The merman leader turned back at me and pointed. His hands only had two fingers and an opposable thumb, so he was essentially pointing with his entire hand, but I got the concept of the gesture all right, I just didn’t know what it was meant to convey.
“Hello,” I said. “My name is Adam.”
His response was to do his banshee-howl thing, only not at full volume and only for a couple of seconds. It had no discernible syllables to it. I mean, it could have been his name—the first name I ever had was Urr, and to be fair the noise he made wasn’t all that far off from that—but it probably wasn’t.
“I don’t know what you’re expecting from me?”
He sniffed again, and pointed.
“The smell,” I said. “I don’t know what you want to know. I could use a bath, sure.”
The lead merman leaned down and rubbed his hand against what could generically be referred to as his thigh. It wasn’t a thigh at all—the longer I spent near them the more it became obvious that everything below their mid-torso was a pair of fins—but it was where the thigh would be located.
After rubbing himself for several seconds his hand came up with a thin layer of his own skin.
He threw it on the ground at my feet, pointed at it, and then pointed at me again.
“Yes, I understand,” I said. “You want to know why I smell like one of you. I think I was tricked.”
He howled and chittered and did the low whistle that soon exited my range of hearing.
“Well I don’t know why I was tricked, but someone put some of that in an ice chest and I picked it up.”
Click click, he said.
“Yes, I think it was stupid too. In hindsight, certainly.”
This would have gone better if either of us knew what the other was saying, but nobody was trying to kill me yet, so that was good.
He howled more emphatically, and for longer, and pointed at the dead skin again, and at me, and then he pointed down the hill, and at himself.
“You want me to go down the hill?” I guessed.
One of the other mermen, on the edge of the semicircle, was having a problem. I’d been noticing it for a while, but couldn’t tell if what I was seeing was normal for them or not. Basically, he kept flicking his arm around quickly at the air near his head. I didn’t think much of it until the one next to him started doing the same thing.
The leader didn’t notice this, or in noticing, didn’t care. He was a lot more interested in getting me to understand whatever it was he was trying to convey.
“I was already going down the hill,” I said, “before you stopped me.”
To elaborate, I gestured this out, by pointing to myself, then to him, then holding my hand up like a cop stopping traffic.
Pretty sure something was lost in the translation. He took a couple of oozy steps forward until he was standing in front of a rotten log, about halfway between us.
He shattered the log with a powerful swing of his arm, and then went back to pointing at me, pointing at himself, and pointing in the direction of the town.
He wanted me to go where I had already been going, but to do something for him when I went there, or… or something. Something involving a hunk of merman flesh in an ice chest.
We were at a pretty tough conversational impasse, and I was probably about to be in a lot of trouble. If option A was to get me to understand and do something particular and that didn’t pan out, option B was to hit me until I shattered like a rotten log. It didn’t get to that, though, because the two mermen having odd fits became four mermen. Also, the general swatting at the air became something like a collective seizure.
It was a pixie swarm.
I’d like to say I figured this out on my own, but Ha had to fly next to my ear to implore me to run before I realized I was being given an opportunity. It wasn’t a dragon riding to the rescue, but it would do.
“Hurry hurry!” Ha shouted. It looked like the mermen were fighting nothing but the wind, and it probably felt like that to them, except the wind had teeny tiny fists that kept hitting soft patches. Their pained howling sounded like a bunch of creaking doors.
The pixie assault opened up a gap in the line, so I ran through the gap. It felt like passing through an airlock, with wind rushing past my face as the pixies got out of the way.
I started to wonder exactly how many of them there really were, and if it was enough to hold off the entire merman line. Then I wondered if maybe I should have been a touch more afraid of pixies, historically.
Once I was ten yards on the other side of them, the leader gave a tremendous, deafening shout, and five more mermen manifested at the far edge of the clearing, ready to cut off my escape route.
“Still run!” Ha shouted in my ear. I headed straight for the middle of them. They closed ranks, but then there was a rush of wind from all around and I got the sense I was now traveling in a pixie bubble of safety, which is probably the best description of what was happening.
The vanguard of that pixie bubble reached the defensive line a few seconds before I did, and committed enough damage to open up a hole. I had to do some ducking and dodging, and at one point I dove, rolled, and slid, but soon enough I was back on my feet and running through the woods, and there was nobody in front of me any more.
* * *
I can travel pretty fast downhill, darkness or not, because it’s essentially like falling in a controlled manner. If this were daytime and I was both sufficiently motivated and unimpeded, I could probably make it back to the house well before sunrise, even though it took two days to make it all the way up the mountain in the first place.
I was absolutely sufficiently motivated, because while the mermen weren’t as fast as I was, there were a lot of them. They kept popping up along the hillside to my left and my right. Only twice did one appear in front of me, and both times the halo of pixies took care of him. I almost hoped one day we would develop an ability to communicate so they could tell me what it was like to be attacked by a pixie cloud.
