The Waste Lands

Beyond the Great Wall of Lud, the real waste lands began.

7

THE MONO HAD BEEN descending as they approached the notch in the wall, putting them not more than thirty feet above the ground. That made the shock greater… for when they emerged on the other side, they were skimming along at a horrifying height-eight hundred feet, perhaps a thousand.

Roland looked back over his shoulder at the wall, which was now receding behind them. It had seemed very high as they approached it, but from this perspective it seemed puny indeed-a splintered fingernail of stone clinging to the edge of a vast, sterile headland. Granite cliffs, wet with rain, plunged into what seemed at first glance to be an endless abyss. Directly below the wall, the rock was lined with large circular holes like empty eyesockets. Black water and tendrils of purple mist emerged from these in brackish, sludgy streams and spread downward over the granite in stinking, overlapping fans that looked almost as old as the rock itself. That must be where all the city’s waste-product goes, the gunslinger thought. Over the edge and into the pit.

Except it wasn’t a pit; it was a sunken plain. It was as if the land beyond the city had lain on top of a titanic, flat-roofed elevator, and at some point in the dim, unrecorded past the elevator had gone down, taking a huge chunk of the world with it. Blaine’s single track, centered on its narrow trestle, soaring above this fallen land and below the rain-swollen clouds, seemed to float in empty space.

“What’s holding us up?” Susa

“THE BEAM, OF COURSE,” Blaine replied. “ALL THINGS SERVE IT, YOU KNOW. LOOK DOWN-I WILL APPLY 4X MAGNIFICATION TO THE LOWER QUADRANT SCREENS.”

Even Roland felt vertigo twist his gut as the land beneath them seemed to swell upward toward the place where they were floating. The picture which appeared was ugly beyond his past knowledge of ugliness… and that knowledge, sadly, was wide indeed. The lands below had been fused and blasted by some terrible event-the disastrous cataclysm which had driven this part of the world deep into itself in the first place, no doubt. The surface of the earth had become distorted black glass, humped upward into spalls and twists which could not properly be called hills and twisted downward into deep cracks and folds which could not properly be called valleys. A few stunted nightmare trees flailed twisted branches at the sky; under magnification, they seemed to clutch at the travellers like the arms of lunatics. Here and there clusters of thick ceramic pipes jutted through the glassy surface of the ground. Some seemed dead or dormant, but within others they could see gleams of eldritch blue-green light, as if titanic forges and furnaces ran on and on in the bowels of the earth. Misshapen flying things which looked like pterodactyls cruised between these pipes on leathery wings, occasionally snapping at each other with their hooked beaks. Whole flocks of these gruesome aviators roosted on the circular tops of other stacks, apparently warming themselves in the updrafts of the eternal fires beneath.

They passed above a fissure zig-zagging along a north-south course like a dead river bed… except it wasn’t dead. Deep inside lay a thin thread of deepest scarlet, pulsing like a heartbeat. Other, smaller fissures branched out from this, and Susa

A fiery fountain erupted directly below them, spewing flaming rocks and stringy clots of lava upward. For a moment it seemed they would be engulfed in flames. Jake shrieked and pulled his feet up on his chair, clutching Oy to his chest.

“DON’T WORRY, LITTLE TRAILHAND,” John Wayne drawled. “REMEMBER THAT YOU’re SEEING IT UNDER MAGNIFICATION.”

The flare died. The rocks, many as big as factories, fell back in a soundless storm.

Susa

8

BUT THESE LANDS, THOUGH poisoned, were not entirely dead. From time to time the travellers caught sight of figures below them-misshapen things which bore no resemblance to either men or animals-prancing and cavorting in the smouldering wilderness. Most seemed to congregate either around the clusters of cyclopean chimneys thrusting out of the fused earth or at the lips of the fiery crevasses which cut through the landscape. It was impossible to see these whitish, leaping things clearly, and for this they were all grateful.

Among the smaller creatures stalked larger ones-pinkish things that looked a little like storks and a little like living camera tripods. They moved slowly, almost thoughtfully, like preachers meditating on the inevitability of damnation, pausing every now and then to bend sharply forward and apparently pluck something from the ground, as herons bend to seize passing fish. There was something unutterably repulsive about these creatures-Roland felt that as keenly as the others-but it was impossible to say what, exactly, caused that feeling. There was no denying its reality, however; the stork-things were, in their exquisite hatefulness, almost impossible to look at.

“This was no nuclear war,” Eddie said. “This… this…” His thin, horrified voice sounded like that of a child.

“NOPE,” Blaine agreed. “IT WAS A LOT WORSE THAN THAT, AND IT’s NOT OVER YET. WE HAVE REACHED THE POINT WHERE I USUALLY POWER UP. HAVE YOU SEEN ENOUGH?”

“Yes,” Susa

“SHAM. I TURN OFF THE VIEWERS, THEN?” That cruel, teasing note was hack in Blaine’s voice. On the horizon, a jagged nightmare mountain-range loomed out of the rain; the sterile peaks seemed to bite at the gray sky like fangs.

“Do it or don’t do it, but stop playing games,” Roland said.

“FOR SOMEONE WHO CAME TO ME BEGGING A RIDE, YOU ARE VERY RUDE,” Blaine said sulkily.

“We earned our ride,” Susa

“Besides, this is what you were built for,” Eddie chimed in. “To take people places.”

Blaine didn’t respond in words, but the overhead speakers gave out an amplified, catlike hiss of rage that made Eddie wish he had kept his big mouth shut. The air around them began to fill in with curves of color. The dark blue carpet appeared again, blotting out their view of the fuming wilderness beneath them. The indirect lighting reappeared and they were once again sitting in the Barony Coach.

A low humming began to vibrate through the walls. The throb of the engines began to cycle up again. Jake felt a gentle, unseen hand push him back into his seat. Oy looked around, whined uneasily, and began to lick Jake’s face. On the screen at the front of the cabin, the green dot-now slightly southeast of the violet circle with the word LUD printed beside it-began to flash faster.

“Will we feel it?” Susa

Eddie shook his head. “Nope. Relax.”

“I know something,” Jake said suddenly. The others looked around, but Jake was not speaking to them. He was looking at the route-map. Blaine had no face, of course-like Oz the Great and Terrible, he was only a disembodied voice-but the map served as a focusing point. “I know something about you, Blaine.”