You're Gonna Need A Bigger Word

— Brother Montague —

It wasn't any cooler a hundred meters in the air than on the ground — there was just more wind, a hot wind that cooked them if they didn't cover themselves head to toe in light-colored cloth. It wasn't the finest stuff, just loose-woven linen, and if it wasn't washed every day it quickly took on the same sun-soaking red-brown color as the rest of the desert. The unusual night brought little relief from the day's suffocating heat. At least the moons were out (except Crevist which was only seen half the year) so they had good vision on the climb.

The climb. They came up the cliff hand over hand, bare fingers and bare toes clinging to the rock face with the arts. The climbing prayer was a cryptic, but any Nexus disciple found at least a few of them, parked in innocuous places in scripture. This one was Jamiah's Climb, its words taken from a passage about Saint Jamiah, who scales a mountain face so tall the height could drive a person mad. She performs the feat to reach the quantheki, a giant bird of thunder, to make peace with it and stop its persecution of the people below. (The meeting does not go well, and she battles the monster to their mutual death.)

Montague had used the prayer once before, to escape a prison tower. Unlike last time, there would be no daring dive into dark water below them. There were no great rivers in Morufu's Palm but dry and dead ones.

It felt like leagues to Minty's three bulwark: they had never climbed before, yet the height was not so great as Red Tower, less than half its three hundred meters. Lynn, Barth, and Fennis had to be coaxed along, slowly convinced the art would hold them against gravity's pull. Once, they got stuck at an overhang they were too afraid to take while hanging upside down, and Minty had to find an easier path. He scuttled along the cliff face sideways like an insect until he found a hidden chimney where they could brace their hands and knees.

When they made the top, they lay their hot and sweaty bodies on the hot ground, with the hot wind blowing over them, coating them in dust, and laughed giddily for minutes, too relieved at first to pull from their canteens.

As soon as the worst of it had passed and they had taken water, they pulled up their supplies. Fennis had trailed a line behind him, nearly thread-like and improbably durable, one of Eldest Brother's inventions. They used it to pull up a cord, which they hooked over an arm that Minty shaped from the plateau's rock. The arm was long enough to keep their gear from snagging or banging against rocks and had a smooth groove at the end for the cord to pass over. With considerable care, they hoisted their gear aloft. They had food for several days, sails that would filter water from the air, and other articles they needed for their stay.

Their appalons would not remain there with them, or else they might become monster food. The attendant they left behind, a Gallian healer turned apprentice disciple, tied each load to their hoisting rope in turn and, once they had pulled the last bundle up, he took the appalons home with him under the cover of Overlook.

The first package to come up included the most important article of their load: a box of wood, suspiciously heavy for its size. Minty left the others to set up camp and picked his way through wan but tenacious shrubs to the center of the plateau. He laid on his belly, and gazed down.

Sand Castle's formation was similar to Red Tower's except it was a few times wider, and the center was hollowed out by centuries of habitation. Either that, or it had always been a ring of stone and never a solid pilar, but what force of nature would cause such an outcome was a mystery. The center space was more than two kilometers across, with the central garden bounded by a perfect circle of roadway. Like Red Tower, the living spaces were carved into the rock, in the same style of repeated arches, but at Sand Castle the facades all faced inward, to where the garden was supposed to grow.

All the rock-hewn dwellings faced now was ruin. The center of the city, what should have been one vast garden, tended daily by hundreds, rich enough to feed thousands, was all torn down. The stands of coconut and date palm, second-canopy figs and olives, bowers of berries and legumes, were all torn limb from trunk, trunk from root, root from ground, all laid flat to bake in the bleaching sun.

Darkness seethed in the heart of the garden's destruction, a blackness whose baleful tentacles touched all the city, reaching even to the heights where Minty lay, gazing down into the distant city. When he considered how large the garden was, an exact two kilometers across by Iraj's report, Minty's belly almost emptied itself of all the water he drank after the climb. There was something wrong with his perceptions: a creature that massive should not exist. Montague had to jerk his eyes away. There might be more than Darkmaw here.

Just inside the ring of rock-carved spaces were buildings, single-story structures made of the more typical adobe. The ring of buildings was only a few ranks deep and were of different types, rented out to travelers and passing merchants as temporary dwellings and stores. The ring of neat blocks was occasionally interrupted by tiny parks and plazas. The occasional wide avenue demarcated one wedge of the circle from the next, dividing the city into sixteen arcs. The neighborhoods were even called "arcs", and each one had a different name, a desert plant or animal.

There was enough space for thousands of people in Sand Castle, not a large city by Lavradio standards, but large enough to deserve the designation. Minty didn't know the tabla's math, but even he could guess they had to bring in food from outside to keep the Calique, travelers, traders, and sight-seers all fed. Smaller spots of darkness lurked where the exotic shops and markets used to be. Terrors scuttled by the tall facade where the circle used to meet, and swarmed Verdin Arc where the temple was supposed to be. The great gateway lay in shadow but according to Iraj the ancient doors were torn down. There were other ways in and out of the city, smaller ones, and at least two secret paths that Iraj knew and had told of, but it was no use doing down there. Montague and his bulwark would be overwhelmed in moments. That was one of the lessons of Monster Hunt, the card game they played to simulate battles with different kinds of monsters: numbers matter.

