The Storm - eARC

by David Drake

  “Count Thomas,” I said, “I don’t see any safe way of using that tunnel to get into the place your son and Lord Osbourn are. Baga and I are going out on the Road to find the other entrance to the cell that King Fidele mentions. I figure I can open it, the way I did the one at Severin.”

  “What other entrance?” Thomas said. “There’s nothing I’ve ever heard of.”

  “Locating it will be the first business,” I said with a bright smile. I wished I felt as confident as I was trying to seem. “The other things Fidele said were correct, though, so I think we’ll be all right.”

  “Well…” the Count said. “I guess you know what you’re doing.”

  Baga and I walked through the haze separating landingplace from the Road; none of the locals followed. I was whistling “The Girl I Left Behind Me.” I hoped the tune sounded cheerful, but the words pretty well said what I was thinking.

  “Boss,” Baga said as we paused on the Road. “Which direction are we going in? Toward Render or toward Flagtop?”

  “We’ll try Flagtop first,” I said.

  I didn’t have any idea, but it had to be one or the other. Fidele hadn’t given any clue, just said the Queen had blocked off the connection. There was a whole lot I didn’t know about this business I’d taken on, but I knew better than to say that to anybody else.

  We dawdled along the Road. I used Sam’s eyes to scan the Waste at our left side. Distances in the Waste weren’t the same as those in nodes or along the Road itself, so if my luck was bad it might be as much as a mile from landingplace—one way or the other.

  Sam got the idea, though, and gave his attention to patterns. He’d seen the gap in the Waste at Severin and seemed to understand that I was looking for the same sort of thing. He and I hadn’t worked together for very long, but we’d fought together. A warrior and his dog get really close on the battlefield.

  As it turned out, we were lucky. The Waste here looked to me like undergrowth in wintertime, blotchy gray with occasional flecks of green. We weren’t but fifty yards from landingplace when I noticed a vertical discoloration in it.

  The thing I’d noticed wasn’t a change in color, more a ripple in the uniformity. The closest thing I could put to it was the way the air trembled over a rock in summer, but here the ripple was side to side instead of up and down.

  Sam and Baga stood while I tried a little probe of what I thought I’d seen. Sure enough, there was a pattern there—which there wouldn’t be if it really was the Waste. Something had been woven back together where there shouldn’t have been anything to weave.

  “We found it,” I said, coming out of my light trance.

  Baga peered at where I was pointing—and obviously saw nothing. “All right,” he said, deciding that there was no point in discussing what he didn’t see. “What do we do next?”

  “Next…” I said. “I lay down here and try to open things up. At any rate, I’ll get a better notion of what we’re dealing with.”

 

  My quick glance hadn’t even given me a notion of what the structure was, let alone how to attack it. It took me considerable concentration just to find the ends of the chains I was searching for. They were much farther away than I’d expected—almost farther than I could reach from where I was lying. What I was working with wasn’t material—wasn’t matter—but it certainly existed and I could work with it.

  You don’t have to know what dirt is to shovel it out of a hole. What I was doing was about that simple, digging a ditch with my mind.

  The strands I was working with had been woven together but not fused. I removed what I thought were silica atoms from the structure in normal fashion, but when the atoms had been unlinked they vanished. I couldn’t understand what was going on, but my job wasn’t to understand.

  I kept working. The strands themselves began to vanish, but as they did more became apparent. I suddenly had the feeling that I was pulling out a cat’s fur, one hair at a time. Did the Waste feel pain? Were the Waste and the Road alive?

  I don’t know how long I worked. I didn’t stop for any conscious reason. I guess I was just becoming, well…I was blurring into the work piece. There was still work to do, but some part of me realized that there would always be work to do, that there was no end or purpose to any of the things I was doing—or ever would do. That brought me out of my trance as suddenly as had happened several years ago on Beune when I was working outdoors and an unexpected rainstorm had drenched me.

