by John Daulton
With a breath to steady her nerves and a quick glance at those horns jutting from the big one’s head, she scooted along the cliff face until she was as directly in line with it as she could be. Flipping her spear in her hands so that its point was down, she jumped from the cliff and out into the wind, plummeting toward the rocks. She started her spell.
In the half instant before she hit the largest of the rocks, she finished the last word of her magic and teleported herself to the sand beyond them. She reappeared, already running toward the hulking sargosagantis lying just twenty paces away.
It twisted so quickly toward her that she’d only barely begun to reach out for its mind, watching the mana draw in case it tried to blink, when it shot the first of its horns at her. In that split second of her reaching for mana, the nine-pace-long shaft was on her, through her, and carrying her flying down the beach. She landed with a splash in the surf well over thirty spans away, her invisibility spell gone and her blood being carried into the sea with the receding of the most recent crashing wave.
She could see the great horn rising from her body like the trunk of a beheaded tree, widening as it rose up into the air. Her guts felt like they were aflame. She lifted her head feebly and saw that all the manatees were gone. She was dimly aware of how disappointed she was, but the pain made it hard to think.
She had enough time to call out to Djoveeve telepathically before the sky faded away.
Though she had no sense of passing time, or even much value for measuring it anyway, four days had passed before she woke up again. Even with the spectacular healing power that Seawind brought to bear, she’d still been in great danger for the whole first day after the manatee incident, for it had been that long that the elf had been at work on her. But awake she did, and alive she was.
Not surprisingly, the first words out of her benefactor’s elven mouth when Pernie awoke were “Foolish girl. Not even elves trifle with sargosaganti.”
Djoveeve, however, was kinder, and the thin slit of her pursed and ancient mouth shaped a smile of genuine relief when Pernie’s bright blue eyes blinked bewildered up at her for the first time in days.
“Crazy, brave little thing,” the old woman said, pushing strands of Pernie’s hair off her pale brow unnecessarily. “You cannot ride a sargosagantis back to Kurr.”
Pernie rolled her head, looking away from the woman to the elf. The folded silk blanket serving as her pillow made wispy sounds against her ear as she did, soft against her cheek. “I almost did,” she said, glaring up at Seawind. “You’ll see.”
He looked from her to Djoveeve seated on the ground next to where Pernie lay upon a bed of grass. The convalescing child was covered in a sheet of silk, her slender little body barely a length of lumps beneath. “She is brave. But if she’s stupid, she’ll die before she is of any use. You make her stay away from the sargosaganti. They cannot be tamed. If she won’t hear it from me, you’d better find a way to make her hear it from you, or there will be more of that water spilling from your old eyes.”
“You brought her here,” Djoveeve said. “You did. You picked her. She is your responsibility. I only teach her what I know. Neither of us asked to be here in our time. You’ll do well to remember that. Your people, your prophecies, choose us. You choose humans because we are not elves. That is why. So don’t stand there now and bemoan the difference. You make her understand. And hitting her with something won’t help. She’s past that now. Some lessons can’t be taught with the blunt end of a spear.”
He frowned across the intervening space at the ancient Sava’an’Lansom and considered what she’d said. It had been a long time since he’d trained Djoveeve, and it was possible that some of what she had said he’d not been considering. He nodded, and left the low-ceilinged room.
Djoveeve turned back to look at Pernie, who was smiling up at her. “You told him good that time,” Pernie said. “He’s been needing a talking-to.”
Djoveeve leaned back and laughed. “Yes, child, I did tell him good, didn’t I?” They shared a moment in that happy thought, until finally, once more she spoke. “And you must do it too when time comes, little Sava. You tell them what they need to hear. They will need your candor just as they have often needed mine. It is not for the spear and knife alone that they bring us here. It is for what only we can see.”
“You mean like sugar shrimp and mana tide?”
“In a way. You see, the elves have no intuition. Not like we do, at least not the males. They simply can’t trust a guess like humans do; they can’t go with their gut. They will be the first to tell you they are creatures of reflex, but their reflexes are based on certainty. That’s why they fight so well. They don’t guess; they know.”
“But I thought certainty was why they always win. They’re very smart, or at least Seawind is, though he’s mostly the only one I know. Sandew and the others were smart too. I saw them fight the latakasoki, lots of them, and with no Fayne Gossa like I had. They never make mistakes. Guessing is silly because they already know everything.”
“But they don’t. They don’t know everything.”
“Then how come they never lose a fight?”
“The dead ones lose.”
Pernie had to think about that, but she supposed it made perfect sense. She’d never seen a dead elf, but then, she’d never seen a young one or a female either. There were all kinds of elves she’d never seen, so she’d just never really thought about that before.
“How come they never let me see anyone else?” she asked after a while. “Are they ashamed of me?”
