by David Drake
As I crossed the courtyard on my way to the stables to pick up Lad, I thought about the fact that I was acting on the whim of my boat instead of suiting the convenience of the Leader. Jon hadn’t specifically requested that I renovate his vessel, but that was only a quibble. He didn’t realize that it could be renovated, but I certainly did.
How was that different from arranging for May’s cousin to become a Champion? May was a lot closer to me than the boat was.
Or at least she had been. I didn’t know about now.
I paused with Lad at landingplace while a mixed group of travellers arrived at Dun Add: pilgrims who’d been visiting religious sites; peddlers; tourists; and three envoys coming to plead or demand that the Leader do something for them in the name of the Commonwealth.
Maybe one of the group was a kid with the dream of becoming a Champion, just as I had come to Dun Add last year. If there was, I wished him the luck of his journey. I didn’t know anymore what the best result would be.
Nobody came down to landingplace to wish me a safe journey.
“Come on, Lad,” I said and made a clucking sound in my throat. We stepped through the curtain of mist onto the Road.
I wasn’t going anywhere. I was going to Beune by a roundabout route. I’d be glad to see folks back home—and see Buck, who was living lame and retired with Demetri, who’d raised him before I bought him for a week’s work digging a well.
My official task was to patrol sections of the Road and the nodes along it. I’d take care of any problems that I could, but I planned to send most disputes to Dun Add. It was more important to Jon that everybody accepts that the Leader judges disputes than that his Champions impose their judgment on parties in conflict.
Lad kept a brisk pace. His eyesight was at least as good as Buck’s, though there’s nothing to see on the Road except when you meet other travellers.
The Waste to either side is a blur of color and texture, much like underbrush glimpsed from the corners of your eyes when you’re riding fast in Here. A dog’s eyesight dulls colors and shifts them to reds, browns and muddy blues, but unless something bursts through from the Waste it doesn’t matter.
The things that live in the Waste are monsters: hostile to all life. They vary in shape and intelligence—one that crawled up on Beune seemed to have no more intellect than the dirt and rock it was devouring—but they preyed on whatever they met.
The Beasts inhabited Not-Here. They used the Road just as humans do, and I suppose they lived on nodes which didn’t exist to human senses. Beasts and humans killed each other when they met, but that was a result of instinctual loathing the way you did when a spider suddenly crawls onto your hand.
Well, I did that. And I’m only guessing that Beasts had the same reaction to us but the result for sure was the same.
Mistress Toledana had laid out a route on which inhabited nodes occurred within a day’s hike of one another. I could stay longer if I found reason to, of course. Mostly my job was to show people who lived in rural parts of the Commonwealth that there was protection available if they needed it; and perhaps, in a few cases, that justice was at hand if they got out of line. I bought food and lodging where I had to, but for the most part the folk I passed through were happy to offer hospitality.
The seventh day out I was in Carvahal, chatting with the mayor in the common room of the only inn, when a peasant rushed in with a shaggy mongrel. “There’s been an attack on Gram!” he said. “I need to get to Dun Add and get us some help!”
“I’m a Champion,” I said, getting up from my bacon sarny. Lad was outdoors, eating a pudding of blood and corn meal. “What kind of attack?”
“A monster!” the messenger said. “It was square and shone like black sunlight! It came right in from the Waste and took six people in a net and went back into the Waste with them. Red Oscar hit it with his big hammer. It just bounced away and the monster cut his arm off!”
“How far is Gram?” I asked the mayor, Ludo. The name sounded familiar but it wasn’t on my route.
“Half a day, I’d guess,” Ludo said. “If you go out from landingplace left and you take the first fork on the left from there, you get there.”
“Will you guide me?” I asked the messenger. My planned route had been to take the right-hand fork beyond Carvahal, but this would be an easy change if I didn’t get lost. Directions in rural hamlets depended more than a stranger would think on knowing the terrain—and Beune was no better than the rest that way. Most people stayed in the node where they were born and had very hazy notions of the world beyond.
