Approaching the Black Mountain: A Name to Conjure With Chapters 19-20
Book: A Name to Conjure With by Donald Aamodt (1989)
The Worst Hangover in Fantasy Literature
Sandy wakes with sun blasting his eyes and sand in his mouth. He spits it out, crawls to shade, and passes out again.
Evening. Pognak digs a toe into Sandy’s ribs. Sandy is too miserable to care. The world seems hellish. A light breeze sounds like a concert. He’s had hangovers before. Nothing close to this.
The animals make it worse. Glupp is fine, always fine. But the rudhars step on Sandy’s feet, nip at his butt, and squeal about everything. When he gets back to camp, the others are eating and enjoying it. Sandy almost throws up watching them.
They get moving at dusk. Sandy leans over his rudhar and vomits. Then come the dry heaves. Zhadnoboth gives him tincture of bloatfish in water. It tastes like sulphur, iodine, and rotten worms blended with things too gross to name. But his insides go numb and the crisis passes.
Sandy and Glupp ride at the back. A demon who can’t hold his liquor sits at the bottom of the social hierarchy. Glupp rubs his head against Sandy’s leg. It helps more than words could.
The Outer Defenses
Zhadnoboth smells hostile magic and stops the group. He reveals a spelled boundary line stretching from horizon to horizon using glowfly dust and a word of power. They find a gap where a sand dragon dragged itself across. Massive charred bones and an enormous talon nearby tell Sandy everything he needs to know about dragons.
They cross the gap without incident.
The Sand Whirlpool
Half an hour later, another stop. Zhadnoboth tosses a rock into the sand. It ripples. He needs a bigger rock but can’t lift it. Pognak silently laughs at him, then heaves a boulder overhead and throws it.
Where it lands, an immense whirlpool of sand erupts. It chews the stone to splinters and charges off.
Zhadnoboth’s solution: levitation. He ties everyone together with braided hair rope and makes them weightless. The idea is sound. The execution is a comedy disaster.
Nobody can get traction. Zhadnoboth steps forward, jerks the rope taut, and falls on his butt. The rudhars flip over with riders in the saddle. Glupp’s legs slide out and he belly-flops. Zhadnoboth does a complete somersault in the air. Everyone is so light that nobody gets hurt, but nobody can move either. A turtle could beat them.
The sorcerer tries a towing spell, shooting energy at a distant boulder to reel them in. Too much power. They hurtle toward the rock at lethal speed. He panics, uses Kythornak’s seventh word of power without preparation, and the spell collapses. Everyone rolls across the desert in a tangled pile and slams into the boulder.
Untangling happens by barroom rules. Every man and beast for themselves.
Glupp Shows the Way
The hasty word of power drained Zhadnoboth’s abilities. Then they discover they’re trapped in a confusion spell, walking in circles. Uskban spots their own tracks three times.
Uskban takes the lead. Fifteen minutes later, same spot. The sorcerer and madman start arguing. The kind that ends with someone getting stabbed.
Sandy watches. Then Glupp does what Glupp does. He gives a huffy rumble and waddles off toward thorny plants he smells. Sandy grabs Uskban’s arm and points.
They follow the grundzar straight through the confusion spell and into rocky hills with spring water and cover. Perfect campsite.
This moment matters. Sandy broke up a lethal argument and redirected everyone toward the solution. He’s beginning to lead, even if nobody put him in charge.
Sandy’s Growing Senses
Sandy can’t sleep. He realizes he’s happy despite everything. Hard travel and fresh air suit him. But fear sits cold in his stomach. He trusts his companions to be worse to the enemy than to each other. That’s all he can ask.
Then his hair prickles. A dreaming thought brushes his mind. Alien. Strange. The thought of a god sleeping deep beneath the hills, one that won’t wake until the end of time. Sandy’s sixth sense has sharpened to something remarkable. He wonders what Zarathandra really is. What mysteries hide in its past. Are the Goddess and Kels Zalkri just two players in something much bigger?
The Goddess Prepares
Chapter 20 is the Goddess’s perspective. She’s satisfied with her team but worried. Their unpredictability and stubbornness are both their strength and the thing that makes them hard to control.
She meditates to prepare. Then Kels Zalkri invades her thoughts. He promises to devour her soul for a thousand years and farm mortal souls forever.
She hurls back one word: “Never!”
His mockery shakes her. She throws her thoughts against his defenses. They bounce off. She forces herself calm. Before tomorrow is over, “that bastard god” will know how sharp her talons are.
The pieces are all in position. The outer defenses are behind them. Sandy is growing into something the dark god can’t predict. The Goddess and Kels Zalkri trade threats across dimensions. Tomorrow it begins.