Web of Defeat

by Lionel Fenn

  Wonderful, he thought; my epitaph will be: he drowned, but he was a lot of laughs.

  Another breath as quick as the first, and his left hand began to lose hold. He struggled to find another place to put it, cursed mentally when his right hand suddenly slid loose and left his arm dangling for a precious, dangerous, foolhardy moment.

  The rankgo paced the lorra effortlessly.

  Gideon fought upward for another brief feast of fresh air, dropped again, and lost his left hand's comfort. Within seconds, his legs, tired and near to cramping from their exertion, slowly, inexorably, lost their grip.

  Red passed on at top speed, helpless to do anything but spear a few rankgos and sound his despair whenever he managed to stop giggling.

  Dropped like an unwanted torpedo, Gideon struck out instantly for the surface, silently praised the refreshing air that filled his lungs, and wondered how his only swimming skill, that of floating on his back somewhat like an overcome guppy, was going to get him out of this trouble. The answer was too painfully obvious, especially when a quill lanced his forearm, and a second one grazed his right ear.

  The River Khaleque, forging blissfully ahead as it had done for countless centuries, blithely carried him downstream, and it wasn't long before he realized with definitely mixed emotions that the rankgos were no longer attacking. As soon as he had stopped trying to steer himself toward shore, they formed an unearthly wall around him, a flotilla of protection and evil guidance, while he could only watch helplessly as his friends tried to keep pace with him on the bank, falling farther and farther back with each bend of the river.

  Soon, a dense barrier of trees and brush closed on the banks.

  Soon after, he could no longer hear his sister's cries as Botham, thinking of her first and Gideon last, prevented her from taking wing to mark his progress and possible rescue at some distant point along the way.

  He was alone.

  Just him and the rankgos.

  Until one of them came a little too close, and he paddled to his right. Closer, and he paddled more quickly. Closer still, and he understood that he was being herded toward shore.

  I think, he thought, this is not a good thing.

  —|—

  The river bottom climbed steeply. Gideon sank in relief and was soon able to stagger up a gentle, rocky incline into a heavy stand of green-barked trees whose high-grown foliage was thin enough to let the sunshine in and dense enough to prevent unwanted ultraviolet rays from pinking his flesh. He spat a little, coughed a lot, and dropped to the ground, knees drawn to his chest while he watched the rankgos cavorting playfully in the water. They seemed to have lost interest in him, and within minutes there was only one left, ominously stationed in the middle of the current just in case, he figured, he was tempted to strike out for the opposite shore.

  "Fat chance," he told it.

  The rankgo put a quill neatly through the heel of his left boot.

  Gideon instinctively reached for his bat, and changed his mind as soon as his fingers closed around it. Clobbering one of them wasn't going to get him back to his sister. Nor, he thought further, was sitting here all day.

  He groaned a little and stood, slapping clots of mud from his jeans and shirt as he walked into the forest. There had to be a reason he had been singled out for escort, and he was not about to stick around to learn why. The blue-eyed rankgo was evidence enough that either Wamchu or one of his wives was looking out for him, and not in the sense of caring for his welfare, his well-being, or his—

  "Sonofabitch."

  He was in a wide clearing whose feathery perimeter was marked by the fronds of fairly large, if not actually gigantic, ferns. Plumes of steam coiled from the bright green grass. A bird sang to itself off-key somewhere over his head.

  And on a rock in the clearing's center sat a woman.

  An extraordinarily exquisite woman wearing a totally inappropriate but startlingly effective blue silk dress that was conveniently slit up both sides almost to the hip to enable her to walk. Which she did when she slid off her perch and sauntered toward him, her straight black hair swaying across her shoulders, her clearly Oriental features arranged in an expression of seductive welcome, and her deep blue eyes narrowed in acute suspicion.

  "Chou-Li," he said, bracing himself for assault either physical or psychic.

  She nodded, and for a brief second her luxurious bangs veiled those deadly eyes. This was one of the wives of Lu Wamchu. This was a creature—and he felt no compunction about calling her so, despite her unquestionable beauty—whose peculiar abilities were as cold as her eyes, and whose compassion for her fellow humans would fill, he supposed, a good-sized colander.

  This was not going to be easy.

  She stopped less than a foot away and gave him a smile, one that proved she was considerably out of practice.

  "I guess," he said, "you're going to kill me."

  Chou-Li put a long-nailed finger to her dark but not red lips and giggled. Coy was also something she needed to work on, but he wasn't going to argue; it was better than having her turn his blood to ice, which deed she had attempted once before, at their only other meeting.

  "And I guess, too," he added with a jerk of a thumb over his shoulder, "I have you to thank for bringing me here?"

  She nodded, once.

  He waited.

  She examined his face from under her bangs while one delicate hand stroked the hair that lay spread across her chest. Then she reached out to touch the knob of his bat, and hissed when a gout of steam rose from the wood. She stepped back. She sucked her finger and narrowed her eyes even more.

  "That," she said at last, pointing to the offensive weapon, "is a Whale thing, yes?"

  He nodded.

