by Mel Dunay
Rina had been amused at the time-she had been a college student and watched the shouting match on a Rivertown news show-but right now she was mostly disgusted at the idea that her ancestors had chosen to bow down and revere this creature, that Vipin had dubbed a “serial thrill-killer,” as a guardian spirit.
The ideas she had come up with last night did not call for a lot of technology-surely the people of Mount Snarl could have tried those ideas fifteen or sixteen hundred years ago, when the creatures first came to the Peak?
Then an awful thought occurred to her: What if they had tried her ideas against the Mountain King and his sister and failed?
She stood waiting between Paa and Harish on the steps in front of the small shrine, and gritted her teeth over the fact that these people who’d known her since childhood wouldn’t hear her out without at least two older men backing her up.
The local priest came up, wearing the saffron robes that priests from most Creator-worshiping sects wore, all across Jaiya. He also wore a chain around his neck with a bunch of ten or twelve fish-shaped pendants dangling from it. The pendants jingled slightly as he walked, and marked him out as a member of the Island City priesthood.
“Young lady,” The priest began. “I have been given to understand that you want Thundermouth to renounce its guardian spirit.”
“Not just renounce it,” Rina said through a dry mouth. “Kill it.”
The theological debate that followed was not as bad as she expected. The priest knew perfectly well that the legends of “guardian spirits” were probably inspired by the same kind of creature that the Scriptures called “Old Ones,” and that according to the Scriptures at least some of the Old Ones were evil and any of them could, theoretically, be killed.
He had some trouble believing that there was an actual, evil Old One-what he called an “Avazata”-running loose on the mountain, but Rina, with help from Paa and Harish, managed to convince him of that. The hard part was convincing him to go public with all of this.
“I think it would be a severe shock to people’s beliefs, to publicly renounce Mount Snarl’s guardian spirit at a time like this,” The priest said.
“Now we could postpone the ritual, let you hunt the thing down, and no one would be the wiser. I’ve never been quite comfortable with this weird ritual anyway, but I was told to tolerate it because it was a harmless and ancient local custom. Since that’s not the case...”
“We renounce the honored dead when we find out that they are not worthy of honor,” Rina said.
“I remember when six months after Uncle Virno died, we found out that he was involved in the drug trade in Stayout. His name was scratched off the lists at the shrine of the dead, and left out of the prayer services honoring the holy dead.”
The priest opened his mouth to say something, and then shut it again. Rina knew he hadn’t been the priest here when Uncle Virno died, so although he probably knew the story, he wasn’t in a position to split hairs about it.
Rina went on: “And if we attempt to postpone the ritual, we run the risk of Shaipinob catching onto what we plan to do.”
The priest spread his hands wide as a sign of defeat. “Have it your way,” He said.
Finally, the Mountain King’s brides showed up, with a mix of parents, chaperones, and proxy grooms in tow. Rina found herself looking down into forty or so faces all looking skeptically up at her.
Except for Amita, who was scowling sullenly up at her. For a moment she froze, and then she remembered the thing in Utiva’s garden, and what she and any other brides were up against, and she forced herself to speak.
“Thank you all for coming on such short notice,” She said.
She outlined the situation. She had spoken to a government agent who was investigating the possibility of a vicious man-eating animal possibly being on the mountain.
The government agent had warned that it would be dangerous to go ahead with the wedding night customs as they were normally practiced.
Rina had volunteered to be the decoy in a plan to trap the creature in the field, and any women who wanted to help or didn’t believe there was a danger were welcome to come along.
But it would not be the kind of thing that normally went on the night after the Mountain King’s wedding. It would not be fun. The agent had told Rina to strongly encourage the others to stay home if possible.
“So how did you meet this guy?” One girl asked.
“I met him back in Barleyfields,” Rina said. With Vipin jailed and his reputation tarnished, she thought it best to bend the truth a bit.
“He thought Thundermouth was likely to be where the creature struck first, but was planning to do some investigating up the goat trails, to see if he could find the creature first and put it down. He said he would meet me at the meadow tonight along with anybody I talked into helping.”
“This government agent wouldn’t happen to be your boyfriend the drug dealer?”
It was the mother of one of Amita’s friends and she had a sneering look on her face.
“That has nothing to do with this,” Harish said, with a warning glare at the woman.
He was probably afraid that Rina would let out Amita’s secrets if pushed too hard.
“He’s not a drug dealer and we’ve only barely started talking about a serious relationship,” Rina said.
She bent the truth even farther out of shape. “And he wasn’t with me when I met this guy. There was a lot of partying in Barleyfields, and the agent had a lot of trouble getting anybody to listen to him.”
An indulgent chuckle ran through the crowd at that. Barleyfields perhaps because it was more prosperous than Stayout or Goatsfart, and the terrain was less rugged than Thundermouth’s, had a reputation for partying and letting the beer flow freely at any excuse.
