Valdemar Books

by Lackey, Mercedes

  As he had predicted, their progress was measured in furlongs, not leagues, with no discernible differences in the territory that they crossed. He could only be certain that they were not walking in circles by virtue of the fact that Blade kept checking the north-needle every time they stopped moving. They stopped for a brief break and something to eat. The sun actually penetrated the canopy in a few places eventually, but it was not much help in showing them where they were. There wasn’t enough of it visible to help them get a bearing from it, either by using a measuring stick or by taking the angle of it.

  In fact, the sunlight proved to be something of a new hazard. The beams of sunlight lancing down through the dark green leaves were very pretty, very picturesque, but they were also to be avoided at all costs. Pinned even for a moment in such a bright light, they would be extremely obvious as something that didn’t belong there.

  There were still no signs of any watercourses, either, which probably meant that this forest depended on rain rather than ground water for the trees to thrive. That was not precisely a surprise, given the daily thunderstorms.

  But a creek or a small stream would have given them a path to a river, and a way to break their trail completely. If they were ever able to wade for some distance along the path of a creek bed, they would completely lose anything that hunted by scent. He had been hoping for a stream, in fact, for that very reason.

  That, and stream water would certainly be cooler than the water in my water skin. The tepid liquid he was carrying had not been particularly refreshing, although he had drunk his ration dutifully. And it would taste better. Much better.

  But there was no sign of any sort of a stream, and eventually the beams of sunlight faded, the light all about them dimmed, and a distant rumble heralded the afternoon storm approaching. At that point, despite their lack of progress, he was almost grateful to hear it. Now they would have to stop and rig a shelter for the night, because it wouldn’t be long before the rain started to fall and made it impossible to get anything constructed.

  Blade stopped, held up her hand, then motioned him up beside her.

  “We’ve got to stop and get our canvas up,” she said, weariness in every syllable. He felt instantly sorry for her; she sounded even more tired than he was.

  She pointed ahead, to one of the few distinctive places he’d seen in this forest. There was a break in the cover, through which the fat, gray bellies of the clouds were clearly visible; at some point in the past few years one of the forest giants had toppled here. They edged forward to a place where the hollowed-out carcass of an ancient snag stood, half-covered with vines, the remains of the rest of the tree lying on the ground beside it, smothered in vines and plants. “That snag is big enough to hold both of us. We’ll use that for the base of our shelter; it’s the closest thing I’ve seen today to something that we can count on to protect us overnight.”

  And she doesn‘t mean from the rain. He nodded. Abandoning any pretext at moving quietly, they thrashed their way through the undergrowth to the giant snag. It stood a little taller than Blade’s head, and as she had stated, was just large enough to hold both of them in its hollow interior. There was no room for a fire, but in confines that close, they would keep each other warm with the heat of their bodies.

  And I’m not certain that I want afire to advertise our presence tonight.

  They were going to need one initially, though— otherwise they were going to be sharing this shelter with a wide variety of multi-legged guests. Rotten wood meant insects, and some of them could be noxious or even poisonous.

  They didn’t have much time before the storm broke, though; perhaps not enough time for Blade to use the firestriker to start a fire in the hollow. But he was a mage, and the easiest spell in the lexicon was to call fire.

  Dare I? It could have been the mere presence of magic that got us attacked. . . . Well, if I don’t, she might not get a torch going before the rain comes. And the fire-spell is so very small, so limited in scope and duration—I’d better chance it. “Move back,” he ordered her; as soon as she had obeyed, he closed his eyes, concentrated—and called fire into the midst of the hollowed-out trunk.

  There was enough in the way of dry leaves and dry, half-rotted woodchips on the floor of the snag to start an enthusiastic and very smoky fire. The smoke had the immediate effect of driving out everything that could leap or fly; Blade bundled other burnables together into two torches and they lit both at the fire and proceeded to char the interior. Smoke rose all about them in a thick fog; he coughed and backed out to get a breath of cleaner air more than once. Half-rotten wood did not give off the kind of pleasant smoke that made sitting beside a campfire a pleasure. It was a pity they hadn’t come upon this place earlier; some of the grubs might have been very tasty, especially cooked. Now their only concern was to rid the tree of all other inhabitants before the rains came.