  "I am... impressed." Her voice was much warmer than the air around her, more in keeping with her exotic appearance than the cold-burn marks her bare feet left on the ground. "But I should have known you would not come unarmed."

  "Right," he said, wishing she'd get to the point.

  Abruptly, she turned and beckoned to him over her shoulder.

  "I don't think so," he said.

  She walked confidently toward the rock, looked again, and smiled when she saw how closely he was paying attention to the sway of her hips under the rustle of the silk that parted and reformed around the length of her limbs, which seemed, to him, to go on forever.

  He smiled mirthlessly and shook his head. She was not going to be able to entrap him merely by using her feminine wiles. He was too smart for that, and too tired from his swim. She would have to think of something else.

  She did. She smoothed her hands slowly down her sides, accentuating the way the natural clinging power of the silk outlined a figure that was entirely natural, and not entirely without its pleasant aspects.

  His smile became cruelly disinterested. She was using an interesting and perhaps even viable weapon, but one that did no more than shorten his breath just a little.

  She blew a kiss at him.

  He shrugged. What the hell, he thought; if she's pitching, I'm catching—at a safe distance, however, since a vision of Ivy flashed through his mind and the consequences he weighed nearly broke his back.

  "I think we cannot wait any longer," she told him. "Please come with me."

  "I've met you before," he reminded her. "And I've met your husband. If you're going to do anything, I'd just as soon you did it here."

  Jesus, he told himself; what the hell are you talking about?

  Chou-Li leaned back against the rock, her eyes now mere slits in that alabaster face, her legs crossed at the ankles, her arms folded under her breasts. "My husband has nothing to do with this," she said angrily. "He sits down in Choy and pretends great plots, using silly little toys to move play armies around as if they were real." A toss of her head threw her hair behind her. "We got bored waiting."

  "We?"

  "My sister and I."

  "Ah," he said, and managed to overcome his fear and step a few paces nearer. This was
getting interesting. "You have dreams of conquest, then?"

  "No. But if it comes to that, we'll take it."

  He frowned. "You're doing this for fun?"

  "Have you ever been to Choy?"

  "Not really. Umbrel, once. Your husband's so-called summer palace."

  "Then you know."

  "Know what?"

  "How boring it is."

  "How boring what is?"

  Her cheeks flushed prettily. "Being married to an arrogant, self-loving, insensitive, tall shit, that's what!"

  Steam rose in a boiling cloud around her. The rock began to show signs of cracking.

  Gideon waved his arms to clear the air, and dared yet another step closer. The woman, for all her vicious and disgusting ways, was undeniably attractive, and perhaps he could entice more information from her, something he could use to stem the tide of famine that was threatening his newfound people.

  "I don't get it," he said honestly. "I don't know what you want from me. I thought it was rather clear that you and I, well, we're kind of on different sides."

  "You're afraid I will kill you?"

  He winced and looked away. "You didn't have to put it quite that way, but yes."

  She leaned back and laughed. A bright, sparkling laugh that withered half the ferns and dropped several large branches from the trees surrounding the clearing. The bird overhead stopped singing. Off to the northwest, the volcano rumbled.

  And when she stopped, flushed and gasping for breath, she shook her head. "Oh, no, dear hero. I will not kill you. I am a keeper of promises and I will not kill you."

  "Thanks."

  "You didn't let me finish," she snapped, stamping a foot, the rock cracking still more.

  "Well—"

  "He never lets me finish, you know," she continued, indicating a vague point over his shoulder. "He just sits around making pronouncements and declarations and never lets me get a word in edgewise. Do you have any idea, hero, what it's like living with a man like that?"

  "Listen," he said, "I'm not the one to—"

  "I swear by all the gods, I really do, that if he interrupts me one more time I'm going to freeze his tongue out."

  Gideon clamped his lips shut.

  "Cretin," she muttered. "How he got to where he is without killing himself is absolutely beyond me."

  "Well," he ventured, "I did have something to do with that, if you remember."

  She looked to the sky, then glared at him. "That's not what I meant. You were lucky. You caught him on an off day."

  "What's an off day?" he asked. "He seemed pretty effective to me."

  "An off day," she said with lowered voice, "is when I'm not around to save his precious hide."

  "Oh. I see." Surreptitiously, he judged the distance to the trees, to the river behind him, and figured that a timely and preferably lengthy diversion was what he needed now in order to make a break for it. He had already proven he could handle the nightbird she had sent to dismantle him in Rayn, and as long as he kept some of the forest between him and her power, he might be able to make it to the valley before she caught him. "Well, I'm sorry for your troubles—"

  "You're sorry?"

  "—but I still don't see what that has to do with me."

  She smiled then, and deliberately looked from him to the trees, and to the river behind him, and shook her head slowly in a playful, scolding manner. "You're going to help me," she said.

  "I... help you what?"

  "Help me do what I'm trying to do."

  There were, as he saw it, two possibilities: she was either trying to make Wamchu jealous so he'd pay more attention to her, or she was defecting to a new set of bad guys in order to establish her own cozy little empire.

  "I want you to help me kill my sister."

