Web of Defeat

by Lionel Fenn

  "I've been talking to Abber," he said at last.

  Suspicion changed direction, and the grey man shifted from cower to cringe without moving a muscle.

  "He tells me he's the palace masseur."

  "He does what he can," Chou-Li admitted with a flash of a calf that put frost on his shadow.

  Thong only shrugged, and a baked pineapple crashed off the roof of the cage.

  A deep breath, and a prayer. "It seems to me, and you can correct me if I'm wrong since I'm new at this sort of thing, that what you both need now is a hell of a good massage."

  The sisters frowned their puzzlement.

  Gideon held up his hands. "It will relax you. Clear your minds. Get rid of all those nasty, hostile thoughts."

  The sisters cocked their heads, and the temperature dropped to normal.

  "Right," he said. "And when you're ready, we can talk again, okay?" He started for the middle hut, cautiously in case he had to duck an iceball or firerock. "I'll just go back to my cell and wait. I'm not going anywhere, right? I mean, where would I go? Right? Am I right?"

  Abber gaped at him, then squinted clever comprehension, straightened, and clapped his hands once. "My ladies," he said, and gestured toward their huts.

  Gideon held his breath.

  Thong was the first to admit it was a reasonably decent idea; Chou-Li only grunted, but stalked off as well, though not before she glared an iceball into the middle of the beard Gideon had been trying not to grow since he first came to this land. He hated it. It made him look silly. And he wondered if Thong, properly coached, might be able to burn most of it off without taking his jaw with it.

  It was an idea.

  He told himself to forget it. The last idea he'd had was to get a jar of his sister's preserves from the old family pantry, and now look where he was.

  He ducked into the hut and took out his bat, hefted it several times and examined the deep green wood, the hypnotic twist of the grain, swung it a few times from his shoulder, and prayed that Abber was all that he'd claimed.

  An hour passed, and he heard the masseur padding across the clearing to Chou-Li's hut.

  If the man, odd as he was, could indeed get him to Shande's territory in a hurry, it might well be that the sisters would simply continue on their own their campaign to subjugate Chey and take it over themselves. And if so, the time he spent getting Tuesday back to normal might also give him time to consider just how he could thwart the sisters' plan.

  Of course, they might decide to speed things up before word got back to their husband, Lu.

  Or, alternatively, they might decide to kill each other off and save everyone a lot of bother.

  Or, they might even set aside their murderous plans, for each other and for Chey, and come after him because he had escaped them and was a danger to their well-being as long as he lived.

  He lowered the bat.

  He rolled a pair of mental dice that landed on their edges and didn't help him a bit.

  This was not turning out the way it was supposed to. He was supposed to get out of here, save Tuesday, save Chey, save himself, and let the Wamchu wives disappear from neglect.

  "Sonofabitch," he muttered, and nearly took Abber's head off when the grey man darted inside and rubbed his hands gleefully.

  "A masterful scheme, hero," the grey masseur gloated. "Even as we speak in conspiratorial whispers, the two ladies who hold us both in such low esteem—"

  "Speak for yourself, pal."

  "—are soundly counting the proverbial sheep, and will do so for at least another hour." Abber straightened then and squared his shoulders. "What now, sir?"

  "What now? Now we get the hell out of here and you take me to Shande's."

  Abber snapped his fingers. "Memory among the aged," he said in apology, "is one of the first functions to betray the passing of one's years. It is, as I surmise from my readings in—"

  Gideon clamped a hand on his shoulder, spun him around, and shoved him through the flap. Momentum carried him a few feet toward the firepit; fear veered him to the left and had him dash between the huts and into the jungle.

  Gideon followed, thinking he ought to suggest they make a little less noise, then decided against it when the foliage thickened overhead, and the ivy curled toward his boots, and the unseen fauna began to make unseemly noises. Instead, he moved to Abber's side and used the bat to clear a passage where they couldn't barge through, and to threaten those plants that advanced toward them on root systems determined to find nourishment in his veins.

