Chapter 12. The Teeth of the Earth.

“It could have been Gray Death,” Ramsay said in a low voice. “She seemed to be hallucinating.”

“With blood like that in their eyes?” Pod said back. “Gray Death doesn’t do that. You heard the girl, she was bid to poison the whole village.”

“Who would do that sort of thing? What could they have to gain by poisoning all those people? The village was a ways off the main road, hidden by a circular wall of trees. Maybe thirty people lived there at most.”

“A monster, that’s who. Could have been a big robbery planned by bandits. With the Royal Army the way it is, there’s no one left around to keep the peace.”

“Could be it’s just the nature of all people when the world has gone to the shit pile,” Ramsay said. “Maybe we’re not as good as we think we are. Our cities and our jewels and gold, is all just like makeup on an ugly wench–just there to hide what we truly are.”

“It may be so,” Pod finished, breathing a white breath into his hands. When he was finished rubbing his fingers together, he snapped the reins and the horses lurched forwards, pulling the wagon onwards, deeper into the forest of dead and burned trees.

“I can’t believe how bad it is,” Manie said, hiding in the darkness of her mind, but even there she still imagined the dead faces of the frozen people, heard Helki’s voice. All of those lives lost forever.

“What have we gotten ourselves into,” Shawn said, wrapping his arms around his knees. “What if someone tries to poison us?”

“It’ll be okay,” Manie said, trying to convince herself as much as him. “We always make it in the end, remember? As long as we stay together.”

“I hope we don’t run out of luck,” Shawn said.

***

As the sun rose, Pod spotted a little stream cutting a pathway through the snow, steaming gold in the morning air. He followed it a few miles into the woods where it was bubbling out of the ground and spent half the day filling and storing containers.

Later on, Ramsey returned with a Nightling buck he’d shafted with an arrow, the carcass hung over his shoulder like a rolled up blanket. He laid the animal out in the snow and butchered it for meat, tying up what they couldn’t eat in a net fastened to the outside of the wagon to freeze. The bones stayed in the bloody snow for the wolves to chew on.

Village after village, the story was the same–each had flames along their borders like crimson wings unfurling in the dark. Fires to burn the dead, smoke to poison the sky. There were so many fires, so many bodies, Manie wondered how there could be anyone left alive in Talmoria at all. Who was burning all these bodies? It was like a thousand sparkling candles set across the night, as far as an eye could see, breathing a smoking flame up into the clouds. The more she saw, the more Manie’s hope died. How could the world ever come back from this? Was it even possible?

“I’ve never seen anything like this,” Shawn said. “Not even in my world. We have to make this stop. It just keeps getting worse…”

“I wonder if we even can,” Manie said back.

After almost three weeks of traveling the dead and abandoned forests, hiding from every sign of life they saw, the wagon finally came upon a road of gravel biting through the gray snow. This new road was rimmed by jagged peaks on all sides, the rocks like razor teeth sticking up. Manie recognized the area immediately. They had come to the Rims of Denengear–the Teeth of the Earth. She was almost home.

“This is it,” Manie said, letting out a breath. There was no way to know what was going to happen once they got to the mansion, and Denengear was just on the other side of this wall. And if her father was dead, who would greet her when she arrived? Would she be tortured for information by his replacement, or just killed immediately?

Deeper in, the spires of rock closed around the wagon like a cage, and the air turned a choking green like swamp water. There were creatures in the darkness, scaly figures like men with claws crawling and snarling among the rocks. Their eyes glowed and flashed in the shadows, glimmering like golden coins.

“What are they?” Manie asked.

“They were men once,” Pod responded. “Thousands of years ago.”

The horses whinnyed and knocked their feet as they went, disturbed by the presence of the creatures.

It was hard for Manie to imagine them as once human as they slid and stalked the dark canyons around the wagon, chewing on bones, eating ravens and grubs raw. The sound of ripping flesh and snapping bones echoed across the mountains like a field of crickets chirping. “What happened to these people?”

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“Their kingdom crumbled, and their culture became forgotten,” Ramsay told her. “The world then whipped what remained into the shadows to die out of sight. But some survived. Those who live in the mountains. We call them The Forgotten Ones.”

“Are they dangerous?” Shawn asked.

“Very,” Pod said back. “They’ve been known to dine on human flesh. Best keep that sword close, Ramsay.”

A long pale figure stretched over the face of some rocks ahead of the wagon, near a wall of stone that had dissolved into a spindly web of rock, full of holes that let light come through around the creature’s limbs. Its skin was sickly and gray. The creature turned its head to show a face that was long and wet, teeth like shattered stones. Blood had stained this one's lips a deep red, and all its bones were clearly visible under wet, pale flesh. Manie couldn’t tell if the creature she saw was man or woman, but it unnerved her all the same. She felt sorry for them.

