by Paul Kearney
Fleam sliced off one questing, clawed hand that had come seeking Rol’s face, and its owner shrieked, high and awful. It lifted its snout and spat out a gob of liquid, which spattered against Rol’s shoulder. He beheaded the creature with one long sweep of Fleam’s curved edge, fluid gouting up in two steaming jets from the thing’s severed shoulders. The acrid smell of burning made him pause. There was smoke writhing from the shoulder of his tunic. Even as he stared at it, astonished, the pain hit him as the ichor burned through his clothes and seared his skin. He cried out loud. It was as though a hot coal had been dropped inside his shirt.
The creatures were thick as a hedge all about them now, and the party was fighting desperately back to back, cutlasses flickering. Gallico was outside the ring with one of them still clinging to his back, stabbing its claws into his corded muscles again and again so that his blood ran down, and then putting its wet mouth to the wounds and sucking ecstatically. The halftroll twisted, agonized, smashing Ur-men to mangled wreckage right and left. Up and down his huge chest little crackling streams of smoke were writhing and he was bellowing with pain and rage as he fought.
Rol ducked below the swipe of another Ur-man’s claws and stabbed Fleam upward through the delicate snout. The steel emerged glistening from the thing’s head and he let it slide off the scimitar, booting it aside. The agony in his shoulder was overmastering him; it felt as though his flesh were being burned deeper and deeper, some fire there seeking his heart. He reversed Fleam in desperation and grasped the blade in his scarred hand, then dug the point into his own body, digging deep, seeking the hot mote that was tunneling there. Then he flicked the blade outward, tearing free a gobbet of smoking flesh. The pain was bearable again, that of a normal wound.
He lunged forward out of the ring of mariners, and flailed into the crowded enemy about Gallico. The scimitar sang joyously in his hand and seemed lighter than ever before. He hacked and sliced and slashed with his own blood soaking him from shoulder to thigh, and cried out as he saw Gallico fall to his knees, the halftroll tearing at his own flesh in his agony, ripping away ragged collops of burning meat from his body.
The ring of men fell apart. Rol saw Mihal yanked from his feet to disappear into a scrum of the enemy, legs kicking uselessly. Creed and Mochran were fighting grimly in a little war of their own, and Bartolomew was standing over Rusaf’s body with a bloody cutlass in each hand. Gallico was buried under a squirming mass of Ur-men, the ground puddled with his blood.
A light began to shine in the depths of Fleam’s blade and in Rol’s eyes. They flared white and seemed to smoke without heat. The black desert night was transformed into a capering chiaroscuro of leaping shadows as the radiance grew. Rol cried out, but the sound was strange, too deep for a human chest to hold. His eyes were two holes through which the sun of another world speared its unbearable brightness. The Ur-men hesitated, backed away. Rol’s cry grew until there was no vestige of humanity left within it. There was a terrible stink of burnt flesh. Fleam was a spike of pulsing argent that stood vertical one moment, flickering so that it no longer seemed bladelike at all but had the silhouette of something else that shrieked with the fevered laugh of a woman. It came down again in Rol’s fist and began to scythe through the Ur-men as though harvesting corn.
To Elias Creed and the others watching, cutlasses momentarily forgotten in their limp hands, it seemed as though Rol grew in stature and his very face changed. In his grip the scimitar steadied and coalesced again until it was a molten bar five feet long which he wielded two-handed, and he towered above them as it snicked and clicked through bone and meat and sinew, scattering body parts and black gore far and wide, dispersing his attackers. They saw a terrible, mirthless rictus on Rol’s face, and the light spilled out of his body until it seemed they were watching some towering creature with luminous wings that arced and beat with thunderous concussions high in the air above their heads. All but Creed cowered on the ground, hiding their eyes. The Ur-men gave a collective shriek, and those who could began running as fast as their wiry legs would take them, but the winged furious light followed them and slaughtered them left and right, hovering above the ground and hunting them down by the light of its terrible eyes.