  The heat was intense, and no less so was the humidity.

  Within minutes, he was panting for a decent breath, and had given up all notion of emptying his boots of the lakes that had formed in his socks. As it was, their pace was slow. Abber was not as spry as he used to be, whenever that was, though he insisted that the pallor that had overcome his unnatural grey was only a temporary condition and would be alleviated as soon as they were able to locate some refreshment.

  Which, at the end of the second hour, they did—in the form of a narrow creek so shallow their hands were unable to scoop water directly and they were forced to kneel down and lick it up like dogs, or cats with no taste.

  It was their first mistake.

  No sooner had they refreshed themselves than they noticed on the opposite bank something stirring behind a large, fern-like shrub. Abber, reverting to a whimper, quickly moved to his right, grabbing Gideon's arm and pulling, at the same time telling him that while he was accurate to a fault on his sense of direction, he didn't have the slightest idea what sort of aggressive and possibly ravenous creatures they might be faced with if they weren't more careful.

  The warning was heeded with alacrity, but it had come too late.

  A screech of feline proportions greeted their sideways retreat, and something blurred into the air over their heads, landed in the creek, and dared them to take a step.

  It was several yards long, from the tip of its blunted snout to the tip of its barbed tail, and at its broad shoulders reached as high as Gideon's waist; wide black and red stripes alternated for control around a slender body and stubby legs that fairly rippled with anticipation; and the eye in the center of its octagonal face glared with an intensity that gave Gideon heartburn.

  Abber started to run the other way.

  Gideon put the bat to his shoulder and waited for the charge. There was no sense fleeing. The thing evidently was out to lunch, and he was it. What he had to do was bring the attack on himself instead of hanging around for the invitation, so when its stare was momentarily diverted to Abber, who was crouching in the creek, he lunged, and swung, and dropped to his knees when it caught the bat on its shoulder and jumped over his head.

  Gideon spun around, dragging Abber behind him.

  The creature snarled and sprang, and the bat lashed at a foreleg, the sound of its snapping making him wince.

  It landed on three legs, foam at its mouth, the single ear on its pate pricked high and trembling.

  When it leapt a third time, Gideon grabbed Abber and tossed him aside, thumped the bat upward into the thing's midsection and, by a stroke of luck, into its left rear leg as well, snapping it cleanly in half, the bottom of which spiraled into the trees while the thing landed on two legs and turned around again.

  Birds cheered invisibly overhead.

  Ivy clambered to the banks to clean up the arena when the carnage was done.

  Abber was grabbed by the hair and tossed aside again when the creature sprang for Gideon's throat, found nothing but air and the fat end of the bat. It gurgled when it connected, fell onto its back, and rolled in the water until it was on its feet again, eye glazed, ear at half-mast.

  "This is insane," Gideon muttered, without a drop of admiration for a creature that wouldn't quit.

  It leapt.

  Gideon swung with closed eyes and ducked.

  It landed on the west bank, slipped in the over-anxious ivy, and righted itself on the one leg remaining, front right an
d filled with power.

  "What are you? Stupid?" Gideon yelled, tired of the one-sided battle and of having to drag Abber out of the way because he didn't have the sense to move on his own.

  It leapt.

  Gideon swung.

  It landed in the creek; its leg landed in the ivy.

  Abber walked toward it boldly, and jumped back when its mouth tried to take a chunk out of his loincloth.

  "Oh, for god's sake," Gideon said in disgust as it wriggled toward him in yet another attack. And he lifted his bat, brought it down on its head, and stepped over its unconscious form to move on, Abber hurrying fretfully in his wake. "That is the dumbest thing I ever saw."

  "Brave," Abber suggested.

  "Brave is when you don't scream when you get a shot. Dumb is when you don't know when you're beaten."

  "I doubt it knows the difference, hero," Abber said, and pointed behind them.

