,” Haskeer mouthed sarcastically, “ another door.”

This one could have been made of iron. It was stout and set with studs, and had a latch with a thick metal ring. Dynahla reached out and turned it. Hands hovered over sword hilts as the door swung open.

A different kind of light greeted them. It was natural, compared to what they had come from, and was accompanied by a mild, fragrant breeze. They filed out.

It was what they thought of as a normal landscape. There was greenery and trees. The sky was a proper colour, and a big yellow, summer sun beat down from it. Yet the northern star was somehow still visible, twinkling above emerald hills. They heard what might have been soft birdsong.

“Don’t be complacent,” Dynahla warned them. “What appears ordinary may not be what it seems.”

“We keep going north?” Stryke asked.

“Yes.”

“How far?”

“Who can say? It could be a short journey or a lengthy march.”

“Can’t we speed things up?”

“We could find mounts.”

“In this place?”

“Like I said, there’s life here.”

“You’ve been here before, haven’t you?”

“Yes,” the shape-changer confessed. “Just once, when I first came to Serapheim’s private universe. That was a long time ago, and I stayed there until I was sent to you.”

“So you came out this way?”

“No. Serapheim used the power of the instrumentalities to transport me directly to your location.”

“But you’ve been here once before, so you know what to expect.”

“Only in the broadest sense. Like I said, this place has a random element. I very much doubt it would be the same as it was on my only previous visit.”

Stryke chewed that over as they continued walking.

Eventually they came to a river.

“This is a likely place to find our ride,” Dynahla told them in a low tone, while signalling them to quieten down.

It was softly agreed that Dynahla, Stryke, Coilla and Jup would scout for mounts. They moved stealthily towards the riverbank, leaving the rest of the band sheltering on the edge of a copse.

Luck was with them. They found what they were looking for near the water’s edge. Four or five creatures, each as large as three warhorses, with elongated, ribbed bodies of whitish-brown, and a forest of legs. The millipedes’ rudimentary faces were dominated by a ravening mouth and a pair of unblinking, black button eyes.

“Dangerous?” Stryke said, peering round the rock they were hiding behind.

“Troublesome, more like,” Dynahla replied. “But they can be made to carry us.”

“How?”

The shape-changer explained.

Stryke went to fill in the rest of the band and got them down to the riverbank for a look. They took the sight of gigantic multi-legged insects in their stride, even if Wheam went a little pale. Standeven, who didn’t know whether to be appalled or disgusted, swore he wouldn’t go near the things. A threatening fist shut him up.

When they were set, Stryke said, “Ready, Dynahla?”

“Yes.”

“Sure you can fake something that big?”

“Just about. It’s takes a lot of stamina to maintain it. But once we get them working I can give it up. Now if you could give me some room…”

They moved away and watched as he went to the ground and twisted, contorted and expanded. They saw the sprouting of a myriad legs, the emergence of coal-black eyes and rapacious mouth.

Finally he was done. He rose up as a creature identical to the ones scooping water on the riverbank. The question was whether they would accept him as their own. Moving sinuously, numerous limbs working in unison, the bogus millipede scuttled towards them. He brushed Standeven’s leg as he passed. The human shuddered, eyes closed.

They need not have worried. After some snuffling, twittering and a winding insectoid dance, Dynahla’s counterfeit was accepted. Shortly after, he led them to the band.

The millipedes turned out to be surprisingly docile. They did prove hard to mount, however, and harder to stay on. For Standeven, getting aboard was an ordeal, and he got a lot of unwanted help. The creatures were big enough to take the whole band between them, with six or seven sitting astride each extensive back. The orcs wove vines for reins and to lash themselves in place.

Dynahla’s millipede carried no riders. His job was to lead the genuine creatures, a task made possible by assuming a female form. The real ones were all male.

They set off at a fast crawl, the band trying to adapt themselves to the left-to-right, right-to-left meandering gait of their mounts.

The terrain they passed through was basically unvarying. It was all rural, as far as they could see, and they came across no cottages, farms or any other signs of habitation. There was an abundance of animal life, mostly evidenced by rustlings in the undergrowth as they scampered past, or the briefest glimpse of fur or hide as something darted for cover. At one point they saw a herd of beasts, gathered in a field on sloping ground. But they were too far away to make out what they were.

Their journey stretched on, and as time passed they became aware that the day had not matured since they arrived. The sun was in exactly the same place in the sky.

“Dynahla told me that it’s always the peak of the day here,” Stryke explained.

“Is it ever night?” Coilla said over his shoulder.

“I asked him about that. He said we wouldn’t want to be here when it happened.”

Shortly after, the landscape began to change. It grew sparser, and rocky. A clump of pallid cliffs loomed ahead, with a narrow canyon punched through it.

The Dynahla millipede, in the lead, came to a halt, causing the procession to slow and then stop. He transformed, contracting, writhing and thrashing until he assumed his usual form. The true millipedes seemed unfazed by the loss of their amour.

He was dusting himself off when Stryke slid down and went to him.

“What’s up?”

“That.” He pointed towards the cliff.

Stryke had to strain to see what it was. Even so, he could only make out a dark shape against the lighter background of rock. “What is it?”

“Something you have to take. Assuming you can get away with it alive.”