  He coughed again, as a new and more acrid set of odors joined the heavy smoke. We must have hit a nest of something nasty. Ugh. Or maybe we ‘ve just incinerated a crop of unpleasant fungi. He hoped that whatever they burned off didn’t give off poisonous fumes. A little late to worry about that now.

  They didn’t quite beat the downpour completely. They were in the process of roofing the snag with their canvas and tying it down when the first cloudburst descended, wetting them both to the skin.

  At that point, Blade gave in to the inevitable and stood in the downpour until she and her clothing had been flushed clean, and he let the rain wash all of the soot and dirt from his own feathers before shaking himself partially dry under the shelter of a nearby tree. It was too bad that Blade’s clothing didn’t sluice clean so easily, nor could she shake herself dry. He made a dash to the snag and squeezed himself into the downed tree with the supplies. She had already gotten out blankets and bread and dried meat. He tucked the packs up in a way that she could sleep on them, and put her blanket on top of the pile. He had to put the dried meat out into the stream of water pouring off the canvas and soak it until he could eat it. Meanwhile, Blade emptied and refilled their water skins, then joined him in their shelter.

  Their combined body heat did do something to warm the interior; with blankets over each of them, they weren’t completely miserable, and Blade’s clothing actually began to dry out. And the strong smell of smoke wasn’t too bad after a while—though they must not have gotten all of the bugs out of their shelter, since periodically he would feel a small one taking a trip-under his feathers, or Blade would slap at something. Once again, the rain persisted until after nightfall, though once it stopped, it was— again—uncannily silent beneath the trees. “Damn,” Blade whispered. “I was hoping. . . .”

  “That we’d left them behind?” Tad was altogether glad of the thick wood at his back, and of the deep shadow of the interior of their shelter. Not even an owl would be able to see them in here. “It might not be them that’s making everything so quiet. It might just be the smell of smoke; you know how most wild things fear fire.”

  “And I might be the Haighlei Emperor. No, they’re out there. They followed us, I’m sure of it.” She stared out into the darkness fiercely, as if willing her eyes to be better than they actually were.

  “Well, they can’t get us in here,” he said, and meant it. “It’s safe enough for you to sleep if you want to take second watch this time.”

  “You can’t sleep?” she asked. He shook his head.

  It was true, he wasn‘t going to be able to sleep for a while; he was horribly tired, but not sleepy. His muscles kept twitching and jumping with accumulated fatigue. His nerves all felt strung as tightly as a Kaled’a’in horse-bow, and every tiny sound out there had him peering into the darkness as fiercely as she. It was going to be some time before he relaxed enough to fall asleep.

  “Well, I think I’ve reached the limit on my nerves,” she replied, punctuating the sentence with a yawn. “Believe it or not, I’m going numb. Right now, I hurt so much that all I want to do is drink my medici
ne and drop off as soon as the pain stops. In fact, right now, they could come kill me as long as they did it while I was asleep; I just can’t get up the energy to care.”

  “I know how you feel.” Awkwardly, he managed to pat her leg in sympathy. “You go ahead. I’ll take the first watch as long as I can.”

  She sounded fatalistic; he wasn’t quite ready to share that emotion, but there was something else to consider. I’m not sure it would matter if we both fell asleep tonight. So far, we haven’t any evidence beyond the fact that something probably dangerous is probably following us. They haven’t actually done anything. Even assuming that they intend to attack us, as cautious as they have been, I don’t think they’re ready to try and pry us out of some place like this. “I think we’re as safe as we can be under the circumstances. Get some sleep while you can.”

