Emily Rodda - The Shifting Sands

He was shaking with anger. And slowly Lief realized that it was the anger born of shock, fear, and worry. It was the anger he had sometimes seen in his parents’ faces, when he came home long after curfew. When he took risks.

“Barda, I could not —” he began.

“There is no time for this now,” snapped Jasmine, her eyes on the monstrous creature thrashing in the dune. “Argue another time. We must get away from here, and quickly. The beast is not dead. It may yet recover and come after us again.”

“Do not worry,” said Lief quietly. “Where we are going, it will not follow.”

They walked for many hours, but spoke little. It was as if Lief was listening to something that neither Barda nor Jasmine could hear, and they themselves grew more and more silent the closer they came to the Center.

They saw it long before they reached it — a lone peak rising high from a flattened circle and ringed by rounded dunes. It shimmered against the yellow sky, alien and mysterious in the fading light. A mighty cone with darkness at its tip.

“A volcano,” hissed Barda.

Lief shook his head. “You will see,” he said.

Filli crept, whimpering, under the shelter of Jasmine’s collar. She whispered comfortingly to him, but her green eyes were dark with dread.

The droning noise grew louder as they approached their goal. By the time they had reached its base and slowly begun to labor upwards, the air was vibrating with sound.

And finally they had reached the top, and were looking down into the peak’s hollow core. A whirlpool of red sand roared far below, flying in the darkness as though driven by a mighty wind.

But there was no wind. And the sound was like the humming of bees in their countless millions.

The Belt burned around Lief’s waist.

“What is this?” Barda was breathing hard, staring down, his big, blunt hands gripping his sword.

Softly Lief repeated the rhyme carved on the stone. And this time, the last lines were complete.

“Death swarms within its rocky wall

Where all are one, one will rules all.

Below the dead, the living strive

With mindless will to serve the Hive.”

“The Hive …” Jasmine repeated slowly.

“The Sand is the Guardian,” said Lief.

Barda shook his head. “But — it cannot be,” he breathed. “The sand is not alive! We have walked upon it, seen creatures —”

“The creatures we have seen are crawling on a much larger host,” said Lief, his voice very low. “The dunes we have been treading are only a covering, made up of the long dead. The living work below. Serving the Hive. It is they who collect the treasures that fall. It is they who make the marks on the surface. They who cause the storms.”

“The gem —”

“The gem, dropped anywhere on the Sands, would at last be drawn to the Center,” Lief murmured. “That is why we are here.”

He tore his eyes away from the whirlpool within the core and turned to Jasmine. “We need smoke,” he said. “Smoke, not fire.”

Without a word she knelt and began pulling things from her pack. Her hands, Lief saw, were trembling.

His own hands were not very steady as he gave his sword to Barda and took the rope in exchange. But as he knotted the rope around his chest, he was half-smiling, and his voice shook only a little.

“I fear you must be my nursemaid again, Barda,” he said. “Again I need your help and your strength — and your rope as well. But this time, I beg you, do not let me go.”

Lief crawled over the lip of the pit and stepped into empty space. He dangled, swinging gently to and fro, looking up at Barda’s and Jasmine’s worried faces and their hands, the knuckles white, gripping the rope.

“Slowly,” he mouthed. He saw them nod, and their hands move. Then, gently, he began to sink through the core of the cone.

Lief’s cloak was bound tightly around him and its hood was drawn closely around his head and face, covering all but his eyes. I must look like a big grub in a cocoon, he thought. But no grub would be so foolish as to invade a hive. If it did …

Shuddering, he turned his mind to other things.

Smoke from the dampened torch, well padded with wet rags, billowed around him. He was not certain it would help, but certainly no other weapon would be useful here. Besides, ever since his dream, Queen Bee’s words had kept coming back to him, and surely that was for a reason.

My guards do not like sudden movements, and are easily angered. Why, even I must use smoke to calm them when I take their honey from the Hive …

He could remember the words so clearly. Strangely, here, at the droning, swirling hub of the Sands, his mind had cleared and sharpened. Perhaps the Hive was no longer calling him, because it had no need. He was where it had wanted him to be all along.

He looked up. His friends’ faces were tiny now. He was hardly able to see them against the glare of the sky. And below, the seething mass that was the Hive was whirling, rising to meet him.

He braced himself, closed his eyes. Then he felt it, like a hot, rough wind, a stinging whirlwind, sucking him in. It spun savagely about him, whipping him, pressing in on him, with a sound like thunder.

It was too strong. Too strong!

He could not see. He could not breathe. Spun in a raging torrent of sound, he did not know which way was up, which down. He knew only one thing:

The Hive cared nothing for him. To the Hive he was not food, or a captive prize, or even a hated enemy to be defeated. To the Hive he was nothing but the carrier of the thing it desired. The Hive would suffocate him. It would rub the clothes from his flesh and the flesh from his bones. Then it would have what it wanted. What it had wanted from the beginning.

The Belt of Deltora.

Panic gripped Lief by the throat. He began to struggle, to scream —

Softly, boy, softly. Gently, gently!

The crabbed old voice was as clear in his mind as if it had spoken right beside his ear. It was like cold water splashed in his face.

The screams died in his throat. He opened his eyes. He forced himself to be still, to stop gasping for air, to breathe evenly.

He opened his eyes a fraction. Through the narrow slits he saw that the smoke pouring from the torch had at last begun mingling with the whirling red.

And the whirlwind was quieting. The Hive was slowing, and thinning. It was retreating to the darkness at the sides of the cone. And the thing that its fury had previously hidden was at last revealed — a glistening pyramid rising through the cone’s center.

Slowly, carefully, Lief reached up and tugged the rope once. His downward progress stopped with a slight jolt as, far above, Jasmine and Barda received the signal.

For a moment he simply swung in space, staring, fascinated, through the drifting smoke, at the astounding thing the living Sand had built, tended, and guarded for years without number.

It was a towering pyramid of cells made of gold, glass, gems, and bleached, white bones.

Lief told himself that he had expected this — or something like it. But the reality was beyond anything he could have imagined.

Anything that would not decay, or would decay so slowly that it would have to be replaced only after centuries, had been gathered and used for the building. Skulls and bones of every shape and size were packed side by side with glass bottles and jars, coins, crystals and gems, gold chains, rings and bracelets, and yet more bones. The individual parts, small and large, had been fitted together with such care that the tower glittered like an enormous jewel.