Claudia J Edwards - [Forest King 02]

by Horsewoman in Godsland (UC) (epub)

  Clearly, Adelinda had either been poisoned or had a spell placed on her. In either case, Len was unable to help her. But perhaps Orvet could. Quick as thought, he dashed to the door, intending to fetch the exorcist. When he reached the main hall, though, he stopped abruptly. Tsu-Linn stood at the junction of corridor that led to An-Shai’s quarters, and past them to the entrance hall and the door. Len couldn’t hear what he was saying to one of two palace servants, but shortly he left the man there and led the other one back down the hall toward the comer that Len peered around. Len nipped back into Adelinda’s room and applied his eye and ear to the tiny opening he left in the door.

  “Don’t let anyone come down this hall,” he was telling the bewildered servant. “No one is' to disturb the foreign woman. You may hear her call out or scream. Ignore it. On no account go to investigate, no matter what happens.”

  The servant took up his post, and Tsu-Linn turned back toward the bishop’s quarters. Len clenched his fists. What was he to do? Adelinda needed Orvet’s help, but there seemed to be no way to fetch him. For a moment he considered just walking past the guard or possibly overpowering him, but an alarm was sure to be raised by the other guard. He went over to Adelinda’s bed and peered down at her. The darkness was too impenetrable for him to see much; he risked lighting a candle. By that flickering light he could see that she lay as before.

  Suddenly, for no reason that he could see, an expression of astonishment crossed her face, quickly followed by alarm, and then terror. She began to breathe in short gasps, as if running hard, and her limbs twitched. Len looked around wildly, feeling more helpless and bewildered than ever before in his life. He hated Adelinda, with what he considered to be good reason, but as he had told Orvet, that was between him and her, and if he wished her to be made sorry for what she had done, he would not have wished this weird supernatural affliction on her. She cried out, a sound laden with hopeless terror, and he winced.

  To Adelinda, it was like wakening. When Tsu-Linn puffed the smoke in her face, she was immediately seized with a dizzy, wrenching sensation and a feeling of nausea and disorientation. When her senses cleared, she found herself lying in the dust of a gray and lifeless plain. The powdery soil was strewn with pebbles and rocks of various sizes from gravel to small boulders, but there was no life, neither plant nor animal. The air was heavy with the same acrid scent the smoke had had, and it burned her nose and throat as she inhaled it. Her lips were as dry as if she had been on this waterless plain for days; she wavered weakly as she drew herself to her feet and looked around for a landmark.

  There were no shadows. The sky was lit with a sourceless luminescence that cast the same gray light from all directions—if there could be said to be directions. There was only one feature visible, a small structure of some sort, possibly two or three miles away. Otherwise the lifeless plain stretched to the horizon unbroken, behind her and to either side. For the lack of a better goal, she began to trudge toward the building. The dust dragged at her feet, making every step an effort, and the bitter air burned her lungs.

  She had gone only a few yards when a fellow traveler hove into her ken, seemingly from nowhere. He staggered into her peripheral vision, staring with the glare of madness. He had obviously been here a lot longer than she; his lips were cracked, and he licked incessantly at the blood that ran from them with a tongue too dry to absorb the fluid. He croaked something that could not be distinguished as words, and whether he lunged at her or merely staggered in her direction could not be told.

  From behind her came a yammering cry. The man cast a glance over his shoulder. With a hoarse scream of purest terror he shoved her in the direction of the cry and turned to flee. But his strength was spent. He fell, scrabbling to gain his hands and knees even as he hit the ground, raising a choking cloud of dust.

  Past her came a flood of creatures, somewhat manlike, yet also, from their narrow, chinless faces and elongated hand-paws, owing some of their descent to the rat. They were dressed in filthy leather and tattered rags, and each wore a necklace of withered human hands strung by thongs laced through the dry skin of the severed wrists.

  They swarmed over the prostrate man, and Adelinda watched, paralyzed with horror, as they tore the living flesh from the man’s bones and crammed it still quivering into their bloody mouths. In seconds the flesh was gone from his limbs and they were tearing at the internal organs. A stench as of the gutting of an animal rose into the tainted air, the screaming stopped. One and then another rose triumphant above the moil, brandishing a hand. Adelinda began to withdraw backward, step by silent step.

