The Traveler in Red: Warlords of the Withered Land

Part Five

Karamanga did not think it wise to be in this place.

They could smell rain on the air, what little air there was, the scent was fanned by an unpleasantly sluggish breeze, and it felt close, the atmosphere feeling full and damp.

Perfect.  This was exactly the kind of weather they expected when they came to this place, at this time of day, at the beginnings of an eternal twilight that took a full week to fall into the gloom of night.  Perfect.

There were dark clouds rolling across the skies, moving sinuously like thick constrictor snakes or like massive aerial whorls of gray-black ash, and they moved in opposite directions, some floating easterly, some stretching out thin and rapidly flowing westerly.  The skies above this strange, arid, moon-baked plain were highly animated, quite unlike the ground below where nothing stirred, not even dust, before the sporadic fitful breezes.

And, though they were slowly setting behind the ragged line of the darkening horizon, two suns, one massive and red, the other much smaller and colored a polar blue, dominated the background of the sky.

The faint dying echo of a gong resonated in their ears and there was a metallic buzz that permeated the space all around them.

Something was burning behind them, behind the sand dunes, beyond the ridge of stunted, twisted trees cresting them, and the crackling sound of the flames was louder than the percussive music of the waves from the winter sea.

This wasn’t what he’d wanted.   He hadn’t thought it would come to this.  Bastards weren’t supposed to drag him along on this crazy bullshit.

He felt a chill as a sudden sea breeze carried the scent of darkness and unending pain over to him, wafting in from over his shoulders like a cloak of nightmare.

He was once more under the shadow of The Wound.

He looked over to the eastern horizon and he could smell the metallic tangy scent of old ash on the wind, the smell of smoke from old fires, and the aroma rode in atop the waves crashing in on the sandy, pebble-strewn shore.   It was a wild beach.  Dark-plumed gulls, their ragged, angular wings cutting through the morning air like scythes, screeched like squalling felines, their voices sharp, piercing an ugly.  They flew in intermingling spiraling paths, a flock at odds with itself, their wings beating and cutting the space atop the fitful thermals rising off the ocean, graceless and savage.  They flew arrogantly.  The ocean ignored them, rolling and thundering as the waves came in from the gloomy, stormy horizon spitting clouds of salty froth high across jagged stones two-stories high.

The smoke from the fires sputtered in from the dunes behind them, moving contrary to the wind fanning the surf.

All along the beach, a dark-sanded and pebble-strewn strip of shoreline stained with the oily refuse from the turbulent, frothy waves, Karamanga saw member of the Broken Mirror field team bent over vomiting or kneeling and clutching their spasming guts as their bodies slowly and reluctantly assimilated to their new physical reality.  The complexions of all the soldiers were grayish and shining with feverish, malodorous sweat as their body chemistries tried to re-stabilize.  They trembled.  They slowly rocked forwards and back.  They coughed fat wads of phlegm onto the ground.  And to a man, they all looked horribly surprised at how bad they felt.

 Brutally cracking through the boundaries of Time and Space was nothing like it was on science fiction television melodramas.

 Major Holloway quickly regained his composure and started barking a series of commands at his men: a roll call, instructions to verify that their weaponry had come through the transit without harm, instructions to check the status of one another’s field kits and supplies.  Holloway no doubt wanted to impose a sense of normality upon his unit, to refocus them on the whys and wherefores of the mission and thus get their heads back in the game.   The Broken Mirror team could not afford to have even one man rendered so inattentive and distracted by their cosmic odyssey that they’d be unable to perform their duties.  As ever, in a military unit, the team was only as strong as its weakest member: each man depended on the other.