Chapter the Tenth,
The Night Before the Last,
In which light swims in a round.
I. Sucked Back In
Dunes surrounded the river for endless tails in every direction. Further east, jet black mountains loomed large in stark contrast to the crimson desert. Sitting side by side, Jai and Ceder rowed in silence until they were beyond sight of the sea.
“Do you hear that?” asked Why, putting one hand to his ear. “Someone is singing.”
“No one would be singing in this wasteland,” said Jai. “It’s probably just the wind.”
As they made progress inland the mounds of sand to either side of the river were each one larger than the last, forming an ever-deeper, snaking valley for the pink boat to navigate. The wind funneled between the dunes like a screeching hawk. Time slowed to a crawl, tracked only by the setting sun.
“I can’t keep this up forever,” said Ceder, rubbing her shoulders.
Jai had spent his entire life hauling an iron wheelbarrow back and forth; rowing was not fatiguing him as rapidly as it was Ceder. “Take a break,” he told her, grabbing her oar, “have a drink.”
Ceder scooped a handful from the river—despite the Coralute’s warning, the water was not too hot to touch. While she rested, her eyes fell on Astray, as they so often did, and she noticed something about him that she had not seen before. There was a small patch of white hair at the nape of the cub’s neck. It was no larger than a scale or two and would have been impossible to discern in the fading light but that it seemed faintly to glow.
“It’s getting louder,” said Why, cupping a hand to his ear, listening to the wind wash over the desert. “Someone is chanting. Slow, like a drum. I’m sure of it.” The butterfly shook his head as if coming out of a trance and glanced up at Jai and Ceder. “Why, that’s really rather frightening, isn’t it? Perhaps I should go investigate.”
“If you leave the boat,” said Ceder, “I have a feeling it will be the last time we see you. Stay here, where it’s safe.”
“Not to worry you, my lady, but here on this river, in the middle of this desert, why, safe is the last word I would use.”
Ceder took her oar back from Jai and they rowed together for a time. Astray sat between the children giving the occasional growl of encouragement whenever it seemed that the comet above was getting too far ahead of the boat. Ceder pointed out the white patch on the cub’s back to Jai. Covered in sweat from the exertion of his double-duty with the oars, he grunted once, indicating that he had not noticed the white fur before, that he had no thoughts on it, and that if she had any questions, he did not have the answers.
The red glow of the landscape faded to a dull claret as the sun sank below the dunes. A rasping chorus emerged from the howling wind and a toneless, seething voice kept the beat, like thunder underneath a pounding rain:
Feel the air grow hotter!
Dry you out as dry the land!
“You must have heard it that time!” exclaimed Why, greatly alarmed.
The tattoo on Jai’s forehead flared like an ember. He collapsed forward off the bench, dropping his oar into the river.
“Jai!” cried Ceder. She pulled her own oar into the boat and knelt beside him. The boat jerked as the current reclaimed them, rushing back toward the sea. The glyphs on Jai’s forehead were no longer aglow—that flash had lasted only an instant—but his breathing was scathed and ragged.
The droning voice drew closer:
Feel the air grow hotter!
Dry you out as dry the land,
Peel your skin away with sand!
Ceder reached a hand into the river to scoop water up for Jai. She withdrew her arm with a sharp hiss—the river was scalding hot. Hesitantly, as if it might burn her hand the same as the river, she pulled out one of the enchanted eggs and lifted Jai’s head so he could drink. When the water hit his lips the dark symbols on his forehead flared again, bright as red coals, and he spat the water out of his mouth like a fountain.
Ceder watched in horror as the rainbow of spitwater flew over the river to the sandy shore and sizzled into a tendril of steam; the Coralute had warned them not to give the desert a drink, but he had not told them what would happen if they did.
The Sands of Syn became deathly silent.
A voice the children knew all too well rolled low across the dunes, over and over, as if Sorid himself was marching across the desert with a thousand war drums at his back:
Feel the air grow hotter!
Dry you out as dry the land,
Peel your skin away with sand,
And steal your blood for water!
The wind above the river funneled into a frenzied cyclone with the boat at its center. Endless tons of sand were lifted into the air, creating a tornado of red ash. Ceder clamped her hands over her ears and huddled protectively over Jai’s body.