Ramsay unbuckled his belt and placed the sheathe in his lap. “I think you’re right.”

For hours they twisted back and forth up the gravel path, the snow thinning the farther they went. The creatures of the rocks never attacked, even when it seemed there were hundreds hiding amongst the shadows. The blue glow went with the wagon, sparkling out from the Protectors’ eyes. Manie wondered if these forgotten people somehow knew their wagon was delivering some kind of salvation to cure the land. Maybe that’s why they’d been spared.

Rain began to fall, mist swarming in around the toothy mountains like a cold breath to choke the fog. The moonlight made the tips of rocks shimmer and sparkle and glow like sharpened steel, the edges thin enough to cut flesh. The creatures of the mountains were gone from sight. They seemed to have abandoned the wagon carrying unknown travelers into their land, and now they proceeded alone, which seemed to take Pod and his horses away from their growing edge.

When they emerged from the Teeth and the path became wider, the rocks sharply descended and the wagon slid down the slope, bouncing across wet rocks as the horses struggled to keep the wheels from going over the edge of the cliff. “Hold on to your feet!” Pod shouted back. A stiff jolt rocked the wagon and the back wheels went over. Manie looked down into a ravine that was too deep to see the bottom. “We’re going!” Ramsey shouted back. “Get out of there!”

“I ain’t lettin’ these horses go, dammit! Hyah!” Pod slapped the reins, but it did no good. The wagon continued to slide back as the horses screamed and winnied in fury. A box of supplies slid out of the net above Shawn and Manie’s heads and went sailing down into the dark ravine below. Manie clung to the wall with all her strength.

“I know what to do!” Shawn shouted, pushing Manie back. He threw out his arm, and a burst of golden light exploded between his fingers, shooting out a burst of sparks. The air folded in on itself like rippling water and the force of the release pushed the wagon back up onto the road with a violent kick. The wagon slid sideways across the road and crashed into the rocks on the other side of the trail, leaning up on two wheels before slamming back down.

“What in the fuck was that?” Pod shouted.

Manie screamed as she bounced from the wall to the floor and was buried under a pile of furs and cloth.

“I sneezed,” Shawn answered, lying on his back and covering his head with both hands. “I hate heights.”

Manie laughed, breathing steadily to keep her heart from pounding a hole in her chest. “That was too close,” she said as she unburied herself from the supplies and leaned up.

“Well, whatever it was, it bloody well saved our arses,” Pod said. “Great job.”

“I need a breather after that,” Ramsey called back with a sigh, climbing down from the driver’s section.

“Yeah, sounds good to me,” Pod decided. “Even my old roots seem to have been given quite a rub. Everybody out. Let's check the wheels for damage.”

Manie stepped down from the wagon and into the muddy gravel, her boot splashing into a puddle. Bad memories immediately surfaced. As she stared down into the water she could see her own face, seventy years ago. A small child–scared, cold, and alone after her mother had just abandoned her.

“This is where my mother threw me from her horse after learning that the Blue Crystal I brought was fake,” Manie said. She turned away from the puddle and looked down the road that twisted along the Rims, and she could still see the river of flaming torches rising up the cliffs in her memory, as if the Teeth of the Earth had been breathing flame that night.

“We’re actually here,” Manie lamented, as if it only became real now that she saw it. The idea of coming had only been an idea not long ago. Now it was standing here before her.

Shawn stepped down from the wagon and stood beside her, stretching his legs behind his back one at a time. He looked out across the valley below and immediately gasped when he saw the city. “Wow. So this is Denengear. It’s big.”

It took a great effort to make herself look, but in the end her dedication won out against her fear. Manie let her eyes rise up to the city of Gold and Glass for the first time in seventy years, and the sight of it stole her breath. “There it is. My home.”

Denengear, like a beacon of death in the night, a sea of rooftops and tall towers, draped in stone, and gold, and wood. She saw the old clock tower that used to be Veronica’s hideout reaching high above what once was Copper Lanes, and below it a thousand yellow flames like blazing teeth crawling up and down the streets. The rest of the city looked similar, with noticeable dark spots, but many places where there was light. The graveyard of gold and glass had been reborn.

“I guess everyone isn’t dead,” Shawn pointed out. “There are people all over the place.”

Manie slid her eyes up the city to the cliff that rose out of the plains like a tongue of stone. There her father’s mansion stood, perched out above the rest of Denengear like a snarling gargoyle with a hundred burning windows for eyes, and behind it, the tower where Manie had been imprisoned for half her life, rising high over everything else, high enough to scrape the clouds, it’s colored glass, windows lit from inside by the same fire that had burned in that hearth since King Mikhail took the throne.

Seeing her tower brought on the sensation of stone fingers coiling themselves slowly around her throat, crushing her windpipe as the grip grew tighter. The image seemed to swim and dance before her like the heat above a flame. Manie thought she was going to faint.