  That's a good one, too, he thought, and bolted for the trees.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Gideon, in his heroic but fruitless campaign to become the best damned football player on the face of the planet, always believed that success depended on what your criteria were for the attainment of your goal. A successful quarterback was one who led his team on to more victories and championships than the other guys; a successful president was one who cajoled, bribed, and shamed Congress into passing the laws that the people who elected him thought they wanted until the tax bill came due; and a successful hero was one who didn't get killed.

  In that case, his deliberate, headlong drive for freedom was an unqualified success.

  He was, however, stopped a good five feet from the sought-after safety of the nearest tree when Chou-Li, in the middle of a high-pitched girlish laugh, froze its bark, stiffened its pith, and iced its sap, causing it to collapse directly in front of him. His consequential options presented themselves then in a less than bountiful fraction of a second—he could either hurdle it, run into it, or stop and turn around, hands out in surrender and a stupid smile on his face.

  Chou-Li smiled back and crooked a finger at him.

  He glanced wistfully into the forest, sent out a silent plea for help along telepathic lines he knew deep in his heart were permanently out of order, and followed her at a respectful distance as she led him eastward along a narrow, frond-lined path. She said nothing to encourage or goad him, and did not look back once she had begun; her confidence in his innate understanding of their current situation was such that when he stopped to examine a particularly beautiful blossom on a stem packed with dripping thorns, she only froze one petal.

  He didn't bother to ask how he was supposed to help her kill her sister.

  He didn't bother to demand that he be returned immediately and without delay to the bosoms of his companions.

  Prudence, and an overwhelming will to survive, stayed his bold tongue, which was, when he thought about it, less bold than impetuous, a word he had always thought was more kind than "stupid."

  What he did want to know, and what she would not tell him when he did ask, very politely and with a disarming smile, was where they were going in such a hurry. No doubt she had a secret camp somewhere deep in the woods, a fortress of some sort she and her sister, Thong of the blue eyes and the heated disposition, had established in order to pursue their peculiar brand of vengeance. There was also no doubt that Thong, who had nearly boiled his blood and set fire to his lungs at their single previous meeting (which, coincidentally enough, was the same time he had met Chou-Li, and the third wife, Agnes, about whom nothing thus far had been spoken, and which was fine with him), was not unaware of her twin's plans for her early retirement from the battlefield of life.

  What he did doubt, rather strongly, was his ability to get out of this in one piece. He would even settle for a couple of manageable pieces, as long as he remained in a regularly breathing state.

  An hour passed, and yet another. Conversation was thwarted by the pace she set and the heavy, humid air that clung to him like fog.

  They paused only once, when she permitted him to drink from a stagnant pool of water in which a variety of unmentionable things and pieces of things floated.

  Once he was done, having done his best not to gag, she blew him a mocking kiss for his bravery and walked on more swiftly still. And it didn't take long for her physical allure to fade into an indistinct blue blur, though not so much of a blur that he didn't notice when she had to step over a fallen log. He was tired; he wasn't quite yet numb.

  A third hour was left behind, the trail widened considerably, and the forest was soon transformed into a tropical jungle, the likes of which he had not seen since the last time he had had a boyhood fantasy about wearing tiger-skin loincloths and talking with elephants.

  Vines as thick as Botham's blacksmith thighs hung limply from trees whose rich crowns were a hundred feet or more above the ground, thus permitting only a bit of sunlight to penetrate to their roots and turning what light there was a subtle shade of mint. The underbrush was sporadic in its placement, but high- and wide-leafed, and there was the sound of constant dripping as warm moisture condensed o
n leaves and fell in miniature waterfalls to thickets and carpets of ivy that, Gideon noted, did not remain entirely still. Since there was no wind to speak of, and no breeze whatsoever, he was puzzled, thinking that some tiny creature used the bedded plant as its home.

  He allowed a secret smile to tug at his lips.

  A tiny creature, such as the cute but poisonous footh of the western forests, might well prove to be the key to his escape if he were able to lure one to his side.

  As a test, and nothing ventured nothing gained, he tossed a pebble into one small patch; the ivy surged over it and spit it back.

  Okay, he thought; that's one for the plants.

  Birds called in raucous congregation.

  The trail wound on.

  Beasts of indeterminate size grunted and coughed.

  Twilight fell.

  A convenient rock appeared in the middle of the trail, and he staggered to it, collapsed on it, and sighed loudly. Chou-Li turned with a frown and put her hands on her hips in an attitude of impatience.

  "I need a rest," he told her. He held up his feet. "They're killing me." He pulled off a boot and massaged his sole, pulled off the other and repeated the temporary respite. Then he turned his boots over and shook his head, "I know I should have gotten a new pair. Another mile and there'll be holes in here big enough to fall through." He replaced them on his feet and rubbed the sides of his neck. "Good!"

  Chou-Li approached him with a wary sidle. "You are truly in pain?"

  "No, but I am truly exhausted." He pointed to her bare feet, so white and soft against the harsh jungle floor that he could not imagine she was touching the ground at all. "I really don't know how you do it. I mean, how do you keep them from being cut to ribbons? Don't you get blisters or something?"

  "What are blisters?"