The river reverberated in the din like a plucked string. The red tornado swelled in size and speed until it began to suck up the water below, forming a whirlwind of scarlet ash and boiling steam. The current was thrown into a loop, rising into the swirling storm, and the boat rose with it. The voice of Sorid was all around them, chanting from inside of the tempest:
FEEL THE AIR GROW HOTTER!
DRY YOU OUT AS DRY THE LAND!
PEEL YOUR SKIN AWAY WITH SAND!
AND STEAL YOUR BLOOD FOR WATER!
Jai opened his eyes, squinting in pain. Ceder was kneeling over him, holding his head. The chanting stopped and the voice of their master said coldly, “I see you.”
Strange shapes emerged in the turbulence of ash; gnashing teeth and the tips of horns, forked tails whipping back and forth, eyeless reptilian skulls, all growing larger and more solid as the storm expanded, sweeping up entire dunes with every rotation. The demonic apparitions separated from the tornado and flew out from the whirlwind for brief bursts before being sucked back in.
“Syn,” said the voice of Sorid, exultant.
The red dragons screeched and thrashed at the disembodied voice of their master. Their forms coalesced and crystallized as the water in the tornado mixed with the whorling sands, spawning short-lived hordes of blood-red dragons that glittered like diamonds in the night.
“Eat them all,” commanded the merciless voice of the magician.
A familiar voice cut through the storm, “EEEEEAT THIIIIIS!”
II. Lighting the Way
Accompanied by stampeding thunder, rain erupted from the sky and charged into the red tornado like an infinite host of cavalry. The half-solid dragons snapped at the rain as if they could bite chunks of liquid from the air, but the driving torrents plowed through the insubstantial demons like light through darkness, dissolving tails, wings, and teeth with endless sheets of clear water.
A streak of green with white wings soared into the last lingering dragon skulls, obliterating them one at a time with thunderclaps like cannonballs. Everywhere the green streak flew, rain followed in waves thick enough for fish to swim through.
For several minutes Jai and Ceder had no idea what was happening above them. They knew only that the chanting melted away one word at a time, then the heat dissipated, and finally the shrieking wind faded. The river was flowing again.
“Was that the Oldest Fish in the Sea?” Jai asked Ceder in a breathless whisper.
She shrugged. “I think we have something else to worry about at the moment.” The rainstorm immediately presented a new threat: the boat was filling up fast. The waterline was up to their ankles. They tried to clear the water out with their hands, but the rain fell faster than they could work. Astray jumped onto the middle bench and looked at the sloshing water in the bottom of the boat with obvious misgivings.
The river bloated to twice its normal width, rushing with the speed of a charging bull. Foaming rapids formed at every turn as though the current itself was mad with bloodlust.
While the children were stooped over, bailing out the rainwater, Astray bit a yellow petal from his necklace and released it into the wind. It floated away like a glowfly.
Lightning struck, illuminating the world! In the afterglow, Jai and Ceder saw that the Sands of Syn were being washed away for as far as the eye could see. Only the tips of the tallest dunes remained, rapidly succumbing to the relentless rainfall.
The current doubled back on itself in the downpour and carried them away from the sea, running to the black mountains. The water ahead of the boat was strewn everywhere with broken rocks sticking out like a graveyard of giant bones.
Lightning flashed again and again! Wherever the jagged bolts hit the water huge explosions of sparks were thrown into the air, lighting the way forward. Ceder grabbed her oar and fended off the craggy rocks as they approached, ferrying the boat left or right with no time to think, acting on impulse.
Jai cupped water out of the boat as fast as he could. At one point he noticed what looked like a pair of purple tree leaves floating away from the boat. “Why!” Jai leaned over the side of the boat and scooped up the unconscious butterfly before he drifted away. Not knowing what else to do with their delicate companion, Jai tucked Why inside his satchel and resumed bailing water out of the boat, though the effort seemed preposterously in vain.
Lightning hit the water a dozen fins in front of the boat—before they sailed directly through the geyser of sparks the children saw that the river was flowing straight for the edge of a ravine, gushing over the side to disappear.
There was no time to turn. In the final moment before the boat reached the edge Ceder pulled her oar out of the water and knelt beside Jai. “Ready?” she whispered.
III. Down the Middle
Without pause or punctuation the boat launched over the ravine through all-encompassing darkness. They seemed to float in midair weightlessly, without time or space, and then, to Jai and Ceder’s immense surprise, they landed almost immediately. Looking back, the ledge they had sailed off was no more than ten fins high; looking forward, their new location was far less preferable.