Eighteen
THE GORTHOR FLATS
CREED FOUND HIM HALF A MILE FROM THE FIGHT, having followed the trail of gore and body parts, a dark road of slaughter. It was coming on to dawn and there was a light behind the horizon in the east. Soon the sun would spring up to begin its daily battery of the parched earth.
Rol lay on his face with his sword beneath him. When Creed turned him over he could see the burnt hole in the shoulder of his tunic, but there was no other mark on him. He pulled the charred material to one side, to find nothing greater than a small rose-pink scar on Rol’s flesh. He was soaked with black blood that was crackling and dry now, but not another mark was on him. He seemed to be asleep.
Creed rubbed his filthy hands over his face, and then trickled a few drops of water from the skin he carried onto Rol’s eyes. They opened, blinking at once, and Fleam came up defensively, halting a handspan from the convict’s nose. “Welcome back to the world,” he said quietly.
Rol sat up and seized the waterskin, squeezed a stream out of its nozzle into his mouth. He shut his eyes again and said, “Tell me what happened.”
“Mihal is gone—dead, I suppose. Rusaf is hurt, but will live if his wound does not go bad. Gallico . . .” He hesitated. “I do not think he will make it through the day.”
The eyes opened again. As they did, the first dawn light sprang swift as an arrow’s flight above the flat pan of the horizon, and kindled in them a luminosity, a brightness that had nothing human about it at all. Then the swift-rising sun rode up farther, and they were Rol Cortishane’s eyes again, striking, but those of a weary man, no more. Creed took back the skin, corked it, straightened with his own small hurts shouting for attention all about his arms and shoulders.
“We cut the spittle that burned out of Gallico, and bound up what we could, but they have carved his back to bloody rags. He lost more blood than I ever saw any creature lose and live, and they sucked it out of him too.”
“Take me to him,” Rol said, and he stood up, sheathing the marvelous scimitar. He set a hand on Creed’s shoulder and Elias had to make an effort not to cringe from that touch.
“You remember what you did last night?”
“Partly. It happened once before, or something like it.” Then he grinned weakly at the expression on Creed’s face. “I am not a ghost, Elias, nor a demon either. You need not fear me.”
“Well, you saved our lives, at any rate. They’d have slaughtered us all if you—if that hadn’t happened.”
They walked back to the dark knot of men huddled on the white blazing blankness of the Flats.
“Bartolomew and Rusaf want to turn back for the coast and make for Ordos. They say this place is cursed.”
“They are right,” Rol said mildly. “But no one will turn back.”
Creed studied him as discreetly as he could. It was the same Cortishane he had come to know and esteem in the past few weeks, but there was something different, all the same. Something in the Cormorant’s first mate had hardened. Whatever had occurred in the night could happen again—would happen again. Would the white winged light always know friend from foe when it came burning out of this man’s eyes?
They murmured and backed away from him as he approached, Rusaf, Bartolomew, even Jude Mochran. Gallico lay at their feet, a felled giant. He turned his head and his eyes blinked on and off.
“We owe you our lives, I think.”
Rol knelt beside him, ignoring the others. “Can you walk?”
“I think so. How far is another matter.”
“We’ll help you.”
“Leave him here—there’s no way we can support the weight of a thing like that,” Bartolomew said hotly. “We must go south—this place is a cursed wilderness. He brought us here on purpose.”
“No,” Rol said quietly, not lifting his head.
Rusaf, Bartolomew, and Mochran backed away from Rol one step, two. In all their eyes the fear shone stark. Spittle had gathered white at the corners of their cracked mouths. They looked like horses about to bolt.
“You stay with him if you like—you’re both monsters together.” That was dark-faced Rusaf, voice shaking. “We want no more to do with any of you, or your goddamned pirate city. We’re men—decent men, not pirates, or . . . or . . . We’ll split the water. Fair’s fair.” He wiped a raw knuckle across his lower lip.
