Read The Singular Six (The Chronicles of Eridia) Page 6
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They walked all day, pausing only twice to eat and rest their legs. They crossed fields of tall purple grass teeming with jackalopes and turquoise butterflies as big as bats and beautiful multicolored birds whose calls sounded like circular saws; they passed a high hill where a herd of mastodons wandered with solemn care amid a circle of standing stones; they hurried past the ruins of a sinister basalt temple adorned with carven rows of leering bestial heads; they crossed a rickety bridge over a clear, rushing stream, on the bed of which an army of spidery pale-green crustaceans the size of grapefruit swarmed about with their front legs held over their heads as if they were afraid of dirtying their pincers; they spent three hours traversing an empty asphalt parking lot that stretched away to the horizon like a calm black sea, the monotonous flatness broken only by several rows of sodium arc lamps and a pair of mysterious cinderblock buildings barely larger than outhouses.
The road they had been following, which had gradually dwindled from a ribbon of smooth, hard-packed dirt to a pair of parallel lines nearly invisible amid the weeds, ended at the edge of the parking lot and did not resume on the other side. Fortunately the land beyond the lot was fairly flat and even, and they managed to trek another two miles before the sun got low enough for them to start looking for a place to stop for the night.
Their long, trailing shadows had begun to merge with the growing dimness when they came upon an ancient, crumbling castle that sat on the eastern edge of a thick, dark forest. The castle had once had four towers, one at each corner of its rectangular keep, but time and weather had reduced three of them to heaps of rubble. The fourth looked as if it might join them the minute the next thunderstorm hit: Cracks zigzagged across its surface and it listed precariously away from the rest of the keep.
The castle’s front gate lay half buried in mats of decaying leaves just inside the entrance. Beyond was the courtyard, its paving stones heaped and broken where several young sequoias had sprouted up.
“Looks like we found a good place to set up camp,” said Bob.