The mountains formed a circle around them to all sides, except for the small crevice through which the river entered the enclosure. The rushing water fell into a violent whirlpool that sucked every drop down its center into unknowable oblivion.
Jai grabbed Ceder’s oar to combat their acceleration toward the center of the whirlpool. The paddle was ripped out of his hands at once and sucked away into the vortex. “We’ll never make it out alive!”
“Why did the King and Queen want us to take the river?” Ceder cried frantically. “Were they trying to kill us?”
“That’s it!” said Jai. He took the waveglass compass out of his satchel—the gift the King and Queen had left them. The directional needle was going haywire.
“What are you doing?” Ceder had to shout to be heard.
“Cross your fingers,” said Jai, and he threw the compass into the eye of the whirlpool.
The rain ceased at once.
Lightning struck behind them, sending a detonation of water and electricity into the air. The boat scaled closer to the center of the vortex, only a handful of rotations away from falling into the gaping black hole.
Astray stood in the prow, digging his claws into the pink wood for purchase. He roared into the cycling storm, though his voice was drowned out by the rushing water pounding against the cylindrical escarpment.
Jai and Ceder slumped into the bottom of the boat. Whatever help Jai imagined the compass might have provided, he had been wrong. There was nothing else they could do.
“Ceder!” he shouted in her ear.
“What?” she yelled back.
“I have to tell you something!”
“What?”
“I—”
Lightning struck into the very heart of the whirlpool, crackling and fizzing like a wasp caught inside a jar, and then the entire brilliant bolt vanished down the vortex. At once the swirling water sped up and began to glow with a bright yellow phosphorescence. The amplified spin threw the boat to the outer reaches of the enclosure, where it smashed against the walls of the cliff, threatening to splinter apart.
Astray continued to stare ahead with the lethal concentration of a dog chasing his own tail. There was no more lightning, no thunder, no rain.
The boat smashed into the mountains and Jai saw a hairline crack appear along the bottom of the hull—another jarring hit would split them in two, right down the middle.
“Jai, what is that?” Ceder pointed to the center of the enclosure.
Something was dangling down from the air above. The children had to squint to see what looked like a thread—or some manner of line—shimmering in the glow of the supercharged water. A gleaming hook hung at the end of the line, two or three fins above the mouth of the whirlpool. The hook swung like a pendulum over the vortex. Impaled on the sharp tip was a wriggling glowworm.
The children guessed what this meant at once. “Somebody up there is fishing!” they shouted, laughing like a pair of lunatics at the absurdity of the idea.
Instinctively they understood this was their only hope, but neither Jai nor Ceder could think how to use the line to their benefit short of trying to jump onto it, which would surely be a suicidal endeavor. Jai bellowed into the sky at the top of his lungs, hoping to be heard, but there was no reply.
Then Astray leapt from the boat.
Ceder reached out for the cub before she could even say his name. The glowing white patch on his back streaked across the darkness like a trail of incandescent paint brushed across the very air. He caught the dangling hook with one claw before the line swung back over the whirlpool. His tail was so close to the black hole that living shadows were sucked out of his fur by the insatiable vortex. When the line swung free, Astray pulled himself up. In one acrobatic, curling leap, he skewered a pink petal onto the hook and then launched himself back into the air. He landed with perfect timing in the prow of the ever-circling boat.
The fishing line reeled away into the blackness above.
The spinning water decelerated, the lightning trapped within fading. The boat veered to the center of the whirlpool.
Streaking down from the darkness an impossibly long serpentine creature with a head like a half-moon scythe plunged into the boat, looped underneath the middle bench, and coiled itself into a pulsing knot. The creature stretched up, trying to hoist the boat out of the water. Its body swelled like one big vein pumping too much blood.
The vacuum was more powerful—the boat dropped several fins in a freefall, stretching the serpentine creature down like taffy, but rather than descend into the black hole, the hull formed an unexpected plug in the vortex like a cork in a bottle. Freezing water shot everywhere, diverted from its natural course. The huge creature reared up again. When the boat finally pulled free of the suction a sound like an upside-down burp burst out in the enclosure, echoing in a round.
Silently their serpentine savior lifted them to safety. Soon the whirlpool was too far below to see. The world went completely black. All Jai or Ceder could feel was the spinning of the boat as they rose into the darkness.