The heat and light surprised the owl, causing it to cup its wings and stop, still within the globe of light and it rotated its head in puzzlement. Though there didn’t appear to be any ill effects communicated to the beast, an unexpected benefit manifested itself in the person of the owner of the skeleton. Flesh grew upon the bones magically fast and in just a second or so, the new creature rose up from the stone surface, still sprouting black and white hair all over and pounced on the giant owl. Four inch claws ripped into the feathery creature and the two rolled over and over inside the globe in a flurry of feathers and fur as the owl turned its beak and talons to good use.
Brian knew he should run while the owl was occupied, for eventually, the two would roll out of the globe of light and the huge newcomer would revert to the moldering bones he had found, but he was interested in the owl. He believed it had been a creature like this one that had taken Petra and he saw the beast as his best chance to find her.
In appearance, the new beast looked as much like a sabre-toothed tiger as it did an ape, but seemed more a melding of the two than one or the other. As he watched, the pair rolled to the edge of the globe just as the tiger-ape clamped its jaws at the base of the owl’s throat while raking one wing with its hind claws. As the right side of the owl’s body, including the now-mangled wing, broke the surface of the globe, nearly one half of the tiger-ape’s body instantly turned to bone and a last buffet of the owl’s wing separated the skeletal arm from the body and broke several of the now-bare ribs. The tiger-ape released its hold on the owl’s throat to howl in pain and rage before lashing out at it with the other arm, sending a spray of blood and feathers across the globe, splashing at Brian’s feet.
With the tiger-ape crippled, the owl managed to get the upper hand despite a trailing and useless wing, and held its opponent down with a talon while shredding its crippled body with the beak. The importance of getting the beast out of the globe wasn’t lost on the owl and it began pushing the tiger-ape outside the space of warmth and light with each stroke of its beak. Eventually, there was just one leg left inside the globe and the owl triumphantly kicked it outside the globe with a taloned foot and turned to glare at Brian, its chest heaving as blood rilled down its breast and dripped from its feathers. As it stood in the globe of light, Brian saw its myriad wounds healing of themselves and he began dancing just beyond the reach of the light, taunting the owl to come after him. At last, the beast could bear no more of it and advanced beyond the globe on tottering legs. As it stepped outside the globe, it lost its strength and collapsed on the cold, wet stone to glare impotently up at him.
Moving forward, Brian said, "Yeah! You’re not so tough now, are you, Birdbrain? Bongo the ape really did for you, didn’t he?"
To his surprise, the owl answered him in a good approximation of English.
"You bear the Staff! Our sister should have brought it instead of the soft one. She is seeking the soft one now and will be with us shortly."
Brian’s ears pricked up at the mention of ‘the soft one’, and said, "So, she got away from you!"
"Her escape can’t last much longer. All my sisters flew in every direction seeking her. We believed that we could lure you to us if we had her, but, no matter. When I am healed, I will track you and take the Staff from your dead hand."
Brian realized that the owl hadn’t yet understood that if it managed to move back into the globe, it would heal much faster. He decided to take advantage of that and cast around for something hard and heavy to use against the monster. There were plenty of large bones that he could use as cudgels, and while most of the land he had traversed seemed to be filled with large, head-sized stones, there was nothing like that here. With the exception of the few building stones and standing stones he had seen here and there, this space didn’t seem to possess much in the way of loose stones or gravel; the surface he walked on was relatively smooth and unbroken, with the exception of a few ridges no more than a half-inch tall. The over-all effect of the place was that of stone that had melted and run to cover everything before cooling. The mist collected in puddles where depressions appeared and he had been able to drink from them to assuage his thirst.
Grasping a huge thigh bone, he returned to beat at the owl’s good wing despite its attempts to sweep his legs from under him until that wing was as useless as the wounded one. He didn’t want to use the Staff as a club for fear of damaging it; its loss would spell doom for all his hopes of taking Petra out of here.
On his last swing at the owl’s wing, the huge bone he wielded broke in half and he moved to drive the jagged end into the bird’s throat. Just then, the bird spoke again.
"Let me go free and we won’t attack you or the soft one!"
For answer, he lifted the bone high again and just before he brought it smashing down in the thing’s throat, the great owl threw back its head and uttered an eerie, warbling call unlike anything he had ever imagined an owl could make. The sound reverberated through the mist, seeming to echo as it bounced from a thousand stone surfaces until it was ended by the bone stabbing through the beast’s throat. Turning his head, he surveyed the mist-shrouded area until his eyes seemed to be playing tricks on him and he thought he saw figures moving in the mist. Each of them he watched turned out to be simple bellying and swirls of the fog. His lips were drawn back in a rictus smile as he picked up the pack and Staff and moved to stand in the globe of light. Removing a fruit from the pack, he began to eat and felt the pack move as the seeds and other wizened fruits were magically transformed into whole specimens.
Once finished eating, he moved on. Brian would have liked to stay within the globe until it shrank to nothing; he relished its warmth, but he wasn’t tired yet and knew that he wouldn’t be able to sleep with the owl’s carcass so close. It stank. Besides, he had no way of knowing how far its last call reached and didn’t like the idea of being asleep when whatever it called arrived.