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He must have been there for a long while because his bulwark joined him to stare in silence, overawed, barely daring to breathe lest a noise give them away. They couldn't see Darkmaw through her living cloak of throbbing malice, but they could smell her well enough: red bile and ammonia, meat rotting off the bone, together aged in the wicked skin of spiked durian. Plenty of cursed creatures had fallen to Minty's team, but those had been mere trivialities, minor pests, petty annoyances by compare. They had never seen darkness; They had never met a monster; Their faith had never been challenged.

Not even Mobeen had seen anything like her. If he had, it would have killed him for sure.

Minty fumbled for his light, got his trembling hands on it the wrong way around, and had to change grip thrice to hold it properly. With a twist, it opened it a crack and let the silver-blue blessings drive away the force that held them.

Lynn heaved an audible breath, reminding them all to breathe. They were in a bubble of safety cast by the fragment, where literal and spiritual darkness was banished. For the first time, Minty found himself questioning the power of fragments of sun. Such tiny things might not be enough to suppress the aura at Darkmaw's core. Maybe nothing could.

"Maybe it's really, really tiny, inside the aura," joked Fennis, "like a midget monster pretending to be big."

"That would be nice," added Barth, but without much hope in his voice.

"Everyone, wear a light." Minty opened the box he carried. The inside was lined with bronze plates hammered thin and a cushion of velvet dimpled to fit a dozen fragments, sitting naked, their silver spheres spilling light in sheets and waves that intersected in peaks and troughs, floating outward, spreading like water.

The darkness below them stopped its seething. It noticed the light, knew it for the enemy it was, hated it. She feared it.

It was a lot of fragments but Minty couldn't afford to waste them. He made two of them himself, but the rest had come from Eldest Brother's hand. Minty had the silver to make more, but they were hard work. So far only Thalia, Mataba, and he had learned the trick of making fragments. Montague was proud to have been the first, learning while his spirit was joined to Phillip's. What Phillip could do in fifteen minutes, Minty had to do in stages over two days. Even once the trick was learned, it wasn't easy to teach. Not everyone could understand how solid matter was mostly empty space, that the space they couldn't see had to be filled with light, packed fuller and fuller until the light ignited into fire.

He sent Fennis to chop down a woody shrub and bring him the thickest parts, then shaped the wood into three new fragment containers and filled them from his box. That left him with only nine fragments, but his people were protected from Darkmaw's despair.

Darkmaw was a kilometer away, too far for what Minty had in mind. But, her species was insanely aggressive. All he had to do was toss a few large rocks down into the city, and Darkmaw and all her children gathered beneath them. He imagined he could feel her through his feet as she pounded her way across the flattened garden, crushed the buildings at the periphery, and leveled the ground where the innocent rock had landed. The brood mother and her many children merged into one pulsating blob of hateful night, none of them discernable individually, at least not by sight, but his practitioner's senses knew exactly where the evil heart of the nest lay.

Calique hunters had a trick for running down large prey. They took the fruit of a certain cactus and cooked it in a bed of sand and hot coals until the outside turned brittle. They opened a hole in the fruit with care to expose the clear, sticky goo that formed within and added a glowing fungus to it. The sticky goo dried on the outside, sealing the hole. When thrown with enough force, the fruit shattered and the animal was left with a glowing fungus stuck to its hide. It could run and run but, until the sun rose, it was easy to find.

Montague put the trick to better use, with fragments instead of mushrooms, and (after a suitable number of trial runs with rocks) used his sling to rain the sticky light bombs onto Darkmaw. The first projectile sailed down into darkness, smaller and smaller until it couldn't be disappeared. There was a moment when he feared the shell hadn't shattered or, far worse, the light had been swallowed up by living darkness. But then the fragment sparked into a glow.

The first light's illumination was weak against her aura, showing just enough to hint at her awfulness. It landed next to her eye, a massive lens sitting on top of her thorax, wider than a man was tall, smooth, red-black, as glossy as the rest of her was matte. It could see him, he was sure of it. She could see his spirit and knew him for an enemy: tiny, soft, easily broken. He would fit inside her mouth with room to spare.

Darkmaw wasn't tiny. She wasn't large. Large was too small a word for what she was. Minty tried to think of bigger words. Massive didn't carry enough weight. The cursed insects he'd battled on the Maricotta Crossing had been massive. Darkmaw was ten times that. Twenty times. Too many times larger to count properly. She was enough times larger that she was something else entirely.

Minty lost himself staring into that eye and was startled when Lynn grabbed his shoulder to pull him back from the edge.

Darkmaw made a noise, whatever angy utterance scorpions made when they couldn't get to their meal, magnified by millions, a scream across all octaves of human and beast-enhanced hearing. She hated the fragment. She hated him.

"Light her up," Lynn urged him, handing him another sticky bomb. "Let's see all of her." Once again, Montague was grateful for the veteran's mettle.

One by one the brittle fruits fell into the void, then flickered into light. Most of them hit their mark and, bit by bit, Darkmaw was revealed. Her back was a barge for lost souls. Her tail was a battering ram filled. Her stinger dripped with liquid death. Her legs were palm trees. Her claws were scythes for harvesting men. Her pedipalps were greatswords, beckoning helpless bodies into the Mouth That Ended All Things.

Gargantuan. That was the word.

Gargantuan and covered with scorpion babies, all of them pale instar copies of herself.