I don’t know how long I was running, because I’m trained to run for days and once I get started I tend to zone out and lose track of time. If this were a continent, I’d probably just end up going until I hit civilization.
I couldn’t run forever here. I was still on an island, surrounded by the water the things chasing me lived in. Long-term, there was no escape, and I would eventually have to face them again and play another game of charades until we either figured one another out or somebody clubbed me to death out of frustration.
These were not happy thoughts, so I tried not to dwell on them.
While I don’t know how long I ran, I do know it was a while, because at some point the sky started to brighten. It was that creepy half-light signaling the sun would be making an appearance on the low horizon within the hour.
It was around then that I concluded something else was chasing me.
This something else triggered old instincts, because whatever it was, it was in the trees. My gut said it was a large cat. My head told me there were no large cats on the island, and mermen didn’t travel like cats could, so it had to be a third thing. This did nothing to assuage my gut.
I kept running, until the sky brightened enough and the timing was right enough for a quick look at my pursuer. He or she was man-sized and man-shaped, and that was all I could tell for sure. I nearly stopped and called out, but then I heard another banshee wail and decided announcing my location for any reason was a bad plan, and I kept going.
“Ha,” I said, for I could still hear her buzzing around my head, “how close are the walking fish?”
“Close,” she said. “Look.”
“I don’t want to look, because then I stop watching where I’m going.”
“You should fly.”
“I can’t fly.”
“Oh.”
I kept running, and things were all right for a few minutes because I no longer got the sense that I was being hunted by a predatory feline. Then it landed
on me.
I was hit in the back and knocked facedown onto the ground. I was thankfully crossing a moderately flat space with few large rocks or upturned roots, or it would have been a lot more painful.
I heard a rush of wind as the pixies attacked as I rolled over to face my new foe.
It was Mirella.
“Ha, stop!” I shouted. The pixies dropped the attack, which was good because they were probably about to blind her.
Mirella was dressed exactly as she had been when I last saw her, only now she was covered in two days’ worth of mud and blood, and she could really have used a comb for her hair. Her eyes were wild and she looked practically feral.
It’s possible I was never happier to see someone in my entire life.
“Oh thank goodness, it’s you!” I said, maybe louder than I should have.
“Follow me,” she said. “Follow me exactly.”
She grabbed my hand and pulled me into a full sprint, which is what I was doing already, so the interruption seemed sort of dumb. Also, no hug or happy to see me, or anything, which was surprising enough to be a tiny bit scary. I wondered if the situation we were in was drastically different than what I thought it was.
I followed her steps exactly, which got us to a low hill on the other side of which was a rocky outcrop. She pulled us down to the ground behind the rocks.
“What’s going on?” I asked. The cloud of pixies settled into a buzzy morass in the air some distance behind the rock, using it for shelter more or less the same way we were. This turned out to be smart.
“Shh!” Mirella said.
We poked our heads up over the rock to have a look at what turned out to be a charging army.
The forest was two-deep in mermen. Ha was right; they were close. I had no idea how close.
“We have to keep moving,” I said.
Mirella put her hand on my shoulder.
“No,” she said. “Just wait.”
The sunrise lit up the sky to our left, and then the earth in front of the mermen erupted in a tremendous explosion. We ducked behind the rock as debris flew past the shelter. The pixies scattered.
We huddled there in silence for several seconds, until the noise died down.
I poked my head up again.
Half the forest, it seemed, was gone. So were all of the mermen.
Part III
The Priestess
14
I’ve never been in the middle of a modern war, so when I saw the hillside erupting in packets of flame carried by the concussive force of high explosives, I could only connect it to bomber raid scenes in Vietnam War movies. This would have made more sense if a bomber had flown by, though, and there wasn’t one I could see.
“What the hell was that?” I asked.
Mirella just looked at me silently for a few seconds, and then we hugged.
“Hi,” I said.
“Hi.”
“I thought maybe you were dead.”
“Did you really?” She seemed surprised.
“It came to mind a few times, yeah. You?”
“A moment of weakness, perhaps, but I decided this world is too stubborn to let you die.”
I laughed.
“Fair enough. What did I just see?”
“Cousin made bombs,” she said.
“Stubby did that?”
“I’ve asked you not to call me that,” Esteban said, emerging from the underbrush downhill of us. “Haven’t I?”
The island’s sheriff didn’t look all that much like a law enforcement officer any longer. He was in shorts, and had a pair of swords lashed to his back and a gun on his hip, a bandanna on his head, and nothing else. He held out his hand and helped me to my feet.
“It’s good to see you among the living, Adam,” he said, which was nice because I never thought he really liked me all that much. “You smell terrible.”