  The creatures knew she was there. There was nowhere near enough flesh on the emaciated corpse to satisfy them. Nothing was left now but stained dust and pink bones. One by one the 'bloody-mouthed creatures left the gruesome pile and began to slither toward her, their beady eyes fixed on the warm, sleek flesh of her body. Her nerve broke; she turned and fled toward the house she had seen, the only possible place of refuge on these barren plains.

  The creatures were not fast. That was all that saved Adelinda. The dust slipped treacherously beneath her feet; her lungs labored agonizingly in the poisoned air; her head swam with the terrible effort of running; but though they snapped at her heels, they could not come quite close enough to bring her down. Several times she looked up from her dogged stride to find that she had veered from the direct route to the building; she moaned in terror to see how much distance she had added to that she must still cover.

  At last the building loomed darkly in her blurring vision. She staggered the last few steps and sagged against it, turning to look back. The creatures had fallen behind in the last few hundred yards, but they were coming, they were coming! Slowly but inexorably they drew nearer, yammering with insatiable hunger. Adelinda turned back to the building, searching for an entrance. There was none on the near side, but when she turned the comer, holding to the rough stone waii of the building for support, she found a grillwork window and a door.

  Gasping with relief, she made for the door. But there was no handle on the outside, only a thin crack that even her fingernails would not fit in. She hammered on the door, without result. The window—perhaps she could get in that! But the iron bars were fixed.

  Peering through, she saw a patio with a chiming fountain. A current of sweet air wafted through the window. Seated with his back to her on a cushion-strewn bench, surrounded by delicate flowering plants, shaded by a featherleaf tree, was a man.

  “Hey,” Adelinda shouted. The yammering was coming very close. “Let me in!”

  The man stood and tamed. It was, as she had almost known it would be, An-Shai. When he saw her at die window, an expression of concern shaded his handsome face. “Adelinda, my child, what are you doing out there? It isn’t safe.” He crossed to the barred window.

  Adelinda gulped. She could almost smell the fetid breath of the creatures. She could hear the whisper of the dust beneath their foot-paws. “You’re telling me it isn’t safe out here. Can I come in, please, Your Grace?”

  An-Shai looked distressed. “No, I’m afraid you can’t come in here, my child. This place is only for those who acknowledge me their master. It’s the law. You can’t come in.”

  Adelinda whirled, bracing her back against the wall beside the window, breathing in great ragged gasps. She could hear the creatures’ nails scrabbling on the wall around the comer. Their yammering had sunk to a low gobbling mutter.

  “This is a nightmare,” she said to the Wank sky. But she could not believe it.

  “Adelinda!” came An-Shai’s kindly, anxious voice. “If you would only take me for your master, I could help you. If you will submit yourself to my protection, you can come in here where it’s safe.”

  Take him for her master? Submit to his protection? Outrage flooded Adelinda’s soul. “An-Shai!” she called.

  “Yes, my child?”

  “Stuff it in your ear!” She launched herself away from the building, rounding the far comer, and runnin
g away from it on the opposite side from the pack, lashing her failing body on by a terrible effort of will. Outrage burned away in terror when she heard the triumphal yammering of the pack as they sighted her and took up their pursuit. She struck out across the featureless plain, running away from the only safety she knew of.

  In the fitfully lit bedroom, Len leaned over her as she moaned and thrashed. He wrung his hands helplessly. What could he do? She was utterly unresponsive to any efforts to wake her. She had broken out in a cold sweat, was gasping for breath as if running for her life. She muttered; he leaned closer. “An-Shai!” he heard. The rest was lost in incoherence.

  Adelinda’s run had degenerated to a shambling trot. The creatures were in little better condition, however; they could not quite reach her. A break in the horizon caught her eye. Was that a line of hills far away, or boulders close at hand? If they were hills, they were unlikely to be of any help; she was almost spent. No, they were boulders. Thankfully she plunged in among them. The creatures raised a yammering yell as she disappeared from their sight.