“I can’t do that!” the messenger said. “I’ve got to get to Dun Add!”
You’ve got to get to some place farther from the danger, I translated silently, but his panic at least proved there was something real going on in Gram. Aloud I said, “I need a guide. You can turn around and come back when you get me there.”
“I’ll guide you,” Ludo said. “My niece married a sheep farmer on Gram.”
“Let’s get on with it, then,” I said. I bolted the last of my sarny and washed it down with the lager. “We can both use Lad, I guess.”
We were on the Road within ten minutes—Ludo needed to tell his wife and also made sure that the spectators who flocked around at the commotion knew that he was bravely guiding the Champion from Dun Add to the place of danger.
I guess that was fair. He was guiding me, after all.
The messenger from Gram had vanished before Ludo and I set out. Well, he was a civilian. He had no duty to be brave.
Ludo was forty or so with a ginger beard, maybe to make up for his—very—high forehead. I chatted with him as we hiked along. I realized that I’d missed the companionship of Baga on the way from Dun Add. Boatmen are rare—I couldn’t handle a boat, for example—and it made sense for Baga to carry the Consort’s mission to Nightmount.
I could easily have chosen another servant to accompany me, but I’d decided I didn’t need a porter because I’d be buying meals and lodging along the way. I could wear one set of clothes, washing them as required: I didn’t need fresh outfits to impress people—mostly farmers—with my wealth.
And I’m used to being alone. I’ve usually been alone in a Maker’s trance; always, except for a few times when Guntram and I worked on an artifact together.
Working is different from tramping along the Road. Ludo had been born in Carvahal and had rarely left it; he’d made the trip to Gram a year ago to attend his niece’s wedding, and he dealt with a distiller in Williamsburg for his spirits. He brewed his own lager, but there was enough demand for spirits during the quarterly fairs that he kept some on hand.
Ludo talked nonstop. I finally realized that he was chattering because he was afraid. He’d volunteered to guide me without hesitation, though; and I really was interested in his talk, because it reminded me of Beune—though he was the top man on Carvahal, which was a much wealthier node than Beune would ever be.
We’d come about four hours from Carvahal when we met the first refugees from Gram, a couple and a family. Both heads of house had sheets of mica which polarized light enough to permit them to follow the Road. The messenger we’d met in Carvahal was one of the few people in the hamlet trained to enter an animal’s mind for travel. It was a pretty common skill on Beune, though few people went any distance from the node. The refugees we met thought that some of the shepherds had gone the other way up the Road toward Garcia, the main market for wool from Gram.
There’d been another raid. This time in addition to the shining black cube, there’d been half a dozen men with the heads of snakes, which didn’t make sense to me. They’d captured more locals and carried them off into the Waste. Folks had run, but the snake men were fast. Nobody’d tried to fight them this time; not after what had happened to the smith before.
“It’s less than an hour from here to Gram,” Ludo told me. “And there’s no more branchin
gs.”
“You can go back, then,” I said. “Thanks for your help.”
“No,” Ludo said forcefully. “We’ll go on to Gram. I just wanted you to know that we’re close.”
We were even closer when we met the larger clot of refugees, fifty or more; people who’d stumbled out onto the Road with no way at all to see where they were going. Unless they kept literally in touch with one another, some would wander off into the Waste where they’d die of heat stroke.
They had nothing to add to what we’d learned from those who’d fled earlier. I had to push through them. Lad was nervously standoffish at the mixture of panic and despair he scented. I didn’t blame him. Women and children crying make me uncomfortable, but here men were weeping also.
“Come back with us!” Ludo shouted. “Here, everyone hold on to me. The Champion will protect us!”
I switched my shield and weapon on when I came to the misty curtain separating the Road from Here. The hackles rose along Lad’s spine. We stepped though onto Gram.
