Chapter 5

Entering the Dead Mountains

∞

There was a distinct contrast between the Dead Mountains and the rest of the terrain surrounding the black city of Messolin. Most of the terrain was green with forests and grasslands. There were hills, valleys, and some farmland for those that nourished themselves through their bellies, and there were villages scattered throughout the lands also. The villages themselves dated back to the ancient times, to the times when the Prim had taken control of everything, establishing their version of peace upon the land, and the villages enjoyed their protection in exchange for goods, but the Dead Mountains always loomed nearby, overlooking the outlying lands like a dark shadow, and the Dead Mountains were not green at all. They were as black as a night-sky without a single star or moon to illuminate it.

The group stood tight together at the bottom of the path that ascended into the mountains, the grass and forest ending abruptly, and the smooth black correllium metal taking over, a path cut, like a carving into clay, up to the top. The stories Panpar had told them up to this point were true. The Black City hadn’t been the only thing the Ancients had cut into the mountains.

The clicking noises coming down from the peaks and valleys above them, kept them from taking their first few steps onto the path.

“How many do you think there are?” Morifai asked Jo-Laina, but she didn’t have to guess. She didn’t have to limit her knowledge of how many based on the clicking noises that they could all hear alone. She could see their shadows, and there were hundreds of Barakai tucked away behind the ridges and folds in the walls on the way up.

“We won’t make it more than fifty paces,” Jo-Laina responded. “The Barakai are positioned on either side of the path, on both sides of it. They hide for now, but they are gathered thick like weeds along the path.”

She was more interested in the shadow that was not Barakai. It was far up the mountain; about a half a day’s ascent. It was one of the Minh shadows. It surrounded by Barakai, and yet seemed safe among them.

Jo-Laina took a step forward and Greegus reached a massive hand from behind her and grabbed her shoulder. “Have ya gone mad, sis?”

She smiled and pulled both of her swords. “Today is as good a day to die as any. Is it not? Or have you lost your nerve?”

“If ya command it, I will follow ya, sis. But I would hope ya at least have a plan.”

“Something tells me we won’t need one,” she said and she began to walk again.

∞

Therefore, they walked.

“If I wasn’t seeing this for myself, I wouldn’t believe it.” Makus commented.

“Shh,” Jo-Vanna returned.

“Why? They know we’re here! If they wanted to feast on us they’d come down and do it.”

“He has a point,” Panpar added. He was three from the very back and spoke loudly, so that everyone could hear him. “And a good point I might add. The Barakai listen only to their stomachs, which are always empty, and yet they remain hidden from our eyes like prairie dogs in their burrows. We shouldn’t dismiss this. There must be a reason.”

Jo-Laina conceded Panpar’s point to herself. She turned it over in her head much in the same way that a cook flips a flour jack on a flat iron over a flickering flame. The Barakai were nocturnal by nature, hunting mostly at night, but even though it was morning, that in itself wouldn’t stop them from coming down onto the path to eat.

The thought of the Barakai eating, the way that they eat, brought a crawling feeling to Jo-Laina’s spine. She tried to shake it off, but the feeling wouldn’t leave her, and the images of people that she had known who died to the Barakai, surfaced in her mind.

The Barakai had raided villages seventeen times in Jo-Laina’s lifetime and had done it at night every time. One of those villages being the one in which she was born—Toshina.

In Toshina, they had a defensive weapon against the Barakai, that wasn’t really a weapon, but form of protection from them. The village itself was miles away from the emptiness that was the Dead Mountains. The Correllium Mountains receded deep into Bolimar, but a vein of it resurfaced, like the wet burp of an infant, right in the middle of Toshina. That vein of correllium jutted right out of the ground, sticking ten feet out, like a bubble does in soup. The vein was hollow. It had an opening just large enough for any human sized creature to enter and crawl down into. Once you climbed down below ground level, the throat of that correllium straw opened up into a cavern, and when the Barakai decided to come into their village the occupants of the village would retreat into that cavern. The Barakai were too large to fit into it and could not tear into the correllium to widen the hole, so anyone that made it into the cavern was safe from them.

That is only if they made it into the cavern in time. Not everyone was that fortunate, and both Jo-Laina and Jo-Vanna had personally witnessed multiple Barakai victims. It was a sight that, once you saw it, you could never forget.

Upon seeing a Barakai, a person would be reminded of a praying mantis. The difference in appearance first was being the color of them, and the second being their heads. Their heads were triangular, and their bodies were wider than the body of a praying mantis. And when they caught a victim, they drew that victim in with their powerful front legs, their bodies seemed to split open like dual French doors, grappling like strands would shoot out from inside, yanking their helpless victims forward into their open chest cavity, and then the Barakai would begin to feed. The process was slow and agonizing from what Jo-Laina could tell, because once the Barakai got what it came for it would trot off with that victim screaming as their insides were slowly sucked from them. It was said that the Barakai kept their victims alive for as long as they could, draining them over time, and leaving nothing but an empty husk when they were done. Dying to a Barakai was not considered a good death.

Coming to the Dead Mountains, with the goal of reaching the very top, was not a decision based on intelligence. It was not something that virtually any citizen of Messolin would agree to. Nobody knew for sure how many Barakai existed in the Dead Mountains. The only thing that anybody knew for sure was that the number was a lot and that, without correllium blades for weapons or a place to run and hide, a person was doomed to die to the Barakai. There was no escaping that fate.

Yet Jo-Laina’s band of warriors joined her anyway.

The Barakai clicked there communications to each other on each side of them as they made their way higher into the mountain range. After the Barakai did not attack them right away, Jo-Laina sheathed her swords, but continued carefully. Out of all of the battles that she had fought with these men, she had never once felt this vulnerable. There was no doubt in her mind that if they were attacked at this point, there would be no winning. Why the Barakai were holding back was a mystery. If she hadn’t been there herself, she would never have believed anyone that told her that it could be like that.

It didn’t change the fact that they were at the mercy of the Barakai, and a trembling Picket, perched upon her shoulder was a constant reminder of it.

∞

Scratch and Picket were not the first bolainin that the twins had. The twins could not join their minds with anyone or any creature that they wanted to. It was as if their minds had to have a specialized link with their target. The only exception to this seemed to be with meerkin. Any prim could join minds with any meerkin, but that exception seemed to be limited to meerkin alone. Before they acquired Scratch and Picket, their aunt Veranda had served them both as a bolainin, and continued to do so until her death.

It was through their aunt that Jo-Laina and Jo-Vanna first met and heard Panpar’s stories. Before that initial meeting, Panpar had been a wanderer who only claimed to be a warrior. He had no clan to call his own, and he had no correllium chest plate. Back then, everyone considered him a foolish old man who told stories that nobody believed, and he told them as often as he could get someone to sit still long enough to listen.