Into Darkness

53

“Where is the device?” Richard asked, grabbing Sang by his arm before he could leave. “Is that it?”

Sang stopped and looked across the sand to what Richard was pointing at: something that definitely did not belong in this strange, windblown landscape of organic shapes.

There, across the way on the edge of the sand, stood a square piece of stone, each side about the length of his arm from his shoulder to his fingertips. It wasn’t tall. It wouldn’t quite come up to his rib cage. The top was slanted, so that if you stood before the stone at the edge of the sand on the other side, you would have been able to have a good look at that slanted top, but Richard couldn’t see it from where he was.

The stone looked smooth, but not smooth in the same way the sculpted rock all around them was smooth. This thing was absolutely square and straight on all sides. And while it was smooth, it was not polished like so much of the stone in palaces.

With everything some shade of red it was hard to tell what color it might actually be, but Richard thought it would be dull gray in his own world. There were markings all over the stone. He was too far away to know what kinds of markings they were, but he could see that they covered the entire stone.

Richard wondered if he should draw his sword and destroy the device before the goddess could send more Glee to his world.

As if reading his thoughts, Sang was gesturing urgently. “Hurry. We must get away from this place for now and get to those who side with me, against the goddess. I told them about you and said that I was going to see if I could get you to come back with me. They will be waiting.”

Richard and Vika followed Sang as he rushed off between the labyrinth of smooth, flowing shapes of the towering rocks surrounding the white sand. Once they were through the meandering gaps in the rock walls, the descent rapidly became steep. There was a path of sorts between the standing forest of rocks, at times with crude steps cut into the soft rock.

Below them, Richard could see a thick blanket of clouds covering the ground far into the distance.

As they moved down from the place with the device that sat at the edge of the area of sand, they gradually descended into that dark reddish cloud. As the visibility grew less and less, it was similar to moving down into clouds below high places in the mountains in Richard’s world, and having those clouds turn to a dense fog once you were inside them. It was the same here, except the fog was a dirty reddish color.

The farther down they went, the wetter the air became with mist. At some point, the mist turned to drizzle. Even before the drizzle, the heat and humidity had Richard’s shirt soaking wet.

Vika unbuckled some leather straps so that she could open her outfit at the neck. This was definitely not a place to be wearing leather, although the red fit right in. In fact, the red leather stood out brightly in the murky red world.

Sang looked relieved when they finally got into the heavier drizzle. He used his wrists to rub the water collecting on his arms around on his body, seeming to luxuriate in the wetness that he had missed for so long. He looked back at them and drew his lips back to show his teeth.

Vika glanced at Richard, wondering what it could mean.

“I think he is showing us a smile,” he whispered to her.

She gave him a look of silent incredulity.

If it really was a smile, it was about as grotesque a smile as he had ever seen.

After about a couple hours of moving quickly down slopes of loose scree that slid out from underfoot, over ledges and down through canyons of towering rock walls, and then over yet more rock, but this time harder and more jagged, they emerged from the bottom of the cloud cover into a strange, wet-looking world. The ground for as far as Richard could see was relatively flat. The only mountainous area was behind them, as was the one they had just climbed down from out of the clouds. Haze and drizzle made the visibility toward the horizon poor, but he didn’t see any hills or mountains off that way.

There was scattered, low vegetation among open swampy areas, and there were a lot of rather tall plants that resembled lush ferns. Mostly roundish rocks, most small, covered much of the ground where there wasn’t the water or areas of the low vegetation. Among those small rocks were a few smooth, round rocks no bigger than about the right size to sit on. The rocks covered most of the dry areas above the water. In fact, they littered the ground endlessly. Some of the expanses of water in the distance looked larger, but most of the water nearby was in patchy areas much like the swamps he had seen before, but without the trees.

In the distance were peculiar trees with long, crooked, bare trunks. High up each tree had a single, dense clump of leaves. Widely spaced here and there, the trees seemed to march across the landscape beneath the cloudy red sky. They were the strangest-looking trees Richard had ever seen. None, though, were very close.

Flocks of birds moved through the air like current in a raging river. As some swept down closer, he could see that they weren’t actually birds. They were large bats flying in colonies.

As they reached the bottom of the climb, Sang walked right into the first body of water he could get to until it was up to his neck. Richard could see several snakes writhing just below the surface of the water. Sang stretched out and swam for a bit, as if to refresh himself.

“Sang! There are snakes in the water!” Vika called out in alarm.

Sang kept swimming for a moment before turning back to them. “Don’t worry. The snakes are friendly.”

“Friendly? What if they bite you?” she asked.

“They eat small insects. They don’t bite us and they do not have venom, like the snakes in your world. The only animals that sometimes cause harm to us are the boars. They are big and mean, and sometimes even kill Glee.”

“Boars?” Richard asked. “You mean you have wild boars?”

“They live in the muddy places.” Sang gestured off beyond the immediate swampy water. “But sometimes they attack us. They are dangerous. They are big with tough hides our claws can’t cut through and have sharp tusks, bigger than our claws. We must always watch for wild boars when we are not in the water. They like the mud, but they don’t go near the water.”

He then busied himself at the edge of the water, dredging up water plants with round nodules dotting their entire length. They were a sickly green color, with a slight iridescence to them. When he had an armful, he flopped them over on the rocks.

“Float weed,” he told them.

As soon as he was free of his load of float weed, he started using his claws to pry at a large, flat snail stuck tight to a rock at the waterline.

“This is a muscle snail,” he announced as he worked at prying it away from the rock. “I want you to be able to try our delicious food.”

Richard thought the place smelled rather rank, like most any swamp he had been in; not as bad as some, worse than others. Vika looked around at the strange and forbidding reddish desolation, then looked over at him and spoke in a low voice that Sang wouldn’t hear.

“He’s right. This place is an absolute paradise.”

Richard half huffed a laugh in answer.

“Sang,” he said, “we’re not hungry right now. More importantly, we don’t have time for this. We need to stop the goddess before she sends her hordes to my world to kill people. You said that there were those of your kind who wanted to see me if I returned with you.”

Sang blinked up at him, then walked up onto the rocks. The water sluiced off him as he emerged from the swampy water, some of the string algae draped over a shoulder.

“Yes, you are right. My apologies. I was just so happy to be home that I wasn’t thinking. I was eager to show you some of the wonderful things about my world, so that you would not be so afraid that you must remain here.”

“Where are the others?” Richard asked, getting right down to business as he scanned the other swampy areas. They were dark, and it would be hard to see any Glee if they were in the water. “We need to talk to those who believe as you.”

Sang stretched up on his webbed toes and peered into the distance. He pointed with a claw.

“There are some of them over there, on those rocks, harvesting muscle snails. I will go talk to them and ask them to gather the others right away.”

“Good,” Richard said, as he took Vika’s arm and guided her up onto some of the rocks that were a bit flatter and easier to stand on without their ankles twisting.

In the distance, he could just make out the dark shapes of other Glee near the edge of some of the swampy areas. They were hauling up float weed. In other places he saw a few Glee swimming through larger bodies of water. They were so graceful in the water that they hardly disturbed the surface.

Richard was beginning to feel frustrated and annoyed. He had come to stop the Golden Goddess from sending the Glee to slaughter the people in his world. He and Vika had given up their futures—their lives—in order to accomplish that vital mission.

He hadn’t known that he was going to end up playing mother hen trying to gather up groups of distracted Glee.