Nothing was waiting for us, human or otherwise.
I took two steps forward, turning my whole body a quarter turn to right and then to the left so that I was sure I wasn’t missing something lurking at the edge of the Waste. After I’d checked, I switched off the shield so that I could see my surroundings normally. I got a clear view of houses with fieldstone foundations and timber walls up to half lofts. There were only a few places in Beune as fancy as these, but they weren’t mansions.
Ludo had entered landingplace only a pace behind me. He hesitated a moment where he was, but when the refugees began to return in a rush he came farther into the node.
“Where the monster come from is up near Elder Timritt’s house,” said a barefoot man with his tunic tied around his waist with twine in place of a belt. I judged him for an artisan’s helper.
“Just now or the first time?” I asked. More refugees were pouring in from the Road. It must have been terrifying to stand in a gray blur, knowing that a misstep meant slow, inevitable death.
“Both times,” the fellow said as several other returnees nodded. “It come out through the back of Big Red’s tract both times, but the second time there was snake-men with it.”
“Come along,” I said to him. “You can keep behind me, but make sure I’m going the right way to find where the monster’s coming from the Waste.”
Gram had only the one street through the middle of town. I followed it. I wanted to examine the edge of the Waste where the creature had appeared, but for now I’d stay where I had good footing and knew there wouldn’t be anything in my way.
The creature had appeared twice. I didn’t want the third time to be when I was straddling a fence.
“There, right there!” the local said, pointing past me to the open-sided shelter on my left. The hearth and anvil it protected looked stark and bare; tongs and a heavy hammer had been laid on the woodpile rather than put away properly in the free-standing tool cabinet on one side.
Behind the smithy was a good-sized house with a covered stoop. The front door was open. “That’s Red’s house,” the local said. “The black thing took his wife when it cut his hand off, but the servant girl was tending him after that. I didn’t see her after the snake-men came.”
I went into the house. A man was sprawled on the couch against the wall of the front room, his left arm resting on the floor. A mug had fallen on its side, and there were two large pottery bowls.
The man’s eyes opened and he murmured, “Alma? Is that you?”
“I’m here, Red,” the local said, slipping past me. “I don’t know where Alma went to. The thing come back again.”
“Get me some water, Jeft,” the man on the couch said in a weak voice. I could see now that his right arm was bandaged in the middle and there was no hand attached. “I dreamt Alma was a lizard and come look at me. That didn’t happen, did it? I’m just dreaming?”
“Well, there was snake-men this time,” Jeft said. “It wasn’t Alma, though, I don’t think.”
“Sir?” I said. “Red? How did you lose your hand?”
“This black thing comes up,” he said. “I see it come around the back and I say, ‘Hey, who’re you?’ And it comes right at me, and bloody hell, I step out from the shed and whap it one. The hammer bounces back and drags me over with it and while I’m trying to get up again and this ribbon comes out of the black thing and zip! my hand’s on the ground and it’s still holding the hammer. And I guess I passed out then.”
I opened my mouth to see what Red remembered about the lizard coming into the house when I heard screaming outside. Lad began to bark angrily.
I went out onto the stoop, holding my hardware ready. When I looked around the back of the house, I saw a black, shining cube about six feet each way. It was coming toward me from the Waste. It made a faint hissing.
It was time for me to be a Champion of Mankind. At least I could give the locals time enough to get away.
CHAPTER 10
Learning Experiences
As the Cube slid toward me, six more figures came out of the Waste. With my shield on, all I could see of them were man-sized blurs. They swept past the Cube and approached me from both sides.
Nothing I could see of their fuzzy presences suggested that they were armed, but the whole business was new to me and therefore scary. I wasn’t trembling and it sure wasn’t going to change what I was doing, but it was like having yellow jackets come out of a hole toward me: I might be about to get hurt.
