Where Gods Fear to Go

by Angus Watson

  Then he found the squatch.

  Unfortunately, the squatch heard his mind too.

  Sofi held a clenched fist aloft. They stopped.

  “You’ve woken it up,” she said.

  “Yes. Sorry.”

  “Do we need to attack?”

  “Hang on.”

  Finn reached out again but found nothing.

  The three women stared at him. They were lovely. No, they weren’t. Well, they were, but…

  “Focus, Finn,” said Thyri, “the squatch could be ripping Ottar’s legs off right now.”

  “That’s probably not helpful,” said Sassa.

  “It isn’t,” Finn confirmed. “Please be quiet.”

  They were silent. Sassa, Thyri and, for the love of Tor, Captain of the Owsla Sofi Tornado were quiet because he had told them to be. They were relying on him. He was Finn the Deep now and–and he really had to focus. Squatch squatch squatch.

  Hello? he tried.

  Who’s that? replied a voice similar to Ayla’s, if you could call something that you couldn’t hear a voice.

  Finn. Finn the Deep.

  What do you want?

  You’ve got Ottar the Moaner?

  The Moaner?

  That’s his name.

  What a horrible name to give to a baby.

  It’s a tribe thing. We mock the people we love. Can we come and get him?

  No.

  No?

  You don’t deserve him. You left him when he needed you. I found him terrified and upset because his sister was in danger. You left him.

  I didn’t leave him. I was with his sister.

  So it was you that put his sister in danger?

  Well, yes, but she made me.

  You left him on his own. A baby in the middle of nowhere. You don’t deserve him. He wanted me to take him.

  Finn sighed. This was not going well.

  “What’s happening, Finn?” asked Thyri, but both Sofi and Sassa waved at her to be quiet.

  He’s not a baby, he’s a boy. He tried. And the others left him by mistake to try to save his sister. As soon as they realised they’d left him they ran back. When we realised you’d taken him we walked all night–we climbed a cliff–to get him back. Doesn’t that prove we deserve him?

  Did you save his sister?

  … No

  What happened to her?

  She was swept downriver by a flash flood.

  You let her drown?

  Not on purpose. And she may not have drowned.

  You don’t know if she drowned? No, no, stop talking now. You are not taking him. He’s mine and I’ll look after him.

  He will want to come with us.

  He will not, and even if he does it’s because he doesn’t know what’s good for him. Babies don’t.

  Can we talk about this face to face?

  Come any closer and I’ll kill you all. In fact, go away now.

  We are Ottar’s people. He belongs—

  That’s it! I’m coming to kill you.

  But we’re Ottar’s friends! I’m his brother, sort of—

  He was interrupted by a roar; a real-life, bone-shaking, trouser-filling roar.

  Finn and the three women looked up at the cluster of pinnacles. The squatch ran out. It was huge, at least as large as the largest squatch from the Shining Mountains.

  It looked about and spotted them, a hundred paces away in the valley below. Beating its chest, it roar-screamed, even louder now it wasn’t shielded by rock. Then it charged.

  Finn looked at the three others in the elite squad and raised his hands apologetically.

  “Stop fannying about, start running,” said Sofi. And she was off.

  Finn had never been a fast runner. He should have been able to go faster, but it was like he was in a dream. Thyri, Sofi and pregnant Sassa tore away, leaving him in their red dust.

  The squatch was on him in a moment.

  I am your friend! he mentally squeaked as a great paw grabbed his head from behind and whisked him into the air.

  All he heard from the squatch was rage.

  The beast grabbed both his feet with its other paw, held him across its chest and pulled.

  Finn felt his neck bones pop.

  He pummelled at the beast with his fists and tried to bite the fingers encircling his head, but he might as well have attacked a tree.

  I am Ottar’s brother, he roared in his mind.

  Something that felt pretty vital popped in his neck. Tor’s fucking balls, he thought. He’d come through all this only to have his head ripped off by something which was meant to be on their side.

