by Lionel Fenn
It was, Gideon had noted at one point, like crossing a cracked and disgustingly filthy mirror.
There weren't even any shadows to keep them company.
Desolation, he thought, has found a home here, and make no mistake about it.
Nevertheless, and no matter how hard he struggled to avoid thinking about it, he knew they were not unnoticed. He could feel it in the oppressive atmosphere of the place, in the spectral touch of the dry-cold air, in the hollow sound of their heels on the hard, dustless ground—no, they were not alone, and probably hadn't been since they'd begun their uneasy journey.
Someone was following their progress, but though he frequently checked the skies and the land around, he was unable to fathom how it was accomplished. Neither was he reassured when he saw the expression on Lain's face, and the way Red continually tested the air for scents, and the way Tag lashed out with his dagger at shadows that weren't there.
It was nerve-wracking, and several times he came close to wishing that whoever was doing it would stop it and become visible, if only to ease his mind about which way he was going to die.
And the moment that thought crossed his mind, he slapped himself, hard, and ignored the others' stares.
Then he pointed with his bat: onward, don't look back.
—|—
"Giddy?"
"What."
"You really must love her."
"I hadn't thought about it. I'll tell you when I see her."
"Still, you've gone through a lot for a woman who's been around."
"What the hell are you talking about? What do you mean, been around?"
"You think she's still a virgin?"
"Shut up, Tuesday, and ride the goat."
"Men," she muttered.
"Ducks," he snarled.
—|—
"Gideon?"
"What."
"Do you think my sister sent us out here to die so she could use us as martyrs to rouse the troops so they'll defeat the Wamchu in the Scarred Mountains?"
"Jesus, Tag, what the hell made you think of that?"
"I don't know. I'm just trying to figure out what we're doing here, that's all."
"Well, think about something else. Think about how good it'll feel not to have the Wamchu threatening you the rest of your life when we get him off our backs and put him where he belongs, permanently."
"You think we'll win?"
"Beats me."
"What about Agnes?"
"A piece of cake."
"What's cake?"
"It's an expression, that's all. It means we won't have any trouble taking care of her."
"You really believe that? Really?"
"Would I lie to you, son?"
"We're gonna die, right?"
"Shit."
"Jesus, Gideon, what a hell of a thing for a young kid like me to think about at a time like this."
—|—
"Gideon?"
"What."
"The lads took all the tips from these arrows."
"Thanks."
"Just thought I'd tell you. I knew I should have held out for a watch."
—|—
Some time later they came to one of the more ambitious fissures, one that ran more or less diagonally to their left and was a good ten feet across at its center. Cautiously, Lain walked along the rim, peering down, once whistling a sonar note to check on the depth, which he announced to be slightly less than fifteen feet. Large enough to hide a small raiding party, but not large to permanently damage them if they fell in, unless they landed on their heads.
Gideon looked down and saw darkness; the Shashhag's celestial illumination was not strong enough to reach more than a few inches below the surface, though it was reasonably adequate in keeping the ever-retreating horizon in sight. Neither was a comfort, and he stopped looking down.
A second such depression they discovered just as the sky began to shade toward night, and they debated using the hole as their encampment until dawn.
"I can't sleep down there," Tuesday said. "Do you have any idea what it's like for a duck to be underground?"
"We'll have to keep watch all night," said Tag. "One up above, and one down there. If anyone comes, the one up here can throw the attacker down, and the one down there can bash out his brains." He smiled. "Can I stay down there?"
Lain and Gideon unloaded the gear from Red's back, and dropped it at the fissure's midpoint.
"I think," the greenman said, "it would be best to remain aboveground."
"Hear, hear," the duck agreed.
"Down there we could be trapped. Up here, we can use down there as a last ditch for a stand, should we need it."
"Sounds good to me," Gideon said.
Tag sighed.