Because the figures were well ahead of the Cube, I stepped into the trio on my right and swiped at the nearest one. Its body flopped down in two pieces. I cut back-handed at the remaining pair, dropping one and at least touching the other with the same stroke.
The three on my left might have caught me from behind if they’d come on quickly, but they paused when their fellows went down. The figures—the snakemen, as Jeft had called them—weren’t any better equipped or dangerous to me than so many human bullies with knives. When I moved a step toward them, they ran back to the edge of the Waste.
The Cube was up with me now, an opaque blackness with sharp edges. The bottom of the shape seemed to flow over the irregular ground like oil rippling over waves, never losing contact.
I thrust at the center of the flat approaching me. My weapon skidded like a knife from polished granite. I felt no penetration or even give.
The Cube advanced as I retreated. There was a flicker of energy from the upper right corner of the front. It whipped toward me. I followed the course and parried it away as I would have done a club. I didn’t feel much shock at the contact; my stroke severed the Cube’s weapon with snarling sparks. The ribbon sucked in.
I was still feeling my way with this new opponent. If I’d been fighting a human I’d have thrust at his shoulder, but as it was I used Lad’s agility to circle the Cube to my right. The Cube rotated on its axis to keep the same face toward me.
I slashed at the corner from which the white ribbon had appeared. This time I felt a crunch. Sparks and bits of hardware spilled away for a moment, like rice out of a torn bag.
Another whip of white light curled, this time from the upper left corner. I was out of position to parry, but my shield absorbed the stroke easily.
The Cube began backing away. I followed, wishing that I’d thrust instead of cutting at the Cube’s corner. The strength of its armor clearly fell away quickly from the center to the edges. The lack of result from my first thrust had made me worry that the creature was impregnable, but that clearly wasn’t the case. Also its weapon was pretty puny against anybody better equipped than a peasant with a hammer.
I thrust across my body at the upper left corner of the Cube. I felt another crunch, but the contact wasn’t as damaging as I’d hoped because the creature was fleeing me.
It made a half turn on its axis and plunged back into the Waste. I thrust as the Cube vanished, but the center of the back was as unyielding as the front had been.
&nb
sp; The accompanying figures—the three I hadn’t struck—returned to the Waste also. I backed away to give myself some room, then knelt facing the point where the Cube had left. My arms were trembling and I gasped through my open mouth. The fight had lasted only a minute or two, but it’d been as draining as a day spent digging a foundation.
When I was sure that the Cube wasn’t going to suddenly reappear, I shut down my equipment so that I could see normally. Lad paced about, still keyed up; every time he came close in his circuit, he licked the back of my left hand.
I saw the corpses of two things shaped like men. Their skins were gray-green and covered with fine scales, but their blood was as red as mine. Their short-faced heads reminded me of the anoles that come out on stone walls in springtime.
I looked for the third lizardman, the one I hadn’t put down. A group of villagers was moving away from where they’d gathered. The third creature lay on the ground, beaten to death with billets of firewood and blacksmiths’ tools. Jeft, holding the brain-smeared hammer, was walking toward the house where Red lay.
Ludo was coming toward me. “Found your niece?” I called.
“I found her husband,” Ludo said. “He hasn’t seen her since the first attack.”
He swallowed and said, “Did you kill the creature, Lord Pal?”
“No,” I said. “Not yet.”
I took a deep breath because this wasn’t going to get easier if I let it drag on. “Look, Ludo,” I said. “I’m going to trust you. If I don’t come back, you’ve got to get word to the Leader at Dun Add. I don’t know what they ought to do, but somebody there will.”
“Milord?” Ludo said. “What will you be doing?”
I pointed to the grass leading to the Waste. It had turned brown along the track where the Cube had been sliding. I’d noticed that when I first saw the site—before the Cube had appeared most recently. “The villagers said that the thing always arrived at the same place, and the seared grass says the same thing. The Cube doesn’t come from the Waste, it comes through the Waste from somewhere else.”