Hugh Cook: The wizards and the warriors

Standing there on the sands of the Tongue, Hearst thought of the way Elkor Alish had gone raging to war to revenge a wrong committed over four thousand years ago. The Dareska Amath would have laughed at such a loss of proportion – and at Alish, seeking to honour their memory by destroying the Confederation of Wizards.

Now the Swarms were sweeping north through Argan. That disaster must make Alish re-assess the situation, and see that their world was too fragile to sustain a never-ending feud that threatened the destruction of the strongest and the best. And if Alish would reconsider, then, possibly, Morgan Hearst and Elkor Alish might one day be able to meet again as friends.

The time came when the cliffs of Seagate appeared through the surfhaze: one more march would bring them to those cliffs. Another day would bring them to Hartzaven, where they hoped to be able to find a boat to take them to the northern shore.

Hearst decided to make the march to the cliffs by night, for if they were going to meet anyone on the Chameleon's Tongue, this last part of the journey was where it was most likely to happen.

They made their way by moonlight. The moon was cold and steel-bright in a clear sky. There was no cloud; every star was visible. The beach stretched away into the darkness; they walked on the wet sand, letting the waves' wash obliterate their footprints.

The ocean had calmed; the waves were less than knee-high, but broke with a series of sharp retorts, each like the crack of a whip. Breaking, each wave curled over, forming a tube in which phosphorescence was stirred to life, so it was as if a bolt of lightning shot along the inside of each tubing wave just before it collapsed into miniature thunder.

Where feet scuffed the wet sand, phosphorescence shone, a speck here, a speck there. Blackwood scooped up a handful of sand. In the centre shone the blue-green fire of one single phosphorescent creature. Its body was too small to see, but its light, in the darkness, held close to his face, was bright as one of the ardent stars of the heavens.

The Rovac warrior Morgan Hearst led them on, into the darkness.

At Hartzaven, a sheltered harbour in the mountainous upthrust at Seagate at the end of the Tongue, the travellers stole a double-hulled ocean-going canoe from a small fishing village. They also took quantities of dried fish, sweet potatoes and white paste. The paste, extracted from the roots of a type of fern, looked and tasted a little like flour. After living for so long on lizards and shellfish, they welcomed the change in diet.

They ventured the Sponge Sea in the stolen canoe. The seas at the end of autumn favoured them with an easy crossing. They landed on the northern coast, a hundred leagues from the Dry Pit.

Much of the coastline was ancient metamorphic rock, but this was interrupted by dead, cold lava flows, which had run from far inland out to the edges of the Sponge Sea. Miphon said the lava flows had issued from the Dry Pit thousands of years before; to reach the Dry Pit, they need only follow one of the lava flows inland.

It was a hard journey, through countryside that was mostly flat and monotonous, though here and there isolated mountains rose above the barren plains. There was little vegetation, but there were many insects. One afternoon the travellers broke open an ants' nest, a nest of earth that stood half as tall as a man; they mixed handfuls of black ants and white ant eggs with the last of their fern-paste, and roasted the combination over a slow fire. Several times Miphon found small colonies of honey ants, which they ate along with roasted crickets.

Water was a problem. They found a few small pools 510 and streams, but sometimes ran short and went thirsty. Still, they managed, coping through habit and experience, aided by observation and alertness; they made steady progress through a landscape where others might have struggled just to stay alive. They fed on snakes, beetles, worms and grubs, and did not think that they were suffering.

In times past – including very recent times – the way to the Dry Pit had been very dangerous because of the ferocity of the nomadic tribes that used to inhabit the area. However, so many expeditions of wizards had recently ventured the area that those tribesmen who had not been killed fighting wizards had fled to safer areas.

Once, the travellers met a wandering rock, but Miphon drove it away with ease. Now that his only remaining power was the power over the minds of stone, he found such control very easy. Given the chance to regain all his former powers, he would have done so without hesitation, but he had to admit that life was much simpler now that his power was diminished. The meditation needed to build and control his remaining power demanded much less energy than he had been forced to expend previously. Miphon also found he could control the creatures of stone with much more precision.

Truth to tell, released from most of the demands of maintaining his powers as a wizard, Miphon felt stronger and younger than he had done for years.

On the seventh day they came on the scene of a battle. Fire had been the major weapon used. Scattered on scorched ground were the frayed, tattered remains of the bodies of human beings and pack animals. Morgan Hearst kicked apart the charred remains of a hamper one of the pack animals had been carrying. He revealed books, charts, maps, all ash-black and illegible.

'Wizards,' said Hearst.

That was all he said. The other two made no comment: none was needed. They went on, leaving the battleground behind them. It did not figure in their dreams, and by the next day they had almost forgotten it; after all they had been through, it would have taken more than a few dead bodies to upset them.

On the eleventh day after leaving the shores of the Sponge Sea, they reached the Dry Pit.

It was huge. Standing on the southern side, Hearst estimated that the northern rim was at least twenty leagues away, if not further. At their feet, cliffs fell sheer to indecipherable depths where thunder rolled, where shadows walked, where strange clouds of purple, umber and orange lumbered out of clefts and chasms, spitting lightning.

'How do we get down?' said Miphon.

'Easy,' said Hearst. 'Jump.'

They shuddered, stepping back from the edge.

'Somehow,' said Blackwood, 'I can't imagine Garash scratching his way down a cliff. Yet he got down there somehow. There has to be an easy way.'

'Or,' said Hearst, 'at least a way which isn't quite suicidal.'

Without further ado, they began to walk round the Dry Pit, but found no way down. They camped for the night; waking the next morning, they found the tracks of a large, multi-clawed animal which had come close to their campsite in the night.

'What is it?' said Blackwood.

'No comment,' said Hearst, who, frankly, didn't know.

As they marched on, they became aware that there were carrion birds circling over a spot some distance ahead. Something was lying out there, dying.

'If it was dead,' said Hearst, 'the birds would have come down already.'

They debated the merits of waiting. Their waterskins were mostly empty, and that, in the end, decided them: they could not afford to wait. Advancing, they began to make out low mounds lying on the barren ground. The mounds slowly resolved themselves into corpses – and low-slung animals which were tearing at these corpses. It was the animals, obviously, which were keeping the birds at bay.

They dared their way forward.

The animals, big lizard-style creatures, turned tail and fled, scuttling over the rim of the Dry Pit and disappearing into the depths. Reaching the bodies, they read the tracks.

'A walking rock was here,' said Miphon, pointing to a huge furrow which had ploughed up some drifting sand, and to scratches on bare lava. 'The bodies… well, you can see for yourself.'