by Jim Grimsley
Keely giggled. “What’s Emmen-go-home?”
Pel shrugged, grinning at him. “Just a saying, back where I come from. Once upon a time it was the name of a storm that happened in the late summer.”
“Where?”
“You ask a lot of questions.”
He felt abashed for a moment, till Pel chucked him on the shoulder.
“No harm in questions, boy. You’ll never amount to much if you don’t ask. But you know, in my case, the question of where I come from is just too deep to answer.”
“Too deep?”
“Too many ways to think about it. Let’s look at the storm instead.”
Distant rumbles might be thunder or might be something else. At times Keely felt as if he could feel the distant one, the voice of the enemy singer in the flitter; he could hear the echo of the sound of the river of numbers, of values, of the math box. A break in the smoky mess showed the undersides of low clouds and a bright patch of light overhead, the place at the top of the lone tree where Dekkar was doing his priest-work.
“How come the fire stuff never falls on us?”
“Dekkar won’t let it,” said Pel. “He’s a cunning devil, that one. These lot will be sorry to have tangled with him, these trees.”
By now Keely had an inkling that Pel’s jovial tone was meant to be reassuring, but Keely felt better while talking, regardless, and he hardly minded having company, since he could not sleep. Again he wondered that the others could in all this noise and confusion.
The ache in his head was less, but still behind the rest of his thinking ran that stream of music, that place where his brain was putting together what he had learned from the math box. For instance, as time passed he came to have a clear feeling for where Dekkar was, too; not so much an image of him atop the standing tree as a feeling for his relative location. There were currents of sound flowing from Dekkar but these sounds were nothing at all like the numbers in Keely’s head; still, there was some connection. These were feelings inside Keely, not thoughts; he was aware of some disturbance in himself but could not have articulated it. Nor was he concerned about it; his mind was taken up with the fire, the lights in the distance, the dull pain in his skull.
Rain began to fall, and the strong wind sent it straight along the river against the current for a while. The overhanging bank protected them at first, but as the wind changed Pel was doused in the face, since he was tall. He shook his head and guided Keely inside the boat, closing the hatch.
When they turned from the hatch, Dekkar was behind them, smelling of wind. Water dripped off the cloak he was wearing. He had a palm full of colored stones that he was pouring into an embroidered pouch. He studied Keely in the dark. “You didn’t sleep?”
“For a while I did, but I woke up.” He was thinking that Dekkar looked more like a priest than anything else, no matter what Pel said. Beyond, through the portals, the big bug monster was still sweeping the river.
Pel shook out his rain cloak. “We had a nice chat on top until the rain started.”
Dekkar considered Keely another moment or so, saying to Pel, “We should head upriver, as fast as this boat will go.”
“You’re finished here?”
“My opponent is reconsidering her options, since I made it clear I’d destroy this forest down to the last tree in it if she continued attacking me.”
They were making no attempt to hide the conversation from Keely. The back of his neck prickled.
Pel was steering the boat clear of the bank, picking his way into the center of the current through the clog of debris. The mantis vanished beneath the current and Keely wondered whether it would follow. Pel asked, “The trees matter to it?”
“To her. Yes, they do. I’m pretty sure she’s one of them.” From his cloak he drew out something familiar, the math box, the thing Nerva had used on Keely night after night, the sound of which the boy still heard in his head. Dekkar held it for Keely to see. “This was very helpful.”
Keely nodded, not quite understanding. He wasn’t sure how he felt that Dekkar held it.
“Do you want it back?” Dekkar asked, kneeling in front of him. “I took the box from Nerva but it may be you want it for yourself.”
Keely looked at the flat box, dull in the dim light. “No. You can have it.”
“She used it to hurt you, I think.”
After a while he nodded his head. He refused to look up from the deck, where Uncle Figg and Kitra were still lying side by side, breathing deeply.
“It doesn’t have to hurt, Keely. It’s just a teaching box. If you want to put it on again, I can see to it that it doesn’t cause pain.”