Rol stood up. He was very calm. “You are all going to do as I say. We will continue north, and Gallico is coming with us. We are going to Ganesh Ka.”
“Who or what in hell are you to command us?” Bartolomew exploded. “You’re not even the captain—a first mate is all you were. We’re not your chattels to be told where to go and when.”
Rol strode forward with a blurred swiftness that startled them all. He took Bartolomew by the collar. The youth’s eyes flashed white, like those of a calf caught by the slaughterman.
“That may be so, Geygan, but I promise you this: if you do not obey me in this thing I will kill you. Do you understand? I will kill you.” This last was said with such quiet intensity that even Creed backed away, hand on the hilt of his cutlass. “Now help Gallico to his feet. The night is gone, so we must march in the day. Elias, you lead. Our course is due north. Bartolomew and Mochran, you will help Gallico. Rusaf, you next. Carry the waterskins. I will be at the rear.”
Not another word was said. Gallico heaved himself up, leaving the ground dark where he had lain. Jude Mochran and Bartolomew Geygan supported him one to either side, and the party set off once more. Already the carcasses of the Ur-men were beginning to stink, and glass-blue flies the size of a man’s thumbnail were settling on them in clouds.
They stumbled through a baking purgatory of heat. It poured down relentlessly from a shadowless sky and beat up again in reflected waves from the ground. All about them the horizon became a ripple of swimming mirages. Creed fell back down the little column.
“Look,” he said, pointing.
Black beetlelike figures moving across the Flats. Impossible to tell how far away, with the torrid atmosphere rippling in between.
“They’ll leave us alone for a while, I think,” Rol said. He seemed dizzy, and swayed slightly as he walked. Creed’s own tongue felt too large for his mouth. He passed it over the cracked skin of his lips.
“We have two half-full skins of water.”
“Fourteen leagues, Gallico said the Flats were across. We must do it in two more marches at most.”
Creed looked at the trio of Mochran, Bartolomew, and Gallico. The halftroll was taking most of his own weight but his helpers were wearing down fast. “We’ll be lucky,” he said.
They halted to rest every hour, and Rol supervised the periodic rationing out of the water—a mouthful per man, and twice that for Gallico, no more. Then he and Creed took over from Mochran and Bartolomew, and they continued on their way.
It seemed impossible that the halftroll should still be alive. From the waist up, every inch of his torso seemed ripped and torn in some way, and though these wounds were drying in the sun, the deepest still oozed clear liquid. He spoke little, and his face was a granite clench of agonized determination. Occasionally he stumbled, and his weight bore down on Rol and Creed like that of a sinking hill.
The sun coursed across the sky, and finally approached the featureless horizon in the west. As it did so, it lit in stark silhouette the sharp-peaked ranges of the Myconians, bringing them to life out of dust and haze as though they had sprung fully formed over the brim of the world just that moment, and then it dipped behind them in a matter of minutes, leaving a roseate residue in the west, and the first glitter of the stars.
The cold deepened quickly, at first refreshing, and then debilitating. They kept walking. Rol and Creed had been counting paces for the first half of the day but had lost count in the afternoon as they labored under Gallico’s immense arms. Creed thought they might have made some five leagues, but it was wishful guesswork, no more.
Rol allowed the party to sleep for a couple of hours and they lay huddled together on the barren plain, shivering with closed eyes. Creed woke up toward the end of that time to find Rol standing with drawn sword looking south across the Flats. He hauled himself to his feet.
“What do you see?” He had realized by now that Cortishane could see in the dark, and Gallico too.
“They’re on the move, but keeping their distance. Small bands of not more than half a dozen apiece. They’re afraid of us now.”
“Just as well,” Creed muttered. He yawned. He thought perhaps the lack of water bothered him less than the others—in the Keutta quarries there had never been a lot to go round. “Shall we wake them?” The others looked corpselike in their exhausted sleep, save that every now and again a flicker of emerald light would peep from under Gallico’s eyelids and the pupils within could be seen moving under the skin.