  Weird clouds bloomed in his mind. He felt another pop in his neck.

  Sofi came sprinting back, hand axe in one hand, dagger-tooth knife in the other. She jumped and flew at the squatch, power and beauty combined in the perfect killing animal.

  But then she seemed to collapse in mid-air. The squatch stood aside and Sofi fell past to crumple in a heap on the red sand.

  Ayla’s sister roared, and pulled. Something snapped in Finn’s groin.

  Would his legs come off before his head, he wondered, as the agony seized him.

  Then he could think no more. He could do nothing other than scream as the squatch continued to tear him in two.

  Chapter 12

  Wasp Men

  Freydis the Annoying slept by the fire.

  Paloma Pronghorn brained a squirrel with her killing stick, skinned it, spitted it and set the shiny carcass over the flames. While the rodent roasted, she sliced stems from beavertail cactus and rubbed them in sand to remove the spines. She used her knife and her killing stick to carry rocks from the fire to a pool left in a pothole by the receded flood and added the chopped-up cactus stems to the boiling water.

  Paloma had cooked plenty of animals before because it was fun, but she’d never cooked a plant. Other people cooked plants. She ate them. But she’d seen it done and thought she’d give it a go, to kill some time while the child slept. That’s what she told herself. She knew full well that she was really trying to make amends to the girl for losing her temper. Now that she was calm, she was a little freaked out that she’d become so angry. She had very nearly hit the kid. She’d no idea that she had a temper like that.

  It was because she’d been so worried about Freyis all night, obviously, so you could argue that it was an anger born of noble sentiment and affection. But that was a reason, not an excuse.

  A red-spotted toad floated to the surface of her cooking pothole, upside down, limbs splayed. Paloma hoiked it out. It slapped wetly onto the rock and lay still. Sorry, she thought. Innowak’s tits, she was not doing well. Checking your pool for animals was probably step one of pothole cooking.

  She flicked the dead toad into the river.

  Was she going to be a dreadful parent who shrieked at their children in public, she wondered? Her father had been one of those. The first emotion Paloma could remember was embarrassment as her father yelled at her and her sister in a purple-faced, vein-throbbing rage because they’d been mucking about in some busy but sombre place.

  She fished out a piece of cactus on the point of her knife, blew it, tried it and decided it needed a little longer.

  Of course, she’d have to meet someone with whom to have children before she worried about what kind of mother she was going to be. That didn’t seem likely at the moment. She was annoyed with herself for snogging Finn. When the group was reunited, she mustn’t, she thought, get so drunk that she shagged him. Then again, she’d managed to resist that easily enough last time and she’d been properly shit-faced. There probably, she mused, wasn’t enough booze in the world to make her shag Finn.

  Freydis woke.

  They sat on the beached raft and Freydis ate while Paloma explained their situation. She was outlining it to herself really, laying out the challenges and possible solutions, not expecting help from a six-year-old.

  “So I guess the answer,” she said at the end, “is to walk back
along the river.”

  “It’s not,” said Freydis, her voice muffled by a mouthful of squirrel (she’d tried one bite of cactus and gone straight back to squirrel). “We should carry on down the Red River on the raft until we find somewhere nice that we can live for a while.”

  “Should we?”

  “We should. The rest are headed south. You say we came south-west overnight, over a hundred miles?”

  “We did.”

  “So we’re here,” Freydis drew lines in the sand. “And they’re there. We could walk back upriver and then south and hope to catch up, which we probably won’t, or we could walk east to try to meet them and get lost, or we could wait for them to come west. So we wait. We can’t wait here, though, there’s no shelter. We might be found by living versions of that wasp man, or worse, so we need a cave or at least some proper trees.”

  “How will the others find us?”

  “Ottar always knows where I am. As long as you stay with me and he’s with them, they’ll find us.”

  She peered into the child’s eyes. Freydis stared back at her, chewing squirrel.

  Paloma stood. The broad, brown river rushed by. Could she lie on the raft and kick her legs and propel them upstream? For a hundred miles? Maybe. But even if she could they’d still have to track the others, which would be boring and difficult.

