by David Drake
The air of the small room was gray with cloying residue from the drug the cripple had smoked while he transcribed the words from the cloth to the floor they'd whitewashed for the purpose. The container had been full when the wizards began their preparations; only half a dozen pellets remained. The older man's fragile control had broken under the weight of the spell they were attempting.
Though rural labor had given the younger man considerable wiry strength, Cerix's arms did the work of other men's legs. From the waist up, he could wrestle down youths half again his size. He batted away Halphemos' hand with childish fury and gripped his wheels again to spin himself forward.
“Cerix?” Halphemos said.
The cripple didn't move. He closed his eyes; tears crawled down his cheeks. “You don't know what it's like!” he pleaded. “I can feel the demons gnawing on my legs. Every day, every breath, every moment. You don't know!”
“Cerix,” Halphemos said softly. “We owe it to Ilna and her brother. We have to do this.”
Cerix gave a shuddering sigh. “So you say,” he said in a savage whisper. He shook himself, then wiped his face with his sleeve. He looked at his friend with a forced smile.
“Well, I suppose you're right,” he said. “I'll be needing something to steady me afterwards, won't 1? Sure, let's get this over with.”
Halphemos clasped hands with Cerix. They took their places beside the circle of power, Halphemos squatting and the cripple beside him in the chair. The lamp hanging from the wall bracket behind them shone on the parchment which Cerix held in his left hand.
“Can you read it?” he asked. He tapped the sheet with the length of rye straw he was using as a pointer.
“Yes,” Halphemos said. He cleaned the athame he used for private incantations by running his left thumb and forefinger over the blade of walrus ivory. As a showman he used a narwal's tusk for the broad motions of his public displays. “You've taught me well, Cerix. I won't fail you.”
The cripple grunted. “I'm not worried about you,” he said. He touched his pointer to the first of the syllables he'd written on the parchment in the blocky modern script which Halphemos could read.
The younger wizard tapped the corresponding symbol drawn on the floor in cursive Old Script. “Phosousouel,” he intoned, his voice strong but laboring against the power of the word he spoke, “gistochama, nouchaei...”
The circle and the words around its rim were written in soot congealed with olive oil. Each time the athame touched the floor, the symbols rotated to bring the next in front of Halphemos. Cerix, his face stiff and gray, drew his straw along the parchment at the rate the chant itself set.
“Apraphes einath adones...”Halphemos said. He flexed his torso unconsciously as though he were shouldering a heavy weight, but his voice remained firm. “Dechochtha iathenouion.”
What had been a circle on the floor opened slowly into a pit with white sides whirling like a maelstrom. The syllables in Old Script stood stark and black against blurred chaos. Cerix continued to deacon out the chant, but even he could no longer be sure of the words on the parchment. Halphemos didn't miss a beat.
“Chrara!” he shouted. “Cherubin! Zaaraben!”
The room had vanished. A hot, violent wind roared from nowhere, and the pit was a corridor before them.
There was no floor or existence except for the shimmering tunnel beyond their world. Against its blazing white light, objects were forming.
“Namadon!”Halphemos shouted.
The wind was a hurricane, an unstoppable torrent. The parchment flashed from Cerix's hand, shredding into fragments as it disappeared down the tunnel.
The wind whirled the wizards after the parchment. Halphemos continued to shout the incantation.
Cashel eyed the bulge of rock above them as best he could by the light of a few stars. It didn't look very high. At least it wasn't as high as it was steep. “Zahag, you go up and I'll hand Aria to you!” he said.
Something was chuckling in the darkness to their right. It went on the way a brook runs, mindless and gurgling.
The chuckling thing had been keeping parallel with Cashel and his companions all the way up the slope. It could've been any distance away, from miles to close enough to hit if Cashel spat into the encircling night.
“Well, I don't know,” the ape said in a subdued voice. He was hunched at Cashel’s feet—literally. He pressed his coarse-furred flank against Cashel's shin. “I don't think I want to lead.”