"Now all we have to do is decide precisely what constitutes a threat to our well-being," Lain added as he sprawled on the ground and rubbed his thighs and calves.
"Out here, I think that would be anything that moves, or looks like it's moving, or even thinks about moving," Gideon said.
"Hear, hear," Tuesday agreed.
Tag fed the lorra, and sighed.
"Not necessarily," the greenman said. "For example, is that person a threat, or merely a spectator?"
Gideon ordered himself in no uncertain and probably obscene terms not to look in the direction Lain was pointing. He didn't have to. He knew what he would see—a dark figure standing against the blood-red sky, menacing and patient, with an invisible smile on its invisible face.
He looked.
The dark figure was outlined against the blood-red sky, and he could sense the smile on its invisible face.
"I am not optimistic about our chances for a good night's rest," Lain said glumly.
"No kidding," said Tuesday, who had ducked under Red's belly and was watching the dark figure from the protection of the lorra's chin.
Tag had his dagger out and was walking carefully around the rim of the fissure. Once, he spun around and shook his buttocks at it, once leapt into the air and slashed the blade in the direction of the dark figure's throat. Gideon watched the performance without comment; he had seen it before and knew it to be a Kori war dance of provocation, which hadn't worked the first time, and he doubted very much it would work this time, even if he wanted the figure provoked.
"How far away would you say it is?" he asked Lain.
Vorden rose up on an elbow, squinted, sighted along the shaft of an arrow he pulled from his quiver, and closed his eyes in calculation. "Two hundred and thirty yards, give or take. Do you have something in mind?"
But Gideon was rummaging through the pouch Glorian had given him on his departure. She had mentioned something about Whale, and he was hoping that somewhere among all the things he didn't recognize in there was something he had used before.
It was there.
He pulled it out.
"It looks like a round rock," the greenman said, interested enough to get to his feet.
"To me, it looks like a baseball," Gideon said.
"Really? It doesn't look like horsehide to me, though it could be the light, you understand."
Gideon looked at him in astonishment. "Horsehide? You know baseball?"
Lain shook his head.
"Then how did you know about horsehide?"
"Lucky guess. I'm rather good at that, you know."
Gideon didn't doubt that he was, and he didn't doubt that the baseball-like sphere he held was one of Whale's better devices, a sideline of his armory business. It was a bomb. Small, to be sure, but meant to be thrown great distances in order to disrupt the swarming hordes that might be bearing down on one during a day's fighting. Gideon had used one before, throwing it as he did his specialty when he was a professional quarterback—long and hard and with no clear idea where it was going to land.
Close enough, in this case, would be close enough.
"Gideon, please," Tuesday said from under the lorra.
"Think of it as a sign," he told her with a grin.
/>
"It isn't a sign, it's a bomb."
"Think of it as a sign that if it's a bomb, then it might blow up where it's supposed to and give us some peace, at least for the night."
The duck stuck its head out, exchanged glances with the giant goat, and lifted a wing in capitulation. "All right, then, go ahead. You want me to call signals?"
The dark figure hadn't moved.
Gideon tossed the bomb up a few times to check its heft, then in one single and marvelously smooth motion drew back his hand, hesitated, and threw.
"Lord," said Lain.
"Wow," said Tag, who was under the lorra with the duck.
And in the Shashhag there was complete silence.
Complete, that is, except for the humming of the sphere as it soared in an incredibly high arc over the ground, leaving behind what appeared to be a faint trail, like a comet. It quickly became lost in the darkened red of the sky, appeared again as it began its descent, and vanished just before it struck the earth.
Gideon waited.
The dark figure hadn't moved.
The bomb landed, and exploded, and the concussion on the otherwise noiseless plain was deafening. Gouts, divots, and spumes of earth fanned into the air; dust formed a cloud that hovered because there was no wind to take it. Red bleated, and Tuesday quacked, and Tag came out to stand beside Lain while Gideon watched patiently for bits and/or pieces of the dark figure to litter the landscape.