“I cannot tell you that just yet, little Sava. But if it is meant to happen, then you will. They are an amazing race, beautiful beyond reckoning. The first time I saw an elven woman, I fell in love.”
“What?” said Pernie, sitting bolt upright. “With another woman?”
Djoveeve took her by the shoulders and pushed her back down into the bed, smiling but insistent. “You must lie still for another day or two, child. There is a bit more healing that must happen on the inside still.”
Pernie grumbled about that. Nothing hurt when she sat up.
She made a face at Djoveeve but didn’t try to sit up again.
“And yes, little one, I did fall in love with a woman, though there was nothing I could do about it. I simply was. But elves don’t love the way we do; they don’t hold each other or kiss each other in the dark.”
“I know about what happens in the dark,” Pernie said a bit indignantly. “You can say it. Besides, I’ve seen the critters at Calico Castle doing it all the time. They climb on top of one another, and Gimmel says they will keep on until a baby comes out.”
Djoveeve had occasion to laugh again, but Pernie mistook it for disbelief, which she wasn’t having any of. “It’s true,” she protested. “All the time I seen Nipper’s old bull get up on that bald-faced cow Gimmel brought back from Leekant, and it followed her around and went after her constantly. And that cow had a calf by the end of the year. It just came right out all gooey and covered with snot. And people aren’t any different, and even Kettle said it was true because I asked, and she never lies to me.”
Djoveeve patted her on the cheek and nodded that it all was true, or at least close enough. “Of course you are right about all of that. People do, just like many animals as well, though not all by any stretch. And elves are like those creatures who don’t make love. At least, not until a very specific time.” She sat up straighter then, and cleared her throat, though there was nothing in it to be cleared. “The rest of that, you’ll just have to wait to learn. I’ve said more than my vow allows as it is.”
Pernie didn’t care about vows, though. She was still trying to imagine how any woman could be so beautiful as to make her fall in love. At one time she’d thought Orli Pewter was beautiful, but not enough to be in love. Or at least she didn’t think so anyway. She had liked following her around because she was nice to her. But then she tried to take Master Altin away, so now Pernie thought Orli w
as uglier than Gimmel’s bald-faced cow.
Thinking about life at home made Pernie a little melancholy, and for a while she lay back trying to remember things she used to like to do. Much of it was the same as the things she liked to do here, as she thought about it. Climbing trees and jumping streams. Swimming and chasing animals about. Hunting and practicing with whatever weapons someone would let her at or that she could make herself. She had to admit the elves and old Djoveeve were actually much more generous about that last part. Plus she got to use poisons when she wanted to. Granted, they made her drink the poisons she practiced with, dosing her for months and months first to build up her resistance, but eventually they did let her, and she did suppose being immune to them was probably a good idea. She didn’t like barfing very much, though. Although sometimes the strangest-looking things came up, which made it not so bad.
She’d also found Knot here, and she really did love him. Thinking of him made her worry, and she sent a thought out in search of him. He’d unrolled himself from her pack and gone back to the fern meadow where she’d gotten him.
That was fine. She could get him to come back now. It was funny to think about it, but in the light of the recent conversation about mates and mating, she thought the little monster sort of saw her as its mate, or something like it anyway. She thought about how Djoveeve must have felt being in love with a woman who could never love her back. It made her sad inside. She imagined Knot loving her like that, hopelessly, and thought about not calling him back to her. But then she knew he was just a bug. She’d been in his head before. There simply wasn’t that kind of emotion there. Still, it was a sad thought, unsettling, and she looked up at Djoveeve wondering what it must be like, to love someone and not have that love ever returned. So she asked. “What happened to the elf woman that you loved?”
Djoveeve shook her head and gave a wan, breathy sort of smile. “Nothing,” she said. “She’s living her life perfectly happily beneath—” She stopped abruptly, saying instead, “We’re even friends in our way. In the end, I might as well have loved the sky.”
“Was it magic that did it to you?” Pernie asked. “Were you under a love spell like Lord Thoroughgood used on Miss Pewter all that time?”
“No. Not magic. At least not directly, not intentionally. They’re all like that. The females, I mean. That’s why the elves always take human women to be Sava’an’Lansom. It is said that if a human male sees an elven woman, he will simply give up and die. Apparently they just lose the will to live. It’s what happened to the very first Assassin of the Vale.”
“Because of how pretty they are?”
“Yes. Because of that. As I said, you will see. And if you are weak like I was, you will carry the heart wound with you always, as I do, like a scar in your heart’s memory. But the heart heals over, and you will be stronger for it in the end. It doesn’t happen a second time.” She looked off into the distant space of memory for a moment, and when she spoke again, her tone was tutorial again. “But only if you pass your test.”
“The test of seeing an elf woman or of killing the orc?”