“Get up there,” Cashel said. He wasn't going to raise his voice, but his hands squeezed his quarterstaff hard. “Or go your own way, Zahag. And may the Shepherd forsake me if I have any more to do with you!”
Well, maybe he'd raised his voice a little after all. The chuckling stopped briefly while the echoes died away.
“Yes, chief,” the ape said. He clambered up the rock face as easily as he'd have walked the same distance on the flat. His arms covered an amazing span. With his short legs gripping also, Zahag looked like an enormous crab spider.
“Send the female up!” he called from close above. An arm reached down; the ape's hand was half again as long as Cashel's own.
“I'll show you that I'm worthy, Cashel,” the princess said in a tiny, frightened voice.
Instead of making a stirrup with both hands, Cashel put his left palm against the rock and said, “Hop onto the back of my wrist, Princess. Then grab Zahag's hand, all right?”
“Whatever you say, Cashel.” Aria piped in a desperate and completely failed attempt to sound cheerful. She stepped on his arm in a gingerly fashion and waved her right arm overhead until Zahag caught it. She must have closed her eyes.
Cashel didn't blame her for being frightened. He hadn't been willing to lean his staff against the rock so he had both hands free to lift her.
Besides, she didn't weigh anything. Purple finches sometimes landed on Cashel's shoulder while he waited to turn the oxen at the end of a furrow. Aria didn't seem much heavier.
“I can see the light!” Aria cried. “It's right ahead of us. It's coming from a cave but there's a rock in the entrance!”
The moon came out from behind the high clouds in which it'd hidden for most of the night. Cashel didn't have any great affection for the moon. When it was full, the animals got restless.
Cashel had never thought of moonlight as being hostile before, though. Maybe it was the things it shone on in this place.
The slope had been a succession of crags, each a barrier but no single one so high that Cashel couldn't climb it. Even Aria could manage with help. The path they followed was barren, but on either side scrub pines found soil enough in crevices to grow.
Among the pines below Cashel stood hulking, two-legged figures. He couldn't tell their numbers in this light; some of what he saw were probably the shadows of misshapen trees.
There were likely a dozen of them, anyhow, and any one of them bigger than Cashel was himself. Like Zahag their legs were much shorter than their arms, but they had long skulls and were as hairless as so many eggs.
“Do you want us?” Cashel shouted. His back was to the crag; he held the quarterstaff across his body and a little advanced, ready for use. “Come and get us, then!”
One of the figures stepped into the full moonlight, half a dozen paces below. It resumed its gurgling chuckle. None of the others advanced.
“Cashel!” the princess cried. “Please come up! Please!”
Goodness, she must be scared to say please like that. And surely she had a right...
Cashel turned to the crag. He butted his staff firmly so that it wouldn't slip, put his left foot about knee-height up the rock face, and lifted himself on the quarterstaff.
Zahag had one arm stretched back to hang on to a knob of rock. With the other he caught the crook of Cashel's left elbow. The ape's flat grip was as strong as a hook of strap iron. Cashel flung himself to the top of the outcrop, drawing his staff up after him. The cap of bronze cutwork gave him a better grip than the polished iron fer
rules of the staff he'd left in Folquin's palace.
The moon went back into the clouds. The chuckling seemed louder, but that might have been Cashel's imagination.
“Quickly!” Zahag said, tugging Cashel along by the hand still holding his arm. “Maybe you can snap their chief's neck, I don't say you can't, but what if the rest of them come for us?”
Cashel shook his elbow free. “Right,” he said. “We're almost to what we were seeing.”
It was a night for first times. Zahag had just included Aria in his band, or whatever it was that apes had.
The blue light Cashel had seen the night previous was up a last slope, no more than forty paces long and gentle enough that even the princess could walk it unaided. Crawl it, maybe, but Cashel didn't intend to take a hand away from his staff just to keep Aria from skinning her knees.
The glare was so fiercely bright that the air around it glowed. It seeped past the irregular surface of the great boulder crammed into the mouth of a cave. Cashel heard a faint whine like that of a distant mosquito. It made his skin tingle.