He looked up at Dekkar, confused. “You’re going to make me use it, too?”
“No. But you may find you need it. You’ve learned a language from it. Not really words the way we think of words—a language made of numbers. You’ve learned a kind of math that Nerva also knew how to use. She was using it on you to control you. That was the part that hurt. But you may find that you need more information from the box in order to understand what’s inside your head now. I can’t make that go away.”
The river of numbers in his head, that had been so present before, chose this moment to diminish to a trickle, hardly a concern. But he understood what Dekkar was talking about, and he nodded his head.
“Thank you,” Dekkar said, but Keely wasn’t sure for what. He stood. “Anyway, it was a help to have this while I was up in the tree dealing with our pursuers.”
“More than one?” Pel asked.
“Oh, indeed,” Dekkar said. “Heading up from the south and down from the north. Whole armies.” He chuckled quietly.
“Careful.”
“What, you’re worried about Keely? I don’t think I’m frightening Keely, am I, son?”
Keely shook his head. He felt himself smiling, he didn’t know why. Overhead, rain drummed heavy and hard on the roof of the boat; outside the world had gone to a wash of gray rain, flashes of light occasionally illuminating the shores of the river.
“Are the trees dead now?” Keely asked.
“These ones burned up on the riverbank are dead for sure,” Pel said.
Dekkar was watching the river ahead, torrents of water over the glass.
“The syms are dead, too, then,” Keely said.
“It’s not a very nice thing, is it?” Dekkar asked, then answered himself, his voice softer, more tired-sounding. “No, it’s not.”
After that Keely sat on the bed, kept his back to Dekkar, watching the lights along the southern horizon, dimly visible behind the curtains of water.
Uncle Figg and Kitra woke up at the same time, Kitra rolling away from Uncle Figg’s back, standing, shaking out her hair. Uncle Figg sat up and watched her. Uncle Figg’s face was swollen again, the sores from the monster-teeth inflamed. He touched them as if they were tender, looking at Keely. “You’re awake.”
“Yes, sir.”
Penelope clambered to the window ledge, balanced there looking out. At the back of the boat, Zhengzhou was stretching.
“My God, what happened along the shore?” Kitra asked, leaning into the glass.
“We’ve had a bit of a struggle while you rested.” Dekkar glanced at Keely with a glimmer of a smile, and Keely bowed his head, feeling warm and pleased inside. “We’re glad it didn’t disturb you.”
“The place looks flattened.”
Dekkar was staring at the bank; if he heard, he decided not to respond.
Keely touched the math box, which lay heavy on the bunk, partly covered in a fold of bedroll. “The trees are dead.”
“Apparently.”
He put the headpiece over his skull, turned on the box. In the math-space in his head he was watching functions change, curves propagate, space form, knots untie. At other times, though, the streams of equations repeated in less regular ways, and he had understood for a while that some of these number sequences served a function like words, the numbers carrying values that were more li
ke meanings. He was listening for this, and when he heard the sound, when he understood what was being said, the feeling of tension in his body built. This was the language called Erlot, the words Nerva had spoken that had forced Keely to do this and that. When he heard Erlot, he had a hard time separating the language from Nerva’s voice using it. His stomach fluttered, and as soon as he could he took off the headset, put the box down again.
Dekkar was watching.
Penelope climbed into his lap and he petted her fur till she settled down, content as a cat. She put out a vibration that he found comforting.
Now he could feel some of what Dekkar was doing; Dekkar himself, even while standing here in apparent quiet, was speaking a language of his own. The river of Erlot in Keely made it easy to fathom part of what was happening near Dekkar; near him not in any visible way. Shades moved, silhouettes twisted, ghost images flickered, lights danced, and, on occasion, the flash of pin-lights, bright and variously colored, moved fast in a sphere around him; but none of this was happening in the world of Keely’s eyes. There was another world behind his vision, and while he was sitting still he could feel the presence of Dekkar in that world, distinct as a lighthouse in a crashing sea.
