Chaos Storm (The Flight of the Griffin Book 2) (35 page)

'Oh, thank the Source. Thank you, thank you and thank you three times, that was terrifying, but I live to tell the tale, or perhaps never to tell the tale, we shall see. Magicians are not meant to fall from a balloon, that's for certain.' He rubbed at his watery eyes and blinked, trying to bring some clarity to his vision. Between his dangling feet he could make out the blurry shape of the city, it was still some distance below, and he could tell he was drifting slightly towards the part that had, what looked to be, a full scale battle raging. Reaching up with his left hand, he tugged on the ropes and to his delight the dropping bag responded by turning in that direction, back towards the city, 'Splendid, splendid!' he chortled, now thoroughly enjoying this new experience. He reached up with his right hand and tugged the ropes to that side, and the dropping bag turned in a lazy arc allowing him to get a better view of the whole situation below - and then he glanced up just in time to see the dragon, blue ferocious and very, very angry, rushing in, claws extended to snatch the dropping bag out of the sky.

* * *

Pardigan place-shifted behind a female warrior just as she was bringing her sword down in a blow that would have cut him in two if he had remained standing there. The sword struck the hard stone of the walkway, and she gasped with shock, her head darting from side to side, trying to work out what had just happened and where her easy victim had gone. With a smile, Pardigan stepped forward, reached out and muttered 'Burn' sending a strong electrical charge into her sword - she dropped it with a yell.
'Oooowww'

'Here I am, you missed me. It isn't nice to go chopping other people up, please don't try it again.' She glared at him, slowly crouched down and, without letting her gaze fall from his eyes, groped around in the sand for her fallen sword. What she didn't see, was Elisop moving stealthily in behind to hit her over the back of the head with a cooking pan.
'Dong!'
The sound echoed around the low buildings behind the wall as she crumpled to the ground.

The two of them struggled to pick up the fallen woman, move her around and then tip her over the side back into the desert. 'Over she goes,' muttered Pardigan. They leaned out and watched her roll down the sandbank to join a pile of similarly unconscious, yet still living, Soul Eater warriors. 'I don't think that one was going to eat our souls either,' remarked Pardigan slapping hands with Elisop. 'And of course it's another soul that won't end up in that crystal thing.' He glanced about for their next victim, but there seemed to be fewer and fewer, tired, sweating and gasping warriors trying to get up the sandbank.

They sat on the wall with their legs dangling over the edge and tried to make out what was happening. It was clear that the storm had made a mess of the Soul Eater camp as well as the city. The tents and buildings were all gone, swept away in the whirling wind, sand and crazy moving desert. The elephants had all disappeared, not just the big one either, Pardigan couldn't see any now. There was a scattering of people milling about, two dogs fighting over something in the distance and a small group of people gathered some distance away, out of range of the bows, surrounded by a protective ring of warriors.

'Must be the Emperor and his advisors in the middle there,' said Elisop. 'Nasty little man wasn't he? He was all waving arms and horrid red eyes. I wonder what they're doing. I think that crystal thing is in there with them, that's almost exactly where it was before the storm.'

'He's getting more power, sucking souls out of the crystal so he can attack again,' muttered Pardigan. He glanced about to see where the others were. 'Quint! Quint we think the Emperor is…' But he didn't get to finish as the big blue and yellow dragon soared over their heads, the downward beat of its leathery wings buffeting them so much that both he and Elisop were pitched forward off the wall and sent tumbling down the sandbank. 'Whaaaaa!'

Quickly scrabbling back up the loose sand, Pardigan reached the top, placed a hand up onto the wall and hauled himself over. When he turned back, the dragon was passing back over the Emperor's group, the warriors all gazing up as it circled above them before turning away towards the distant mountains - it was dragging something behind it, all ropes and cloth.

'Horrible creature!' shouted Elisop as Pardigan reached down to haul the little spy up. 'I hate flying, and I hate large magical flying creatures, neither thing is natural.'

'What was that in its mouth?' Pardigan shaded his eyes trying to make it out. 'I'm sure I heard a shout as it passed.' The dragon was already some distance away, so it was impossible to see any detail. He glanced across to the Emperor and his group and saw they had apparently finished what they were doing and were now walking slowly towards the city. 'Oh Source… Quint!' He glanced over to see if Quint was watching. 'Quint, the Emperor's coming back.'