  I sat up before I was fully conscious. Sam whined and licked me, so I closed my eyes and started rubbing the loose skin of his neck.

  “You all right, boss?” Baga said. He sounded worried.

  “Yeah, I guess,” I said, rising to my feet to get away from Sam’s tongue. I opened my eyes and rubbed my lips with the back of my hand. “I’m pretty wrung out, that’s all.”

  “You been under close on six hours, boss,” Baga said.

  “Holy heaven…” I muttered as I looked at what I’d been doing. There was an opening into a node, an ordinary landingplace. Instead of being grassy, the ground was red sand. The vegetation beyond was low and had ragged leaves. It was late twilight.

  “What now, boss?” Baga said.

  My first thought was to say, “We go back and get something to eat,” but then I thought about why we were here and what a delay might mean for Lord Osbourn if there really was a monster in this node. I didn’t figure that Count Thomas’s son had much chance, but maybe we’d find some bones to bury.

  I took a deep breath and brought out my shield and weapon. “Now, Baga,” I said. “You and I go find Lord Osbourn. If the Almighty wills it.”

  I stepped through the haze that had formed since I’d come out of my trance.

  CHAPTER 22

  A Very Old Problem

  The air was very humid; it was like walking into a warm cloud. Trees loomed ahead of us, widely spaced and colorless in the fog. I smelled rotting vegetation

  There wasn’t much undergrowth, but dead foliage covered the ground. I picked up a frond with my fingertips to look at it more closely. It was about twice the size of my hand with the fingers spread. I’ve seen palms and it reminded me of them, but the bark of the tree it came from was diamond-shaped and like no other tree I’d seen.

  “Boss, there’s no birds,” Baga said.

  I hadn’t thought much about it, but the bodies I’d seen flitting among the trees were insects—though some were the size of birds. Something boomed in the distance. I decided it was more likely a frog or the like. A really big frog.

  Sam walked a step or two ahead of us, staying alert and obviously uneasy. I didn’t switch on my equipment because I wanted to take in my surroundings with my normal senses.

  I wasn’t sure how far we were from the opening Osbourn had slid down. Distances on the Road weren’t the same as those in nodes, and the Waste had rules of its own. I’d walked off the edge of it at Gram in order to get to what turned out to be Christabel. It scared me more now in memory than I’d felt doing it when my blood was up and I was determined to finish the raiders once and for all.

  A distant voice called, “Someone? Was that someone speaking?”

  I stopped and shouted as loud as I could, “Lord Osbourn? Is that you?”

  I couldn’t tell where the voice was coming from. The warm mist seemed to smother sound the way it did vision, though that was probably just in my mind.

  “Please!” the voice called. “Get me out of here before the monster catches me!”

  I moved on faster now that I knew there was somebody here. The cries didn’t really give me a direction, but I figured we must be going the right way for him to have heard Baga talking.

  “Keep talking!” I shouted. “We’re coming!”

  There was something beyond the trees ahead of us. I couldn’t make out the shape until we were just about on it and I saw it was smooth and shimmering. It might even have been clear originally, but the grime of ages covered it now. It was circul
ar with sidewalls ten feet high. The roof was a broad cone with the peak pointing down—into the building.

  The shape made no sense to me until I realized that rain, leaf litter and fallen branches would slide to the center and then down into the interior if there was an opening. That would supply organic raw materials for a converter like the one in the boat that fed everybody aboard during a voyage.

  The building might be an Ancient artifact, complete as the Ancients had left it!

  That meant that it and the whole cell or whatever you wanted to call it wasn’t just old, but millennia old. I couldn’t get my head around that thought; and anyway, I was here to find Lord Osbourn.

  “I’m here!” the voice called from above. It wasn’t Lord Osbourn. “Can you get me out? My father will pay you well if you can take me home.”

  I looked up. A huge tree had grown to the left of the glassy building. The trunk had broken off about twenty feet in the air. At the top of the tall stump knelt a man whose clothes had rotted to rags; I thought I saw a family resemblance to Count Thomas.