He looked over his shoulder. He couldn't see the huge not-men who were following, but he'd have known they were there even without the continuing chuckle. Why did only one of them make a sound?
Zahag and Aria were scrambling ahead. Cashel lengthened his stride, leaning well forward to keep his balance without having to dab a hand down. The slope's weathered surface gave his feet a firm grip.
His companions had reached the cave mouth. Aria was weeping from fear. She leaned against the boulder, trying to move it. “I'm worthy!” she said. “Oh please Mistress God, I'm worthy!”
Cashel didn't laugh. He didn't remember ever seeing anything so silly as this: the princess straggling to move a boulder that Cashel knew was beyond his own strength.
But she was trying. Cashel didn't think he'd ever come to like the princess, but it wasn't hard to respect her.
“Zahag, keep an eye behind,” Cashel said, running his left hand over the seam where the boulder was wedged against the cave wall. “Let me know if I need to...”
He didn't finish the thought. It'd have bothered Aria still worse; and truth to tell, Cashel didn't much fancy seeing a dozen or more of those brutes hoisting themselves over the lip of rock himself.
He wondered what they were called. He'd have to ask Tenoctris when next he saw her. When.
The boulder's fit was closer than Cashel had seen between house beams in the past. He tried the weight, pressing one palm against the boulder just in case it was balanced to shift at a touch.
Well, he hadn't figured it would be.
Cashel itched all over, he supposed from the glare. He'd felt this way when he spun his staff as he and Zahag had gone through the wall of flame to rescue the princess.
Who didn't want to be rescued—then. She sure did now. Since Cashel had taken the job, he guessed he'd better get on with it.
He set the butt of his staff into the seam and leaned against it cautiously. As he'd expected, the lever flexed without any effect on the boulder. This fir staff might not have quite the strength of the hickory he was used to, but Cashel was pretty sure that even an iron bar as thick as his arm would bend without doing a blind bit of good.
Zahag began to jump back and forth, shrieking at the night in ape language. Cashel could pretty well guess what he was saying. Prayers might be a better choice, but who knew? Maybe swearing would keep the others off for a little longer.
Cashel set the quarterstaff beside the cave. He spread his arms to grip the boulder well around the curve on both sides. He knew he couldn't lift something so heavy, but he had to try.
Cashel braced himself and started to pull. His grip on the rough surface stayed firm, but the boulder didn't move. He kept leaning his weight back. His pulse was singing in his ears.
“I'm worthy!” Aria screamed over the ape's gibbering curses. “I'm worthy of a king!”
She must have picked up his staff. Cashel couldn't see it any longer in the corner of his eye, even before the red haze of blood filled his vision.
The boulder didn't move. The boulder would never move.
“Duzi, save my flock!” Cashel shouted. His world exploded into crackling blue fire.
By using the spear as a balance pole, Sharina was able to dance across the fallen tree to keep up with Hanno ahead of her. The bark beneath the layer of wet moss had rotted enough that sheets of it threatened to slide away beneath her; Hanno, twice her weight, seemed to have no difficulty.
The bottom of the gully was rock-strewn and forty feet down. Sharina didn't really expect to slip off... and as much at home as Hanno seemed in this rain-drenched world, he'd probably reach back and grab her before her feet had left the trunk.
“Unarc keeps a snare or two down there,” Hanno said as he hopped to the solid ground. His spearbutt gestured into the gully. “The hombacks travel the easy way, so once they've made a trail you can take them from the same snares till you're old and gray.”
He laughed. “Not that Unarc's got hair enough to get gray,” he added. “Don't expect he's been getting older this past while neither, not the way the Monkeys are cutting up.”
Sharina stepped to the ground instead of jumping; she was afraid that the bark would slough and spill her if she put that extra strain on it. The hunter's balance must be perfect, because she knew that though her own was quite good she couldn't equal the big man's ease on dangerous footing.