  The creature, its eye half-closed, its ear flat along its skull, writhed after them like a serpent that had had two goats for lunch. Gideon would have laughed had he not noticed the way its legs were growing back.

  "Which way?" he asked.

  Abber pointed.

  They ran.

  Along the creek for several hundred yards before darting back into the jungle, which was now fairly steaming as the day's heat increased and the moisture from the tropical flora wafted gently upward in curls and streams of fog-like white. They were not able to move as rapidly as before, not because of the grey man's poor physical condition, but because of the way their strength was drained by the temperature and their struggles through the impossibly thickening brush.

  Several times, Gideon was forced to a walking pace.

  Several times more, Abber fell and took several minutes to regain his uncertain feet.

  Once, Gideon thought he heard the jungle drums sounding their ominous messages again, and he spent a great deal of time looking over his shoulder, expecting the Wamchus to come screeching through the trees at him, decidedly annoyed and certainly not willing to buy his ready-made story—that the masseur had, in a frenzy of desire for freedom, kidnapped him and forced him to follow along on pain of death.

  Onward they pushed, deeper into the jungle.

  Abber was cleverly able to relieve some of the discomfort by plucking on the run various tasty fruits and bloated nuts from vines dangling overhead; Gideon tried them all, found them all uniformly bland, and ate as if he knew any one of them would be his last meal.

  By the time the sun began to drop behind them, he was almost ready to believe that the Wamchus had been left behind.

  By the time shadows filled the air over their heads and dropped the temperature to a degree far more amenable to his system, he was trying various smiles of smug satisfaction and concentrating on keeping up with the grey man, whose own step was more spritely now that he was not afflicted by the tropical sun.

  Finally, as night began to sift more solidly toward the jungle floor, Gideon stopped and put his hands on his hips, leaned over, and blinked away a vagueness his vision had decided was much more interesting than clarity.

  "Are you all right?" Abber asked.

  "Doing the best I can," he said, panting.

  "It is not much farther."

  "How much is not much?"

  "An hour, perhaps less."

  He straightened and grinned. "Remind me to thank you once we get where we're going."

  Abber grinned back. "I will do that, hero."

  They set off, slower but steadier, until Gideon realized his face was tight because he'd been frowning. "Abber?"

  The grey man, virtually invisible now in the twilight, looked over his naked shoulder. "You sense something?"

  "I think so."

  "So do I. It is quite puzzling, actually, because none of the creatures in this area are—"

  Gideon stopped.

  Abber stopped.

  They looked up, to a tangled weaving of vine and leaf that gave them only fragments of the darkening sky to view; and in one fragment he saw something black, and large, and growing larger as he watched.

  "Oh," he said.

  Abber raised an eyebrow.

  The black speck that now looked like a fair-sized rock spouted a spark that grew into a flame.

  "That," he said, "is not a rocket."

  Abber instantly dropped into a reflexive cower.

  A wind battered the trees, the leaves, set the vines to whipping the air in a frenzied hissing.

  Gideon pulled out his bat and looked for a place to hide, found no castle or deep cave readily available, and looked up again, into the eye of the dragon.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  In some remote and disembodied way, Gideon was intellectually fascinated by the creature's methodical approach, and by the way its huge, leathery black wings stropped the air while its tail served as a functional if not terribly decorative rudder. He could not yet see its eyes' malevolence, hidden as they were by the occasional spurt of flame from between its lips and the plumes of smoke that writhed about its head; but he could see all too clearly the last of the sun glinting off its powerful hooked claws and other ugly things protruding from scaled and muscular feet. They looked dangerous, and he shifted the bat nervously, waiting to see what the thing would do.

  What it did was disturbing, not for the power it displayed but for the unnerving potential for something more than saurian intelligence.

