'The utility of that gate spell never ceases to amaze me.' Inta thought when they stepped through the other side. Of course, it wasn't perfect. The nature of the spell was such that very few really knew of its existence… thanks to a little convenient memory alteration. 'I wonder if-' Inta chuckled and dismissed the idea, 'No, no if anyone searched my mind I'm sure I'd have had to answer a lot of questions. Unless I did do that already and they wiped that memory too.'
There was an unpleasant thought. One of the dark sides of an all powerful ruler with unstoppable magic. 'You never really know if they 'got' you or not, or even how much of yourself is yourself and how much of you might be imposed. I suppose I could even be a creation and all my memories merely implants and… I'd better stop thinking about this before I drive myself mad.' Inta stopped that unpleasant and faintly quease-inducing line of thought and instead looked at the world around him.
The land on which they were standing was one of blasted earth. Rust colored sand and rocks great and small that were no different than the sand. Mounds of stones stood here and there in small pyramid piles that were clearly not natural. The sun beat the world like a hammer and the haze of air seemed to dance in the distance. "I don't envy the soldiers who have to go through this when the time comes." Inta said while he approached the first stone pyramid. The mounds of rocks were unshaped and varied between waist high and chest height on himself. They were laid out in long lines, each one about a bowshot from the other in two directions.
He put a hand on the stones and felt the heat of the day on his fingers, 'I wouldn't want to be a human out here.' He thought, but Entoma, having heard what he said and nearly read his thoughts answered him…
"I believe it's going to be the undead passing through here, lots and lots of death knights." Entoma answered. "So the locals have nothing to worry about."
"I'm sure they would beg to differ." Inta replied as he looked out into the great empty beyond.
"Lord Ainz doesn't grant them permission to differ." Entoma retorted, but stopped speaking when Inta looked over his shoulder.
"They don't need his permission to differ, yet." He pointed out, for a moment his expression was cold and hard, but it softened when he saw that she froze with surprise at the way he spoke, at his near blasphemy. "This is not his land, they rule themselves. You're here as an ambassador, Entoma, not a conqueror. They can do as they like. And I wouldn't refer to them as locals."
"But they are locals. They live here." Entoma pointed out as if he'd become suddenly slow in the head.
"They do. But when you say something like that, it sounds…" He rubbed his chin a little as he sought the right word, "It sounds like you're looking down on them. You can't make friends with people while you're doing that."
Entoma relaxed after the sudden criticism was explained, and she asked, "So what do I call them?"
"Their names." He answered her with a smirk on his dark, masked face. "Now where do we go from here?"
Entoma looked around her, "I-I don't know. I just, I assumed it would be obvious."
"Should we ask for help?" Inta proposed.
Entoma immediately shook her head, "No. Not if we don't have to, I need to do this myself. We'll be fine."
"I suppose." Inta said and drummed his fingers on the capstone of the waist high pyramid of stones, "This has got to mean something, right?" He asked.
Entoma came closer to it, "It smells funny." She said when she came near.
"I smell nothing." Inta answered after a deep breath.
"It must be a pheromone, if I knew what it was… but I don't." She finished the thought and shuffled her foot in the red stands. "I made a mistake, just like Lord Cocytus did."
Inta looked down at her and waited.
She explained, "Before the war, we had a small conflict with the lizardmen. Lord Cocytus was put in charge of a small army of undead, he made mistakes, he didn't scout the enemy. He didn't have enough people, he- the long and the short of it is that he lost."
"I see. That seems impossible." Inta answered as his estimation of the lizardmen minority shot up a dozen notches in an instant.
"But it happened. Now I've made the same mistake, I didn't prepare, I don't know where to go or who to look for or…" She sighed, "Maybe I should call for help."
"Relax, Entoma, it's fine." He reached out and put his warm hand on her shoulder, "We can figure this out and you can explain it later, these stones have got to mean something, right? They look kind of like the markers on the Central One. That road has markers at every intersection and notices that you're coming close to a town, I'm guessing this is kind of like that."
Entoma thought that over, staring at the stones as if willing them to speak to her. 'It makes sense, a lot of sense actually, it's the sort of thing I would do.' She told herself and leaned in closer to the capstone. She inhaled the pheromone and began to circle around it, one side was definitely much stronger. She then straightened and turned around to point straight ahead. "We go that way."
There was another little pyramid of stones directly in front of her a bowshot's distance.
"Okay, you're the ambassador." Inta remarked, he intuitively wanted to question her, but with the sudden surge in her confidence, he just couldn't. So he followed instead.
She went to the next capstone and repeated the process, again having found the side with the strongest scent, she followed it. Notably, the pyramids began to shrink, however this never changed the ease with which she found either them or the direction she wanted to go. Until at last the pyramid was literally just four rocks in a square with one white painted one glinting in the sun and Entoma said point blank, "We're here."
Inta looked around, they'd walked for so long that the sun was now clear on the other side of them and would start its descent before much longer. "We're certainly here, but where exactly is here?" He asked. As near as he could say, 'here' was nothing. It was the same as everything else, blasted red sand dunes and open plains of the same, which whirled around when picked up by a wind that was uninhibited by anything. Their cloaks billowed around behind them and Entoma sought an answer. The only difference between where they stood now compared to where they stood hours before was that there was a large open gorge in the ground a quarter bowshot from where they stood.
The gorge was massive by any measure, running from where they stood to far, far out of sight. And it seemed at a glance to be as wide as a mountain.
"Maybe there?" Entoma guessed when she pointed to the dropoff.
"I guess it could be worth a try." Inta acknowledged and they walked closer to the edge.
The sun's descent cast a strange haze over the land around them and the blasted red seemed to come more alive, the wind picked up and the sand became a rainbow of colors parading through the air, in any other circumstances… such as not being completely lost, Inta would have called it beautiful to watch the cascade of colors when the sand flew over the edge and down into the canyon below like a solid rainbow waterfall.
They reached the edge and looked down below.
"Okay." Inta said when he looked at what awaited them. "You were right. We're here."
Entoma didn't bother to restrain the smugness in her voice as if she knew the whole time that they'd make it. "Yes, we are."
"We are indeed, and that… that is impressive." Inta acknowledged as he looked at the city of bridges and cliffs that made up a canyon the size of a mountain, and as deep as one of those was tall.