Chapter 34
In Which Glenda Is Feeling Light-headed and Slightly Nauseous and Doesn’t Want to Think About How Far Away the Ground Is, or How the Air Would Whistle Past Her Face if She Fell.
In Which Her Stomach Feels Like It Is Caving In on Itself.
In Which She Wonders if She Could Spit Out a Levitation Spell in Time, but In Which She Admits to Herself that Most Likely, She Would Only Get It Partially Out before the Grotesque Crunch and Splatter of Impact.
Glenda was afraid of heights.
She could have spent the flight in relative comfort, lounging in the coach’s cushioned interior and only faintly feeling the rattle that followed each beat of its great leafy wings, but the mongrel witch had wanted directions.
“The mad sorcerer travels through portals,” Glenda had protested, staring up at the chimeric offspring of a swan, a stagecoach, and a flowering vine, but the mongrel witch had only clucked her tongue.
“This ‘mad sorcerer’ might be happy to fling himself through space and end up God knows where, but I prefer to see where I’m going.”
Which left Glenda crawling on her belly up the extended neck of the carriage, to peer dizzily at the ground far below. With great relief, she spotted the outline of a town, and slid back into the carriage through the soft curtains.
“We’re close,” she said. “It’ll be harder to orient without the sorcerer’s fog as a landmark, but if we land now, it should only be a couple of hours ride.”
“We can’t fly the entire distance?” Reclining on a spread of hand-embroidered cushions, the witch looked perfectly at home.
She made a careful selection from a jar of biscuits, plucking a specimen dotted with nuts and the crimson flash of berries.
Pressing it past her rosebud lips, Domitia chewed without hurry.
Glenda tried to think of a reason that didn’t involve the upcoming inversion of her stomach. “I can spot large landmarks, like my outpost, but the field won’t stand out by air.”
“Very well,” said the witch, and the carriage descended.
Glenda’s gut plunged; she gripped the wooden walls for support, wondering at how the witch could maintain her calm even through this horrible dropping.
They touched down with a clatter, bringing Glenda’s teeth together in a painful click, but the impact caused no damage.
Its movements smoothed, the carriage rolling on freely.
The witch pulled languidly at a cord, opening the carriage curtains. In the clearing ahead stood a local man, eyes wide. His armful of collected wood tumbled piecemeal to the ground.
“Which way now?” asked the witch, and Glenda told her.
Glenda feared the carriage might have difficulty passing through the press of trees, but it reacted to the thinning space like an animal, tucking its enormous leafy wings and hunkering on its wheels.
In clearer sections, it picked up speed, rolling at a unicorn’s gallop; this required Glenda to pay constant attention, shouting directions before key turns could be missed.
Finally, feeling more exhausted than if she’d walked the distance on her own two legs, they arrived at the prophesized location.
It looked a mess. The Order had dutifully retrieved their slain knights, but the spoiling bodies of the transmogrified steeds remained, filling her nose with sweet decay.
Strangely coloured flowers grew where the dragon’s breath had passed, and great gashes yawned in the earth amid the swaying greenery.
At the feet of the eroded statue, the basilisk lay rotting.
It had been a lovely bay before the transformation, with a yellow horn that curled like carved butter. Now, the creature hung draped across the statue’s legs, foul and deflated, strips of its pebbled hide flapping loose in the wind.
This was the sickness that the mad sorcerer brought to the world.
Stepping carefully from the carriage, Glenda picked her way through the grass.
The walk felt terribly long. The aroma of the dead monster intensified as she drew nearer, all liquifying offal and the vinegar stench of its venom, so that by the time she reached the statue’s shadow, her stomach threatened to spill.
Holding her breath, she pulled the sword free from the sucking socket of its eye, then scrambled backward across the meadow.
She entered the carriage breathing hard, the sword still coated in flaking blood. “This is it,” she said. “Cameron’s sword. And now we find him?”
The mongrel witch smiled, receiving the blade with thick fingers. “And now we find him.”