  Within the boulders, the land began to rise steeply, further sapping her waning strength. The boulders, higher than her head, seemed to crowd her upslope and to the left. Without warning, one of the creatures leaped out at her, slashing at her face with a filthy flint knife. She threw up her arm and deflected the blow. Seizing a rock, screaming with rage and the burning pain of the ragged gash that spouted blood the length of her forearm, she smashed the creature’s head and left it twitching as the rest poured out of a slot between two boulders and fell upon their fallen packmate. Adelinda took advantage of their cannibalistic preoccupation to renew her flight, but she knew the scrawny carcass would not hold their interest long. Indeed, they raised their yammering pursuit cry before she had gone more than a few hundred feet, and now she was leaving a reeking crimson trail of bloody drops to lure them after her!

  In the bedroom, Len recoiled when a bloody gash suddenly opened in Adelinda’s right forearm. She screamed and convulsed. His breath hissing between clenched teeth, he snatched a piece of cloth from her pack and pressed it tightly against the wound in spite of her thrashing. The bleeding slowed, but it was becoming clear to the young farmer that Adelinda was in deadly peril. Whatever happened to her in her unconsciousness could appear on her body here, evidently, as the gash had done. If she died there, would her body die here? She moaned again and he bent to examine the wound. The flesh around it was already hot and swollen, inflamed as if with several days of virulent infection. He felt her forehead. The cold sweat was gone; her skin was dry and hot as if with fever. And these changes had taken place in minutes! Len went to Adelinda’s pack and rummaged for a weapon. If she died, someone was going to pay, and the same if her sufferings went on much longer.

  Cradling her wounded arm with the other, Adelinda struggled up the steepening slope. Gravel rolled under her feet and she floundered awkwardly. At least she seemed to have distanced the pack, or at least she could no longer hear them. But her gashed arm burned and throbbed. The site of the wound was swollen, oozing a stinking greenish pus, and she could feel her skin parching with fever. Thirst consumed her, though she felt weak and queasy. Only a dogged determination to keep going kept her from sinking to the earth to die. Irrationally, she felt that if she surrendered to pain and fear, An-Shai would have won.

  Two boulders loomed up before her, leaving a narrow passage. Too weak to contemplate walking around, she squeezed through, to find her passage blocked by an ornate wrought-iron gate. She fumbled with the latch; it was locked. She sagged against it, too exhausted to turn and seek the way out.

  “Adelinda, my child!” It was An-Shai, shock and concern in his resonant voice. “Let me help you!”

  She raised her weary gaze. The gate closed off a beautiful little dell, with a crystal spring gushing from a crack in a great boulder that made Adeiinda’s mouth feel even dryer A couch strewn with cushions and cool silken sheets sal new the spring, and beside it was a table laden with medicincs, bandages, and pitchers of fruit juices beaded with condensation. An-Shai stood just inside the gate, watching her with a compassionate gaze.

  Adelinda tried to form words, but her mouth was too dry, and all that came out was a formless croak. She licked her lips with a tongue almost as moistureless as they were. “Could I have a drink of water, please?” she managed to whisper.

  Great sorrow shadowed the bishop’s face. “I’m so sorry, Adelinda. I wish I could help you. The water, and the medicines, and this refuge are only for those who have accepted my protection.”

  Adelinda sighed. “I thought that might be the case,” she whispered, and turning away, supporting herself against the boulders with her unwounded arm, she trudged back out into the sloping boulder field.

  Surprisingly, as she walked, she began to feel a little better. The pain in the wounded arm eased, and her fever subsided. But now the yammering of the pack began to draw closer again, and there was no strength in her to run. She looked about for a refuge. Hie boulders crested in a ridge not many feet in front of her. She drove her exhausted body to climb that. At the very top were two great flat sheets of rock, and she scrambled onto the right-hand one just as the pack made its appearance from the boulder field. They made as if to climb onto the rock; Adelinda withdrew to the far edge of it. The rock teetered and groaned. The creatures drew back, evidently unwilling to trust to the unsteady surface.