A beetle with a jeweled carapace droned between her and Hanno. It moved slowy with its wings blurring to support a body the size of a man's fist.
The forest floor squished, but Sharina's toes could find a hard substrate not far beneath the leaf litter. They'd passed stands of giant horsetails in particularly wet sections but the trees here were araucarias, conifers whose trunks were visibly conical and whose branches started horizontal but bent up sharply on the tips.
“Are the animals you hunt dangerous?” Sharina asked, as much to show interest in her companion's life as because she cared about the answer. She'd been raised to keep an inn. If the customer thought of you as a friendly peer, he was more likely to pay his scot without objection than if he considered the inn staff to be surly menials.
Although some interest was justified. The Hairy Men might be a new danger, but Sharina was pretty sure they weren't the only threat to hunters—and castaways—on Bight.
“No, not unless you happen to be standing in the place a hornback's bound and determined to go,” Hanno said. He carried what he'd described as a light pack: it nonetheless weighed at least fifty pounds, mostly of grain and dried fruit. “They don't have no more brains than a cockroach, but they weigh a ton or better, some of them. But that's like felling a tree on yourself: if you pay attention to what you're doing, it won't happen but maybe one time in a thousand.”
“And predators?” Sharina asked. They were paralleling a body of water shallow enough that horsetails of ordinary size grew most of the way across its fifty-foot width. If there was a current, it was a sluggish one. That a pond—or marsh—should stand so close to a deep ravine proved that the underlying soil was an impermeable clay.
“There's lizards that run on their hind legs,” Hanno said. “Half a ton each and they've got a righteous mouthful of teeth, but they rush straight on. You just butt your spear against your right boot and let them run right up it. Anyhow, they ain't common.”
“I'll keep that in mind,” Sharina said. She grinned, trying to imagine herself awaiting the charge of a half-ton monster with a mouthful of teeth. Well, since she'd left Barca's Hamlet, she'd done other things she'd never have expected she could.
“We cross the lagoon up here,” Hanno said. “There's a ford. And then—”
A lizard—a baby crocodile, all scutes and bony plates, Sharina decided—splashed from the horsetails into the water as they approached. It swam with strong, sinuous curves of its flattened tail; its clawed feet were against its sides.
“Anyhow,” the hunter conti
nued, “Unarc's place is just over the rise. He's got a hide in a hollow tree that I figure you can lay up in while I check on the boat alone.”
“Well,” Sharina said. “If you—”
Water roared. The little crocodile vanished in a whirlpool. A flat-headed monster with eyes bulging on the top of its skull swept to the surface, turned, and vanished again into the tannin-dark water. It was huge. Its skin was. the slimy black color of a rotten banana.
Sharina stopped. “What was that?” she snapped.
“Oh, they're no danger neither,” Hanno said. “Not to something our size. They're salamanders, I reckon. They lie on the bottom of a pond. When something swims overhead, well, you saw what happens. I don't recall I ever saw one leave the water except when a pond dried up. Even when they have to they can't walk far.”
His spear pointed. “Here's the ford,” he said, and strode into the water without concern.
Sharina followed, keeping close. At least the salamander had just gotten a meal. That salamander had, at least.
“I'm wondering about heading for Sirimat after I get you back to Valles,” Hanno said. He strode into a tangle of roots and tree boles on the other side of the lagoon. There wasn't anything Sharina would have recognized as a path without him, but the big hunter slid between obstacles instead of forcing his way against them. “If the Monkeys are acting up—”
He shrugged, then moved his spear in a serpentine arc. It threaded through a knot of upturned roots that Sharina had thought was completely impervious to an object so long.
“—well, I can't work my trap lines and fight Monkeys every night. So I need to find another place I can hunt.”
Sharina blinked, then giggled. Hanno wasn't inventing little concerns because he was afraid to face the major question of survival. He took survival as a given and was puzzling over how he was going to make a living in the future.
That wasn't a little concern, come to think—if you assumed there was going to be a future. She wasn't sure Hanno had good judgment, but he was better company than a realist would have been.