“Oh, I’m all ears.”
“Grammar!”heyelled.“Your grasp of sentence structure is atrocious!You slaughterintransitive verbs like a scythe through a field!Every word you speak is anaffront tolanguage itself!If my hands were not tied, I would beat youover the head with grammar books until a proper dialect was cavedinto yourfuckingskull!”
Zaria reared herhead to the sky, breaking into open, cackling laughter.There were whoops andchitters and loud animal snorts.The dunes seemed to shimmer with the noise.Isaac walked beside her, growling, his fists clenched beneath the rope, wantingto feel like something more than a barking dog on a leash.
By now, they weremarching up a gentle slope of sand, nestled in the wide valley between twoenormous dunes.There was no cover for hundreds of feet in any direction.Zariadidn’t seem to notice the exposure, laughing as she was.
“On my word, Isaac,”she said, clapping him on the back again, “I’ll make a proper man of you yet.”
“I am quite fine howI am.”
The morning sunbegan to catch her face as they ascended the slope.“You know, might be, whenour adventure is over, I’ll show you some fine taverns near the shrubland.”
“Thank you,” Isaacsaid, “but no.”
“Oh, it’d be mypleasure to ply you with drink.”
“I’m quite sure itwould, you mangy beast.”He frowned.“You common brute.”
She slapped a handto her chest, as if his words had pierced her heart.
“That’s not funny!”he yelled, getting mad again.“You are not funny!None of this, in any way, issupposed to be—”
They both stopped.
In the distance, acolossal skull rose from the sand.It was so spectacularly massive, sogargantuan in comparison to the empty land around it, that the dunes seemed tobecome the size of wrinkled skin.The fleshless skull tilted up towards the skylike a man drowning in water, its animal maw half-submerged in the sand.Isaaccould only imagine how far the rest of the skeleton had sunk below the earth.Various holes and gaps ran along its snout and cranial plate, and he wasn’tsure which of the openings were eyes, nasal cavities, or simply damage broughtby centuries of time.Whatever they were, the gaps in the skull were allcavernous in size, and the bone itself had been bleached a chalky white by thedesert sun.
“Well,” Zaria said.“Fuck me, that’s ominous.”
Isaac didn’t move.He almost couldn’t breathe.
This was it.Thetomb.
He was really here.
Somewhere, deep inthe earth, perhaps right where he was standing, his father lay trapped,clutched in the grasp of an ancient necromancer.He wanted to believe he couldfeel the man’s presence, as if he could sense the lastof his family through the stone and sand, the last bits of distance thatremained between them.It wouldn’t be true.All he could feel was the wind andthe sun and a sense of awe.
Zaria snorted.“NowI understand why my fellows always stood clear of this place.It spooks thefur, I’ll admit.”She glanced at him.“You ready?”
He nodded, silent.
For a moment, sheseemed ready to continue their jest, to keep up the game between them, but he turnedhis head to look at her, and the expression on his face stopped her cold.Shegrew sober in an instant.The hyena blinked, closed her mouth, and straightenedher back, her poleaxe glinting in the sun.
Isaac took a deepbreath, making his way down the dune.
In the distance, theskull of a colossus leered toward the sky, as if begging to scream.
ChapterSix
Eyes& Teeth
It tooknearly an hour to close the distance to the skull.
Thelonger Isaac stared at the colossus, the more its massive size seemed todistort all sense of perspective.At a distance, its head nearly resembled acliff.Halfway through their approach, the contour of the teeth and platesstarted to give the impression of a military fortress, the same sort of leeringthreat as palisades and ramparts.By the time they stood in the shadow of thefallen titan, the ancient skull resembled nothing less than a glacier, the bonebleached as white as snow, the sockets and joints curving out like the peaks ofmountains.This creature was large enough to change the landscape.Itwasa landscape, unto itself.Even now, its corpse was cratering the sand.
Isaachad read about the glaciers formed in the Scorch, when elemental wizards hadsought to block the mountain passes between the nine kingdoms.Entiretopographies had changed.Rivers had flown.Stone eroded.Forests bloomed.
Beforenow, he had not truly understood the size of such a creation.