  So, waiting made some sense, and it also made sense to find somewhere decent to wait. But was she really going to hunker down in a desert that everyone said was full of monsters and disasters and risk never seeing her friends again on the say-so of a six-year-old?

  She guessed she was.

  “Okay, let’s get some provisions together and—”

  A scream rang out downriver. Paloma had heard a lot of screams in her time but this was a new one. It was loud and bone-juddering but also melodious, as if a woman was being tortured with her lips sewn around the mouthpiece of a bone flute.

  “We should hide,” said Freydis.

  “Owsla don’t hide.”

  Another scream ripped the air, then another, each louder than the last.

  “However,” Paloma continued, “we could lie tactically under these bushes until we see what’s making that noise. And let’s put the fire out. We don’t have enough squirrel to spare so we don’t want anyone joining us.”

  “Good idea!”

  They scooped sand over the fire then lay together under a low bush. Moments later a large flying creature flapped around the downstream meander. Five more followed.

  At first Paloma thought they were large birds flying quite slowly, then she realised it was a trick of perspective and they were very large birds flying at a good clip. Then she realised that they weren’t birds at all. She very nearly gawped.

  The dead one had been pretty awful, but the wasp men looked a lot more fearsome when they were alive. Shiny insectoid man-sized bodies were carried along on huge, leathery wings. Round black eyes on stalks protruded from acorn-shaped heads. Six crab legs ending in human-like hands sprouted from their thoraxes, and, above those, two sturdier limbs ended in long, thick pincers. Shiny black abdomens hung like armoured pinecones, stings like black, pointy penises protruding from the tips.

  “They’re not very nice, are they?” Freydis whispered.

  “Shall we be quiet for now and discuss them when they’ve passed?” Paloma suggested.

  The creatures flapped by. Their wingbeats sounded like soiled blankets slapped against rocks.

  Then they started screaming again and Paloma missed the wing-slapping. The screams were directed at something on the far side of the valley. Paloma got up on her elbows. It was a lion, a big one. The creatures flew towards it, screaming and screaming.

  The lion stood transfixed, as if frozen by the onslaught of sound. A flying horror flapped down, grabbed the lion’s torso with six hands and snipped off its head with a pincer, with as much effort as a man snicking the head off a flower with a knife.

  The wasp men landed. Paloma couldn’t see past the tightly packed monsters, but it was clear that they were ripping the lion apart and eating it.

  “What’s happening?” whispered Freydis.

  “They’re resting for a while.”

  “Have they seen us?”

  “No. Stay where you are.”

  Much more quickly than one would imagine it took six human-sized animals to eat a large cat, the beasts flapped skyward, dripping blood, leaving nothing but a bloody stain where the lion had been.

  Paloma waited a while after the creatures had disappeared around the next upriver meander, then crawled out from their bush.

  “What were they doing?” asked Freydis.

  “Hunting, by the looks of it, along the river. I hope nobody followed us…” she tailed off. Chances were that at least some of their friends had followed them down the Red River.

  Sitsi Kestrel stood before the Swan Empress Ayanna on the Mountain of the Sun.

  “You are accused of remaining alive while six of the Owsla have been killed. Have you anything to say before we cook you and eat you?”

  All the dead Owsla–Morningstar, Talisa White-tail, Luby Zephyr, Sadzi Wolf, Caliska Coyote and Malilla Leaper–stood behind the empress. Sitsi’s joy at seeing her friends again made her forget for a moment that she was to be cooked and eaten. But only for a moment.

  She didn’t want to be eaten!

  She turned to run, but the dead Owsla women screamed, chased her down and grabbed her. They tore at her, ripping her clothes. They lifted her above their heads, chanting her name and shaking her.

  “Sitsi! Oi, Sitsi!” It was Keef. She was in the canoe. Her head was on his lap and he was shaking her shoulder. She sat up. They weren’t in Calnia. They were on the northern bank of the Red River. With the hand that wasn’t shaking her, Keef was holding the low rocky bank.