  “I’m coming down!” he said. “We’ve got to get away at once. It could come back any time!”

  The figure disappeared. Baga said, “Did he go around the back? I don’t see any way down on this side.”

  Sam barked and the stranger came around the stump toward us. His forearms and clothing, such as it was, were freshly smeared with some brown goo.

  “Are you Lord Herbert?” I said. I held my gear ready but still off; this fellow wasn’t a threat.

  “Yes, my father will reward you,” Herbert said. “But we’ve got to get out of here!”

  “You can go back the way we came and get out to the Road,” I said, “but we’re not going till I find my companion, Lord Osbourn. Where is he?”

  “Look, I don’t know, he ran off that way—” Herbert waved an arm generally in the direction we’d been heading when we found the structure “—when the monster came out of the woods yesterday. I told him to run! There isn’t room on the tree for two people, I didn’t have a choice.”

  I didn’t know exactly what Herbert meant, but I was pretty sure I wouldn’t be happy about it when I learned more. Instead of speaking, I walked around the tall stump to see where Herbert had come from.

  The tree had apparently been struck by lightning. There was an arm-thick black scar down to the ground on this side. At the base of it was a triangular opening, rotted into the wood. The hole was about six feet high, but the top couple feet were too narrow for a man. I knelt to stick my head in and found that the inside of the trunk had rotted out. I could see faint light through the hole in the top.

  “It’s too narrow for the monster to get through,” Herbert said from behind me. “But he keeps coming back every day, and if I’m late getting food and water in the building, it chases me. I’ve always been able to circle and make it back, though.”

  I pulled myself out of the tree trunk. The interior smelled sour from the gooey remains of the rotting wood. I understood the stains on Herbert.

  “What do you mean by food and water in the building?” I said.

  “Look, I’ll show you but we’ve got to leave!” Herbert said desperately. “You’ve got to be ready to run. There’s two doors and it could come through either one of them.”

  Herbert was shorter than me and looked soft. His face had his father’s features, but his father was a hard man despite signs of good eating. Lord Herbert was thin at the moment, but from the way his tunic and belt had been cut, he’d been fat when Arcone dumped him into this place. He’d been very lucky to find his perch in the tree stump, and probably even luckier to make it up the inside for the first time.

  We went back to the building and in the opening nearer us. As Herbert had said, there was a similar one on the other side. The floor was the same clear material as the walls and roof; it all seemed to have been cast in one piece.

  I used a light trance to examine the material, expecting to find silica. It was carbon instead: we were in a huge, perfect diamond.

  “You see, you just hold your hand here—” Herbert said, stepping close to the wall midway between the two doorways. Amber fluid began to drip into his hand through an opening I hadn’t noticed until that moment. “And there’s water on the other side.”

  I went to Herbert. After a moment’s hesitation, I put my shield into my pocket and held my fingers out close to where Herbert’s hand had been. The liquid that glopped onto them felt slightly cool. It looked like honey.

  I tasted it with the tip of my tongue; it was more like boiled maize. Not bad, but even more boring than the meals my boat’s converter had turned out before Guntram and I had finished our repairs.

  “Now can we go?” Herbert said. “By the Almighty’s sake, man!”

  “Not until we’ve found Osbourn,” I said. “Look, don’t be so frightened. I’m armed and I’m a Champion of Mankind. It’s my job to deal with things like your monster.”

  “You don’t understand!” Herbert said. “The other guy had a weapon too. He cut the thing apart and it didn’t make any difference. It can’t be killed, it just grew together again and chased after him. To eat he’ll have to come back here.”

  “‘The other guy,’” I repeated. “That would be Lord Osbourn?”

  “I don’t know what his name is!” Herbert said. “I told him to run and he ignored me. That’s all I know about him.”

  I looked at him. It probably wasn’t fair for me to feel Lord Herbert was something that ought to be scraped off my shoe; it must’ve been rough during the months he’d been trapped in this place with no reason to believe he’d ever get out.

