All That Lives Must Die - Eric Nylund [240]
The gate, however, vibrated of its own accord—the barest rumble that flipped the tumbler back into place.
“It’s fighting me,” he whispered to Fiona.
“Then play harder—or faster—or louder,” she said. “Whatever it takes.”
Robert walked back from the edge of the cliff, his face drawn tight with worry. “Eliot, I wouldn’t play any louder, if I were you. Look.”
Eliot stopped playing. He put on his glasses and then he, Fiona, Mr. Welmann, and Amanda followed Robert back the edge.
The cliff dropped a mile straight down. Switchbacks started from the top and descended into smog. Rivers of lava snaked around mesas of black basalt—their bases eroded by the molten stone. Meteors streaked across the sky, so did the occasional on-fire, out-of-control airline jet.
Eliot winced as one plane crashed and burst into a fireball.
He’d gotten a glimpse of the Blasted Lands at the beginning of the school year. It’d scared him then . . . still did. But something was different.
Fiona said, “It’s quieter.”
Eliot knew there were damned souls here—dozens had rushed the gate and tried to escape last time—but Eliot hadn’t expected to see thousands of them down there . . . and all of them quiet.
They formed lines that stretched to the horizon. Each person carried a large stone that, when they got to the end of the line, they dropped into the lava below . . . and then went back for more. The stones disappeared in flame, but elsewhere, they’d actually started to pile up, making jumbled shorelines, and in some places damming the lava altogether.
“What are they doing?” Eliot whispered.
Mr. Welmann wiped the sweat off his face with a red handkerchief. “Something, that’s for sure. Since Beelzebub died, the Blasted Lands were taken over by a new Infernal boss. Looks like he’s put everyone to work.”
Eliot remembered with Louis had told him: “We are monarchs of the domains of Hell, the benevolent kings and queens over the countless souls who are drawn there to worship us.”
But not everything was different under the new management. In some areas, people fought one another, full-scale wars waged atop a few mesas, the losers tossed over the side into the fire.
“You see them now?” Robert asked Eliot. “The crazy ones? I don’t think we want them hearing you playing and coming up here.”
Eliot imagined tens of thousands rushing the gates . . . and him and the others fighting, trapped with their backs against the wall.
He turned to Amanda, worried she might freak out.
But she wasn’t; instead, she stared with open fascination at the lakes of lava and burning mountains. She took a step closer—and Eliot set a hand on her arm, pulling her back from the edge.
“Hey,” he told her.
She blinked, breaking whatever weird trance she’d fallen into, and nodded at him. Amanda’s eyes, though, still glimmered as if they’d absorbed the heat of this place.
Mr. Welmann dug into the pack that Aunt Dallas had given them. He took out a pair of binoculars and gazed through them. “Hmm.” He handed them to Eliot and pointed between two mesas.
Eliot squinted into the binoculars, his gaze traveling over jagged obsidian, and smoldering fissures, and then saw what Mr. Welmann had: A simple suspension bridge swayed across the chasm. It was made of rusted cables and black metal . . . an arc a half-mile long that swung in the heat.
It looked amazingly untrustworthy.
He moved his view left and right, and spotted more of these bridges. They linked one mesa to another, and then to fields beyond the lava. The Blasted Lands leveled out there into plains of ash.
Eliot then spotted a fine straight black line—no, two parallel lines—that ran over the plain and vanished in the distance.
“The Night Train’s railroad tracks.” Eliot handed the binoculars to Fiona. “That’s how we’ll get out. We can use those bridges to cross, and then follow the tracks right into the Poppy Lands.”
She looked and snorted and said, “The Poppy Lands are not the way out.”
“They’re our only way now,” Eliot said. “I’ve been on those tracks. Nothing touches them—not people, flaming