Pressing them from behind was another presence, very strong, overwhelming. Erlot words, not a song but a ribbon of musical values, odd sour harmonies, a feeling like fingers along Keely’s spine.
For a moment Keely could feel all of them: Dekkar, the other singer, and himself, all locked in the same drama, the riverboat in a sphere of glass riding against the current of the river and a hand pressing down, behind wind and rain, driving the sphere and the boat forward. The pressing of the hand made Keely’s head ring with pain. He tried to stifle the echo of Erlot, and it was in fact already fading; the feeling that he could see the hand, hear the speaker, sense another aspect of Dekkar, ebbed away. Rain beat down on the boat, wind rocked it, but nothing from the sky touched them and they sailed steadily upriver unopposed.
For a long stretch of the journey the land was flattened, and for a while after the trees were increasingly intact but blown out of the ground all in the same direction. The rains doused the fires and left charred bodies of trees at a tilt—somehow disquieting, when he remembered that each of them was living and conscious as he was. When they were ripped out of the ground like that, were they still alive, at least for a while? Were they suffering? The Erra Bel passed a lot of boats with the tree-people on board; the cluster of boats massed at the point where trees reappeared, beyond the smoldering line of fires doused in rain.
After they were upriver from the fires, Zhengzhou gestured to the glass canopy and said to Uncle Figg, “Some of those boats are following us.”
“They see us now,” Dekkar said. “I’m not hiding us anymore.”
Keely reached for the math box, held it against him.
Into darkness the riverboat sailed. A few tense minutes passed, and Zhengzhou announced, “They’re not gaining on us, they’re hanging back.”
Uncle Figg walked toward her and then stepped back suddenly, not from Zhengzhou but from the bench where the Nerva-thing was confined.
It sat up in a quick move like a snap, the Nerva-thing, ropes fallen off it as if they’d collapsed through its body, and Keely’s heart pounded and he leapt out of the bunk. Penelope was reared up on the blanket where he had been sitting as if she meant to protect him. He ran to Dekkar as fast as he could and hid behind Dekkar’s boots; Keely’s legs were crossed and he was afraid he would wet himself, but he had the math box in his lap. Dekkar touched a hand to his head.
The thing was like Nerva again, with Nerva’s face and not the face of the needle-mouth, but she had changed, as if pieces of her face were missing, as if she had been wounded. The teeth were shorter but still hideous. Her skin was colored a clammy gray that looked wet, and under the skin pulsed a wave of dark color, a thin line, that passed through her top to bottom. She tasted like the math box, the quality of her, across the boat, and Keely wanted to look away but was afraid to take his eyes off her, especially when Dekkar started to move.
The Nerva-thing stretched its mouth and made a shrill sound. Its eyes flushed red as if shot through with blood. It spoke in words everybody on the boat could understand. “If you’re coming upriver to find me, it may amuse you to know I’m already here with you on the boat.”
“Great Rao,” Dekkar said, bowing his head.
“You know me by name.”
“Yes, I know your name. Not much more than that, really.”
“Humble.”
“Practical.”
Nerva’s face shuddered, fluttered in the most sickening way. The thing fanned that mouth again, its breath wet, the body not altogether under control; it was struggling. After a spell of this, unable to move from the bunk, it drew itself upright and still. “You have not told me your name.”
“Dekkar up Ortaen.”
“False. That is not who you are.”
“That is my name.”
“But not who you are. I know who you are, what you are.”
“Do you?”
“Yes. Release me and I will show you what I know.”
“Better I should hold you.” He had drawn near to the end of the bunk and stood there; she, the Nerva-thing, sat facing him on the bunk, wounds oozing on her face and arms, her eyes the color of burning embers.
She struggled suddenly, looking more like Nerva than before, that wave-pulse still passing through her, the occasional shadow or burst of shadows fluttering like bird wings out of her, then subsiding. Dekkar stepped back and the Nerva-thing hissed.