“Give them a minute yet.”
“Would you have killed him?”
“Who? Bartolomew?” Rol smiled unpleasantly. “I hadn’t thought of it. It was something to say.”
Creed studied his face. It was still that of the young, bearded first mate of the Cormorant, but something in the eyes had become indefinably colder. He looked away. “They will desert you at the first opportunity. Perhaps not Jude Mochran, but the other two, certainly.”
“And you, Elias Creed, convict, pirate, what about you?”
“I will follow you. You are going to the place I want to see above all others. And I have nothing but life to lose.” He met the cold eyes squarely. Rol nodded.
“You’re like me, then. All right, let’s get them up. We need a lot of miles under our belt ere the dawn.”
The men ate some fish and drank their meager water ration without speaking, though they all watched Cortishane as though he were some breed of dangerous animal that was padding about in their midst. Gallico seemed in much better condition. He refused their support with one of his old grins, and limped along under his own power. They made much better time as a result. Creed watched the sky and found Gabriel’s Fist, then tracked half left until he found the Compass-Star. They followed it north like pilgrims set upon some crackbrained quest. No one spoke, and Cortishane walked at their rear as silently as a ghost, his strange eyes gleaming as they caught the light of the rising moon.
“Have you ever traversed these Flats before?” Creed asked the halftroll.
“Not all the way. I have never been to their heart—I doubt few men have. But I have been some distance in from both north and south.”
“Why—why would anyone want to come here? It makes the Keutta quarries look like a garden.”
“The Bionari have chased me in here from time to time, or rather I led them. It is a good place to lose people, if you can make good speed and are well provided with water. Not everyone has a mariner’s knack for sniffing out the compass points, or for following the stars.”
The party walked all night. By the end of that time Gallico was flagging and they had to take turns supporting him again. Rol called a halt just before dawn and they collapsed to the ground as if their legs had been cut from under them.
“I need to sleep,” he said quietly to Creed. “Take a watch, will you?”
But Creed was exhausted also. He nodded in and out of sleep like a fever victim, finally succumbing a little before daylight. He was woken some time later when the sun leaped up above the flat eastern horizon and smote his forehead, levering open his crusted eyes and dazzling his fuddled mind. He cursed himself, lurched upright like a stiff-limbed marionette.
“Rol, Gallico,” he croaked.
They came awake slowly, fighting their way out of sleep.
“They’ve gone. They took the water.”
The waterskins had been tied to Cortishane’s wrist. The lashings h
ad been cut free in the dark. The hard earth held no sign except a few scuffed bootmarks.
“Mochran too?” Rol asked, blinking stupidly.
“All of them. They took the water.”
The trio stood up and scanned every direction under the white glare of the morning, squinting. There was no sign of their erstwhile comrades.
“They’ll have taken off for the south,” Rol said wearily.
“Then they’re fools—we’re over halfway now. How do they think they’ll get past the Ur-men?”
“Perhaps they think them cowed. Perhaps they fear me more. I am sorry about Jude Mochran. He was a good man. Gods of heaven, I slept like the dead. I felt nothing.”
“No use crying over it,” Gallico said. “They have taken their chance, now so must we. We’ll not last another two days without water. We must get off the Flats by nightfall.”
They stood, momentarily paralyzed. It would be very easy to lie back down on the ground and bury their heads in the dark of their arms. “Come on, then,” Rol said at last.
Creed had marked out their course by the stars the night before with an arrow of flaked earth. They set off now three abreast. In the scant minutes before the heat haze leaped up to dance on the lip of the sky, he thought he saw the blue shade of high land to their front. Then it was just the tantalizing mirage of nonexistent water-shimmer again, the silence of the blasted waste about them. Not a breeze stirred; the very air seemed cowed by the glare of the sun.