  He was still a coward, though.

  “Go on out to the Road,” I said. “I’m going to ignore you too. C’mon, Sam.”

  I continued on the way I’d been walking. I guess I could’ve let Baga guide Herbert back to the hole I’d made, but Baga had volunteered to serve me, and he’d known that might be dangerous.

  “Osbourn!” I called. “We’ve got a way out, now!”

  Sam paced ahead briskly, around the trunks of standing trees. Once he came to a fallen trunk leaning on its root ball. There was enough room for him to wriggle under the bole, so he did. He came back when I called him, though, and he skirted the next similar trunk we came to.

  “Lord Osbourn!” Baga called. He was walking a step behind me and a trifle to the side. He kept looking in all directions, particularly behind us. I didn’t blame him for being afraid, and he’d come on anyway. The sky had brightened considerably since we’d entered the cell.

  Sam started around the top end of another fallen tree. The bark was starting to slough away. It looked pretty much like ordinary pine bark, not the funny diamond shapes. The branches were bare sticks.

  “Boss!” Baga said. “There’s something here.”

  I saw the glint when I looked back and went to where Baga had stopped, looking at the ground. It was a weapon, lying on the fallen bark and foliage but not covered.

  It was Lord Osbourn’s weapon.

  I dropped my shield into my pocket and picked up the weapon. I switched it on left-handed and slashed it through the air. It worked normally; I nipped a collop out of the tree bole just to make sure there wasn’t something invisibly wrong with the weapon. The ripping hiss and the smell of burned wood showed that there wasn’t.

  Shutting down again, I looked more closely at the fallen trunk. Boot toes had pressed troughs in the sodden wood.

  “Osbourn climbed over this,” I said. “He must’ve been holding the weapon and dropped it. I guess he was being chased.”

  “Why didn’t he fight if he had a weapon?” Baga said. Maybe he hadn’t heard Herbert claiming weapons weren’t any good. I’d heard, but I hadn’t believed it.

  I tapped the weapon’s electrode against my right arm to make sure it was cool, then held it out to Baga. “Take this,” I said. “Just to carry. I don’t want to leave it here, and I don’t want it knocking around in my pocket
with my shield.”

  He took the weapon carefully. “Boss, I’ve tried,” he said. “I can’t make them work.”

  “Just carry it,” I repeated. More men than not could use weapons, but I’d take Baga’s word that he couldn’t.

  I went around the treetop instead of climbing over as Osbourn had and angled to the left, which I thought would take us in the direction he’d have gone on the other side. “Osbourn,” I shouted again.

  Sam suddenly hunkered down low and started barking furiously—an angry snarl. The swale in front of us was too damp for the pinelike trees that were the most impressive parts of this forest, but it was filled with stubby plants like pots with the diamond-shaped bark I’d seen on taller trees. These fronds were ten feet tall and splayed out of the top of the trunks. The fronds drooped to the ground.

  Something black and broad and taller than me burst through the screen of vegetation and lumbered toward me.

  I’d switched on my gear when Sam started barking. I met the thing’s charge with my shield advanced and my right arm bringing the weapon around in a quartering cut.

  I struck the creature squarely. It wasn’t human; that was all I was sure of in the instant. My stroke sheared deep down into the chest starting at the base of the thick neck.

  The thing’s head and right arm slid sideways off the torso, still attached by a tag of skin. I recovered my weapon and waited for the creature to fall over. It was built more like a large ape than a man: very broad, and covered with skin that bagged loosely.

  Instead of falling, the creature’s body shivered. The head and upper right torso slid upward the way a slug crawls, rejoining the rest of the body seamlessly. As the creature rippled back together, I caught sight of something metal at the back. I wondered if it was a spearhead sticking out of the body.

  I lunged and ripped through the center of the thing’s chest. I didn’t see why that should have any more effect than the previous cut had, but I had to do something.