* * *

Bartholomew Bask was having a really bad day. It was true that days were rarely good for Bartholomew, however, today really had been especially bad. He tried to relax and cast his mind back, attempting to make some kind of sense to his predicament and why he was currently sprawled, baking in the heat of the hot sun, in a boat, in the middle of a desert.

The day hadn't started out right from the moment he had peeled his eyelids back. The night had been as cold and uncomfortable as the previous two nights of his desert journey, which was bad enough, but his temper had been especially piqued this particular dawn by having no proper morning meal with which to break his fast. To Bartholomew, this was an outrage and completely uncivilised and, to a man of his stature, he deemed it tantamount to torture. The Dhurbar's repeated claim that it was
he
who had eaten all their stores was blatantly insulting. Their lack of preparation for the journey was obviously none of his affair, and he told them so in no uncertain terms.

Three tortuous days of journeying across the Great Expanse of the desert on the back of a camel had been exhausting, extremely uncomfortable and unpardonably lacking in dignity for a merchant of his position. He still wasn't entirely sure how he had even come to be on this journey.

After breaking his fast with nothing more than hard biscuits and water, which was clearly scandalous and something he would be taking up at the earliest opportunity with the merchants guild in Dhurban, the caravan had emerged from the mountain pass for its final trek across open desert. With the end of this awful journey in sight, he had been preoccupied with the anticipation of soon finding some comforts and sustenance in the great city of Dhurban. Since before the sun had risen they had been leading their mounts through the pass on foot. Upon exiting the confines of the narrow rocks his first undertaking had been to negotiate the remounting of his camel, which was an evil foul tempered brute given to spitting at him whenever it could. Several giggling Dhurbars had aided him, jabbering on in their own incomprehensible language, they had heaved and pushed him in an extremely degrading and undignified way until he was finally seated and then they had then started out upon the last leg of the journey.

To improve his mood, he had taken to riding half asleep, dreaming of cream cakes, sweetmeats and chilled berry wine and barely noticed the storm blowing up in the distance. It was, however, just a short time later that his day took a really bad turn and the world around him had inexplicably gone insane. From being the same awful, dry, featureless expanse of sand he had come to loathe with an intensity, it had decided to defy all known laws of nature and turned into a thrashing ocean of shifting sand that seemed to think it was the sea, and he had started to question his grasp on his sanity.

The long line of camels, horses and people, along with the assortment of dogs and goats that accompanied every Dhurbar caravan, rapidly fell apart with everyone and everything screaming as they fought for stability where now there clearly was none. Bartholomew's camel had danced about, managed to run three spans and then sank into the sand as if it were soup. Bartholomew's cries for help had gone unnoticed, and he had been thrown to the ground, such as it was, and had gone under and then bobbed to the surface spluttering, spitting sand and cursing profusely. There was nothing much wrong with his sanity he surmised, it was the world in general that had clearly gone insane.

Rubbing sand from his eyes, he had cast around to try and make some sense of the situation, only to see the dunes around him rising and falling as if he were floating in an angry sea. He watched in alarm as his camel, bellowing in terror, lost its battle with the desert and sank below the surface leaving bubbles of sand rising to the surface in its wake, which Bartholomew found quite alarming. His mind fought for reason and survival, but decided there was no sanity to be found, so he had started to whimper.

It may well have been his bulk that saved him or the mass of packed tents and provisions that he saw bobbing past and clung to, but while he survived, all around him both men and beasts floundered and were swallowed screaming and terrified down into the depths of the desert sand. Bartholomew Bask had hugged his raft, spitting sand and cursing his ill luck as he bobbed about being burnt steadily by the hot desert sun.

Several turns of the glass later, with the sun now high in the sky and the skin of his exposed face blistered and painful, he was still alive, gasping for water and generally out of sorts. He hadn't thought his predicament could get any worse when, without warning, the sand stopped moving and everything about him set in place as if suddenly remembering how a desert was supposed to behave.

At first he had thrown up his hands and thanked the Source that the desert was once again behaving as nature intended, but then realised he was now stuck up to his chest and couldn't move. After waiting a short while for someone to come and help, he had tried to dig himself out, pushing the sand away with his arms, but he was not used to such exertion. In actual fact, he wasn't used to doing anything much for himself. There was always someone else to call on, to shout at if things weren't just so… but now there wasn't. It was all so unfair.