  She didn’t need a second invitation. In an instant, she had downed her vial of medicine and curled up against his side in her blanket, propped up by the packs to save her shoulder. Provided she didn’t get a kink in her neck from sleeping this way, or stiff muscles from a chill, she ought to be more comfortable tonight than she had been since the accident.

  He stared out into the darkness until his eyes burned—and just as he was contemplating waking her to take her watch, the forest itself woke. But not with sounds of alarm—to his intense relief, these were normal night sounds, the same they had heard every other night of this journey.

  The whoop of something up above startled Blade awake. She came alive with a jerk and a thin gasp of pain. “What?” she demanded, then relaxed as she recognized the noises outside their shelter for what they were.

  The sudden onset of normal night sounds had been the trigger that let all of his own fatigue catch up with him. Suddenly, he could not keep his eyes open, no matter how hard he tried. He was actually nodding off even as he stared into the dark.

  “Can you take over?” he whispered, and felt her nod. That was all he needed; a moment later, not even the scream of a makaar would have awakened him.

  For the second time that morning, Blade motioned to Tad to freeze. Obedient to her hand gesture, he went rigid, and for something as huge as he was, he blended into the forest surprisingly well. His eyes were fixed on her, not on the forest around him; that was because she hadn’t used the gesture that meant danger, just the one that meant wait.

  In fact, there was no danger, only an opportunity. She had spotted another of the long-limbed tree dwellers climbing cautiously down out of the canopy, in pursuit of something it had dropped. This must be a young one; the elders never were so foolish as to risk coming down into the danger zone just because they wanted something they had lost. If she was lucky, this one would not survive a lesson in why they did not.

  Although this hunting was delaying them, it was a necessary delay.

  Her quarry dropped down off the tree trunk and took two cautious steps on the forest floor, reaching for the bright object it had lost. It had four long limbs, a pointed snout, and large eyes set on the sides of its head. If it had been up in the canopy, she would never have been able to spot it, for its brown fur blended in beautifully with the bark of the tree. Not that she could have reached it with her puny weapon, either. Nothing short of a very powerful bow would put a missile up into the canopy with force great enough to kill.

  She whirled her sling twice and let fly.

  The beast barely had time to register the movement and start to turn his head. Then the lead shot struck it squarely on the skull with a wet crack, and it dropped to the ground, instantly dead.

  Grinning with elation, she ran forward anyway, just to make certain of it with her knife; fresh meat was too precious a commodity for her to take any chances that it might simply be stunned. When she finished, she stood up and motioned Tad to come up and join her.

  She straightened and walked over to see what it had dropped. The brightly colored object that had exerted a fatal attraction for this tree dweller proved to be absolutely unidentifiable. It was bladderlike, and a bright blue and red. It could have been a flower, a seed pod, a fruit, even an insect carapace or a portion of some other unfortunate animal. She ignored it at that point; perhaps it was edible, but this was not the time nor the place to experiment.

  Tad, meanwhile, had made short work of her prey. It hadn’t been very large, and he had dismembered it and eaten it almost whole. This was the second such catch she’d made this morning for him, and he looked much the better for the fresh meat. The first had been a rodent, both rabbitlike and rat-like; bigger than a rat, but small for a rabbit. This one was about the size of a large rabbit, though the long limbs had made it look bigger. If her luck kept up, she’d be able to keep him in fresh-killed prey, mouthful by mouthful. That would take one worry away from her; how to keep him from starving. Gryphons weren’t big eaters just by choice.

  Although the forest sounds had by no means returned to normal, there were more signs of other living things now, which made her feel a bit better. Maybe they were outdistancing their invisible trackers. Or maybe those trackers were just waiting until nightfall to move in on them.

  At least this meant that she could actually see some game to take down.