After hours of trudging through the mist, he noticed a glimmer ahead of him and realized that the mist was thinning again. He looked around for one of the standing stones, hoping to climb it and use its height to survey the area, but found only one of the short, building blocks. It was only three or four feet high, but afforded him a slightly better view as it allowed him to rise slightly above the thicker mist which seemed to cling to the ground here.
Something that might have been a sun hung near something else that could be called a horizon, if one were generous, and a vagrant breeze blew the mist from the ground in a path that led directly toward the sun. The stone surface glistened in the wan light and he was sure that he saw, not more than a mile away, a large pool of water that stretched on into the mist, the further reaches disappearing in the distance. But on the nearer side of the pool, a building stood, relatively whole; it possessed a roof, and seemed to be built of the same stones he had found all over this place.
Throwing caution to the wind, he leapt off his stone and ran toward the building, hoping to get as far as possible before the fog and mist clamped back down, making it impossible to find his destination. His luck held for a half mile and he could make out details of the structure before the fog descended, cutting off his view of the place. It was a simple structure; square, with only a pair of windows showing on the side that faced him and a porch leaned drunkenly over one side of it, denoting the presence of a door. Like all the other stone in this place, it was dark-grey and glistened with wet where the weak rays of the sun struck it.
With the fog growing thick again, he could only slow to a stumbling walk and grope his way in what he hoped was a direct line toward the structure. His thoughts drifted into a hopeful vein as he began to think that he would find Petra there, and his steps came faster.
* * *
She thought of them as ‘the Little People’, but their actions and demeanor belied the name; they were as brutal and coarse as the ‘People of the Fire’ that she had seen earlier. They rode on the backs of beasts that were little larger than big dogs, but seemed
more like outsized opossums than anything.
Petra thought of them as homunculi, but not the classical sort, for these people were more or less symmetrically formed and about four feet high, though the men were bulging with muscle and seemed a little taller than the women. All of them had their hair braided in closely packed braids and the men, judging from the huge bulges in their clothing, possessed exceedingly large genital organs. The women were thin to the point of emaciation but were buxom in the extreme; one of them drawing near on opossum-back while she picked her nose, suddenly stretched, causing the woolen top she wore to gap dangerously where it was buttoned with bits of bone. One of the buttons popped off, revealing exceptionally large breasts that bordered on the ludicrous. Much like some of the celebrities Petra had seen on TV and in the tabloids, only… bigger. How they managed to walk without overbalancing, she didn’t know.
She wondered if she had strayed into some kind of adolescent nightmare but crept from her hiding place to follow the group of a dozen or so. The meat she had stolen from the People of the Fire was gone and she was getting hungry. So far, she had found no way to replenish her supply of food and the only way she could think of was to steal more. At least she was armed now, kind of; an area of broken stone that littered the solid flooring had rendered up a shard of stone, glass-like in its sharpness and about eighteen inches long, tapering to a needle point. The stone edge was duller near the thicker part and she had experimented with knocking part of the edge away with another stone she had picked up. This gave her a somewhat knurled section to grip and she felt that if pressed, she could at least defend herself.
After hours of following the group through the mist, keeping just out of sight and using the sounds they made as a guide, she abruptly stopped when the cadence of the opossums’ clawed feet on the stone stopped. She took several steps backward and crouched so as not to be noticed and tried to discern what the halt portended.
A breeze grew to an actual wind and a great part of the mist was blown away, leaving her scrambling for cover among several thigh-high stones. With the disappearance of the mist, she saw what seemed to be a still lake stretching away to be lost in what remained of the mist and the group she followed preparing to make camp on its shore. A globe of wan light hung just above the horizon of the lake and she supposed it was what passed for the sun in this place.
One of the women removed a large bag of some type of furred skin from her saddle and passed it around to the others. One after another, they removed pieces of what appeared to be cooked meat from the bag and began chewing it. The opossums were staked out some distance from the camp and the bag was placed atop a stone much like the ones she hid behind. Her mouth watered as she thought of the food that it held and it was all she could do to refrain from running to it.
The men removed the saddles from the opossums and she noted that there were tent-like structures rolled up and suspended from the sides of the beasts. As the men began raising the tents, she saw three or four children, naked and strangely silent, run for the water and dive into it. Their heads disappeared below the surface and they were under the water a very long time but surfaced just as she began to worry that they might drown. Slinging large shells onto the shore, each as large as their heads, the children laughed as they waded back ashore. A couple of the women picked up the shells which resembled mussels, and began smashing at them with sharp stones. Once they had cracked them partway open, the women inserted bone knives inside the bi-valves and pried them the rest of the way open.
One of the men had been moving from animal to animal among the opossums and she now saw that he had filled a leather bucket half-full of blood. He scooped up water from the lake to add to the bucket and Petra was amazed to see the mixture begin to boil. He placed the bucket beside the women as they worked and as each mussel was denuded of its shell, they dropped them into the bucket.