'Damn it, damn and damn it a third time,' he shouted. After what seemed an age, he was still stuck and was so hot and weakened by the whole experience that he had simply given up, lain with his face in his hands and began to sob dry sandy tears.

The next strange event to take place had happened some time later. Upon reflection, he now surmised that he must surely have been delirious and hallucinating at the time. He reasoned it had all been some strange nightmare descended upon his poor exhausted mind while he lay dying, encased in sand, baking like a Sunday lunch piglet - all that had been missing being the apple in his mouth and possibly some nice apple sauce. In this tortured dream, a boat had come alongside; the seamen had dug him out and with the help of ropes and tackle managed to haul him on board like a large hooked fish. From there he had flopped onto the deck, unable to move and slipped in and out of consciousness, listening in his delirious state as the crew had cast off and sailed on through the sea of dunes like characters from a child's crib story. Obviously it was all utter nonsense, he wisely concluded he was dead and decided to drift away into a blissful sleep sure that he was being carried away to become one with the Source, to be rewarded for his lifetime of good works and kindness.

* * *

'Get that smelly monkey away from me.' Princess Fajira swiped Nhasic from the table and the little demon scurried away then up and out of the hatch to find a safer place to sit with less irritable company. 'Why do we have that fat man on the deck, why was he buried in the sand? Loras… Loras?' She turned to see Loras climbing hurriedly up the stairway, following after Nhasic. 'Loras, come back to me my Loras, I need you here.'

Closing the hatch behind him, Loras joined Tarent at the wheel.
The Griffin
was sailing through the sand dunes as easily as if it were crossing the sea between Sterling and Minster. The ship's bow rising and falling with the flow of the desert, the billowing sails being driven by a breeze that neither boy could feel, yet it drove the boat on with a spray of sand washing back over the deck each time it came crashing down, ready to ride up the next dune. Nhasic was now balanced on the bowsprit taking Quint's favourite position, the little demon screeching its own mixture of insults and defiance at the sea of sand ahead of them.

'This has to be some of your best magic, Loras,' Tarent grinned across at his friend. 'I thought she was dead… gone, but she's back and we haven't lost her after all. I could sort of understand it when the boat came back together and that we sailed when the sand thought it was water, but its sand again and we're still sailing!'

Loras grinned happily. 'I love magic, it's amazing isn't it.
The Griffin
was never really gone, she had just been changed, which is what happens when she shifts between boat and creature. This change was a bit more drastic than normal but she was still there, I just had to figure out how to explain that to her. And she can sail because the sand dunes look like waves, so all I needed to do was show this to the essence of the boat and… well, we are sailing. When it all went strange like a real sea, I don't think it actually needed my magic at all, not really.' He thought about it for a moment. 'I think the Emperor is up to some pretty big magic himself. Whatever he's doing I don't think the sand moving was actually intended, it was a consequence of that magical storm we saw.' He shaded his eyes and looked towards the distant city. 'I wonder what's happening over there…'

'Loras, my love…' the Princess had poked her head out through the hatch and was squinting up at them. 'Loras, my darling, please come back and make the air cool again. It is a little too warm for me down here, you know how I like it to be cool.' She pulled her head back in without waiting for an answer and slammed the hatchway closed.

'Go cool her down Loras… my love,' Tarent tried hard not to grin, 'anything to keep her happy until we can give her back to her father, or are you planning on keeping her?'

'No Tarent, I don't think magic will even work on her. I'll cool her down and keep her happy, but she has more chance of getting Nhasic to be her husband than me.' He tottered over to the hatchway, balancing with the pitch and roll of the boat, sighed, and then went below to cool the air for the Princess.

* * *

The Emperor, Djinn Tsai, stopped walking. He stood some fifty spans from the city wall and stared up at the people who were watching him from the ramparts. They were all the souls he needed to gather, and now that the city's defences had been brought down, he could finish this task and move on. Slowly raising his arms he began to mutter the incantation, drawing in the air from all around, the first grains of sand skittering across the desert surface towards him. He began to swing his arms, his chanting growing louder until it became a deep bass-rumbling dirge. Eyes flashing red as the energy of Chaos flooded through him his arms became a blur as the storm began to build. It would take a little time to move the various elements, but this would be a storm that would bury the city, and this time it would kill everything living inside. The glorious anticipation of harvesting all those souls was so delicious that he was driven now to work his magic as fast as he possibly could – he reasoned there was nothing left that could stop him, there was no need for caution… it was time.