  I can probably get enough small animals and birds over the course of the day to keep Tad in good shape, she decided, retrieving the bit of lead shot and pocketing it before checking her north-needle. Tad had cautiously taken the downed creature into the shelter of a bush to eat it; she pressed herself against the bole of the tree and picked the next landmark they would head for. That was how she was navigating, in line-of-sight increments; checking her north-needle, picking a particular bit of distant cover that was farther west, and moving in toward it. Not only were they—hopefully—avoiding being spotted by their foe, they were not frightening the game.

  She made two more such moves when she spotted another one of the rat-rabbits, nosing about on the forest floor in search of something edible. She warned Tad to freeze and potted it, too. That made three pieces of small game in about three marks, or one piece per mark, and she was beginning to feel very proud of herself. That was not at all bad for someone hampered by a bad shoulder, with a primitive weapon, in unfamiliar territory. If I remember my gryphon-rations correctly, he should actually prosper on that amount of food. Granted, it’s like feeding a hawk by tidbitting it, but beggars can’t be choosers. If he isn’t exactly full at any one time, he isn‘t going hungry, either.

  He looked faintly annoyed at being asked to swallow another bit of game every mark or so, but he didn’t say anything. He was used to eating once lightly, and once hugely, then sleeping on that larger meal. He probably wondered why they were stopping so frequently just so he could eat.

  But if she carried the game until they had enough for him to have that single large meal, she’d be weighing herself down for no good purpose. Let the game ride in the most efficient way possible; inside Tad.

  If he hasn’t figured out what I’m doing, he will soon, she decided, moving on ahead.

  She was worried about him; in spite of the fact that she was the one with the worse injury—as her shoulder reminded her sharply of just how badly hurt she was, every time she moved a bit too quickly—in some ways he was the more vulnerable of the two of them.

  She knew, only too well, just how vulnerable he was. Trapped on the ground as he was, he had as many weaknesses as she did. Unless he could get his back up against something to protect it, he could not only be attacked from the rear, but from below. Most of what he had learned about fighting was meant for aerial combat, not ground fighting. Granted, he could improvise, and granted, he had four sets of very nasty “knives” on the end of each limb, not to mention the weapon in the middle of his face, but he was made for another element. Faced with the need to fight on terms and terrain he was not suited to, he was vulnerable in ways even he probably didn’t realize.

  His other weakness was the sheer volume of food he had to consume in order to stay in decent physical shape. I
f she couldn’t get that into him—well, too many days of rain-soaked dried meat, and he wouldn’t be in good condition at all.

  Too many days of that kind of ration, and we‘II have to find a permanent place to hole up, because he won’t even be able to travel.

  Walking was much harder on him than flying; he wasn’t built for it. Intellectually, of course, she had known that; watching him try to move through the underbrush had driven it home to her in a more concrete form.

  He was not clumsy; he was a great deal more graceful at this sort of travel than his classmates had ever been. He was, in fact, as adept at it as some humans—but he tired easily, and occasionally his wings got caught up on some obstacle or other. It would be some time before his legs strengthened and gained the endurance for steady walking, and until then, he was handicapped.

  If they ever ran across a large browser like a deer, he should be able to bring it down so long as they surprised it, but until then she was the better ground hunter. He was going to be depending on her for something he was normally self-sufficient at.

  She was just grateful that he was as good a tracker as he was. He’d done a fair amount to confuse their scent and backtrail, and that could only help right now.

  That might be one of the reasons I’m spotting game today; that muck he had us rub all over ourselves is probably hiding our scent and confusing the tree dwellers. Scent rose, especially in this heat; a wary canopy beast would not come anywhere near the ground with the scent of a large predator coming up to meet his nose, but at the moment all that they smelled like was crushed plants.

  And that might very well be the explanation of why they had been surrounded by silence until lately. Quite frankly, Tad was damp, and he smelled like—well—damp raptor, a combination of wet feathers and the heavy musk that was peculiar to gryphons and birds of prey. He hadn’t been able to dry out properly since the accident, and that made his scent more obvious. Could be that when we first camped, not only was he not as fragrant, but we simply weren‘t on the ground long enough for the scent to rise into the canopy. Now we are.