As she watched them eat later, her mouth continued to water and she finally just hunkered down behind her stone to wait until they were quiet and asleep. She whiled away the time thinking of the short, interrupted love-making session she and Brian had indulged in and she wished above all other things that the session could be renewed and drawn out to its conclusion.
Petra knew that she was losing her memories of her self and was becoming more like her doubles in the last few worlds she had visited, but her vial of potion was with Brian and thus lost to her. She felt a moist trickle on her cheek and wondered if it was a tear; it was hard to tell with the moisture from the mist which had returned.
After an hour or more, she noticed that the sounds the Little People had made were almost completely gone and she edged around the stone, her eyes trying to pierce the mist. There was nothing moving that she could see and all was quiet except for a few stentorian snores. Hoping that she didn’t become lost in the mist, she moved carefully toward the camp and was soon moving among the sleeping forms with her makeshift knife in her fist. She passed three of the children sleeping huddled together under one of the tents in a bedroll, this time with clothing, and continued on as their slight snores sounded behind her.
Finally finding the stone with the bag of meat on it, she was about to raise her body to grasp it when she heard noises almost under her feet. Her heart went into her throat as she realized a pair of the adults were about to make love. She hoped they wouldn’t notice the relatively large figure standing over them and could only stand there while they sated their lusts.
The mist blew away slightly, affording her an unobstructed view and she goggled at what she saw; the man was as horrendously endowed as she had suspected, but instead of possessing only one organ, there were two, and he was putting both of them to use as the woman arched and thrust her own enormous endowments at him. Petra didn’t know how the woman could stand accepting even one of the organs, then as the mist blew away even more; she saw what was being done with the other organ and became sick to her stomach. She knew that these weren’t normal people, and she knew that they had evolved differently than humans, but that didn’t make any of this any easier to accept.
As the pair eventually shuddered toward ecstasy, huffing and squealing, she grabbed at the bag of food and quietly fled for fear that their noise would rouse the others. As she stepped past the farther extremes of the camp, she heard voices calling out and hoped they were telling the couple, who still made sounds like they were killing a cat, to be quiet. At least the mist had returned in full force to shield her retreat.
Heading back the way she had come, she found herself skirting the shoreline and finally, with food at hand, clothing on her back and a weapon in her hand, she felt equal to the challenges this place offered. The meat she found in the bag seemed to be jerked in some way, and she found it filling after drinking plenty of water with it. The stuff seemed salty and spicy and she wondered where the Little People found spices. Then it occurred to her that given the novel way they boiled their mussels, they may have used something to season the meat that she didn’t want to think about. The thought of what it might be sickened her a little and she tried to put the thought out of her mind.
When she became tired enough to sleep, she cast about for someplace to shelter and was rewarded by a heap of stones, one long one leaning on the others and affording a kind of lean-to. Cautiously approaching it, she made sure something hadn’t had the same idea and crawled gratefully into the place. The other side was closed off by a large stone and by maneuvering a couple of other stones into place at the entrance; she was able to attain a sense of security. With only a small hole at the top of the entrance, the place soon warmed from her body heat and she lay down to sleep for a while.
She awoke with a sense of something having changed and saw light shining in through the hole at the top of the entrance. Carefully moving to it, she fully expected the Little People to have tracked her and be standing outside with torches, ready to retrieve their food and assault her. She shuddered at the thought of such a thing and tremulously peeked out the hole.
> The mist had blown away almost completely and the wan sun still hung just at the horizon, casting its weak rays down on the wet stone and the still lake. Other than that, there was nothing else in sight and she breathed a sigh of relief. Turning from the entrance, her eye fell on the bag of food lying beside her feet, still damp and grimy from being barefoot for so long. A sudden thought came to her and she quickly dumped the food out onto the stone beside her. If she was careful, it would last several days and as it was depleted, she could knot it in the bottom of her smock. What she needed instead of a bag, was a hat and shoes of some kind. She should have had some calluses on her feet by now, but the constant dampness and contact with the stone abraded the skin away before they could form. There were several spots where they had been cut and scraped raw and the blood had only crusted over since she had been in the shelter.
Taking her makeshift knife, she removed the drawstring from the bag and began painstakingly picking the stitches out of the side of the bag. If she was careful, there was more than enough hide for a pair of shoes with some left over. After an hour or so, she had a couple of small bags to cover her feet, and wrapped the drawstring, cut in half, around them to keep them on. She put the fur on the inside to keep her feet warm and the leather was hard and tough without being brittle. Exposure to the damp would probably soften it and let it abrade away on the stone, but at least they would last a while. With the remainder of the leather; the bottom of the bag, she found that it would serve as a kind of hat and keep her head warm and dry.
The thought of her hair came to her then and she snatched at the ends, noting that it had grown nearly a foot in her time here and, drawing it forward, she saw that the color she had put on it had faded until it was once again, dark-blonde. Either that or it had grown out and her hair had been breaking off. She didn’t know how that was possible, but it was the only other thing she could think of. The rinse wasn’t supposed to wash out. She used a strip of leather from the bag to tie her hair up and stuffed as much of it under the hat as she could.
It Happens Every Day Page 10