For he had hit it.
He had no idea how he'd managed to get it that far, nor how he had been so miraculously accurate.
But he had hit it.
And he waited.
Until the dark figure emerged from the cloud and began walking toward them. Slowly. As if in a solemn processional. A dark hand up to brush debris from its shoulders, the cowl that covered its head, the puffed and hanging black silk of its sleeves.
"Oh hell," Gideon said, and rummaged frantically for another bomb.
Tag drew his dagger, and Lain drew his rapier, and together they formed a wall in front of Tuesday, who was running for the fissure and getting nowhere because Red was standing on her tail.
"Oh hell!"
"I believe," said Vorden Lain, "we have made an error."
Gideon agreed.
"I wonder if it would be fruitful to arrange a retreat at this point."
Gideon doubted it.
There was no sense in running. Not now. Not when their mistake was striding confidently toward them, strawberry-blond hair blowing in a nonexistent breeze, elegant clothes reassembling themselves after their disarray, boots thudding in echoes, spurs chink-chinking, and the red lining of its cloak perfectly matching the blood-tint of the sky.
"Got it!" he cried, holding up another bomb.
"Too late," said Lain.
"Too late indeed, you miserable little worm," came the voice from the dark figure, the voice of the Wamchu.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
It had been some time since Gideon had seen Lu Wamchu, and he didn't regret a single moment of its passing. The Wamchu, however, evidently felt quite the opposite emotion since, as he positioned himself in front of the band, his expression was one that could only belong to a man starved for the company of those he was about to crush beneath his heel.
He was exceedingly tall, his silken ebony ensemble giving him an aura of insubstantiality, and highlighting his fair complexion and Orientally aslant eyes—the product, perhaps, of an errant cheerleader on a tramp steamer bound for Shanghai. Or so Gideon thought as he waited for the man to step away from his sister so he could throw the damned bomb and be done with it.
Despite certain unpleasant displays of magical tendencies, which the man overdid on occasion, the Wamchu was no immortal, nor was he immune to the ills of hand-to-hand combat. Gideon had proven that at their last meeting. And since he knew that the others knew the Wamchu's essential if not demonstrable humanity—in at least the physical sense—he wondered why they didn't take action. They were two able men, a reasonably enthusiastic boy, a lorra, and a duck—certainly that should have been enough to overpower the man, despite his size.
But no one moved.
And he would have been hard-pressed to prove that any of the others were even breathing.
Cautiously, while the Wamchu hooked his thumbs into a belt wide enough to strangle a society matron, he edged over to Lain and whispered, "If I distract him, you can nail him."
Lain adjusted his green cap without making a single sign that he had heard.
Gideon covered his puzzlement with a brief spasm of coughing while he sidled over to Red and suggested, sotto voce, that the lorra be prepared to charge as soon as Gideon made his move.
Red's eyes remained distressingly white.
Tag was doing a magnificent job of cowering while standing up, and the duck was under the lorra's belly again.
I'm missing something, Gideon thought; something's going on that's escaped me.
"Well, hero," Lu said, his silent gloating done for the moment. "I imagine you are thinking that it would be a wise thing on your part to attack me, since it would appear that you have me outnumbered."
Gideon, in spite of himself, nodded.
"I think not," the man said, leaned back, and laughed.
"Where's Ivy?" Gideon asked, and twitched the bat in front of him, slowly. "Five seconds, Lu, to tell me where Ivy is."
"Oh! And then you will kill me, is that it?"
"Four."
The Wamchu turned his back on them, spread his hands as if appealing to the horizon, and said over his shoulder, "Idiot! What kind of an idiot do you think I am?"
Gideon considered the choices, weighed them, and was about to spit out a list that would have had the man reeling in his tracks, when he heard scuffling off to his right. He whirled, just in time to see a company of Moglar leap from the fissure, weapons brandished, grimly leather armor creaking like saddles that have been in the sun too long. Then, to his astonishment, another fissure not ten feet from where he stood peeled back, and another company of Moglar leapt to the surface.