“I know, it’s a long story.”
“No, I’m sure it was necessary for your role as lure.”
“My what again?”
“Your friend,” Mirella said. “From the top of the mountain, she told us to expect you. That was all very clever.”
I looked back up the mountain, and the smoking ruins of the hillside. Esteban managed to clear out a whole lot of real estate at once. It would have taken a long time to put all of it together, and he would have had to know an army was going to be showing up in the field in the first place.
There was a lot here to unpack.
“Was it your idea?” Esteban asked. “We assumed as much.”
“Stubby, not only was it not my idea, I learned about it the same time that squad of mermen you just blew up learned about it. We should talk.”
They both looked surprised.
“We have a camp not far from here,” he said.
“Mermen?” Mirella asked. “Is that what you said?”
* * *
We were joined by four of Esteban’s deputies, all dressed more or less as he was. Then we climbed down to their camp, which was just below the next ridge, in a rocky recess that didn’t entirely qualify as a cave. It afforded a decent view of the lower island, the first one I’d really gotten in two days.
On our way down, I learned everything Mirella had been up to since we last saw one another. Not much, as it turned out. Not nothing, but it was fair to say my three days had been more eventful, if a tiny bit less dangerous.
“I was carried off the side of the road by the wave,” she said, “where I landed on top of a tree. The water found the lowest point while I stayed above it. It was hours before I could move from that position, and then only to another tree. The ground was underwater for more than a day. I tried to make it up to the road so as to get back to the house, but it was nightfall before I even touched land again.”
“That was when I found her,” Esteban said.
One of his deputies—I didn’t know any of their names—got to work starting a fire. This seemed like a bad idea, and I was about to say so when Mirella caught my expression.
“It’s all right,” she said. “They come out in force at night, but by day it’s safe in the open spaces, as long as we’re on land.”
“They lurk in the water on the lower island at all hours,” Esteban said. “They like the water. They hate the fire and they don’t care for the sun.”
What followed was a tale that amounted to the small band of goblins behaving like guerillas against an invading force from the ocean. At night, dozens of the white-skinned creatures turned up all over the island, attacking anyone and everyone without explanation, so they decided their best option was to keep to the trees and pick off the enemy in coordinated assaults.
“Swords work on them,” Mirella said. “Their flesh is thick so you must be careful or you will not get the sword back. It’s better to confront them on dry land, if at all. Their attacks are less effective on land.”
The sunrise showed a down-island landscape still covered in water, but from my vantage point, it looked to be less than two feet deep.
“There are parts of the island that don’t qualify as being on land any more, I take it?” I asked.
“I would say anything deeper than a puddle gives them an insuperable advantage,” Esteban said. “Cousin said you called these things banshee, now you say merman. Have you seen them before now?”
“No.”
“So regardless of the name we choose, we still don’t know how to make them go away.”
“Blowing them up seemed pretty effective,” I said.
“That was a major blow, I agree,” he said. “But we’ve killed many of them already, and always there are more. I’m afraid this is like fighting a hydra: we kill two dozen, and four dozen arrive in their place.”
“What did you even use to do that?” I asked. “Do goblins know how to build munitions out of rocks and dirt, because that’s a cool trick.”
Esteban looked embarrassed by the question.
“Cousin has caches of weapons hidden on the isla
nd,” Mirella said.
“Really? Why is that?”
“He’s paranoid,” she said. “Or so I would have said a week ago, had I known about the caches a week ago.”
“I’ve been to war too many times not to anticipate the next war,” he said. “I purchased decommissioned explosive devices on the black market before ever agreeing to terms regarding my employment. In my official capacity, I was able to identify regions of the island considered off-limits to the public, and buried stores there.”
“That’s alarmingly prescient,” I said.
“Not so much as you would think. Although packing them in waterproof containers was modestly insightful, if I’m to brag about anything.”
Mirella smiled. “Cousin subscribes to a philosophy that the day will come when humans decide to eliminate all of us. He considered having so many of our kind concentrated in such a small place a foolish idea for this reason.”
“Yet here he is, stuck on the island with the rest of us.”
“I decided if the attack was to come, I would make sure everyone here was ready for it.”
“With bombs buried in the hills.”
“Yes. Only I expected that attack to come by boat and by plane, not in the form of gelatinous nightmares rising out of the ocean.”
“We looked for you, as we hunted,” Mirella said. “Until your messenger came. Then we knew you were safe and what you were planning, so we prepared accordingly.”
“Yes, I’m surprised you were unaware of the weapons cache, given the instructions.”
“This is what I’m trying to tell you,” I said. “I didn’t know about this until I got here.”
“How is that possible?” Mirella said
“Well, let’s start with how much I hate prophets.”
Immortal and the Island of Impossible Things (The Immortal Series Book 4) Page 25