Keely pressed the math box against his ribs, remembered what Dekkar had said, that the box had helped before. He would have to walk very close to the Nerva-thing in order to give it to Dekkar.
“If you can hold me, you mean,” said the Nerva-thing. “But why should we struggle when we could speak? May we not treat as friends? You are a creature of many talents.”
“What you are is an open question.”
“Not a question for the likes of you, you mean. Humble soul that you are.”
Dekkar made some sign, some gesture. His hands were moving too fast to see. But it was a threat; Keely felt the impulse in the part of himself where the Erlot he had learned was beginning to stir.
The Nerva-thing spoke without any hint of concern. “I could make a creature like you feel so greatly appreciated.”
“I seek only to feel serene,” Dekkar answered.
“Practical.”
“I like to think so.”
“Perhaps it would be best for me to break these bonds, then, and eat you all.”
The creature lunged, not with any movement of the body but in some level that made the fabric of the riverboat interior ripple, as if the world were simply a broadcast being adjusted, or, in this case, contested. Keely took a deep breath and walked across the cabin, planting his feet firmly, pressing the math box into Dekkar’s hand.
Dekkar looked down at Keely and blinked.
The next instant so much happened that only later could Keely sort it out. The math box was so welcome to Dekkar that it unsettled him, Keely could feel it. The intensity of the math-music pouring through Keely himself had grown so strong his head was pounding. Dekkar faltered and the creature lunged, physically moved off of the bunk for the first time, grabbed Keely by the shoulders. The Nerva-thing shrieked and Keely glimpsed that hideous mouth opening and unfolding, striking at him, covering his face. Strong hands held him in place when he kicked and struggled. Burning and blackness followed. The needle-teeth entered his eyes, and they burst and drained wetness down his face. Convulsions wracked his body and he felt himself struggling but still the arms held him firmly and the teeth raked him. A burning like acid poured over his skin.
He heard the Nerva thing scream, an awful sound full of a terror Keely had not heard since he left the Reeks. Commotion followed around him; he had an instant of panicked breathlessness and then blacked out complete
ly.
2. Fineas Figg
The child a dead weight in his arms, Figg sat on the floor, numb, Kitra behind him.
The thing was on the bunk again, fastened there, Dekkar standing over it, Penelope prowling the length of it, now and then rearing up as if she wanted to fight it again. The thing was palpitating more than breathing, no longer resembling Nerva so much as a kind of soup in which pieces of Nerva’s face and torso were floating. Whatever Dekkar had done to it had hurt it and stunned it, though the voice, when it returned, was as placid as before.
“You may hurt this corpus as much as pleases you,” the Nerva-thing said. “What happens to it does not reach me to the slightest degree.”
“You should kill it,” Kitra said, “before it attacks one of us again.”
Dekkar was standing over the creature, which began to smile. “He can’t,” it said. “He tried.”
Quiet on the boat, and Figg felt a hollow in his stomach, fear settling there.
Kitra knelt behind Figg, starting to whimper. The Nerva-thing partly opened its mouth again, expanding those teeth, hissing.
Dekkar stepped toward it and that look of vagueness, of parts floating in relation to one another, happened again, and the thing squealed—a smaller, weaker sound this time. Dekkar looked strained, though, his body somehow more physical than before, more present. They were fighting each other, clearly.
“Starting from this moment you are dying and dead,” said the voice, matter-of-fact. “You are abandoned.”
“So you hope,” Dekkar said, his voice strained.
“Your master has closed his gate. He is afraid of me.”
“To confine you,” Dekkar said, making an effort even with so few words, but he was shaking his head, and the Nerva-thing was coming to pieces, the dark wings appearing and now and then one of the flock careening out, fluttering, shattering, dissolving.
“Your master will never reach you. The farther north you come, the stronger you’ll find me.”
“You need a body,” Dekkar hissed; he was flushed, veins standing out.
“I have one,” Rao said, and the body of the Nerva-thing collapsed, dissolved into wraiths of smoke, as if the hand that had held it released it and no longer protected it.