  It swept out of sight ahead of them, and only a foolish part of his mind dared hope it had not seen them. Then, moments later, just as Abber was scrabbling to his feet to move on, it exploded through the foliage, fire and claws and the strength of its wings clearing a lane through the jungle that it could use for more intimate contact with its prey once it had finished.

  With a yell Gideon threw himself to one side, landed on a bed of ivy, and covered his head until the wind, the heat, and the choking smoke had cleared. He pounded the ivy several times to keep it honest and hurried back to the trail, just in time to dive on the other side as the dragon returned, leisurely clearing away the last few annoying branches and leaves, and showering the ground with bits of flaming debris that the ivy shied away from with an almost audible hissing.

  Abber called out in pain, his right arm scorched by a fallen torched frond. But there was nothing Gideon could do but wave him back to cover and pray that the odd little man would take the opportunity to make a break for it. There was, after all, no sense in both of them frying when it was clear the dragon was only after him.

  A faint whistle alerted him to the next development—the dragon was swinging around in a great loop for its final approach, and any thought of escaping by plunging deeper in the jungle was dispelled by the realization that no matter where he ran, the dragon would only follow.

  Angry that the beast was taking such a cavalier attitude toward his death, he stood sideways in the middle of the now open ground, kicked aside a fiery clump of grass, and waited.

  Watched the dragon settle into its flight path.

  Watched the great mouth open and saw the double row of meat-sharpened teeth.

  Watched from the corner of his eye Abber scuttle behind a palm tree several yards up the lane.

  Watched as the dragon swayed from an unexpected updraught caused by the heat his previous approach had created.

  Watched himself watching and decided he was an idiot for standing here like a sacrificial lamb when he should be trying to think of something life-savingly clever.

  The air roared as the dragon passed through it, pushed it ahead, created a vicious brief wind that snapped off the tops of the tallest trees and swept a swirling bow wave of dust and flaming earth ahead of it. The ground trembled, and it was soon apparent that the beast was going to forego well-done for medium rare as it stretched out its claws and barreled down the cleared runway with all wings flapping.

  Gideon, assuming the creature assumed he would be paralyzed with fear, ducked, allowing the wall of dust to cover him, pelt him,
and consequently hide him from the bloodshot eyes that searched for him below.

  The dragon passed over with an ear-popping rush that knocked him on his rump and rolled him back into the ivy, which promptly threw him back onto the trail, just as the beast realized its error and made a deft backward roll that had it returning on the same flight path more quickly than Gideon had imagined any creature of such ungainly size could possibly move. He barely had time to bring the bat up, step aside, and take a halfhearted swing at the underside of a wing that was easily the width of a decent-sized home in the suburbs.

  He missed, but a ripple of the wing caught him on the shoulder and slammed him to the ground. Dazed, he used the bat to push himself to his feet; stunned, he rubbed at the shoulder and realized with a groan that if it wasn't broken, it was certainly maimed for life. Dirt stung his eyes. He could feel the first run of blood snake down his side.

  The bat seemed unaccountably heavy.

  While the dragon was making another turn, he used a little-known method of auto-hypnosis to dull the throbbing pain in his shoulder to a degree acceptable only to the most timid of masochists; it was a trick he had learned in football when he got fed up with screaming every time he was tackled, and needed here because of his growing collection of injuries and his understanding that conventional bat-fighting as he knew it wasn't going to work. He wasn't, because of the speed and enormity of the thing, not to mention the agony in his shoulder, going to be able to use the same tricks he had previously worked on the creek-cat that was, probably, still back there working on regrowing its legs.

  What he needed, and needed badly, was a plan. And a medic. And a fast way home.

  Abber bleated a warning.

  He wondered if the dragon would be averse to negotiation.

  When he lost several inches of his three-inch beard on the next pass, he dragged himself painfully out of the brush and mourned the passing of a fair, if cowardly, idea.

  It occurred to him that he was scared; it also occurred to him that giving in to fear could very well prove his undoing if he was going to get out of this alive—or at least long enough to wring his sister's neck.