Djoveeve’s brow wrinkled a little, only for an instant, before she nodded. “Yes. Most of that, anyway.”
Pernie couldn’t decide if she wanted to see a woman so beautiful she’d have a wounded heart, but she supposed Seawind could cure anything. And what could be worse than a giant manatee horn through the guts anyway? She did, however, dread that rotten orc.
Chapter 40
Black Sander sat upon the wide lip of a clay jar as if it were a stool. He stared across the pale yellow gloom at his three companions, two men he’d hired for muscle and the teleporter, who still trembled as much as he had at the candle shop before making the teleports. His companions sat, as he did, atop their own clay jars, and at their feet were four more small jars, one filled with almonds and the other three with water, each corked tight. The only light came from the cap of a yellow mushroom, which one of the thugs held in his lap as dearly as a child might a favorite bedtime toy. The man’s fingers twitched as he held it, the tips of them caressing its glowing flesh in a searching sort of way, as if he were certain that at any moment it might disappear.
“You’re going to break it apart if you keep fiddling with it,” Black Sander said in a voice so low it was barely a hiss. The man started at the sound, his eyes wide and the whites jaundiced by the mushroom’s light. He followed the direction of Black Sander’s gaze to the cap in his lap, and jerked his hands away as if it might bite him.
“Don’t like it in here,” he muttered back. “It’s too dark and too tight. I can’t hardly breathe.”
“You’ll breathe just fine if you stop thinking about it,” Black Sander hissed back. “Just relax. We’ll be there soon enough.” He turned to the man to his left, and watched the sand in the hourglass run out. He waited for the man to turn it over, which he did immediately.
The brawny fellow saw Black Sander looking at him, and gave a grim nod. “Twenty-six,” he mouthed silently.
Black Sander lifted his wide-brimmed hat and pushed his long, agile fingers through the dark hair beneath, nodding back at the man. He would have liked to have stood and stretched, but there was no room for it. The small space, a square cube made of taut canvas stretched over a wooden frame, would not accommodate such a thing. It was even worse now than it should have been; the unexpected near collapse of one corner of their little hiding place had reduced their headroom substantially on one side. Someone on the outside had thrown in additional weight, and a knot in one of the four main poles had proven a nearly fatal flaw for the plan. Were it not for the quick reflexes of the man now holding the hourglass, they might all be sitting in a Crown City jail.
But he’d caught the drooping canvas and held up that side of their tiny room, all upon his back, his legs trembling and his arms braced against his knees as he held up the weight of well over thirty stone in Goblin Tea beans. They’d had to scramble to aid him, Black Sander and the claustrophobic lad, but they’d strapped a pair of daggers in place with two belts and somewhat splinted up the pole. It still drooped, and they all knew it might give at any moment, but at this point in the plan, they had no other choice but to trust to chance.
The man with the mushroom got up and went to a length of bamboo sticking through a hole in the side of the canvas wall. It had a small bellows-like device affixed to it near its end. He wrapped his lips around the opening and pumped the bellows hungrily, sucking in the air it brought from outside the crate they were hiding in.
“Sit down, you fool. They’ll hear you panting like a damn dog. There’s plenty of air in here.”
He did as instructed, but he mumbled, “I can’t breathe.”
“Calm yourself. We’ll be off the ship at any moment now.”
The man slumped back on his clay pot, too late to prevent the aroma of urine from mixing and even overwhelming even the mask of the Goblin Tea for a time.
Another two turns of the hourglass passed after that, but at length, and such a length that even Black Sander began to grow anxious, there were sounds from outside their confinement again. Faint sounds, dull and muffled, but clearly something was finally happening. He glanced to the teleporter sitting there, the man having not uttered one word since they’d left, and gave him a look that promised death to him, his wife, and his unborn baby if he uttered so much as one magical word. The man nodded that he understood.
The crate jolted a moment after, and Black Sander quickly yanked off the bellows from the tube and slid a long wooden dowel through it, stopping where a mark on the dowel lined up with the tube opening. The hole was now plugged up tight.
The crate rocked several more times, then settled. He could make out the faintest hum of voices, but there was far too much wood crate and Goblin Tea in between for him to make out what was being said.
They all tipped at a shallow angle then as someone outside moved the crate. The man with the mushroom looked as if he might cry out. The fellow with th
e hourglass set it down and slapped a hand over the mushroom bearer’s mouth.
Black Sander smiled as their tiny apartment leveled out again, and for some time there was no movement again, or at least none they could detect. The crate jolted once again, then all was silent. No one said a word. After a time, there came another jolt, as if something had been slammed up against the side of the crate. Then silence followed yet again. This sequence repeated eight more times, and after the last, a new type of rumble commenced. They were all jolted once more, this time in a distinctly directional sort of way, as if a wagoner had just whipped a team of draft horses into motion.