Chapter 354
On the morning of their departure, all the members of the small squad gathered near the elevator leading to the surface. Hadjar looked at the bustling Underworld City spread out beneath him. Serra’s stories had been greatly sugarcoated. He didn’t think there was anything special about it, except for its location beneath the ground.
“Take these,” Paris handed everyone something resembling black, convex glasses that had ‘lenses’ made from two stone plates with a thin slot across the middle. “Don’t take them off during your first week outside, or your eyes will get damaged by the sunlight.”
They all carried bags stuffed full of various dried food. Only Ramukhan carried two bags — one was full of food, while the other was overflowing with different amulets and talismans.
“May the Evening Stars illuminate your path.”
With these parting words, Paris once more lowered the bars that covered the entrance to the wide platform. Huge runes and hieroglyphs flashed along the edges of the iron disk that the squad of hunters was standing on. An invisible force pulled the platform up, leaving Underworld City behind. Hadjar put his palm on the hilt of his blade and looked at the distant white dot at the top of the black well. They rode the elevator up in absolute silence. Only the nervous sniffling of Salif’s boy could be heard. Hadjar hadn’t bothered to learn his name.
After about ten minutes, Hadjar closed his eyes and smiled. A dry, but pleasant wind blew across his face. The surface was already close.
In another ten minutes, the platform stopped and the runes went out.
“Come on,” Ramukhan said.
He pushed forward, past the shutters made of translucent mica that let light come through. The wind immediately rushed into the elevator. It played with the Bedouin amulets hanging in Hadjar’s hair, which had grown slightly over the past two months.
This time, Hadjar didn’t feel the same enthusiasm as before while standing atop the mountain hidden by the clouds. He saw white, motionless, fluffy clouds, nearby mountains piercing through the clouds as well, and the blue-black sky and the stars, both of which seemed like they were so close... Due to the new atmosphere, he felt slightly dizzy, but that was it. The inhabitants of Underworld City felt a lot worse. Ramukhan handed out wide, red strips of fabric to everyone. Once they’d covered their noses with them, the underworld dwellers started breathing much more freely. To Einen, what was happening was quite logical, but Hadjar once again found he had a poor understanding of things.
“Apparently, you don’t know about the true path of cultivation either,” Glen said, standing next to him.
“Do you want to tell me anything about it?”
His former enemy, and now a member of the squad he was on, arched his eyebrow and grunted arrogantly. “The knowledge I gained cost me too much to share with you. But I believe this supposedly ‘true path’ wouldn’t have been forgotten in our kingdoms if it had actually been true.”
Hadjar looked at the witches and sorcerers who were trying to catch their breath. Indeed, while he couldn’t do what they could, and while he didn’t understand Shakar’s and the others’ Techniques, he was, at the very least, in harmony with his own body, which they clearly weren’t.
“I wonder,” Einen went over to the edge of the cliff and peered through the bottomless abyss of clouds, “how are we supposed to get down from here?”
Karissa just smiled. She approached the entrance to Underworld City and touched the stone ledge. With a dull echo, a part of the wall moved aside, exposing a niche filled with balls of some kind. Ramukhan helped the witch pull enough out. The balls turned out to be multicolored rags, each three feet in diameter.
“Are you kidding me?” Hadjar was unable to hide his shock at what he was expecting to happen next.
“Are you afraid of heights?” Tilis’ lips stretched into a bloodthirsty grin.
Ramukhan handed everyone a ball.
“Direct a stream of your energy into it and hold on tight.”
Leading by example, Ramukhan wrapped one of the rags around his wrist. After making sure that everything was firmly in place, he released a stream of reddish energy. Like water to a jug, it flowed into the ball, making it bigger and bigger, until Ramukhan was lifted off the ground and the wind carried him toward the clouds.
“Hurry up!” His voice came from underneath the clouds.
With the same bloodthirsty grin, Tilis grabbed her ball and jumped off the cliff, bumping Hadjar with her shoulder as she passed by him. Karissa followed after her. She took the boy along with her, as he simply didn’t have enough energy to power the artifact.
Salif took a nervous Glen with him, since he also had no problems flying among the clouds using the rag ball.
“You know,” Einen unwound his turban and wrapped it around his belt, clutching it as tightly as a drowning man might clutch floating debris. “I sometimes think that it would’ve been better if I’d spent all of my savings and just bought a ticket to join a noble caravan.”
Hadjar looked at the bottomless abyss again and swallowed noisily. He kicked a pebble off the cliff, not to hear the echo, but just to calm his nerves. That had been Nero’s advice on the day they’d climbed the Blue Wind pass.
“W-wait for me,” Hadjar asked, stuttering a little.
He didn’t make a whole show of it like Einen had, but simply wrapped the rag around his wrist. It cut into his wrist, but this pain was a welcome one. It soothed him and allowed him to distract himself from his other frightening thoughts.
“On three,” Einen suggested.
Hadjar nodded and shouted, “Three!”
Grabbing his friend by the shoulder, he jumped down. Expecting the usual pull of gravity, Hadjar was very surprised when he ‘went’ through the clouds. There was no shaking, or a howling wind in his ears, nothing that would indicate that they were falling rapidly.
The ball of fabric was handling its task quite well. It lowered them slowly.
Cold, moist clouds licked his heels. This sensation was much more realistic than the dream in which Hadjar had fought against either Traves’ shadow, or his own Self… Or his Dragon Self? It was still a bit confusing.
Soon, the dampness of the clouds gave way to a hot wind. Even at such a height, a scorching, hellish heat still reigned in the Sea of Sand, but, of course, it wasn’t as unbearable as the heat on the ground was.
In addition, the view that Hadjar was now seeing had been worth spending two months beneath the ground for. The vast expanses of the desert really looked like a shimmering, golden sea from above. The dunes were like waves. The beautiful sight could’ve deceived anyone not familiar with the place with its veneer of serenity. However, Hadjar was all too aware of the perils of this region.
Turning to Einen, Hadjar started to ask him something, but realized that, at the moment, it was better not to annoy the islander. He was clutching his rag with both hands and whispering softly. Apparently, he was praying to the Great Tortoise, or his forefathers.
They descended the mountain in about fifteen minutes. The artifacts weren’t as simple as they’d seemed at first glance.
At the foot of the mountain, the rest of the squad was already waiting for Hadjar and Einen. They were loading up camels at the Alpha Stage, which had been prepared in advance. The animals were tall, strong, and capable of crossing the entire desert several times over without breaking a sweat. There were fourteen of them. Tied together in a long row, they were calmly grazing... sand. It was amazing.