  “Get out smartish,” said Keef, “and take your bow and arrows please.”

  Sitsi did as she was bid. She’d been awake for about three heartbeats and Keef hadn’t make a joke yet. Something was very wrong.

  The Owsla man followed her up onto the rock platform. He reached back down to the river and lifted his boat out, then grabbed Arse Splitter from it.

  “What’s happened?” asked Sitsi.

  “I heard a screech like nothing I’ve ever heard before, then a couple more, coming closer. I reckon there are monsters approaching.”

  “Wasp men?”

  He shook his head. “Sounded much bigger. Remember that dragon thing that burst into a cloud of wasps when we met Dead Nanda’s people?”

  “No? What are you talking about?”

  Keef raised an eyebrow. “You’ve forgotten about the dragon?”

  Sitsi smiled. “Yup, it’s completely slipped my mind. A flying monster that burst into wasps after I shot it isn’t a big deal for me.”

  “Ha! You had me. Good. Anyway, point is, by the noise of them, we’ve got a few more of The Meadows’ monsters flying towards us.”

  The stood and listened. Nothing.

  “I really did hear it,” said Keef, sounding as if he was trying to convince himself.

  Sitsi stretched and looked around.

  The landscape had changed while she’d slept. Upriver, debris-skirted towers and mesas of red rock thrust monumentally out of the green and red land. Downriver, the channel entered a canyon and took an immediate sharp turn out of sight southwards.

  Standing next to her was the one-eared Wootah man peering downriver with his one eye, looking for the monsters he said he’d heard.

  She had woken from a really weird dream into a weirder reality.

  “What exactly did you hear?” she asked.

  A screech echoed out of the downriver canyon. It sounded like the scream of a demon having its nipples twisted off by a bigger demon.

  “Something like that,” said Keef.

  More screeches rang out, closer. Whatever was making them would surely appear at any moment.

  “We should hide,” said Sitsi.<
br />
  “You hide. Arse Splitter and I will greet the beasts.”

  “There’s no point only one of us hiding.”

  “So don’t hide.”

  Sitsi snorted, strung her bow, plucked a dozen arrows from her quiver and placed them on the red rock. Dry ground, space all around and almost no wind. It was a good archer’s perch. Excitement thrilled through her limbs. It had been a while since she’d put an arrow in a foe. She just hoped these weren’t impervious to arrows…

  Keef peered downriver, axe in hand. For once, he wasn’t leaping about like a fool. Motionless, he radiated a calm, reassuring strength.

  The screechers flew into sight. There were six of them–living versions of the dead horror they’d seen upriver, with bodies the size of bears and wings to match.

  They weren’t insects as someone had said, because they had eight legs, not six. They were more like flying lobsters. Their human-like hands, six on each beast, opened and closed as they flew, as if ready to grasp their prey. Yuck, thought Sitsi.

  Their heads were worse than their hands–black and featureless, other than for a line which was presumably a mouth, and two black balls on stalks which must have been eyes. Those eyes. Sometimes Sitsi regretted having super-eyesight. Their eyes were all black initially, but as she focused in on the leader’s, the sheath that encased the eyeball slid back to reveal an interior of shiny, swirling white-orange, with a dark red dot in the centre.

  The dot focused on her. He, she or it screamed and changed course towards them. The rest followed, blaring their ear-offending screams.

  Keef was saying something. The creatures were coming fast, a hundred paces away now.

  “What?” she shouted.

  “What?” he shouted back.

  She looked at him and gestured that she couldn’t hear. He made arrow-shooting gestures.

  Well, obviously, she thought.

  She shot the first one in the head. Its wings folded and tumbled into the Red River with a splash that they couldn’t hear above the screaming of the others.

  Sitsi breathed out. So they weren’t arrow-proof. She paused for a moment to see if slaying the first deterred the others. No. If anything, they screamed louder and flew faster towards them.