“What kind of creature are we talking about?”
One of the brides asked. Rina remembered her as one of the more educated ones, taking a break from her college studies to participate in this.
Rina described it as a large, white ape-like creature, very large and fast.
“There’s been sightings of similar creatures in the higher peaks to the south,” She said, drawing on an interesting article she’d read a few years ago.
“Those aren’t normally hostile but the agent believed this one had wandered into our area for whatever reason. Possibly turned man-eater when it had trouble killing its normal prey, and moved to a more populated area for easier access to humans.”
“That sounds a lot like the old fairy tales about the Mountain King,” One of the young men scoffed. “The shape of the creature, anyway, and the white fur.”
“The agent seemed to think that something similar might have happened long ago, and started the stories about the Mountain King,” Rina replied.
She had been avoiding eye contact, looking over the heads of the small crowd in front of her, but now she scanned them, looking to see whether they believed her or not. By the Creator, they looked...not convinced necessarily, but as though they were weighing up what she had told them.
She had a member of the council backing her up, more or less, and she also had the fact that this sounded like the kind of thing college educated people would tell the locals about this or that ancestral belief.
One of the parents asked Harish if he agreed with this plan, and he said he did, with a face that made him look like he’d just taken a swig of sour beer. Rina hoped it looked like he was simply impressed with the gravity of the situation and not like he’d been coerced into saying this.
Another parent asked if the tithing fee would be waived if they pulled their daughters out at this point. Harish said no, it would not, but the payment could be deferred.
This was not what Rina wanted to hear, and probably not what most of the parents wanted to hear either, but clearly there was a limit to what he could get the rest of the council to agree to on short notice with no explanation beyond “There might be a man-eating beast on the peak.”
&nb
sp; There was a lot of arguing back and forth. The wealthier parents were inclined to pull their daughters out just because there was obviously something dubious going on, while their daughters, who tended to be on the indulged side and wanted to party, fought to stay in.
The poorer, less educated daughters were more frightened by what Rina had said and more willing to pull out, but their parents were more suspicious of this “freethinking” woman. Besides, they were in less shape to pay the tithe for exemption from the ritual.
Finally, Rina found herself with three female companions, two from poorer families and one from a more prosperous one. There were also four males: the rich girl and one of the poor ones had boyfriends, and all three had fathers chaperoning, although the rich girl’s father had clearly not been planning on involving himself until the man-eating apes were mentioned.
There was a debate about whether to go ahead with the marriage part of the ritual. The priest was rather looking forward to dropping that part altogether, and Rina said she would not be participating in that part.
“The man I wanted as my proxy groom isn’t going to be available for this, and I didn’t really want to go through the marriage part without a guy I was at least somewhat interested in.”
“Even if he is in jail right now,” Amita sneered.
She had kept quiet up until now, apparently afraid of Rina getting her in more trouble, but her bad mood had finally gotten the better of her.
“I know he didn’t do what he’s accused of, because I was right there when everything went down,” Rina snapped.
Beneath her concern for Vipin, she felt a little embarrassed to be defending a man she was attracted to, like the long-suffering girlfriend of a wrongfully convicted man in a bad soap opera, but reminded herself that if Kajjal had been in that kind of situation, and Amita had been making snotty comments about her, Rina would have defended her friend as well.
Amita wasn’t participating in the ritual. and didn’t seem to have an opinion on the question of going forward with the marriage ceremony itself, beyond sneering at Rina. But the other girls were heavily invested in the pageantry of the ritual and they carried the day.
Rina could not get away to visit with Vipin at the jail that evening, but she stayed busy enough to where she fell asleep immediately that night, without dreams.
CHAPTER EIGHT
The ceremony the next morning was not as flashy as the one Rina had seen as a small girl. There were fewer brides, and fewer rich ones, and that undertone of fear hiding underneath. Rina recorded it with her camera phone, for Vipin’s sake.
As an anthropologist, he had been intrigued to learn that the words of the wedding ritual were based on an ancient rite, one used for conquering kings to wed a number of princesses from subjected kingdoms all at once, in order to cement the conquerors’ political ties to their new realms.
Vipin would appreciate being able to see what that might look like. Well, he would appreciate it if they all lived through this, anyway.
The wedding ceremony was followed by a feast and a dance, but Rina did not get to participate in either of those. Instead, she went around gathering up old clothes from each of the girls involved, helped the beekeepers move the hives into position and set up the trap.
The dance wrapped up earlier than it would have, allowing the girls to and their escorts to douse themselves with wool oil. Paa unsurprisingly joined the escort group, against Harish’s advice.
“Have we heard anything about Vipin?” Rina asked.
“The constable managed to get in touch with the agency Vipin works for, and they said they did have an agent with that name and that general description working in this area...”
“That’s great!” Rina said. “Why isn’t he with you right now?”
“They said they needed to do some checking. Even though Vipin gave them some identification codes they seemed to recognize.”