  Adelinda glanced over her shoulder and froze in horror. The huge boulder was teetering on the very brink of a drop of thousands of feet, grinding over the underlying bedrock as it inched inexorably toward the cliff. Far, far below, roads traced across an indistinct farming country, divided into fields, laced with streams, blotched with darker patches that must have been mighty forests. Between her and this distant land was nothing but hazy blue air and a wobbling rock.

  She shifted her weight, intending to draw away from the brink, and the boulder rocked alarmingly. The creatures, with a yell of rage, began to push on the edge of the boulder, urging it over the edge of the cliff. Adelinda looked about desperately for some means of escape.

  “Take my hand, quickly! Let me help you!” An-Shai, secure on the other sheet of rock, which was part of the bedrock of the cliff, reached out toward her. Adelinda started to take the offered hand, then drew back suspiciously.

  “I suppose your hand is only for people who have submitted to your protection.”

  An-Shai sighed. “Adelinda, you’ve shown more courage and determination than anyone I ever met, man or woman. You’ve overcome deadly dangers and terrible hardship. I only want to help you. Why won’t you accept my protection before it’s too late?” As if to underscore his words, the boulder heaved suddenly another foot toward the brink.

  Adelinda crouched and clutched dizzily at the boulder’s slick surface. It was tilting so steeply that she was in danger of sliding off it. “The price of your help is too high.”

  “How high a price are you willing to pay for not accepting it?”

  “I don’t believe this is real,” she said desperately. “This is just another one of your creations.”

  “Make no mistake, this is real enough to kill you or cripple you. Your body is back in your bedroom, but if your soul dies here, how long can your body survive mindless?” The boulder heeled over even farther, gratingly. “Take my hand. Let me help you. Everybody needs someone to help them sometimes. You need me now. There’s no shame in needing other people. I’m strong enough to pull you off that rock before you fall off it or it carries you over the edge, and I’m strong enough to take care of you for the rest of your life, too.”

  “You’re crazy!” Adelinda cried. “You want to make a slave of everybody. Leave me alone! I won’t take your help!” With a despairing yell and a terrible convulsive effort, she flung herself off the rock and into the milling pack, striking at the slinking little monsters with her good arm. Thrown into confusion by the sudden attack from their formerly fleeing prey, they scattered momen
tarily, and Adelinda dashed through the opening and ran headlong down the

  slope.

  In the bedroom, Len started up from the floor by the bed-shelf as Adelinda thrashed convulsively. "... help!” he heard her mumble as she tossed. He looked at the wound. It was nearly healed and the fever was gone! The short hairs on the hack of his neck bristled.

  Adelinda plunged down the slope, falling as much as running, held up only by momentum and luck. The pack was in full cry after her, and she was horrified to discover, glancing hack over her shoulder, that the man-rats had been joined by slinking, mangy canines, huge brindled beasts that slavered as they loped along. If they catch me, she thought, there won’t be more than a bite apiece for them.

  The glance back over her shoulder had been a deadly mistake. Without warning, the gray light was blocked off, and she found herself pitched down an ever-increasing slope into the dark maw of a tunnel. She tried desperately to stop, but (he steepness of the powdery, sliding soil and her momentum carried her into the cave’s mouth and down, out of control. She scrabbled at the moving surface and tried to dig in her boots, but it was too late; she was carried beyond the reach of the light, and her last sight of the day was of the man-rats and their hounds, balked at the entrance to the cave, yelling in baffled rage.

  The last spark of light vanished; she was hurtling downward, banging into rocks and the wall of the tunnel as it twisted and turned. She grabbed at anything she could, but could not break the long slide. Her speed was too great. Her hands were battered and bleeding and there seemed to be no part of her body that had not crashed into something with bruising force. But worse than the physical pain was the terrible fear that the slope would steepen even more or drop off into a sudden pit and that she would fall to dash herself to death on unyielding bedrock. Her broken body would lie forever in the dark depths, and somehow that thought was as unnerving as the fear of falling.