"Son of a bitch," he said.
Lain sheathed his rapier and readjusted his cap.
Tuesday and Tag made for Red's back, and were aboard just as several more ostensible fissures were revealed to be little more than clever camouflage covers for untold hundreds of giant dwarves, who swiftly gathered in a large circle around them, mumbling ominously to themselves while the Wamchu leaned back and laughed again.
By the time Gideon was able to recover from the shock of seeing both his plan—whatever that was—and his future slip away from him, he realized that the Shashhag was no longer a plain of uninterrupted monotony broken only by the infrequent fissures, but now only a plain of uninterrupted monotony.
He was surrounded by an army.
He was surrounded by an army of greasy-haired, uncouth and unpopular warriors whose only lot in life was to do the Wamchu's evil bidding, for good or ill, and think nothing of their own lives unless they were threatened by superior forces or people who could hit a lot.
It was humiliating.
It was also, he thought while the Wamchu laughed on, awfully puzzling, since an army here meant one army less fighting in the bowl of the Scarred Mountains; he was positive that this wasn't right. There just weren't that many giant dwarves to go around. And there weren't, so far as he knew, any other warrior clans, castes, or social classes.
Which meant that the Vondel brothers were fighting someone else.
Or, that the fighting wasn't as far away as he had thought.
Or, that the Wamchu had been defeated and was using the remnants of his army to capture him, and only him, for the sole purpose of delivering his oft-promised revenge.
And that didn't make sense.
Why use a whole army?
Unless Lu was more afraid of Gideon than his present attitude let on.
Wamchu wiped tears from his eyes and put his hands on his hips. "So, hero, you were counting?"
/> "Three," Gideon said.
It was a long shot, but it was just possible, as Glorian had speculated, that the Moglar would not fight if their leader was incapacitated, or dead; it was conceivable that the muttering louts would turn tail and run as soon as they realized that there was no one left to tell them what to do.
Lu was puzzled, and hooked his thumbs even more snugly behind his belt.
"Two."
Of course, Gideon reminded himself, it was also possible that they could get so pissed off that they would trample him into the ground, cut him to pieces, and feed what was left of him to whatever disgusting creatures made their home on this dread-inducing plain.
He paused.
The Wamchu watched him warily.
The Moglar shifted side to side with impatience, their stringy black hair whipping their shoulders unmercifully.
"For god's sake, Giddy, do something!"
Lu turned his attention to the lorra, and to the white duck on its back. "Well, well," he said. "Whale's little starlet is still a bird, I see."
Tuesday strode up Red's neck and stood defiantly between the rise of his deadly horns. "Bird enough to know you're a chicken, blondie."
"Hey, Tuesday," Gideon said softly.
Wamchu took a step forward, and the Moglar stopped muttering. "Blondie?" He brushed a hand through his long, thick locks and smiled mirthlessly. "Jealous? Is the little duckie jealous of the big man's hair, which the little duckie hasn't got any more of since she was turned into a little duckie by the big man with the pretty hair?"
Tuesday's tail rose, her feet dug in, and her eyes narrowed to an impossible squint. "Step over here and say that, you wimp."
"Wimp?"
Jesus, Gideon thought, and tried to pick out which would be the first hundred Moglar he would have to fight.
"Wimp, you say?"
The warriors edged in, edged back at a brusque gesture from their leader, and edged away yet again when the Wamchu did indeed take that step toward the duck, who was hissing, beak-snapping, and flapping her wings in such a vile manner that even Lain, wise to the ways of the forest and the world, felt constrained to throw caution aside and nock a tipless arrow in his bow.
Tag was too busy getting off the lorra and behind Gideon to do much else but drop his dagger, pick it up, drop it, pick it up, drop it, and throw his hands up in confusion.