“What?” Rina said. She thought, they’re abandoning him again, aren’t they?
“I’m guessing there’s a question of whether it’s politically expedient to acknowledge your friend, and it’s been kicked upstairs to be answered.” Paa said.
He was silent for a moment and then added: “I don’t think that jail would stop him, from your descriptions of what he’s capable of but I I hope he doesn’t hurt the constable too badly on the way out.”
“I’m sure it will be fine,” Rina said.
She had trouble imagining Vipin harming someone who was merely annoying, like the constable and not a threat like Jabar.
Rina and her father managed to find a suitable, slightly precarious boulder on the slopes above the meadow where the brides would spend the night.
It was reachable by one of the goat trails, and a workable distance away from a clump of rocks where the larger group could hide-not so close that Shaipinob, the Mountain King, would automatically go after the others when it realized where the boulder had come from, but close enough to where Rina hide with the others at first and then get into position easily.
Rina and Paa stashed a makeshift pike by the boulder to act as a lever and as a weapon, and a handful of machetes and threshing implements near the main hiding place for the others to use.
They were working on the assumption that Shaipinob’s lair was somewhere up on the peak itself, and had chosen a slope that was off to one side relative to the most direct path up to the peak.
As the sun set and the moon rose, the group huddled down in their hiding place to wait. For Rina, the suspense was terrible, stretched to the breaking point.
And yet, the feeling was familiar: she had gone through something like this before, but where? It was a little bit like the feeling of waiting for her parents or Kajjal’s parents to come by and inspect the accounting books in a year when the girls’ clothing store was bleeding red ink, but this was far worse.
Paa put his hand on her shoulder, and Rina looked wildly around. Paa put his hand on the top of her head and turned it to the right and upwards.
There was something large and pale coming down the slope in the moonlight. Rina heard a slight inhale of breath from the girl beside her, and quickly put a hand over her mouth before she could make a noise.
Everyone else was perhaps too frightened to make a noise, Rina certainly knew she was. Hopefully it wouldn’t stop her from acting when the time came.
The pale thing came closer, and Rina could see that it traveled on all fours, but seemed to have hand-like paws both front and back, like an ape. it had the long arms and relatively short legs of an ape as well, but a much longer, leaner body that made her think of Bhana.
In the moonlight she should be been able to see its eyes gleam, as she had with the other Old One, but there was no orange glints of light here. There didn’t even seem to be dark sockets where the eyes should have been.
There was a sharp-toothed mouth, wide as a steel trap, open so that Shaipinob could paint its environment with sonar. A pair of huge nostrils flared just above the mouth. She thought the nostrils gave off a faint reddish bronze glow, like Vipin when his Oldblood side showed, but she wasn’t sure.
Above the nostrils, the creature’s face was blank and featureless except for a pair of huge leaf shaped ears, poised to collect sonar feedback, and a ridged crest along the top of the skull, that reminded Rina of the one its sister had.
The thing paused, a little above the goat trail the humans had used to reach their hiding place, and sniffed the air. Rina retreated behind the clump of rocks so that she would not show up on its sonar.
Hopefully it wouldn’t decide to go chasing after that herd of goats it smelled...Rina touched the nearest machete, just to reassure herself that she had something to use if it came after them now.
The thing snorted and continued down the slope. It struck Rina that this creature was much less humanlike in its behavior than its “sister,” Bhana, had been.
She couldn’t assume that it was stupid because of that. The thing trotted down to the tent and s
topped dead. Was something wrong? What had she not done right? Rina started crawling towards the boulder.
The creature began muttering to itself in a harsh, gutteral tone. Rina suddenly realized with horror that it was talking to itself in the language of the ancient Scriptures, but the words she recognized were all curses and condemnations, the kind of thing the Scriptures used when laying out the punishment for malefactors.
Once again, she wondered what had gone wrong. She reached the boulder, and grabbed the pike. She heard the creature start to move again, first a walk, then the trotting movement from earlier, then a gallop. She showed herself to get itself attention, draw it away from the others, then she started to push the boulder loose.
The thing could not move as fast on the rocky part of the slopes as its sister had been able to on solid ground, but it moved faster than a human could. The boulder pulled loose and tumbled down, straight at the Old One...but Rina saw it dodge aside at the last moment and keep charging.
Her best bet for now was to hold her position and point the pike at it the moment it tried to jump her. There wasn’t much chance she could kill it, or survive the encounter, but there was a chance this would slow it down enough for the others to escape or Vipin to intervene.
She was more afraid than she had ever been before in her life, but she could not run. There was a terrifying clearness in her brain that told her this would only be worse if she tried to run. Other people might die.
She would almost certainly die no matter what she did, but if she stuck to the plan, she would die showing this thing what its brides really thought of it. She remembered Raki’s horrible description of what was done to the victims, and bared her teeth in something that was more snarl than smile or grimace.